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And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

shkspr.mobi

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Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#261

Post by roenxi »

inigyou wrote: post #247
WalterBright wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free markets do not resolve the tragedy of the commons. The fix is to not have commons. For example, we are running out of fish in the ocean from overfishing. But there's no shortage of cows and chickens, despite massive consumption of them. The former is the commons, the latter is private property.

Are you saying I should have to bid for oxygen rights?

You pay market price for oxygen. It just happens to be 0 right now. There isn't any reason in principle that price can't change (eg, if you want to go underwater getting the oxygen will most certainly cost you something, if you want your air at a certain temperature or humidity that costs you too). If we set up a moonbase or something then it might well be that oxygen would cost something.

Much like how there isn't any reason you have to pay for food in principle. It could become so cheap and easy to produce, say, bread or cheese that it is available everywhere at no nominal cost.

So yes, you should. You already do, realistically.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#262

Post by boomlinde »

sylware wrote: post #242
boomlinde wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue…

In France, we have a bed story for children related to exactly that: "Pierre et le loup" (aka your "crying wolf"). It may be a EU wide tale.

It's one of Aesop's fables, so it's probably widely known in all of Europe.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#263

Post by inigyou »

roenxi wrote: post #261
inigyou wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying I should have to bid for oxygen rights?

You pay market price for oxygen. It just happens to be 0 right now. There isn't any reason in principle that price can't change (eg, if you want to go underwater getting the oxygen will most certainly cost you something, if you want your air at a certain temperature or humidity that costs you too). If we set up a moonbase or something then it might well be that oxygen would cost something. Much like how there isn't a…

If it's zero I'll just buy the entire planets worth of oxygen, please and thank you. That'll be $0.00.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#264

Post by roenxi »

nrr wrote: post #227
WalterBright wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free markets do not resolve the tragedy of the commons. The fix is to not have commons. For example, we are running out of fish in the ocean from overfishing. But there's no shortage of cows and chickens, despite massive consumption of them. The former is the commons, the latter is private property.

I fear that this conflates open and closed access with exclusive property rights. It isn't untrue that asserting exclusive property rights on something makes it closed access[0], but there are other mechanisms for achieving closed access of a resource, like enforced regulation. Slightly more formally, an assertion of exclusive property rights is a sufficient condition for something to be closed access, but it isn't n…

> I'm personally of the mind that, as long as I trade with certificates that bear Caesar's face (or trade with proxies for such certificates, like a MasterCard), he gets to make the rules in exchange for my being able to lean on his legal system to protect my interests, so I find that the equitable access angle is nice.

It is a minor point I suppose, but this is the other way round. Because Caesar makes the rules you trade certificates that bear his face. It takes vigour and energy on the part of law enforcement to stop people from moving to private currencies.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#265

Post by roenxi »

inigyou wrote: post #263
roenxi wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You pay market price for oxygen. It just happens to be 0 right now. There isn't any reason in principle that price can't change (eg, if you want to go underwater getting the oxygen will most certainly cost you something, if you want your air at a certain temperature or humidity that costs you too). If we set up a moonbase or something then it might well be that oxygen would cost something. Much like how there isn't a…

If it's zero I'll just buy the entire planets worth of oxygen, please and thank you. That'll be $0.00.

I'm sure you're just being silly, but ok. Take what you can. That is pretty much literally how it works. I'm not stopping you.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#266

Post by cucumber3732842 »

pjc50 wrote: post #257
cucumber3732842 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US spewing all the alarms at the line level employees and fatiguing the shit out of them is a direct (and predictable, but of course everyone who complained in advance got sneered at by the usual demographics) result of OSHA policy. Same bunch of moronic incentives that result in there being a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally. Whenever you see an alarm fa…

> a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally. This is called "normalization of deviance" and generally should be avoided, because it often precedes a serious accident.

>This is called "normalization of deviance"

You don't even need to get to the point of breaking the rules for it to be a problem. This is stupid human factors type stuff.

The filthy capitalists don't want their oil rigs going kaboom and their expensively trained workers having injury downtime. There is a natural incentive alignment to some extent here.

And then the useful idiots show up, and rather than fostering that alignment they put their thumb on the scale and they change the calculations. The filthy capitalists crunch the numbers and they realize that over the life of the oil rig and a fleet of some number of them they'll make more money spewing alarms at the guys running the place until their eyes glaze over. Sure he'll miss something important blowing up the works with loss of life and limb 2/ amount of the time instead of 1/ if you'd have tuned it right buuuuut, you'll lose less money that way because if you do it the "right" way you'll get dinged by the OSHA people every time some petty accident type happens because you turned the alarm for that one off so as not to fatigue people. A typical example is some industrial facility where policy defines "hot" as anything lukewarm and up and so they implicitly train people to ignore it. People are opening "hot" equipment all the time, getting approvals to do it, ignoring warning lights, etc, etc, so basically no net improvement in actual safety over having nothing at all. And this is fine until one day someone gets killed because they let loose something that was 300deg not 110. You see this goddamn fact pattern all the time. Machinery beepers, hazard signage and barriers, machinery interlocks, etc, etc, it never fucking ends.

Great job guys, Mission Accomplished (TM). When everything is a hazard nothing is.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#268

Post by cardanome »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #152
cardanome wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideal number of jails and homeless people is zero. Obviously you will not reach that literally. That's why it is an ideal number, not a real number. It is still a good and worthy goal. Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good. You can also reduce the crime rate dramatically by better social security, education, easier access to mental health…

>Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good. If we had Finland's winters, I think we could eradicate homelessness by January.

If this is an attempt at humor, it is in very bad taste.

And no, please educate yourself on what Finland did to eradicate homelessness. It has nothing to do climate but with the fact that Finland made it an explicit political goal to eradicate it i.e political will.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#269

Post by altmanaltman »

femto wrote: post #130
edot wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who decides which rules are neutral? Even this is relative and subjective. Laws are not inherently neutral. A pH of 7 is only neutral because it is bounded by 0 on the left and 14 on the right. In a different system, perhaps it would be from 10 to 30 and thus a pH of 20 would be neutral.

The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule": "Treat others as you would like them to treat you." It has a long history, both secular and religious. Pretty well everything flows from it, and if someone is doing "the wrong thing" whilst claiming to obey it then they are probably deluding themself. The rule is suited to enforcement, since if someone does something "wrong", rather than immediately attack…

What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It's okay for me to treat others that way?

Just because something has a long history (secular or otherwise) doesn't give it any merit by itself.

If we need some standard to judge against what is morally acceptable in the case I presented (no this doesn't apply if you like to hurt yourself and others) then you are back to defining a standard which cannot inherently be neutral.

Re: And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

#270

Post by Otterly99 »

inigyou wrote: post #251
californical wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything. And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises. And even in…

Has anyone studied why homeless people refuse help? It's usually because the "help" isn't help. E.g. "you can sleep here but only if you haven't used drugs in the last week, so we'll test your blood before we let you in"

How are you supposed to help a person like that thought?

I understand that you cannot reason too well with an addict, so it might be surprising to some that somebody would refuse shelter if it meant being clean.

Still, what should be the approach then? Unconditional help?

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