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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

#321

Post by rithdmc »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #301
rithdmc wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently unsubscribed from a grocery delivery service becuase they kept pushing adverts through their app. I gave them notification permission so I could see when my delivery is nearby, not so they could spam me. Voting with my wallet on this one. (For the curious, a subscription means free delivery. The subscription costs 10 euro a month, and if you don't have a subscription, the delivery fee is around 4 euro)

> For the curious, a subscription means free delivery It sounds like a subscription means ad-funded delivery to me though

You don't need a subscription to use the app, and I presume these ads are pushed to all users.

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

#322

Post by dahart »

edot wrote: post #121
rayiner wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time…

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.

Hehe, unfortunately that example undermines your otherwise good point, physical laws do not support your claim. Changing the units of a physical scale range does not change the relative position of a point inside that range, it only changes the name. 20 in a [10,30] range is still the absolute midpoint, and represents the amount of base or acid on an absolute scale.

Not sure I agree with the claim that we only allow “neutral” rules. That’s not necessarily true. And of course who decides which rules are neutral depends on which rule we’re talking about, and where you live, and (important) doesn’t depend much on whether the rule is subjective or not - the same processes are used even when the rule is objective. Some rules are fairly objective because they’re tied to health & safety. All humans require clear air & water, for example. Most tolerate a little pollution due to business interests, but whether pollution is poisonous isn’t particularly subjective, aside from the debates over the economic damage from small non-lethal amounts.

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

#323

Post by seki285 »

OroPla wrote: post #243
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…

Reminds me of my time in a large dormitory. The first time the fire alarm went off at night without there even being a fire, I went outside. All the other times - and I lost track of counting - I just ignored it and went back to sleep.

This. The alarm would go off but I'd continue playing dota

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

#324

Post by derf_ »

t-3 wrote: post #230
decimalenough wrote: post #118

> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day . Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat". You can set your p…

> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment. Considering most of SK's population is in Seoul, and Seoul is within range of NK artillery, wouldn't most people be aware before the notification came anyways?

"Aware" is definitely one choice of word. The expectation in Seoul is that if the day ever does come, you will be dead before you make it out of the office building you work in. They run evacuation drills anyway, because of course they do.

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

#325

Post by enoint »

midtake wrote: post #221

This article is painfully shortsighted about Egypt's moment in the Arab Spring. (1) the problematic Vodafone message in question is presented as "without attribution" but it very clearly starts with the words "The Armed Forces asks"! (2) it makes it seem like the government was naturally unpopular in Egypt and clinging on to power in desperate ways when in reality the online anti-state dissent turned out to be astrot…

I think it helps that the author was not a party to it. Those daily aphorisms are a canary indicating Vodafone is under occupation. One day, that canary changes. Maybe for good, maybe not.

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

#326

Post by quietbritishjim »

eloisant wrote: post #281
sylware wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're thinking about The Boy who Cried Wolf, Pierre et le Loup is a different story.

And Pierre et le Loup seems to be Peter and the Wolf which is a Russian story / piece of music.

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

#327

Post by tremon »

WalterBright wrote: post #187
rmunn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." Not only that, but you're also going to have people disguising their personal, selfish ambitions for power or money (or both, those two ambitions are usually found together) by pretending to other people that they want "the right thing". Most politicians operate this way. (I can't say "all" because there are some examples in history of politic…

> selfish ambitions for power or money Free markets are designed around a selfish ambition for making money. You can only make money by pleasing your customers. And hence free markets are the greatest mechanism for prosperity. There's nothing wrong with making money that way.

Free markets are also designed around participants of equal or comparable power. As long as market power is as skewed as it currently is, there are a lot of things wrong with making money that way.

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

#328

Post by cwmoore »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #151
pianopatrick wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also have "zero homeless" if you had a certain amount of cheap housing that even drug addicts and mentally ill people could afford. Or where the cost of helping them is not too much. Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.

>if you had a certain amount of cheap housing that even drug addicts and mentally ill people could afford. That was absolutely free, $0? >Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft. We already have those housing units. They have concrete "beds", toilet-sink combos made out of stainless steel, and a thick steel door that can't be burned by arson. N…

Actually, no, you have to commit a crime to get in. The ride in handcuffs is free-as-in-compulsory.

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

#329

Post by marcosdumay »

OroPla wrote: post #243
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…

Reminds me of my time in a large dormitory. The first time the fire alarm went off at night without there even being a fire, I went outside. All the other times - and I lost track of counting - I just ignored it and went back to sleep.

I once worked at a building that decided it was a good safety practice to test the fire alarms every 3 months.

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

#330

Post by flammafex »

WalterBright wrote: post #193
vkou wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well do free markets resolve basic problems of resource distribution? Like, say, the tragedy of the commons?

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.

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