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

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

#381

Post by Scoundreller »

Hugsbox wrote: post #357
nerdsniper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

I'm in Nova Scotia, Canada, and we had an even more (in my opinion) egregious case about two months ago that I'm still fuming about. Got woken up at just around 3:20 in the morning (I get up to go to work at 5) to an emergency alert blasting over mine and my wife's phones: "WOMAN WITH DEMENTIA MISSING FROM CARE FACILITY IN [town that's an hour from us]" What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Get up and start wal…

Also in Canada. Ontario would blast the province for technically “abducted” children that were typically joint custody disputes.

There was one exception case where children were actively harmed, but already murdered by the time the alert went out. I suspect police couldn’t kick down the door where they were murdered because they didn’t have a warrant/sufficient cause yet: right to peace and privacy in your home but not on your phones!

The alerts are 4G/5G only, so for a while I had a shortcut that would downgrade me to 3G at night.

Despite everyone questioning the system being labelled as “with the child abductors”, there are far fewer of these alerts. Either abductions are way down, or they’ve tightened up the criteria to blast the province.

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

#382

Post by like_any_other »

protocolture wrote: post #119
like_any_other wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. Nations organize themselves into states to protect and promote their interests, including their existence as cultural and ethnic groups, from competing states (and other dangers, e.g. natural disasters). A.k.a. politics. I was not aware politics has been solved by the internet.

>including their existence as cultural and ethnic groups I mean if people want to have a distinct culture or ethnicity they will or will not as they desire. If anything the history of the nation state is forcing 12 different ethnic groups into a single culture that only reflects part of their heritage. Look at Nazi Germany trying to suppress Bavarian culture as insufficiently German. Or the UK suppressing Welsh and I…

> I mean if people want to have a distinct culture or ethnicity they will or will not as they desire.

Yes, and they usually want to form a state based around this identity. I suppose you don't consider that desire legitimate. But then who will perform the functions of the state that you baselessly claim the internet solves? Who will settle disputes, determine land ownership, pass and enforce laws, prevent other groups from taking the territory, etc.? The internet?

> Ukraine Iran and Afghanistan are really the only states that have done defense "Alone" in recent memory.

It's telling that you think that because they don't only do good, then the good that they do doesn't count. They're not innocent enough for you, so they should dissolve their militaries, surrender their ability of self-defense, and throw themselves at the mercy of the world (How does that usually work out?) I wonder if you apply this standard evenly, or only to things you dislike.

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

#383

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

protocolture wrote: post #137
HWR_14 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates? What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B?

>What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates? Coordinated Defense pacts are already a thing. Like are you worried that these micro states wont want to join NATO? And before you get weird, 5 + 5 + 5 is the same as 15. Theres no reason to imagine smaller militaries per capita. >What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B…

> "5 + 5 + 5 is the same as 15."

Soldiers are not interchangeable robots in a RTS. Personnel, units and organizations have to practice working extensively together to function as a cohesive whole and have anything resembling esprit de corps.

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

#384

Post by orbital-decay »

nerdsniper wrote: post #342
CatMustard wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely unrelated to the actual content of your post, but: > megameter Completely valid SI way to represent distance, but I have never seen anyone use this in my entire life! Out of curiosity, do you live in some location or work in some industry where this is used? If so, where?

I did some intercontinental work and found it easier to say (mostly in my own head) that I was “eleven megameters” from home, rather than “seven thousand miles”. I blame my nerdiness and willingness to be slightly weird. But I do enjoy the unit very much now and I think its time might be coming!

Was it straight line or orthodromic distance?

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

#385

Post by smnrchrds »

Hugsbox wrote: post #357
nerdsniper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem! Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote…

I'm in Nova Scotia, Canada, and we had an even more (in my opinion) egregious case about two months ago that I'm still fuming about. Got woken up at just around 3:20 in the morning (I get up to go to work at 5) to an emergency alert blasting over mine and my wife's phones: "WOMAN WITH DEMENTIA MISSING FROM CARE FACILITY IN [town that's an hour from us]" What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Get up and start wal…

That's really egregious to do in Nova Scotia out of all places. Where there was a mass murderer on a 13-hour rampage, they just tweeted about it. This is what they use the emergency alert system for?

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

#386

Post by nrr »

WalterBright wrote: post #286
nrr wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> that does depend on what one's definition of a free market is Sigh. No need to make up one's own definition. Googling "free market": "A free market is an economic system where prices, wages, and the flow of goods are determined by supply and demand. There is no government control or central planning telling people what to buy, sell, or make. Instead, private choices and voluntary trades drive the economy."

As it turns out, I'm not making up my own definitions here. The view of a free market being a market with equitable access is attributable to Adam Smith from his Wealth of Nations. He bases his understanding of this freedom on the absence of private rent-seeking and absence of monopoly privilege (though in 1700's vernacular).

Henry George in his Progress and Poverty makes similar gestures toward defining a free market this way.

Part of the reason why it's important to consider other definitions (and other economic models) is that there is an important result in economics from the 1970's that, more or less, establishes the lack of a guarantee that the demand curve in an aggregate demand model (a macroeconomic model) will slope downward. This makes the aggregate demand model less than useful for a priori arguments about supply and demand in the macro context; they must instead be approached a posteriori.

It's also the big reason why I'm uninterested in a colloquial definition that is heavily filtered through von Mises and Friedman.

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

#387

Post by john01dav »

roenxi wrote: post #260
lurk2 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing." […] The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all…

> This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure... Yes, it does. And we live in a society. So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible and that we have achieved them. The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness. People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up…

The law in North America and Europe (possibly elsewhere too, I don't know) is full of accommodations for special interests at the cost of everyone else, due to concentrated benefits and diffuse costs causing the former to lobby aggressively while the latter doesn't.

To make a clear example: I don't think that it's fair that I'm not allowed to plumb my own (commercial¹) building just because I didn't learn how via a difficult to get, underpaid, full time, 4 year apprentiship in whatever state I'm living in at the moment, with usually ~0 practical escape hatch to demonstrate competence in any significantly different way, or to just have the result inspected.

1: some places, not all, have exemptions for owner occupied single family homes

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

#388

Post by nerdsniper »

orbital-decay wrote: post #384
nerdsniper wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did some intercontinental work and found it easier to say (mostly in my own head) that I was “eleven megameters” from home, rather than “seven thousand miles”. I blame my nerdiness and willingness to be slightly weird. But I do enjoy the unit very much now and I think its time might be coming!

Was it straight line or orthodromic distance?

the latter. (great circle distance)

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

#389

Post by nrr »

roenxi wrote: post #264
nrr wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm unsure that I agree. History has borne out a lot of evidence that people will jump to other means of paying for things in the face of the local currency collapsing, even in the face of amped up (but nonetheless impotent) enforcement.

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

#390

Post by cryptonector »

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…

> but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.

Doubt.

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