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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

#401

Post by ahazred8ta »

CatMustard wrote: post #289
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…

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?

It was also somewhat popularized by the navigator in the Star Blazers / Yamato series. Anime nerds FTW.

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

#402

Post by WalterBright »

nrr wrote: post #386
WalterBright wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 marke…

People often try to derail debates by arguing about the definition of a word. I'm not interested in such.

The government tries to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand all the time. Unsuccessfully. A while ago, a good friend of mine asked me what would happen to jobs if the minimum wage was raised. I said the number of jobs would go down. He said "aha! here's a study that proved that the jobs increased!" I said I don't need to read it, because the researchers goofed.

Some years later, the study was retracted because it was flawed.

It was like a story on HackerNews some years back that made a claim that electric cars were 90% efficient. I knew that was hokum right off the bat. But I still had people with PhD's in engineering saying it was true.

The car loses 10% just in losses in the battery, let alone anything else.

So I did some research on the author. Seems it was a person without a degree in physics or engineering who worked at a ski resort.

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

#403

Post by Nursie »

imagent wrote: post #237
Nursie wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violent crime in the UK is in long-term decline and despite what you may have heard, London is now safer than any US state. Violent crime in most western countries seems to me to be the opposite of downplayed - it’s up-played to whip up fear and support for populists, using emotive language and pointing to the worst examples rather than overall figures. The figures generally show we’re all so much safer from violent…

No, we're in a vicious cycle where the police rarely do anything helpful about violent crime, so people have stopped reporting it.

No, you’ve fallen victim to propaganda.

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

#405

Post by nrr »

WalterBright wrote: post #402
nrr wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 marke…

People often try to derail debates by arguing about the definition of a word. I'm not interested in such. The government tries to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand all the time. Unsuccessfully. A while ago, a good friend of mine asked me what would happen to jobs if the minimum wage was raised. I said the number of jobs would go down. He said "aha! here's a study that proved that the jobs increased!" I said I don't…

Please forgive me. I happen to have a formal background in economics by way of training as an actuary, and I can't take seriously the implication that the standard model is a law. Supply and demand aren't invariant under all conditions.

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

#406

Post by dahart »

altmanaltman wrote: post #366
dahart wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It’s okay for me to treat others that way? No, that’s not what the Golden Rule said. It says to treat people the way you want other people to treat you. How you treat yourself is your own business. There’s also a certain amount of making reasonable assumptions here. Obviously the intent is to get people to treat each other fair & well, not to set a l…

Yes, reasonable assumptions! But according to whom? The golden rule can be reasonable to you but not to me. But does that make me bad and you good? Not really. It just means we disagree on what it means to be a moral person. Anyone who doesn't agree with your "reasonable assumptions" has bad morals can be twisted to mean any moral values based on what you mean by reasonable. For example, the church can say it is reas…

The reasonable assumption I was referring to is what the words in the golden rule mean, not what actions are moral or not. The golden rule is almost as far as it gets from a “specific fixed rule”, despite the name, and it doesn’t prescribe what’s bad or good or moral, and nobody upthread said anything about what makes you bad or good. It’s nothing more than a rule of thumb, an aphorism, a (perhaps extremely obvious) reminder that you shouldn’t treat other people in ways you wouldn’t like yourself, at a minimum. Is this hard to understand or something? The aphorism is already completely relative and subjective, there’s really no need to belabor that point, it’s built in.

How can you trust the system? What are you even asking? We have laws, a lot of them, and the golden rule is not one of them. But if you don’t hurt others, and others don’t hurt you, we’re off to a good start. Use whatever definition of ‘hurt’ you’d like, it doesn’t matter if it’s reciprocal.

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

#407

Post by femto »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #186
femto wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And lex talionis as a byproduct.

That's a complete misreading. Eye for an eye is

"treat others as they treat you"

Golden rule is'

"treat others as you WANT them to treat you".

It's the complete opposite of eye for an eye. If someone is being badly treated by others, most would want to be well treated instead, so the Golden Rule would say that you treat others well, even if others are treating you badly.

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

#408

Post by antonvs »

khafra wrote: post #215
everyday7732 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are they expecting a Texan civilian who gets this alert to even do? This is baffling.

I mean, it is Texas; it's not unreasonable to expect thousands of heavily-armed people to form a posse and shot a few dozen people unrelated to the situation.

In Texas, that’s just Tuesday.

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

#409

Post by rayiner »

lurk2 wrote: post #400
roenxi wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> And we live in a society. Correct. > So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible Doesn't follow. > and that we have achieved them. Doesn't follow. > The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness. That depends entirely upon what you mean by "fairness," which will itself be loaded with presumptions about how the world is and…

> That depends entirely upon what you mean by "fairness," which will itself be loaded with presumptions about how the world is and ought to be.

If you’re an immigrant from my home country of Bangladesh, you’ll be treated more fairly in any Anglo country than in any other country, including Bangladesh.

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

#410

Post by antonvs »

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 Earth is spherical. What do you mean by “straight line” here? The direct line through the Earth?
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