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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

#411

Post by antonvs »

k__ wrote: post #211
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…

Just a few days ago, I received one because of "the odour nuisance is no danger for the population" People were calling the emergency hotline because the wildfires 200km away got so big that their smoke engulfed the city.

Ironically that was almost certainly false, i.e. wildfire smoke is not healthy. With the smoke from Canadian wildfires in the northeastern US, the advice on the worst days has been to stay indoors. Here’s an announcement from the New Jersey government about this: https://www.nj.gov/health/news/2026/approved/20260717a.shtml

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

#412

Post by antonvs »

jameskilton wrote: post #3

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust. Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch ". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustwort…

I’m curious whether you think that civil society, by your definition, still exists in the US today.

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

#413

Post by orbital-decay »

antonvs wrote: post #410
orbital-decay wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes. Perfectly unconventional, like megameters!

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

#414

Post by internet_points »

Arodex wrote: post #259
internet_points wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too You haven't actually argued why it can solve them too. When you're about to make a general argument about tech, try to exchange "tech" with "cocaine" to see if the argument still holds ( If cocaine can cause social problems, then it can solve them too )

Cocaine does solve a societal problem: the cult of performance pushing people to their limits. Without cocaine, there would be more burnouts and depressions (right now; I am not talking about long-term). See also the role of "soma" in the novel Brave New World . People take cocaine voluntarily . It solves a problem for them, at one point at last (addiction is as much a psychological problem as a physiological one). I…

On a meta-level, this type of reasoning explains so much of what comes out of Silicon Valley.

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

#415

Post by Hugsbox »

smnrchrds wrote: post #385
Hugsbox wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think that's why they abuse the alert system now. People were outraged that he was running loose (very close to where I lived at the time) and nobody was notified, so now they notify us about every tiny little thing.

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

#416

Post by jacquesm »

WalterBright wrote: post #373
shmeeed wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You can only make money by pleasing your customers. If only it were so. Alas, in the real world enshittification, shrinkflation, skimpflation, dark patterns, planned obsolescence, vendor/platform lock-in, rent-seeking, regulatory capture and the like absolutely rule the day, due to a host of free market failures. I don't claim to have a better alternative. But I find your take a bit strange. Are you as a customer sa…

When was the last time you were forced to buy something you didn't want?

Today. I'm forced to buy and pay for Google's bundled AI crap even though I don't want it and never consented to it.

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

#417

Post by 542354234235 »

tony69 wrote: post #21
jMyles wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ideal number of _prisons_ (as distinct from jails / pretrial confinement) is zero. This whole charade in the USA of dressing up slavery (without even a single day of interruption on January 31, 1865) as "correction" is absurd. It's obviously a way to continue an economy that relies on a supply of involuntary labor, and has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety. There are plenty of ways to implement…

Some crimes are bad enough that the perpetrators don’t deserve second chances. I’m ok with punishment for its own sake in some cases even if it would be more “cost effective” or “productive” for society to rehabilitate.

Sure, the idea of revenge is attractive to me as well. But I really don't want the legal system to operate at the level of my base emotional desires. If a crime is bad enough that there should be no second chance, segregate them from society safely until they die. I don't see how the justice system hurting/harming/torturing people does anything other than normalize hurting others when you feel wronged, and therefore normalizing more criminal violence.

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

#418

Post by NotPractical »

rayiner wrote: post #117
jameskilton wrote: post #3

A good article, but missing one very important word: trust. Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch ". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustwort…

> 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…

> The thing I admire most about Anglo-American culture is that people will jump off a bridge if you give them a court order that complies with all required procedural formalities.

The president of the United States routinely violates court orders and has little respect for the law or the Constitution. Also, nobody is going to willingly jump off a bridge because a judge told them to. You'll find that the death penalty isn't carried out by asking people politely to kill themselves.

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

#419

Post by WalterBright »

nrr wrote: post #405
WalterBright wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Supply and demand aren't invariant under all conditions.

I'm curious. When does it not apply?

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

#420

Post by HappMacDonald »

Sha1rholder wrote: post #161
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.

Your pH example actually proves the opposite. pH 7 is not neutral because it happens to sit halfway between 0 and 14. pH is not inherently limited to that range at all. Sufficiently concentrated solutions can have pH values below 0 or above 14. A solution is called neutral when the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions are equal, which happens to correspond to about pH 7 at 25°C. Change the temperature and n…

I know it's off topic: but I am curious and this sounds both challenging to search for and likely to not get a straight answer from an LLM. Do you happen to know if this means that water may tip from neutral to slightly alkaline or acidic at different temperatures or pressures?

I have always found it .. peculiar that water just so happens to (as you aptly put it) "have all the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions equal" :)

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