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When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

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Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#211

Post by recursive »

Retric wrote: post #192
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent companies. It's not so muc…

Having only 50k employees is something they control. Their Net income is ~20B/year at that’s enough to pay for about 1 million low level customer service agents. I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to reach.

Employees cost more than their wage/salary. The numbers you provide accommodate poverty-level compensation. I don't think that would be better.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#212

Post by katmannthree »

jfk13 wrote: post #207
katmannthree wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider the following: >Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actu…

> Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?

>Supposing free will doesn't exist, why would you think we can decide to do anything to make things other than they are?

For the exact same reason as people who do believe in free will, some combination of our inherent traits and environment made us want to change things.

Not having free will doesn't mean people immediately turn into dust, it just means the reason you decided to get a Big Whopper Breakfast Bucket™ from McWendallKingFC© has more to do with explicit and intentional psychological manipulation on their part than it does on you as the individual making a totally intentional, rational, and well thought out choice that definitely doesn't have anything to do with their highly optimized (to their benefit of course, not the benefit of your health) food and very realistic commercials of smiling happy people and great vibes.

There's really no immediate practical application of free will (or the lack thereof), human behavior is what it is whether we have it or not. If we all believe in it then it's very easy to say "the buck stops here at the individual" in regards to antisocial behavior. If we don't have it then the causal chain is a lot messier and one reasonably could assign shared responsibility towards institutions that encourage suboptimal behavior (such as the advertising industry).

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#214

Post by katmannthree »

phobosanomaly wrote: post #169
katmannthree wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society. Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich themselves?

On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to flee before they locked the door and started pulling out chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their economist's trenchcoat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem "A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situati…

Terrific read, thank you. I'd be interested in seeing an economist's take on the viability and effectiveness of forcing industries to deal with their own externalities.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#215

Post by wolco2 »

wvenable wrote: post #185
the8472 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see the issue with reddit. People can vote with their feet if they don't like the local lords.

Many city, state, and even country subreddits have been taken over by right-wing moderators. This has been a coordinated process over many years. And while you can create new subreddit for your country easily you're still can't be /r/canada.

Time to start your own perfect reddit. /r/Canada may be currently occupate but wvenable should be available.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#216

Post by cgriswald »

katmannthree wrote: post #191
cgriswald wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. If you force the industry to pay for the negative externalities of the industry, the fixes/costs can be baked into the product ( e.g. , safety equipment, emissions standards). If you force the industry to pay for things that are the result of government ( e.g. overly-permissive licensing standards, building la…

In practical terms I absolutely do agree with you. People collectively respond to whatever incentives they're allowed to, you _do_ get riskier behavior when you reduce individual responsibility for actions. If you'll forgive me for going on a wide ranting tangent though, consider the following: >Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actu…

> Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars.

This isn't true. If you require auto manufacturers to be responsible for auto deaths and they decide to get out of business, then what? Trains? But won't the train manufacturers be held responsible for train-related deaths? Then you have the same problem, just with trains rather than autos. At that point, you either keep whittling things down until some mode of transportation is cheap and safe enough (but potentially very sub-optimal along other vectors) or everyone walks and goods don't get anywhere, which has its own cost in lives.

> A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool.

I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence. Despite this advertisement and culture, the vast majority of people are responsible/reasonable (if unskilled and/or ignorant) drivers.

I think governments could reduce the number of deaths far more greatly by having more stringent licensing guidelines (including regular re-testing), safer roads, saner zoning policies, better public transit options, etc. than by silencing any speech that suggests a correlation between speed and fun.

> I think we can do better.

Certainly. However, I'm not convinced removing agency from individuals and ascribing fault to entities with no direct (and at best marginal indirect) control over specific or aggregated situations will get us there.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#217

Post by phobosanomaly »

katmannthree wrote: post #214
phobosanomaly wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On man, if an economist saw this they would be rubbing their hands together like Sylvester the Cat finding Tweety bound-and-gagged and covered in BBQ sauce. You'd have to flee before they locked the door and started pulling out chalk and graphs and a STATA license code from their economist's trenchcoat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem "A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situati…

Terrific read, thank you. I'd be interested in seeing an economist's take on the viability and effectiveness of forcing industries to deal with their own externalities.

If you run across anything, I would be super interested to take a look as well.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#218

Post by Retric »

recursive wrote: post #211
Retric wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having only 50k employees is something they control. Their Net income is ~20B/year at that’s enough to pay for about 1 million low level customer service agents. I am not saying they need to do so, but the solution is to make it unnecessary to call not simply to have nobody to reach.

Employees cost more than their wage/salary. The numbers you provide accommodate poverty-level compensation. I don't think that would be better.

As a global company Facebook is not bound to pay US workers US wages. Around 300$/month is the Median wage for a call center job in India. They could pay ~3x as much and sill have plenty left over for the overhead involved.

Even just assigning call centers based on the callers country of origin would be dramatically cheaper than US wages for everyone.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#219

Post by TheRealPomax »

barkingcat wrote: post #165

This article screws around with de Zwart's name so much while complaining about another organization's screwing around of his last name is really something.

It doesn't, it uses correct contextual capitalisation. "De" is the definite article in Dutch, and in a full name the correct capitalisation is written using lowercase ("Hans de Zwart").

However, when used in isolation it needs to be capitalised so as to differentiate it from "an incorrectly capitalised noun/adjective following the definite article".

If English had surnames that started with "the ...", the same rule would be applied, where "Jason the Bouvier" would be the correct full name spelling, but in isolated context, such as "According to The Bouvier, this policy has [...]", capitalisation should be used to make it clear that this is expressly not the definite article.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#220

Post by stickfigure »

thesuitonym wrote: post #210
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems the large tech companies just have a policy to automate as much as possible Mistakes happen at scale regardless of whether it's automated or human-controlled. Having actual humans do the work is hardly a magic bullet, because people make mistakes frequently as well. Worse yet, humans are more prone to being compromised or acting maliciously, such as in recent attacks on prominent companies. It's not so muc…

A few years ago I bought a laundry washer and dryer set. They were nice, mid-range units and I was pretty happy with them. About a year after purchase, the plastic clips that held the handle on the dryer broke off. I called the phone number on my warranty papers and spoke to a human being in Tennessee. I told her what happened, and she asked me for the model number and my address. They shipped a replacement that arri…

How many of those washer/dryer units do you think they sold? Hundreds of thousands? If it's a super common model, maybe millions?

Google and Facebook each have 3-4 orders of magnitude more customers. I'm not sure manning phones is realistic.

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