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When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

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Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#221

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…

> 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 whittlin…

>This isn't true.

Fair, I'm willing to concede that transportation incidents are fungible for the purposes of this discussion. That segues right into the question of relative safety per unit distance traveled. A quick google search brought up this article from the washington post [0] which gives the following:

Motorcycle: 212.57 fatalities per billion passenger miles

Car: 7.28

Ferry: 3.17

Train: 0.43

Subway: 0.24

Bus: 0.11

Plane: 0.07

Granted this is skewed by cars being the only viable last-mile rural transportation method but we can examine that too. According to USDOT, urban motor vehicle crash deaths overtook rural crash deaths in 2016 in a reversal of the previous longstanding trend of deaths being 60% rural and 40% urban [1]. You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a result of private industry, but the rate at which people die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car. That's almost 90 lives saved per day if we all rode the bus. I suspect this rate is tied to CDL and bus maintenance standards and would remain largely unchanged if buses became the transportation method of the majority.

>I'd argue that this is both a tiny proportion of deaths and a tiny influence.

I'd love to see some data but given what I've seen of the local street racer scene and how they view certain movie franchises that glorify their subculture I think the influence is significant. Would society be better if we straight up banned everything that shows people doing bad stuff? Probably not, but media still has a tremendous impact on how people behave. It's again a case where an industry offloads negative externalities onto society.

>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.

Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no? I used to be a vocal proponent of not yielding an inch of freedom as well but I'm less and less convinced about that as time goes on. Just because the harm isn't as immediate as people getting trampled 30 seconds after one yells fire in the crowded theater doesn't mean it's still not real harm that could've been avoided. There's a significant amount of internal propaganda here in the US about how amazing freedom is but I'm really not sold on the idea that the average person's life here is better as a result of it compared to a society that recognizes the complexity and interconnectedness of the world and responds to it with structure rather than "individual freedom" and a literal world-leading number of people sitting around making license plates in jail.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/14/the-s...

[1]: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/urban...

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Every problem looks daunting until you have the right incentives to solve it.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 whittlin…

>This isn't true. Fair, I'm willing to concede that transportation incidents are fungible for the purposes of this discussion. That segues right into the question of relative safety per unit distance traveled. A quick google search brought up this article from the washington post [0] which gives the following: Motorcycle: 212.57 fatalities per billion passenger miles Car: 7.28 Ferry: 3.17 Train: 0.43 Subway: 0.24 Bus…

> You _do_ still have the problem of people dying as a result of private industry, but the rate at which people die per mile is an order of magnitude lower if you take the bus versus a car.

These numbers don't reflect the absolute difference in safety between these modes of transportation. Imagine a world in which buses replace cars as the primary mode of transportation. You've now got many, many more buses on the road. So, if there is a collision, rather than probably being car-on-car or car-on-bus, it's most likely to be bus-on-bus. That will raise the fatalities per billion passenger miles in two ways: (1) The amount of energy in a bus-on-bus collision will be quite a bit larger than when a car hits a bus or a car hits a car. (2) When there is a fatal collision, the number of fatalities is likely to be higher. (It takes no stretch of the imagination to imagine if one person on a bus dies in a collision, his fellow passengers are more likely to also die.)

You also have second-order effects, like vastly reduced visibility for bus-drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists...

> Forcing manufacturers to deal with the externalities we're discussing would also incentivize them to encourage safe driving, no?

No. Not if they don't actually have any control or responsibility over the externality, like in the case of drunk driving, which was my original point. The only things a manufacturer could do in that case is fight for prohibition or install a breathalyzer in every car. The former was tried and turned out to be pretty bad for society. The latter probably would destroy the industry and/or be trivially worked around by the dedicated drunk.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#224

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.

Considering that the person referred to in the article, Hans de Zwart, is the one who translated the Dutch article into English, I'd say he knows how to write his own name.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that this sentence (and the whole article) contains the same mis-capitalization the articles complains Facebook is doing. It is most likely an aggressive final pass of spellcheck or auto-correct that wasn't re-incorrected before publishing, but really ironic all the same.

No, if you only write the last name in isolation then you should capitalize the ‘D’. So it’s Mr De Zwart, but Hans de Zwart.

Honestly, this sounds less like "falsehoods programmers believe about names", and more like "natural language processing is terrible". A real name policy is unconscionable, of course, but "Found 1 sheeps."-isms on the display side are only a serious problem (rather than a nuisance) to the extent that they trigger (possibly latent) serious problems in something else.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#226
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different sexes have different civic obligations. E.g. Selective Service, a.k.a the draft, in the US.

Sounds like it's ripe for a discrimination lawsuit.

> Sounds like it's ripe for a discrimination lawsuit.

Such a lawsuit has occurred:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coalition_for_Men_v._...

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#227
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't categorize this as best-effort. This is why we need more consumer protections because I think any reasonable person can agree that this is not how consumers should be treated and we shouldn't normalize it by providing a flawed rationalization of "Google needs to make more money"

If you are not paying for a service, should you expect the same protections? If you do but implicitly (by sharing info good for ad targeting, etc), should it not be made explicit then? It should stop being "free" and legally become "free* (conditions apply)".

> If you are not paying for a service, should you expect the same protections?

Precisely the problem: People who are paying for services do not receive protection!

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#228
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the pattern of names in the UI comes from wanting to justify collecting the name in the first place. What is it actually good for?

Indeed. I consider "gender" even sillier - e.g. Facebook adding 100s of different genders to their website - how about just removing the field altogether? Same about "legal sex" - why would the government care in the first place?! ( Doctors might, but the rest of the government, not really.)

I can see wanting to know what pronouns someone uses so you can autogenerate reasonable sentences about that person (i.e. "Tomp marked himself safe from the rabid bears in Honolulu")

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#229
post #163

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.

I'd say the issue with Reddit, in the context of this discussion, is that it doesn't work. For whatever reason you like, Reddit doesn't delegate the community to its moderators. It delegates the responsibilities, but not the rights. Reddit still has an overarching "community standards" and is thus, at that level, still just one big community, with the accompanying failure. The attempt to solve that with subreddits wa…

Reddit is an inconsistent mess because it's fundamentally reactive at the very top. Someone Who Matters notices they host racist communities? They ban the most obvious ones, but not communities like /r/Sino which are blatantly racist in ways the Western Media finds difficult to complain about. Someone Who Matters notices they have transphobic communities? Ban the most obvious ones, except ones like /r/ShitRedditSays which hide behind a twisted interpretation of feminism, as they could play a more effective card were they to be banned.

And so on and so forth. It's administration by reacting to bad press.

Re: When thebiglebow.ski is blocked by Facebook

#230
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a web developer but whenever this kind of thing happens I just wonder why there isn't a single standard library in every common web language to deal with this and if there is, why it's not being used more often.

Do you really need a library for that? Why can't you leave the name as it was entered by the user, without making further assumptions?

Because people will abuse everything.

Whether it's curse words or porn websites or whatever.

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