> Seatbelt laws are still wrong, government has no business protecting me from myself.
If there are multiple people in a car and some choose to wear seatbelts and some choose not to, those who are not wearing seatbelts become a danger to everyone else as their bodies become in-vehicle projectiles.
Sure, I can understand the debate when it's just a single person in a car. But when a person's decision starts impacting others the debate is going to be very hard to win.
Even if it’s just you, you’d be leaving your mangled corpse on a public road for other people to deal with, which is a nuisance.
Like take the car crash out of the equation and imagine some cars came with an ejector switch that launches you through the windshield at 70 mph. This would not be allowed.
It also protects innocent bystanders from being forced to see your horrifyingly mangled body tossed on the ground in front of them in what could otherwise have either been a crash with no injuries, minimized injuries, or at least contained injuries. Do you still think that law is overstep, if so why? Genuine question,
I have no horse in this race and am on the fence myself.
Because any restriction of freedom is bad in principle and acceptance of those tend to create overreaching, totalitarian states/mafias. There are valid arguments for restricting freedom from an individual to harm another, but making sure no one can see your dead body right after you happen to crash your car definitely isn't one. It is very much infeasible and an absolute helicopter mom type of concern.
Keeping with the analogy, yes, you should always wear your seatbelt on public roads (release), but that doesn't mean I feel like I need to buckle up just to move my car while staying in my own driveway (debug).
That's reasonable. I think major restrictions that cause you to need to refactor your code when going from debug to release are a footgun and a half, but that'd at least be defensible.
So proud of all the HN denizens that none of us asked lvass about their stance on mandatory baby seats in cars. Or those bars they use to pin you down in your car on roller coasters.
>His foundation really does seem to do a good job with 'effective altruism'
Can you provide some sources for this? I'm by no means an expert in this area, but my city happened to receive some of his modified A. Aegypti since 2017 and it didn't make the people here happy, at all. Though I don't even think there's a comprehensive study on how much good or harm came from it.
This is the norm. The gaming industry glaringly works that way since it came into existence. There are a lot of privately owned companies creating awesome stuff that stay awesome until/if they decide to IPO or sellout to a public company. Public company owners mostly have terrible incentives and time preference which makes everything turn to shit.
It's about time Linux desktops adopt some form of ${XDG_WEB_ENGINES:-/opt/web_engines} convention to have web-based programs to fetch their engines as needed and play nice with each other.
We have a saying in Brazil that absolutely no part of our government works, except for our IRS. Pix is such a huge win for them. Brazil has a huge informal/illegal economy that employs more people than those who are lawfully employed (40M vs 39M). We have an effective tax plus legal compliance rate of around 60%, that really stifles down anyone attempting to open a legit business in an already harsh environment. Pix has not yet been used to crack down on the informal sector, but with sufficient motivation and some data analysis, it absolutely can be.
after learning a bit about other countries, i would argue that we are better than most, we just compare ourselves with first world european countries, but even when comparing with USA we are fine in a lot of fronts
If ads just vanished, that would be great, but making it illegal ought to do more harm than good. For one, a lot of ad money would be routed to shills, which are far more pernicious and have already infested otherwise great platforms like Reddit. Everything would turn to crap and no adblocker would help you. An ad ban would make every influencer profile instantly worthless, unless they decide to shill, which they're probably already doing anyway.
Also big tech would be incentivized to sell even more user data, as their business would still mostly exist, either via subscriptions, or through the now even more profitable user data market with more expensive targeted shilling.
I have thought about whether banning advertising would be a good idea prior to stumbling onto this article. I'm not saying there would be no downsides, but I think there would be a TON of benefits as well.
Consider that advertising is mostly (not 100%) a zero-sum game. It's not zero sum when it helps to inform people of products and services that would make their life better, that they would willingly have sought out and purchased if not for their lack of knowledge that the product existed.
However, there are lots of extremely common situations where advertising is just a net drain on society:
* when it encourages people to buy things they don't need, exploiting our monkey brains' desire for the seratonin that accompanies buying stuff.
* when everyone already knows what's out there in the market, and it's just massive empires fighting for market share, like coke and pepsi, or various car companies, trying to keep their products in people's minds. They're just playing tug-of-war and very little changes.
* again like with soda, or cigarettes, or vapes, or fast food and junk food, where the products being advertised are actually worse for your health than the default alternative (drinking tap water, not smoking, cooking food at home). Perhaps people enjoy these things, but there is a hedonic treadmill effect where you quickly get used to them and are no better off than if you just avoided them.
* when advertising makes public spaces less pleasant to be in. And when it's distracting to drivers, increasing the chances of an accident.
* when advertising makes websites hard to use
* when the advertising industry vacuums up tons of talented people with the attraction of the money they would make, who might otherwise have gone into careers that are more beneficial to the rest of society
I don't doubt that shills and astroturfing would still exist or possibly get worse if you did nothing about it -- but you could ban that too. You wouldn't catch everyone, but the threat of punishment would make it much less likely for people to be willing to participate in that sort of stuff.
I do think that we would need a replacement for the small, actual valuable thing that advertising provides, which is providing information. I think it would be great to allow sorts of "ad indexes" or "product indexes" which are websites specifically dedicated to aggregating information about all the products available in a given market. Maybe search engines are already good enough for this purpose. Honestly, when I want to learn about what's out there because I'm getting into a new hobby or something, I just do the google-reddit trick like searching for "reddit good value electronic piano" and reading about what other people like.
Likewise for politics, it would be fantastic if every election had a website where candidates could submit their policy platform and potentially a video or two (though I like the idea of JUST text for this) where you can read about them. It's hard enough to find out about candidates for local elections already.
So I'm very much in favor of trashing the whole thing. I think it's a case where advertising benefits those who do it (and in very rare cases, consumers) but mostly just has massive negative externalities. Classic case for either banning it, or putting a steep tax. Usually I'd prefer the latter (as in the case of carbon taxes), but I think taxing ads would be very complicated and the tax rate would probably instantly make most ads vanish anyway, so I think a ban makes more sense.
I definitely agree with ads being bad in principle. But banning shills is an even worse idea than banning ads, because you absolutely, under no circumstance, can correctly identify those. Any "replacement for the small, actual valuable thing that advertising provides, which is providing information", is bound to become infested in ways you cannot control. Escalate this idea further to solve the issues you created and you would end up banning speech or trade.
This is exactly the type of thing that makes me like America. Taking risks is an essential part of life and the more open you are to sane risks, the better. The reason I don't move there is tax laws, but boy do I, as a third worlder, want a "gold card".
Sorry, local news websites are a disaster. You can probably find the story by searching terms from the URL slug. That particular story doesn't really matter, it was just the most recent one in my area that came to mind. There is no shortage of similar stories across the US.
You may think yourself as very American, but the real Americans voted to keep you (and pretty much everybody else, don't worry) of their America. I call this cognitive dissonance (or trolling, I'm too simple to tell).
I don’t see a problem there, they take jobs from americans and the current companies abusing the H1B process are doing so not to gain rare knowledge or experience but to abuse people. So i’m totally onboard. H1B should be for people like Musk, not randos that happen to know a few things.
i have a problem with abuse of a system yes. I also have a problem with illegal immigrants. do you think trying to confuse and argue the point is going to change my or anybody’s mind?
You're the one who is confused. I know you're "america first", that was obvious.
You specifically said something which is false: "literally nobody has a problem with immigrants using legal methods".
This is false because your own statements in these very comments are continuing to demonstrate that you, personally, have a problem with immigrants using legal methods.
Abuse of the legal system? That would be a SLAPP, which is something your own example of Elon Musk has done, not "applying for and being granted a visa":
Historically the burden of proof in the legal system is on the authorities, not the accused. There's a name for countries where only people with security clearances are allowed to form opinions.
But even from an utilitarian perspective, compilers do have warnings and they could just have used that.
reply