How is it undisputably bad? This woman now has access to higher quality men around the world instead of a random farmer without much to offer (no offense to the random farmers in the audience).
She now has the option to leave a dead end rural lifestyle is she chooses. And if she's into the dead end rural life (insert whatever dumb american tropes we have that idealize wasteful rural modes of living), she won't find rich, high flying city guys very appealing and it's all a wash. Or maybe she wants to move to a different dead end rural community with a better match than the random farmer she happened to be born next to. Now she can do that on farmers only.
You could say some good and some bad (and of course very bad for the random farmer whose main reproductive strategy was apparently counting on his mate not realizing he's not a catch and there are much better options), but you can't say it's only bad.
Ideally, none of these people reproduce at all since we already have plenty of humans. Hopefully the shift to digital relationships can greatly reduce our headcount in the long run. This trend seems well underway already thankfully.
So... this “dead end rural lifestyle” that feeds the world now will be populated by young men only running the machines abd tending the crops and animals by themselves.
Hmmmm...
Now let’s extrapolate that to every country. Because that’s what social media did.
That example was taken from outside the United States. It’s only worse inside North America now.
>This trend seems well underway already thankfully
On average, for now, yes. Not across the entire national population, though. We're just selecting for the sorts of people who thrive (reproductively/evolutionarily speaking) in the modern high competition/low scarcity environment. Because this environment is very different from the environment, say, 200 years ago, people that are more fit to the current environment are relatively rare now- which is why you see trends pointing towards overall population decline- but those small subgroups are there, quietly reproducing at >2.1 children per woman. As such, over time, they'll come to make up the majority of the population, as the relatively non-competitive phenotypes numerically stagnate or dwindle.
Ironically, the prediliction to be convinced of viewpoints like your own (given things like personality and political tendency have a significant hereditary component) is one of the things likely to be selected against!
The future is a dwindling relative population of midwit liberals, lots of live-fast die-young r-selection chads, and one 150 IQ guy who made a billion clones of himself.
Machines, immigrant laborers and huge agribusinesses, mostly. I don't engage in the trendy family farm fad if that's what you're asking.
More to the point, are you implying that it wouldn't be possible for a dead end community to grow food? If so, why? Seems like a bizarre argument but I'll bite.
>Like rent an apartment? Have a car to get to work?
Then you rent an apartment or buy a car. Are you implying you can't do this after bankruptcy? It's much easier to do these with a bankruptcy on your "record" than with a $1000 monthly payment.
If you've got an 800 score and no money, no one will give you a loan. If you've got a trash credit score, but an extra $1000 that isn't going to loans, then you can 'afford' to get fleeced on 36% 72 month auto loans for 7 years until your credit is rebuilt.
Depending on the market, I can’t imagine it being easy/straightforward for someone with “trash credit” to find a landlord willing to lease an apartment at the market-rate.
That $1000 is likely getting spent no matter what, either in repaying loans, or paying a premium over the market rate to get a landlord to agree to lease you an apartment instead of someone with an 800 score.
AMP seems like a solution in search of a problem. Are people really having trouble with loading speed in 2020? I travel to remote areas in third world countries regularly for work and still don't really have problems loading pages with mobile data.
Even if it didn't have all of the problems associated with it I just don't get the point. I don't need Google to repackage a website with less useability. It's frequently not even faster.
I lived in Africa and the only internet I had was cellular and by the gb. Amp is a massive improvement over the extremely large web pages we now have to endure.
It's also much faster to render, which makes a huge difference on the crappy Android phones that are everywhere. Hell, I'm using a $200 Android phone right now because my iPhone broke and browsing the web is painful on it. And with the terrible hauwei $40 phones that have taken over Africa, most of the web is unusable.
I don't like Google's control of Amp, but it exists because of the original sin of html and js. Everything about html is terrible: bloated, pointlessly verbose, etc.
I have a dream that we all just start using Gopher and dump the www, but it's never going to happen. Maybe even browser vendors could get to together and design a super light weight markup based on S-exps or something, but that's probably not going to happen either. Amp is the best we got and it solves a real problem. And it solves the problem well.
But does AMP makes internet usable on those $40 phones? I have a recent mid-range $200 phone and pretty much the only website the regularly hogs my browser is Google News, which coincidentally is also the only one that uses AMP. It's anecdote, but in my experience AMP (or whatever else Google News does) degrades performance to an amazing extent.
Google News is far from being the only one using AMP and there's a massive difference in loading times and rendering speed for most news sites between AMP and non-AMP versions even on my 1GBit internet connection.
FWIW my impression is not that Google News is bandwidth heavy, but that it is JavaScript heavy. It works fine on the computer but it's hard to use on the phone, even on the same connection.
Fair points, although to your last point, I wouldn't necessarily agree it solves the problem well. AMP makes some websites almost unusable (intentionally disables core functionality) and there's no way to disable AMP except manually re-typing the URL for every page. If its goal is just to serve a smaller page, it is a rough workaround with high costs IMO (often slower loading times, weird performance issues, disabled functionality, less open internet).
I appreciate that not everyone has fast data, but not having data speed to read a basic web page is really becoming the exception, not the norm. Data transmission is getting cheaper and faster and available in more remote places every year.
I wouldn't have a huge problem with AMP if I could opt out. Unfortunately I can't. So despite my blazing fast unlimited plan on a flagship device, I'm getting served crippled pages with degraded performance. It's like I own a Ferrari kitted out with all the extras and Google is saying "here have you tried out this cool bicycle? It has special pedals so you can't go too fast and we reconfigured the handlebars so you don't accidentally do something like steering! It even has a bell. Ting-ting, ting-ting! How cool is that?"
In all seriousness, it is neat if it makes the web more useable for low-connectivity users, but maybe then limit AMP to those places (which are shrinking every year) and don't serve needlessly crippled pages when I'm standing in downtown Amsterdam or Hong Kong at the center of the internet, connected to blazing fast Wifi.
As much as a smack my lips at a supported non-XML, S-exp language for markup, isn't this what Brotli's dictionary of all the bloated XML tags, et. al. sets out to solve with its compression?
Sure, but that's just another layer on a steaming pile of shit. The webpage is still super large, it still takes up ram, it still takes up cpu to decompress and compress, etc etc. It's the kind of solution one comes up with when they recognize that nothing can actually be done to solve the real problem.
> Are people really having trouble with loading speed in 2020?
Huh? Yes. Hugely. I'm on my fast home internet using a new iPhone I bought two months ago, and loading a NYTimes article just took 8 seconds. God only knows if it's bounded by network or CPU or both, if the problem is frameworks or ads or what. And it isn't even "stuck" on anything -- I watch the blue loading bar in Safari move pretty smoothly across the top.
I did a search for a NYT article on Google, clicked it, and it appeared instantaneously.
That's an insane difference. I know everyone hates AMP here, but when I've got my user hat on rather than my developer hat... it's unbelievably more performant.
I do, and I don't even live in 3rd world country - I live in Germany in one of the largest cities in the country.
But even if I can load both pages at roughly the same time AMP experience is just so much better, they always load at the very least at the same speed as the original website, there's no weird scrolling implemented, there's no annoying popups, etc.
I always choose AMP pages when possible, compared to the "native" ones - because I know for a fact that I'll get fast loading, and other stuff mentioned above.
Not really. A world as complex as ours needs to be starting new initiatives all the time. Basically every convenience you take for granted (electricity, indoor plumbing, grocery stores) was because society said "we need to start". In places where they were slow to do that, it's generally less available and lower quality or they have to rely on technology from the places and people that took initiative.
"we need..." is a persuasion technique. It tries to sell an idea by (a) trying to incorporate you into it the argument before you even agreed (the "we" part) and (b) pushing on through a sense of false urgency (the "need" part).
"We need" is never ever an argument on itself. And it can be easily countered with: Who is this "we" you're talking about because I surely haven't agreed yet if I go along in your story. And the "need" isn't a shared need unless I'm willing to agree that it is a shared need between you and me.
"We need" forces the other to think past the problem and move directly towards "solutions". As if the problem exists outside of our own experience and should be considered as a problem. "We need" never explains why a set of facts is considered a problem in the first place. It just puts the focus on solutions, maybe even solutions that detract from what truly ought to be done.
The same is true when posing "society" as this homogeneous group that declares in unisono "we need to start". This couldn't be farther from the truth. "Society" is just a complex network of individuals, tribes, factions, parties,... with ever evolving shared and conflicting interests. Anything a society seemingly "agreed" upon is more emergent behaviour then deliberate action.
"society" sure didn't consciously decide "we need to start using technology or believing experience x, y or z." On the contrary. There are plenty of examples of beliefs being disparaged, vilified, questioned,... to the point where their proponents were burned on the stake. Or technologies and their inventors being ridiculed or banned because nobody was interested, or it was unclear which problem they truly solved.
Humanity survived just fine without electricity, indoor plumbing, grocery stores, digital technology and so on for hundreds of thousands of years. Ask any elderly person if they felt unhappy 60 or 70 years ago because they weren't able to consult Wikipedia via digital devices. They will simply answer "Well, we just went to the library. And that worked out perfectly for us. There simply wasn't an alternative and we didn't lament the lack of an alternative."
Stating that society agreed to "we need to start" would putting the horse before the cart.
I typed out a much longer response but this will do:
I think you are not following my argument or the OP. Neither supposes that "we need" is a standalone argument. OP provides specific examples for why "we need" to do these things.
"We" doesn't mean literally every human. Do you think people are actually being misled by this? It just means something like "society at large".
"We" need plumbing. This doesn't mean you can't individually live alone in the woods without plumbing.
"Need" doesn't mean you "must" have something. You don't "need" water if you're suicidal.
"Need" is just shorthand for "sustains our current way of life". If you want to see the downfall of civilization, you don't "need" agriculture. If you don't care about people on dialysis or the millions/billions of others that would die without power, then you don't "need" electricity or internal combustion engines.
You're allowed to have these opposing views.
The "we need" arguments assume that most people want to maintain or improve standards of living.
If you want to decrease standards of living, that's a fine opinion to have (although weird). More importantly, if you don't care about society, why bother arguing this at all? Why post on HN? No one is stopping you from living a pre-plumbing, pre-agricultural life if that's what you want.
"Society" of course tries to sustain itself. If society wants to keep existing in its current form, it does need to do many things (indoor plumbing, running water, electricity, or as the OP talks about, preparing for certain dangerous situations).
"We need" is both a social construct and a rhetorical device. No more, no less. I'm all fine when "we need" is used as a conclusion to a careful and thoughtful debate in which we both, equally, established a common need and a common wish to address that need knowing we're both deeply invested. I'm wary of hearing "we need to..." at the opening of every argument over and over again without showing how invested the person making the argument is in solving the issue.
If everything is turned into a priority, then nothing becomes a priority. Both time and the willingness to pay attention are in short demand.
We need to invest in an equitable society, economies of scale, reduce greenhouse gasses, invest in green technology, prepare for the next pandemic, vote for sensible politics (whatever those may be), invest in education, in the military, in getting to the Moon and establishing viable economies there, getting someone on Mars, invest in global network of satellites across the world, invest in developing nations, overhaul global supply lines and create less dependencies, find a better cure for cancer, invest in cybersecurity, invest in solutions to safeguard rights such as free speech and privacy, reduce fossil fuel dependency, invest in new industries and markets, and so on and so on and so on.
Here's how the vast majority of people reason, then. There are only 24 hours in a day. And life is rather short with just a few precious decades. How can I spend those valuable hours and my own talents in a healthy balance between taking care of myself and my loved ones, and deriving a due sense of personal satisfaction, meaningfulness and purpose?
There are 7.8 billion different answers to that question reflecting different and often very conflicting beliefs, wants, needs, dreams, desires and hopes.
"We need" at the start of every argument dismisses the reality that humanity or society is made up of individual humans, each of which is a unique universe of thoughts and feelings in their own right.
"We need" is a wonky substitute for a far more honest "I - personally - feel strongly about this issue, this is how invested I am in the issue, and I'm curious as to how you're feeling about this."
Worst case, "we need" is simply you projecting a personal fleeting desire to the entirety of humanity. "We need to go to Mars". I'm sure some people feel strongly about that. Maybe you do in this very instance, but will you still actively be thinking about how humanity could get there in an hour or two? Or have you moved on by then, forgetting that you even posted a fleeting thought on social media in the first place? Moreover, you just placed this massive issue - the urgency to get boots on Mars, or the preparation for the next pandemic - at my doorstep, how am I as an individual supposed to even contribute towards solving that problem while including the entirety of humanity or society?
"we need preparing for a pandemic" or "we need to invest in dialysis for people who need it for their survival". Sure, but that's your personal sentiment. But it's not an argument. How are you, as an individual acting on that sentiment? Who are you voting on? Are you making donations? Are you a researcher? Are you running for office yourself? Or are you endorsing politicians who will be making decisions? Or have you invested millions in factories that might one day supply vaccines, hopefully? What are you doing to show the way forward beyond a moot online demonstration of a due sense of self awareness?
"We should have had a (non-false) sense of urgency about this last year?" Who is this we? Why are you involving me into this? I read the news and social media like the next person and I'm an individual with limited time and resources. I'm not an elected decision maker. I'm certainly not privy to intelligence reports. And when I voted for decision makers that ran for office, a pandemic sure wasn't on everyone's mind.
It's an argument that could easily be met with could have, would have, should have, but "we" - whoever that is - didn't. Hindsight 20/20.
Instead, a better argument is "I feel it's important to vote for politicians that are aware of the importance of public health and who are willing to endorse increased public spending on public health and social security. I feel it's important to hold politicians who don't do this publicly accountable. That's why I openly voice my concern because I care about the impact of their policies on my own community and other communities. I also call representatives, I vote, I support news organizations through donations, I attend rallies to show support and so on."
Showing how you're caring is far more important then just telling you're caring.
Preparing for expected catastrophes is not a fleeting desire. It's basically the opposite. There are entire industries built up around this (FEMA, insurance, flood control systems, the CDC, banking reserve ratios, backup servers, many safety rules and systems). Saying we need to adjust these efforts to reflect the real world cost-benefit trade offs is common sense. You can disagree with the particular calculus they're doing (e.g. by thinking a pandemic is so unlikely that we shouldn't prepare very much), but I don't see a sound argument to say "we don't need to prepare at all for these costly events".
>If everything is turned into a priority, then nothing becomes a priority. Both time and the willingness to pay attention are in short demand.
I don't think people are turning everything into a priority. But if some ill-defined group is trying to do this, it wouldn't change the fact that certain things are a priority if we want to maintain our way of life. Disaster management is one of them.
I'm sure a bunch of people think irrelevant things happening on Instagram are a priority. But that doesn't change the fact that preserving infrastructure is a priority for maintaining our way of life.
As I said, if you don't care about maintaining our way of life, then of course you won't care about what we need to do to preserve that way of life.
>Here's how the vast majority of people reason, then. There are only 24 hours in a day. And life is rather short with just a few precious decades. How can I spend those valuable hours and my own talents in a healthy balance between taking care of myself and my loved ones, and deriving a due sense of personal satisfaction, meaningfulness and purpose?
I think I see the disconnect. No one is saying that the fry cook at McDonalds needs to align global resources better to deal with potential catastrophe. You are reading "we" too literally. (Rather, you are just misunderstanding the word "we". "We" doesn't mean an has never meant every human. We really just means a group of which the speaker is part. It need not include you.)
"We need to better prepare for certain catastrophes" means that politicians and other key actors (say businesses, insurers, bureaucrats, researchers, engineers that have relevant assets, skills, experiences, etc.) need to think better about these and non-key actors (say voters, consumers) need to shift attention, money, votes, etc. to supporting those key actors in this goal. If you are okay with disruptions like pandemics, then you can disagree with this. I think most people would prefer to avoid these disruptions though, given the comparatively low cost for doing so.
>at my doorstep, how am I as an individual supposed to even contribute towards solving that problem while including the entirety of humanity or society?
Support politicians that endorse science and logic, for example. Wear a mask as another example.
I don't think anyone is asking you to do anything that "includes the entirety of humanity or society". We are saying make the choices you can make and support the politicians and businesses that deal with these problems proactively.
>But it's not an argument.
No one is saying "we need to prepare for a pandemic" as a standalone argument. But the argument is not complicated. A pandemic could disrupt our way of life greatly by "harm X" (lets say decrease in quality adjusted life years or GDP). It has a chance of occur of "probability Y". Y here is close to 100% as we know. The cost of preparing systems to mitigate the risks to "harm level Z" is "cost Q". As long as harm X times probability Y is really big (which as we see, it is) and cost Q is less than harm level Z, then it is rational to invest Q resources into mitigation.
You can disagree with whatever numbers we might pick for X Y Z Q, but to say we shouldn't perform the calculus is just to say you don't think society is worth preserving. Again, you can have that viewpoint if you want.
The conversation that I think people are trying to have is "How should we preserve, improve and maintain society" and you're basically saying "don't bother". It's fine to say that, but the people having the discussion obviously aren't going to listen to you.
If we're discussing whether Liverpool should trade Coutinho then no one will be interested in your view that "football is stupid".
>How are you, as an individual acting on that sentiment? Who are you voting on? Are you making donations? Are you a researcher? Are you running for office yourself? Or are you endorsing politicians who will be making decisions? Or have you invested millions in factories that might one day supply vaccines, hopefully? What are you doing to show the way forward beyond a moot online demonstration of a due sense of self awareness?
I am doing things to my ability but this is irrelevant to our argument. I can make a powerful and logically airtight argument supporting thing X while selling a product that kills thing X. I can even make that same argument while personally killing thing X at that very moment.
I'm not holding this discussion to trumpet (or even to discuss) my own virtues or actions. I'm having this argument to disagree with a poorly reasoned argument made by the person I first responded to. I could be a computer simulation and it wouldn't take anything at all away from the logic of the points I make.
>"We should have had a (non-false) sense of urgency about this last year?" Who is this we? Why are you involving me into this?
I'm not involving you. You misunderstand the definition of the word "we"
"People in general" does not mean every single person and certainly doesn't have to mean you.
>I read the news and social media like the next person and I'm an individual with limited time and resources. I'm not an elected decision maker. I'm certainly not privy to intelligence reports. And when I voted for decision makers that ran for office, a pandemic sure wasn't on everyone's mind.
You shouldn't elect someone that campaigns on a single pet risk, so much as you should elect someone that takes a rational, cost-benefit approach to risks in general.
>It's an argument that could easily be met with could have, would have, should have, but "we" - whoever that is - didn't. Hindsight 20/20.
Well, that's not exactly right is it? "We" certainly did meet the risk where I am. Americans (or more specifically, some Americans in some places) are having issues understanding science. There's not much hindsight involved. Were there epidemiologists that said we didn't need to worry about or prepare for the risk of a pandemic? Pandemics have happened in the past and will continue to happen in the future.
More importantly, everyone saw what happened in China. America saw this and part of it decided not to take steps to mitigate the risks. I can tell you steps to take to mitigate your risk starting tomorrow and many Americans will still ignore it. This is not hindsight bias.
You could argue China's failures shouldn't be criticized by hindsight bias. But why are many Americans continuing not to fix the problem happening today and tomorrow? Hindsight is not the issue. I can give you steps right now to fix this. But many Americans don't want to listen. As a result they are going to fail. When I point this failure out in the future, it won't be hindsight bias.
>Instead, a better argument is "I feel it's important to vote for politicians that are aware of the importance of public health and who are willing to endorse increased public spending on public health and social security. I feel it's important to hold politicians who don't do this publicly accountable. That's why I openly voice my concern because I care about the impact of their policies on my own community and other communities. I also call representatives, I vote, I support news organizations through donations, I attend rallies to show support and so on."
Ok, that's what this article is doing. I'm not sure who you're arguing against here.
>Showing how you're caring is far more important then just telling you're caring.
I don't care about showing or telling about my caring. I'm just trying to correct the person I originally responded to. What I do or don't do is irrelevant to correcting OP's point.
I was at a mega corp store yesterday to buy some basic necessities. While paying the bill, I was asked to donate money for Covid-19. They do this nearly all year, asking for donations for something or the other.
Why should I trust this mega corp with just one dollar? How do I even know what they are doing with this money? The mega corps have repeatedly shown they care about nothing but profits. Isn't it hypocritical to ask for money from common man to fix problems that they created in the first place (like pollution)? I'd rather trust Doctors without borders than these people.
But the thing that annoys me the most - if they really cared that much, why can't they donate a dollar (or whatever amount) from their profit every time I shop there? Instead of pestering shoppers many of whom live paycheck to paycheck?
Yes, we need to do much much more. But the leadership for it (both in thought and action) is not these multi billion dollar corporations and their cronies (especially the media). They are largely the reason we are here in the first place - causing pollution, wage stagnation, privacy violation etc
The reason they ask you to donate is to gather pricing data: If you're willing to donate, it means they can raise the price of the goods without hurting the demand curve.
They actually do donate the money; they're not trying to keep your dollar. It's difficult to acquire this data via other means, so they don't mind paying it out properly.
I don't like megacorps either but I don't see which part of the OP you disagree with.
>Isn't it hypocritical to ask for money from common man to fix problems that they created in the first place (like pollution)?
No. I think a better word is "unseemly". I don't think it's hypocritical for a company or person to use carbon and then buy carbon offsets or donate to the rain forest or something.
Even if it were hypocritical I would still rather have a polluting corporation that fought pollution than a polluting corporation that didn't.
>if they really cared that much, why can't they donate a dollar (or whatever amount) from their profit every time I shop there?
Many of them do just that. I don't think corporate giving is the solution to society's problems but it is a real thing that happens and can make a difference for some people.
Corporations of course do things for marketing and PR reasons. If one of you things is to encourage you to donate or to donate themselves then I don't see the problem (although I am annoyed having to press a bunch of buttons to pay).
We don't fully understand the long term effects. Many people are experiencing prolonged sickness that may never go away. The disease can do permanent damage to basically any of your organs.
Seems crazy to adopt a policy of infecting the world with a dangerous disease that we don't really understand.
Maybe what he's getting at is that the technologies the west "can't dream of" were invented in the west. Drones, for example. The west doesn't use drones to deliver medicine because it has very well developed infrastructure to deliver medicine.
It is cool Rwanda is doing this but I would guess the west has dreamed of drone deliveries of things and decided that its current system is ok.
On a more serious note, until there is a protocol and implementation available then we can't say anything for sure. Us Security folks aren't magicians.
That was uncalled for . Yes it is hard or impossible to do in zoom .
If these tools use open standards and well documented protocols this will not be a problem.
I can verify without a phd in cryptoanalyis and reverse engineering my browser is running a secure connection to a website and certificate is signed by the source(for sites enabled with FS and HSTS ).
Don't get me started on browser certificates. That's a whole week of my life I'll never get back.
The short versiom of it is, your browser trusts CAs to say whether a certificate is valid. But CAs often trust other CAs who may not actually be that trustworthy. Those CAs then trust other CAs who definitely are not as trustworthy... Etc.
So that certificate/padlock picture in your browser may not be as trustworthy as you think. It's an active problem.
In terms of an actually relevant reply that's not bemoaning browser certs...
Yes I was a bit harsh. But I was trying to demonstrate a point - no one knows for sure until we can look at this stuff in detail. Until the researchers get to pull it apart then no one can verify anything. The little green tick on a zoom call is practically worthless until some external work is done.
The protocol is documented and open. I linked to it in my comment.
The open proctols for RTC today is webTRC. Zoom does not use webRTC. If the proctols Are open like http then I can build my own client and do not have to use theirs (just like you can your own hacker news app) . Zoom will not use webRTC for this precise reason. If they and all others did I can choose my client and I can choose a client who I trust and will give my green tick open source or not .
Google supported jabber in chat for a long time , slack supported IRC (both dropped the support ) but when they did you could any irc client in slack or use google chat using jabber with any client
If an open protocols for video are used like email (although not good example for encryption). It does not matter who your service provider is you can verify they are secure , or move to another one .
Today I have more than 10 video conferencing apps on my devices (zoom, Hangouts, meet, Webex , teams, GoToMeeting , chime , Skype, SfB, FaceTime , signal, telegram , ring central and Uber conference... ) because a customer , partner friend or family uses one of those . I have only one email and browser client though, it does not have to open source at all, ppl happily pay for closed source gmail or o365 without worrying will my mails deliver to you while still using official client or client of their choice
Sorry, to clarify, when i say protocol I specifically mean the E2E encryption protocol.
Also, have you thought about asking your clients/whatever to use one app to communicate with you? Even if you get half of them onboard, it sounds like it would save you a lot of mental bother.
I wish , every company has their own app to use , they will invite you to their conference by default, asking 10 people on the call to change for 1-2 is not feasible.
Many of them cannot install any new native application on their desktop / phone without IT approvals or their vpn does not allow traffic to consumer apps like Hangouts . They also need to record for compliance , pre-Covid some apps like Webex are connected to their conference room bridges using dedicated lines and hardware etc
Family / friends do not use use biz tools , it not easier to convince Apple users who like FaceTime, messenger is popular in few countries , wechat in China , WhatsApp in other places .
It is easier install another app rather than trying to get your grandma to switch from one thing someone installed on her phone and she learnt to use.
This is well known issue since Ken Thompson’s trusting trust paper and not what am I getting at it
It is degrees of trust . Trust is not absolute , neither is security . Depending on your threat models you have to secure yourself. More transparency improves security does not solve all the problems just makes it costlier for an attacker . If cost outweighs the benefit they will not attempt to do it.
Https does not magically make your communication 100% secure ,however the number of people who can issue a certificate from a comprised root CA or control one is considerably less than the number of people who can monitor your plain text traffic .
>But public policy decisions affect everybody, so the criterion needs to be a lot stricter for how complete the information needs to be and how confident we need to be in our knowledge before we impose a public policy on everybody.
Again, your own logic destroys your argument.
We have made public policy decisions that heavily subsidize oil, cars, lowered air quality, etc.
These decisions affect everyone not just car drivers. These decisions were not based on complete information (in fact, we had very limited knowledge of global warming, air pollution, etc. when we made public policy decisions to favor air pollution).
>The idea that public "leaders" should be able to take calculated risks with everybody else's money (and lives) is, IMO, pernicious. This is exactly the mentality that has created so much mess in the world throughout history. No, "leaders" should not take calculated risks that affect everybody.
So why should Cletus who like to roll coal on Tesla drivers be able to take uncalculated risks that affect everybody?
I seriously think you don't understand what externalities are.
I think only snowwrestler has a good point. "Waiting for the science" is the same as saying "we know for a fact that burning carbon is safe" if both of those result in burning unsustainable amounts of carbon.
>I'd say having 70% of the information, something like that.
This is still missing the point. This means that you need only 31% of science to continue burning carbon, but you need 70% to stop burning carbon. You have created an asymmetry that's not justified by anything (let alone science). Public policy cannot be agnostic about the science. It's not possible.
If you say "let's wait" you're saying "it's safe to keep doing what we're doing" even though you don't have any justification for that.
To put it really simply, you've created a default bias. There is no reason to assume the default is better than a given alternative. It needs to be justified. If you can justify it, fine and good, let's do it. But no one has.
> If you say "let's wait" you're saying "it's safe to keep doing what we're doing" even though you don't have any justification for that.
As I responded elsewhere in this thread, by this criterion, we should stop pretty much everything we are doing. Which is not a viable option, never has been, and never will be.
>As I responded elsewhere in this thread, by this criterion, we should stop pretty much everything we are doing. Which is not a viable option, never has been, and never will be.
No, I'm not saying this. I'm saying we need to stop pretending its sustainable to keep burning carbon at the rates we are. It's not sustainable and we need to take painful steps immediately to stop this.
It does not mean we need to "stop doing pretty much everything we're doing". Not sure where you get that idea. It means we need to stop allowing every Cletus in Kentucky to buy an F-350 and pay $1.89 for a gallon of gas to cruise 56 miles to the local Walmart to buy factory farmed beef and a bunch of plastic sh!t shipped across the globe from 12 different parts of China.
The idea is we should live in reality, not that we shouldn't live.
> It does not mean we need to "stop doing pretty much everything we're doing". Not sure where you get that idea.
Because your own stated criterion is that we need to be able to justify what we're currently doing based on scientific knowledge. We cannot justify most of the things we're currently doing on that basis.
> The idea is we should live in reality
We apparently don't agree on what "reality" actually is, at least with respect to how much of an emergency CO2 emissions are. You think they're a dire emergency. I think they're not an emergency at all. You will, I take it, claim to justify your belief that they are a dire emergency based on some kind of scientific knowledge. But it isn't. Nobody has a good enough predictive track record about the climate to make such a claim. So this claimed "knowledge" isn't actually knowledge at all; it's just people's beliefs and hypotheses and speculations. And that isn't a good enough basis to dictate public policy to everyone. Which is one of the key points the article we are discussing in this thread is making.
>We cannot justify most of the things we're currently doing on that basis.
Exactly my point. Why do you think we need to have a higher justification for good ideas (engaging in sustainable behavior) than for bad ideas (engaging in unsustainable behavior)?
>We apparently don't agree on what "reality" actually is, at least with respect to how much of an emergency CO2 emissions are. You think they're a dire emergency.
>Which is one of the key points the article we are discussing in this thread is making.
And the point you're still missing is that not doing anything to stop risky behavior is making an assumption that it is safe to continue the risky behavior. That assumption is not grounded in anything.
> Why do you think we need to have a higher justification for good ideas (engaging in sustainable behavior) than for bad ideas (engaging in unsustainable behavior)?
You're misstating the alternatives. We're talking about public policy. The alternatives for public policy are "don't dictate what everyone must do in area X" or "dictate what everyone must do in area X". The former does not need a "higher justification". The latter does.
>The alternatives for public policy are "don't dictate what everyone must do in area X" or "dictate what everyone must do in area X".
The world is not this simple. Regardless, we must dictate that people cannot inflict externalities on third parties without compensation.
>The former does not need a "higher justification". The latter does.
Where are you getting this idea? You're just stating a conclusion without any support. I can do that too:
You are wrong, I am right. You need to scientifically justify acts that have harmful externalities. You do not need to justify harmful acts that restrict harmful externalities.
Wow, this is easy! I should have been arguing like this all along!
>No, it's an affirmative choice to not impose a public policy on everyone based on what we think we know right now.
You're either misunderstanding his point or misunderstanding reality.
Our public policy today endorses (and heavily subsidizes) the burning of carbon on a scale never before tested.
Why should the default position be to subsidize this as opposed to alternative means?
Or are you arguing that we should be agnostic about the science and thus stop burning all carbon immediately (i.e., returning to a scientifically validated state in the past where we didn't burn carbon)?
>You have this backwards. Claimed knowledge doesn't get to be assumed to be right until it's shown to be wrong.
I'm guessing you have it backwards but I'll let you explain. Which knowledge do you think we are claiming that we shouldn't assume to be right? Give a concrete example and we can discuss. If you think we can "assume its safe to burn obscene amounts of carbon" without any evidence of that safety, then you are the one who has it backwards.
You can't make a public policy that is agnostic to the science of burning of fossil fuels at current levels. It's clearly unsustainable, but let's set that aside. If you want to argue it's sustainable and should continue, you would still need to rely on (nonexistent) science to make your case. It's not an argument to say "this is how we done things for a long time so this way doesn't need to be supported by science." That's illogical.
> Why should the default position be to subsidize this as opposed to alternative means?
I don't think the government should be subsidizing any energy sources or playing favorites with certain sources over others. That applies just as much to playing favorites in favor of "alternative" energy sources as to playing favorites in favor of oil, coal, and natural gas. (Actually the government subsidizes all of these.)
However, that has nothing to do with any beliefs about the relative risks of different energy sources. It has to do with a belief that government subsidizing anything or playing favorites in general is likely to do more harm than good. In other words, the government does not have reliable enough knowledge to justify favoring any energy source over any other, so it shouldn't.
> It's clearly unsustainable, but let's set that aside.
No, let's not. Let's ask, instead, why you apparently believe that the only way to fix anything that is "unsustainable" is government policy. Why not just let the market work? If governments would stop subsiziding fossil fuels, their prices would be higher, and there would be more market pressure to find alternatives. Just as we found alternatives to horses that saved us from the "unsustainable" practice in the late 19th century of using horses for transportation, which, if that had gone on the same way, would have us all by now, as the saying goes, knee deep in horsesxxt. (And people were predicting exactly that at the time.)
> It's not an argument to say "this is how we done things for a long time so this way doesn't need to be supported by science." That's illogical.
No, it's not, it's a fact of life. Most of the things we currently do are not "supported by science". We do not have well-supported scientific rationales for most of our current activities. That's because we don't have a good scientific understanding of the relevant domains for most of our current activities. But just stopping all of our current activities that aren't "supported by science" is not a viable alternative, never has been, and never will be. So it's you that is being illogical, not me.
>I don't think the government should be subsidizing any energy sources or playing favorites with certain sources over others. That applies just as much to playing favorites in favor of "alternative" energy sources as to playing favorites in favor of oil, coal, and natural gas. (Actually the government subsidizes all of these.)
This is not possible. You might be misunderstanding how subsidies work. Everything the government does is a subsidy of something or other. Building out roads nice new roads in every podunk town in America is an enormous subsidy to oil. Allowing people to pollute my air with carbon is an enormous subsidy to oil. Again, it is literally impossible to be agnostic.
>No, let's not. Let's ask, instead, why you apparently believe that the only way to fix anything that is "unsustainable" is government policy.
Where on earth do you get the idea that I think this?
>Why not just let the market work?
Externalities. Unless you start making all carbon users bear all costs associated with their carbon use, I have to bear that cost for them. The market can't sort that out unless I can forcibly stop other people's carbon use myself. In that case, we would have a violent solution, not a market solution. Governments is justifiable largely on the grounds that it replaces the need for these violent solutions.
>If governments would stop subsiziding fossil fuels, their prices would be higher, and there would be more market pressure to find alternatives.
Agree.
>Just as we found alternatives to horses that saved us from the "unsustainable" practice in the late 19th century of using horses for transportation, which, if that had gone on the same way, would have us all by now, as the saying goes, knee deep in horsesxxt.
This move had nothing to do with global sustainability. It had to do with scalability, user friendliness, etc.
>No, it's not, it's a fact of life. Most of the things we currently do are not "supported by science".
Agreed. So the question is why do you think some policies (like burning carbon) are justifiable without science. While others (like not burning carbon) need more science? You haven't justified this asymmetry.
>We do not have well-supported scientific rationales for most of our current activities.
Exactly. So why do you think we need well-supported scientific rationales for new activities?
>That's because we don't have a good scientific understanding of the relevant domains for most of our current activities.
Absolutely agree. You're talking common sense here.
>But just stopping all of our current activities that aren't "supported by science" is not a viable alternative,
And no one is arguing we should. But pretending that we can continue burning carbon at current rates (without any scientific support for this) is not in any way more justifiable than saying "we need to start burning less carbon".
>So it's you that is being illogical, not me.
Nope. It's you. We can't keep burning carbon the way we are and there's no reason to think we can. There are better reasons to think we can't.
> Everything the government does is a subsidy of something or other.
No, a "subsidy" is not the same as a purchase. Purchasing something at whatever the current market price is is just a purchase. Fixing prices at lower than the current market price, and making up the difference in various hidden ways, which is what the government does with fossil fuels, is a subsidy.
> Building out roads nice new roads in every podunk town in America is an enormous subsidy to oil.
No, it's an enormous investment in transportation infrastructure for the benefit of everyone. Which benefits all transportation technologies. Unless you think that hybrid or electric or fuel cell or solar powered vehicles are somehow unable to use the same roads?
> Where on earth do you get the idea that I think this?
What else do you expect me to think when the only thing you propose to fix whatever you claim is wrong is government policy?
> Externalities
Which is a non-answer unless you know, with sufficient confidence based on scientific knowledge (not somebody's beliefs or speculations or hypotheses), the amount of the externality and who can address it at the lowest cost. Which nobody knows for the case of CO2 emissions.
> Governments is justifiable largely on the grounds that it replaces the need for these violent solutions.
First, government solutions are violent: the government can dictate what everybody does only because it can back up what it says with violence if necessary.
Second, you ignore the obvious third alternative: give people a better option in the market. If the government did not subsidize fossil fuels, gasoline would be more expensive and more people would be buying cars that used less, or no, gasoline. No need to use force on anyone. And if there were more entrepreneurs figuring out how to build cars that used less, or no, gasoline, they would get cheaper. That is true even for the SUVs that you apparently abhor: a hybrid SUV can easily get double the gas mileage of a conventional one. But with gas as cheap as it is now due to government subsidies, the added cost of the hybrid simply doesn't pay for itself over the life of the vehicle.
(It's worth noting, btw, that this is even more true because the average "life of the vehicle" in the US is so short due to the availability of cheap financing and leases, which is due to government manipulation of the financial system. If people had to pay higher interest rates on car loans, they would have more incentive to keep cars longer and not buy a new one every year or two just because some shiny new thing came out. Which in turn would mean an initial investment in something like a hybrid would be more likely to pay for itself over the life of the vehicle. Another example of government meddling skewing incentives in a way that does more harm than good. And before you ask, my wife kept her last car for 19 years, and I kept my last car for 14; mine had more than 260,000 miles on it when it finally gave up the ghost. We both plan to keep our current cars as long as possible.)
> So why do you think we need well-supported scientific rationales for new activities?
I have made no such claim. I have never said individuals need well-supported scientific rationales for every new thing they decide to do.
What I have said is that dictating a public policy to everyone requires a well-supported scientific rationale, or at least a much higher standard for one than has been used.
> We can't keep burning carbon the way we are and there's no reason to think we can. There are better reasons to think we can't.
Then we simply disagree. You think this claim has a well-supported scientific rationale. I don't. I think it's a combination of ideological beliefs, speculations, and hypotheses, with no predictive track record to back it up. So I don't think dictating public policy on this basis is justified. If you want to base your own choices on it, go ahead.
Now, if you had said "we can't keep importing fossil fuels from countries like Saudi Arabia the way we are", then I would agree. But the basis for that has nothing to do with CO2 emissions, and everything to do with national security and geopolitical realities.
Or, if you had said "we can't keep burning coal the way we are", I would agree, because burning coal has a huge impact on air quality and respiratory diseases, and mining coal has a huge impact on the environment in the area where it is mined. But again, that has nothing to do with CO2 emissions.
Or we could talk about how it's stupid to burn oil when it has so many important other applications in the chemical industry, or the risk of oil spills.
> pretending that we can continue burning carbon at current rates (without any scientific support for this) is not in any way more justifiable than saying "we need to start burning less carbon".
You're misstating the alternatives. The alternatives for public policy are not "keep burning carbon at current rates" vs. "burn less carbon". The alternatives for public policy are "allow people to make their own decisions about burning carbon" vs. "dictate everyone's carbon burning activities by force". The former does not need a well-supported scientific rationale. The latter does.
>
Which is a non-answer unless you know, with sufficient confidence based on scientific knowledge (not somebody's beliefs or speculations or hypotheses), the amount of the externality and who can address it at the lowest cost. Which nobody knows for the case of CO2 emissions.
So the best course of action is to treat any uncertain number as zero?
Did I a say "subsidy" was the same as a purchase? Not sure what you're getting at.
>Purchasing something at whatever the current market price is is just a purchase.
Um. It's a purchase. It can also be a subsidy and generally is when the government does it. If the government purchases a bunch of oranges to give away (or throw in the gutter) it is subsidizing the orange market. Are you not familiar with how government subsidies work in general?
>Fixing prices at lower than the current market price, and making up the difference in various hidden ways, which is what the government does with fossil fuels, is a subsidy.
There are lots of ways to subsidize things. Almost everything (or maybe absolutely everything) the government does creates a subsidy of some kind.
>No, it's an enormous investment in transportation infrastructure for the benefit of everyone.
It's not for the benefit of everyone though. Car-centric life obviously is not very healthy, so it's not healthy for the general public to subsidize this. More importantly, it creates dangerous externalities for people that walk, bike, etc.
It heavily subsidizes unsustainable suburban modes of living, etc. Can you imagine the shitfit people in Kentucky would have if they had to fund their own roads?
>Which benefits all transportation technologies.
Wat? How does building a 20 lane highway in Houston benefit bikers? It doesn't. It actively harms them.
How does building a road to Dingleberry Alabama benefit people that ride the subway in DC (or want to ride a subway in Alabama)? It doesn't.
>Unless you think that hybrid or electric or fuel cell or solar powered vehicles are somehow unable to use the same roads?
Again, this is taking kind of an autistic view. In theory, yes my fart-powered car can use the roads. In practice, since 99% of cars are powered by carbon, we know that a road subsidy benefits carbon users 99% of the time.
>Which is a non-answer unless you know, with sufficient confidence based on scientific knowledge (not somebody's beliefs or speculations or hypotheses), the amount of the externality and who can address it at the lowest cost.
Huh? Why would we need to know this? If my neighbor is pumping carbon dioxide into my living room, I don't need to do any calculus or science to know that (a) he's wrong and (b) he needs to stop. That is a problem that markets can't solve.
Why would we need to know the person that can do it at the lowest cost? The person doing the bad behavior should bear the cost regardless of who the lowest cost avoider is.
>Which nobody knows for the case of CO2 emissions.
We know a lot about the costs of C02 emissions. It's ridiculous to say we need to have perfect solutions before we can push back on our current failed "solution".
>First, government solutions are violent: the government can dictate what everybody does only because it can back up what it says with violence if necessary.
Absolutely. That's a huge role of the government. If some asshole is pumping carbon dioxide into my living room, the government needs to correct his behavior. If a strongly worded letter doesn't do it, violent action must (ethically) be taken to correct the situation.
>Second, you ignore the obvious third alternative: give people a better option in the market.
I'm not sure why you think I ignored this. I have literally written books on market solutions. But they can't solve everything.
>If the government did not subsidize fossil fuels, gasoline would be more expensive and more people would be buying cars that used less, or no, gasoline.
But you would still have too many people buying. You need to read up on externalities.
>No need to use force on anyone.
Yes need to use force. This is econ 101. When you have an activity that forces negative externalities onto third parties without compensation, you get
sub-optimal levels of that activity. When you don't bear the full cost for polluting the air I breath (this is very well documented stuff here) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3155438/, then you'll tend to create sub-optimal levels of pollution that wouldn't exist if you had to bear those costs.
>And if there were more entrepreneurs figuring out how to build cars that used less, or no, gasoline, they would get cheaper.
This helps but doesn't fix the problem.
>That is true even for the SUVs that you apparently abhor: a hybrid SUV can easily get double the gas mileage of a conventional one. But with gas as cheap as it is now due to government subsidies, the added cost of the hybrid simply doesn't pay for itself over the life of the vehicle.
Even without government subsidies, gas is extremely cheap.
>What I have said is that dictating a public policy to everyone requires a well-supported scientific rationale, or at least a much higher standard for one than has been used.
This is the part you still aren't addressing: We are already dictating a public policy to everyone without any scientific support whatsoever.
>Then we simply disagree. You think this claim has a well-supported scientific rationale. I don't. I think it's a combination of ideological beliefs, speculations, and hypotheses, with no predictive track record to back it up. So I don't think dictating public policy on this basis is justified. If you want to base your own choices on it, go ahead.
You're misunderstanding. You are saying that the public policy you like (lets keep it simple and say "Ford Excursions") doesn't need any scientific backing whatsoever. But the public policy I like (lets say "bikes") somehow requires a "well-supported scientific rational". You need to explain this difference. Under your system, our current policies are also not justifiable (nor are the policies you are advocating for).
>You're misstating the alternatives. The alternatives for public policy are not "keep burning carbon at current rates" vs. "burn less carbon". The alternatives for public policy are "allow people to make their own decisions about burning carbon" vs. "dictate everyone's carbon burning activities by force".
You are ignoring externalities. This line of thinking is fine for activities that don't harm others. It doesn't work if there are externalities. Unless you think I should be able to forcibly go stop my neighbor from polluting, you still haven't solved the problem.
>The former does not need a well-supported scientific rationale. The latter does.
You can't just say this without justification. Or you can, and I can too:
The former needs a well-supported scientific rationale. The latter does not.
"Negative externalities" seems to be the operating pivot of this conversation. It seems to me that many laws are a system to identify entities producing negative externalities, and make them bear the cost of that externality. The purpose of the lawmaking process, then, is to be a system that discovers new externalities, or more precisely, defines what is a negative externality and what is not, as it relates to chosen policy.
At what point in the progression of scientific consensus does evidence for the consideration of a new externality require a response by passing laws that define the externality and how it can be bourne?
One argument is that there is not enough scientific basis to ground policy regarding CO2, specifically. And, separately, there is enough evidence that some forms carbon energy should be restricted, but due to other factors like pollution from coal. This argument is coming from a strong negative-rights model of government (like the US), where axiomatically people are allowed to do anything not currently restricted by law. The advantage of this system is that it allows people to act in the face of ever-changing circumstances of the world without needing to get approval from the government every time a new thing is discovered. The disadvantage is that now you have to hold externalities to higher bar of proof.
I think that we, individually and as a society, still have to act in the world, imperfect information and all. We cannot demand perfect data to base our decisions on, because always waiting for perfect data means that every decision will be too late. But, just like in science, we need to be able to change our beliefs/laws as evidence mounts that the basis for our previous belief is wrong. The problem is that politicial discourse is so deadlocked on pure narratives (all negative or all positive, no room for nuance or complexity) that we'll never be able to agree.
Yeah you're pretty much right. But this can be solved pretty simply with a pigovian tax.
It's not inconsistent with any definition of rights that I'm aware of to say that you can't pollute our air without consequences. By contrast, the current state of affairs does not mesh with any philosophical system that I've found. Under what theory can some stranger pollute my air? That's no more justifiable than me pouring perchlorate in my neighbor's well. The stronger someone believes in individual rights, the stronger they support my argument.
I think it's a misreading of philosophy (not saying you're doing this) to say that we need to justify restrictions on obvious negative externalities like air pollution. The polluter needs to justify his actions, not the neighbor whose air is being poisoned.
(The science on the deleterious effects of air pollution is of course settled regardless of what anyone thinks about global warming.)
I think the problem with your argument is that you assume there is always an a priori agreed upon definition of what constitutes negative externality, and this is just not true. Specifically, the line (emphasis mine):
> It's not inconsistent with any definition of rights that I'm aware of to say that you can't pollute our air without consequences
What exactly does pollute mean here?
I could say that my neighbor generating sawdust while sawing wood to build their deck is "polluting" the air. Or me sneezing while standing on my porch outside is "polluting" the air. Or if I'm watering my plants and some water flows downhill to my neighbor is "polluting" their lawn. Or me practicing piano in my house is polluting the soundscape of the neighborhood. Or, ..., or, ..., or, ..., or, ... See, there are limitless ways that one could construe basically any action someone takes as producing a negative externality. Almost certainly all of the examples I mentioned have been argued as negative externalities, and the answer is not to either accept every argument or reject every argument, because the details and circumstances matter.
My point is: Don't presume that negative externalities are automatically identified, and don't presume that every identified negative externality automatically justifies action to correct it, and don't presume that your chosen favorite corrective action produces no externalities of its own.
To be clear, I agree that there is enough evidence against CO2 that it is worth considering taking action to force CO2 generators to bear the cost of the externalities they produce. I don't agree that it's "obvious" that: 1. the negative externality exists, 2. the chosen remedy will actually solve the problem, 3. that the chosen remedy is known to be sufficiently free of its own negative externalities to consider forcibly changing our behavior. I think these things are true, but I don't think it's obvious that they're true, and trying to assert their truth by trying to make them axioms is dangerous and counterproductive.
No, we don't. We have a lot of ideological beliefs, hypotheses, and speculations about the costs of CO2 emissions, with no predictive track record to back them up. So we don't have the kind of knowledge that we would need to have to justify dictating public policy to everyone in this area.
She now has the option to leave a dead end rural lifestyle is she chooses. And if she's into the dead end rural life (insert whatever dumb american tropes we have that idealize wasteful rural modes of living), she won't find rich, high flying city guys very appealing and it's all a wash. Or maybe she wants to move to a different dead end rural community with a better match than the random farmer she happened to be born next to. Now she can do that on farmers only.
You could say some good and some bad (and of course very bad for the random farmer whose main reproductive strategy was apparently counting on his mate not realizing he's not a catch and there are much better options), but you can't say it's only bad.
Ideally, none of these people reproduce at all since we already have plenty of humans. Hopefully the shift to digital relationships can greatly reduce our headcount in the long run. This trend seems well underway already thankfully.