PurpleBoxDragon

Given the gambling example, should we be mad at the advertisers or at the forum for making money off of allowing such ads?

If the Gambling Association made a bunch of posters about their new lotto and paid anyone who put them up in buildings, and the person running the Gambling Anonymous meeting came and picked up a few to put up during their meetings, do you blame the Gambling Association or the one who picked up the posters?

Ads are currently such a nightmare because almost everyone making money off of them has chosen to go with services that handle everything instead of filtering their ads and hosting them locally because letting those services handle it all pays better. It allows for far more tracking and targeted ads, sometimes for better and sometimes for much worse.

A sane system would consider the knowledge and power differences between the average individual and the corporate lawyers who wrote the agreement, along with the one sided nature of the agreement, and void any consent as not having been possible to give. Likely the agreement would be treated as one signed by a child, where the more powerful party is the only one bound by it.

may then pass discriminatory laws for which the Bill of Rights no longer applies against.

Cannot they already do this to some limited extent (and perhaps are even required to do so)? For example, laws concerning voting.

which makes them look very different from normal traffic which kind of by necessity makes them look a lot more like bots.

But if they are doing so because they are disabled, and the difference means they receive a worse experience, may result in an ADA complaint (especially if a government service falling under section 508 is involved).

What about the deafblind?

Blame the laws, not the company.

Why not both? If I move to a country that legally allows me to do something horrible, people will rightfully call me a bad person regardless of the legality of the action.

the answer from the dev team is almost always, "Works as designed".

When I say 'works as designed', what I'm actually saying is that I didn't have control over the design, go talk to the ones who did.

There are cases that I'm all for bashing Google when they don't give the company they're targeting enough time to patch something

While I understand the common ethos of our current culture supports this, has there been analysis if giving what could constitute a second chance to fix security issues leads to less prioritization of security initially? I could definitely see a business deciding to lower their security expenditure since if an issue is found, they will be given a grace window to fix it before the world hears about it. It would still be damaging, but it would be far less since the PR machine could spit out that it was patched before it was announced to the world.

There has to have been some agreement to limit the grace period since people will go live once a reasonable time frame to fix it has passed and they won't be judged negatively if others agree reasonable time was given. So if we won't judge someone for giving only 6 months instead of 3 years, what about the one who gives only 2 weeks instead of 6 months? How do we calculate which of two time frames is better?

In C# var is always a place holder for the actual type which the compiler only accepts if it can figure out the type. If you do anything to the var that you can't do to the actual type it will still give you a compile time error.

And they do. But what exactly is that line. Prurient content that empowers people? Banned. Content that literally allows control over non-consenting individuals based on their gender? Accepted.

This is like a serial killer who campaigns against littering. They have a line they won't cross, but we shouldn't accept it.

If we enforce some morals and not others in our app stores, who exactly do we choose as the arbiters of morality?

Apple and Google are, and their moral guideline is money. They are in the business of making money. If the content seems close enough to illegal and small enough revenue to not be worth investigating it, or if the content is legal but costs more to host than it brings in due to backlash, it will be censored. I would even guess that content that is illegal but brings in enough money won't be banned (unless a court order comes in that isn't worth the cost to fight).

One can just look at Reddit's history of banning content and see that it bans things not based on morals or laws but on when it stopped being a revenue generation. The allowed their most popular sub-reddit for years until moral outrage grew due to a news investigation, and then banned it under the guise of being illegal and protecting minors (despite the content not being illegal, as the federal government wouldn't have allowed to continue operating had it been).

Don't Apple and Google already block plenty of legal content they don't want to deal with? Consumers should force them to explain why they are willing to deal with this specific content.

They’ve been exempt / free from responsibility for far too long.

I've seen arguments that the government not allowing these debts to be discharged through bankruptcy was a major cause of the problem. Do we want more market manipulation, or should we start teaching students that because the government has allowed for a trap even bankruptcy cannot escape, you need to learn how to avoid it?

Is it that they are helping insufficiently, or that they are using this as a strategy for making money and showing their true colors by engaging in it only to the extent they make money? It is easier to support someone whose intentions are to help despite an imperfect execution than it is to support someone whose intention is to fake helpfulness only to the extent it beneficial to them, even when both result in people being helped.

Getting research subjects is hard. For any significant sort of test beyond a simple survey, it is really really hard. So colleges force their undergrads to be participants so that the graduates have enough fodder to write research papers off. Of course, the IRB views this as unethical, so all the undergraduates are given an alternative to being a participant in research, at which point it becomes a question of crafting an alternative that is painful enough all the undergrads choose being a research subject but not so painful the IRB considers it unethical.

I'm use to the alternative being a research paper that can easily take 20 times longer to complete than being a test subject.

Over a reasonable horizon, you weren't profitable.

The average worker isn't allowed to do that even when they lose money in a given year. Why is it so naturally assumed to be acceptable for a business to do it? Maybe the time is to just remove the loopholes in general from both business and personal income taxes.

It is likely easy to pronounce in that person's culture, just not for you.

Often names will live on long after the family has left the culture. In my own case, my original family name was difficult for anyone in my own family to pronounce. Some number of generations ago (all records are lost so this is mostly an assumption) the name itself was Americanized so that the kids who never grew up in the original culture nor who knew the language could pronounce the culture.

because people do not control their names, just as they don't control their physical features

This one also stands out to me because there are numerous physical features or other uncontrollable things which our society, to some level, tolerates judging or making fun of. Being short. Being bald. Having a disgraced member of society as a family member (someone who isn't just a criminal, but committed a crime that is harshly judged by society). None of it is fair, but it is still allowed to a large degree.

Even more complicated, when we get to personal relationships, judging based even on things like ethnic history is somewhat allowed. Part of me wonders, if I can judge someone I consider acceptable to pair bond with on some criteria, why can't I also use that exact same criteria as a source of humor? If I can't use it to do little things like make a joke, then it seems even more wrong to use it to make larger judgments of a person.

I think it would have to be a requirement of any money the government spends on code. Otherwise, they will easily defeat the requirement to make it public by passing it through a private company.

By hiding the code, it makes security through obscurity far more possible. If you force the code to be public, very poor security will be discovered far faster and be more of an issue to the public.

While this will also make abusing security flaws easier, I think there is also a real benefit to forcing it to be public that could potentially outweigh the risks of doing such.

Nobody, or very nearly nobody, lives up to their "true potential".

I agree.

But how do we discuss reasons that are or aren't justified to be taken into account. For example you can break down potential blockers into temporary and permanent. Being sick or the death of a loved one can temporarily hurt your potential. Poor nutrition or a brain injury can permanently hurt your potential.

Do we judge people based on if they can overcome anything holding them back? Or do we wait for them to overcome it before we judge them? What if we are the gatekeepers of a method to overcome our limitations (such as the person deciding who gets to attend university)?

A huge part of science as a field is consensus.

How many were against Einstein for decades? Appeal to consensus among experts is still a fallacy.

Could one say that meritocracy is not meritocracy? No matter what skill you measure, a population with adequate nutrition since conception is going to be far better than a population where malnutrition impacts both pregnancy and children.

So what is the take away, especially with applying this to all areas of our lives? We can do something to try to equalize the workplace, the chess tournament, or the tennis court. But what about equalizing the stage or the bar?

This is not denying the bad behavior of intelligence agencies in the past.

But to say it is okay for someone to work for those agencies is to deny their bad behavior in the past. There has been no change to those agencies except they are better at covering up their current day bad behavior, so to say it is at all moral to support them is only possible if you find that their past behaviors weren't really bad.

I think the legality and the morality of free speech aren't connected. You can have legal but immoral speech and illegal but moral speech (such as the example you give). It is possible to have speech that is, regardless of legality, wrong and something not to celebrate or call good (say someone encouraging a suicidal person to attempt).

Whom is a representative democracy supposed to represent - only educated, upper-class, "quality" folks?

I think there is an valid question to what extent should people and views be represented. The simplest idea is that everyone is equally represented, but every voting system I've ever heard of has a minimum age, meaning that we think you can be too young to be represented.

Also, anyone who supports a non-mandatory system also supports, perhaps not knowingly or willingly, a system where the apathetic are not represented.

So, we already have a system where we think it is okay that apathetic and young individuals aren't represented, is it really that astonishing to suggest that some people think other groups should be included or that they want to change the boundaries of the already excluded groups?

In my mind, as soon as a society makes it acceptable to look at a 17 year old and say "You are too young/inexperienced/immature to vote", that society has legitimized unequal forms of representation.

legal and morally right

I guess the first question is, if I do something illegal, but either avoid being captured or manage to otherwise avoid prosecution by using money or influence, have I done something wrong, legally speaking?

Because there is an argument to be made that making money off of children's consent to contracts is legally wrong, but because of the widespread nature of doing such by those who have enough political power to impact how laws are enforced, the laws are not enforced to protect children. That we aren't correctly enforcing laws that protect taking advantage of a child by using consent that can't legally exist does not make the action legally right, or if it does, then we are effectively invoking the notion of "it isn't illegal if you don't get caught".

Isn't the scale of potential damage far different between the two? A failed nuclear power plant can cause harm that will last longer than any human civilization has managed to last. The harm caused by launching Challenger is equal to something much smaller, such as a single day of car accidents.

There is also a false dichotomy presented here, because the alternative to nuclear is not limited to just fossil fuel. There are numerous forms of clean energy that doesn't have the failure possibility of nuclear.

Which isn't acceptable either.

Based purely on the evidence at hand, our society deems it not only acceptable but not even noteworthy.

Or is it? Look at cases where SEA countries were pushed to stop using child labor in their factories. It was done more by economic pressure than by law, but the end result was that those children ended up much worse off. To the companies that were pushing the economic pressure, is that a result they were okay with?

So if a law gives you a choice in how you choose to censor a work of literature, would it be the artist's self censoring and not an act of government censorship? Assuming we applied the same logic.

And given that Mitch McConnell only has that ability by consent of the Senate. They could elect someone else in his place if they wanted to (Democrats might very well vote for a different Republican in such a case instead of voting party lines. it would only take a few Republicans siding with Democrats to replace Mitch).