bawolff

Just because thinkers think something doesn't make them right. Thinkers are expected to defend their thoughts with arguments and logic. If they can't convince the do-ers, maybe their thoughts just aren't very deep and should rightly be ignored.

The invention of the telegraph changed how information is traded and the contents of newspapers, the invention of the TV changed politics, and so on.

Isn't that kind of the definition of a tool? Something that does something useful and as a result changes the way the world works (whether in a big way or a small way)? Wouldn't be much of a tool if it wasn't useful. It wouldn't be very useful if it didn't have an impact.

But we regulate lots of tools. Cars are tools, you still need a license.

I'm fully pro gun control. I still think guns are instrinsically tools, neither inherently good nor evil. They are still dangerous and should be regulated as such just like any dangerous tool.

We can't look inside the TLS tunnel, we only transport the TCP side.

But you could if you were malicious, you control the tunnel creation code.

It's end to end encrypted in the same sense that when you go to hackernews your ISP can't see your password because of TLS.

But its not like that. I do not have to trust my isp to not be evil. There is nothing my isp can do to read the password. I do have to trust you, you could easily modify the software in a way to read my password.

I guess it depends on how you define tool. Like as far as i know, traditionally Molybdenum-99 (an important isotope in medicine) is made by fision of highly entiched uranium. The same thing a nuclear bomb does, just a little more controlled so there is no big boom.

Is that a different tool or the same tool put to a different use? I would lean to calling that the same tool, since its the same process. I think at some point if we divide tools too finely we just end up encoding the use of the tool in the tool definition and the whole thing becomes moot. Like is a gun used for hunting a different tool then a gun used for murdering? Maybe you could say a machine gun is different, but what if its the same model of gun?

[As an aside, there are very real arguments over if nuclear bombs are a net negative for humanity. For all the downsides, mutually assured destruction significantly suppressed major wars]

I understand that that is what the author is trying to refute, i just find it extremely uncompelling.

Academics seem to like saying that considering any tool or technology to be value neutral, is naive.

And sure, technology choices have plenty of second order effects. Stopping any analysis at just how you are directly using the tool is probably insufficient.

At the same time, i still think that is part of how we use a tool. Society's choices about a tool (or even the choice to ban a tool) is still a part of how we use the tool and not instrinsic to the tool. I feel it all comes back to how we decide to use it. We can use nuclear technologies to treat diseases, power our cities, or we can use it to bomb places. We can chose to regulate the waste appropriately or not. Etc.

When i say things like its just a tool and it matters how you use it, i am claiming it is not inherently good or evil. It can have good or evil (or both) effects depending on how individuals use it and how society regulates it.

I have yet to hear a compelling counter example.

Browsers don't want you to bypass their content enforcement

I for one am happy that browsers dont let any random web page i visit port scan my internal network.

This is fully end to end encrypted! We use the WISP protocol for TCP-over-websockets.

Umm, that doesn't sound right. By definition, i dont think you can be end2end encrypted in a web browser, since your server controls what code is run by the web browser. Puter would fully be able to spy on you if they were so inclined because they control what wasm you load.

I guess, but it seems like if your encoding is not ascii compatible its better to just store as a blob anyway. Even without the null issue its not like string functions not expecting utf-32 would give reasonable answers.

if people aren't buying the bonds, then people do not believe that they are doing amazing.

But how much less then normal.

Like the logic here is the scalper company buys all the crops and then resells at an exorbitant mark up because everyone needs to eat, but then the market price becomes what the scalper is selling for. Would the farmer really leave that much on the table? They may be willing to give some discount to sell all at once, but there comes a point where it is no longer worth it to them to do so. The whole scalping thing only works if you can buy low sell high, but if you sell high the people you are buying from will start to notice that they too can sell higher to other people.

Concerts are different because there are brand reasons to keep prices low. Farmers aren't a charity, they aren't going to sell significantly below market price just for the good vibes.

Yes, although i would argue that a cartel suppressing supply is a different mechanism than what is happening with scalpers.

The onion futures thing is kind of interesting, because it was essentially the opposite of a scalper - they didn't try and buy all the onions to make price go up, they did it to crash the price of onions so that their short positions would pay off. Still a fair counter example to the idea that the market would self correct by itself.

People not trying to monopolize the food industry is a bit of an american centric view, e.g. Canada had a government mandated wheat monopsony for a long time. I think australia had something similar. I'm sure there are plenty of historical food monopolies. They of course couldn't be too greedy or its off with their head.

What is it that they don't understand about live music?

There is a reason this doesn't work in general though.

If you bought up all the food, farmers would raise prices until either you couldn't afford to do that anymore or eventually there is a splurge of new farmers taking advantage of all your free money until you run out of money. It could maybe work in times of famine where the government introduces price controls or rationing; it does not work in normal times.

For black markets (which is essentially what scalping is) to work, there has to be some shortage of a good that is priced artificially low. It works with concerts because singers can only sing so much but they also don't want to make the concert so unaffordable that only millionaires can go. There are very few situations like that. In most industries you would just increase prices until supply equals demand.

I never liked writing cursive. Then i tried a fancy pen once and it was so much better. I suspect cheap ballpoint pen killed cursive as much as anything else did.

I mean, there was that whole elephant hunting thing...

eh, other countries can improve their offering.

Or they could use coercive measures to punish the countries undercutting them. There is no world police after all to prevent them.

A big reason why capitalism works is 2 factors: its easy to start competitors and established players are not allowed to shoot up and coming companies. Neither apply to countries.

I'm not arguing about whether its a good thing or not, just that it is the way the world works. Whether or not Ireland's policies are a good idea depends on how much value they capture vs how much value they lose due to their consequences, chief among them being the strain such policies can put on foreign relations & trade.

As I pointed out, if Ireland didn't adopt it's tech FDI policy which it did in the 1990s, it would be a much poorer country today.

Perhaps, but if you want to measure the effect it had on ordinary Irish people you should be using GNI not GDP. I'm not saying it had no effect, just that GDP is a misleading measure.

Why should Ireland undermine 13% of it's GDP

Undercutting other countries on tax policy tends to piss them off. So it comes down to whether the benefits of the policy outweigh the blowback.

The 13% of GDP figure can be a bit misleading as GDP from being a tax haven tends to help the average irish citizen a lot less than more traditional ecconomic activity.

Alberta coal

Alberta doesn't have any coal power plants afaik.

I mean, if you own a house (you cant put solar on the roof of something you don't own), you probably do have access to loans. Houses make great collerateral.

Not neccesarily saying it makes economic sense to get a loan to install solar, just that homeowners usually aren't the poor class that saying usually applies to.

Probably people are responding less to the dumbness of the take and more the arrogance of the tone combined with the dumbness of the take. Everyone has dumb takes, not everyone is an asshole while giving their dumb takes.

Regardless i do agree with you though, not sure what the point of digging up ancient skeletons is.

In fairness, minimizing surface area (doing nothing unless you need to) is security 101, so i hardly think that is a criticism.

I never believe people when they say, we would have been famous if not for one piece of bad luck 35 years ago.

Yeah, i'm sure the lawsuit was crappy and set things back. But if you can't recover after 35 years, then its something deeper than what happened 35 years ago.

Then life moves on without you in the club.

Unless they are chosing something super obscure and sketchy, most club members are going to be fine with the leader just saying, we're picking whatsapp, either join or dont.

I think there is less cost to being in multiple chat platforms than multiple social media platforms.

Hopefully though we will slowly wean off the live vaccine. For the most part the live vaccine is only used in developing countries. There are a bunch of factors that make that difficult but i think eventually we will get there.

Well also Rinderpest, but i suppose you meant human disease.

Personally i'd call smallpox as actually eradicated despite the samples. I think its fair to call other diseases effectively eradicated, even if they aren't total. If less than 10 people in the world are dying per year, that is effective eradication even if not total

Really, you don't find it plausible that environment could affect mood?

I dont know if the hypothesis in the paper is correct, but it seems clear that environment can affect mood in some cases. There is a reason why night clubs and libraries are decorated differently. From there it seems very plausible other elements of environments could have an affect (perhaps subtle) on mood.