brightlancer

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" is a value statement; in the US, some folks agree with it, some do not.

Under your argument, folks who disagreed about that value statement shouldn't bother discussing criminal justice policy; I think that's erroneous and part-and-parcel of Don't Bother With Those People.

Yes, _some_ policy conversations might be futile if folks have completely opposed values, but I don't think we should apply that generally.

We MUST work with people who hold different values than us, without trying to change their values so that they become part of Us.

Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).

Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.

Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.

he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,

Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?

The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.

This is such a great contrast:

But they vote a straight blue ticket because that's what they learned to do back in the 1960s.

and

but still votes red because she was raised in a religious household and came of age during the peak of the right's lean toward peddling to christians.

There's no explanation for why the old man votes "blue" other than he learned it in the 60s. OTOH, the woman votes "red" because "she was raised in a religious household" and started voting when The Right was "peddling to christians".

"peddling" -- that's a pretty negative term.

I don't know if it's ironic or demonstrative that an article about how difficult it can be to have political conversations produces a comment thread with such biased viewpoints.

I've listened to Haidt speak about it and his book is in my tall stack to read; I don't think I'd heard of King but I grabbed the PDF. Thank you.

learned there are still plenty of people that were unhappy the south lost the civil war and want to remedy that

Did you peel that back to the next layer? Did they want to reintroduce slavery? Or did they want independence from a distant government?

I knew folks in the South who thought some of the craziest racist things and probably would've been OK with slavery (I did hear them promote segregation).

At the same time, the vast majority folks I knew who defended the Civil War or wanted secession didn't want slavery or segregation, but local (and often less) government. Did they misunderstand the role of slavery in the Southern secession? Usually. Does that change their _current intent_? No.

The latter group (which was much larger) should be engaged with on the issue of local government and secession, especially in the context of folks in Blue States who've been rattling about secession under Trump.

"healthcare should be for everyone" is a great claim to make. but then the question is implementation. how will you get rid of the current system and replace it with a more equitable one?

And as importantly, what does "more equitable" or "fairer" mean? More broadly, how do people define "better"?

In the US, a major issue is that The D and The R have radically different ideas of what those words mean, even though they agree on the high level objectives like "healthcare should be for everyone".

Framing has always been used in political debate just to target certain values; what may have changed (or not) is as a deliberate tactic to keep people divided: folks who do not speak the same language cannot communicate.

On a lot of issues, I think 80% of folks are in 80% of agreement, but the partisans (whether politicians or activists) are framing the issue to prevent that consensus, because the partisans want something in the 20% that 80% of folks don't agree with.

For the last 20 years at least, the leadership of the two main political parties in the US have largely invested in messaging around the values that they represent.

Except that the "values" each promotes are often inconsistent with other "values" they promote, sometimes to the point of absurd irrationality, e.g. marijuana vs tobacco or alcohol.

And other "values" are completely independent, but correlate so highly that "tribalism" is a much better explainer, e.g. abortion and guns.

and into a world where the parties policies are aiming to realize fundamentally different visions of the world, based on fundamentally different values.

That's not new.

On a very high level, the two major parties do want everyone to be healthy, wealthy and wise -- the issue is that they disagree on what those words mean, and what should be sacrificed (and by whom) to achieve it, which means the two major parties have always had very different visions of the future.

If you discover that someone has completely different values from you, then discussing policy isn't going to be useful anyway, because there's no way you'll agree on a single policy when you have different fundamental values.

And that right there is a call to tribalism: Don't bother with Those People, They Have Different Values, They Aren't Like Us.

TNG was lit much like other action/adventure shows when it debuted in 1987, e.g. MacGyver, Magnum PI, Simon & Simon, The A-Team (which ended that spring) -- the Bridge and hallways were much brighter than even a sitcom, I'd bet as a specific aesthetic choice of The Future Is Bright.

When DS9 debuted a few years later, it was stepping into a cultural mindset that had embraced Dark And Gritty in broader entertainment. That series is still much brighter than many shows today, but that's because of a technological revolution (including costs) rather than a change of "TV as an art form rivaling movies".

Yes, there is a mindset within Hollywood circle(jerk)s that so-dark-I-cannot-see is "more sophisticated, serious, and artful", but viewers broadly think it is idiotic. (Also, 2-and-a-half or 3 hour movie runtimes.)

In most fields (film, painting, music, etc), there are standards -- agreed upon to varying degrees, sometimes almost unanimously, sometimes with only a plurality -- based on objective or almost-objective criteria. In other words, there are "measurable" criteria that expert or even merely good practitioners can agree on. In these cases the word "quality" is often used as a shorthand for possessing these kinds of properties. In this sense, ascribing quality is functionally different from a mere opinion, linguistically and technically.

Could that be selection bias, where people who think X is "quality" promote other people who agree and push down those who disagree?

At that point, it may be true Agree X has found something objective and measurable, but they're using circular reasoning: these metrics are important because they show "quality", and we know it is "quality" because of those metrics.

same with $10 ear buds vs $150 iems

Are there $150 pairs which are better than every $10 or $20 pair? Sure.

But there are plenty of $150 headphones which have the same quality as a $10 pair of earbuds. People overpay for brand names, for trendy styles, for good marketing/ branding, etc. Price _alone_ is not an indicator of quality.

Meaning quality is more important than quantity.

It's not a binary choice.

Price is a non-linear factor here: "quality" may be prohibitively expensive as a single purchase, even if it is less expensive over X years than re-buying a cheaper item every year.

In the US, shopping trends are clear that many people (perhaps most) value quantity very highly, to the point that they will sacrifice "quality" which is loosely defined and more subjective. IME this also ties into Americans being very price conscious.

That's a silly comparison: by that metric, Apple "won" against Saudi Aramco and Berkshire Hathaway, and Microsoft also "won" against them.

Except that they aren't in the same business.

On the desktop, Microsoft is still kicking Apple's ass. Even moreso for servers. The only place Apple "won" is on mobile, where Microsoft lost to _everybody_.

S230 is flawed,

Yes.

and it must be amended, updated, or replaced with a better version that addresses common grievances.

That assumes it will be "better" and less flawed. To that point:

In my subjective experience, I would prefer to see S230’s protections “scale” with the size of the platform and its function. For instance (and I know this will be a highly controversial take), I don’t think large, centralized platforms like FB or X should have S230 protections at all, because

sec230 in its current form is better than every "reform" I hear suggested.

There's always going to be a lot of money/profit in amoral behavior that's legal -- while being moral means passing on that behavior and money. It's possible to run a business morally and successfully, but rarely as successfully as someone who runs one amorally.

IME, most people in the US will happily take a job with the extra money at an amoral company, even if the lesser paying job at a moral company would still be enough for a comfortable life. (Folks in the US are very price conscious; I don't know how that compares to other cultures/ societies.)

In the US, minors can get a driver's license at 16 in most places, and at 15 in a few I've seen.

And a person of any age can drive a car on private property.

It had nothing to do with tax rates and everything to do with wage "controls" (i.e. caps) during WWII.

Employers were not allowed _by law_ to pay their employees competitive wages, so they offered benefits which weren't restricted.

Even after the war, this was still a benefit to employers: the cost of benefits paid by the employers could be deducted from their taxes, but employees didn't have to pay taxes on it (unlike wages), so it was more efficient; also, changing jobs meant changing health insurance plans, which complicated job switching for employees.

(BTW, the supposed "high tax rates" were paid by almost no one, in part because they only applied to the highest tax brackets but also because of numerous tax deductions.)

considering that the median employee takes almost zero risks and can leave whenever they want.

This is an important point that is often ignored.

Within the past week there was a thread about "How to get paid FAANG money at non-FAANG companies", and someone mentioned starting your own business -- which folks (correctly) pointed out involved risks and time that most folks don't want to take.

(Also, it's always funny on HN when someone sarcastically talks about a CEO "only" being paid an absurd amount of money, when almost all of us are getting paid multiples of the median salary, plus whatever annual bonuses and stock.)

The problem here would be that there's not enough people who can provide the level of protection a third-party vendor claims to provide, and a person (or persons) with comparable level of expertise would be much more expensive likely.

Is that because of economies of scale or because the vendor is just cutting costs while hiding their negligence?

I don't understand how a single vendor was able to deploy an update to all of these systems virtually simultaneously, and _that_ wasn't identified as a risk. This smells of mindless box checking rather than sincere risk assessment and security auditing.

I know people really dislike how Apple restricts your freedom to use their software in any way they don't intend. But this is one of the times where they shine.

Yes, the problem here is that the system owners had too much control over their systems.

No, no, that's the EXACT OPPOSITE of what happened. The problem is Crowdstrike had too much control of systems -- arguing that we should instead give that control to Apple is just swapping out who's holding the gun.

Even then the "blast radius" was only the BitLocker team with about 8 devs, since local changes were qualified at the team level before they were merged up the chain.

Up the chain to automated test machines, right?

My understanding from Brave is that this year Google is essentially disabling v2 add-ons, but the code will still be in Chromium (for other things Google does), so Brave can just re-enable it.

But Brave expects that Google will actually pull the code out of Chromium next year -- when that happens, it is unlikely anyone else will have the time to maintain patches to put it back in.

and they will not need to work ever again

Maybe not washing dishes, laying bricks or constructing houses, but there will always be work. Things will continue to get cheaper (and better), but they will always take _some_ human effort to make. (And we'll always find new things we want.)

English speakers in India use the word “revert” in email a lot more often than Americans do, because there it can mean “reply”, as in “I will revert with that information later today.”

That's not just an issue of frequency but redefinition. I read about English-speaking Indians using the word "prepone" to mean "pushed forward" (as an inverse of "postpone"), and they were shocked when non-Indian English speakers didn't know what they were saying -- because it's not a word in British or American English, and AFAIK it's not a word in among any other native speaking English societies.

Neologisms and re-definitions aren't inherently bad, but it can make communication more difficult.

Before we delve into everything else...

Risk-sharing mutual aid societies are now among the largest and best-funded organisations on the planet - we call them "governments".

I'm not aware of any mutual aid society that shot an unarmed man SEVEN TIMES IN THE HEAD because they misidentified him. The Metropolitan Police did, and none of the officers were disciplined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Jean_Charles_de_Me...

That right there is a great example of the bias of the BBC.

----

The article is engaging but doesn't give a good explanation of the difference between "insurance" and "gambling".

At the very end it brings up financial derivatives but again does not explain them well or the danger they caused.

Is "insurance" a type of "gambling"? Maybe. But it's quite different from gambling in a US casino (and I presume UK casino).

In the US, "gambling" refers to wagers placed at known odds, sometimes against other players; legal gambling has limitations on how much money the House can take: e.g. if a casino "wins" $100, they must also pay $80 to someone.

Again in the US, "insurance" (excepting health "insurance", which is mostly not insurance) is someone paying a regular premium and the insurer promising to pay if certain events happening to the person, with the government requiring that the insurer keep financial reserves to pay out claims. If you stop paying your premiums, you lose your insurance. If the insured events never happen, the insurer keeps your money.

In a sense, insurance is a type of gambling, but closer to buying an umbrella in the morning in case it rains in the afternoon.

Financial derivatives were portrayed as insurance but were not regulated as such, and the banks did not keep reserves to pay them out; because folks were also taking "insurance" against events that happened to third-parties (i.e. not themselves) it looks a lot like gambling (though they weren't regulated as that, either).

I highly recommend the film "The Big Short" to explain the 2008 financial crisis in fairly plain terms. (I finally picked up the book but it's in the queue on my shelf.)

There's only no making money on health insurance

Health "insurance" is mostly not insurance: it's a healthcare plan for periodic maintenance and minor incidents combined with an insurance plan for large and catastrophic incidences.

When I buy car insurance, they don't give me 4 free (or even discounted) oil changes a year. Car insurance exists for large and catastrophic incidences. Same with home insurance.

Actual health _insurance_ plans are much cheaper than healthcare plans, but they also only cover large and catastrophic incidences.

Laws that are uncontroversial in one year can become very controversial in another. Is it murder to kill your slave? Is it murder to kill the man breaking into your home at 3AM? Is it murder for the government to kill the man convicted of murder?

I think it's a good idea for all laws to have sunsets, though some could be longer than others.

In the US, I see federal laws renewed every few years with little public debate, sometimes released to the legislature with little opportunity for them to debate, let alone read and verify changes.

The trouble is that perhaps our societies are now so polarised we’d never be able to agree to pass uncontroversial legislation without partisan horse trading.

Again, some things may be more controversial than they appear.

When things are uncontroversial, I think there's usually broad agreement to pass it without horse trading. More often, I see something (very) controversial is packaged with the uncontroversial, and the reporting of the situation is biased.

These restrictions prevented what these women saw as their right to be elegant in appearance.

...

The events that it set in motion on the streets of Rome created a precedent which saw Roman women stand up for their rights and make their voices heard.

Recognizing that yes, women and men should have the same legal rights, I find it hilarious that the tipping point that year was that women had to limit their wardrobe in public.

From [wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Oppia) because I find the phrasing interesting:

"Cato argued that the law removed the shame of poverty because it made all women dress in an equal fashion. Cato insisted that if women could engage in a clothes-contest, they would either feel shame in the presence of other women, or on the contrary, they would delight in a rather base victory as a result of extending themselves beyond their means."

Again, men and women should be equal under the law, but it isn't an antiquated notion that women would engage in a "clothes-contest", particularly among economic classes.

(Men, to be clear, are socially permitted far less peacocking with clothing, so there isn't anywhere near the same contest.)

Neither of those sentences cite a source. The papal bull notes, "our predecessor of immortal memory, Pius IX, solemnly proclaimed the dogma of the loving Mother of God's Immaculate Conception."

Pope Pius IX died in 1878. Did he proclaim that Mary was born without sin but she still didn't have a soul?

So, how many errors do we have to find in the paper before we just dismiss the paper as nonsense?

There's also a noticeable pro-transit, meh-cars sentiment among Millennials/younger people

I read this a lot but I don't find the data that supports it. There appears to be a very loud group of millennials online who won't shut up about how awful cars are, but I can't find data supporting this among the age cohort.

(Also, generation theory is great for napkin math but so misleading that it shouldn't be used for serious work. In doing a quick search to see if maybe I had just missed obvious data, I found studies using different year brackets for "Millennials", which makes this all apples and oranges.)

Come to think of it, I can't think of anyone I know who owns a car that was not chosen in the same way we'd choose an appliance. There's no sports cars, nothing luxury beyond the average luxury sedan, no pickup trucks or jeeps or anything other than practical 4 door vehicles of various sizes with lots of safety features and good gas mileage (if not electric).

I spent most of my adult life in Georgia, in Atlanta specifically and also in the ginormous metro. I've known plenty of folks who drove pickups and jeeps, sports cars and muscle cars. And tons of SUVs. More than luxury sedans, folks would buy luxury SUVs. There were regular sedans, but those tended to be older and/or the second car. I can't think of anyone who went out and bought a new Camry.