drcube

I can sleep at Burning Man with ear splitting sound camps blaring mere feet from my tent. It's called earplugs, they work well and they're very cheap. I've used them to equal success at home on the Fourth of July, too. It simply isn't a big deal. Let Cletus light firecrackers and work on his car in his own drive way. Who the hell are you to tell him otherwise? Go live in an HOA if you want to tell your neighbors how they can and can't behave on their own property.

I've had a couple employers offer to transfer my personal number to my work-provided cell phone. I said no thanks, and carried two phones around instead. But it was a surprisingly popular option among my coworkers. They'd rather let their boss own their personal, everyday smartphone than carry around two phones.

And yet, kids still drink and smoke. Yes, age restrictions are foolish and invalid, century of public policy notwithstanding. Not every policy that has existed should continue to exist.

That's no different from showing yourself to your theater seat replacing ushers, or throwing your hamburger trash away replacing busboys. Pumping your own gas. Or bagging your own groceries at some grocery stores. This is a very old trend and self-checkout is nothing different.

The number of sexual partners adults have has been steadily rising

Got a cite for that? I was under the impression the opposite was true.

And even if it is the case, see the book "More Sex is Safer Sex" by Steven Landsburg:

"You’ve read elsewhere about the sin of promiscuity. Let me tell you about the sin of self-restraint.

Suppose you walk into a bar and find four potential sex partners. Two are highly promiscuous; the others venture out only once a year. The promiscuous ones are, of course, more likely to be HIV-positive. That gives you a 50-50 chance of finding a relatively safe match.

But suppose all once-a-year revelers could be transformed into twice-a-year revelers. Then, on any given night, you’d run into twice as many of them. Those two promiscuous bar patrons would be outnumbered by four of their more cautious rivals. Your odds of a relatively safe match just went up from 50-50 to four out of six."

https://slate.com/culture/1996/07/more-sex-is-safer-sex.html

Why would you expect more people to miss books? Books didn't go anywhere. Anyone who wants them can easily buy them or borrow them.

You know what I miss? Dead tree user manuals that used to come with hardware and software. That's something that has gone the way of the Dodo, unlike most other books. Luckily I can still buy printed manuals from the FSF.

The main answer is "minorities". Look at the American South during the Jim Crow era.

Minorities need protection from majorities in democracies. And not just racial, religious or ethnic minorities. Everyone is a minority in multiple ways.

You have hobbies, beliefs, goals and connections that the majority in your country doesn't have. And they are all at risk under a democracy. This is why we don't have a "pure" democracy. This is why the Founders put many anti-democratic features in the US Constitution.

Every right you enjoy is a point where society drew a line and said "this will not be subject to a vote".

Democracy is not a synonym for "good". Whether something is democratic or not tells you very little about whether it is worth keeping. Most things are not democratic, nor should they be.

If a homeless person was living in your home, even if you invited him there in the first place, you still have every right to kick him out of your home if you decide you don't want him there anymore. Even if it's winter, and he'll die of starvation or freeze out on the streets without your hospitality. It may be a cruel and heartless thing to do, but it's perfectly legal, and should remain so. I believe we should have at least as much autonomy over our own bodies as over our real estate.

Farm living shows it isn't a paradox.

1) Animals on family farms are actually treated pretty well. "Torture" is absolutely not the word for it, though it probably does apply to varieties of factory farming, in effect if not intent.

2) More animals die, in absolute numbers, from plowing fields and harvesting crops than are slaughtered for their meat, mostly because we choose large animals for their meat while small animals like to live in grain fields. The only way to conclude that vegetarianism is more ethical is to discount the lives of smaller, wild animals in comparison to their larger, meat-producing cousins, or else define having habitats and homes destroyed, starving to death, or being snagged on a thresher as more humane treatment than being stunned and having their throat slit after being fed and cared for until adulthood.

In general, living closer to nature shows that death and suffering is unavoidable. Certainly we should strive to minimize suffering, but interruption of a huge source of food for most of the human population is a bad way to go about it.

If a fish were living inside your body, you'd have the right to expel it, too. That has nothing to do with the treatment fish deserve or don't deserve, and everything to do with human bodily autonomy.

What if it prevents one accident today, but causes two accidents tomorrow?

This is a "feature" I actively avoid. Why in the world would anyone want to buy something online without a chance to review their purchase? Other web pages don't even let you leave the page without asking "are you sure?".

Consider the question of why humans evolved to make art in the first place, and you'll probably conclude that it was sexual selection. In other words, artists get laid. Though it may be that artists get respect in general, which improves chances of survival in a social species like ours. So I respectfully disagree with Mr. McCloud's definition.

I'm not trying to weasel out of anything. Of course they're monopolies.

My point is simply that a monopoly isn't some sort of God-emperor who can do anything without consequence. Even monopolies have to bow to customer pressure, they're just less sensitive to it than companies in more competitive industries. Supply and demand applies to monopolies, too, that's why their prices might be higher than they would be in a competitive environment, but their prices aren't infinite. "Going without" is always a choice, even if there are no competitors.

There's always a choice. Suppose your ISP started charging you $10,000 per month for the service you have now? Would you pay it? Could you? No, you'd probably just go without home service, or rely on your cellular data plan, or get dialup, or just take an internet sabbatical until the ISP cleaned up their act.

For some people, their tolerance for bullshit is less than others. For those people, perhaps charging a dollar extra for YouTube access is enough. It only takes a fairly small percentage of customers to put a lot of pressure on service providers. Monopoly or not.

Then why doesn't society pay for it?

I've been drinking things in grocery stores before buying them since I was a baby. When did this become "shoplifting"? After all, we eat in restaurants before paying too, and nobody considers that a crime.

My guess is they're just hedging their bets with regard to wording. Presumably, there will be some crimes that entail losing your basic income, and it's probably up in the air whether the basic income will apply in whole or in part to children.

So "eligible citizens" in this case probably means "almost everybody, minus a few exceptions the legislature will certainly come up with".

Don't the cops already have her fingerprints? This is partly why biometric authentication is useless. You're supposed to change passwords frequently. How do you change your fingerprints? Who chooses a password the cops already know, and anyone else who knows you has access to?

Why don't more people just ignore the gag orders? I would. I understand most people won't, but there certainly should be more than one guy who illegally revealed his NSL in the 15 years or so since they began.

And here's what their "about" page says:

"Our mission is to help protect you, your children, your communities, and your businesses from the most dangerous threats facing our nation—from international and domestic terrorists to spies on U.S. soil…from cyber villains to corrupt government officials…from mobsters to violent street gangs…from child predators to serial killers."

Our mission is to help protect ... your businesses ... from cyber villains. The FBI acknowledges right on their home page that they have an obligation to share security vulnerabilities with companies.

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us

And good luck getting the locals to agree to compete with unpaid forced laborers.

Is "Federal Bureau of Investigation" really that hard to write out once in awhile?

We know what POTUS and FBI mean. Google the acronyms, if you don't.

You can create wealth out of thin air. The economy is not a zero sum game.

You're not going to be a very successful entrepreneur if your customers are broke.

Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only disease that you can get yelled at for having.

"Dammit Otto, you're an alcoholic!" vs. "Dammit Otto, you have lupus!"

That's "per device". For an $800 iphone, that's equivalent to banning their sale in NY.

Yeah, it's called "buy two smaller ones or take advantage of the free refills".

I don't understand why this is restricted to Facebook. If the telco is providing no-cost data to poor consumers, why does it matter which websites they go to? That's the suspicious thing about this, not the simple fact that Facebook is involved.