lliamander

This is similar to an intuition I've had about what it means to program "algorithmically". We often draw a distinction between "algorithms" and "business logic", but fundamentally they are the same thing. They are both plans of the steps necessary to accomplish a goal. The only difference, in my mind, is the style in which the program is written. To program "algorithmically" means to take steps to make undesirable program states impossible to represent.

- In the case of search or sort algorithms, where the primary concern is the speed of computation, undesirable states would be performing unnecessary or duplicate computations.

- In the case of encryption algorithms, undesirable states would be those that leak encrypted data.

- In the case of an order shipping and fulfillment system, an undesirable state would be marking an order as fulfilled when not all of the items have been delivered.

The more care that is taken to prevent undesirable states, the more the program takes on an algorithmic style. And the only way you can be sure that those undesirable states are impossible is to think in terms of proofs and invariants.

I should probably clarify - I don't mean to presume to know if the judge did it, I just mean I agree with the above poster's qualifier.

Not every case of reframing in a debate is "whataboutism". Whataboutism is where you bring up unrelated topics. In this case, looking at how we got into a messy situation in the first place is entirely legitimate.

There is no discussion to be had when the Trump admin is directly violating people's constitutional rights.

And yet here you are, still talking. So long as we are continuing this conversation, do you have any thoughts on how the executive branch should effectively enforce immigration law, which it has an obligation to do, according to the constitution?

I've heard that accusation so frequently from people who have zero concern about the constitution, let alone even know what it says, that I honestly struggle not to laugh.

I quite obviously reject your framing, and believe that there is a real discussion about how to properly adhere to the constitution in the face of conflicting considerations. But you do you.

No, you made up a hypothetical scenario that was highly sympathetic to your position. I am saying that we should not let edge cases (real or hypothetical) dictate general policy on how we handle immigration law enforcement, and that any outrage we feel at the tragedies that result from such enforcement should be directed toward the people that allowed these situations to develop in the first place.

The right move would have been simply to not help Flores-Ruiz evade ICE.

Anecdotally, I have heard that the most trustworthy (perhaps only trustworthy) Federal law enforcement group is the US Marshalls.

Which is why all US military clothing is mandated to be domestically produced (Berry Amendment).

Cool.

But how much industrial capacity do you want to take up making clothing?

I actually want the market to decide that. But that is fundamentally what we do not have. It has been more or less the result of conscious trade policy (by all governments involved) to incentivize production in other countries.

No, I did not. Are you actually going to engage with the arguments I have made?

No.

We don't make our own clothes because:

1. The regulatory burden on manufacturing is much higher here than foreign countries

2. Those foreign countries have a deliberate policy of maintaining a trade surplus in order to improve their own industrial capacity at the expense of our own

I would absolutely expect that even in a more level trade environment there would still be some foreign manufacturing of clothes. But what we are seeing is not the happy accident of the free market, but the result of very deliberate government policy.

Do you want people operating sewing machines or (say) welders?

Adequate clothing is actually a very important in war. Frostbite, sunburn, heat exhaustion, cuts and scrapes (which can lead to infection), trench foot, etc. are all conditions that can be mitigated through clothing.

Yes, there will still be specialization and trade in a balanced regulatory environment.

Minimum wage is possibly the worst, most ham-fisted way of driving productivity gains. Minimum wage and similar regulations are why so many jobs have shifted overseas in the first place. The "productivity gains" have almost entirely consisted in improved logistics for mobilizing cheaper foreign labor, not actually making domestic workers any more productive.

cheaper

One major reason why it is cheaper to make these clothes overseas is because we have such a stringent regulatory regime for worker and environmental protections, and using foreign manufacturers is essentially a loophole through those regulations. Whether those regulations are useful or not is entirely beside the point: if they are good, then moving manufacturing over to lower regulation countries is bad and we should impose tariffs on all of those goods. If those regulations are bad, then we should just repeal them and let domestic manufacturers compete on an even playing field.

but replacing the fundamental principles of existing licenses with new simple principles that slice the world into acceptable and unacceptable behavior in a better fashion.

Feel free to come up with a different set of principles, but don't call it FOSS.

What frustrates me about this current FOSS discourse is that the are a bunch of people who want to change FOSS principles without (seemingly) understanding what those original principles are or why they were chosen. These critics live in a world in which FOSS has been uproariously successful but don't appear to appreciate what was necessary for it to be successful in the first place.

You cannot have soft enforcement of ethical norms without hard entry requirements. That soft enforcement can only be achieved in the context of high trust social groups, which exist in the context of relatively insular cultures.

That's the thing, while there is value in investing in open source (for corporations and individuals) that value is often speculative and hard to quantify. When times are tough, people tend to focus on short-term, concrete benefits.

There's no 11th commandment to be nice.

Look, if you didn't find it funny, you're right. But those people who found it funny were also right. Humor is a matter of taste.

It's just being a dick in a way that it's popular to be a dick, because you can't be arsed to think for yourself about your own actions.

Maybe, or maybe people think it's funny and based on relevant criticism of the band's musical range and the music industry overall.

Criticism, in the right context, is kind--it's not kindness to let problems stagnate when they can be fixed.

There's no use in this conversation if you are just going to equivocate between "kind" and "good". Kindness, as I understand it, usually implies some sort of consideration for the feelings of other people, which is manifestly not always the right thing.

"Kind" is at best a context-dependent virtue. There are plenty of situations where being critical or divisive is the right thing.

And even when the harshness doesn't come from the best place, we still need it to some extent or we become fragile and blind to our own flaws.

Yes, and abortion means intent, which is an aggravating factor.

What is the "intent" exactly? If a young woman has been propagandized by the surrounding culture into thinking the child growing inside her is nothing more than a clump of cells more akin to a tumor or parasite, the mental state she has when she has an abortion is much different then if she is aware of the full moral gravity of what she is doing.

Is killing an infant a mitigating factor? Killing someone with a genetic handicap?

No, obviously.

Maybe in case of 'threat to the life of the mother', you can argue for 'self-defense', but still, you would have to be judged.

Clear cases of self-defense rarely go to trial. It would be very rare that cases of medically necessary abortion would ever go before a judge.

And that still leaves malformation, viability, rape and incest for which I don't find any moral mitigation tbf

Why wouldn't those be mitigating factors? There's no reason to think that (for example) a teen girl who was raped would be judged as harshly as a 30 year-old woman who intentionally had unprotected sex.

I wouldn't be so sure about that...

That's a potentially interesting side debate, but I'll just say for now that as long as non-neglible number of children saved, a broad abortion ban that permits those limited exceptions would be a win.

(I don't, to me the limit should be 'when it can live out of the uterus')

If you have a moral theory that justifies that position, please share. Because in my experience that's probably the most unprincipled position in the broader abortion debate.

EDIT: I want to clarify something. When I say:

The best way I see to establish "good faith" is to set clear expectations about what content is allowed

What I mean is that each social media platform needs to define what content is acceptable within its own terms. They don't necessarily need to be super detailed, but they should be explicit enough that people are able understand what is and is not allowed (or de-ranked, shadow-banned, etc.)

What I am trying to avoid here is people using social media under false pretenses. If a social media platform claims to be a neutral town square, but then behind the scenes tries to shape the discourse for their own political ends, that would be a false pretense.

One of the reasons Elon Musk bought Twitter was because the Babylon Bee was moderated for misgendering a trans person. I could see an argument for why this might not be ok, but for me the same argument to me would fall apart on the /lgbt or /trans subreddits.

That's sort of precisely my point. It's all about social media companies setting forth clear policies about what is acceptable on their platform, and ensuring that their moderation is consistent with that policy.

If Twitter wants to ban misgendering, let them. But they have to tell people. You can't claim to be the town square on the one hand and try to shape the discourse on the other.

I personally would prefer to use social platforms which establish boundaries on content. HN is an excellent example, and essentially the only "social media" I publish on for that very reason. But HN makes sure to tell people what is acceptable.

This sounds a lot like we're kicking the can of worms down the road.

Now we have to define what content is allowed and someone has to decide if some action is contrary to that policy.

I mean that the social media platform has to be explicit about what they allow. It doesn't matter what social media platform wants to allow (provided it is legal) so long as they tell their users what it is.

Finally, we have to define if something is contrary to the interests of users, meaning we have to define the interests of users... holy cow.

IANAL, but it seems to me this kind of thing already comes up all the time in things like contract law, employement law, unfair business practices, etc.

I think less is more in this case. There are enough social media sites out there that you can dial in pretty exactly what you want to see, no matter your persuasion.

I agree. What I am proposing requires no new legislation, and merely requires us to enforce existing legislation more or less as it is written.

I respect the opinion 'capital punishment/life sentence for any abortion, even in case of incest, rape, or unviable fœtus' way more, even if I find it unhinged. At least they are consistent.

Why? In no other place in the law do we completely ignore any potentially mitigating factors and always seek the maximum penalty. There's nothing more "consistent" about being overly-simplistic in this one area of law when we aren't anywhere else.

Every crime has degrees. There are always factors that affect the severity of punishment. When I say that conservatives see abortion as murder, what I mean is that they see it as falling on the spectrum that includes murder and manslaughter (voluntary and involuntary) etc. All of those people you listed bear legal and moral culpability, but the degree of culpability is something that has to be weighed in light of the facts.

There's also always an element of practical politics: the vast majority of abortions have nothing to do with rape, incest, viability, or threat to the life of the mother. Even allowing for these exceptions (some of which I would argue are in fact morally consistent) would result in a dramatic decline in the number of unborn deaths.

conservatives see it as a power tool.

That is not an accurate statement of the conservative view of government regulation.

I think a more accurate description of the difference would be to look at Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations theory, and in particular how the political left and the political right understand the idea of "fairness"[1]. I think it is our ideas about fairness that primarily drive the different views of regulation.

What is that difference? Well, as you said about social democrats, I think that people on the left view regulation primarily as a way to protect the little guy. Conservatives see it as a way to ensure that rewards are proportional to one's contribution and merit.

[1]https://moralfoundations.org/

However, there is a history of Republicans increasing government regulation on private businesses, most recently around private doctors providing health care for women.

No one (except certain strains of anarchists) is against laws restricting "big" crimes like murder, theft, etc. Regardless of how you think about it, Republicans tend to think of abortion as murder, and so it is perfectly consistent to constrain that behavior while still being against government regulation broadly speaking.

Now, I'm not going to try and convince you that abortion is murder, I'm just saying your accusation of Republican hypocrisy is not convincing at all.

Republicans say they are pro small government, but their actions clearly prove otherwise.

I would say that Republican politicians are much more comfortable with big government than the average voter that supports them.

As a conservative I definitely disagree Republicans pushing such legislation, though I sympathize with the need to respond to what appears to be a systematic attempt to control the discourse.

The right strategy is a two pronged approach:

The first (and most important) is to address government pressure, and to establish strong First Amendment protections against Congress and federal agencies from putting their thumb on the scale. This unfortunately failed in Murthy v. Missouri, but since it was rejected for reasons of standing rather than on statutory grounds, I think there is good reason to think this could succeed in the future (especially because there is prior precedent stating that the government cannot pressure private actors to do anything the government itself does not have the power to do directly).

The second approach is to focus on how Section 230 is enforced. Section 230 grants broad immunity to social media companies to engage in content moderation without liability (as it should) but I think we need to establish what is meant by "good faith" moderation. The best way I see to establish "good faith" is to set clear expectations about what content is allowed, and any moderation beyond that is done by users customizing their own experience. A pattern of moderation which is contrary to stated policy, especially when it is contrary to the interests of users, could be "bad faith" moderation that would exempt the platform from Section 230 protections, and possibly be considered an unfair business practice (and thus subject to civil litigation).

I think this would be in the best interests of all social media users of every political stripe. And none of this would prevent social media companies from systematically suppressing conservative content as "disinformation", but it would prevent them from doing so surreptitiously or under pressure from the government.

The mass of unpunished retail crimes that has afflicted US cities these last several years rather undermines your narrative.

#3 is happening and could cause #2 if wars for livable land and water resources break out.

Seems more likely to me that attempts to solve #3 will lead to #2.

If we actually attempted to curtail fossil fuel consumption as much activists claim we should, there would be such a drop in agricultural and industrial productivity that there would be mass starvation, particularly in the developing world.

I don't think those countries would peacefully go along with that plan.