Wow this one specific guy was wrong thirty years ago!
23,058 karma · joined April 4, 2014
passion: the study of complex adaptive systems
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Of course we should, at a society level. This basic concept is called public policy.
It's the wrong way of thinking about the problem. The whole point is that they've gained too much market power for any individual to be able to stop them meaningfully, and that collective action using the power of government is the only way.
Any argument that tries to talk people out of that is on the same side as the tech oligarchs, in my opinion.
> They literally aren't, though.
They literally are. They are common carriers, which is a legal concept with a lot of precedent. The UK term for this, ironically, is "public carrier" and while yes it's a privately owned it has distinctly public characteristics encoded in law that sharply distinguishes these spaces from genuinely private areas.
On the other hand, I travel a lot, and I take videos frequently to protect myself. Almost invariably, what I'm talking about here is walking around a rental car when I pick it up and drop it off. But there are other scenarios, like documenting that I was at a gate on time if they're claiming I was late and denying me boarding.
Of course, there are the ones that are contemplated by this article, like a dispute with another passenger or someone about what happened or what's happening, since the consequences of that stuff can be so severe.
I think a lot of European countries have laws around this that usually have exceptions for scenarios like that. For example, I was once recording the condition of a drop-off rental car in Italy. The rental car employee started screaming at me, claiming that, since he had been in the frame at some point or another, what I was doing was illegal. Meanwhile, he was refusing to give me a written receipt or some other proof that I had actually returned the car. If you know anything about rental cars in Italy, you want that, so I just took the video to confirm that I had, in fact, given them the keys and the car.
After it blew up and some research was done, it became clear that, while Italian law does have very strict restrictions on publishing recordings of people, recording your own customer service interactions for purposes of protecting yourself is clearly allowed.
I think a fairer policy here would be sharing, publishing, or distributing any recordings is very strictly prohibited, but merely possessing them can be permitted if the recorder can make a bona fide assertion that it was done for purposes of recording or protecting themselves and their rights as a customer.
Pretty sure it matters. In fact, I think the merits of the people that you run for president are super insanely unbelievably important. The idea that there's any other way to look at this is completely baffling to me. The fact that Biden was essentially incoherent and Kamala did not appear to have a discernible idea of why she was running in the first place mattered a ton, as did the fact that Kamala was literally selected by an opaque committee process with no voter input whatsoever.
They matter a lot. Try it the other way and run a candidate that has a clear and articulable vision for how people's lives will get better if they're elected, and then starts to act on that vision as soon as they're elected effectively. See what happens. It'll be different. It's happening in New York City right now, if you want one example. When people try this approach instead, the distinction is really easy to see. As is the suddenly vicious opposition from the establishment Democratic Party that's behind these people you're talking about
> People are refusing to vote for Talarico because... Nah, he's unelectable...
This election hasn't happened yet. Once it happens, that will be a better time to explain why he did or didn't win.
I still think that your understanding of the reasoning of the people who don't like him is flawed. The reason people oppose him and don't want to vote for him is because they don't think he's like them and or has their interests in mind. They think he cares about other things and other people besides them and the things that they care about. Conversely, the people that will vote for him will have been convinced that he does care about the things that they care about and will help people like them. Because that's pretty much always how it works.
Have you ever talked to a single person who has the views that you think they have? Or is your opinion of these "people" with these crazy views something that was served up to you by a company run by Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Ellison?
> I feel you think you've had some sort of "gotcha" moment by implying that Democratic candidates have failed in meeting their claimed goals.
Yeah, of course I do. The fact that Democratic politicians have failed to improve the lives of regular people and aren't really trying to is pretty fucking relevant to why they lose to obviously corrupt opponents.
Which seems important if your goal involves acquiring and wielding political power instead of lamenting all the idiots out there in internet posts.
Do the candidates you support have any kind of track record of making people's lives better, helping average regular everyday working people live lives of dignity where they can afford to live in places and raise their families?
Or do they have a long track record of doing the opposite, favoring the interests of war overseas and corporate hegemony at home?
Those are political questions.
Is it irrational to take out yourself as well as your enemies if you have no realistic prospects for improving your situation but you do have the ability to hurt people who hurt you?
So you can dispense with that assumption. Hopefully you can pick up on the point I was making, which is that there are a lot of irrational belief systems in politics. You can find them everywhere.
What I dislike is this tendency among overeducated elite, nominally Democratic Party-type commentators to focus on this meta discussion: Why are they stupid? Why are they misinformed? What bots are influencing them?
How about we just focus on the merits? What exactly is your favorite politician proposing to do? Do they have a conception and understanding of how power works and will they use it to achieve goals of any kind? Can we evaluate them on those goals? The last time your team got a chance, what did they do with it? Can people trust you? Who do you serve and who do you fight?
If the answer to that last question is that you serve Wall Street corporate interests and Silicon Valley and you fight against labor and wage earners then you're not on my team either.
Now see if you can figure out why self-destructive choices can be rational at times?
Can you formulate a hypothetical where smoking is a rational decision? I can.
So they voted for the candidate who had a track record of lower inflation.
Turns out things didn't happen that way but that's a different criticism. You're assuming a forward-looking omniscience of some kind or prediction skill that just doesn't exist.
Perhaps the many, many comments in this thread, going on and on about how people are misinformed, ignorant voters who vote against their own interests, could be understood for what it actually is, which is that.
There's no such thing as people voting against their own interests. People vote based on what they think will make their life better. The quality of a person's life has a massive number of interrelated variables that are hard to tease out.
Someone might decide that their quality of life will be improved by having better jobs or doing something about the extractive corporate sector that makes it almost impossible for normal people to thrive. They might also try to improve their lives by trying to make other people besides themselves feel humiliated and outcast in society since they are sick of being those people. In fact they might decide that's only thing they can change since that first thing isn't on the agenda of either party.
In all cases people get to decide what they care about and what they think their life improvement chances are by whatever metrics they pick. They are right about their preferences by definition. That's inherent to democracy.
Obviously.
Typically, the way it would work is that they would say, "You authorized it," and you would say, "Actually, I didn't authorize that payment. I only authorized the prior payments. I never authorized the subsequent ones because I logged in to their site and attempted to cancel, but they did not provide me with a means to do so."
To which they could say no your initial authorization should also apply to these subsequent charges because that cancellation method is not one we accept. In the past, that defense could work. Your NEW counterargument would be: Sorry, but they cannot rely on and profit from unlawful behavior.
My point would be that the argument would be clear. It stands to reason that a business cannot consider an unlawfully collected payment to be legitimate. If you can demonstrate that you attempted to give them notice of cancellation and they ignored it unlawfully, then that's your justification that the payment wasn't authorized. You can, of course, revoke authorization to collect payment anytime you want.
This is a really common kind of dispute that businesses have with credit card users. Typically, their response is that the user did, in fact, authorize it because they agreed to a variety of terms that mandated this and that for cancellation, and so on and so forth. In essence, if they can get the user to admit that they gave the original authorization, their argument would be that it was never withdrawn because the user previously agreed to some T&C buried definition of how cancellation would be defined.
The counter to that, of course, now, is new, which is to say that those terms are unlawful and thus negated. It seems completely sound to me as a strategy.
Assuming that you pay with a credit card, I would assume you could dispute the charge on the basis that they're violating the law and win any faceoff immediately on that basis.
In your example, the additional 1,000 lottery tickets might add nothing whatsoever to the value of the winning lottery ticket in your hand. It's just not a good metaphor. That's not how buying shares in a company works. Investors don't invest using bearer instruments of totally unknown value. They invest using cash. Cash always adds the value of the cash. That's intrinsic to it being cash.
A much better way to think about it is that you have something in your hand that's worth X dollars and has Y shares. If somebody were to give you X dollars in investment in exchange for Y additionally issued shares, then at the end of that operation the company, by definition, would be worth $2x, and your Y shares would be exactly half of that value, meaning that you start with X and you end with X.
As mentioned, knowing exactly what the company is worth in dollars is a little tricky, but that's the premise, and it completely makes sense.
Back to your lottery ticket example: let’s say you had a company with assets consisting solely of a winning scratch-off lottery ticket worth $1,000, and then you agreed to sell half the company to an investor who contributed $1,000 in cash. At the end of the exercise you would have a company worth exactly $2,000 (the company's assets include the lottery ticket and the new $1,000 of invested cash) and you would own exactly half of it.
If you have a unique skill at buying scratch-off lottery tickets and can turn that $1,000 in cash into more than $1,000 in lottery tickets, then you and the investor win from the transaction. That's what the investor is betting on.
If you can't get those results then the investors shouldn't invest in you and you shouldn't seek investment.