> Imagine that you find that the water supply in your town was built illegally, because the former mayors prohibited the building that was necessary. You may think that is a travesty, you may want to enforce the law strictly in the future, and force the issue, rather than working around it. But what you will not do is tear up the water system and leave the city without water.
If you think that the former mayors are ideologically and morally committed to an illegal water supply, and will immediately stop enforcing the water supply law the second they get back in power (and also somehow the illegal water supply disproportionately helps them win elections); then it might well be a reasonable political move to tear up the water system and leave the city without water. That's one way of forcing the issue.
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take
part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!"
- Mario Savio
Yes, if the biggest political issue in that country at the time was would-be immigrants taking advantage of the slow legal process in order to stretch out their illegal stay in the country longer.
ICE should absolutely be running surveillance ops on immigrants that is their job. That is necessary to do in order to find and deport illegal immigrants, many of whom have been going out of their way to evade deportation for decades.
Housing prices aren't going up because of billionaires, they're going up because of the collective action of millions of ordinary Americans, many of whom are not rich, who own houses and resist the construction of new houses near them to meet demand. Taxing the ultra-wealthy more does basically nothing to make my own housing costs less; making it legal for a housing developer to completely ignore the protests of old retired people on a fixed income and build a new condo development next to the house the old retired person bought 30 years ago would.
Buy some solar panels yourself and use them to generate electricity in your own home? Write to your local legislators expressing support for utility scale solar panel arrays?
Private industry should be able to profit off the sun and it's disturbing that you think asserting this is a dunk. Steinbeck's temporarily embarrassed capitalists quote (not "millionaires", that is a misquote of what he actually wrote in 'A Primer on the 30s' for Esquire magazine in 1960) was referring to well-off liberals involved in socialist activism in the 30s and having a naive, self-interested understanding of what policies would actually help the proletariat. The government often can't be trusted to run efficiently because the government is insulated from having to actually make a profit delivering services people want to pay for, and is often being used for other poltical ends by people who do not care about wasting taxpayer money. Communal infrastructure is often not something everyone benefits from because infrastructure that is legally required to serve everyone by law often has a bunch of compromises that make it practically unusuable for some group of people who can't do anything to change it because they are a numerical minority.
In particular, a lot of people say this about major social media platforms when they are censoring content the speaker things is genuinely bad; and then call for government regulation of those platforms in order to prevent them from censoring content the speaker likes and thinks is important. And even if the government did just nationalize Facebook, the fact that it's no longer a private company doesn't remove the political component of the decision - people argue and vote on what they want the government to do, and then sometimes a court rules that it's unconstitutional for the democratically-elected government to do the thing it wants to do.
Why should I believe your claim that AfD content is getting pushed on YouTube? Isn't it more likely that you personally hate AfD and so you find it salient and enraging whenever you see any AfD content at all yourself, regardless of exactly how YouTube's recommendation algorithm works on your account or whether they treat AfD particularly differently than any other political content? Are you actually measuring this?
To be clear I think it's entirely possible that YouTube is adjusting its recommendation algorithm to show AfD content to people more (or perhaps less) than would happen "organically", because AfD is a salient political party in German politics and YouTube knows this. But how do you determine what is the correct amount of AfD content to be recommended to people in a politically-neutral way, that doesn't end up amounting to you arguing that the YouTube algorithm is only fair if it censors political content you personally think is bad?
No, we should put them in jail in order to keep them off the subway in the moment as well as to disincentivize other people who are considering fare-jumping. Murder is not the only additional crime an antisocial person who is already committing the crime of fare-jumping might commit, that affects the well-being of everyone else using public transit.
He might've been deterred from committing the murder if he wasn't on the train at all but was instead in jail because he got immediately arrested by the cops for fare-jumping. Also murder isn't the only crime I don't want to happen on transit, that is most likely to be committed by someone who is already breaking the law against fare-jumping to be there at all.
People sleeping in their own private tents on public land in urban areas is as much of a problem as people sleeping on public transit is. I want protectors of law and order to catch and arrest people sleeping in tents in public parks just as much as I want them to do so for people using public transportation as shelter. If there isn't enough law enforcement resources to do both and it's necessary to prioritize, then I would reluctantly say to prioritize public transit, simply because public transit is more enclosed and so it's harder to quickly get away from people who are a threat on it. But ideally we'd do both.
We don't actually have the technology to build housing on the cheap for the most marginalized people in society, who would trash that housing without intensive and expensive and very often coercive support from some kind of social worker. One of the biggest reasons many homeless people avoid the homeless shelters that do exist for the most distressed people in our society, is because the other most distressed people in our society living in the same shelter are prone to stealing from them or physically harming them. And another reason is that they want to irresponsibly use drugs in a way that makes them a potential threat to others and so is banned by the shelter.
Fare jumpers absolutely need jail - the sort of person who jumps the faregate is also much more likely than the average person to be a nuisance or a violent threat to other people on public transit. I think it's more important to jail fare jumpers than a lot of other types of petty criminal, because enclosed public transit is one of the most important areas in a city to control crime; people need to feel safe on public transit in order to want to use it to get around. The sort of person who fare-jumps is extremely often homeless, mentally-ill, or a gang member - not someone who is capable of being compelled to do a minor chore for the station without way more coercive effort than the station employees can be expected to provide. The right response to fare-jumpers is to have police - uniformed specialists in using violence or the threat of violence to enforce public order - physically remove them from the public transit station and keep them in a locked room under guard where they can't harm someone else.
Is it incorrect that immigrants being kicked out (or being disincentivized to come to begin with or remain) has decreased demand for housing in the US, causing house prices to fall?
If you raise people from poverty, they'll want to spend the money they now have as non-poor-people on things like taking airplane flights, cars, and eating beef, because those now no-longer-impoverished people consider access to those things to be part of their good quality of life. In particular all of these things happened to over a billion people in China as China has gotten less impoverished over the past half-century. Another way of looking at it is that causing there to be fewer flights, beef, and fossil fuel car journeys is literally the same thing as making most people poorer - the only way to make there be fewer of those things is to make them drastically more expensive so that even people who are generally getting richer (like, for instance, the average person in China) find it harder to afford them.
This could be a crazy violent act that deserves making someone a felon, it could be an act of self defense that was unfairly prosecuted, or it could be something in between.
This is a genuinely interesting question - if humanity had the technological capacity to set the global temperature at any value, what value should that be? Is there any reason to think that the temperature in place from the beginning of the Holocene to the beginning of widespread fossil fuel usage by humans is the best one?
This is feel-good bullshit. The thing that will actually make people stop burning so much fossil fuels is if gas costed $50 a gallon and everyone who drives a car for any reason is thinking about this number before they use their car. Which is absolutely the sort of state of affairs that large numbers of people - and not just in the rich world - would legitimately riot about.
Why should I believe your assessment that a huge chunk of fossil fuel use by the rich world went to "relatively small marginal gains in quality of life"? I think they went to massive quality of life gains for huge numbers of people, and that suddenly removing fossil fuels as an energy source would be catastrophically bad for huge numbers of people, and not obviously worse than the effects of global warming over a comparable timeframe.
> Sure, nuclear is a good tool that we should leverage. But the reality is that the situation is such that we need to change a bit of everything everywhere, and the first step to do that is to realise it, accept it and vote for it. What do people instead? Say "it's because of those other people, I am better, and I will now vote for an extremist because my lack of common sense tells me it cannot be worse".
It might be worth voting for an extremist if that extremist being in a position of power keeps people out of power who would otherwise work against nuclear power plants; even if the extremist himself doesn't care about nuclear power one way or the other.
If it's an actual peaceful protest, that just involves people advocating for something in the public commons that doesn't disrupt the ability of anyone else to the use the public commons, then sure this is a reasonable point. I was responding to the person who said sarcastically "Yea, protest should happen where it doesn't bother anyone. Right.", who would likely not find that kind of actually-peaceful protest likely to be effective.
And I do actually want immediate arrest and physical removal to be the default first response in a situation like an effective protest. I do not want people to get away with disrupting the public commons and then claiming that they were justified in doing so because they were carrying out a protest. Indeed, I want the police to immediately arrest and physically remove anyone at all who is disrupting the public commons. The police are a weapon, and I want that weapon used effectively against people who disrupt the public commons, so that the public commons can be usable by everyone.
There's a lot of interest in using Rust on mobile platforms, and it's definitely possible to write code in Rust that executes on mobile. I've personally been working on a mostly-rust project that effectively uses a Kotlin shim for the UI on Android, and this works surprisingly well and was less effort to get working than I expected it to be.
> Your claim is that if someone is bothering you then they should be arrested?
No, my claim is that people who violate public order laws in the public street should be arrested even if they claim that the reason it's important for them to violate those public order laws is because they're protesting something and a protest won't be effective unless it annoys people. I want that to not be an effective defense against getting immediately arrested and physically removed from the scene by cops.
Yes; I'm assuming that the paragraph in the linked article:
> Marvin, 78, said she's not sure how many times she's blocked the path of these robots, which hit the streets of Philadelphia in March. The University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus has made a practice of it to protest "corporations that displace human delivery workers in order to enrich their own bottom line." Her past encounters have circulated online. The Wednesday incident was the first time, however, that the police got involved.
is basically accurate.
I don't think the robot has actually been given bad-faith programming to never yield to assert dominance, because I don't think that's something that would be possible to reliably program into present-day robots. I think that the robot is probably programmed to stop moving if it detects an obstacle in front of it, which is only a problem if someone like Marvin who openly states that they have an ideological problem with a corporation using delivery robots deliberately interferes with them on the street.
If a human is blind or in a wheelchair and unable to move, that shouldn't be a crime; but also it should be a reason for people nearby, or perhaps the cops, to help them move, in part so that they stop blocking the sidewalk. And if a person who is blind or in a wheelchair deliberately stays put in the sidewalk blocking it for other peoples' use despite offers to help them move; then they are committing the same kind of crime as Marvin and should be arrested on the same charge.
This is a major reason I actively want human delivery people to be replaced by robots, I expect that in the long run the negative externalities of the sorts of people who in practice do delivery work are greater than the negative externalities of delivery robots.
Preventing this from happening, so we can have reliable robot delivery service, is the point of having an institution of police that can carry out disorderly conduct arrests.
If someone is bothering me, I don't care if they claim to be doing it in the name of a political protest or not, I just want them to stop. And if they don't stop then I want the criminal justice system to compel them to stop, if necessary with violence (the cops arresting someone is absolutely an act of violence, one that I completely approve of in many cases).