baddox

Who says systems of anarchy wouldn’t also force certain people to do certain things?

Then you have an endless circle of force, which doesn’t really explain why governments can work but other systems couldn’t work. Because of course other systems would also contain circles of force.

How are the human beings in government able to behave in a reasonable fashion without being forced to?

Challenging the FBI in court is not in violation of US laws.

Modern cosmology by definition doesn’t make different predictions than saying “cosmological models mention things like stars and galaxies, and those models fit our observations, but those stars and galaxies aren’t technically real.”

The mathematical construct was developed/discovered to explain observations. Normally when we do that we consider the mathematical explanation to be “real” in that it is describing reality.

Heck, I've torrented movies and TV shows that are on streaming services I'm currently paying for. The main reason I do that is to get subtitles which aren't on the streaming services. Did you know that HBO, at least in the USA, has virtually no non-English subtitles on their streaming service? Even for HBO-original content that has been released on DVD/Blu-ray and thus does have subtitles for a large number of languages.

It’s not particularly shocking that the nominal winner of an election would not contest the nominal results of that election. To expect a party to do that out of principle would be ludicrously naive.

Why is the assumption that the Secret Service would escort the President from the White House? The Secret Service is squarely under the control of the executive branch (formerly the Department of the Treasury, now the Department of Homeland Security). I wouldn’t expect them to be the actual last-chance arbiters of a Presidential election.

It's lots of people's names, of course. I don't agree that domains should be redistributed based continuously purely on "what's the biggest company with this name," but I also don't like how much momentum you get just from being interested in the web in the 90s and picking up the juicy domain names. I don't have a great solution, but I don't think the status quo does a great job of allocating domain names with either economic efficiency or with user-friendliness in mind. Of course, one could certainly argue that domain names are much less important now that most people get their content either directly from the massive media/social networking websites or indirectly from Google searches.

A create-react-app hackathon project is absolutely a valid instance of "putting up websites for fun."

> If you just flat out ban shit without nuanced understanding, you hurt people more than help.

Absolutely. We should have understanding and we ban shit that is harmful.

I don't know, I bet plenty of people are feeling lonely when they go out for some entertainment and that entertainment makes them feel less lonely. I don't see why that's such a bad thing.

I recently supported the new Patreon page created by a podcast host who I have been listening to for over 10 years. He sent all his supporters a short personalized video, and watching that video gave me the feeling of an authentic personal connection. Of course there's no deception going on here, I do believe that he genuinely appreciates my (very small financial) support, but there's no expectation that we're now "actually friends" in the traditional sense (he has hundreds of supporters). But still, it's a nice feeling of personal connection, and it doesn't feel like an indictment of major social problems plaguing society (other than perhaps the obvious lockdown-associated reduction in human contact).

Of course, in my example there's nothing remotely flirtatious or sexual going on, which as I understand it is common on OnlyFans. Maybe that detail makes it completely unlike my example, but it really doesn't feel that different to me.

That's still not what the commenter is talking about. The problem on Amazon is that you can buy a product that is listed as "CompanyX microSD Memory Card" and you will receive something that was not actually manufactured by CompanyX. AFAIK that will happen rarely if ever at Walmart. But yes, it's possible that CompanyX will make lower quality products in the future.

On my iPhone I think Apple Maps has a vastly better navigation UI. Part of that is its first-party ability to turn the phone screen on when issuing instructions for upcoming maneuvers, which I much prefer to having the screen on constantly for a multi-hour trip (not to mention working well with Siri). Part of it is the overall aesthetic of the map features. I really like how it highlights traffic lights along your route to let you easily count how many lights are remaining until you need to turn.

That said, even here in the Bay Area I tend to do a sanity check of the route on Google Maps first if I’m taking an unfamiliar route. Just a few months ago a section of I-80 was closed just south of SF and Apple Maps had no clue! I believe it was a fairly last-minute schedule change for some planned construction due to vastly reduced traffic during the lockdowns.

That's where I am too. I actually mostly agree (at least in principle) with a lot of the arguments about Apple's anticompetitive behavior and hostility towards their app developers, but I can't help but think that if app developers had their way, iPhones would be much worse products for the average iPhone customer and iPhone would have essentially no product differentiation from Android.

Too often these discussions on HN center on the power dynamics between Apple and app developers, and occasionally mention in passing something like ("choice is good for the iPhone owner too; if they don't want X then they can just choose to not install X"), but the discussion rarely tackles the nuance of the power dynamics between app developers and smartphone owners.

Which customers do you think Apple cares more about, app developers or their actual iPhone customers?

You’re free to send emails or text messages from the backend of your web app. This is hardly a great example of “Apple crippling their web browser.” Personally I don’t want your advertisements pushed to me. Even the notifications permissions prompt on desktop Chrome is ridiculously spammy since it’s on basically every commercial website these days. Safari on iOS is a great web browser that provides a great web browsing experience in my opinion.

What changed though? Before iOS and iPhones existed, you also couldn’t sideload on iOS, but no one was complaining. Apple created a new product essentially from scratch, and it has some limitations to how software can be distributed to it. Your car infotainment center and your fancy air purifier probably also don’t provide an easy way to install arbitrary software on them. But creating a new device that can’t do every conceivable task doesn’t change how you can sell other software online.

Why would you build an iOS app with the intention of selling it somewhere other than the iOS App Store? It’s not like Apple is blindsiding any developers with the revelation that the App Store is the only way to distribute software on non-jailbroken iPhones.

If you define “what your software is” so precisely that it must be running on iOS to count as your software, then sure, by definition your software can’t exist on Google Play. But that’s just as ludicrous as manufacturing shirts and defining “what your product is” as “shirts being sold at Walmart,” then complaining that you cannot by definition sell your shirts at Target because they would no longer be your shirts.

> It's value that they created only by preventing business from servicing themselves.

Well, and building a product and ecosystem nearly from scratch that arguably started an industry that’s now around half a trillion dollars a year.

You’re asking why you should care about opinions that are different than your opinions?

Is it possible that such a system would be more tenable now with cheaper and more ubiquitous devices that can measure or calculate local solar time?

They’re not raising any prices on services that I’m aware of. Haven’t these policies and fees been in place for a long time?

That's not the question. The question is whether there should be any laws against murder, given that people disagree on precisely what constitutes murder.

> Suffice it to say I do not watch the news, I very rarely visit Twitter and do not follow anyone, and that is the only way I have ever seen that expression used - in the news, on Medium, on FB, on anywhere, when I've come across it. "Agree with us or you are violent."

Have you Googled the term? Apart from the first page or so being dominated by that very recent event of the crowd intimidating people and many other people conflating that event with that slogan, you'll find plenty of articles about what it means: that choosing to not speak out about an issue helps support the status quo. In fact, I've generally seen it used to try to persuade people who don't want to support the status quo that staying quiet or trying to "not be political" is in fact supporting the status quo.

That example is a crowd intimidating people with the intent to compel speech, of course, and they’re using the slogan “silence is violence.” But those are two different things. You could pick any slogan you want and have a mob recite it while intimidating people into agreeing. That’s not an indictment of the slogan.

Why is that not perfectly analogous? The law can describe what is and isn’t hate speech, and courts and juries can decide individual cases when necessary. This is the same for all criminal laws. The fact that not all people will agree what is and isn’t a violation of a given law at a given time is simply not a valid argument for why a given law shouldn’t exist.

But you aren't concluding, because people disagree on precisely what qualifies as "murder," that there should be no laws against murder. That is the argument proposed in the earlier comment about why there should not be laws against hate speech.