gameman144

I think we might disagree in terms of the kinds of advertising we're talking about.

The best advertising for me is showing me a product and showing me how it's used -- the "Coca Cola will make you have friends and have a good time" style ads could be construed as manipulative, I totally get that, but if I see an ad that just says "here's the product, here's what it does" for a product that _actually_ solves a problem I have, that's pretty great in my book, and is a win-win for me and whoever makes the product.

Someone telling you about a product is not manipulating you. Tracking or certain ad practices might be manipulative, and it's fine to push back against or ban that manipulation, but that is not at all inherent to advertising.

This feels very similar in my mind to blanket concepts like "let's ban lobbying". There are certainly specific modes or practices in lobbying that are damaging to society, but lobbying itself (specifically, informing lawmakers about your specific perspective and desires) is a valid and desirable function.

Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life that someone else is trying to provide and the only missing link is that you don't know about it.

In both cases, it seems totally fine to have strict guardrails about what kinds of practices we deem not okay (e.g. banning advertising to children, or banning physical ads larger than some size or in some locations), but the extreme take of the article felt like it intentionally left no room for nuance.

Let me give you an example: I don't mind raking leaves, but I hate the step where you have to use the rake in one hand and your hand in the other to pick them up, spilling leaves on the trail to the bin.

My wife saw an ad for "rake hands" -- I had never thought that a solution to my gripe would exist, but for twenty bucks a significant source of friction in my yard work is gone, and I would have never even thought to look for such a solution.

This is interesting to me, none of the ethics classes I've ever taken even had room for a holier-than-thou instructor; they were taught as "here are various ways that people have tried to determine the right thing to do throughout time".

A professor saying "And I'm great at doing the right thing" would be as out of place as them bragging about their fitness or wealth.

This is super interesting to me -- I would expect that this world view would object to the comparatively extreme infrastructure and capital requirements of professional sports and other in-world consumption, vs. the relatively small outlays for digital consumption.

I can speak to one instance of this (which was before COVID and the events surrounding George Floyd, so apply context as needed), but I took a class on networking implementations in low-budget and rural regions.

As part of the curriculum, there were distinct lessons (in this hard-science course) on feminist design, avoiding white-savior rollouts, and cultural relativism -- with much room to expound on their importance, and little room to critique.

I happened to agree with lots of the mindsets of these lessons a priori, but I was definitely acutely aware the whole course that there was an ideological bent, even in STEM.

The networking stack obviously had no viewpoint, but the course teaching it certainly did.

I would guess "Legal tender 2" was deemed a failed experiment, since rapid deflation is extremely undesirable in a currency.

> Well, we should have made a system that didn’t allow the wealthiest people on the planet to do that.

This feels correct-ish, but also pretty unrealistic. If you're born into a system where you have to choose between getting slapped and getting stabbed, then obviously the system shouldn't have been made that way -- that doesn't change the fact that it is that way, and you have to act within that system regardless of what ought to be the system instead.

I feel like this mindset is part of why so many people are nervous about having kids, and I couldn't disagree with it more.

Your kid is not an optimization problem, they're a part of your family. If you want to do something unique that's going to bore your kids, it's fine to give them something to do; a half hour of screen time while you enjoy that fancy restaurant while traveling is fine. Your kid will be fine.

Sometimes you should put your comforts and freedoms above your kid's. You are not their servant, you are your own person who has your own wants and needs, and those get to win out sometimes. If your kid throws a tantrum when you're in an art museum, yeah, try to discipline them and calm them down and teach them. If you have a rare opportunity to visit a museum you've always wanted to, though, then it's fine to lose a battle or two here or there if the alternative is missing out on unique experiences that you value.

There are sacrifices to being a parent for sure, but the mindset that it's taboo to allow anything to happen that's not immediately in the best long-term developmental interest of your child is mind-boggling to me. Don't raise your kids in front of screens, but being a parent isn't some phase change that means you have to abandon all your interests and dreams and desires; it just means there's one more person whose interests and dreams and desires you have to care about now.

`memcmp` would be able to crush this game, but the fun is in doing it as a human!

Maybe, but impact can also make a pretty viable case.

For instance, if you own a home you may have an easement on part of your property that grants other cars from your neighborhood access to pass through it rather than going the long way around.

If Amazon were to build a warehouse on one side of the neighborhood, however, it's not obvious that they would be equally legally justified to send their whole fleet back and forth across it every day, even though their intent is certainly not to cause you any discomfort at all.

With cookie banners, legislation said that every website needed to ask for consent -- a thousand sites, a thousand banners.

Operating system level controls, though, provide a single control plane. One can very easily imagine OS-level toggles per application of:

[No Internet, No Internet outside your own app-sandbox, Ask me every time, Everything is allowed].

No opt in from apps required -- they might break if the network is disabled, but the user is still in control of their data.

> A company can be sold including its assets (its X account)

The argument would be that a company's X account is not one of its assets -- it is one of X's.

Isn't brass only a risk if it's heated enough to release fumes, whereas lead dust at room temperature is toxic?

Businesses can still pick their customers, they can't just accept/reject customers based on protected categories (e.g. race, sex).

Which ethnicities would those be, and how does this follow from the data above?

Potentially nothing, but apartment buildings don't move, so an artillery shell at one-hundredth the cost would probably be the preferred option anyway for nations motivated toward such things.

One of the reasons the US is viewed as such a good place to start a business is that the country will go to bat for their (favored) businesses internationally.

National security is very far from the only scenario where the government will intervene in geopolitics, for better or worse.

Capitalism would absolutely love to give you delicious and peak-quality tomatoes. If consumers were willing to pay the additional cost needed to harvest and handle more heirloom-variety tomatoes, there would be a huge incentive to provide them.

If people aren't willing to pay the premium needed, then the revealed preference is for the easily harvestable varieties. Farmers markets and local producers that sell to fewer people who will pay that premium are likewise capitalism's answer to this problem (i.e. saying "Industrial agriculture can't meet the consumers' needs, but local farmers can.")

Capitalism need not be industrial-scale, it just needs to fill consumer demand somehow (which is why small business are so crucial)

Wait, but... it is.

Am I missing something, or inferring sarcasm where there is none?

I don't think it's quite like that, since there's no direct action aiming to antagonize poor North Korean citizens; they are suffering indirectly due to the harm done to the actual target.

In the homeless analogy, maybe the attempted-robber's friends go hungry, since he usually uses the bicycle to go to the grocery store.

To me, I don't imagine this changes the calculus much, since almost any intervention will have side-effects.

It's not like he went in out of pure malice or anything though, they were trying to hack him first. Not saying it's some morally pristine thing, but it definitely communicated what it was trying to communicate.

As an analogy, we should have empathy for homeless people stuck in poverty, but if one of them continually bikes to your house and tries to break in, is it morally dubious to eventually take their bike chain rather than just shooing them away each attempt? I imagine the moral razor would fall on similar lines.

The second amendment only applies to the United States -- it's totally normal to have one set of rights for citizens and another set for the government itself.

I know this is tongue in cheek, but you absolutely can be restricted from having a biological weapons factory in your basement (similar to not being able to pick "nuclear bombs" as your arms to bear).

Not at all! Passively choosing from the equally-qualified-candidate distribution across the board will yield representation that's right in line with that distribution.

There may be some groups that are entirely men and some that are entirely women, but the aggregate result will approach the true population of qualified candidates.

In this scenario, you should expect to have a representation of around 1 woman per 4 men, if the rate of qualified candidates is 1 woman per 4 men. If you want to hire more than that ratio, you have to be doing some discarding of otherwise qualified candidates on the basis only of being men.

> There is a huge difference between trying to counter institutional prejudice in order to improve the quality of the student body and work being done, and whatever you think a religious “pledge of allegiance” is.

In the eyes of the advocates for each, I actually don't know that there is.

Religious pledges likely are intended to say "we want faculty who will teach and represent the values this school holds and that students expect out of this institution", which feels pretty much exactly like the rationale for DEI pledges.

You definitely have the right to petition the government for redress of this grievance: you can ask your representatives to pass laws banning it.

The first amendment would have nothing to do with that actual law though (since if it were, literally anything could be considered a grievance)

Do you have any data to back this up? That feels very wrong anecdotally, but I'd be glad to be proven wrong.