gameman144

I don't find it unreasonable at all, the author is under no obligation to communicate in any particular way.

If a stranger drives through my neighborhood and asks "when are you going to plant begonias? I drive through here all the time but I want to see begonias", a fine response is "if you want to pay for some begonias, I'll plant them!"

It's true that these aren't centrally planned, but good infrastructure provides a feedback loop. People want to work at an office that's easy to commute to, so offices open near good transit. The extra offices require more transit, so more investment goes to the same area. Repeat ad infinitum.

For professions or companies where in-person collaboration is still needed, bigger concentration of business helps focus infrastructure investment into areas where it is most impactful. For instance, it's easier to make a subway line go through an area with lots of offices than it would be to have multiple separate lines passing through satellite hubs.

I think we might have different fundamental viewpoints here, and that's okay.

In my view, current government policy is actively enabling people to dig themselves into holes of debt which they'll never be able to get out from.

It's great that people are choosing to study art, music, and philosophy. I personally have a degree in music, and it's one of the great joys of my life! Whether the government should loan me an absurd amount of money strictly for those pursuits, though, is a different question. There's great value in history, but I think most people would hardly endorse a government policy of loaning anyone a few hundred thousand dollars in living expenses to go to their public library and read about the Civil War for a few years.

Also, it's completely feasibly to encourage a broad range of studies while also conferring a degree in an employable field. This is the model of liberal arts schools: you study art, music, philosophy, literature, etc. but you can leave the school with a degree in an employable field.

As far as I understand it, your belief is that without the government lending people money with minimal constraints, fields that are less employable would go away almost entirely. I don't agree that this would be the case, but if that's where you're coming from I think that's a reasonable enough disagreement that we can land on.

Loan companies might not want to do that, but it's absolutely part of the due diligence they have to do. If I borrow a few hundred thousand for a home, the loan company does a deep dive to ensure that my home is a sensible buy (e.g. appraisal) and that I'm in a position to pay back the loan (e.g. credit check, historical performance). It's absolutely wild that we'd absolve loan companies from this due diligence for young adults with less credit history and no ability to default on the loans.

Also, you may be right that schools start to prioritize programs that allow borrowers to earn enough to repay their debt. Why is this a bad thing? I would absolutely argue that a poor student would be better off being unable to obtain loans for a degree with poor returns then they would be taking on mountains of debt that they can never discharge.

For the rich, those talented enough to earn scholarships, and those willing to accommodate loan companies' stringent conditions on risky borrowing, degrees with poor monetary returns will absolutely stick around as they always have.

They study in a field which has a high likelihood of loan repayment, or study at a less expensive school.

If a really smart poor person wants to become a really smart rich person by pursuing a degree in film studies, it's reasonable (in my opinion) for a bank to say "borrowers whose only education is a bachelors in film studies tend to have trouble paying back loans, so we won't lend you very much".

If that very smart poor person is pursuing a degree in accounting or engineering, though, most banks can do the actuarial work to determine that the likelihood of payment is pretty good.

This all seems totally fine and fair to me. And if the really smart person does have trouble paying back their loan, bankruptcy can be the absolute last option they resort to, just as it is with most other loans.

This seems fine to me. If someone has no assets and no reasonable prospects to pay back $100,000 of debt, then saddling them with $100,000 of debt is a bad idea.

Additionally, discharging student loans in bankruptcy should absolutely not be a way to get off scot-free, it's meant as an escape valve. If your options are the terrible downsides of declaring bankruptcy and the terrible downsides of a life in extreme debt, neither option is great, but having the choice is useful.

> It means that only rich people can go to college, because they are the only ones who can afford it.

I hear this a lot, but I don't understand the argument to be honest. If someone is poor today, then they can take an exorbitant amount of debt that they can't discharge in order to attend university.

In a world where loans are dischargeable in bankruptcy and the federal government limits subsidizes loans, we'd expect prices to fall somewhat and rates to rise somewhat. It seems like we would still expect the poor student to be able to take on a large amount of debt to attend university, though, no?

It sounds like the assertion here is that the data is used for reasonable purposes and improves the user experience. That's likely very true.

If I prioritize privacy over that better user experience, though, that should absolutely be something I'm allowed to do.

I might not want to give a stranger at a bar my real phone number, so I give them a fake one. Maybe this leads to a worse experience than if I just said "no thanks", but I really value the fact that I'm allowed to do that.

It might be worthwhile to point out which bits of an analogy you take objection with when trying to refute an analogy. Meta is not my local coffee shop, but for the sake of the argument it might be fine to interchange them. If it's not fine to compare them as such, pointing out what aspects you think break the comparison is helpful, since it lets others in the discussion try to come up with a better argument/analogy and elevate the discussion overall.

I mean, a marketplace for anything that didn't at least discriminate against women hasn't existed longer than the last century or so. Appeals to nature always seem pretty flimsy to me, because everything is incompatible with nature, until one day it's not.

I tend to agree here, but there's a reasonable viewpoint that people shouldn't be able to consent to some things if they're assumed to be unreasonable or socially harmful.

For instance, we disallow the selling of organs. I'm all for bodily autonomy, but this seems reasonable.

At the very extreme case, one might say "I give you permission to murder me, if you provide for my family".

While I agree that self-direction and autonomy are essential rights (pretty strongly, in fact), everyone puts limits on them. For some people, the dynamics of prostitution might be that limit. It's not the case for me, but reasonable people might draw the line there.

The child labor analogy doesn't really match up here.

The parent comment is saying that if prostitution is legal but hiring prostitutes is not, then people will only hire prostitutes in areas where law enforcement is weak.

A comparable analogy would be that if laboring as a child is not criminally illegal (which it is not) but hiring children as laborers is illegal (which it is), then the people that hire child laborers will be doing so in areas where law enforcement is weak.

This seems to be both a pretty apt analogy, and also seems to be clearly true in the child labor case.

> If the same-sex couple commissioned a website for a hetero wedding, the designer would be obligated, right?

Based on this ruling, no. The designer would be just as firmly within their rights under this ruling to say "I don't think anyone should get married, so I won't do a heterosexual wedding website", or to say "I think this person is too tall, so I don't want to make their website".

If the designer agreed to make a given website, though, then declined upon finding out that the customers were a same-sex couple (in a way that didn't change the contract at all), then that would still presumably be a case of discrimination.

Decisions like this seem like tricky business, and probably doesn't help that most news about things gets filtered through two or three layers of news media first.

It's definitely a tough situation overall, and there's no totally satisfying result (which is the sign of a good case for the courts, as far as I'm concerned).

As a constrasting example, in many states, political affiliation is a protected class. If a swastika-tattooed neo-Nazi asked for a portrait, would an artist be obliged to do the painting, even if no endorsement of the ideology was requested? As distant a case as that is, it seems like the legal principles being argued here carry over more-or-less directly.

Wasn't the whole cake thing that they wanted custom writing on top? As in, a plain old cake would be fine, but a cake that said "Congratulations on your wedding!" would be speech, as far as I read it.

It's a good point regardless, though, and I don't envy the position of trying to draw the line between what's protected speech and what's not.

Edit: it seems the cake was not requesting custom writing -- custom writing was explicitly protected as free speech in another case. It seems in the analogy of the burger joint, that case was more akin to a burger joint which only sold "I endorse your decisions" buns. Which makes me as glad as ever that I'm not in charge of being the arbiter of what's speech and what's not.

It seems like there's a distinction between things here, though. As far as I can tell, no precedent has been set here regarding an individual's right to receive non-speech-based goods or services.

For instance, if you go into a burger shack and the owner doesn't like some trait about you, they still have an obligation to sell you the same burgers they'd sell anyone else. If they have a special bun where they write out in sesame seeds "I endorse your decisions" for some people, though, then they'd be under no obligation to give you that specific bun.

> Because you can't have your cake and eat it too. If Google can't cache the whole article, they can't provide search for the article.

Yeah, this is exactly the point that such a regulation would bring up. Businesses can't expect Google to both use your data and not use your content in their search results.

If you say "I don't want Google's indexers to read my content and surface it to people that haven't clicked my site", that's fine -- Google won't be able to index your content (as requested), though, so your site won't appear in search results.

This seems like a situation where the cards are much more clearly on the table, and my expectation is that no reasonable business would choose to have Google not index their full content.

My read on this is that news organizations are upset that Google/Facebook are taking profits by providing cached content that makes people not want to actually click their links.

If this is the primary concern, though, then wouldn't it make more sense to draft a law regulating content caching, rather than the pay-per-click approach? It seems like a law that said "Sites that serve any content which wasn't part of a 'you can cache me' section need to pay for that content" would address the concerns of both parties here.

This would solve the alleged issue that news organizations are bringing up, while also making it totally clear what the consequences are. If you don't want Google to be able to use your content within search results that's totally fine, but you can't then also be mad that they don't surface your content in search results.

Seems like letting news site determine what content Google can cache for its results, and then letting Google determine ranking based only on that data would be a completely reasonable compromise. As it stands now, though, Google is directly incentivized to just never surface these websites, which hurts everyone involved.

Finishing a project is one hell of an optimization, I suppose!

There are lots of languages where the gender-neutral term and one of the gendered terms are the same. Consider the Spanish "ellos", meaning either "the masculine group" or "the masculine and feminine group". The word "ellas" denotes a feminine-only group.

It seems very reasonable that "guys" could function similarly in English. Moreover, I might not say "the guys I've dated" as a straight man, but if all the women I've ever dated were talking together in a room, I wouldn't bat an eye asking "what are you guys all doing?".

Similarly, I wouldn't say "all the folks I've dated", but I might say "good evening, folks" -- the word is a misfit solely because of the idioms and context, not because the word is inherently communicating something else.

Reducing the uncertainty does not give you an edge vs having certainty a priori though.

For instance, you are not better off discovering that the urn has a 50:50 ratio than you would be if you knew that 50:50 ratio ahead of time.

If you're saying that you could discover a better ratio, then the thing that gives you the edge is the better ratio itself; if you knew the better ratio ahead of time, the epistemic uncertainty would only harm you.

Why would 30 and 30 be the worst case? You could have drawn a statistically improbable first ball, no? E.g. in your 59:1 example, you could have drawn the 1 rare ball.

> It's not "censorship" for the public to control what content is given a platform in taxpayer funded libraries, any more than it's "censorship" for Apple to decide what products are given shelf space in its stores.

Wait, but both of those are censorship of a form; Apple is just allowed to censor whatever it wants.

Taken to the extreme, should a library be allowed to stock only books that promote the political party of whoever won the latest election?

Obviously decisions for shelf space have to be made. If those decisions for shelf space are made solely by the government's dislike of the material, though, that feels pretty obviously like government censorship to me.

I can understand the principle here. Just to confirm, though, you'd then have no problems with controversial books being donated by private groups to public libraries, is that right? Or are there other considerations in your calculus.

I can speak to this in some degree: marriage is much more significant than a negotiated commitment for me personally.

A negotiated commitment takes a specific form (the terms of the negotiation) but a marriage defines a commitment to be committed. I've heard some folks of my generation say things like "we got divorced because we fell out of love", which sharply contrasts with my view of marriage and falls more in line with a standard committed relationship.

To me, a marriage is a commitment to consistently try to fall back in love and work through things, even at those points you might otherwise quit.

Granted, I'm a religious guy and my view on marriage is flavored from that perspective, but making the marriage official was certainly key to the commitment for me personally.

It's also a relatively apt description of a small subset of left-wing groups. My assumption is that the parent comment is explicitly referring to this small subset.

Similarly "white supremacist" is often used as an insult on the inverse side, even for groups that don't believe in or desire white dominance. If someone actually does believe in those things, though, it's still a totally fine term to describe them.

> House the people. It's that simple.

It's not, though. Seattle ran into loads of problems with housing-first policies where the houses would get trashed and people with substance abuse problems would continue camping out as groups.

Eh, better to downsize than to run the company into the ground. I don't envy the decision, but I see why they made it.

This doesn't address the issue specified above. In this example, you already provide unique value to your employer at $20/hr over what they're paying you.

If you have no recourse when they value your work at $40/hr, what recourse would you have when they value your work at $60/hr but still pay you $20/hr?

Being a more valuable employee works great in combination with exercising leverage over your employer (quit-threat, striking, competitive labor market), since those threaten to take that value away from your employer if they don't play ball.