heartbeats

Wouldn't that cost them too much in administrative costs? Impounding a vessel is fairly cumbersome, let alone 100 plus crew.

Game-theoretically, it seems preferable to sink them without any warning.

Consider: the fines would only be paid if they are less than the cost of acquiring a new ship. So if they have to pay fines of 90% of the value, you're still saving them 10% compared to getting a new ship. And if the fines are >100%, they would just ignore it and leave Argentina with the ship.

Unless Argentina can turn it into a revenue stream, sinking them unconditionally seems preferable. The Chinese fishing boats don't have anything to give them in a negotiation. All they have to give them is leaving the area, and that is accomplished by sinking the boats too.

I'm sort of curious how to fix this. I mean, in the abstract, I would really like to meet people who are different from me. But in practice, if I wanted to meet some, I could just hop on Twitter and find partisans of any ideology I could think of in mere seconds. And that's not what I want.

In the abstract, I don't want to live in a bubble, but when the alternative to doing that is to leave your bubble, it's a very uncomfortable prospect indeed.

If Facebook is not intended to be addictive, but is anyway, then it's poorly designed. Are you suggesting Facebook isn't addictive?

Art is not a commodity; there is no futures trading on art.

> our technological global civilization

Good riddance. If our technological global civilization results in conditions that make technological global civilization impossible, then so be it. It wasn't fit to exist to begin with. It's a self-regulating problem.

> There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.

I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?

> The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.

No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.

It's not just a matter of economy - people aren't even picking the low-hanging fruit. If any country wanted to severely cut CO2 emissions, there's a simple thing they could do:

1) reopen all the closed nuclear plants 2) deregulate nuclear power plant construction, focus on mass producing cheap power plants with no regard for safety 3) shut down the coal plants 4) throw everyone who protests in prison

Obviously, this isn't done because all of these steps are politically impossible. But it just goes to show - if we were serious about this, we'd have picked the low-hanging fruit already. If we haven't even picked the low-hanging fruit yet, how can you say it's impossible?

> To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?

It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.

But the object of knives isn't to stab people to death; a vanishing number of knives bought are used to stab people to death, and "lunatics" are not a core base for any knife seller.

A well-designed system does what it's supposed to. Facebook's either supposed to be addictive, or it just is by accident. If it's by accident, it's poorly designed. If it's not, it has an objectionable purpose.

A knife that's well-designed does what it's supposed to - slicing up humans or food.

If social media sites are well-designed, what does that say about their purpose?

> Twitter's interface was very intentionally designed to maximize the amount of time per day a person spends online. The Fediverse really doesn't need that, but it has it anyway.

This seems like an unbacked assertion.

Cynically, the fediverse lives and dies with its userbase. If nobody's using it, it will die. If everyone is using it, it will grow and prosper.

Thus, the Fediverse too, as a matter of survival, has to incentivize people to use it. Cynically speaking: in the early phases, it's vital to enslave people's brains to produce content.

> We've just seen first-hand evidence that millions of people could be dying and some would find it politically expedient to pretend that it wasn't actually occurring.

I'm sorry, I don't follow, who do you mean? Colonialism? The Uighurs in China? People in India/Pakistan? Possible victims of global warming? The Holocaust?

>We just don't have the will or the policy.

Right, that's what I mean. The minute things get anywhere near serious, people are gonna figure something out real quick. Restarting the nuclear power plants and closing the coal plants would take weeks, be profitable in economic terms, and hugely reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.

I mean, if you were really serious, you would just deregulate nuclear power totally. If the estimates of the harms of global warming are true, you could take 1 Chernobyl-scale incident per year and still come out on top. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.

The combination of facts that (1) we aren't serious about this and (2) there's plenty of low-hanging fruit we could reap if we were, leads me to believe this will not really be a problem, as soon as we do get serious about it.

I've never understood why people wouldn't just figure something out as global warming gets worse.

There's lots of nuclear power plants out there, shut down for political reasons, that'd be ready to go in weeks if you didn't have all the anti-nuclear protests, for starters.

There's also geo-engineering and such - spraying black stuff in the atmosphere to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight.

The idea that humanity couldn't deal with this situation if it spent anywhere in the ballpark of 100% of its resources on it seems to me frankly laughable.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission does not regulate commodities, only commodity futures (and swaps, and options, and other derivatives).

If it were done temporarily, wouldn't it allow for the ocean to recover?

If you could farm fish cheaper than catching it, wouldn't that totally take away the incentive for dodgy fishing in 3rd world countries? And if that were done for a few decades, it seems like you could return to normal after that.

So does usury.

You loan someone $40000 @ 5% APR and he spends it on education. If the loan is to be paid back in a decade, he has to cough up $416 per month. Unlike a mortgage, he can't foreclose on his education.

Since he doesn't have any assets to sell, and is by law unable to get out of them through bankruptcy, his only choice is to work some amount of hours every month to pay off the loans.

If that is not slavery, then surely ISAs are fine too? And if that is slavery, then how are ISAs any worse?

Can you eat profit? What is the worth of a man besides his honor? What profiteth a man if he gaineth the whole world, but loseth his soul?

When you add in "responsibility" like that, it becomes very vague. What does it mean for a company to have morally transgressed? Does it mean that it has violated its conscience, or does it just mean that it's an unfortunate behavior we would do best to punish?

Companies are inert objects. They do not have consciences. I can't say that a company does an evil thing, any more than I can blame a rock someone else threw for hitting my head. It hurts, but I can't very well blame the rock for it. Companies are just like driftwood in the ocean; their motion is defined solely by the forces acting upon them.

What is left, then, is to suggest that society should go after the companies that don't do what we want. But this can never be done by individuals. It has to be done by unions, governments, or something of the sort. It cannot be done by the companies themselves, and it cannot be done by individuals.

When you suggest that companies are doing something wrong, and not the government for failing to regulate them, this is tantamount to suggesting that the responsibility for punishing them actually lay on the individual. But to do so makes the primary victim into the perpetrator of the aggression against him. It is a terrible thing to do.

The ones who actually did it (Russia) ended up worse off, but workers everywhere else in the world gained, because the elite became more willing to let go of certain privileges to pacify the working class.

The goal of threatening to kill someone isn't to murder them for the sake of murder, it's to negotiate with them from the fairly sensible starting point of "give me what you want or I'll kill you". If what they want is "fair wages and a decent life," that seems reasonable enough.

> A lot of people can barely afford living in their home town and your answer basically is "just move to a small town in the middle of nowhere"

Isn't that the inalienable consequence of society? People that can add a lot of value will get to live in the desirable areas, whereas people who can't will have to move elsewhere. Do people have a right to live in their home town? What if their home town is a global financial center?

They bear the risk of prices going down. If I rent a $100k condo, and the housing market goes down 10%, I don't owe my landlord an additional $10k. (Schematically, my rent even goes down 10%).

I have a responsibility not to violate the law or vandalize the roads, but I don't think I have a responsibility to drive extra carefully or patch up potholes as I see them.

To me, this seems like a very cynical scheme. We tell "normal people" that they, personally, ought to BUY AMERICAN to prevent jobs from moving abroad. When they eventually do, we can tell them they should've done more and that it was their fault. It shifts the liability on to the victims, rather than the perpetrators.

But the responsibility of ensuring that a country has a good trade deficit is upon the government, if anyone! There's no serious way I can prevent it, so the only real point of saying it's my responsibility is to diminish the government's responsibility for failing to prevent it.

To suggest that the companies have a moral obligation, is to suggest that an abstract body corporate can have a conscience. If it could, there would be no need to ban slavery - just expect that the honest businessmen of America cease to traffic in them.

It's the responsibility of the government to create a well-functioning nation, and to use corporations to this end. But to suggest that people or the corporations have a direct responsibility, is to shift the responsibility away from those who are on 'our side', and to those who are either neutral or its primary victims.

I have many links to evidence that there are real people out there who are convinced that there was election fraud. Whether there actually was any is immaterial; the mere appearance of fraud is bad enough.

Maybe people just got bored? Maybe they don't like peace after all?

> Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all ‘progressive’ thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. The Socialist who finds his children playing with soldiers is usually upset, but he is never able to think of a substitute for the tin soldiers; tin pacifists somehow won’t do. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.

> Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said to them ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet. Perhaps later on they will get sick of it and change their minds, as at the end of the last war. After a few years of slaughter and starvation ‘Greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is a good slogan, but at this moment ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ is a winner.

-Orwell

Young people don't make up that large a portion of the voter base in swing states.

If you leave your car unlocked and the guy who stole it uses it to run someone over and leaves the scene, you should certainly be fined.

There is a cap. Also, you can't get reimbursed unless you're an actual lawyer - no pro-se.

Neo-Nazis, ISIS members, Proud Boys?

Murder, arson, kidnapping? Hate speech, harassment, cyberstalking?

Like in the 1940s, when we failed to take extremism seriously and 6+ million were killed?

Well, you wouldn't.

There's lots of people in this world who are sad. Are you suggesting we should prioritize the aggressors over their victims, just because they happen to look like you? Or because they're at a higher risk of committing terrorism?

Also, that doesn't scale. Getting someone a therapist costs a good amount of money, getting them on meds is dirt cheap. Convincing someone who doesn't trust you very much they should go see a therapist is going to be a very hard sell.

You can't force people to hang out with extremists, so of course those people will be shunned. Are you suggesting we should make it a crime to not hang out with people who want you dead?

If they're not allowed to improve, then how are they to rejoin society again?

edit: wait, are you suggesting joining ISIS or the Aryan Brotherhood is just a subjective difference of opinion?

What are you gonna do with these kids, then? Just let them sit at home and wait for them to carry out the next terrorist attack?

Many of them have bright futures. If anything, it's dystopian not to let them live their lives to the fullest extent.