ineptech

I think you egregiously misunderstood that comment. Of course those silly examples are silly; that's the point, they are silly in the same way and for the same reason that DVD licenses are silly. Do you believe in things that look like contracts and sound like contracts and are full of impressive-sounding legalese and were written by a team of lawyers, but are despite that a load of old tosh?

You're welcome, and for the record, I'm equally fascinated by your position - that a corporation can change the ethics of my actions merely by wishing it so. Like, is this limited to corporations, or can regular people wield this magic? You seem to think that money changing hands is a critical factor - why so? If a moral commandment can be attached to a purchase, why not to a gift, a meal, a story, a forum comment? That's why I keep going back to the hypothetical about "By reading this you promise to give me money" sort of license. Yes, it's absurd, but that's the point - your position leads to absurdities.

And lots of them! Could a restaurant declare, "By purchasing this sandwich, you promise not to give us a bad review on yelp"? If not, how is that different? Would that license apply if the sandwich was free? What if someone else bought it for me? If I make you a sandwich and stipulate that you must declare it to be delicious, and it isn't, is it more ethical for you to break my "license" or to lie?

I got more! What about DVD region restrictions? If I buy a movie in America and the license requires me to buy a second copy to watch in Asia, am I ethically obligated to do that too, even though that doesn't have even a fig leaf of moral justification beyond the manufacturer's profit motive? Is it unethical to skip the unskippable ads? For that matter, how does this license magically transfer itself from the rightsholder to the manufacturer, warehouse, retailer, and thence consumer? If I sell it used to my friend John, has he "agreed" to a contract with whoever originaly published the media through the magic of transitive association? What if I give it away for free, or throw it away and someone picks it out of my trash?

We're not done! Does this magic travel backwards in time? What license did I agree to when I inherited my Dad's old Beatles albums on vinyl? Bandcamp offers seven different licenses for music, is it one of those or a different one? Am I allowed to watch in in Asia, or is it region-restricted too? If not, how do you know?

We haven't even discussed immoral licenses. What if the license says, "By purchasing this you agree not to show it to any filthy stinking [ethnicity] people", can I ethically ignore that? What about those Taylor Swift albums that she doesn't own the rights to, can we pirate those? What about a trans person who wants to read Harry Potter, is it more ethical for them to purchase the books or to bootleg them? Can I download Abbie Hoffman's "Steal This Book"? OJ Simpson's autobiography? Henry Kissinger's?

Etc, etc. You get my point, I hope, which is that the seemingly simple "piracy is bad because it's unethical to ignore a shrinkwrap license" position is actually fraught with contradictions and argumentum ad absurdums. Whereas, the inversion - breaking the license is unethical because piracy is bad - is blissfully free of these problems. It allows exceptions, as in "OK, Henry Kissinger is fair game but you still have to pay for books not written by mass murderers" without compromising its central premise. The only downside is, it requires you to demonstrate that piracy is bad in itself, which requires a discussion of the different ways it can help and hurt different artists in different circumstances, rather than a tidy one-line proof that all pirates everywhere are bad, QED.

This is a long thread and post and sometimes with all the hypotheticals it's easy to be misunderstood, so to be sure that I am actually taking a stand (as opposed to just throwing rocks at yours) I'll close by trying to clearly summarize my position. Media piracy is certainly ethically dubious, but its ethical position is not changed by the shrinkwrap license(s) that are sometimes attached to it. If it's ethical to pirate a movie, it is still ethical to pirate the same movie with a sticker saying otherwise, and if it's unethical to pirate a movie with such a sticker, it's still unethical to pirate the same movie without that sticker. That the license claims it constitutes an "agreement" is simply false by any reasonable definition, as proven by the fact that people regularly purchase media who demonstrate their failure to agree with it by word and action. The only purpose such licenses serve is that some corporate lawyer somewhere decided it might help them win some hypothetical lawsuit; it is the ethical and legal equivalent of wearing a t-shit reading, "By reading this shirt, you agree not to rob me."

We're going in circles; why are they different? I understand that the movie studio would like them to be different, they put a sticker on the side of the DVD saying so, but I don't care about their opinion on the matter and even after four responses it's not clear why you think I ought to.

I get why you're taking this position - If I agree to not do X and then do X, you can call me unethical even if X is harmless. So, if you can show that pirates somehow agreed not to pirate, you can declare that those pirates are unethical without having to show that piracy itself is unethical. The problem with this position is that it uses semantics to contradict reality. You're asking us to imagine someone who picks up a DVD in a store and reads the sticker on the side and loudly declares, "What nonsense, I'm going to go pirate this movie right now!", and claiming that ethically he is somehow agreeing to the license, and that when he goes home and uploads it, that he is somehow breaking a promise not to pirate it despite having explicitly promised do exactly that. That's an obviously contorted position.

If piracy is bad, it's because of the ramifications of the actual act of piracy, not because a corporation fooled me into pinky-swearing not to do it. Companies try to tell us what to do all the time, you can just ignore them; boilerplate legalese has no moral or ethical valence. However, I will also say that I appreciate the time and patience you've put into this thread, you've been nothing but civil and in good faith, so thanks for that.

...yes, much like the very clear agreement in my comment where you agreed to give me all of your money. Why can you ignore the one, and I can't ignore the other? What, ethically speaking, is the difference between them?

See my edit: of course, as a benevolent Rightsholder(tm)(c)(R) I am only demanding your money if you continue reading after the "contract" you "agreed" to.

The point, of course, is that there is no agreement in either case. You agree to do something when you agree to it, not when I claim that you agreed to it. You can argue the opposite legally, and you might even win, but you can't argue it ethically; absent a crisis of conscience halfway through, someone who intended to pirate a movie and then went on to actually pirate a movie did not agree not to pirate a movie a priori.

By reading the rest of this comment, you agree to give me all your money forever. (edited to emphasize "rest of" which OP apparently missed)

Assuming you're still here, what's the ethical difference between this and "by purchasing this DVD you agree to blah blah"? In neither case did anyone agree to anything.

And,

> In just five years, $6 billion was invested in renewable energy — the equivalent of 12% of Uruguay’s GDP.

Any country that invests 12% of its GDP in something over five years is probably going to produce some impressive results!

I agree with all of this, I should've said the buyer's value can be significant, in terms of hours spent by the agent. I've had agents that toured dozens of properties with me, around a very large area over several months, and didn't make a cent because I ended up buying in a different county with a different agent. But that isn't so much an example of value-for-money as of a broken market in which agent pay is only tenuously related to job performance.

For the buyer, the value is clear: someone to go out with you to house after house, let you in, walk around with you, talk about whether you could fit a king-sized bed in that room, etc. It's a lot of work and the buyer gets a lot of value from it.

But for the seller, who pays the tab, the only value is that some buyers' agents will steer their clients away from you unless you offer a large commission. The individual realtors I know are nice people who work hard, but the industry as a whole is pretty obviously maintained by collusion, and I'm glad it finally seems to be crumbling.

No.

I think that ship has sailed. Our internet traffic has been hoovered up at the telco for decades (and shared with several other governments), our cars tell half a dozen "partners" which businesses we visit, our phones keep track of who we are in proximity to and report it all back to the world's largest ad company, and opening a brokerage account to buy stock involves scanning both my face and driver's license, but this is what would be going too far? Using drones to look at loud noises that might be gunshots?

Particularly when juxtaposed with public schools. It seems like partly a difference in values and partly an accident of history that teachers of children have a powerful union and a lot of societal support, but many teachers of adults need to rely on welfare programs.

It can simultaneously be true that X causes more problems than it solves, and that the disappearance of X would cause even worse problems. Also, this is a common strawman: almost no one advocates police abolition over police reform, but discussions about police reform very often involve someone who advocates reform being asked to defend abolition anyway.

Ah, I meant the lecturer is a PhD, which was supposed to be juxtaposed with the 1xx level course to indicate that it's probably a waste of time on both sides. I'm sure there are huge lectures that aren't useful, but Geology 117 (which I really took) was obviously a waste of money when I spent a pittance per credit hour on it in the 90s; charging someone for it today just seems like highway robbery.

Is there any value to those lectures, nowadays? I can see a PhD lecture on the fundamentals of virtually any academic topic, for free and at my leisure, on youtube and similar sites. Waking up at 8am to attend an in-person Geology 117 lecture with 300 other freshmen is probably as outdated as a fax machine. Perhaps the next step is, education that isn't based on personal instruction isn't rare enough to be worth paying for.

I'm excited about the use cases, and leery-but-cautiously-optimistic about tying the experience to meta, but am I the only one worried about buying hardware from a company that's synonymous with monopolistic price-gouging?

(Ray-Ban is owned by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxottica )

Very cool, I hope this gets widespread enough to become the default way to prove identity online. I know a lot of people are very concerned about preserving the right to be anonymous, but it should be equally concerning that it's difficult to not be anonymous without involving a giant corporation.

Would it be too much to ask for a Keybase style app on top of this? One can hope...

Whether/when its better to think in terms of "X has a 37% chance of happening in a single trial" vs "If you ran a lot of trials, X would happen in 37% of them" is kind of a fraught topic that I can't say much about, but you might find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_interpretations

"The expected value of a random variable with a finite number of outcomes is a weighted average of all possible outcomes." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

Did the self-selected amateur news sources that seemed more accurate than mainstream news happen, by any chance, to align with your preferred narrative?

I don't think that sweet, sweet heated seat revenue is the endgame here, I assume this is the POC for an in-car app store.

(I say "is" rather than "was" because everybody bitched when they forced ads onto smart TVs and swore they'd never buy one, and yet it's nearly impossible to find a name brand TV without them. Won't be long before there's a monthly fee to mute the voice telling you what's on sale at every burger joint and strip mall you drive by)

You're interpreting "tax liability" to include every possible deduction, when I think it's perfectly clear that OP was referring to taxable income before deductions.

> You don’t file a form with the IRS when you get married, have a child, divorce, pay for daycare...

Er, yes you do? I'm pretty sure all of the things you listed are explicitly included in the 1040 and associated tax forms we have today. Daycare expenses, for example, are supplied in form 2441: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-2441

This seems like pure FUD. The claim isn't that easy file would work for all people, the claim is that the present system is needlessly opaque in a way that benefits only the tax prep middle-men. More generally, it's really hard to claim that the US can't possibly accomplish something that many other countries already do.

Those are two separate discussions. Even if I do something dumb and am rightly blamed for it, we can still have a retro to discuss process improvements that would make it harder for that mistake to happen again in the future.

Fair warning, the research mentioned at the beginning of this video is controversial and (I think it's fair to say) has generally failed to replicate.

The research in question ("Praise for intelligence can undermine children's motivation and performance", Dweck & Mueller): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9686450/

Overview of the controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Dweck#Criticism

Previous HN discussion on the paper: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12233571

This looks like nothing but engagement bait for twitter's new monetization program. If I tweeted "Capitalism is cancer" or "Socialism is cancer" I'd get a lot of dumb responses too, but that wouldn't be evidence of anything except that constructive debate involves nuance and asking thoughtful questions and defining terms.

I feel like the news used to focus on things we didn't know, and has shifted to telling us what we enjoy hearing. A great deal of it is in the form "<person you dislike> did <exactly what you'd think they'd do>", and what the reader gains is not information but a fresh opportunity to disapprove of their outgroup.

> Keybase was sort of trying to do this with social proof, though it's reliance on a centralized provider (keybase itself) made it brittle.

I think something like this could've worked, which is why I was so sad over its demise. I think Keybase (like the MIT PGP keyring, which it is sort of a fancier version of) was predicated on the idea that it's much easier to build a centralized keyring and then decentralize it once it's widely adopted than to build a decentralized keyring from the ground up.

Why? If any currency is appreciating, people are incentivized to hold it, which has the effect of decreasing supply, and decreasing supply makes the price of something go up, not down.

> That doesn't sound right. Nobody talks about the oracle problem in the context of market makers connecting to nasdaq.

I don't follow, one of us is confused about what the other is saying and I'm not sure who. If the Oracle problem were solved tomorrow, one of the first things that would happen is publishing stock prices to ledgers so that derivatives could be implemented in smart contracts, yes?

Anyway, what I'm saying is, whatever real world data you'd like to have on a blockchain ledger, election results or stock prices or sports scores or whatever, the Oracle problem is specifically the fact that you wouldn't be able to trust it if it were there, not the fact that it isn't there yet.

> A congress who wanted to do so [1] could declare that henceforth the answer on the blockchain _is_ reality

This is a workaround - if the value on the ledger is the source of truth, there is no Oracle problem.