liara_k

There are several of different options. The most obvious is an independent line of authority delegated from the state's legislature or governor. This is where the police get THEIR authority. Other options include close supervision by the courts, private rights of action (i.e., citizen lawsuits), strong FOIA-like transparency rules, etc...

Certainly, there's a libertarian argument made against requiring seat belt use, including mathematical economics models that can prove it... provided a few unstated assumptions are met--like rational agents, complete information, perfect competition, etc... Of course, the problem is that those assumptions aren't met.

If someone is more seriously injured in a car crash because they weren't wearing a seat belt, the cost of that is going to be borne by society at large in a variety of ways. A more serious accident is going to consume more Police and EMS resources. The increased hospital and resulting medical costs will be shared by millions of people through (even private) insurance companies. If the person dies, the investment the public made in the person's education is lost, etc...

The response to these points from libertarians is typically to propose a system where someone can chose not to be bound by this rule, and pay the price in increased health care/disability premiums or something. But these systems ignore significant information and transaction cost problems. The person makes a statement about whether or not they want to be bound by a seat belt rule, but how is that information verified? (People lie...) If it's just a contract term, not a law, if someone is pulled over for speeding and wasn't wearing a seat belt, do the police ticket the driver for violating the contract? If someone who says they want to follow the seat belt rule is unlucky enough to just forget it the day they got into an accident, do we just let them die? If a crash victim comes into the hospital unconscious, do they verify seat belt contract compliance with the insurance company before spending money on life-saving treatment? Or do they treat the person only if they'll be able to pay out of pocket? The whole system is full of costs, complexities, and moral hazard--it's a mess.

It's SO much simpler and less costly just to have a seat belt law that applies to everyone. Sure, a few people will find it a little paternalistic and annoying, but the other way is a lot worse. We might be willing to deal with a more complex and expensive system if the rule is very intrusive or highly restrictive of personal liberty. Being able to drive without seat belts isn't worth it.

Reinforcement learning gets ignored again... :/

Likely because bots and troll farms are totally out of control, and they don't have a more accurate way of fighting it. IMHO, this is also the reason behind some of the heavy-handed moderation on some subreddits. AFAICT, as bad as it is already, this is only going to get worse as (1) NLP AI gets better and (2) there remains no positive defense against sybil attacks.

Just curious... I'm assuming people have already thought of doing a pseudonymous web of trust--or is that somehow inherently impossible even ignoring the old spam-solution form checkbox for universal adoption?

If this is intended to make a §230 argument, consider that its reason d'etre is based on the complete impracticality of pre-clearing user generated content.

The practical considerations differ by orders of magnitude when we're talking about paid advertisements.

Tunnel vision is a thing. Taking some time to zoom out is often incredibly useful.

Also, the philosophy and sociology of science are a VERY different thing from "the humanities".

> not yet liquid stock that they would like to sell me

That's... isn't that impossible by definition?

Diversity e.g., in higher education admissions isn't just about what's fair for the students, it's also about what's best for the university and the students.

Universities are naturally xenophillic--both in their desire to understand more about the world and in their desire to influence it. Exploration and openness to new experiences and ideas are also important intellectual values important to develop in students. All of these are enhanced with a diverse student body.

As a more concrete example... $IVY_LEAGUE doesn't gain that much by having its average standard test score go from the 99th to the 99.5th percentile. From the university's perspective, it gains more by admitting students who spread the influence of the university's ideas, enrich and enlarge context in classroom discussions, etc...

Variables go "out of scope" (in at least one sense) at last use, but are not `Drop`-ed (de-allocated, etc...) until the end of the function. The difference is important because of rust's rule against simultaneous aliasing and mutability. Consider this example:

  fn main() {
    let mut a = 1;
    let b = &mut a;
    *b = 2;
    println!("{}", a); // prints "2"
    // *b = 4; // If this line is uncommented, compile time error.
  }

Because b is a mutable reference to a, this means that a cannot be accessed directly until b goes out of scope. In this sense, b goes out of scope the last time it's used. _However_, AFAIK, b isn't actually de-allocated until the end of the function.

Of course, it doesn't matter in this trivial case, because b is just some bytes in the current stack frame so there's nothing to actually de-allocate. But if b were a complex type that _also_ had some memory to de-allocate, this wouldn't happen until the end of main(). But in this case, b's scope also lasts until the end of main, which is kind of like adding that last line back in...

This can be seen in the following example, where b has an explicit type:

  struct B<'a>(&'a mut i32);
  impl<'a> Drop for B<'a> {
    fn drop(&mut self) {
      // We'd still have a mutable reference to a here...
      // If B owned resources and needed to free them, this is where that would happen
    }
  }
  fn main() {
    let mut a = 1;
    let b = B(&mut a);
    *b.0 = 2;
    std::mem::drop(b); // Comment this line out, get compiler error
    println!("{}", a); // prints "2"
  }

In this example, without the std::mem::drop() line, the implementation for Drop (i.e., B's destructor), B::drop would be implicitly called at the end of the function. But in that case, B::drop() would still have a mutable reference to a, which makes the println call produce a "cannot borrow `a` as immutable because it is also borrowed as mutable" compile time error.

In other words, this "going out of scope at last use" is really about rust's lifetimes system, not memory allocation.

IMHO... this is one of the rough edges in rust's somewhat steep learning curve. Rust's lifetimes rules make the language kind of complicated, though getting memory safety in a systems programming language is worth the trade-off. There's a lot of syntactic sugar that makes things a LOT easier and less verbose in most cases, but the learning curve trade-off for _that_ is that, when you _do_ run into the more complex cases that the compiler can't figure out for you, it's easy to get lost, because there are a few extra puzzle pieces to fit together. Still way better than the foot-gun that is C, though. At least for me... YMMV, obviously.

According to whom? The propagandists of their political adversaries, I'd wager.

"We apologize for the fault in the subtitles^Hjavascript. Those responsible have been sacked."

"Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked"

"The directors of the firm hired to continue the credits after the other people had been sacked, wish it to be known that they have just been sacked."

The problem with this is that consumer Internet access is priced based on the assumption that it will be "bursty". Heavy users are subsidized by light users, both on a moment-to-moment basis and overall.

Reselling consumer-level Internet access to means you're taking away the users that would otherwise be subsidizing your service (because they're buying from you instead) while still expecting the local ISP to shoulder a large share of the costs for bringing your packets to their final destinations.

That issue goes away if you pay for a dedicated line (IE, explicitly contracted reserved bandwidth) to an IXP or place somewhere will sell you bulk transit, and you're paying for that too. That's fine. The problem is with expecting to make a profit by being the ISP to your whole block, based on a $100/mo GBPS fiber drop.

Not to say that the ISP mono/duopolists aren't loathesome--excessive market power is the root of... not all, but lots of socio-economic evil. The economics of telecommunications is complicated.

That's true in general now. Particularly in industries with high capital intensity, network effects, and/or monotonically increasing returns to scale. But that's a LOT of modern industries.

It wasn't always that way... or, at least, not for such a large proportion of the economy. The problem is that economic models and resulting policy is still based on assumptions that, due to technological change, no longer hold. The logic is usually sound, but the assumptions are ridiculous (see, e.g., abuse of the Coase Theorem).

It's far past time to re-evaluate this perspective, but we keep running into that Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The purpose of (most) speech is to create action. If the phrase "I'm going to kill you" is intended to alter someone's behavior. If property is involved, whether it's through force or threat of force, it's still robbery. If the threat of violence is delayed, it's still extortion.

For libertarian extremists who, just treat the right to be left in peace to live your life as you see fit... as a property right.

That only works if you're actually going to act on the intelligence gathered from having the discussion centralized. That's something the U.S. is clearly willing to do with, e.g., ISIS. But even what limited programs we had towards combating white nationalist terrorism were canceled by Trump.

The price of Amazon stock is ultimately supported by expectations of future dividends. The same is true for other stocks too, of course.

Whether or not the company has paid out dividends in the past is a good predictor of whether they'll do so in the future, but it's not the only such predictor. Having accumulated a mountain of cash but using it to invest in the business (buildings, equipment, and other productive assets) is another. Probably better, at least in some sense/cases.

The other way in which the stock is supported is by other people's expectations of other people's expectations of future dividends, and so on. I.e., speculation. Still tied to dividends, just in an unhealthy and volatile way.

Speaking for myself...

The most obvious example was my response to emotional situations in fiction. Going from only being able to empathize with characters only on an intellectual level to also being able to empathize on an instinctual/emotional level was was so incredibly obvious it was like going from black and white to color.

One the one hand, you could dismiss "I cry at movies now" as just an intellectually-driven conformity with gender stereotypes. You could dismiss my self-report as rationalization--even a dishonest one. On the other hand, what we're fundamentally talking about here is my own mental states--something about which I have first hand observation and you can have only assumptions.

Go through the thought exercise of what kind of information you'd need to evaluate this kind of claim scientifically. You'll quickly realize how incredibly implausible it would be that anyone would perform (or fund!) a study like this.

Seeing as that's never going to happen, You're left with the choice of either (1) believing people's self-report as the best available evidence, or (2) requiring trans people to solve something like the "Chinese Room Argument" just to justify that their own mental states are, in fact, real. It's like asking someone to prove they actually love their spouse, and aren't just simulating that behavior. Who else is subjected to this level of burden of proof? It's totally unreasonable.

While anecdotes aren't evidence themselves, they're extremely useful (1) when there aren't scientific studies available and (2) for generating theories that can later be tested. Whether they're interpreted as an invitation for further discussion or unjustified proof depends on how responsible the audience is.

There's more to "capital" than a physical machine.

Compare the cost of creating software (often many millions) to the per unit cost of copies of that software (zero).

Compare the cost of developing a new processor architecture and setting up the manufacturing plant (billions and billions) compared with the per-unit cost.

Compare the cost of building out a physical network infrastructure to cover a city (many millions) compared with the cost of connecting a single user to the box down the street.

Compare the cost to create all of Facebook's hardware and software infrastructure to the marginal cost of adding one more user to the platform.

> Is it really high capital intensive? I make websites and i m not rich.

If you work in the industry and aren't familiar with concept yet, it's something that you would greatly benefit by reading up on. Capital intensity is about the RATIO of capital costs to operating costs. Compare the cost of developing a website with the cost of operating it. In general, the former are much higher than the latter--though there are some exceptions.

Actually, the total (absolute, not the ratio) cost is related to a third factor I didn't even list--constant or increasing returns to scale. This means that products can be VERY expensive to develop before an extra dollar of investment won't result in more than one additional dollar of profit. No surprise that there's a synergistic relationship here with capital intensity (very low per-unit costs). This isn't going to be super-applicable if you're building websites for small companies, but if you consider how much it would cost to develop a commercial operating system that was on par with what's currently out there (Android/iOS/Linux/MacOS/Windows/etc...) it would many millions on the low end to billions if you couldn't rely on open source.

> unless google+apple conspire to regulate the market to prevent others from entering

Not to pick on you specifically, but this view is way too wrong to be so common.

The information economy is fundamentally different from the industrial economy for (at least) two reasons:

- Extremely high capital intensity

- Positive reinforcement through network effects (same and cross-side)

As a result, market concentration in information and technology markets is extremely high compared with other industries. It's not a conspiracy, and it's not something anyone can change. It's just the nature of the product itself.

There are a few strategies to combat it (open source, adversarial interop, etc...) but "just build your own" isn't one of them. Because it's almost always impossible in practice.

One theory that seems plausible to me is that there's deliberate confusion and misinformation created to combat or discredit leaks. Imagine that there's an adversary who has access to "open source" accounts that make it to popular or tabloid press, but you want to prevent them from making reliable inferences from that information.

One strategy would be to pollute that channel with misinformation, so that the adversary needs to go down a lot of different rabbit holes to have a chance of finding something real. Bonus: these could be really useful counter intel traps. You'd need just the right mix of plausible and outlandish, because you'll need to fool an adversary who (you should assume) can see through the strategy in general.

But it's just speculation.

And for all of us on the outside, it can be kind of a fun scifi thought experiment.

Yup, thanks. Will be more careful with that distinction in the future. =)

No, but Rust provides this memory safety without GC, which is AFAIK, unique in a mainstream language.

The type system knowing about ownership and borrowing also allows the elimination of race conditions (outside of `unsafe`, of course...). I don't know of a GC language that also does that, though obviously that doesn't mean there isn't one... ;)

Yeah, but then you have to do orders of magnitude more transactions, creating a large paper trail in exactly the place you'd want to avoid that.

A few possibilities:

First, the amount appears to be the total through a bank, where this number would be aggregated over a several (possibly many) individuals.

Second, the amounts reported do not reflect the total funds laundered (illicit funds made to appear legitimate) but the total revenue stream, which would be offset by liabilities. For example, one laundering technique I've read about involves buying real estate and selling it at an inflated price to someone who has the illicit funds. For example, A has illicit cash and wants to transfer it to (apparently) legitimate profits by B. B buys a property for $1m. B sells the property to A1 for $2m. B keeps the $1m difference as profit. A1 later sells the property at a loss, and the cycle is complete. Repeat this a few thousand times, but probably with a smaller % margin. But assuming a 100% margin (and the whole laundering effort being exactly this scheme) that'd be $450B total revenue but $225B actually laundered.

Interesting side effect: This pushes up the cost of housing in an area until the launderers abandon it, at which point demand and purchase volume dries up significantly and valuations sink. Additional profit could be made off this market manipulation.

I've had very similar ideas, and think this is really critical missing feature that's holding back a lot of progress.

IMHO, what's needed is something like a document database (in that it allows arbitrary schema) but even more importantly, it needs to have some system-level indexing. Right now, applications that deal with large amounts of small pieces of data each roll their own, e.g., embedded database, because (1) most filesystems aren't capable of adequate performance with very large numbers of small objects and (2) you can't maintain an app-independent index anyway, so... These applications then can't interact with each other without some app-specific API, which is often costly to develop against (at least, compared with a common filesystem API) and with only the capabilities that the app developer sees fit to give you. Which they often have very little incentive to do--their real incentives are usually to keep things proprietary and customers captive.

The absence of these two capabilities makes "the unix way" where "everything is a file" an impossible data model for these types of applications.

IMHO, the right data model is probably some combination of user (UUIDs or strings doesn't matter) and content-hash indexing with versioning and conflict resolution similar to Git (and CouchDB).

The FCC has a map app.[1] Go and plug in some random addresses.

The link below is for a NJ suburb , and lists 6 ISP competitors. But three of them are just satellite services and two are Verizon. In practice, there are exactly two competitors here: the phone monopoly and the cable monopoly, but the FCC would point to this to say that there's robust competition!

Here's another one I just picked at random, in a suburb of Oklahoma City.[2] The FCC lists 9 different providers. 3 of them are Satellite, 2 are Cox Cable, and 4 are AT&T. Again, there are exactly two competitors here: the phone monopoly and the cable monopoly. Look around yourself.

Two long-term competitors are not enough for meaningful competition. Duopoly competition has the same strategic profile as the Prisoner's Dilemma. When you have the same two players in the game over a long period of time, they learn to cooperate. See Axelrod (1980) etc...

Regulatory capture, juking the stats, crooks and liars all.

[1]: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/location-summary?version=dec2...

[2]: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/location-summary?version=dec2...

Unfortunately, the FCC's tracking data for broadband availability is notoriously poor.[1]. Think "regulatory capture" and, if you'e seen The Wire, "juking the stats".

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/30/18644726/fcc-broadband-re...

For a few years I've wondered about the viability of a "source-available" license with a lot of user-friendly terms (like being able to distribute modified versions which anyone else can use as long as they themselves have a license for the original work, etc...) and a built-in GPL/BSD/etc... conversion after N years.

IMHO, the maximalist position of the RMS camp, while rightfully paranoid about the dangers of fully proprietary software, isn't the optimal solution. Yes, certain kinds of open source projects have been extremely successful, but a lot of this has been driven by corporate interests (i.e., people working on open source projects as a part of their work) and the software that gets built reflects and reinforces these interests.

I'd be happy to pay to have the latest version of some really useful software that respects my rights in lots of other ways (e.g., more control over and access to my data in the app, and be able to tinker/adapt it as I see fit, with full source), particularly if the alternative is that this software doesn't exist. If feels like, at least in some software domains, that the alternative are either (1) user hostile proprietary software or (2) nowhere close to the proprietary alternative in terms of features and robustness.

Obviously that's not the case for stuff like databases and operating system kernels, but that's what it often feels like out of these back-end type packages.