weberc2

Unless the GP edited, there's no suggestion of punishment in his comment.

In theory they are better, but in practice “what makes them the most money” is often “what is best for the people” and governments and elected officials are often inept or corrupt. This doesn’t apply for every government or corporation on every issue, so we need to be nuanced in who we entrust which issues to. Specifically we want to look at the severity of the issue, the incentives, and the corruption and the competence of the government in question.

I don't doubt there are definitions of privilege which are falsifiable, as those pertaining to discrimination. But those are seldom used, and when challenged, the claimants fall back to some abstract unfalsifiable definition, i.e., a motte and bailey. Given that, perhaps it would be clearer if we stuck to a term that is clearly falsifiable, such as 'discrimination'.

And as for discrimination, it's difficult to study, and a lot of these bedrock studies/theories never even found anything substantial to begin with (the implicit association test, the blind orchestra auditions study, etc) and of course all of the others that have failed to replicate. Never mind that we are fond of using data from the 30s-80s as indicative of attitudes in 2019. Maybe we can finally begin to question whether social science has a groupthink problem?

Is societal privilege even falsifiable? Can it explain anything? (Or rather, can it be made to explain anything and everything?)

> Patents should expire but don't always do due to all sorts of shenanigans between corporations and govt.

I'm not familiar with this. Genuinely didn't know it was an issue.

> We however need to take a communal interest in the essential stuff.

Yeah, I'm 100% on board so far.

> I mean, a lot of damage could be done to societies before patents expire.

This is where you lose me. What's the threat model? Monsanto releases a food product that is so good that they capture the entire food market in some way that anti-trust regulators aren't able to regulate and then jack up the price, all before the patent expires? Presumably yours isn't a food safety concern because you're advocating for lowering the bar to GMO technology. This sentence sounds like FUD; help me understand why I'm mistaken.

> I definitely wouldn't say that government is always trustworthy, but having the food supply controlled by a democratically operated nonprofit entity with a clear interest in everyone's wellbeing is obviously better than having the food supply controlled by a single for-profit entity with no stake in the wellbeing of employees or customers except insomuch as it provides profit for its owners.

I don't think this argument is very convincing. For example, why limit the application of this rationale to food supply? Why trust the market (i.e., corporations) with _anything_. Is our government strictly superior to the market in all cases, or does the market have some strengths that the government lacks? If so, why are those strengths the wrong tradeoff for this case in particular but perhaps not for others? Without more nuance, this argument could support socialism (as in "the government completely owns production", not the capitalism-friendly democratic socialism).

Another issue is that we're not talking about complete ownership of the food supply, but only temporary ownership (i.e., patents have a lifetime) over individual food products that are individually subject to competition and regulation.

> While Monsanto owns the patents, they can legally wreck anyone who attempts to violate them. If the government owns the patents, "violation" doesn't exist because anyone can use them freely.

Patent enforcement is a feature, not a bug. We want people to invest in making food production more sustainable, so we need incentives. Notably, patents _do_ expire, so Monsato's (or whomever) risk is rewarded and society benefits. If the enforcement is too strict or the patents too long, we can adjust those knobs accordingly. No need smash the system because the knobs aren't tuned properly.

I wasn't saying it was. Merely observing that the government isn't a popular alternative either. Note that this isn't even my valuation--anti-corporatists tend to very strongly dislike both corporations and (the U.S.) government. Of course no political movement is entirely homogenous, so there are probably people who distrust corporations but love the government.

The alternative is the government, right?

You might be right, and I think it makes for interesting introspection. For me, it’s not necessarily a policy grounded in rigorous economic philosophy. Rather, someone—a person with thoughts and feelings—just went the extra mile to serve me and give me a pleasant experience, and I want to give them a token of appreciation in return. It’s participation in humanity for me, rightly or wrongly. Maybe I would also tip the software engineer (who went above and beyond to ensure the product I bought was well-crafted) if only I had some direct contact with him or her?

I’m fine with the notion of tipping as a reward for extraordinary service, but it absolutely shouldn’t be part of a standard compensation package and especially not considered as part of a minimum wage requirement.

It’s not a bad idea because it’s not well supported by current tooling and practices, not because of scalability. The scalability problem is tractable.

Maybe it's not your objective, but comments like this would be a lot more convincing if they were accompanied by a proposal for replacing cars and especially a steel man of the pro-car position.

How could it mean that blind auditions are fairer if it didn’t detect a gender bias signal to begin with? Genuine question?

I agree there are things you need to control for, but I don’t think its as hopeless a comparison as you seem to imply. As previously mentioned, I’m already controlling for healthcare and pension, for instance. What other insurances do European governments pay for? As for vacation days and maternity leave, I believe US professionals have pretty generous allowances as well, but I don’t have any data on hand—certainly an interesting question.

EDIT: This spurred me to do some research and I came across this analysis by Pew research: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/06/05/through-an-... TL;DR: no matter how you measure, the standard of living is better in the US than in Europe.

As an ignorant and neutral bystander, I’m really curious why this is downvoted and would be interested in reading the rebuttal (seems like I could learn something).

Mind you, I don’t advocate for struct embedding, but it doesn’t force you into a type contract. The outer struct retains its type—it is not a subtype of the nested type so it can’t be used in places that take the inner type.

Literally all it does is automatically create methods on the outer struct that delegate to the anonymous member.

Unlike inheritance, there is no fragile base class problem and methods on the inner anonymous member can’t dispatch to methods on the outer struct. Also, the “parent” member is just another field in your struct. You can modify it or replace it at runtime, unlike the parent in OOP languages.

What then do you mean that American cars/houses are unsustainable? I don't think big houses/cars is a good thing, but I think it probably is sustainable for quite a while (less climate concerns, in which case everything is unsustainable, depending on who you talk to) because we don't have the same density as Europe. I haven't thought much about this, but that's my hunch. I'd be really interested to hear counterarguments.

The middle classes in Europe definitely don’t have more. Salaries are 30-40% higher in America (even accounting for healthcare and pensions) and the cost of living is quite a lot higher.

It’s not just the very wealthy. The middle class in America also enjoy a much nicer standard of living than in Europe. Have a gander at the cost of living indices and there are very few categories where the US doesn’t fare better (and often dramatically better). Not to mention the takehome pay (post-pension, post-healthcare) are quite often 30-40% larger for working professionals. I think we still need a stronger social safety net, but Europe is not so dramatically better than the US as this thread makes it out to be.

I get it, but I disagree with subverting the type system. The type system is there to promote safety and maintainability; you shouldn't subvert it even if "you" are the std lib.

Both types implement the `Client` interface. So either type can be passed into a function that accepts the `Client` interface, but a `CachedHTTPClient` cannot be passed into a function that accepts an `HTTPClient` (you would have to pass the `CachedHTTPClient.HTTPClient`) and of course not vice versa either. You can do the same thing in Java (forgive my syntax):

    public interface Client {
        ArrayList<String> getUsers();
        void createUser(String name);
    }

    public class HTTPClient implements Client {
        public ArrayList<String> getUsers() { /* ... */ }
        public void createUser(String name) { /* ... */ }
    }

    public class CachedHTTPClient implements Client {
        private HTTPClient httpClient;

        public ArrayList<String> getUsers() { /* ... */ }

        // In Go via "struct embedding", this method would be generated
        // automatically; in Java, we have to write it out. NBD.
        public void createUser(String name) { this.httpClient.createUser(name); }
    }

golang is right :) Seriously though, Go doesn't have inheritance and I don't miss it. The only reason I need it in Java, etc is because so many libraries expect/require you to subclass.

This is often a reasonable thing to do (encapsulation). Callers don't have a right to private details, and I would go further and say that an interface value's concrete type is itself an implementation detail that callers shouldn't depend on unless the interface's documentation declares it stable.

This might be a bad practice, but I don't feel very bad if you subvert the type system like this and it bites you. If `io.ReaderTo` is important, it should be a bonafide first-class method, not something that's determined and dispatched to via reflection.

It is exactly composition; the compiler just generates the methods to automatically delegate to the anonymous elements. It's just syntax sugar that probably creates more confusion than it alleviates. It's not inheritance of any kind because the outer struct cannot be passed into a function that takes the inner element type (e.g., if you have `type B int` and `type A struct {B}` and `func foo(B) {}`, you can't pass an instance of `A` into `foo()`--`foo(A{B: 0})` is a compiler error.

As it is just composition, it is strictly better than inheritance, but still probably unnecessarily confusing versus just writing out the delegation methods yourself.

> Inheritance with embedding is a false friend in Go. Stick to composition.

Note that this applies to every language with inheritance. Composition is _always_ better.

Of course, that’s not what the parent implied, as I demonstrate in the sibling thread.

The parent observed that “Bigots oppose hobby lobby”, not that everyone who opposes hobby lobby is a bigot. You levied the unsubstantiated accusation that the hobby lobby founders are bigots. These things are not the same.

> You are aware that there are more articles on this topic than that singular one presented, right?

Yes, I'm sure there are lots of articles, many of which are slanted to support one agenda or another and maybe a few that aspire to present a balanced viewpoint. I'm not sure what your point you're making.

> An objective view of this issue doesn't paint HL in a good light, imho.

Probably not, but it doesn't support the "hateful bigots" accusation. "Greedy capitalists disingenuously hiding behind religious rights" at worst.

Does that article (and publication) strike you as trustworthy? Does it appear that the author and publication aspire to present a balanced perspective? Would you be persuaded if I linked to a Fox News (or similar) article on the issue?