Yes, the TLD belongs to Mali. But the reason why the creators of lemmy.ml picked that TLD is because they’re Marxists. They’re also the creators of Lemmy itself, which is another reason why Lemmy communities tend to be pretty far left: the first instance was literally Marxist, and presumably most of the early users leaned in that direction.
Nice, you avoided having to think on a self-imposed technicality. Real intellectual rigor there.
Makes it easy to dismiss my argument without bothering to think about it, you mean. Just take abortion, then. Or “tax is theft”, or right to bear arms, or any of a thousand other beliefs you probably don’t agree with.
So like, if you were in a restaurant and ordered food, but it never came because a couple of the servers were blocking food from being served because the company wasn’t taking a strong stance against abortion, you’d think “these good people are taking a moral stand, good for them! The company better not take any action against them to make sure I get my food!”
Or for that matter, if Google stopped all cooperation with the IDF, the company’s Jewish employees could (in fact should) disrupt business because Google was supporting terrorism?
It seems to me that you can only support forms of protest you’d be willing to accept when the other side uses them against you. Basically the golden rule.
This is sort of implicitly true. You can’t get people’s money if they can’t figure out how to use your product/service.
At the same time… People are pretty dumb.
Yeah, I remember that being a real thing: one studio would get wind that another studio was working on a film with a particular theme, and they’d rush to put out an equivalent movie. Later on, it wasn’t even just cheap knockoffs: remember when Deep Impact came out right at the same time as Armageddon? And then like…The 13th Floor, eXistenZ, and The Matrix all came out in 1999. I wonder how much of that was strict copying, how much was scripts influencing one another, and how much was just the zeitgeist.
I remember, towards the end of the last millennium, marveling with some friends about an article estimating the current size of all the data on the internet. IIRC, it was in the neighborhood of a couple hundred terabytes. Wouldn’t fit on your phone, but there’s plenty of data hoarder types who have that kinda storage on the server in their spare room.
And when that future comes, Apple will still manage to fill 50% of your space up with god-knows-what.
Lol, it seems like there was a whole category of films made to ride the coat tails of better, more famous films by sitting beside them on the shelf at Blockbuster, waiting to be picked up by clueless parents.
My sisters still give my dad a hard time about all the knock-off movies he brought home when we were kids. To this day, a Gordy is family short-hand for a disappointing knock-off: “Hey, wait, this isn’t brie, this is ‘cheese product’…you got the Gordy cheese!”
I think the fans & press deserve equal blame for the initial hype. At some point I saw a supercut of things Sean Murray said, then the resulting headlines and Reddit posts.
In an interview, the journalist asks: “Will you be able to play with your friends in a shared universe?” The answer: “Well…we hope that eventually there will be at least some multiplayer functionality, though maybe not on day one…like maybe you could explore one another’s planets or share pictures or something.”
Headline: “NO MANS SKY WILL LAUNCH WITH MULTIPLAYER!”
Reddit comments: “I’m already forming a guild, we’re going to play as bounty hunters chasing down other players who are pirates in glorious multiplayer space battles!!”
There were tons of examples of that. Journalists would poke and prod for a soundbite, take it out of context and exaggerate it, and the community would just go batshit with their expectations.
As a software dev and open source contributor: stay the course, then! I’ll take open source software over a union 10 times out of 10. I get paid so well for what I do that it’s silly, and I love spending my time doing the stuff I like. I’ve been a union member in other fields, it’s not an experience I’d like to repeat.
I seriously doubt anybody is contributing to open source for status & seniority. Respect, maybe. The status & seniority people become managers; as the old joke goes, that’s the best way to get them out of the workforce.
A while back, one of the image generation AIs (midjourney?) caught flack because the majority of the images it generated only contained white people. Like…over 90% of all images. And worse, if you asked for a “pretty girl” it generated uniformly white girls, but if you asked for an “ugly girl” you got a more racially-diverse sample. Wince.
But then there reaction was to just literally tack “…but diverse!” on the end of prompts or something. They literally just inserted stuff into the text of the prompt. This solved the immediate problem, and the resulting images were definitely more diverse…but it led straight to the sort of problems that Google is running into now.
Man, fuck off. You claim to know everything? You sure don’t do much exposition if that’s the case. Content to just bitch, huh?
I know about Bell and the breakup. I don’t know as much about the original evolution of the telecon market in the US. I bet if I did some research I’d find regulatory capture, government protectionism, and at the very least abuse of IP law. Not sure how much explicit government funding I’d find, but I bet it’s a lot more than zero.
I know the government loves to set baselines. I’m very skeptical, in many cases, that they’re necessary. Just asserting that they are and telling me to “Read. Up.” is not persuasive.
I’ve listed some of the many reasons I’m not a libertarian elsewhere in this thread. See, I’m of the opinion that any intelligent person should be able to explain an argument, even if they don’t fully agree, because if you don’t understand an argument you don’t actually know if you agree or not.
But you wouldn’t know about that. If I were you, I’d stick to your forte: scanning pages of arguments and examples, ignoring almost everything while looking for cases where you suspect a person might have made a mistake or admitted they didn’t know everything, then jump out and yell “HA! You don’t know a specific thing, therefore everything you said is invalid! Do your own research to see if you’re wrong or not, because I’m like too important to spend time explaining my own beliefs! PUBLIC. RECORD.”
Explain to me: if I were a libertarian, why the fuck would I try to hide it, anyway?
No, on second thought…don’t bother.
(cont)
So the FDA is strict and overbearing… but did nothing to prevent it?
Yes, exactly. They control what drugs are allowed in the country in the name of safety, and yet some of the most damaging drugs in history slipped right past them. So what’s the point, then? Much less regulated markets do just as well when it comes to drug safety, drugs are cheaper, and terminal patients can make decisions about their own health. So what’s the benefit of the FDA?
I listened to a podcast years ago talking about the FDA. Wish I could find it. It wasn’t some right-wing think tank or anything, in fact a lot of the issues it raised trended left-wing. For example, I remember one of the issues being that the FDA banned human trials on women of childbearing age–that is, 18 to 50. Of course, testing on children is verboten anyway, and over-50 is a whole different category because hormones change dramatically post-menopause. So, effectively: the FDA banned human trials on women.
This resulted in some ridiculous consequences: pregnancy or birth control medications being tested on men, for example. But more generally, all drugs are tested on men only, and men are substantially different from women. This meant that women tended to face much more severe side effects from drugs, since drugs that had gender-specific side-effects on men were filtered out by the trials process, but not those affecting women. There were examples in the podcast where these side-effects were fatal. This has been going on for decades, ever since the 1970s, and it’s only started to change recently.
That’s one example of overregulation having very concrete consequences. And yet, the FDA hasn’t faced any consequences, and in fact the consequences are largely hidden because they’re diffuse and aggregate: hundreds of thousands of women feeling sick or dizzy or tired.
I would say that counts as the FDA being “strict and overbearing” and yet failing to prevent harm to the public. And again, even as they protected a handful of women from the potential consequences of human trials, they let fentanyl out the front door (along with many medications that had adverse effects on women, discovered in the wild rather than in trials).
Are we sure this is all important and necessary?
If anything, it was exacerbated by the obscene amounts of money it made for the makers of the drug, money that they used to lobby government officials. Isn’t that the free market in action?
Absolutely not! That’s regulatory capture in action. High levels of regulations result in high profits for drug companies by strictly controlling IP, excluding generic drugs, and making it nearly impossible to start up new drug companies. In turn, the existing companies use those high profits to influence further regulation, streamlining the approval process for their own (sometimes dangerous) drugs, giving them a veneer of safety, and blocking out competition. This is exactly the kind of thing that libertarians rail against.
The libertarian ideal would be more like: dozens and dozens of drug companies offering low-price, high-quality drugs, making a reasonable but profit in the process, with independent consumer- and hospital-funded organizations checking them for safety and effectiveness. People are less trusting, and more careful about the drugs they take, but in extreme cases, where a person is terminally ill, they’re free to try whatever treatments they want. A single drug with terrible side effects would be enough to put a drug company out of business (because they’re smaller and less wildly profitable) and severely damage the reputation of any rating organization that stamped their approval on it, so both are much more careful about putting out and approving new drugs.
But again, I’m not a libertarian. I’ve got views that would blasphemous to a libertarian. Hell, I’m pro gun control. I just get sick of the endless ridiculing of strawman libertarian caricatures on Lemmy and Reddit. They have valid points, they just tend to carry it way too far (from my perspective). I’m done defending them for now, I think I’ve managed to flesh out the strawman a bit for people who are open-minded enough to consider their POV, instead of just saying “LOL libertarians just wanna fuck teenagers and shoot guns” or whatever.
You LITERALLY did.
I LITERALLY was talking about Hong Kong from it’s establishment in the 1840s through to the Chinese takeover in 1997 (and beyond, really, because they were mostly left to their own devices for most of 2 decades after Chinese rule).
As I said, you skipped ALL the other stuff that led to today, including how most of the civilized world followed the same general trajectory.
Hong Kong should have been the exception to that rule if heavy regulation is actually a requirement in the healthcare industry, but in fact it’s top of the heap. If you can achieve the same results without regulation, what’s the point of regulation?
I was suggesting it was an example of how your “the British didn’t care” bit is incompatible with facts.
I was speaking informally. I meant that the British didn’t govern with a heavy hand. They weren’t entirely disinterested, but they were a lot less paternalistic than they were back home in Britain.
Externalities? You mean the kind of stuff that governmental regulations on private businesses are intended to prevent/mitigate?
Yes, exactly that kind. You do realize I’m arguing your side here, right? Are you having trouble keeping up?
You’re debating like all the libertarians I know. Poorly.
Yeah well ur stupid. Zing!
They got safer over time because what people want is to not die and the government put rules on how those things can be manufactured and operated.
So explain why things continued to get safer even when the government was not actively adding extra regulations? Why did life expectancy go up through the Reagan years, when the government was actively deregulating?
Sounds to me like the regulation on the automobile manufacturers pushed them towards innovation.
Regulation must have helped somehow, right? It served an an inspiration! There’s no way customers would’ve simply showed a preference for safer cars over time…
No, the bad press happens when the press leaks an internal memo proving that the car maker knew full well that they’re car had a flaw that could cause death or dismemberment but they decided not to do anything about it because it would hurt their bottom line.
This is the status quo. Car companies sell cars, and car accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the US. I’m about to shock you to your core, here: car companies know about car accidents, and yet the continue to sell cars! Even weirder? People also know about car accidents, and continue to buy cars!
Every car on the market has known flaws that cause accidents. For example: they have rubber tires, and those tires have a tendency to wear and eventually blow out, a known cause of accidents which leads to a known and quantifiable number of deaths every year. Shocking!
It’s all shades of gray, man. Car companies can’t make perfect cars that never cause accidents, and even approaching that ideal would make for ridiculously expensive cars. So, they find themselves (like every producer of a product ever) in a situation of balancing costs & risks. Emails talking explicitly about that look bad out of context, but even the NHTSA has thresholds and compromises in their regulations.
They still knew to avoid the dangerous mushrooms or berries.
What, without the government itemizing the dangerous mushrooms & berries in law? What stopped self-proclaimed Hong Kong doctors from passing off poison berries as medicine, if they didn’t have some FDA-equivalent telling them what to do?
[Re: housing] Cite your sources.
I mean, the YIMBY movement has all kinds of pages and YouTube videos making my case for me.
An example: housing prices in Tokyo were going wild in the 80s, and they responded with massive deregulation. Now housing is Tokyo is much cheaper than comparable cities (I mean, to the extent that other cites can even be compared to Tokyo, with a metro population roughly equal to the population of Canada). I saw a graph a few years ago where there was an obvious elbow in Tokyo housing prices when the deregulation occurred, putting it on a totally different trajectory from New York, London, Paris, etc.
And notably lacking since then: stories of high rises collapsing or massive fires burning down whole neighbourhoods. Tokyo is incredibly safe, even though you can build a 5-story house on an area only large enough for 2 parking spaces and open a restaurant on the first floor.
Like Hong Kong: it only takes one counterexample to demonstrate that heavy regulation isn’t required. You can argue that it can be beneficial, or at the very least isn’t too harmful, but it’s hard to argue that it’s necessary when Tokyo does fine without.
I spent years in that house dealing with the never ending noise of the traffic and the foundation shaking any time a semi drove by.
But you did have a place to live. You weren’t homeless. You didn’t have to stay with your parents. You didn’t have a 2-hour commute to work & back. You made the choice to live there, and to stay there for years, in spite of the fact that there was road noise.
There simply isn’t enough land in and around major & desirable cities for everybody to have a nice, quiet, private 2-bedroom house with a yard. So the choice is: do you regulate as if it were possible, and fuck anybody who can’t afford the resulting $8M homes (see: the Bay Area)? Or do you allow lots of housing development so that people can at least find affordable places to live, even if they have to experience road noise?
Again, I agree that there are some zoning laws that are due to be revised or repealed, but suggesting that they are all pointless and detrimental to society demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of basic civic planning.
Even most libertarians agree that some regulation is a good idea, they just think it should be minimal.
But also…that’s an easy assertion to make, and you could make it everywhere. “You just don’t understand X well enough to know you’re wrong”. That’s not convincing. I’ve faced similar dismissals in cases where I’m convinced the counterpoint was wrong, and I could make my argument at length (eg: rent control is great!). I reckon I could imagine approaches to civil planning that would be compatible with libertarian principals, but would avoid situations where industrial plants were stuck in the middle of residential areas. I’m sure there are think tanks that have worked on the problem.
No, the libertarian playbook says my neighbor should be allowed to open a gun range in his backyard if he wants to.
Not all Communists are Stalinists, and not all Libertarians are this extreme either. Even the extreme ones tend to support courts & policing, and have an explanation for how this sort of situation would work itself out. I dunno, I don’t understand their perspective enough to defend it in this case.
You know that’s actually a thing, don’t you? There have been plenty of people with a terminal condition who have volunteered in clinical trials knowing full well it may kill them.
Yes. But it’s also a thing that some chronically ill patients have to travel abroad for experimental treatments, because the FDA hasn’t got around to allowing trials yet.
Opioids are a problem all around the world. Some countries are way worse than others, but it’s not at all unique to America.
It’s not unique, but it’s uniquely bad, in spite of the fact that healthcare is one place where the US leads the world in heavy regulation.
I’m pro-gun control. I like public transit. I think cities should be organized to some extent. Countries that managed large-scale cooperation did much better during the pandemic. Global warming is hard to solve in a pure libertarian system. There are lots of reasons why I’m not a libertarian.
I wish it were nice and simple to identify where regulation helps and where it doesn’t, but it’s the source of endless debates.
Even most liberals love to dunk on libertarians.
I’m not a libertarian, because I don’t take my liberal views to the extremes that cross the line into libertarianism. But I find many of their arguments persuasive. And yes, I explicitly said I was going to play devil’s advocate, because it annoys me the way people dismiss a ridiculous parody of libertarianism and then act like they’ve made a real point.
I’m definitely a liberal, and I don’t deny it at all. I fit right in on /r/neoliberal on Reddit. That doesn’t make me a libertarian: I’m pro-gun control, pro-public transit, etc. I have lots of views that libertarians would absolutely hate.
that’s what your writing conveys.
You mean my devil’s advocacy? I think any intelligent person should be flexible enough to explain ideas they don’t fully agree with. If you can’t even explain an opinion you disagree with, you don’t actually disagree with it: you’ve just dismissed it in caricature.
Don’t have any counterarguments? Don’t let that stop you! Just throw out some insults and act as though a serious reply is beneath you, given your superior understanding of the world. If confronted, gesture broadly at the comment you’re replying to and say something like “that third point you made is stupid!” Don’t bother elaborating or explaining why. Everybody will probably think you’re a professor of economics who’s just sick of explaining himself or something!
Here you go. That’s some examples where economists have considered the effects of regulation on cost, and thus mode of travel, and thus fatal accidents.
It’s hard to put specific numbers on a counterexample. Here’s an article with a table estimating the impart of increasing the cost of air travel.
“Data, stop. Data. Stop. Data, SHUT UP!”