Yep, drawing red lines around age of consent has worked so well in the past, I think this is the way.
I'm so glad we have simple and effective solutions like this. Otherwise can you imagine the kinds of problems we'd have with kids vaping, buying lootboxes and scrolling social media designed to hijack their not-yet-fully-developed-brains?
... And by "age of consent" I meant "minimum legal age recognized to make decisions pertaining to topic X". Is there a proper term for that, so I don't sound so stupid in future?
A tragic story would be one where folks in positions of power in these organizations saw these crises coming from a million miles away, tried to avoid disaster, and failed.
I don't think this is a tragic story.
I think this is a rather boring and formulaic plot we're seeing over and over: the story of late-stage capitalism and the application of value-extraction to human social structures resulting in comically terrible outcomes.
I'm beyond being shocked by this kind of behavior but it is still striking to me how some of the most profitable companies in history will go out of their way to do shady deals for a slight short term increase in their record profits.
The resulting reputational damage and future risk to their monopoly revenue has got to make deals like this -EV for the company in the long run, but decision makers at these companies are paid more for short term profits and they know it.
If the "Craftsman" brand of tools didn't go completely out of business despite removing the lifetime warranty and just slapping the brand name on cheap chinese tools, then "Reputational damage" does not exist.
Yep. Reputational damage is a thing of the past in a world where everyone is completely bombarded with useless and incorrect information 24/7. Maybe it was never a thing at all, and companies merely assumed it was as a theoretical. Either way, I have never seen any brand actually suffer long term because of their reputation.
Pedantry: "Craftsman" was never a company and didn't "go out of business".
"Craftsman" was originally a store brand used by Sears, under which it sold tools that Sears contracted various third parties to produce.
In 2017, Stanley Black & Decker purchased the "Craftsman" trademark from Sears (Sears Holdings at the time), giving Sears a long-term royalty-free license to continue producing and selling tools under that trademark (I think that license lasts for about another decade at this point? And then there'd be a small royalty payment for using the trademark beyond that point.)
As a result, several different stores now each carry tools all called "Craftsman", they're generally not the same tools; different stores sell different tools produced in different places, and all sell their own versions of the tools under the same "Craftsman" brand name.
This undoubtedly causes absurd levels of consumer confusion. As you say, it's absolutely causing tremendous reputational value for the trademark.
The line has to go up, and the slack has to be taken out of every last source of revenue. Like that story that was here yesterday about insurance companies monitoring customer's insured assets with drones and AI. Every unexploited dollar left on the table is slack, and a perfect market leaves no dollar unexploited. Therefore a more perfect market can be built with more perfect machine-powered decisions to more perfectly screw you out of every nickel they can.
"Oops, sorry your brother cut his leg and you had to speed to the hospital, but you better get a second job if you wanna keep your car."
Fuck this shit. Fuck all of it. And fuck all the status quo warriors sitting on the sidelines bleating about "it's just the way it is" because the axe hasn't swung for them yet. You're safe now because the market has more vulnerable people to grind up first, but rest assured, as it churns through them, your time will come too.
And relatedly, I'm sorry that while you were speeding your brother to the hospital, you blew through a red light you couldn't stop for and caused a three-car pileup that killed an elderly woman.
There's a reason we have these rules, and the problem of better enforcement leading to more application of the rules isn't a late-stage-capitalism problem; it's a "rules require flexibility" problem (but it's not great if the nature of the flexibility is "you didn't get caught").
> And relatedly, I'm sorry that while you were speeding your brother to the hospital, you blew through a red light you couldn't stop for and caused a three-car pileup that killed an elderly woman.
Firstly, surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy.
Secondly, we're not even talking about authorities surveilling you to prevent safety situations (which would, by itself, already be plenty vile enough). We're talking your insurance company checking on you to make sure your roof doesn't have moss on it, and jacking your price/nuking your policy if they feel your behavior is too "risky," according to a model you (and probably they) don't fully understand how it works.
There's so much wrong with this and if you don't think so I doubt a comment here is going to change your mind. If you place ANY value at all on personal autonomy and privacy, I don't believe it's possible to, at the same time, say your insurance company by virtue of insuring your car, has the right to surveil that car at a time and via a method of their choosing, with no notification, and with no oversight, solely for the purpose of jacking up your price and/or rewriting your contract on the fly. These relationships already heavily, heavily bias in the favor of the corporation. Do they really need YET MORE unearned, unchecked authority in our lives?!
> surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy
Not at all times, of course.
But if we built the technology to do it whenever someone is operating a multi-ton vehicle on a shared roadway (similar to how we require police to wear body-cams), I wouldn't actually be sad about it or feel unduly watched.
I do concur, however, that routing it through the insurance company is pretty sub-optimal; I'd much prefer a public authority that I could vote out if they screw up.
Way back in high school, I remember learning the Mean Value Theorem in calculus, and I asked the teacher (little annoying asshole that I was) whether the consequence of the theorem that "for a continuous function, the mean of the values in the interval is one of the values in the interval" implies that you could track how long it took someone to get from point A to point B on the highway and conclude that even if you didn't see them speed, they must have sped.
He paused and responded "yes, but nobody will stand for getting tickets like that."
Fast-forward to the 2020s and I find there are actually plenty of people who would, in fact, stand for that.
> Firstly, surveilling every person in the world at all times to ensure safety is a gross misapplicaiton of tech that flies in the face of personal freedom and privacy.
Are you referring to the opt-in system of surveillance which insurance companies use to monitor driving (install our app/plug our device into your OBD port)?
Or are they, these days, buying data on your driving from stuff like traffic cams (wouldn't be surprising, sorry if I'm giving them the idea now)?
Does it really matter if it's opt-in when insurance companies are going to make the price without the "discounts" you get for opting in completely unaffordable for most people? When I shopped around for auto insurance most recently, I discovered that Liberty Mutual is already using this model. The quoted price is way higher than most, but convenient discounts are offered if you download an app that lets them spy on your driving habits. What happens when every insurer starts doing stuff like this because it becomes socially acceptable for them to do so? The issue, as usual, isn't from one or two firms offering a discount in exchange for data collection, it's when this data collection happens at scale and is practically unavoidable, especially for people who don't realize what they're really opting into.
> Does it really matter if it's opt-in when insurance companies are going to make the price without the "discounts" you get for opting in completely unaffordable for most people?
let’s be accurate with statements yes? i was offered one of these devices, refused it, and my rates did not increase. you’re claiming the rates people have been paying are lower than after they refuse the device. This is incorrect.
That's not the mechanism by which this happens. It's likely illegal (or at the very least, a bad look PR wise) for them to increase your rates based on your refusal to be spied on, but the base price will likely increase as the adoption of technologies like this becomes more widespread, and the discounts will become a more important part of how people afford car insurance. It's not that your specific policy will go from $200/mo to $300/mo for not opting in, it's that over time the same policy for new customers will be $300/mo but with a $100/mo discount for letting them spy on you.
Inflation will also do that. So are you mad at the current administration for increasing the prices of all policies?
in reality so long as there still competition and the gov keeps their regulatory noses out of it, then competition alone will take care of it.
Besides, the devices are embedded into cars now so this is entirely a nonissue going forward. Everybody already has one and your driving data is being sent to insurance companies without you even knowing.
Actually these days new cars have GPS tracking built in, and the manufacturers sell your location data, so it's much more fine-grained than traffic cams, and they didn't need your help getting the idea.
> Are you referring to the opt-in system of surveillance which insurance companies use to monitor driving (install our app/plug our device into your OBD port)?
Not the person you're replying to, but yes, absolutely stuff like that. (I think GP was talking about drone surveillance and stuff like that, but sure, we can talk about this too.)
The problem is that people are being coerced into giving up their privacy and autonomy. In this particular case, the coercion is (as usual) money: you presumably get a discount for letting your insurance company spy on you. I expect, though, that ultimately the insurance companies use these things as justification to charge more on average. Let's face it: most people are not particularly good drivers. That's a problem, certainly, but not one that should or will be solved by a company with a profit motive. Some people will drive within whatever arbitrary, poorly-understood parameters that makes the insurance company's algorithms happy, but most probably will not, and will likely see their premiums go up, but not realize why.
And even if this did actually result in lower premiums on average (for the people who opt into this dystopia), it's still a problem, because the implication is that only rich people are allowed to have privacy.
We already live in a world where being wealthy can buy you more privacy. The question is only where we put the comfort slider on that fact, not whether it is a fact.
In the thread I saw yesterday, can't spend the time to find it atm, the topic was specifically about an insurance company using drones and AI to ascertain that someone's roof had moss growing on it. The homeowner fully acknowledged that this was a lapse in his upkeep, but also, I am incredibly opposed to the notion that a company can surveil people as such simply because they buy insurance from them.
You’re on a website run by venture capitalists who use this platform to increase the value of their portfolios… so unless you’re an agent provocateur, your comment needs to be read as ironic performance art because I hate to break it to you - you’re also part of the problem
I operated under this mental model originally as well. But, based on all available information, while HN allows running ads for YC portfolio companies and uses it for other promo purposes (YC applications), I have come to the conclusion tha pg, dang, et el are running this place as part science project, part public good, funded by YC returns (which, while not exact, can be predicted with high confidence from public information wrt portfolio liquidity events).
Certainly, you need funding, look what happened to Reddit's quest to squeeze community for returns. HN runs lean (two servers in colo, a few mods) and small (less is more), so they can be more flexible in what they're optimizing for. I will argue there is something intangible that exists they are cultivating. More for another thread, but I would be cautious about saying "You cannot speak truth about capitalism failings because YC runs HN and YC is a VC fund." Simplicity is rare, and the evidence does not indicate this forum runs to maximize profit.
Kinda tired of hearing this over and over. By and large, most HN readers and commenters are just regular people. Certainly we are regular people of a certain demographic, but we're not all venture capitalists or startup executives or whatever. Not even close.
If you have evidence that the people who run and moderate HN are doing so with a heavy bias toward projecting some sort of venture-capitalist narrative, please present that evidence. My interactions with dang, at least (reading his comments here, and a few email interactions) suggest quite the opposite.
If the problem you're referring to is capitalism, it is not possible to not participate in capitalism because capitalism operates every nation state and every portion of the planet.
If the problem you're referring to is venture capital, I don't work at a VC firm and have no intention to.
Someone on HN [1] recommended "Broken Code," [2] a book about the various people who tried to fix Facebook/Meta from the inside and noped out. Highly recommend having purchased and read. "Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” -- Captain G. M. Gilbert
It's really not though. All that money goes somewhere, and not just in their pockets. Some goes to make sure that serious penalties and serious enforcement doesn't happen, because that too is another avenue of ensuring maximum profit.
> Some goes to make sure that serious penalties and serious enforcement doesn't happen
Representatives aren't emotionless puppets that respond to money. They're people, and they can be good or bad. In this case, they're bad, and they're the ones to blame, because they're responsible for protecting consumers from bad companies.
> that too is another avenue of ensuring maximum profit
This is also insanely deluded and ignorant of reality. Every communist country in existence has power deals between bureaucrats in charge of the state, and bureaucrats in charge of producing things. This is a result of human nature, and capitalism doesn't come into it at all.
> and they're the ones to blame, because they're responsible for protecting consumers from bad companies.
in your example they’re both bad—both the original aggressor and the one refusing to enforce against that aggressor.
we need to mitigate against this desire to find The One thing to blame. By their very nature complicated situations will have many problems, rarely simply one. we need to remember this so we don’t accidentally stifle conversations by saying “No! It’s this other thing! Not what you said!” we need to recognize this when we find ourselves falling into this trap.
keep in mind, in your scenario, if the elected representative were to enforce against the aggressor, the aggressor would go to jail because their actions are bad—-this tells us that no, it isn’t only the elected person. Both of the parties in your scenario are actively making the situation worse.
Sorry, yes, I agree - both the evildoers, and figures of authority that enable their behavior, deserve scorn and derision. I didn't mean to say that entities actually doing bad things don't deserve shame.
The point that I'm trying to make is that, while evildoers will always exist, we don't have very much agency over their actions. You don't have very many options over the actions of a bad company (or person) - but you do have the ability to hold your representatives accountable and protest and vote against them if they don't make good laws and enforce them.
So, even though evil companies/people should be shunned, at the very least we know that there's always going to be some of them around - but our representatives are ostensibly acting in our bests interests, and have more responsibility, power, and accountability than the bad actors, so we should focus on them instead.
That is - the same amount of energy applied to our representatives will do far more good than applied to bad companies.
if we want to point fingers then I certainly have my targets but what good will that do? you’ll piss off one side, promote the other, and increase the divide for both.
another solution, actually boycott immorality. morality was pushed from society not so long ago, at least in the US, and what you see is the result. why wouldn’t you follow the letter of the law and screw over large swaths of people if it’s legal?
> mistaking morality for having anything to do with whom you are or are not allowed to fuck
> Except of course kids and in general people who don't want you to
There's no self-consistent system of morality (that does not involve religion) that simultaneously supports all of these positions. What religious morality are you using?
The average CEO nowadays is paid 344 times more than an average worker, while in 1978 this figure was "only" 21 times.
And indeed, lots of it goes to prevent serious penalties, like lawyering-up, lobbying, (deceitful) media campaigns, bribing "scientists" and "doctors", etc. Just look at Big Tobacco's playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement and see it playing out with Big Oil and climate change, Big Chem (PFAS in our water), etc etc. And, let's not forget Big Tech, with companies like Twitter/X where fascism now thrives, and Instagram/TikTok/Whatever who mine our attention.
These companies have grown, much like tumors, to be overly powerful, overly protected, and overly influential. And they wreck havoc on our societies and planet. Their attempts of "self-regulation" are laughable, and so far also laughable have been our governments' attempts to reign them in.
My point is that the kind of corp feudalism we see now is a direct following of unrestrained capitalism/libertarianism. Unless we reign in the companies, break them down, make them pay fair wages and hold them responsible for their societal and environmental impact, we will drown in our own garbage.
And yes, it's capitalism to blame, a philosophy where you optimize only for profit, throwing all other values out the window, in the hope that the (non-existent) "invisible hand" of the market will somehow fix everything magically.
it doesn’t matter how many times this is said, rational people know the issue is with humans and not capitalism. we can’t keep giving human behavior a pass and blaming systems that literally cannot take any action on their own. we see this with guns as well, the problem is not the system nor the laws, the problem is people. i wish you luck in fixing people, as many have tried before you and failed.
The solution to guns is simple. Ban guns and make ownership hard.
It's the same reason you don't allow 10 year-olds to operate a vehicle, cause it can be a danger to society.
> it doesn’t matter how many times this is said, rational people know the issue is with humans and not capitalism.
This statement is the equivalent of hand waving. Capitalism is a system made by humans, it's not some divine order. We have toppled other flawed systems in the past, feudalism (kings and queens heads were rolling), slavery, and we can do the same with capitalism.
These large complex systems have a life on their own and are susceptible to laws that individuals within can't predict/influence, so it's not human nature. Humans are largely compassionate, cooperative creatures. But the system in which we are placed influences our behavior to a huge extent. In this case, the system is definitely the problem, because it has bugs and corner cases that make it collapse, one way or another, and behavior that we consider "bad" to flourish.
Capitalism, let's call it for what it is, has become money-based feudalism where the most ruthless and sociopathic people "succeed". How else would you call Big Tobacco's disinformation campaigns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Frank_Statement#. This purposeful misinformation of the public is surely evil. How else would you call tobacco execs' behavior if not evil and sociopathic? The capitalistic system is basically cutthroat lying and stealing and extraction of value with a false veneer of fairness and law.
- Theoretically, we are all equal in front of the law. In practice, the rich can lawyer up and get away with things that a normal person wouldn't be able to
- Theoretically, all of us, through hard work and enterprise, can "succeed" in capitalism. In practice, it's much more important who your daddy is, where you were born, and where you studied (which is also influenced by money)
- Theoretically, the government system in which we participate has elected bodies which are supposed to protect us from harm (e.g pollution, climate change, etc). In practice, money has allowed large corporation to buy politicians, lobbyists, campaign time, influence public opinion, etc.
So, you see, in capitalism, the system is very very rigged, it promises one thing, but, behind the scenes, it's all about money. Everything is optimized for money, everything else is thrown out of the window (including people, nature, morals). There is only one option to defeat this rigged system, and that's not individual action, it's collective action.
Strikes work, greedy corps can't actually survive without their workers doing the work.
The pandemic made many people re-evaluate what's important, and we saw that it's the lower paid professions that were the "essential ones": nurses, delivery drivers, sanitation, etc. Why are they lower paid then?
Now we are back to pretending nothing ever happened and corporations really hard are trying to make it business as usual again, trying to put you back to the office, trying to raise their prices and blame it on inflation.
But guess what: with the fabrics of society unraveling together with the natural world, when there is no drinkable water and no food to eat, and fires are raging everywhere, you will realize that capitalism was the cancer causing all this. You'd be regretting you didn't band up with others and acted up sooner.
> The solution to guns is simple. Ban guns and make ownership hard.
But then this is stepping on an enumerated right. If we remove or make it difficult the right to own guns, what’s next? Freedom of speech? That one was attacked recently as well. So no the solution is not to further limit rights due to the hoplophobia of a few, the solution is actually what you’re trying to stop. Prior to recent history, it was quite common for a child to have a gun. They didn’t go around shooting people then, so what’s different? (removing morality such that people are only scared of breaking laws, and nothing else).
The rest I didn’t read because this isn’t a blog and you tried to compare capitalism with feudalism.
I understand capitalism doesn’t allow you to be lazy and have no job, but that’s a feature not a bug.
> I suggest reducing the word count to 10% of what’s here so busy people with jobs can read it.
Fine, I will oblige :)
TLDR;
1. capitalism is bad, social democracies beat it in every index.
2. Google/Meta grew to the tumors they are nowadays due to capitalism.
> I suggest reducing the word count to 10% of what’s here so busy people with jobs can read i
No, I am not interested in editing my post to cater to people who don't have the mental capacity/space to read 300 words with attention and understanding (another symptom of capitalism, people are struggling to keep jobs that demand so much of them that they can't even read). I've heard Twitter is good for that though, maybe you should check it out.
This is deluded. "Capitalism" is not "structured" in this way at all. This is a failure of regulation, and it's extremely easy to see why: because competent regulators would take anticompetitive action against large monopolies like Google and Meta, as well as enacting laws to prevent undesirable things like personal data being sold.
> The perverse incentives of capitalism will never create good social change
...and you just outed yourself as being extremely ignorant of basically all history, as the vast majority of socially beneficial inventions and rights of all time have come from capitalist countries.
> This is deluded. "Capitalism" is not "structured" in this way at all. This is a failure of regulation
I do agree with you that this is a failure of regulation. However, in the stage of capitalism we are currently in, capitalism actively FIGHTS regulation.
Whether it's lobbyism, hiring "scientists" to challenge independent studies, outright tax evasion, or simply accepting fines for disaster after disaster (oil spills, bad plane design, data sales) because they can afford it. Hell, politicians now are deregulating our countries by privatising or de-funding branch after branch (see the NHS in the UK).
Capitalism at its current stage is just a giant fire-sale, and our governments are as deeply involved as the corporations, not out of maliciousness, but due to how the system naturally drags everybody and everything in, with its need for constant growth. You know what else constantly grows? Tumors.
"Pete Buttigieg: Hungry Babies, Regrettably, Are Just the Price of the Free Market"
Is worth preserving.
I'd say not, and I will work my best to dismantle it and throw it in the past, where it belongs, along with slavery, feudalism, fascism and other obsolete and harmful human societal arrangements.
> However, in the stage of capitalism we are currently in
This is, again, deeply deluded and detached from reality.
People always fight those who hold them back. This applies to employees fighting bosses, children fighting parents, companies fighting regulators, citizens fighting corrupt governments, and different bureaucrats fighting each other in socialist and communist systems.
It's blindingly obvious that this phenomenon isn't specific to capitalism, and outright false to claim that it wouldn't happen in any other economic system. (and, in fact, it would be much worse in command economies, as history clearly shows)
> Capitalism at its current stage is just a giant fire-sale
Again: there's no "at its current stage" - there is corruption in government that has allowed bad actors to run rampant. The fact that tens of thousands of companies are behaving reasonably trivially disproves your claim that this is a "stage". This is bad actors, which have always existed, and always will continue to exist, that are now less checked than usual because of regulatory failure.
> we also need to think whether a system that produces statements like this
...which proves decisively that you have no idea what you're talking about. This is not an argument - this is emotional pleading.
That describes a lot of your posts, actually - pleading. Because there are no logical points made, just a lot of emotionally manipulative, trivially-false statements.
> will work my best to dismantle it and throw it in the past
...and there's the activism, which comes with the typical lack of understanding of reality that is common to proponents for communism.
You should visit North Korea for yourself and see how alternative systems to capitalism actually work.
The fact that you got mad when I called you out in a response[1] and proceeded to stalk my other comment threads to personally attack me conclusively proves that you're not interested in debate or reason, just pushing your own ideological agenda. I have no responsibility to respond to you. Your opinions and arguments are invalid, because you're shown that you're willing to resort to stalking and personal attacks against those you do not like.
1) You've got your chronology and causality wrong[1]. No, I did not "stalk [your] other comment threads" after my other response to you.
2) And no, pointing out flawed logic in an argument is not a "personal attack".
3) My interests and motivations don't affect the validity of my arguments. I just said that assertions aren't proofs (here), and that working for a particular employer is a choice, not mandatory (elsewhere, at your link above). Hitler could say either of those, and it would still be correct. So could Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Emperor Bokassa, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, or Churchill. See how it has nothing to do with ideology?
4) What you claim are "proofs" are still just assertions, and working for a particular employer is still a choice. You were wrong, that is all.
___
[1]: I think I've replied to you exactly twice before, and you posted this exact same (apart from the link) response to both. Since what you're saying is either "you attacked me elsewhere, and then followed me here!" or "you attacked me here, and then followed me elsewhere!", it's confusing as Hell. Which is supposed to be "elsewhere", and which "here"? It even took me a while to realise both links were valid, and not some weird loop... (I was beginning to speculate whether Dan G had moved one sub-thread or both into some offshoot. That is, after I realised they are two separate sub-threads in the first place.)
I'm so glad we have simple and effective solutions like this. Otherwise can you imagine the kinds of problems we'd have with kids vaping, buying lootboxes and scrolling social media designed to hijack their not-yet-fully-developed-brains?