> Opposition to speed-limit cameras exposes the absurdity of most speed-limit laws: it's a law so bad many (most?) people are opposed to having it strictly enforced. If that's not a bad law, then I don't know what is.
Not all laws that are heavily disliked are bad laws, and not all laws that most people like are good ones.
True, but as someone who considers myself a safe and considerate driver, my opposition to strict enforcement of speed limits comes from this: when the police can easily enforce something numerical, they optimize for maximum revenue and devote nearly 100% of their traffic enforcement resources to speed traps.
This leaves all manner of unsafe drivers free to proceed with making illegal and unsafe maneuvers on the road without a snowball's chance in hell of ever being prosecuted for it. In most North American jurisdictions, what do you think the ratio of speeding tickets to tickets for all other traffic offenses is? Do you think someone doing 55 km/h in a 50 km/h zone is more dangerous that the person who always plays chicken with left-turn traffic by blazing through the tail end of yellow lights at intersections? The person who stops traffic to make an illegal left turn in the same place every day? The person who doesn't turn on their lights on the freeway driving 100 km/h at night when it snows?
> Sure, they have their bad moments (pun intended), being caught uploading users' address books, spamming user's friends with invites and perhaps paying for downloads. No one's perfect and some of us sometimes do try to stretch things a little to see how far we can go. Don't we?
Are you being sarcastic here? I can't tell. Uploading your users' address books to your servers without permission isn't just 'stretching things a little', it's a textbook privacy violation.
Conversely: with an ebook reader, you can bring your entire collection with you wherever you go, and you can add to it from the device without having to wait 2 days, pay shipping, figure out where you're going to put the book, settle on an organization system so you don't lose it...
There are some good points here, such as the fact that in most (all?) major ebook ecosystems the distributor can take away your ability to read a book, but some of his points (like "Attention Profit vs. Attention Deficit") are because he was reading from iBooks on an iPad.
"ome of his points (like "Attention Profit vs. Attention Deficit") are because he was reading from iBooks on an iPad."
Agreed. I almost never read ebooks on my iPad or even my Kindle Fire. Occasionally I'll use those to read a book that has color imagery, but never for novels. The eInk Kindle is lighter (besides the obvious advantage in terms of portability, the iPad hurts when you go to sleep while reading and it hits you in the face) and has longer battery life, too.
It's simply not true that paper books are "bug-free". The cheap-jack binding used on most paper books nowadays is good for maybe two or readings, if that.
I don't read for a "tactile experience". I want the delivery device to disappear completely if possible so I can concentrate on the content. The eInk Kindle is also superior there. It's lighter than just about any paper book.
> Three quarters work, and one quarter do not. What's the unemployment rate in the USA now? If you include those who've 'given up' looking for work or whatever, I think it's around 12%. Yeah, let's fork out a couple of trillion dollars a year and double that.
Not everybody is on the Brazilian system, only people below a certain income level. According to http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf the employment level among those in poverty is something like 10%. Obviously you can't directly compare that to the Brazilian system without knowing more about how the US vs. Brazil define poverty, but it's obviously wrong to assume that all income levels are employed at the same rate.
This has the problem of "where does the first hacker come from?" Then I realized the first hacker is almost certainly Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program for Babbage's Analytical Engine.
> It seems doubtful that the answer to social inequalities is to make special privileges for each group to match the special privileges already enjoyed by others, as opposed to working more towards an ideal of equal treatment for everyone.
If two people are running in a race, and one of them has been running the past 4 miles with a 50-pound weight on their back, taking the weight off isn't going to make the race fair. You've either got to give them some kind of help or put a weight on the other person's back.
The mentality of the world as a competition between different groups of people, where either men win and women lose, or men lose and women win, doesn't seem particularly helpful either. A race implies winners and losers, so I think this is a bad analogy. An idea of "let's treat men worse for a while as revenge for years of male-dominated history" isn't very sophisticated, no particular offense intended. Also, giving special privileges to all the known groups will just disenfranchise the people not associated with any particular groups (in this case, one might consider trans people). Human equality (or even including non-human-persons equality) would seem a better ideal than just male-female equality.
If we're actually intelligent creatures, let's try and fix the underlying problems instead of just pushing them around for someone else to suffer from.
Most people have a weight that's not obvious to others. One person runs with their 50 pound sexist society weight. Another runs with their 50 pound tormented in school and has no one to turn to for help in moving past it weight. Another has a 50 pound echoes of institutional racism weight. I could go on, but I think you get the point.
Everyone could do with programs to help unload their weights. No one needs or deserves more weight.
No you don't, doing so only breeds more animosity. There's a reason why men get touchy over female hires and promotions that are framed in the context of diversity and women's rights. Hiring or promoting someone primarily for being female, especially if they aren't the best candidate, is stupid.
Whoever downvoted this, I suggest they look into the criticism of "colorblindness" in regards to racism, and consider if an analogy can be made here as well.
Not all laws that are heavily disliked are bad laws, and not all laws that most people like are good ones.