If you don’t get paid when you are sick, you are in essence being punished for being sick.
Not being punished for being sick is a basic human right.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights entered into force in 1976. The human rights that the Covenant seeks to promote and protect include:
the right to work in just and favourable conditions;
the right to social protection, to an adequate standard of living and to the highest attainable standards of physical and mental well-being;
the right to education and the enjoyment of benefits of cultural freedom and scientific progress.
Appreciate the distinction between representative democracy (a mechanism for choosing/changing the government), and the rule of law (a set of statutes and/or common law laying out how society should function). The covenant was agreed by (mostly) governments chosen through representative democracy, and signed into law (or at least given a nod in various legislation, policy etc).
Ideas like 'the will of the people' overriding established good and just law is the preserve of populists, and in extreme, of fascists. The Brexit referendum being a good case in point.
That’s the difference between voting and democracy. Unions are a form of democracy, as it’s the people who are determining their own rights. But yes, unfortunately rights often have to be hard fought for rather than simply voted into existence.
As another commenter pointed out, from the article you posted:
> all of this is taking place in an industry without bankruptcy protections, where individuals carry personal liability for business taxes, and where businesses are barred from writing off normal expenses.
So your argument is not backed up by your own link
> That market always will exist because cutting makes drugs cheaper and legal drugs will never be able to compete.
That question varies depending on where in the country you ask it. There’s a huge cultural aspect to moonshining and a lot of people in the south drink it.
not op, but a wild guess is i think they're attempting an "oh you know the ones", aka the ones trying for a more equitable society, which the status quo equates with "they're trying to destroy the status quo!"
I agree with the sentiment but a couple problems with this approach
1. When you put the onus on the individual, powerful organisations will jump at the opportunity to absolve themselves of blame. Look at recycling and how it was pushed by the plastics lobby or the idea of a “personal carbon footprint” that was pushed by oil companies. There is a fact that these are systemic problems, that require systemic solutions.
2. History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. Which massive threat to human life has been solved through bottom-up grass roots action (I.e. not protest to drive systemic change)? Look at small pox, the ozone and cfcs, covid, lead pipes, asbestos, etc. these all required huge top down programmes to deliver results.
Re. #1 it drives me nuts when I see articles with titles like “Did you know that almond milk uses X gallons of water to make?” as if the onus is on me to understand the calculus of almond vs. cow milk vs. just pouring plain water on my cereal.
If we look at every issue an article like that wants to point to they all have mostly systemic causes, big Ag pushing factory dairy farms, heavy water subsidies for almond growers on land that otherwise wouldn’t support growing almonds, etc.
I hate that in the name of “conserving the earth” there’s this sort of endless game of shame and blame. Switch from cow milk to almond milk, not good enough. Recycle plastic, oh but you need to be aware of which plastics you’re recycling. You can switch to reusable containers. Oh but don’t buy aluminum, the carbon footprint for producing it is too high.
If we just decided to regulate one thing, like the diesel fuel container ships use, that would have a bigger effect than any of those environmental “tips”.
Personally, I think this is why solutions such as carbon taxes and appropriate pricing are the way to go. Market forces start bringing out the desirable outcomes as people look to find ways of living, purchasing, and consuming sustainably.
The question to me is: what is the thing I should do? Where should I invest my energy?
Time and energy are finite resources and taking political action to drive systemic change has proven results (see previous examples).
I don’t know of any transformative movement against mass threat to human life that hasn’t relied on some form of top-down implementation to achieve its aims. Maybe environmental vegetarianism in the west? But that’s hardly been an unqualified success…
Sustained political movements that drive results build upwards through the layers outlined, because that’s how you change culture — and politics is downstream of culture.
We live in a democracy, so if you don’t convince your neighbors first, then politicians will correctly respect the majority’s wishes over yours.
COVID is a great counter example:
The reason that it destroyed our society and has led to years of bitter fighting that’s doing massive damage to public health is precisely because it was authoritarian policy lacking public consensus — and now is likely to destroy many of the institutions that supported it in the backlash, as the public investigates gain of function, PSYOPs, ineffective policy interventions, etc.
But let’s assume that I must choose one thing to focus my energy. Birds are better off with me working on a habitat in my back yard that maybe homes 10 birds over my lifetime, the next 70 years.
That will have a greater impact than any way I can influence top-down implementations.
But fortunately, I can both build a habitat, donate to environmental charities, advocate for improvement, and vote for political parties.
WRT #2, I'd argue that many, MANY peoples – towns, families, cultures – have survived MUCH longer thanks to their bottom-up, localist thinking. I'm not saying top-down doesn't work, but it clearly isn't working for climate change. Too many adverse incentives, to much systemic ineffectiveness.
The tldr is that both of them urged Roosevelt to develop the weapon, and only later when the destructive potential of the bomb was obvious expressed regret. Einstein's 1938 letter to Roosevelt was the first step toward the Manhattan project. See https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Resou... if you want to read more.
So it's weird to say Einstein "warned us" about the x-risk of nuclear weapons prior to their development when his letter to Roosevelt was begging for more money to speed up the development of nukes.
I think the entire saga is mostly an unrelated red herring -- AI is nothing like nuclear bombs and reasoning by analogy in that way is sloppy at best.
Mostly? It's just kind of funny that x-risk people point to Einstein and Oppenheimer as positive examples, since they both did literally the exact opposite of "warn the public and don't develop". The irony makes you chuckle if you know the history.
Particularly given the weird fetish for IQ in the portion of the x-risk community that overlaps with the rationalist community, it's also really funny to point out that what they should be saying is actually something like "don't be like those high-IQ fools Einstein and Oppenheimer! They are terrible examples!" ;)
Not at all. My point was that while Einstein said (warned) that nukes are possible and while they were being built in Los Alamos, the lower key physicists,academics and apparently people like you were saying that nuclear explosion is impossible. It was the quite laughable. And it's exactly the situation now, Agis are being built and laymen are in denial.
In both meat eating and driving those activities have inherent harm, eating meat will cause animals harm, driving a car will cause pollution and release of GHG.
The harm of the drugs trade (on a societal level) is _due to its illegality_ I.e. it is run by criminals.
Not being punished for being sick is a basic human right.
The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights entered into force in 1976. The human rights that the Covenant seeks to promote and protect include:
the right to work in just and favourable conditions;
the right to social protection, to an adequate standard of living and to the highest attainable standards of physical and mental well-being;
the right to education and the enjoyment of benefits of cultural freedom and scientific progress.