ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Because i do.
Are you saying this in the vibes-based sense, or is there another reason?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
My understanding is that the CCP is more than happy to threaten the families of ethnic Chinese living abroad. The "C" part of MICE. I imagine the usefulness of that coercion gets less and less potent as the generations toll on and they get more distant from any family which is still within the territorial domain of the CCP, but second-generation is sort of in that "sweet spot", where they could conceivably qualify for high-level US clearances, but could also have significant ties to extended family back in China. I don't know how US counterintel is dealing with this problem. Presumably, they could choose to simply deny clearances to folks who have too much family that they are too close with back in China. Alternatively, they could still grant those clearances, yet try to flag those relationships as being of sufficient concern for some sort of extra monitoring. Or, of course, they could just be doing nothing besides trying really hard to impress upon the person applying for the clearance, "You know that if you do this, there's a decent chance that you'll be putting your family in danger. And you must must must must immediately report it if you receive any threats like this, no matter how scary it is or how much you care for them. Or else."
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
You haven't gotten banned for it.
...try calling atheists delusional, and see what you get. Try saying that atheists are treated with kid gloves, and see what happens.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Last night, I saw some signs that caused me to reflect back on this OP and think about distinctions between making fun of stupid people and trying to think about how to live life and what to expect from society while at least not mentally denying the existence of a wide range of folks. I wasn't sure I'd share it here, but you mentioned low-income tax preparation, so I feel like I must.
The signs were offering tax return services. I think at least one of them mentioned something about an advance being available; that's a service that I understand being available. Might not be the best rates, but offers of short-term credit to low-income folks has been beaten to death as a topic, so I wasn't at all impacted by that. What caught my eye is that these signs just threw out completely random ass numbers. One said something like $4995, which was portrayed as like, "This is how much money we will get you," and then sort of portrayed as the "fine print" being that the number was only good if you had one child. Nearby, there was another sign that just boldly declared a slightly different figure, but this one had it in a series of figures. This much if you have one child, about a grand more if you have two, and about another grand more if you have three. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it wasn't "about a grand more"; they gave specific numbers, as if those were just straightforwardly the number of dollars that you'd receive on your tax return if you were in the appropriate category and used their services. As if you could just find the company that advertised the highest number, and that's how you could get the most dollars.
Maybe I just didn't pay close enough attention to the signs while driving by and they had detailed fine print in little letters, but man, first off, that just sounds like false advertising. Most of all, it struck me just how much of a fundamental misunderstanding of how any of this works1 it would take for this sort of advertising to be effective. But then I feel like, surely, this sort of advertising must have some level of effectiveness within the community in which it is being used, otherwise people likely wouldn't do it, right? Thus, back to reflecting on the need to always remember how wide of a range of people there are in this world.
1 - In fact, I may have some fundamental misunderstandings about how these sorts of advertisements work. If it really was "higher number wins", then you'd think it would get even more obscene. Yet, being completely out of whack too often may just piss customers off and drive them away. Do they just pick some X percentile estimate for likely returns in the local area? ...what friggin' percentile of returns would ~$5k be?! Has EIC gotten that insane, or are there really that many people who randomly ended up with wildly off W9s?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Another very common occurence is that they will buy cases of bottled water with food stamps, immediately dump the water out into the parking lot of the grocery store, then come back in and redeem the now-empty bottles for cash.
So you're telling me there's a business opportunity to make the largest cases with the largest number of the smallest bottles possible that can be stamped with a bottle deposit, so as to reduce the wasted expense?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
prohibition of X
I think this reasoning fails to get off the ground, for reasons that may be coincident with what FC is getting at. "Prohibition of X" is different for different values of X. What is the nature of X? How does it come to be? Where? By who? What is its size? Use? Alternatives? Etc. That is, people have prohibited alcohol, drugs, prescription drugs, small guns, large guns, of course you can throw in F-16s and nuclear weapons, or even just Chinese drywall. The list goes on. People have also tried prohibiting things that are less than tangible, like encryption or killing babies, or all sorts of stuff. I see almost no reason why there should be a single schema that dictates how every possible prohibition of every possible X will (not) work. Different things are different. Some may be extremely difficult to prohibit; others may be relatively easier. It is likely impossible to do any with 100% success everywhere, because 100% success is just not a thing in law/public policy (I guess there's probably some guy out there who is just really determined to bring over some Chinese drywall... and for Sagan's sake, we can't even get to zero killed babies), so we usually have to use some other metrics for success.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
This, plus the fact that we have no idea how to do "treatment" that actually works. Scott posted loooooong ago that honest studies on rehab for alcoholism fail to beat a placebo. The end goal of most rehab studies for harder drugs like potent opioids isn't even "stops using potent opioids"; it's "maybe uses potent opioids slightly less and gets up to criminal mischief slightly less often". The true believers in the idea that we're just going to "apply 'treatment' directly to the forehead", if we just try hard enough politically and decide to spend enough money, and that it will magically convert addicts into non-addicts/non-users, are just banging their heads against reality.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I find that looking at these aggregate numbers to be fascinating, and also difficult to really understand, especially because I really get the feeling that it's tough to understand without really digging in to the data sources, seeing if there are discrepancies between sources and how they choose to do their groupings. For example see the wiki article, which has different tables that are listed from the 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2022 ACS.
Especially the "detailed ancestry" section. Median Indian household income is $152k?! That's wild and dwarfs the top line white/black gap. Makes me wonder if composition effects are significant. That is, are Indian "households" just bigger? Like, more people, plausibly more working people, living in the same house? Conversely, many articles have been written claiming that poor family relations and divorce have plagued black communities more. If Indian households have 2-3 individuals earning incomes on average, while white households have 1.5-2, while black households have 1-1.5, could that be a huge effect? I do recall EconTalk mentioning household composition effects being rather important when talking just about the country-wide median household income statistics, and I wonder how much of a story they tell here.
Additionally, in the detailed ancestry section, they don't have a category for "African Americans (Black Americans)" at all, like they do in the top line chart. So, how are they actually describing these group boundaries? The number from the top chart for this category would be at the absolute bottom of the bottom chart (coming in just below Appalachian), and that's kind of wild to me, too. Even the "Subsaharan African" number is substantially higher. Is the general African American number being pulled down specifically by people who don't identify with any other ancestry, even if they have some sense of where their family came from? It would have to be a pretty strong pull, and I don't have a sense for how relatively big these groups are.
What about self-identification issues? If Cletus decides that Appalachia sucks and that you can't make a living there, so he moves out, finds a job in the fancy city, meets someone there, marries her, makes a family there, etc., how many years will it be until he stops identifying as Appalachian? He thought Appalachia sucked! "Nah; I'm just American." Possible analog to an evaporative cooling mechanism.
I don't think today will be the day that I have time to pour through all the details, but thanks for another reminder that I really need to sometime.
A big reason why Medicare spending grows so rapidly is because US healthcare spending in general is growing rapidly and Medicare covers a population (old people) that tend to be much sicker than average.
This one is pretty shocking, and I didn't realize until my mother got cancer right around her retirement age. It pushed her retirement date a little earlier than she had originally planned, which was a little annoying to her, but probably for the best. In any event, she asks me to help her look through some financial stuff, because even though she's normally pretty good with that sorta stuff, "chemo brain" is a bitch, as is just aging in general. When she was able to get on to Medicare was my first real exposure to how the system works, what it costs (I'm not even sure if I really had much of a grasp on which parts were truly free and which parts you had to pay extra for), what all the options are, etc. I shouldn't have been surprised that it had similar terms to normal health insurance, with things like premiums, out-of-pocket maximums, etc. What I was definitely surprised about was just how shockingly cheap it was, with incredibly low maxes. Like, simply insane. Like, better than the best monetary value I've seen out of even the top tier, most expensive insurance I've ever been offered by an employer, with premiums significantly lower than I've see out of even the bottom tier, most cut rate insurance I've ever been offered by an employer. That was when I realized just how massive of a wealth transfer the program is from young to old. It was also when I realized how the incentives worked. Out-of-pocket maxes so low that if you have literally anything happen to you in a year, then you simply do not even have to consider the price of any other medical service that you might think about consuming.
That's when it sort of clicked, why the large conglomerate that is managing her care has bundled in everything imaginable into what seems to be their "cancer package". If you can squint your eyes and think that it might be helpful for the cancer, for managing or recovering from the chemo, whatever, it's part of their package. They'll pay for Ubers to your appointments, every therapy under the sun (physical, occupational, mental, etc.), even your gym membership (at their extra fancy, extra expensive gym that just so happens to be a part of the conglomerate). Feel like you're not sleeping the best? We'll send you to some sleep specialists, do the full workup. Not fully happy with a rapid recovery of mental faculties from chemo? We'll give you some brain scans, a variety of tests, and surely, more weekly therapy of various sorts. The list goes on. It's a good thing that she's retired now, because she has basically a full-time job just managing and going to all of the myriad of possible appointments and offerings they provide in their neatly-packaged conglomerate, and all of the expenses can be justified in some way or another with respect to the cancer or side effects from the treatment, or something.
On the one hand, cool that she can get so much attention to get every month of vitality possible; I really do value the additional time spent with her, especially with her still being able to be as clear-minded and engaging as she is. Moreover, cool that she doesn't have to constantly worry about money. She hadn't really saved as much for retirement as she would have liked, and pre-retirement, I really got the sense that she was kinda constantly worried about it and how things were going to work out. Now that all the paperwork has been done and the numbers are on the table, she can see how it's going to work, that it's going to be okay, and that she no longer has to worry about it. On the other hand, hot damn, that means that she (and we, by extension) literally do not even have to think for a millisecond about a cost-benefit ratio for literally any possible option within their menu. From her perspective, it is all literally completely and totally free. There is not a single moment where she has to think, "How much tangible benefit do I think this is going to provide for me, and how much do I really value that benefit, to the point of being willing to give up some amount of my own resources for it?" If anything, the only thing that she trades off is just the time of going to the thing and doing it, but of course, she's retired now and has a lot of time in the week. So if she assesses that the tangible benefit has any decent probability of being literally any value more than epsilon>0, why not? How much does it 'cost'? Who knows? Who cares? It doesn't come out of my pocket. I personally benefit from this, because 100% guaranteed that if there was any real expense, she'd be leaning on me to help figure out what's worth it and how to make the finances work. A nice burden off my shoulders, too. I can see the 'cost' now, but damn if the incentives don't do their best at making me apathetic, just because then I don't have to think about that stuff.
A couple final scattered thoughts. First, there was a moment where I thought, "Damn, I don't always sleep the best, and I've had some recurring sleep problems before. It would be nice if I could get a full workup and see if we could fix it. But that would be suuuuuper expensive, and I don't know that I can justify it, given the solid probability that they're not actually going to be able to help me in the end even after I wrack up huge bills." And even some jealousy that she can just go do that for free. I also sort of wonder, society-wide, if we'd be serving our population's health and productivity better if we did stuff like figure out people's sleep problems and fix them when they're young and have many years for those benefits to accrue, rather than make it prohibitively expensive for most of your life and then free right near the end.
Second, I almost wanted to make an analogy to the public school system. People often joke that the school system is mostly a daycare, with incidental ability to help educate children, primarily for the purpose of freeing up parents from having to take care of them. It almost is like getting hooked into one of these big health programs while on medicare is like that. "We'll take your elderly parents, give them constant care, keep them busy coming to appointments and such, and make sure they're at least doing alright," and it's not that genuine medical care isn't there (like how genuine education is not absent from public schools), but that it's more minor or incidental. "We make it so that you don't have to worry about your parent most of the time," just like, "We make it so that you don't have to worry about your child most of the time." A useful service, yes, with some amount of real value, for sure. Like I said, I realized that I genuinely benefit from it in that way. But how effective is it? How costly is it? How efficient compared to possible alternatives? Who knows? Who cares? The bureaucrats and the unions and the conglomerates control all that and don't really want you to know the answers even if you did want to know. All the incentives are just about perfect, so long as the whole thing doesn't blow up spectacularly at some point, and so long as the schools aren't so ineffective that China eats our technological lunch and conquers us via warfare.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Now, I'm open to general arguments that the government should never have been involved in non-discrimination laws in the first place, but I tend to think this is one of the weakest planks of hardcore libertarians. Yes, in theory capitalist greed alone could be enough to not want to discriminate. But I think once you have a world with racially segregated hospitals and race-based banking discrimination, no matter how you got there, it kind of doesn't matter if there were technically no violations of the Non-Aggression Principle at any step in the process, you've ended up in a space where some people are meaningfully less free than other people, since bodily health and finance are basic components of freedom in a free market capitalist system. The free market is already not doing its job.
Even from the perspective of merely fixing a "market failure" I think whatever minimal form of government must exist would have a compelling interest to step in and regulate a handful of high-impact domains to preserve the freedoms of citizens living under such a system.
Since Arjin @'d me, I read this. Going in a different direction than the main conversation, and in the spirit of just getting a sense for how people think about things, what do you think about Justice Alito's question in the recent social media cases:
JUSTICE ALITO: [...] does Gmail have a First Amendment right to delete, let's say, Tucker Carlson's or Rachel Maddow's Gmail accounts if they don't agree with her -- his or her viewpoints?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The self-reports from the polling I linked to above shows people changed their minds most from exposure to the gays, not science lies.
Their polling did not have an ability to consider a distinction that gets at what I had said. "I know a guy who was born gay" gets recorded as "I know a guy". I already pointed this out.
You’re still not presenting a theory for why, consistently, a small percentage of the population shows a predisposition for homosexuality
You're right. I'm not presenting a theory for that. I'm talking about the question of whether bad science was pushed as the only acceptable theory for that and whether that influenced the culture and how people thought about these issues. Whereas you're saying that this theory basically doesn't matter in people's opinions while tangentially being extremely committed to trying to prove the theory through the worst argumentation method possible, as if it's sooooo utterly critical to your thinking that this theory is correct, but, ya know, also that it basically doesn't matter.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Most of this conversation has been about our senses of the important factors, culturally. In a battle of senses, appealing to an external source, whose raison d'etre is tracking cultural forces, and that is almost certainly in your direction politically, is evidence of the general sense. It doesn't say anything or require anything about NYT readers.
The self-reports back my position, not yours. That is to say that I’m sure the “science says” bit did help change minds, just not nearly as much as the other thing.
So I’ve demonstrated the kind of evidence I would accept.
What self-reports? The self-reports of the NYT? Or your personal self-report? You and some buddies? What evidence have you shown of even self-reports? There are plenty of self-reports of folks who said that they were convinced by a version of 'born this way' or 'I know a guy who was born that way'. I don't think you've presented any sort of general evidence at all concerning any population statistics on self-reports. I don't think you've presented any sort of evidence at all. Just a wholesale rejection of all of the high-profile cultural evidence.
I don't see the relevance of your link.
You just brushing off people being gay back when it was a high-cost activity
No. I'm specifically saying that in literally every other case when we look at people who engage in high-cost/risk activity, we don't say, "They must have been born that way." Like, this is simply obscenely bad deductive reasoning. You cannot possibly be endorsing a version of, "For Activity X, if some number of people engage in Activity X in the face of high costs/risk, then we can conclude that people are born with the genes of Activity X."
What's most hilarious about this is that you're absolutely adamant that the bad science around born this way was completely irrelevant, but you just can't help yourself in that you're not making any argument at all about the cultural power around the idea and compulsively defending the idea, itself, but with, like, the shittiest version. Not even, "Here's some science," but like, "Yeah, my opinion, man," and, "Why would people endure high cost/risk for a chosen behavior?" Just hilariously bad. Your own behavior demonstrate just how utterly powerful and controlling the idea is.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Perhaps so. Nevertheless, I don't think I took most of the conversation here to be about the question, "What would actually-existing society actually choose to do with a magic futzing machine, and what would be the effects?" That's a question that would probably require significantly different analysis, and I think it would be even more fraught with potential for just being pure gobbledygook (did not expect spellcheck to recognize that as a word), precisely because cultural responses to new tech, including new biotech, seem wildly unpredictable. See, e.g., the use of masks/vaccines in response to COVID, which was an insanely constrained problem in terms of higher-order effects by comparison.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
If you think it's political/religious force that is important, then, stupid question here, but can't we just futz with that with our magic futzing machine? I was viewing some commentary on the recent paper claiming that there was a developing left/right divide between men/women, and one of the hypotheses was concerning the role of "religiosity", particularly among women. To the extent that we think we could plausibly target hypergamy/neuroticism/hornyness, plausibly one could hypothesize target "religiosity" or other factors that people associate with other cultural/political beliefs.
Moreover, the neuroscience literature has already identified plausible candidates for receptors and genes that relate to pair bonding, some of which even have animal analogs (e.g., there are two closely-related species of voles, one of which pair bonds strongly, and the other which doesn't nearly as much) or which seem to be correlated with measures of "relationship quality" in humans (it would take me a while to dig up some cites; I read this wayyy back in grad school). We could conceivably target something along these lines. Seems like we can think incredibly broadly; we really are considering quite a magic futzing machine.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Cultural progress is harder to predict, and can be much swifter than genetic or technological progress (at least historically; we are in an incredible moment of rapid technological progress, and it would be difficult to construct an explicit metric for this). Especially if genetic engineering is on the table, I don't see why it is necessarily impossibly more difficult to affect people's senses of "intolerability" either as an aside/effect or as a goal. Literally the original subcomment in this subthread is:
If we are thinking of crazy evopsych hacking, why don't we just make women ever so slightly less hypergamous/choosy and less neurotic and ever so slightly more horny?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
(I'm approaching this from a non-moralising stance because I'm not going to argue religion here, just plain secular modern attitudes where 'sex is fine, contraception is fine, abortion is regrettable but on the whole fine').
That is a particular form of a moralized stance. You have chosen a specific set of morals to adopt. You also now make no mention of marriage, which was in your original comment.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
That's the problem here: for abundant sexual access outside of marriage
That is probably the problem here. Most of the rest of the bind that your comment presents seems to go away.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
But I’m not really seeing the evidence this was very load bearing for the public at large in supporting gay marriage when bigger factors exist.
What kind of evidence would you accept? If it being the primary argument in essentially all the at-the-time documents (like briefs to the Supreme Court) and the NYT saying that it was "critical" for precisely that isn't good enough, what kind of evidence is? And what possible evidence could you bring that is up to this incredible standard in order to support a different conclusion?
Note that you haven’t addressed the cases I’ve cited (as have others I think) where we know people who had every reason to not be gay and yet they still are despite the risk/cost it was.
I don't see how this is relevant to anything. People do all sorts of stuff even when I think they have every reason to do otherwise. They have different worldviews; simple as. I spoke here before about a person I met who was utterly convinced that it was his duty to sell marijuana, even though he had every reason not to, knowing that it was likely that he would go back to jail and cause hardship for his young daughter. What am I supposed to conclude from this? That he was born with the genes of a drug dealer?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
“consent” is both complicated and insufficient as a principle.
Congratulations! You appear to not be a subscriber to a consent-only sexual ethic. Unfortunately, this probably means that you're a bigot. Right-thinking people know that consent-only is the proper sexual ethic, because that is how we justify our other political positions. As soon as you start letting concerns other than consent into the picture, it's harder to smugly say that any concerns other than consent are just some backwater religious shit.
You are now no longer even relevant to the conversation when they ask the question, "Why can't children consent?" because as soon as you try to pipe up with, "Uh, actually, I have other concerns for my sexual ethic than just consent," you will immediately be deplatformed as an obvious bigot, and the public conversation will just be between people who can at least try to maintain some message purity on the basics of the movement.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Ah yes, with Fully-Automated, Luxury Gay Space Communism (plus even more plus good contraceptive education/use), finally we will overcome the silly hangups of backwards, religious, sex-negative prudes that may have only been useful in evil patriarchal capitalistic systems. Then all the kids will have loads of double plus good sex!
I mean, yeah, this is what they say/want, and it doesn't change anything about my comment on how this worldview violently clashes at a fundamental level with those who think, "It is trivial that children cannot consent."
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
That's hard to answer unless the standard of "knowledge" is sufficiently defined for the context.
Agreed. That's why I was so hopeful with Westen's approach to probing his "knowledge prong" of consent. However, I really don't think he got very far with it. I've said here before that if there is going to actually be solid theoretical development on this topic to actually get something useful, it's going to have to be here.
We know quite a lot about child psychology in general, which is sufficient for setting general laws and ethical norms for child behaviour.
I mean, do we? This is kind of a mess. At very early ages, we have some pretty standardized milestones. Beyond that, you very rapidly descend into a nature/nurture mire and all sorts of theories about what children could or could not be educated into being capable of. (I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the details here still need to be connected somehow to the theory of consent to sexual relations in order for this project to be completed, and that is no small task.)
I never suggested that sexual partners should have the same understanding of sex, only more than that possessed by a child.
More in what way? Vague additional "sophistication"? This, frankly, isn't going to cut it.
As for our historical fate, I'm reminded of Allan Bloom in the Closing of the American Mind, when he takes inspiration from Irish monks in the Dark Ages. They were unable to contribute much to the stock of human knowledge, nor to solve the problems of their times, but they lovingly preserved certain ideas and texts, thereby greatly influencing the history of Western Europe and ultimately the world. If those Irish monks did what they saw as their duty, then it seems like others in less hopeless circumstances can do likewise.
This is very nice. I am sort of putting on a bit (hopefully obviously) about us having to put together a theory to be the last line of defense. I'm pretty much at peace with the idea that a couple of schmoes on a whacko corner of the internet aren't going to have a significant influence on the problems of our times. Personally, I actually surprisingly do at the moment feel like I can have a significant influence on my very niche corner of the academic literature (it's about as far of a topic from this conversation as you can imagine; also, I really didn't feel like this about my own work until quite recently, so I hope you don't get the impression that I have a raging ego about my work even in my little niche; my collaborators and I just happened upon what I think is a really cool perspective in the last few years), but I really can't imagine I'll have much influence outside of that. I'm more just curating my own mind, and if I influence any other individuals in the process, I guess that's neat.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
If you want one to provide an argument that wins against your hypothetical nebulous "them", then it's a rigged game from the start.
Fair enough. The context of this perspective is that we saw them just lie about what we know about reality in order to win political victories and then subsequently freely admit that it was all bullshit, but that it doesn't matter now that they won. Reasonable minds can disagree on whether that model of a rigged game reflects underlying reality or a mere rhetorical trick.
Unfortunately, I don't see much in the rest of your comment that would really go against anything that I've said, in particular. In fact, your closing
If you are more interested in preventing harm, improving society in the direction that will actually make teens better equipped to handle relations with adults (sexual and otherwise) seems to be the way.
seems to dive right into the mire. That is exactly the hypothetical route that I am proposing they will use to achieve their goals, and you are saying that we should plow forward, full steam ahead. More comprehensive sex education, more earlier! Where to draw the line? Lines? Where we're going, we don't need "lines". I don't usually talk a lot about the topic, but it shows up here often, plenty of examples of these folks just brazenly having more sexual "education", with more sexually-explicit teaching materials, at ever younger ages, with it 'never being too soon' to start teaching children how to be better equipped to handle relations with adults (sexual and otherwise). I also don't actually claim a super strong predictive position of to what extent these types of efforts could empirically be successful. But I do strongly claim that the people who think this have a violent, fundamental clash of foundational theoretical principles with the people who think, "It is trivial that children cannot consent." I think a lot of people were forced to parrot the latter in order to not be an X-ophobe and to support the Good and Righteous Fight, and they do not realize that their "enlightened societal learning" is already being implicitly viewed as false, just like they didn't realize that their "enlightened societal learning" on biological determinism of sexual orientation was basically a lie from the start, pushed for political gains, but already disbelieved by those who have other foundational theoretical principles.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The current contours, given existing statutory law for material support, were outlined in last year's case Twitter v. Taamneh. Worth a read. Of course, if you listened to oral arguments there, they did try to grapple with whether they could say something about 230 or about Constitutional limits, but the opinion they converged on dodged all of that and focused purely on statutory interpretation, making their job a lot easier and kicking the can down the road a bit. The upshot, at least for folks who want to impose some sort of legal liability on these companies is that, since this was purely about statutory interpretation, it's entirely possible that they could just pass a different statute that can provide a different standard. It will likely only be when more statutes are passed that pull that line closer and closer to Constitutional/230 limits that we'll really see where the boundaries are.
As an aside, in that case last year, these companies were all swearing up and down that their algorithms are totally passive, agnostic to the nature of the content, and that they are indifferent to the customers who use them. Compare to this week's arguments, where many of those same companies were all swearing up and down that they expend significant time, money, and effort to carefully curate a newspaper-like editorial product that reflects the company's desired expression, and that being able to prohibit Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow from using GMail just because they don't like their politics is just a regular part of their editorial discretion. This massive hypocrisy was pointed out multiple times, and we'll see if it matters in the final decision. There have been times before that the Court has been pissed off by repeat litigants who appear to make a mockery of the Court's standards and processes by making contradictory claims about the same underlying facts in different cases at different times to achieve the results they want.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
we have to have them in the law if we are going to have them.
Big Laconian "IF". Hilariously, also a Big Lacanian "IF".
But you've kind of proven my point. You don't really have any way to justify this sort of boundary. So, when they come and ask, "Why can't children consent?" I guess, you're gonna be like, "Well they can, but I have a giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness, if you'd like to look into it!" And I mean, uh, they're not going to give much of a shit about your giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness; they're going to hear that you said that children can, in fact, consent, and they're going to view your giant gray ball of arbitrary murkiness as just some superstitious, sex-negative, religious prude bigot weirdness that they can safely ignore, because, "Ew."
I think @ZRslashRIFLE would call it vibes-based.
I also think that it leaves you in an unfortunate spot in a couple ways. The first is that no one else has any reason to adopt your claim that "murdering people is wrong". They don't have the same upbringing, experiences, or social forces that you do, so if they happen to think that it's totally fine,
evenespecially for minor differences in religion, then there's basically no point in you having made any of the statements that you have made. Their perspective is apparently fine, simple as.The second is that you might find yourself shifting over time, even unintentionally. See the fictional Breaking Bad. Sure, maybe the first time you murder someone in cold blood (after agonizingly convincing yourself that it's for the greater good), you'll experience guilt. But the second time? A little less agony before; a little less guilt after. Infinity starts at three, and so at that point, your upbringing, experiences, and social forces will easily leave you with zero concerns about casually offing people for minor differences in
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