Jiro
1yr ago
On Facebook without E2E encryption (but with TLS), your messages are only exposed to Facebook and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility.
You obviously haven't heard of the third party doctrine.
If Facebook has your messages, and you haven't encrypted them E2E, the government can look at them any time they want without a warrant. Your statement that they can only be seen by Facebook and by hackers is false; the current legal environment makes them open to the government, no warrant needed.
You're also ignoring that for the government to look in your basement takes some effort. Looking at millions of people's data is trivial.
Jiro
1yr ago
You can do things that help them live a life where they have sex that disgusts you, or you can discourage such a life.. Social pressure is a thing and I don't believe for a moment that if nobody hired gays, there would be exactly the same amount of gay sex around.
And you certainly wouldn't have an operation if you didn't hire someone to operate on you.
Jiro
1yr ago
Unless you're talking about Catholics, anti-death-penalty sentiment seems to usually come from the left and anti-gay from the right, so I doubt that.
All I ask is that if death penalty proponents are serious, they stop half-assing the process and let people see it.
Once again: this isn't because of proponents. It's because of opponents. This is a constant issue with death penalty arguments. Someone claims that the fact that we don't do X means that we are ashamed of the death penalty. No, "we" don't do X because if we did, the activists who don't like the death penalty regardless of what we do would raise a stink about it. I'd be fine with public executions. But there would be campaigns and boycotts and blacklisting by people who don't really think non-public executions are any better than public ones, but who will do anything they can to make the death penalty harder.
Why aren't executions public? Activists. Why don't we just hang or shoot them? Activists. Why do we make it look medical? Activists. Why do we care so much about making it painless? Activists. Don't blame proponents for any of it.
Jiro
1yr ago
When doctors help the state to punish and eliminate its enemies, atrocities often follow.
The word "often" makes this statement true but vacuous. Otherwise, if you're trying to suggest that getting doctors involved makes things worse, I'd like to see some evidence other than your say-so.
Also, I'd take issue with describing criminals as the state's enemies, at least the kind of criminals who get the death penalty in America. They're everyone's enemies.
Jiro
1yr ago
How could the same argument not be made about everything that people feel disgust about? "If you're willing to hire gay people but you're not willing to face the full extent of what gay actually means...."
Jiro
1yr ago
but that would run afoul of the unwritten rule that execution must be as clean and sanitized as possible so as not to offend the delicate sensibilities of the executioners
That's not to not offend the sensibilities of the executioners, that's to not offend the sensibilities of death penalty opponents who are trying to nickel and dime the death penalty away.
Jiro
1yr ago
I'll go as far as to say that things are immoral because they feel distasteful and for no other reason
Is gay sex immoral? Plenty of people find it distasteful.
Jiro
1yr ago
Illegal immigrants can't vote. Hell, legal residents can't vote.
They can increase the votes of people living in the neighborhood.
Would you demand that someone not rent to gay people, or otherwise profit off of gays, if they can't bear to watch gay sex? If they can't bear to watch an operation, do we forbid them from being operated on?
Squeamishness is not a source of morality.
Jiro
1yr ago
I don't think the parentheses go there. "is (a citizen) or (resident having legally remained in the country continuously)".
Jiro
1yr ago
Another really big difference is that the choice of media was small. You had a single digit number of television networks, if you wanted to be a popular singer, you needed to go to a record company, any fiction with wider distribution than a mimeographed fanzine had to go through a major publisher, etc. Few cultural things had chances to become hits, but anything which did become a hit became so on a massive scale. You're never seeing another Beatles because the system no longer works that way.
Jiro
1yr ago
The demand doesn't really have to be elastic. It has to be elastic to the point that after the public buys all the lower priced versions from the big company, they'll still buy the regular priced versions from its competitors. That is, it has to be elastic at the margin where the remaining products are regular priced. If it was elastic like that, the regular market without predatory pricing would also have been elastic, which is unlikely since it would have expanded until it no longer was.
As for your point about storage, most people don't behave like homo economicus and won't stock up like that. And to the extent that they do, it not only makes it harder for the big company to sell at high prices, it also makes it harder for lower priced competitors to enter the market again, so it works in both directions, not just against the big company.
This is like playing a game of chicken.
Yes, it is. But there are two factors. The first is that it's a game of chicken. The second is that if the company does drive someone out of business, there are entry costs for someone else to enter the business again. Yes, sometimes entry into a market is cheap, but sometimes is not always.
Also, as sliders points out above, some products have high initial costs but low marginal costs and the company can use predatory pricing indefinitely since they already had all the loss up front.
Low price products aren't a problem if they stay that way. They are a problem if the company raises the price once they've driven competitors out of market and relies on entry costs to keep others from entering the market again. The company can also use lowering the price as a threat: if anyone tried to enter the market they'll lower the price and make them go broke. As long as it's a valid threat, they don't have to do it very often and many companies will refuse to enter the market because of the threat without costing the big company anything.
If you precommit to doing something that harms both you and your target, you may get your target to act as you wish and not have to follow through on your precommitment very often.
Answer me this: what should a large company with an advantage in slightly cheaper production do? Because to me it seems like anti-market people will be unhappy no matter what. If they leave the price the same, then they get called greedy for not lowering their prices when they can afford to and charging way more than the product cost to make. If they do lower their prices they get accused of predatory pricing.
They can lower their prices but to an amount that's still greater than the cost of production. Then it isn't predatory pricing.
Jiro
1yr ago
You can do it in small quantities that aren't enough to cause a problem for the big company, so Amazon sellers don't disprove anything. You can't do it in large enough quantities that it makes a significant dent in the big company's ability to weaponize selling below cost.
The more undersold it it the better an investment it is to get it now. The less undersold it is, the less you are being pushed out as competition.
How are you going to invest in it? You can't buy large quantities of the product under production cost because of the factors described above. And you can't invest in competitors because if the big company can keep this up long enough to drive competitors out of the market, investing in competitors won't gain you anything.
The thing is, if you took literature and threw out all the perverts, assholes, authoritarians, supporters of controversial wars, racists, sexists, and just plain kooks, I am not sure how much writing that is worth reading would be left.
You've managed to use mistake theory in the middle of conflict theory.
Nobody wants to get rid of all such people. They want to get rid of the ones who are not ideologically on their side.
Jiro
1yr ago
Buying someone else's products retail in a store will let you get a couple of them, but not enough to be profitable to resell. In order to get enough of them that you can resell them, you have to make a purchase from a wholesaler aor from the company itself and those purchases aren't going to be "walk into a store", they will come with contracts and the contracts can forbid reselling below a certain price.
Furthermore, even if you could buy the company's products below cost and resell them somewhat less below cost, you'd still be competing with the company, who's directly selling their products below cost, so it wouldn't work.
Jiro
1yr ago
If conservative publishers get cancelled, "picking up the $20 bill" is going to amount to "create your own social media and your own bookstore chain". In some cases it may mean "create your own payment processor".
Conservative book publishing outside of some of Baen doesn't have access to a general audience, and anything that gets big enough that it can try to sell to a general audience is going to get driven out of business. There will always be individuals selling on Amazon Kindle, but the audience will be tiny, just like there are always forums like themotte, but the audience is tiny.
Jiro
1yr ago
The Arabs hate the US because the slogan "they hate our freedom", while laughed at by a lot of the left, is pretty much true. The Arabs don't like to have multi-ethnic, religiously tolerant states where the inhabitants get the freedoms that the West approves of. Even freedom of the press and separation of church and state would be alien to Arab countries, never mind something like gay rights.
Jiro
1yr ago
We need a chart showing percentage of that age group rather than absolute numbers.
Jiro
1yr ago
I think Scott has written before something like "if you want to understand conservatives, pretend that there's going to be a zombie apocalypse tomorrow. If you want to understand leftists, pretend everything is going to be stable for the rest of time".
The reaction to Covid doesn't fit this pattern.
That is a mistake theory recommendation, and the Times isn't running on mistake theory.
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