domain:abc.net.au
KMC
6m ago
The most famous and most 'successful' shrouding of costs related to government is tax withholding. If people had to actually pay their tax bill all at once, they would be pissed, but by withholding throughout the year, and then returning the amount that was too much, people feel like they're getting paid to do their taxes, instead of being robbed slightly less.
ControlsFreak
7m ago
Nobody is arguing
The argument is, instead, that adding a regulation increases the chance that we will slide down that slippery slope.
This is a vastly better argument, but one that wouldn't allow us to then simply reject any continued discussion, just because we've 'declared' slippery slope and observed that we're epsilon on it. For example, one might ask about the underlying reason for why it increases the chance that we will slide down it? The answer could take many forms, which may be more or less convincing for whether it does, indeed, increase the chance. See here for some examples, and feel free to click through for any specific sub-topics.
Section 5.4.1, "sensitive security parameters in persistent storage shall be stored securely by the device," seems a bit more likely to be a costly provision, and IMO one that misunderstands how hardware security works (there is no such thing as robust security against an attacker with physical access).
IMO, it shows that you misunderstand how these things work. They're not saying "secure against a nation state decapping your chip". They actually refer to ways that persistent storage can be generally regarded as secure, even if you can imagine an extreme case. To be honest, this is a clear sign that you've drunk the tech press kool aid and are pretty out in whacko land from where most serious tech experts are on this issue. Like, they literally tell you what standards are acceptable; it doesn't make any sense to concoct an argument for why it's AKSHUALLY impossible to satisfy the requirement.
And then there's perplexing stuff like 5.6.4 "where a debug interface is physically accessible, it shall be disabled in software.". Does this mean if you sell a color-changing light bulb, and the bulb has a usbc port, you're not allowed to expose logs across the network and instead have to expose them only over the usbc port?
H-what? What are you even talking about? This doesn't even make any sense. The standard problem here is that lots of devices have debug interfaces that are supposed to only be used by the manufacturer (you would know this if you read the definitions section), yet many products are getting shipped in a state where anyone can just plug in and do whatever they want to the device. This is just saying to not be a retard and shut it off if it's not meant to be used by the user.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11m ago
But I think it's also good to minimize governing by the elastic clause as much as possible.
I'd agree with that. But suppose we want to allow people to respond to warnings, even to push back on them and explain why they think they're in the right, but we don't want people to outright defy warnings.
"respond", "pushback", and "defy" are all subjective terms. If we nail down a definition for them, we can just recapitulate this conversation again, about whether or not people were "defiant", or merely "pushing back".
If a mod says "you are breaking the rules, stop it," and the reply is "You aren't the boss of me, I'm gonna keep doing it", I don't think most people are surprised if the response is "okay, we'll cut to the chase and just give you a ban then." That doesn't seem to require a lot of elasticity. We give warnings because we want people to modify their behavior without having to ban them. We give limited-duration bans because we want people to modify their behavior without perma-banning them. If someone straight-up tells us that they aren't modifying their behavior based on the current response, escalation seems like a reasonable response.
cae_jones
13m ago
So typical that reading this comment made me go "wait, it's not like that in Europe?" For a country whose selling point has supposedly always been freedom, I had so little that, when that technically changed after high school, it was like one of those wild animals bred in captivity with no concept of how to live in the wild. The most freedom I got was on that one high school band trip to Universal Studios Orlando, in which I was the goody two-shoes stopping my 16-17 year-old companions from trying to order alcohol from a restaurant that seemed more than willing to believe that the tall guy in the group was actually 21.
... Wait, what freedoms do I have that Europeans lack? I guess I could get a weapon if I wanted?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
26m ago
I mean, I think the regime you describe for the ADA satisfies all of the 1-3 points you propose for basic things you agree on, though perhaps not in a manner you like.
There is an unlimited number of things people might want to "fix" about our society, but a limited amount of resources to spend fixing such things.
Of course. The ADA, and many similar pieces of legislation, contain explicit limits on what is to be covered and who must (or may not) provide accommodation under the Act.
There should be a way to determine how many resources we want to spend fixing a particular problem.
We do this with the ADA, and many similar laws, via a combination of the private market and our adversarial justice system. Businesses talk to consultants and experts to understand what they need to do to be in compliance. Sometimes people think they're wrong about whether they are and get sued. Then a jury of their peers is going to be responsible for figuring out whether they were in compliance and how much they harmed the plaintiff if they weren't.
This process may not come up with some obvious fixed-in-advance dollar amount but it seems a very common way of determining how much "we" should spend fixing a particular problem.
Paying to fix the problems should be done in a fair and above board way. (i.e. reverse lotteries where you randomly get fucked over are bad).
Of course. The Act describes who is covered and what accommodations those covered need to make. If anyone is alleged to be in violation theirs a public judicial process to determine if they are. Characterizing this as a "reverse lottery" is absurd. Lots of businesses (probably most) manage to go without being sued under the ADA or similar laws. Who wins and loses is not random either, unless you think the outcomes of jury trials are random. In which case there's this whole thing called "the criminal law" that should be much more concerning.
cae_jones
26m ago
American, fwiw, but elementary was without exaggeration the best period of my life and not a day goes by that I don't grieve its being in the ever-more-distant past. Most of the negative things I could say about the experience come from the benefit of hindsight, ex, I got away with far more than I should have, but conversely wasn't well included or socialized and was one weird hat away from being the class Luna Lovegood.
But, regarding peers, teachers, and family, and what roles they played? I am struggling to come up with a meaningful description. It wasn't until I was 11 that I actually picked up any grievances toward teachers (mostly just one cranky old math teacher who was probably just getting too old to put up with my bullcrap). The most stressful year was probably grade 4 (age 9), mostly because homework went from "I guess that counts as homework" to "when did finishing a chapter and several dozen math problems become a Herculean labor of focus?". Also I thinkt's the year my backpack ripped from all the books and papers I had to carry around.
7th-8th grades and high school ... weren't as miserable as college, but very little short of watching loved ones die has been as miserable as college, so not a high bar. Mostly, the majority of what made elementary great was replaced with having to listen to tryhard teenagers call everything gay / skanky, trying to actively resist the cultureshift resulting in getting sent off to summer camp, so I just gave up and avoided people for the rest of hs. I got into the state's math and science school for the last two years, and that was a huge improvement, though by then my sleep cycle was all out of whack and I had been able to half-ass everything to the point that I had like no study skills, so I kinda oscillated between successfully half-assing and getting destroyed until I somehow graduated on time (basically one of two non-terrible days that year), only for things to immediately get far worse thereafter.
SO basically, the polar opposite of what seems to be the norm, from the general vibes I've gotten from online discussions. Each phase was worse than its predecessor by quite a lot. It was usually because of a change in peer behavior most of all, but also me never having to learn how to try until I got to college, and discovered that absolutely nobody had the vocabulary to talk about soul-crushing akrasia or the neurological underpinnings and everyone just going on about choice and distraction and other irrelevant concepts. But mostly the alienation only started around age 12-13, kinda backed off a bit in high school, then came back with avengance when college began. Teachers were mostly fine. Parents were mostly fine. Peers were fine until they got to the age where they had to start signalling how mature they were by immaturely sexualizing absolutely everything, usually insultingly, like that would prove how totally not the thing they were saying they were.
I'm going to go imagine going back in time and yelling at 11-year-old me with all the hindsight-powered "how to be better" type wisdom I can unfairly foist onto an obnoxious 11-year-old again. 😔
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
31m ago
I think it's good old issue #594 back from the dead.
Skibboleth
40m ago
Catch-all pejorative for political opponents is actually the standard usage.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
I played, it's very much in "wait" territory imo. It has potential. I like the way you assign families to jobs, and how you can turn people's homes into artisan workshops. I also like the addition of combat to the city builder format. But I also think it's very much half baked even by early access standards. The map takes way too long to traverse, the AI has no chill, some techs seem to not work at all, and so on.
I think that if the dev can keep at it, Manor Lords is going to be great someday. But it's pretty meh at the moment.
NunoSempere
1hr ago
Here is a link to coverage of this topic on Linux Weekly News: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/970824/8002d283c35edf86/
Incidentally one of the few publications I pay for subscribing, because coverage is generally thoughtful and informative
NunoSempere
1hr ago
Our biographies sound eerily similar, I also took the IB, gave up on college, built a career partly out of programming. I tried harder in highschool though, and IT isn't quite what I do.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
1hr ago
I reject the concept that as soon as epsilon regulation of an industry is put into place, it necessarily and logically follows that there is a slippery slope that results in innovation dying. I think you need at least some argument further. It's easy to just 'declare' bankruptcy a slippery slope, but we know that many end up not.
Nobody is arguing that "the moment any regulation is in place, it is inevitable that we will slide all the way down the slippery slope of increasing regulation and all innovation in that industry will die". The argument is, instead, that adding a regulation increases the chance that we will slide down that slippery slope. That chance may be worth it, if the step is small and the benefit of the regulation is large, but in the case of the entirety of ETSI EN 303 645 (not just section 5.1 in isolation), I don't think that's the case, and I certainly don't think it's a slam-dunk that it's worth the cost.
Section 5.1, "You are not allowed to use a default password on an network interface as the sole means of authorization for the administrative functions of an IoT device", if well-implemented, is probably such a high-benefit low-risk regulation.
Section 5.4.1, "sensitive security parameters in persistent storage shall be stored securely by the device," seems a bit more likely to be a costly provision, and IMO one that misunderstands how hardware security works (there is no such thing as robust security against an attacker with physical access).
They double down on the idea that manufacturers can make something robust to physical access in section 5.4.2, "where a hard-coded unique per device identity is used in a device for security purposes, it shall be implemented in such a way that it resists tampering by means such as physical, electrical or software."
And then there's perplexing stuff like 5.6.4 "where a debug interface is physically accessible, it shall be disabled in software.". Does this mean if you sell a color-changing light bulb, and the bulb has a usbc port, you're not allowed to expose logs across the network and instead have to expose them only over the usbc port? I would guess not, but I'd also guess that if I was in the UK the legal team at my company would be very unhappy if I just went with my guess without consulting them.
And that's really the crux of the issue, introducing regulation like this means that companies now have to make a choice between exposing themselves to legal risks, making dumb development decisions based on the most conservative possible interpretation of the law, or involve the legal department way more frequently for development decisions.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
So while people might have supported the ADA if it was 1% of the budget, they might start getting pissed at the program when it balloons up to 10% of the budget and a bunch of reverse lottery sob stories start showing up in the news. And suddenly instead of 10% or even 1% of the budget, you get 0% for your cause and no one trusts you with a 1% allotment cuz they will all remember the horror days of 10%.
Except that's not what happens. Your program lasts forever because it sounds good to the normies and has strong built-in constituencies. So there's no incentive NOT to do this; if you do it you win.
Felagund
1hr ago
What exactly do you mean by neoliberal?
I've never seen it used in the way you're using it.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
It's weird to have more than one person give you "advice" suggesting you try to become a drug dealer, right?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Is that worth saving the nightmare of having billions of adversarial objects, likely quickly and easily controlled by the Chinese or Russians, literally everywhere on all our networks? Maybe not. But maybe so?
I'm in the curious position of not particularly caring about the Russians running botnets on your vacuum cleaner, but hating IoT with a passion, and being prepared to murder anyone that tries to sell me a toaster that connects to the Internet. What do?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
Dude it's common sense. It doesn't need to be explicitly spelled out in the rules, any more than the rules explicitly enumerate every single word you aren't allowed to use to describe fellow posters.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
Still working my way through Life Worth Living. I keep finding myself pausing to note down various choice quotes. And I definitely appreciate the authors' clear disdain for Bentham.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
2hr ago
Excellent post!
In general I think we should be suspicious of any public program that tries to hide its costs, or launder those costs onto private actors.
Another example of this is AML/KYC regulations, which basically require banks to serve as a branch of law enforcement at their own expense. I don't think From the excellent Bits About Money post on the topic:
Money laundering is, effectively, a process crime. We criminalized it not because of the direct harms, but because it tends to make other interdiction of criminal activity more difficult.
Money laundering covers anything which obscures the link between another crime and the proceeds of that crime. This is intentionally extremely vague and expansive. The victim is, take your pick, either the state or the financial institutions the state has deputized to detect it. [...]
Much like KYC, AML policies are recursive stochastic management of crime. The state deputizes financial institutions to, in effect, change the physics of money. In particular, it wants them to situationally repudiate the fungibility of money. [...] They are required to have policies and procedures which will tend to, statistically, interdict some money laundering and (similar to how we discussed for KYC) trigger additional crimes when accessing the financial system. Particularly in U.S. practice, one sub-goal of this is maximizing the amount of assets which will be tainted by money laundering and then subject to forfeiture proceedings. [...]
And so every financial institution of any size has a Compliance department. One of their functions is having a technological system which will sift through the constant stream of transactions they produce and periodically fire “alerts.” Those alerts go to an analyst for review.
This implies floors upon floors of people who read tweet-length descriptions of financial transactions and, for some very small percentage, click a Big Red Button and begin documenting the heck out of everything. This might sound like a dystopian parody, and it is important to say specifically that this is not merely standard practice but is functionally mandatory. [...]
I think the thing that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are rightest about, which is broadly underappreciated, is that the financial system has been deputized to act as law enforcement. [...] Is this tradeoff worth it? I wish that society and policymakers more closely scrutinized the actual results obtained by AML policies. Plausibly we get sufficient value out of AML to have people attend mandatory diversity training at 1 PM, Banking the Underbanked seminar at 2 PM, and then AML training at 3 PM, while experiencing very little cognitive dissonance. But if that case can be made, then let it be made. I find the opposing case, that AML consumes vast resources and inconveniences legitimate users far out of proportion to positive impact on the legitimate interest of society in interdicting crime, to be very persuasive.
Sorry for the giant quote-post, I just think that article is very very good and also quite relevant to the topic at hand.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
My personal way of squaring that circle is that I'm open to regulation on mass-produced end-user consumer goods, and a more freedom on anything that requires some deliberate action.
I think this is very reasonable, and these regulations pretty much go after just that. Consumer IoT devices, that are being mass-produced and just thrown onto the internet by the billions. What's worse is that they're making the same handful of mistakes over and over and over and over and over again, even though everyone and their dog knows that they can fix these things (at least the worst problems; not every problem) using even just a small number of best practices. A small number of things that every expert technologist has been screaming, "OH MY GOD PEOPLE JUST DO THIS SHIT WHY WON'T YOU DO THIS SHIT IT'S SO EASY AND WOULD PREVENT SO MANY PROBLEMS!" Things that they don't do because they don't have to. There's no law making them. They're Chinese, but their devices are being sold in the US, so fuck the US anyway. And even if they did do them, it would cost them epsilon amount of money, and they'd never be able to market it as anything to make them more money, besides, all their competitors are just churning them out as cheaply as possible without bothering, and they're not suffering for it.
There are many edge cases, and gattsuru brought up a lot of good cases that may be difficult. Things that might legitimately contribute to a regulation-innovation tradeoff. Most of them still seem kind of minor, so while they might produce some small tradeoffs, I think it's unlikely that they're going to wholesale preclude innovation. There's still going to be plenty of innovation, though there may be some edges that are unfortunately trimmed. Is that worth saving the nightmare of having billions of adversarial objects, likely quickly and easily controlled by the Chinese or Russians, literally everywhere on all our networks? Maybe not. But maybe so?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
Your argument becomes close to saying that ranking any human attribute is in bad taste, because someone ends up at the bottom, which is bullying.
It's been awhile since I was in elementary school, back in the previous century, but even that far back, the whole "self esteem" program we were subjected to pretty much endorsed something like this — you're great just the way you are, nobody is better or worse than anyone else, everybody's equally special in their own way ("which is another way of saying nobody is," to quote Dash Parr), everybody gets a participation trophy.
It's the "equity" mindset, the moral axiom that fairness demands equal outcomes for everyone; the same thinking that, when applied to identity groups, creates our "disparate impact" regime. And to many of its defenders, whether it's true, or even if it's a "noble lie," it's the only thing holding back horrific oppression. After all, you know who else once thought some people were better than others, back in mid-century Germany?
You can own a weapon. Attitudes towards recreational drug use are far more liberal. You have less concern over police brutality and the justice system needs a warrant to surveil you. You have far greater freedom of speech. You can hire and fire notionally who you please, and it’s easier to get a job because of it too. Religious freedom laws are much more comprehensive. If you are a parent, you are allowed much more latitude in deciding what is best for your child, even if not in agreement with the government.
More options
Context Copy link