Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing. Said society also finds it incredibly important to remove or nullify those who aren't trustworthy because "a rotten apple spoils the whole bunch". Trust is hard to earn, and easy to lose, and it only takes one person exploiting the trustworthy without consequence to ruin a good thing.
So no you can't build a system that's meets all of the article's criteria because almost all of them rely on the unspoken rule of trust in civil society. Everything built for good can be abused for evil.
The phrase "the right thing" is load-bearing, to steal a Claudeism. The Muslim Brotherhood that ran the country before El-Sisi thought they were doing "the right thing." El-Sisi also thought he was doing "the right thing." Egyptians mostly thought El-Sisi was doing “the right thing” during this time period. According to multiple independent opinion polls, his approval rating was high during this period because people were grateful to have stability.
In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing." To have a functioning civil society, you actually need the opposite of what you're saying. You need a collective general trust that people will follow the rules regardless of what they think is "the right thing."
Logic compels this conclusion. People who disagree on fundamental aspects of how the world and society should work cannot cooperate in a civil society if we trust that everyone will follow their vision of "the right thing." The only way we can cooperate is if we agree to neutral rules and procedures, and have a collective general trust that we'll all follow the rules regardless of our view of wrong or right. The thing I admire most about Anglo-American culture is that people will jump off a bridge if you give them a court order that complies with all required procedural formalities. That's how you create a civil society.
Therefore you can re-read the sentence as:
> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to uphold those shared rules and principles, even when doing so is inconvenient or runs against their immediate self-interest.
This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure, and even if we accept that such a neutral procedure exists in principle, it doesn’t follow that we agree on what that procedure looks like. Deferring physical conflicts is only possible if factionalism doesn’t win out. The last decade and a half of western political history has been defined by the recognition of certain factions that this deferral can’t go on forever.
Yes, it does. And we live in a society. So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible and that we have achieved them.
The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness. People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality. In fact, normally people struggled to come up with general criticism beyond accusations that specific individuals didn't follow the procedures properly or relatively minor tweaks to the administrative details.
Neutral procedures are a solved problem, the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.
To make a clear example: I don't think that it's fair that I'm not allowed to plumb my own (commercial¹) building just because I didn't learn how via a difficult to get, underpaid, full time, 4 year apprentiship in whatever state I'm living in at the moment, with usually ~0 practical escape hatch to demonstrate competence in any significantly different way, or to just have the result inspected.
1: some places, not all, have exemptions for owner occupied single family homes
Correct.
> So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible
Doesn't follow.
> and that we have achieved them.
Doesn't follow.
> The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness.
That depends entirely upon what you mean by "fairness," which will itself be loaded with presumptions about how the world is and ought to be.
> People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality.
Define "neutrality."
> Neutral procedures are a solved problem
If this were true we wouldn't be having this discussion.
> the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.
"Draw the rest of the owl."
If you’re an immigrant from my home country of Bangladesh, you’ll be treated more fairly in any Anglo country than in any other country, including Bangladesh.
As for el sisi. I remember an egyptian friend who fled the country after he did some protesting and journalism critical of the new regime. He said he was amazed by what good they had done for the country and was happy to see the change...despite his past opinion and current exile. Not that he would go back permanently. He married a german gal and later moved to the US.
The president of the United States routinely violates court orders and has little respect for the law or the Constitution. Also, nobody is going to willingly jump off a bridge because a judge told them to. You'll find that the death penalty isn't carried out by asking people politely to kill themselves.
You’re correct that rules are themselves to an high degree arbitrary. They can only be imposed by a source of authority that’s beyond question: God(s), elders, founding fathers, kings, etc. In the case of the U.S. it’s historical inertia going back to 1215.
I would say people need to accept them as neutral and make them their own sense of right and wrong. You can have a stricter personal set of right and wrong, but it needs to be something that society recognizes as a stricter in all ways.
Not sure I agree with the claim that we only allow “neutral” rules. That’s not necessarily true. And of course who decides which rules are neutral depends on which rule we’re talking about, and where you live, and (important) doesn’t depend much on whether the rule is subjective or not - the same processes are used even when the rule is objective. Some rules are fairly objective because they’re tied to health & safety. All humans require clear air & water, for example. Most tolerate a little pollution due to business interests, but whether pollution is poisonous isn’t particularly subjective, aside from the debates over the economic damage from small non-lethal amounts.
pH is not inherently limited to that range at all. Sufficiently concentrated solutions can have pH values below 0 or above 14. A solution is called neutral when the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions are equal, which happens to correspond to about pH 7 at 25°C. Change the temperature and neutral pH changes too. So if you arbitrarily changed the scale to 10–30, that wouldn’t magically make 20 “neutral.” Neutrality comes from the definition and the underlying conditions, not from being the midpoint between two numbers.
I have always found it .. peculiar that water just so happens to (as you aptly put it) "have all the activities of hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions equal" :)
Water is H-O-H; H+ and OH- both come from water. If there are no impurities, then for every extra H+ there is an extra OH-, so it's not that they are "happen to be equal". They're born equal.
Changing the temperature does change the concentrations of these ions so pH does change by definition. But the water remains neutral, since the ratio of H⁺ to OH⁻ is still 1:1
"Treat others as you would like them to treat you."
It has a long history, both secular and religious. Pretty well everything flows from it, and if someone is doing "the wrong thing" whilst claiming to obey it then they are probably deluding themself.
The rule is suited to enforcement, since if someone does something "wrong", rather than immediately attacking them you can reasonably ask "Would you like it if I did this to you?". Limitation of power is built in.
Because even the "golden rule" leaves a lot of wiggle room - for example, should marital infidelity (or x) be a dealbreaker for electing someone? Maybe, but looking at hypocrisy (and thereby actions) might provide better insight as to what those groups actually believe is the "correct" standard?
> The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule"
Mostly agreed, but a surprisingly large percentage of the population seems truly unable to feel empathy for others (and can even show glee at others being negatively impacted by something) unless it personally affects them (a prerequisite for "Would you like it if I did this to you?" to work?). They can be gung-ho about laws that negatively affect others but upset if it affects them. For example, the countless examples of "Community members vote for politician promising illegal immigrant deportation, then upset/disagree that long-time beloved community member deported", or "Voter voted for politician promising criminal-record-immigrant deportation, then upset/disagrees that partner with past criminal record deported".
Just because something has a long history (secular or otherwise) doesn't give it any merit by itself.
If we need some standard to judge against what is morally acceptable in the case I presented (no this doesn't apply if you like to hurt yourself and others) then you are back to defining a standard which cannot inherently be neutral.
No, that’s not what the Golden Rule said. It says to treat people the way you want other people to treat you. How you treat yourself is your own business.
There’s also a certain amount of making reasonable assumptions here. Obviously the intent is to get people to treat each other fair & well, not to set a logic trap and interpret this aphorism literally to mean you should hurt people if you’re okay with being hurt, even when you know other people don’t want to be hurt. Most people don’t want to be hurt. Obviously.
Anyone who doesn't agree with your "reasonable assumptions" has bad morals can be twisted to mean any moral values based on what you mean by reasonable. For example, the church can say it is reasonable assumptions to burn witches and then twist reason itself to make it morally good as well. In that case how can we trust this system itself? If the answer is by using your own eyes and thinking for yourself, then why do we need to follow a specific fixed rule?
How can you trust the system? What are you even asking? We have laws, a lot of them, and the golden rule is not one of them. But if you don’t hurt others, and others don’t hurt you, we’re off to a good start. Use whatever definition of ‘hurt’ you’d like, it doesn’t matter if it’s reciprocal.
The take-home being, as long as peoples preferences are different, the rule has some failure states based upon that.
And the wider example that this points to is that as long as everyone's values are different.. the rule loses a lot of it's luster. The more different another person's values are, the less you can rely on projecting your own values as a method to gainfully interact with them.
In place of that biblical aphorism (born from a monoculture no less), there is a lot of room available for us to build something more robust and sophisticated and the AI alignment problem offers a fine excuse to get cracking and try to formalize something already! ;)
If you understand and accept the reciprocal intent of the golden rule, via the above mentioned reasonable assumptions, not to mention the hundreds of years of examples and explanations, then it doesn’t really have a “failure state”. And, again, this so-called rule is not law, isn’t specific, and doesn’t cover all situations or all behaviors. It seems very silly to be nit picking this aphorism to death like this. It’s very simply a good faith suggestion to be kind.
The notion of fairness and reciprocity is not a religious idea, it’s common sense.
2. Regardless, if basing rules on whether someone would want those rules to apply to them does not have merit, is there some better basis you'd recommend?
2. Yes, this is where I would push back because one can also assume there is no "better" basis in the strict sense that you can intellectualize morality/virtue only to a certain extent. And it is possible to argue that morality/virtue is often as much a psychological process as a purely intellectual one. So the idea isn't that the golden rule doesn't make sense or that it is objectively weak, but it doesn't map to the idea of actual morality in action. For example, a person may logically believe in the golden rule but that doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that the agent is not fully logical and will not always strictly adhere to a rule just because it is aware of it and aware of it as being Good. In that sense, what use is the golden rule if we are free to ignore it at all (which we often do)? That doesn't mean I'm saying the golden rule is objectively wrong again, but in ranking morality and deciding on very abstract ideas of what Good and Bad are, we ignore the actual psychological forces that are extremely relevant when it comes to the execution of morality in action. So to answer the question, the better basis would be to understand the psychological forces behind why we feel the golden rule is objectively a good and then examine them to understand if we are following the golden rule because we actually think it is good or because we live in a society where it is good and we will be shamed if we don't believe it. One might say it doesn't matter as long as people actually follow the golden rule but another interpretation is that the golden rule by itself doesn't tell us anything (or very little) about the moral character of the person applying it. So just expecting people to follow that rule after knowing it is placing too much trust in the human animal who is often wild and not thinking logically. It is then upon the animal to tame itself and it may do so out of servitude or out of independence and both might lead to equivalent surface values and match the basis perfectly as being morally good while in reality, both have very different meanings for their morals.
2 is, of course, mainly inspired by Nietzsche. I'm working on a short story where he and Plato debate whether a painting is objectively good or bad called A Canvas Called Virtue.
There's an obvious asymmetry in your rephrasing. The parents quote says "do unto others as they do unto you", not as you do to yourself. If you treat yourself terrible and hurt yourself, is it okay for others to hurt you too?
"treat others as they treat you"
Golden rule is'
"treat others as you WANT them to treat you".
It's the complete opposite of eye for an eye. If someone is being badly treated by others, most would want to be well treated instead, so the Golden Rule would say that you treat others well, even if others are treating you badly.
Not only that, but you're also going to have people disguising their personal, selfish ambitions for power or money (or both, those two ambitions are usually found together) by pretending to other people that they want "the right thing". Most politicians operate this way. (I can't say "all" because there are some examples in history of politicians who truly wanted "the right thing" and actually gave up personal power when it was necessary, for the sake of having "the right thing" happen. Cincinnatus is the often-cited example, for very good reasons.)
Which is another reason why legal structures such as the American Constitution, which constrains (or would constrain if actually followed, which is a whole other rant) the power of government to certain specific channels, are important to have. They limit what the power-seekers can actually do with that power once they obtain it, and provide ways for turfing said power-seekers out of office if enough people agree to remove them. (Then you probably end up electing another power-seeker, because those end up being the vast majority of the candidate pool... but sometimes you get really, really lucky and get someone like George Washington).
Free markets are designed around a selfish ambition for making money. You can only make money by pleasing your customers. And hence free markets are the greatest mechanism for prosperity.
There's nothing wrong with making money that way.
Nothing is ideal. The more free market a country is, the more prosperous it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Brockovich#Pacific_Gas_&_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_(Bilott_book)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Right, which is why touting oversimplified economic models is likely to be contentious ;) Speaking of which:
> The more free market a country is, the more prosperous it is.
When do you think the US was at its most prosperous? Most would say somewhere in the mid 20th century, which was hardly the least regulated time in its history…
GDP growth in the 1800s is a rather dodgy time of statistics, as economic statistics were not collected then.
From 1800 to the Civil War, the US economy began to be industrialized. The Northern states industrialized, while the Southern economy stagnated.
The 1870s and 1880s are considered a very prosperous time. It was a time when industry really got in gear and was applied broadly.
I don't have hard facts, but prosperity in my life seems to have been driven by the computer industry, a pretty much completely unregulated sector of the economy.
Are you sure?
No, they are not. No matter how big your company is, if customers don't like your product, you are going bust. Small companies regularly replace large ones. See the book "The Innovator's Dilemma".
Like, say, the tragedy of the commons?
For example, we are running out of fish in the ocean from overfishing. But there's no shortage of cows and chickens, despite massive consumption of them. The former is the commons, the latter is private property.
Much like how there isn't any reason you have to pay for food in principle. It could become so cheap and easy to produce, say, bread or cheese that it is available everywhere at no nominal cost.
So yes, you should. You already do, realistically.
If that were to change, which it may, you would feel differently.
It's a fact that, right now, the dude can use whatever amount of air he feels is appropriate for his circumstances. Even if I wanted to interfere I doubt I'm even on the same continent as he is, and it isn't my business anyway.
There'd be specialist companies that do bulk oxygen supplies too, a quick search found things like https://www.dswgascylinder.com/product/liquid-oxygen-trailer.... Not a market I'm familiar with.
I suppose I'll just add in postscript; your not going to get much out of the conversation if you don't take it seriously. There are people who make great money selling oxygen. It isn't automatically priced at $0. In some hypothetical world where quality oxygen wasn't just floating around in the atmosphere, people would pay for it in the same way they pay for other essentials like food or water. Paying for water is about as crazy as paying for oxygen, they both basically just turn up out of the atmosphere. And there is precedent for a commons essential good becoming more expensive, food used to be something people just picked up off the ground for free. Or hunted down on unclaimed land.
Slightly more formally, an assertion of exclusive property rights is a sufficient condition for something to be closed access, but it isn't necessary.
Though, admittedly, that does depend on what one's definition of a free market is. Is it unfettered commerce, consumer protections and suchlike be damned? Is it a system of commerce that ensures equitable access? I'm personally of the mind that, as long as I trade with certificates that bear Caesar's face (or trade with proxies for such certificates, like a MasterCard), he gets to make the rules in exchange for my being able to lean on his legal system to protect my interests, so I find that the equitable access angle is nice.
(Likewise, trading with Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever the in-vogue cryptocurrency is today means that the code makes the rules, and I get to pay for the privilege of having my transactions indelibly entered into the distributed ledger and for the code governing those transactions to be buggy and exploitable. I'm still scratching my head at it.)
At the risk of building a strawman here, I'll caution that it's logically inconsistent to expect the state to enforce exclusive rights while also urging that strict regulation of a shared commons is an illegitimate market intervention.
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0: That is, unless the title holder grants license, but that's a whole other conversation.
It is a minor point I suppose, but this is the other way round. Because Caesar makes the rules you trade certificates that bear his face. It takes vigour and energy on the part of law enforcement to stop people from moving to private currencies.
Sigh. No need to make up one's own definition. Googling "free market":
"A free market is an economic system where prices, wages, and the flow of goods are determined by supply and demand. There is no government control or central planning telling people what to buy, sell, or make. Instead, private choices and voluntary trades drive the economy."
Henry George in his Progress and Poverty makes similar gestures toward defining a free market this way.
Part of the reason why it's important to consider other definitions (and other economic models) is that there is an important result in economics from the 1970's that, more or less, establishes the lack of a guarantee that the demand curve in an aggregate demand model (a macroeconomic model) will slope downward. This makes the aggregate demand model less than useful for a priori arguments about supply and demand in the macro context; they must instead be approached a posteriori.
It's also the big reason why I'm uninterested in a colloquial definition that is heavily filtered through von Mises and Friedman.
The government tries to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand all the time. Unsuccessfully. A while ago, a good friend of mine asked me what would happen to jobs if the minimum wage was raised. I said the number of jobs would go down. He said "aha! here's a study that proved that the jobs increased!" I said I don't need to read it, because the researchers goofed.
Some years later, the study was retracted because it was flawed.
It was like a story on HackerNews some years back that made a claim that electric cars were 90% efficient. I knew that was hokum right off the bat. But I still had people with PhD's in engineering saying it was true.
The car loses 10% just in losses in the battery, let alone anything else.
So I did some research on the author. Seems it was a person without a degree in physics or engineering who worked at a ski resort.
I'm curious. When does it not apply?
The supply and demand model only applies to analysis of microeconomic systems with perfect competition, namely of systems that lack monopoly and monopsony; that have perfect information; that lack an ability of a single economic actor to affect the price in the market; that lack externalities[0]; that lack transaction costs; that lack unknowable probability distributions of outcomes; that lack economic actors that change their behaviors based on what they expect other actors to do; and that lack non-market rules or structures that restrict prices, quantities, or entry. These assumptions are all-or-nothing, and there are a lot of them. It's also an equilibrium model, and we aren't guaranteed to have equilibrium.
For macroeconomic analysis (i.e., analysis of multiple sectors of an economy or multiple economies), it's problematic because of a theorem from the 1970's due to Sonnenschein, Mantel, and Debreu. I've stated it elsewhere, but it also has the implication that the behaviors of the actors in a microeconomic system do not carry over to the macroeconomic context. This tends to violate many of the assumptions above. (Though, if it isn't obvious how or why, please ask.) Furthermore, in the macro context, I don't think we'll ever have equilibrium; at least, I'm having a hard time thinking of an example when it exists.
Let's bring in a physics analogy. While we can look at mechanics through the lens of elementary algebra, those tools really only give us the ability to look at static force-balance problems for springs and pulleys in equilibrium. To model such a system more closely to how it behaves in the universe, with damping, inertia, and feedback (and whatever other time-dependent behaviors I may be forgetting), we are best served moving to differential equations.
Economics is no different; the supply and demand model is a lot like Hooke's law in its simplicity and its applicability. (In fact, in my modeling, I very heavily used numerical solutions of PDEs.)
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0: When the retail price of kerosene tanked by 70% between 1860 and 1880, this resulted in millions more kerosene lamps and lamps broadly being lit for longer periods of time. This had externalities in the form of more soot and particulate matter (and probably also respiratory illness, but I couldn't seem to find anything with observations from the time period).
I'm going to stop right there. Perfect competition is unnecessary. Part of perfect competition is perfect information.
No transactions have perfect information. There is always "risk" involved. And risk contributes to determining the price of something. Ever wonder why used cars lose a third of their value when you drive a new one off the lot? It's because of the risk that a person might be selling that almost-new car with a hidden expensive fault in it.
Also, risky investments come with higher returns. Safer investments come with lower returns. The lack of perfect information gets a dollar value for the amount of imperfection.
Risk is absolutely part of the free market, and absolutely a part of the Law of Supply and Demand.
Um, OK.
> Perfect competition is unnecessary.
It is definitionally a precondition to applying the supply and demand model for analysis.
> Part of perfect competition is perfect information.
This is mostly correct. It's actually a biconditional: perfect competition iff perfect information.
> No transactions have perfect information.
This is correct.
> There is always "risk" involved. And risk contributes to determining the price of something.
Risk (due to Frank Knight, sometimes called Knightian risk) is a term of art that refers to known probability distributions of market outcomes. My professional training is literally to build pricing models against these.
> Ever wonder why used cars lose a third of their value when you drive a new one off the lot? It's because of the risk that a person might be selling that almost-new car with a hidden expensive fault in it.
No, I can't say I've ever wondered this; I've not been around a lot of new cars. (See also: the whole Mennonite thing.) I know that it's because of the term of art that we call uncertainty (again, due to Frank Knight, sometimes called Knightian uncertainty), which refers to those unknown probability distributions of outcomes that I listed as a precondition to applying this model for analysis. I can't price against those.
A used car market is what we call an Akerlof market, which is a market with a feedback system that has a whole lot of pathologies linked to information asymmetry. This also happens to be the textbook example of adverse selection, which is itself an example of how the supply and demand model fails to predict the market due to that information asymmetry.
> Risk is … absolutely a part …
This is correct with the words written here, but I'll caution that risk as a term of art has been misused.
Other people have a demand to dump garbage in the ocean because it's cheaper than disposing of their trash properly.
How does the free market solve this? Will someone be buying the ocean any time soon?
If only it were so.
Alas, in the real world enshittification, shrinkflation, skimpflation, dark patterns, planned obsolescence, vendor/platform lock-in, rent-seeking, regulatory capture and the like absolutely rule the day, due to a host of free market failures.
I don't claim to have a better alternative. But I find your take a bit strange. Are you as a customer satisfied with how all of this is working out?
But other people are using "forced" in the colloquial sense: "I'm not offered the thing I want, I'm only offered the thing I want bundled with something I don't want", e.g. I just want a TV, but I can't buy just a TV, I'm only offered the choice between a TV bundled with advertising or nothing at all. Hobson's Choice isn't a pleasant situation to be in, but you're not forced to buy that TV; you had the choice to buy nothing at all. It's not the same concept as "buy this product or we will impose a penalty", such as how Americans are now forced to buy health insurance.
WalterBright - to your question "when was the last time you were forced to buy something you don't want?", the correct answer would have been "March 2010", when many people were forced to buy health insurance that they didn't want. Which goes to show that although many parts of the American economy are a free market, health insurance is not. "Coincidentally", prices went up once there was a lot more truly forced demand. Huh. Who ever could have predicted that when you forced more people to buy a product, its producers would be able to raise prices? Wow, so completely unexpected a result... no economists at all would have predicted that... (Yes, Friedrich Hayek, I see you screaming into your pillow. It's okay, I'm being sarcastic).
The washing machine broke after 18 years. It was a cheap model at the time, but it held up well until the end. I'm under no illusion that the 50% more expensive replacement will last anywhere as long. You know, the old "they just don't build 'em like that anymore" that even the sellers tell you freely.
I'd like to buy quality products. For example, I own a coffee machine for which the manufacturer provides spare parts for decades. But I'm not willing to spend 3x for an appliance when there's no realistic expectation to get 2-3x the use of it since it's not economically repairable. So the rational choice is to buy semi-cheap and throw it on the heap when it inevitably breaks sooner than the last one. I hate that game, but I'm not made of money either.
Then the TV died. I did some research online and then spend a very disappointing hour browsing a local electronics shop to get a hands-on feel. It's all "smart" shit the software of which will go out of support within 5 years, with dedicated remote buttons advertising streaming services I don't use, too large screens and/or bad build quality, abysmal sound all around, and, not to forget, stuffed full of surveillance and ads. Out of sheer desperation, I got alarmingly close to spending $1.900 for a premium brand 43" that did tick all the boxes - namely, just being a TV that's as good and inobtrusive as the $700 one from 12 years ago. I finally resorted to buying an 7 year old unit from the same premium brand third hand for 1/7 the price. Which in the event turned out to be a really good deal, I admit, but I don't quite think the used market is what we're talking about here.
It did not feel at all like the market for new products catered to my preferences. These may be a bit peculiar, but FWIW, I take that's a sentiment quite a few people on HN share: questions about "good dumb TVs" come up every so often, so I'm not alone in this.
And don't get me started on printers...
BTW, I see them for sale in pawn shops and thrift shops, with much much lower prices. My home theater came from the thrift store :0)
That implies that there is a collective general trust that when the rules are not the right thing that they can be addressed.
Only slightly. Multiculturalism explodes it, but it's not so very different amongst people with shared language, history, faith, and heroic stories.
No all cultures are equal: torturing kids for as long as possible before they die, to extract as many tears as possible to please the gods, used to be a thing.
We do not all need to agree on "neutral" rules: we can agree it's an evil thing to do to torture kids for as long as possible, to extract as many tears as possible from them.
Don't be one, two or three of the "won't see" / "won't hear" / "won't talk" monkeys: don't be neutral. Fight evil.
At the moment for example there are 300 million women/teenagers/girls alive that have been genitally mutilated, including in the west: you're allowed to not be neutral and take a stance and fight against FGM.
At the Bataclan in Paris islamists with AK-47s (which are forbidden in France btw) lined up 300 people and slaughtered them: you're allowed to not be neutral and take a stance against islamism.
In January the islamist iranian regime killed 30 000 of its own unarmed civilians: same thing, you're allowed to not be neutral.
I don't care if islamists are convinced they do the right thing by spreading terror: they are evil.
And I'm not a religious person.
And btw western societies are based on rule that are mostly not neutral: we don't believe in harm to others, for a start. Even if in several cultures (past and present), that was normal.
At the moment for example there are lots of talks in french media about the status of women in Afghnistan since the talibans came to power.
For, as a western society, we do not care if others believe it's the right thing to mutilate girls, kill your enemies and enslave their women and daughters, etc.
The fallacy of gray is really a nasty thing and no good shall come to civilized societies for resorting to it.
I sense that the checks-and-balances & record-keeping around mass-force-push SMS in the US are now extremely stringent especially after the Hawaii incident. And I'm OK with the current situation here.
OTOH, the checks-and-balances/transparency situation around LPR camera networks is... basically non-existent. I am not OK with the current situation here.
Both of these situations in the same (relatively) high-trust US. The difference is one has some serious regulations around it, and the other is cowboying shit.
The opposite state of affairs is /corruption/.
I am reminded of a story I read lately of a woman who was shocked when her passport and purse were stolen from the beach while she was swimming. Somehow she had the perception that she was in a high trust worthy zone even though she had been doing her doctoral thesis work in a low trust society.
We could represent time-to-reality on a number line.
Trust works in a society when incentives are aligned with trust ie. you trust the society, the society trusts you back and you do the work with these principles and you are rewarded. Even this belief is something that you must trust that the society is fair. This trust creates your beliefs which sets your base-line incentives.
If your society is trustworthy and you are taught to be trustworthy and you see that the rewards are fairly distributed being trustworthy. It creates an incentives to be trustworthy yourself and a society is made by people like you and so everyone else does so too and the society becomes trustworthy and the cycle continues.
You would trust the society because you think your goals are aligned. Both you and society want the same thing.
BUT, the second the average individual works that the society or system is untrustworthy, that the incentives aren't aligned and I can't trust it.
The thing now is that the incentives are so misaligned with the reality of trustworthiness and it has become apparently clear. The incentives have also become unpredictable and questionable sometimes within the society and yet we see society tolerate, dare I say celebrate it sometimes. This makes us question if my personal incentives are aligned with society or not and if I am getting screwed or not by being so trustworthy of society and doing things fairly.
This in turns creates a vicious loop.
As such, fairness, trust and incentives play a very cyclical dependency on each other. You only trust if you feel like its fair and if the incentives prefer you to be fair as well.
I would sadly say that although our society is trending towards unfairness,untrustworthiness and perverse incentives. I do have a glimmer of hope that this too shall pass.
Interpersonal trust might be decreasing: https://www.pewresearch.org/2025/05/08/americans-trust-in-on...
But dwarfed by the trust decrease in institutions: https://www.pew.org/en/trend/archive/fall-2024/americans-dee...
But maybe it's overstated, because trust seems sort of stable according to this group: https://www.edelman.com/trust/25years
>We no longer are capable of coordinated, collective action that benefits society.
I think this might be too doomer for people, but I think it raises the concern often called two-tier policing or 'anarchotyranny', where such collective action to reform a society is viewed as a threat by the ruling organization and systematically attacked and dismantled. In contrast, petty crimes or even serious interpersonal crimes pose no threat to the ruling organization and receive disproportionately low effort relative to the collective action movements.
Violent crime in most western countries seems to me to be the opposite of downplayed - it’s up-played to whip up fear and support for populists, using emotive language and pointing to the worst examples rather than overall figures.
The figures generally show we’re all so much safer from violent crime than we were in previous decades in western nations. We’re also just more exposed to stories about it.
Side rant… every time I’ve heard "We're all in it together" it’s been from someone who believes the opposite. That phrase just grates now.
What distinction are you making between a community and a tribe or family? What is it about a community that makes it more worthy of individuals organizing around it than their families or tribes?
One interesting aspect ij academic literature about trust, it is highly reverse correlated with diversity. No matter the grouping and size, the more diverse, the less trust within the group.
You can alter your own reality by convincing yourself that someone is or is not like yourself ("diverse"), especially by consuming specific types of media - perhaps media that is produced with intention of you distrusting certain people.
Again, it's an important distinction to draw, lest you be drawn in to certain misanthropic theories based on flimsy "proof".
And ideally we have good safety nets that find these people and give them resources and treatment, but some people will refuse everything and end up in bad situations of homelessness due to their drug and/or mental health crises.
And even in a society that forces those people into attempted treatment programs, there will still be a bit of time in between their issues manifesting and them going into treatment/therapy/confinement.
To have “zero homeless” you’d need to preventatively intercept these people before they become homeless and force them into confinement in treatment facilities and mental hospitals essentially. And that’s a dangerous game because you’re essentially taking away someone’s freedom preemptively before they become homeless
But the idea that jails are an unadulterated societal good, or that they are the natural only option to police, is a crazy religion. Why on earth do we have no timely resolutions but through handcuffs and jail? There is expediency, and then there is externalizing the whole of the troubles to the smallest number of people, who could never overturn a majority, even if they had the vote.
I suggest the ability to put certain people in a metal box, at least partially for losing their grasp of a better role in the world, is a big, boldface moral hazard, and self-perpetuating, but with leering cheerleaders.
Some people are wild and out of control sometimes. Treating them all as permanent bad apples is just as animalistic.
Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.
That was absolutely free, $0?
>Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.
We already have those housing units. They have concrete "beds", toilet-sink combos made out of stainless steel, and a thick steel door that can't be burned by arson. Nothing flammable is allowed within them (save the non-homeless person). The technology exists, and the homeless are actually welcome there. People get mad when they are homed thus, though.
Mental illness, drug addiction and homelessness all exist in a range. There are many people who are homeless, mentally ill or addicted to drugs who still have some amount of income of one type or the other.
I would try to target rent under $1,000 per month for such housing
I understand that you cannot reason too well with an addict, so it might be surprising to some that somebody would refuse shelter if it meant being clean.
Still, what should be the approach then? Unconditional help?
I think it's a tough problem to solve: how far should we help drug addict in their addiction? Is the goal to help them survive, help them stop using drugs, help them find a job?
Depending on the metrics you will find that unconditional housing is more effective (ex: https://www.utoronto.ca/news/housing-first-more-effective-tr...) or offering incentives to stop is more effective (ex: https://www.chcs.org/resource/contingency-management-for-adu...)
In the United States, ~40% of the homeless are employed. A deeply non-trivial percent either are kids or have kids. Everyone should volunteer at a support center for homeless youth some time.
Sure, there may be some kind of Pareto principal in play for the hardest 20% of cases to crack. Who cares? Let's eliminate 80% of the existing problem and worry about the rest when we get there.
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the median HN reader has very little appreciation of the human reality of homelessness in the United States, and primarily see it through the lens of people at the extreme, visible margins. I know I used to until I got involved.
edit: I mean all of this in a very boring, matter of fact way, not some kind of holier-than-thou virtue signaling way. The 80% problem of homelessness is a tractable economic problem. While it's true that the United States has an almost dizzying level of propaganda demonizing poor people, it's also true that real homelessness is hard to spot because people have a natural instinct to preserve their and their family's dignity. The first time I came to terms with this was coaching debate in highschool. I had a varsity debater who couldn't afford pants to meet the dress code. Incredibly bright, academically successful kid. His father was an unemployed teacher working menial jobs, his mother was taking care of three kids. They lived in a tent at campsites. I had absolutely no idea. We obviously bought him pants and paid all his travel/etc. fees (he'd been making excuses to not go to events requiring travel). That's a very boring, normal case.
That family should have had a free or nearly free housing option. They did not. They still wouldn't.
My point was that there is a bottom some-percent of homeless people that can’t immediately be helped.
But yeah I think I made my point clear in the second paragraph that we need the resources to provide housing and basic necessities for the majority of homeless people who are able to receive it, though I probably should’ve clarified that those benefits should be tiered and someone who just goes through a terrible point in life and is otherwise in a reasonably healthy place should have easy access to something decent.
Many of these people, and not just the really, really bad nuisance ones people use as excuses to superiority, are literally slaves, performing the scarecrow work of deterrence as living examples, for "society", for no pay.
I think this is an injustice, subverted by its own cruelty, and one of the more compelling arguments for UBI.
The example is true, but to your point, isn't representative... and that doesn't matter.
So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?
It's a very fine line, between authoritarianism and the freedom of someone (whatever their mental state/ability is) to chose to not have a permanent place to live, while going through a difficult or promising phase of life. See also "The Pursuit of Happyness"
Can you, though? And for how long? With the current policymaking and demographic and economic trends?
There is an argument to be made that the European social experiment has largely been indirectly funded by the largesse of the American hard-and-soft power strategy. As we're moving away from that (for various reasons, most idiotic), there is a question as to how it will persist.
(This is not meant as trolling--there's a real existential question here. A starting point is an attack on that argument: what is the "natural" expenditure on defense versus what you can get away with America's force projection? How much social funding is derived from that delta, in the most generous sense? Maybe it's a red-herring.)
If we are speaking about housing specifically, at my part of the swamp it's subsidises by more affluent people (they way our atheistic christian beliefs command) and the general idea predates the rise of America anyway. Dealing with homeless people and the like the European way is also /cheaper/ too, IRRC.
Not having crack junkies shit in my front and backyard and also not worrying about it is tax money well I believe.. It's up to the village council to decide to send coppers to beat them or medics to provide some free hits on a condition of having to take a shower.
This whole charade in the USA of dressing up slavery (without even a single day of interruption on January 31, 1865) as "correction" is absurd. It's obviously a way to continue an economy that relies on a supply of involuntary labor, and has nothing whatsoever to do with public safety.
There are plenty of ways to implement restorative justice which are superior to forcing convicts to make starbucks uniforms (start here if you've never delved into this, but there are great books on the topic which you can find from here: https://harvardpolitics.com/restorative-justice-abolition/).
But the question is: just because some perpetrators don't deserve second chances, why does that mean that McDonalds and Raytheon get to be the beneficiary of their free labor?
And more importantly: with a huge economic incentive to enslave ("imprison"... eye roll) these people, can we ever actually have a system that properly selects people who actually need to be removed from society?
If prisons are actually a viable mechanism for public safety, let's amend the 13th amendment to prohibit all slavery, instead of allowing it to exist in prisons, and then we'll get a clearer picture.
To me, the idea that incarceration and police use of force is wrong because it is racist is backwards. It’s racist because it is wrong.
Obviously you will not reach that literally. That's why it is an ideal number, not a real number. It is still a good and worthy goal.
Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good.
You can also reduce the crime rate dramatically by better social security, education, easier access to mental health care and so many other things.
And don't say we can't afford these things. These measures pay dividends in building a better society for everyone. What we can't afford is having so many billionaires not paying their fair share.
If we had Finland's winters, I think we could eradicate homelessness by January.
And no, please educate yourself on what Finland did to eradicate homelessness. It has nothing to do climate but with the fact that Finland made it an explicit political goal to eradicate it i.e political will.
Finland did something, but "eradicating homelessness" wasn't what they did. It has nothing to do with political will in the case of the United States, and everything to do with a grab-bag of leftist policies that are entirely incompatible. Even if we were to ignore those who are plainly unfit to live in a home from the score, the remainder can't be housed while you import millions of immigrants to compete with them for housing. You can have one or the other of those two things, but they are mutually incompatible. And that's before you even get to the people so broken that they complain that they want to be homeless, to be vagabonds, living out of tents in alleys and panhandling. Such people exist. Sometimes they even manage to show up online and say as much, so you can't claim perfect ignorance here.
The addicts and the mentally ill that used to be institutionalized and whatever else can be said about them, they had a roof over their heads, do you want to bring back the big thorazine zombie warehouses? We could eradicate that homelessness. Is that your plan? I'm not even necessarily against it, but I do get a big kick out of the left that can't even bring themselves to say the words out loud.
Finland is a dying nation with a fertility rate below 1.5. As they continue to shrink, they might manage to have so many surplus homes that homelessness is eliminated... or they might import a bunch of immigrants that put pressure on housing. They might decide that they can't forego military spending with Russia next door, in which case the social spending they're doing won't be necessarily as affordable. Especially if Trump screws NATO with finality. "Please educate yourself"... god, you people. No wonder you lose elections.
I was taught as a child that most people deep down genuinely want to be "good people". If only I had known what an absolute lie that really truly was, I'd have chosen a very different path for my life. Going out of my way to be a "good person" to the best of my ability was a total waste of a life that could have been spent in the pursuit of wealth and power, which I would have been very good at, had I not foolishly chosen to adhere to a "moral code" that was based on fantasy and naivety and a "reality" that just didn't exist as it was taught in schools, churches, and homes.
I wasn't happy at all to end up associating with people who were zero-sum, transactional, and only valued wealth and fame. That can promote a constant sense of insecurity and lack of trust, which prevents the formation of true connections to others (which I've found to be important).
I've been very happy to find myself with groups of people, in work contexts and elsewhere, who try to care for others while pursuing their personal goals. There's a sense of belonging and security.
People like good things. They'll go out of their way to expend time, energy and money to have "good". You could be the source of that good and receive all of these if you try to truly understand others' view of what's good.
Coercive systems do happen, but rarely last, because people will also spend time, energy and money to get rid of them.
Just don't be fooled that there's a universal moral code. What's good for one might not be for another. You might appreciate "Science and Human Behaviour" by B.F. Skinner if you're interested in the mechanics of it.
But we started rapidly deconstructing that in various ways and paired with algorithms and an increasingly harsh world on some fronts this barrels towards certain things. When I grew up colourblindness was advocated for and the assumption that migrants here in western europe would not assimilate was considered racist, a gay person would not be questioned, the future was progress with hurdles to tackle.
Now i've never known society as race centered, expecting assimilation is considered bigotry, there's sectarianism of various kinds, i expect the social safetynet to be built down under it's new pressures, increasing homophobic violence in the major cities that saw lots of migration on one end and the culturewar surrounds trans people and the like on the other end, some of the hurdles like the climate seem insurmountable and yet we grow, etc.
It feels like in a drive towards enlightnment we tripped and fell backwards and consequentially I too have given up some tho not all of my views about being good.
People do generally want to be good people but it is a fairly basic don't-upset-the-neighbours form of good. You can't rely on them to consider any specific act as being good or bad.
I was taught that a "good person" tries to actually care about their fellow humans and other lifeforms on this planet enough to try to live a life that contributes toward a positive future that we'll all benefit from, while choosing not to support the hatred, greed, and ignorance of those people who would work toward the opposite of that. Problem with that sorta fantasy is that it doesn't exist except in a really rare handful of "mutant" humans who are generally killed (or "destroyed" in other ways) for their beliefs that we could have a "better world" that isn't built on suffering and greed.
As for "care", that is one of those unreasonable expectations. You can't tell who cares by looking at them and it doesn't do anyone much good for someone to be caring but incompetent. We get a lot more out of hyper-competent people who don't care but nonetheless do a very good job of making the world better.
If you indeed lived morally you probably can’t know this.
You obviously can not build a cohesive society just by hoping people will want to be good, they have to have a generally shared understanding of what it means to be good.
Whether you see it or not, the vast majority of people /are/ generally good, and more importantly they want to be around other people who value being good, not being a jerk.
Folks who are all about money and power hang in different circles; I can’t speak to their happiness levels, but regular folks steer clear of them and warn others when they get burned.
Stay on the good team. There’s plenty of us and we welcome you. What can I do to help?
Nothing you can do to help me specifically. I'm a lost cause at this point. I see no way back from where I'm at. I literally see zero hope for the future of humanity or this truly amazing planet we were fortunate enough to populate for a short while. If you truly do see some sort of future that doesn't end in dystopia or apocalypse, then you can help by doing everything in your power to work tirelessly toward contributing to that future. That's all. I'd help if I could, but I'm physically, spiritually, and emotionally entirely too "broken" in every way at this point to see any way that I could do anything that would turn any of this mess around in even the slightest way.
I am reminded of what Fred Rogers would say in times like these.
Fred Rogers often told this story about when he was a boy and would see scary things on the news: "My mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world."If he were still alive, I'd vote Fred Rogers for Emperor of Earth all day long. One of the rare few humans who I'd truly label a genuinely good person. Not a hateful or greedy bone in that man's body as far as I've ever read, seen, or heard about him. I suspect the same of Jim Henson, too. Probably Carl Sagan as well. Maybe also Neil deGrasse Tyson for a more modern (still alive) example of a "good person" (as far as I can tell)? I believe "good people" still exist, but they're sadly not in positions of "power" (and probably wouldn't want to be). A shame, because the ones we've got in charge of things right now won't be happy until the planet is literally on fire from pole to pole and one of them has all the everything all to themselves...
I've always found this sentiment to exist exclusively in privileged and overly educated, left wing, Western circles. It is an extension of the philosophy built around tabula rasa, and posits that individuals are not to blame for their actions, but rather society. When someone harms another, it wasn't because they wanted to harm another, but because society failed to instill the correct values.
Even a cursory inspection of history would disabuse one of this notion, but the myth persists. I suspect it's because it clashes with another fundamental privileged and overly educated, left wing, Western belief: that inequality is always caused by injustice. That it cannot be a normal and expected outcome of people making different decisions. This fanciful ideal suggests that we should all be equally successful, with the same possessions and jobs and homes and values.
Back here in the real world, with zero exceptions, we know that power inevitably corrupts even the most chaste and moral of people. Humans are both a product of their environment and possess free will. Both. At the same time. Many people choose to use their free will to harm others, and in places where the rule of law fails, this proportion explodes. This suggests that some very large proportion of society chooses to not hurt others not because of some innate morality, but because of the consequences.
Of course I understand all of this conflicts so deeply with your beliefs that you will choose to dismiss them out of hand. Feel free to consider my comment nothing more than some superficial thoughts.
Isn't it a bit contradictory? If corruption really is an inevitable consequence of power, then there is not much free will involved.
It's easy to think that some people choose to harm other as a result of free will, but even something minor like bullying usually hides some personnal struggle (like home problems, revenge from previous bullying). Even if you take the extreme cases of psychopaths like serial killers, they all have a troubled past and lack of guidance.
Note that I am not excusing their behavior, nor do I claim that all troubled people become psychopaths, but I think in general we should accept that we have much less free will that we would like to admit, and that a lot of our behavior can be traced to a wide range of elements out of our control such as: genetics, epigenetics, culture, immediate family, random events.
On the contrary. Unlimited power allows one to express their free will to a degree most people could only ever dream of. Given all the power in the world, what do humans do with it? Abuse others.
To extend an olive branch, the determinism debate doesn't have a neat answer. I could make compelling arguments for both sides. However determinism isn't just about social conditioning. It also requires accepting uncomfortable arguments about biology and genetics. If one is not willing to accept that humans are born non-equally capable of cognitive and physical tasks, they have no choice but to accept the premise of free will.
No mate, the entire world is -not- like this. Thank your lucky stars you haven't had to deal with this.
I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm not a good person anymore. Not really. I'm the broken wreckage of what used to be a good person. I want to be a good person, but I was born on the wrong planet, or the wrong timeline, or the wrong corner of the multiverse, or whatever. I don't live on a planet where what I want is even in the realm of possibility. Too much hatred, greed, and ignorance here for the life I would prefer to live.
If you're in South Korea, you can expect to get around half a dozen emergency notifications every day. Typical contents include "it's cold, so dress warmly", "roads are icy, so drive carefully", and "Mrs Kim, 79, suffers from dementia and was last seen in Seoul wearing a black coat".
You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.
I've seen it during my career as a software developer, too. Heaps of alert spam that remained unread because 99% of them were useless and not indicative of a problem on our end. It's important to be careful about alerts so you know when real problems occur.
(If by "dangers of creating too many errors" you just meant "don't create too many bugs" then that's not really relevant to this conversation, and also totally the wrong lesson to learn from that incident. The lesson is, software will inevitably have bugs, so make sure you have redundant checks to minimise their impact.)
Edit: see replies, originally I wrote fuses, but hardware interlocks is more correct.
They mention that previous Therac machines had "hardware interlocks" to prevent this sort of issue - maybe those are the safety fuses you're both talking about? - but it says they were never included in Therac-25 in the first place, because the software was assumed to be so reliable, not that they were removed because they blew.
Are you sure this is the same incident? Do you have a link to a source about it?
Edit: This article cited in Wikipedia is much more comprehensive and mentions that Therac-20 did have these fuses, in addition to hardware interlocks. But they weren't disabled because the real alarms were drowned out by false alarms - instead they all represented real instances of the issue.
https://web.archive.org/web/20041128024227/http://www.cs.umd...
(Middle column of the 12th page of PDF, numbered page 29 of the publication.)
> The Therac-20 at the University of Chicago is used to teach students in a radiation therapy school conducted by the center. The center’s physicist, Frank Borger, noticed that whenever a new class of students started using the Therac-20, fuses and breakers on the machine tripped, shutting down the unit. These failures, which had been occurring ever since the center had acquired the machine, might appear three times a week while new students operated the machine and then disappear for months. Borger determined that new students make lots of different types of mistakes and use “creative methods of editing” parameters on the console. Through experimentation, he found that certain editing sequences correlated with blown fuses and determined that the same computer bug (as in the Therac-25 soft- ware) was responsible. The physicist notified the FDA, which notified Therac-20 users.*
> The software error is just a nuisance on the Therac-20 because this machine has independent hardware protective circuits for monitoring the electron-beam scanning. The protective circuits do not allow the beam to turn on, so there is no danger of radiation exposure to a patient. While the Therac-20 relies on mechanical interlocks for monitoring the machine, the Therac-25 relies largely on software.
I remember talking about it several times over my college career, and for good reason.
To this day when people start talking about software in the loop in a safety context I get extremely twitchy. I don't let that shit happen on my watch.
Today, I’d ask about more ways to push the responsibility away from the firmware to stop catastrophic failures. If the debugger pauses the CPU you can’t use the CPU to regulate things. I’ve worked on things where the failure mode can be explosive and it makes dev really harrowing if you can’t rely on hardware interlocks.
They often don't have to know how the nitty-gritty of the HW works. HALs are used everywhere, and some of them abstract a lot away. I've interviewed embedded SWEs that couldn't explain how the tri-state buffers work within GPIO.
I do this for different reasons. I just don't want every site knowing when I'm logged in and using my computer, which computer that is, and whatever else information they're grabbing all day.
(For the curious, a subscription means free delivery. The subscription costs 10 euro a month, and if you don't have a subscription, the delivery fee is around 4 euro)
It sounds like a subscription means ad-funded delivery to me though
Personally I would absolutely refuse to pay for services that still continue to serve me ads even though I'm paying
I loathe advertising. I don't understand why most people seem so apathetic about it
It may be a EU wide tale.
Edit. Didn’t realize it might just be an English version where the boy is killed and eaten. Aesop’s original didn’t have that. Just the sheep killed.
This is called "normalization of deviance" and generally should be avoided, because it often precedes a serious accident.
You don't even need to get to the point of breaking the rules for it to be a problem. This is stupid human factors type stuff.
The filthy capitalists don't want their oil rigs going kaboom and their expensively trained workers having injury downtime. There is a natural incentive alignment to some extent here.
And then the useful idiots show up, and rather than fostering that alignment they put their thumb on the scale and they change the calculations. The filthy capitalists crunch the numbers and they realize that over the life of the oil rig and a fleet of some number of them they'll make more money spewing alarms at the guys running the place until their eyes glaze over. Sure he'll miss something important blowing up the works with loss of life and limb 2/<big number> amount of the time instead of 1/<big number> if you'd have tuned it right buuuuut, you'll lose less money that way because if you do it the "right" way you'll get dinged by the OSHA people every time some petty accident type happens because you turned the alarm for that one off so as not to fatigue people. A typical example is some industrial facility where policy defines "hot" as anything lukewarm and up and so they implicitly train people to ignore it. People are opening "hot" equipment all the time, getting approvals to do it, ignoring warning lights, etc, etc, so basically no net improvement in actual safety over having nothing at all. And this is fine until one day someone gets killed because they let loose something that was 300deg not 110. You see this goddamn fact pattern all the time. Machinery beepers, hazard signage and barriers, machinery interlocks, etc, etc, it never fucking ends.
Great job guys, Mission Accomplished (TM). When everything is a hazard nothing is.
checks notes
workplace safety, then for-profit companies could be free to act for the good of all, like they always do!
- earthquakes: these can arrive indeed before you even feel them (a few seconds before); they filter it to areas where it's expected to be felt, there are discussions around how sensitive to make it (how wide area it should cover)
- extremely heavy rain: this was new recently, and very useful, when locally it all went cats & dogs, more than maybe I've ever seen. See an example here: https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117058657161401667
- military drills: the yearly "if there's an invasion drill", they had sent reminder a week before, and then at the start/end; example here: https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117030180601973598
- Chinese rocket launches that will fly over the island (not sure what could one do about it, and never seen anything, so maybe this is more borderline)
Interestingly (for me), the headers seems to change over time. Started with "Presidential Alert", there were "Government Alert" then, now "Emergency Alert" and just "Alert". I'm not sure if there area list of these or it evolved over time...
Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are:
Extreme Threats
Severe Threats
AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts)
Public Safety Messages
State and Local Tests
Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote parts of Texas, so people who were over 700 miles / 1.1 megameter / 12 hour drive away all got the notification at 4AM.
The only option Texans had would have been to disable all alerts entirely, because this was an "EXTREME" level alert.
https://www.404media.co/texas-blue-alert-emergency-notificat...
Got woken up at just around 3:20 in the morning (I get up to go to work at 5) to an emergency alert blasting over mine and my wife's phones:
"WOMAN WITH DEMENTIA MISSING FROM CARE FACILITY IN [town that's an hour from us]"
What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Get up and start walking around my town to see if she's somehow walked all this way? I felt bad for the lady, but this isn't a "wake everybody up in the middle of the night" scenario, just get the cops involved and look around the area where she went missing.
Fiiiiinally just about get back to sleep (took a while because I was fucking furious), must have been about 4:30 and it starts going off again.
"FOUND: MISSING WOMAN IN [town] HAS BEEN LOCATED AND IS SAFE"
Found. They woke me up to let me know there was no emergency. Do not even get me started on the absurdity of it, I'm genuinely still absolutely pissed. Best part is? We can't shut off our emergency alerts. The CRTC mandates that there must not be a way to opt out of them.
Sorry for the rant, your story reminded me of this bullshit and got me all fired up.
There was one exception case where children were actively harmed, but already murdered by the time the alert went out. I suspect police couldn’t kick down the door where they were murdered because they didn’t have a warrant/sufficient cause yet: right to peace and privacy in your home but not on your phones!
The alerts are 4G/5G only, so for a while I had a shortcut that would downgrade me to 3G at night.
Despite everyone questioning the system being labelled as “with the child abductors”, there are far fewer of these alerts. Either abductions are way down, or they’ve tightened up the criteria to blast the province.
> megameter
Completely valid SI way to represent distance, but I have never seen anyone use this in my entire life! Out of curiosity, do you live in some location or work in some industry where this is used? If so, where?
But I do enjoy the unit very much now and I think its time might be coming!
I use mm, cm, m, km every day, so why not Mm! Definitely an appropriate unit for international-scale measurement, so it's weird we default to just using thousands of kilometres now that I'm thinking about it.
Something like "stormy weather, be ready for electricity interruption". So of course "Armed drones have been seen in the area, don't touch any suspicious objects on the ground" message arrived I opened it on next day...
Considering most of SK's population is in Seoul, and Seoul is within range of NK artillery, wouldn't most people be aware before the notification came anyways?
>"To be shelled by mass artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn't experienced it."
It is estimated that Seoul would have 2-4 minutes of warning of an NK barrage due to the artillery shell flight time. Having 2 to 4 minutes to get anywhere other than an open area is valuable.
A NK artillery barrage on Seoul would be horrific and devastating but it wouldn't kill everyone.
> One early examination of the problem, by Bruce Bennett of the RAND Corporation, finds that circa 1995 the KPA may have been capable of firing as many as 200,000 long-range rounds into South Korea on the first day of a conflict—and that even a short 3-to-5-minute artillery barrage into the Seoul metro area could cause as many as 7,500 civilian casualties—with the total fatalities rising much higher if North Korea continued the attack. An analysis from 2012 by Roger Cavazos finds that a North Korean artillery attack on Seoul could produce around 30,000 fatalities. And a recent study by researchers at RAND finds that an hour-long artillery barrage on Seoul would produce between 87,600 and 130,000 casualties, of which between 6,620 and 10,680 would be fatalities—with many more fatalities to come if the artillery bombardment continued. [0]
[0] https://tnsr.org/2025/06/lost-seoul-assessing-pyongyangs-oth...
I would imagine South Korea has a similar system?
Side note: isn’t it crazy how Seoul is so close to the border that you can see North Korea on a clear sunny day? And the aforementioned traditional artillery-ableness of it all because of that?
People were calling the emergency hotline because the wildfires 200km away got so big that their smoke engulfed the city.
Doubt.
Of course I am referring to SK's .7 TFR.
In the end of the day, we need proper education, not only in technical excellence, but also societal awareness, what it means to be good and how to uphold oneself to such a standard even if everyone around them does not. This is how you defend against the men with guns.
Or:
"Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret." ("You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will always return.") — Epistles, Book I
Probably a lot of ways to think about it, but when you phrase it this way, it becomes quickly pretty hard!
India comes to mind as some of the earliest worst-case examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_WhatsApp_lynchings
I buy into teen mental health tanking correlating with the rise of mobile social media in 2012: https://archive.is/frHnA
I think there's probably far more powerful but hard to describe and prove effects out there in play by connecting to a global async awareness network, but I'll leave it there.
You haven't actually argued why it can solve them too. When you're about to make a general argument about tech, try to exchange "tech" with "cocaine" to see if the argument still holds (If cocaine can cause social problems, then it can solve them too)
See also the role of "soma" in the novel Brave New World.
People take cocaine voluntarily. It solves a problem for them, at one point at last (addiction is as much a psychological problem as a physiological one). It is the same as doping in sports. Maybe you think of junkies in the streets when you think of cocaine and see only the problems it causes, but there is as much if not more cocaine users who are right now successful executives and colleagues right by your side, who can still hide well their use, and have enough money to buy good grades of drug, and a stay in a rehabilitation clinic when things get out of hand.
It's fundamentally not a matter of technology.
> Rapid sending of messages
> Careful checking of the content of messages
> Ability to quickly target a specific geographic area
> Inability to mistakenly send a test message
> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending
> Resilient enough to work after significant damage to infrastructure
> That networks have the ability to vet and ignore
> That networks are compelled to send
> Which can only be used for good
> And cannot be used for evil.
Considering the last two, I'm assuming this must be tongue-in-cheek.
I think that the best approach for public utilities is to design them in such a way as to minimize, or preclude if possible, their ability to choose their customers or level of service. We want them to have a set of rules/instructions, written beforehand and publicly available, that everyone can point to after an event that says, "well, those were the things they were supposed to do, so they did them." The entities that write the set of rules are separate from the utility: the utility solely exists to implement the rules/instructions as efficiently as possible.
There's obviously a reasonableness factor here: it's impossible to foresee all situations. The effort spent on specifying exactly what should be done should be proportional to the potential impact of that possible decision.
"Before Sending" is the lynchpin here.
The receiver needs to be performing verification, and have the ability to blacklist sources.
Which requires distributed infra.
I had a go at trying to sketch out a protocol for this years ago, that was low enough level to be actually mildly censorship resistant and also pay out for middle men successfully routing traffic and there was something like 10-100 times more protocol traffic on network than actual packets. It was a mess.
Staged rollout with engagement metrics that cancel the alert if it’s not alerty enough.
Stages: one town, then a city, then one county, then everyone. Can be complemented by picking a percentage nationally as well, or picking two different towns (Croydon vs Barnstaple.)
Engagement: Poll at each stage as to whether the message was useful, or counted as an emergency, or was read for more than X seconds, or opened more than once.
The alert system also has four levels:
(1) National and (2) Imminent Threat (think “we interrupt this programme to bring you breaking news…”);
(3) Public Safety (“Charlie says” but more specific); and
(4) missing persons / Amber alerts.
The use of the we’d-rather-you-crash-your-car-than-not-get-your-attention klaxon should be reserved for the first two, and its use for the “no barbecues plz” warning should probably have been avoided.
Take a look at the article. The issue is more complex.
You're arguing your point by naming a technology that speculative fiction regularly foresees advancements in, and loves using in stories as the enabler of more intrusive state power.
More surveillance records, better processing and recall of those records are like THE THING when it comes to more law enforcement and passive coercion by the state.
There is honest to goodness disruptive tech that takes time for society to adapt to and reveal where state power wants to go. But those are the vast minority. I think it's a pasttime of industry to play ignorant to how their products will interplay with the government's obvious motivations.
I can't even imagine what the NSAs and CIAs of the world are capable of with their limitless black budgets. Anthropic only balked at domestic surveillance, it had zero objections towards allowing the US government to surveil foreign persons like me.
Legally, to the rules of the country. That is not even a question.
But if we talk about morality, the answer is to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and what it implies.
There is no moral nor legal reason to follow the parent company when it in conflict with the rule of law. People are starting to attribute to corporations a power that they do not have, and that is very dangerous.
(The article is good, thou, and opens a lot of interesting questions)
Egypt explicitly rejects this.
Certainly, if you give up so easily because of a fantasy that some generic PSA becomes the sign to not burn your toast where all the other signs fail, no wonder you need the whole 10 steps to indicate "the impossible"
Isn't the obvious answer decentralization? Have persons necessary to send that message in different places across the country/outside the country needing to sign it for it to be sent. All taking the responsibility of following protocol in these cases.
Then the men with guns come and you can earnestly say “well guys, i know you want to declare the eternal republic of Basingstoke, but all I can do is send a warning about a tornado in Slough, is that close enough?”
This is the wrong prism through which to confront the problem. Technology is neither good nor evil nor neutral - it is a tool lacking agency, to be manipulated by people.
You might as well ask if it's possible to design a gun that can only be used in self-defense, or a knife that can only be used for cutting vegetables and cannot hurt people, or a car that will solve all traffic fatalities. That's impossible. There are certainly designs which improve outcomes, but not designs that definitively solve those problems (i.e. addressing author's use of the word "cannot").
So take your pick: the easier problem of settling for improving outcomes, or the harder problem of building an inclusive and equitable society, where people have a position they can take pride in, a community that they support and which supports them, and where violence (of both physical and other kinds, like aggressive alerting) is a last resort. The solutions for the hard problem aren't found in technology, but in the humanities.
i don't leave my home without earplugs anymore. if there's no opportunity for you as a recipient to put back pressure onto whoever's making the announcements, it seems any broadcast system will just inevitably degrade. they work in smaller situations, like individual buildings and such, but if you really want a message to reach everyone in society, then tell your neighbors: person-to-person remains the only workable structure for that "last mile", so to speak.
Comments on these subjects are far less enlightening than when I want to know how to operate the latest LLM.
Tech has gone some distance from when jobs put the early Apple teams together and stated that he thought everyone would be exceptional in their field without computers, it just so happens that computers help them achieve results in their field.
It feels like computers became a field so vast, powerful, that it can sustain itself economically whilst alienating the very people that connect it to societies and the issues faced by them
That is to say, I wish we had expert sociologists on this forum who can add value just as we have people who can with their slice of technology
So: microphones, tape recorders, radios, television, and even the printing press are all bad civic hygiene? They have all been used to facilitate police states...
"Sorry men with guns, the most we can do is send one of those messages."
MeteoSwiss has an app, which sends geo-specific weather alerts, using the normal handheld notification system. You opt-in by installing it. Simple. No nonsense.
I'm so lucky to have competent bureaucrats.
The latest message I'm being bombarded with it a reminder not to use Whatsapp without a 'valid' sim... like wtf? Is there something should know? Whatsapp is a private org, why is govt asking me about that? But all I get is the random sms bombardment and more questions than answers.
Submitted many hours earlier, fewer upvotes, one comment, sank without trace.
Could you provide a link to what you see?
Which is fine, I don't care about that, but it's CRAZY it hasn't gotten more exposure/discussion!
Title: Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack
HN Post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49281251
Article: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/terabytes-of-creden...
More details: https://exposure.cloudsek.com/ai-supply-chain-incident
> Hugo Chavez realized that there’s no technical limit on how often you can invoke the emergency broadcast system. You can do it every day! The “emergency” can be that you had a cool new thought about the true meaning of socialism. Or that you’re opening a new hospital and it makes a good photo op. Or that opposition media is saying something mean about you, and you’d like to prevent anyone from watching that particular channel (which is conveniently bound by law to air emergency broadcasts whenever they occur).
The only way to stop an oppressive government from abusing the emergency notification system for propaganda is to fight against the oppressive government until it stops existing, then keep fighting to prevent it from existing again.
Both levels can be deactivated on Android (no idea about iOS but I presume it's the same), there's no unblockable presidential alert level.
It most certainly was NOT OK.
By your own statement, both trigger the siren sound by default (including to those driving).
By all means do this if a wildfire is heading my way and I need to evacuate, not to tell me I shouldn't be lighting a bloody barbeque! An ordinary text message would have sufficed.
The net result of this is, like most people I know, ALL such alerts are now switched off on my phone. Thus, if Putin does decide to push the button, I'll probably find out about it a little later then you.
You'd need to get the mobile operators involved to build the list of recipients and then to do the actual work of pushing the message out. Normal SMS is point to point, so a message needs to be sent to each subscriber individually which is a huge job at population-level scale.
It makes more sense to use the existing cell broadcast alert infrastructure which has been planned for exactly this type of use case and has been thoroughly tested.
A more reasonable complaint might be that it wasn't geofenced to only the drought-hit areas, but that would only have excluded something like a quarter of the population.
And given that the system does not have that "important but not urgent" category it's also reasonable to complain when the government uses the "urgent" notification system for something that is not urgent.
It caused me to turn off "severe" alerts (leaving "emergency" enabled).
But, to be honest, it doesn't seem to be too far out of line with the past alerts listed on https://www.gov.uk/alerts/past-alerts
(I also only have the extreme alerts enabled - I've been disabling severe ones since the system was introduced. If there's a storm I'm likely to be staying inside anyway!)
Let us accept that sending a text message about wildfire danger is legitimate. (I'm sure there are some here who will argue that it is not, but let's ignore them for the moment.)
Sending a text message "to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country" could be legitimate use of the threat of violence to defend the country. Or it could be a horribly illegitimate abuse of power, in a much more fundamental way than a wildfire warning could ever be.
So that's what bugs me about your examples. The second one is far too open to illegitimate use. And if the use is illegitimate, then the monopoly on violence is not legitimate either. (At least not within US civic philosophy: "Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed", and all that.)
Yeah, you have to basically decide which side you support more, the Mubarak regime or the rebels, in order to then decide whether you approve or disapprove of the mass text message.
I'm not bothered by the desire to send an informational message to the populace, but the alert is absurd. Sirens going off from a million phones for text that needed to be disseminated within O(day) not O(minutes) - this was patently an inappropriate delivery mechanism.
I have, of course, turned the damned things off on my work phone now too so I shall be blissfully ignorant when the nukes fly.
The stated justification for blue alerts is to warn the public of dangerous criminals. But they are only issued in response to attacks on cops, regardless of the level of danger to any other people. Also, at least in Texas, they're broadcast statewide. Texas is an awfully big state, and so the alerts are guaranteed to be irrelevant and non-actionable for the vast majority of people who receive them.
So it's fairly obvious to me that blue alerts are first and foremost a propaganda operation, aimed at perpetuating the stereotype that policing is a uniquely dangerous job. (It is indeed more dangerous than an average office job, but it has a much lower rate of fatal injuries than construction, or farming, or driving garbage trucks.)
I reached out to their communication department and they had a rep call me to get more information about the emails. She tried to frame it as information only emails but the messaging was clear, that were marketing vaccinations during the holidays and giving no way to opt out of it. I never heard back from them.
Now we have corporations like AirBnb and Etsy sending you emails requesting reviews with no way of opting out of those communications. I had to close my accounts. I cant do that with my health provide, but you see where this is going. There is an effort to send communications without giving people a choice.
I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.
Hopefully they take heed.
Would a downvoter care to explain themselves?
I'm also a man with guns.
Yes, I know, you see a lot of blowhard statements like that; this isn't intended to be one of them. There are things that I am capable of doing that I will never do, and people and organizations I won't work for. Furthermore, I won't put myself in a situation if I can at all avoid it where those I love are at risk rather than just myself -- but at the end of the day, every person should already know where they draw the line, and not shy away from acting if it is crossed. The earlier you act, generally speaking, the less extreme action is required.
The use case outlined in this article should make it very clear to most that believing technology solves all our issues is at least wrong, and at worst dangerous. Technology cannot protect you from bad actors, the solution must be social.
Bitcoin fans in the "cryptobros learning why we have regulation any% speedrun" is another example that comes to mind.
Maybe this confusing can be resolved if you view the authority, spammers, and "armed men" as equals. For example, you can treat them as interest groups, but with different level of power. It's a game, it's about incentives, desire, promise and payment, nothing about "do the right thing" or "for the people".
Now it's the Armed Forces got the top power, so you obey them until either they get replaced, or your own power grown so you don't have to continue pretending. The rule is just that simple.
And on the referenced "Civic Hygiene" article:
> But! Shock horror! After creating the database, the Government loses the election and the homophobes at UKIP get in to power! Now they have a database of every gay in the village, and can harass then, try to "cure" them, or make their lives a living hell.
Then, you just get cured ;) It's like a magic. Previous day you are a guy with a deeply lovely boyfriend, today you are seeking to marry the most beautiful woman available, because the cure they give you make you realized how disgusting the hairs on man's legs really are, ew! puke! Just lie, everybody can do that. Truth only belongs to people you love and love you, not the people who don't care about you, not even the neutral public.
BTW: Completely off-topic here: There was an article titled "Incentives are for losers" posted few weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49227652. It was beautifully put together, the leftist part of me almost convinced.... But, the rest of me realized that if you look the real "successful" people out there, the rich and powerful etc, you'll found that they all succeed by chasing the right incentives. Interesting uh?
They probably dont know that most countries have the exact same political structures with radically different outcomes.
We have treated government with a startling glibness, a deep unseriousness. At the end of the day, the government can kill you and your entire family, and the only thing that can stop them from doing that are the laws of civil society. It is incredibly serious.
Unfortunately, we have been unserious going on several decades. They have realized that the front door is unlocked and the gleaming glowing beating heart of civic power is sitting right there completely unprotected. There were warnings after 9/11, with the patriot act and the GWOT. People who raised these concerns were dismissed as cranks but in fact they were the only serious people in the room. The unseriousness has increasingly accelerated in the last 10 years.
Now we are seeing the consequences. There's a timely acronym for this I think. FAFO?
It is not obvious to me that society would keep on going without change if it were not for the technology that we are all exposed to and expected to use.
I'm pretty sure that the men with guns wouldn't be pleased at the system being so tamper proof that you can't do what they ask.
(1) the problematic Vodafone message in question is presented as "without attribution" but it very clearly starts with the words "The Armed Forces asks"!
(2) it makes it seem like the government was naturally unpopular in Egypt and clinging on to power in desperate ways when in reality the online anti-state dissent turned out to be astroturfed by "shadowy" Western organizations, which ironically ended up being the Islamic Brotherhood's ace up their sleeve as their justification for taking control.
So basically, wtf is his point regarding the Arab Spring? The author sounds painfully naive like it's still 2011, this sort of deliberate naivete makes it difficult for me to trust the rest of the article.
Regarding attribution. As you can see from the linked images, the messages all have the sender "Vodafone". While they may genuinely be from the armed forces, the reader has no way to verify that. If you received a message saying "The armed forces requires you to pet a cat today" would you immediately believe it was from the army?
Regarding the government's unpopularity. I think you might be inferring something I didn't imply. All I've done is link to contemporary news stories and quote from press releases. I haven't expressed any thoughts on the situation at the time, because I wasn't there and am not a scholar of modern Egypt.
The point isn't about the Arab Spring per se - it is used as an example of when a network was forced to send messages to their subscribers. Regardless of whether the Government was right to do so, I think we can both agree that compelling speech through violence is not an ideal scenario.
If Trump administration/US congress told you to use your AI agent to eavesdrop their political enemies should you be loyal to them? To kill children in middle east? To help them in a war against your mother country?
When the rulers of countries and corporations conspire, the amount of evil they can do is unlimited. Thus, I believe the willingness of corporations to stand against the rulers is the cornerstone of a civilized society.
There is an obvious solution that achieves all of these, that, on 1000 year timescales, seems inevitable: deprecation of the nation-state.
The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to. For example, the very real problem of coordination, eloquently and convincingly outlined in the federalist papers (tldr: we need a central republic structure because it's too difficult to coordinate disparate statehouses via horseback with every little intrastate decision) is solved by dint of instant communication and long-term data retention. So it is with every other claim in favor of these huge legacy state structures.
In this age, there is no longer any state needs to be larger than say, 1500 square km - about the size of a large county. This way, people can flee on foot to an adjacent state if needed, and no state can possibly control enough infrastructure to force Vodaphone to send such nauseating propaganda.
We need the elder statesmen in the room to read the writing on the wall and begin this process.
Assuming a rectangle of 30 by 50 kilometers, and no organized military for defense, it would take the Russians about 30-45 minutes to reintroduce the imperial subject experience on your proposed utopia.
The reason states are required are that other people are organized in states. Now I am guessing you are from the US, the standard of your living is only made possible, by millions of men and women working seriously to guarantee it, and thousands of nuclear weapons. Take either out of the equation, and your standard of living will very quickly become untenable.
Hell, the internet that you believe can solve all the problems, is only operational because hundreds of thousands of people are continuously working on it, many of them government employees.
Lmao, which they will get around to after regaining and relosing the same Ukranian square kilometer 20 times for the next 12 months.,
If anything, technology is making possible for states like Yemen and Iran to shut off chokepoints. It might take multiple powers working together to keep things open.
Sea Lanes Opened by the USA: 0 Sea Lanes Closed by US Interventions: 1
The current administration clearly does not care about freedom of navigation operations, but every other post war administration made it a major priority and they are still being conducted in spite of the current cluster.
Its crazy to not see that as the result of more US interventions in the middle east blowing up in their face, than actually any kind of goodwill mission.
Coordinated Defense pacts are already a thing. Like are you worried that these micro states wont want to join NATO?
And before you get weird, 5 + 5 + 5 is the same as 15. Theres no reason to imagine smaller militaries per capita.
>What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B?
Man they might need to communicate on that one hey.
Soldiers are not interchangeable robots in a RTS. Personnel, units and organizations have to practice working extensively together to function as a cohesive whole and have anything resembling esprit de corps.
Nations organize themselves into states to protect and promote their interests, including their existence as cultural and ethnic groups, from competing states (and other dangers, e.g. natural disasters). A.k.a. politics.
I was not aware politics has been solved by the internet.
I mean if people want to have a distinct culture or ethnicity they will or will not as they desire.
If anything the history of the nation state is forcing 12 different ethnic groups into a single culture that only reflects part of their heritage. Look at Nazi Germany trying to suppress Bavarian culture as insufficiently German. Or the UK suppressing Welsh and Irish culture.
Nation States enforce a mono culture to build false unity, always has been.
>from competing states
Ukraine Iran and Afghanistan are really the only states that have done defense "Alone" in recent memory. Everyone else joins larger groups for defense. NATO for example. The Nation State isnt the headline defensive organism, and when it is, its generally a failure.
>Nations organize themselves into states to protect and promote their interests.
This is the closest to the truth, except it would be better put as
>Nations organize themselves into states to protect and promote the interests of the ruling party.
Always has been, ever since the 2 dominant forms of government were Palace Economies and Temple Economies. The goal was suppression and slavery of farmers to ensure the quality of life of the people in the cities, so they can build secondary and tertiary industries to enrich the Prince or Priest at the top of the pack.
Yes, and they usually want to form a state based around this identity. I suppose you don't consider that desire legitimate. But then who will perform the functions of the state that you baselessly claim the internet solves? Who will settle disputes, determine land ownership, pass and enforce laws, prevent other groups from taking the territory, etc.? The internet?
> Ukraine Iran and Afghanistan are really the only states that have done defense "Alone" in recent memory.
It's telling that you think that because they don't only do good, then the good that they do doesn't count. They're not innocent enough for you, so they should dissolve their militaries, surrender their ability of self-defense, and throw themselves at the mercy of the world (How does that usually work out?) I wonder if you apply this standard evenly, or only to things you dislike.
Genuinely dont care, but forming a bigger meaner government seems to be absent from most cultural priorities.
>It's telling that you think that because they don't only do good, then the good that they do doesn't count. They're not innocent enough for you, so they should dissolve their militaries, surrender their ability of self-defense, and throw themselves at the mercy of the world (How does that usually work out?) I wonder if you apply this standard evenly, or only to things you dislike.
I genuinely have no idea what you are driving at here.
My presumption is that, as nation-states are deprecated, coordination between them will have to take the shape of sufficiently decentralized technology that the "networks have the ability to vet and ignore" portion becomes a local and voluntary process.
And - probably an area where reasonable people disagree - it's the (real or perceived) authority that makes it possible to "be used for evil"; if there is no badge and gun, and each message (broadly considered) is to be considered on its own merits (both for its truth and its persuasiveness), then I think that corporate propaganda just lands in the 'ignore' (or even 'spam') pile.
We privatized much of the information backbone that keeps our countries running.
Arm yourselves. Not just one person, arm your entire staff. IMO the most appealing option in this situation is to shoot the thugs in the face. (Ha ha, you're in the UK, I know.)
Yes, they used the SMS as a prompt to increase risk. People are awful these days
The dailymail will join their campaign to seek justice for the victims.