I'm inclined to agree, but a thing that gives me pause is something like... if society decides it's okay to yell at cogs when the machine wrongs you, I don't trust society to judge correctly whether or not the machine wronged a person?
Like if there are three worlds
...then (broadly speaking) I think right now we live in (1), but I think I'd prefer to live in (2). But I'm worried that if we tried, we'd end up in (3) and I tentatively think I'd like that less.
Are ads externalities? In the sense of, imposed upon people who don't get a say in the matter?
My initial reaction was roughly: "web/TV/magazine ads no, you can just not visit/watch/read. Billboards on the side of the road yes". But you can also just not take that road. Like, if someone built a new road and put up a billboard there, and specifically said "I'm funding the cost of this road with the billboard, take it or leave it", that doesn't feel like an externality. Why is it different if they build a road and then later add a billboard?
But if we go that far, we can say "people can move away from polluted areas"! And that feels wrong.
Hm. So the reason to care about externalities is, the cost of them falls on people who don't get to punish the parties causing the externalities. Like, a factory doesn't care if I move away from a polluted area.
So a web ad, I go to the website to get content and I see ads. If the ads are unpleasant enough that they're not worth the content, I don't visit the website. The website wants me to visit (at least in part so they can show me ads), so they don't want that outcome. The ad can't bring the value I get from the website below 0 (or I'll not go), and it can't dissuade so many people that it overall provides negative value to the website (or they won't show it). They can destroy value relative to the world with no ads on the website, but not relative to the world without this website. For, uh, certain definitions of "can't". (And: ads on websites that also want me there for reasons other than showing me ads, are probably less bad than ads on websites that only want me there to show me ads.)
For a billboard on the side of the road... well, who's getting paid? Is it typically the person who built the road? If not, the incentives are fucked. Even if it is... like the website the road is giving me value, and the ad still can't bring the value it gives me below 0.
One difference: most of the value to me is getting me somewhere else, and the people and businesses at my destination probably value me being there, so if the value I get from the road goes to 0 and I stop taking it, that's bad for other people too. Another difference: what's the equivalent of "the world without this website"? Maybe if there's no road there I could walk, but walking is now less pleasant than it would have been because of the road (and the billboard that isn't narrowly targeted to drivers). Also feels significant that no one else can build a road there, and give me a choice of tolls or ads. The road itself is an externality.
I think my main conclusions here are
Absolutely. In adversarial setting (XZ backdoor) there's no point in relaxing accountability.
Well, but you don't necessarily know if a setting is adversarial, right? And a process that starts by assuming everyone had good intentions probably isn't the most reliable way to find out.
it's exactly the case when one would expect blameless postmortems to work: The employer and the employee are aligned - neither of them wants the plane to crash and so the assumption of no ill intent should hold.
Not necessarily fully aligned, since e.g. the captain might benefit from getting to bully his first officer, or from coming to work drunk every day, or might have theatre tickets soon after the scheduled landing time, or.... Obviously he doesn't want to crash, but he might have different risk tolerances than his employer.
(Back of the envelope: google says United Airlines employs ~10,000 pilots. If a pilot has a 50-year career, then United has 200 pilot careers every year. Since 2010, they've had about 3000 careers and 9 accidents, no fatalities. That's about 0.3% chance of accident per career. An individual pilot might well want to make choices that have a higher-than-that chance of accident over their career.)
Something was swept under the carpet here and that may have been avoided if the investigation was careful not to assign blame.
Stipulated, but... suppose that the investigators had run a blameless process, the captain had told the truth ("I disabled the EGPWS because it would have been distracting while I deliberately violated a bunch of regulations") with no risk of getting fired, and they found some rot in the culture there. Can they do anything about it? It seems like if the answer is "yes", and if anyone benefits from the current culture, then we're back at people having incentives to lie.
Blameless postmortems are a tenet of SRE culture. For a postmortem to be truly blameless, it must focus on identifying the contributing causes of the incident without indicting any individual or team for bad or inappropriate behavior. A blamelessly written postmortem assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had. If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the "wrong" thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment.
This seems true and important to me. But also... some people really are incompetent or malicious. A blameless postmortem of the XZ backdoor would miss important parts of that story. A blameless postmortem of Royal Air Maroc Express flight 439 would presumably have left that captain still flying? At any rate, as long as "the captain gets fired" is a possible outcome of the postmortem, the captain has incentive to obfuscate. (Which he tried unsuccessfully. Apparently we don't know if he was actually fired though.)
I guess there are cases where "ability to get rid of people" is more important than "risk that people successfully obfuscate important details", and some cases where it's not. I don't know how to navigate these.
Huh, thanks for the correction.
Smaller correction - I think you've had her buy an extra pair of boots. At $260 she's already bought one pair, so we apply thirteen times, then multiply by 1.07 again for the final year's interest, and she ends with no boots, so that's $239.41. (Or start with $280 and apply fourteen times.)
Not sure why my own result is wrong. Part of it is that I forgot to subtract the money actually spent on boots - I did "the $20 she spends after the first year gets one year's interest, so that's $21.40; the $20 she spends after the second year gets two years' interest, so that's $22.90..." but actually it's only $1.40, $2.90 and so on. But even accounting for that, I get $222.58. So let's see...
Suppose she only needs to buy two pairs of boots. According to your method she goes $40 → $21.40 → $1.50. (Or, $40 and no boots → $20 and boots → $21.40 and no boots a year later → $1.40 and boots → $1.50 and no boots a year later.) According to mine, of her original $40, $20 of it earns no interest and $20 of it earns a years' interest. But that assumes the interest she earns in that year is withdrawn, she gets to keep it but it doesn't keep earning interest. So that's why I got the wrong answer.
Well, I should like to see some examples. So far, our tally of actual examples of this alleged phenomenon seems to still be zero. All the examples proffered thus far… aren’t.
From https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1477942.html:
"These boots," I said gesturing at what I was trying on, on my feet, "cost $200. Given that I typically buy a pair for $20 every year, that means these boots have to last 10 years to recoup the initial investment."
That was on January 17, 2005. They died earlier this month – that is in the first week of December, 2018. So: almost but not quite 14 years.
So, purely as an investment, they returned a bit under $80, which is a 40% ROI.
But... if we're talking about this just as an investment, we need to compare to other investments. Let's say the S&P 500 returns 7% consistently (I think that's pessimistic - note, not adjusting for inflation because the $20 boots haven't changed with inflation either).
So if we think of this as a purely financial investment, I guess it was a bad one?
(This is also often missing when people talk about buying versus renting. Yes, the mortgage is often lower than rent, and house value is likely higher at the end, but you gave up investing your deposit. How do those effects compare? Probably depends on time and place.)
Sam Vimes is a copper, and sees poverty lead to precarity, and precarity lead to Bad Things Happening In Bad Neighborhoods.
Hm, does he? It's certainly a reasonable guess, but offhand I don't remember it coming up in the books, and the Thieves and Assassins guilds will change the dynamic compared to what we'd expect on Earth.
We got spam and had to reset the link. To get the new link, append the suffix "BbILI8HzX3zgJF8i" to the prefix "https://chat.whatsapp.com/IUIZc3". Hopefully spambots can't yet do that automatically.
This reddit thread has the claim:
Something related that you CAN do, and that is more likely to make a difference, is not ever to heat up plastic in a microwave, wash it in a dishwasher, or cook with plastic utensils. Basically, the softening agents in a lot of plastics aren't chemically bonded to the rest of the polymers, and heating the plastic makes those chemicals ready to leach into whatever food contacts them. That's a huge class of chemicals, none of which are LD-50-level dangerous, but many of which have been associated with hormonal changes, microbiome issues, and a whole host of other stuff that fits in the general category of "Why do organisms work differently than they did 100 years ago?"
Notably this is about plasticizers, a different thing than microplastics.
(In progress)
Fall of Civilizations #19: The Mongols
The Eurasian steppe is big and flat. Not many trees, lots of grass. Supports big herds. Thousands of years ago the ancestor of the horse arrived. At first it was used for meat and milk, then later for riding. The Proto-Indo-Europeans came from the area and spread themselves around a bunch. Much later the Huns came from the area and made Rome sad.
Around the 12th Century, the Mongols were one of a bunch of different nomadic groups living in the area. They had a not-so-great bit of territory in the north. They were themselves divided into smaller groups. There was lots of fighting among everyone. Lots of bits where I'm not sure if the people in question are Mongols or not.
A lot of the story comes from "The Secret History of the Mongols". Not sure if it's clear how reliable it is.
Temujin's mother fell in love and got married. She and her husband were travelling somewhere when they were attacked. She told her husband to ride away and save himself so he could marry someone else later, and he did. She got captured and taken as someone's second wife.
Temujin grew up with various siblings (all brothers?), including one older half-brother (from his father and his father's first wife). There were some tensions between them. I think it's around now he gets a blood brother. At some point he rides somewhere else, to stay with another family for a bit? He falls in love with someone there. I think he's something like 14 at this time. Before they can marry, he hears that his father has been killed by relatives of his mother's previous husband, and returns.
His mother and her sons are all abandoned by their tribe and expected to die over winter. But she keeps them alive, and when the tribe comes back they're surprised and a bit disconcerted. At some point he teams up with a brother to kill the eldest brother. The tribe is a bit worried that as he grows he's gonna bear a grudge against them, and he's sent into slavery. He escapes that, goes to claim his bride that he fell in love with previously, rejoins his family, and... I guess probably isn't at this point spending time with the people who sent him into slavery?
He and his wife and family join up with some other tribe including his blood brother. He becomes a good warrior, and he's popular. He divides spoils according to who did well in battle, not according to rank. And if a warrior dies, he gives that warrior's shares of the spoils to his wife and kids. He and his blood brother get more distant, and at one point BB snubs him and his wife encourages them to leave instead of staying. They do, and a bunch of others come with them because he's popular.
I don't remember how, but this escalates into a big feud between Temujin and BB. Eventually there's a big battle. Temujin loses and has to flee. Not clear where he goes but likely China. At this time another group of steppe nomads had conquered Northern China. They had a strategy of protecting themselves against yet more steppe nomads, by hiring some of them as mercenaries to keep the others out. When the mercenaries got too powerful, they'd hire a different group instead. Temujin gets hired, and I think starts assembling a big army again.
What he does is, when his group beats another group, he kills the elites but lets the warriors live and join him, instead of whatever is the custom (killing them all?). His mum, still with him, ceremonially adopts a kid from the group.
(I don't remember what happens to his wife during all this. Maybe she's with him in China. But at some point she's kidnapped, and then he recovers her, and it's not clear whether her first kid is his or not. He keeps the kid but names him something translating to "guest".)
His group grows like this, and eventually the Mongols appoint someone (his blood brother?) as something like "Khan over Khans" to face him. But this time he wins. Blood brother flees. Some of BB's lieutenants offer to betray him to Temujin, but Temujin has them killed for disloyalty. When he does capture BB, he has him executed without spilling blood, which is a mark of respect.
Now Temujin is the ruler of all Mongols. Calls himself Chinggis Khan, "great ruler" or something, it's a title that hasn't been used before. (Translation through Arabic and Latin turns the ch into a soft g and then a hard g, and now he's usually known as Genghis.) Reorganizes things a bunch. Warriors are organized in groups of ten who live together; then ten of those come together and elect a leader; ten of those, and ten of those, is a force of 10,000 which is big enough to be formidable but small enough to travel fast and feed themselves. He imposes a bunch of regulations. Allows a certain amount of religious freedom (there are Muslims, Buddhists, Christians - Temujin isn't any of those). Everyone has to perform one day a week in public service.