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Yeah I hard disagree with their statement.

I've come to observe with having kids (and also moving to Germany and seeing other kids shaped) that so so much is taught. There is a ton born into a kid but so many things like the ability to think critically about a problem is actually taught in primary school and early years education (kindergarten/kita/preschool). There might be some raw horsepower that some people have more or less of with regards to certain problem spaces but for the most part - how to tackle a problem and think critically is very much a learned skill that some may get on their own but it can certainly also be given to them.


I concur with regard to critical thinking being a taught skill. My read is that parent's comment is possibly more of a vent about the type of person many of us have become more familiar with than we ever wanted to in the past decade or so of "post-truth" discourse- the virulent, intentional ignoramus. (We could write reams about what leads people to be this way, but in the interests of keeping short-form commentary short-form, I'll say that I think there are a confluence of causes :P).

People who can assert both "Fauci was wrong about masks" and "Nobody really died from COVID" come to mind.

PayPal was a counterparty so if one side didn't pay or there was a dispute then PayPal was stuck in the middle. Visa and MC are just payment networks and have minimal risk. The only risk I think would be criminal liability (handling drug money) or maybe if the bank goes bankrupt before the payment is due to the merchant (but even that might be borne by they merchant - not sure).

Visa/MC do carry some risk, but the chain generally goes merchant -> acquiring bank -> ? platform (like Stripe or something) -> Visa/MC. So they care a lot about the people just above them in the chain, and not at all about the rest of them as they won't end up holding the bag.

At least if the failed bank is Japanese, all of it will fall under their deposit insurance program (https://www.dic.go.jp/content/000010138.pdf#page=13), although this is actually a rare guarantee (FDIC and SVB comes to mind).

> Full coverage for deposits for payment and settlement purposes, bearing no interest, being redeemable on demand, and providing normally required payment and settlement services


Cards are really slow and expensive to distribute and (tech forward) people would also prefer to just use their phone or watch. This is the kind or project that will take years to work and almost everybody now has a smartphone on one of those two operating systems in their pocket every time they leave the house.

Cards will have a slow demise over the next 10 years but it's coming whether we like it or not.


Support both?

Like to log into e-banking services over here we either have phone apps, or a code calculator device that can be used instead of those: https://www.seb.lv/en/private/daily-banking/tools-and-online...

Seems like common sense to me, the same how I have a wallet on my phone but still carry cards for payments just in case.


Well, at least in Spain cards typically take between 3 or 5 days to get to you via post mail when you first open your account in a bank, and when it's about to expire, from time to time, you get the new one weeks in advance.

So I don't think distribution is a problem. Of course companies would prefer to save the cost, and they also prefer that you use their applications, but I just don't think it's more convenient for the end user. Taking a card with you is not a big deal while having to use a mobile application or approved device limits your freedom to choose which smartphone you want to use or how to use it.


If true they would have told the Russians and the Chinese and yes everybody will know after the fact. But for various reasons they might not want to disclose ahead of time in case Trump gets talked out of it or they realize they're not ready or various other reasons (perhaps the Energy Dept. doesn't actually want to do it but they're going forward step by step hoping it gets halted).

If they already know, complaining about it in advance will soften the public shock when it happens, which is probably not what Russia and China want. They'd prefer that the rest of the world be maximally shocked and outraged by such a transgression of international norms.

Lots of people were using svn and mercurial was also coming up around the time that GitHub launched. Both git and GitHub were superior to all the other options but for many people they did the switch to GitHub and git at the same time.

Yeah, whilst git was more popular than mercurial, I still think mercurial would have won if bitbucket had a better UI.

It's interesting to me that the only thing that made me vastly prefer using Github over bitbucket is that Github prioritised showing the readme over showing the source tree. Such a little thing, but it made all the difference.


Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here and at the same time also open up immigrant visas too?

> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here

I recently went down this rabbit hole a bit thinking this was the obvious solution and was surprised to learn that the Reagan administration legalized all illegal immigrants in the USA in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control....

State control over employment and borders in the US is just too weak to prevent people coming over and so 30 years later this leads right back to the initial state.


This already happened in 1986.

"The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1982. The act altered U.S. immigration law by making it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, and establishing financial and other penalties for companies that employed illegal immigrants."

"By splitting the H-2 visa category created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the 1986 law created the H-2A visa and H-2B visa categories, for temporary agricultural and non-agricultural workers, respectively."

"Despite the passage of the act, the population of undocumented immigrants rose from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...


It creates a huge moral hazard to reward those who illegally entered/overstayed visas

Only in theory - they went through years and decades of hell already so it's not like people are going to try to emulate it just in case it works. Anyway, countries like America "contain multitudes" and there can and will always be seemingly contradictory paths chosen at the same time.

> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here and at the same time also open up immigrant visas too?

Any form of amnesty encourages the same behavior in the future.

How many and what kind of immigrant visas is an open question. There's definitely a need for more workers in some fields. Healthcare in particular could be well served by importing (even more) doctors from around the world.

What's not up for debate is whether we should be enforcing our immigration laws. If people different laws enforced, then get the laws changed. There's no unfairness to the current laws. And flooding the country with cheap labor hurts the lowest tiers of the populace the most.


'flooding'??

That's a strong statement. Also imho it's important that we use Signal for normal stuff like discussing where to get coffee tomorrow - no need for disappearing messages there.


I'm weird, i even have disappearing messages for my coffee chats. It's kind of refreshing not having any history.


I'm an inbox zero person... I keep even my personal notes to disappear after 2 days. For conversations 1 day.


Strong and accurate. Considering non-disappearing messages the same as texts is not the same thing as saying all Signal messages ought to be disappearing or else the app is useless.

Telegram allows you to have distinct disappearing settings for each chat/group. Not sure how it works on Signal, but a solution like this could be possible.


Not if you're using Signal for life-and-death secure messaging; in that scenario it's table stakes.


Even if this worked (which would be massively expensive to implement) the misconfiguration possibilities are endless. It wouldn't be customer-centric to actually release this capability.

Better for the foreseeable future to have separate devices and separate accounts (i.e. not in the same iCloud family for instance)


Same with a Metric ton (a "tonne") which is one thousand kilograms (pretty close to an imperial ton).


Basically everybody agrees with what you're saying which is what makes this an insidious comment.

In general the pressure against regulation comes from narrow winners (oil industry for instance) whereas the pressure for regulations generally comes from people focused on the greater good (even if they are misled by other narrow winners, for instance compliance firms).


There are valid reasons to oppose regulations. They can be used to create barriers of entry for small businesses, for example. They constantly affect the poor more than the middle class.


That is usually the opposite because the absence of regulations usually put the smallest players in a state of dependence of some huge monopolistic groups.

Think pesticides and genetically modified plants for example.


> They constantly affect the poor more than the middle class.

That’s a very broad statement. I expect there are many cases where that is not true.


"greater good" is arguably the most broad statement with a large history of hurting many people based on the "greater good".


Maybe. But the original context here is an article about removing lead from gasoline. Which I’m pretty sure that helped many people based on the “greater good”.

There’s no copper sulfate in canned green beans or borax in beef. Those seem all around good.

Let’s agree that impacts of regulations are nuanced, and not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic like, “regulations hurt poor people”.


When left to their own cigaret companies tell congress cigarettes are safe and non addictive. Left alone companies pay in scrip only usable at the company store.

The 'greater good' has arguably PREVENTED much more hurt of people than it has ever hurt. Meanwhile companies have PROVEN time and time again that they WILL hurt people when left to their own devices. In environmental policies. In pay policies. In employment policies. In EVERY aspect possible.


This is the extreme, and it shows how far some (most?) people would go. There are many examples, and more being minted, it can be a drag.

Yes, not just environmental, all kinds of money stuff. The more money can be how it gets on steroids.

But this says a lot here:

>not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic

With greed involved you can follow the money to an extent, you find lobbyists on both sides of every controversy, sometimes chalking up wins, other times losses. But they stay in business and grow by compromising the greater good with as little profit loss from those paying them the most.

They might switch roles when they lobby in favor of ordinary citizens one time, and squarely against in a future campaign. But they never actually switch sides, the least costly thing to compromise is the "greater good", which ideally from their point of view is intangible, versus actual money, which their clients are usually counting before they have earned any.

It's politics, all regulations are hard to pass, but as lobbying has increased, the difficulty of having good legislation in favor of the greater good is becoming less possible.

It just costs too much to have a seat at the table.

If people want to have good things, it might become completely dependent on older regulations which were in their favor before it got too expensive to do that any more.


Lobbyists at this point is just sports 'flood the zone' defense strategy gumming up the process everywhere so they can point and say 'look at it, government doesn't work'. Another form of the Reagan 'starve the beast' strategy to say 'look at it, government doesn't work'. I'm starting to feel the same with speech online. Capitalism and other negative social elements working to undermine the social system that impedes them just constantly flooding the systems that assume/can handle the volume of/when all interactions are in good faith but can't designed to handle malicious flooding.

Our society has an IRC/USENET problem.


For each instance did it help more than it hurt?

Not to simplify but if you have to make a decision shouldn't you always decide to help the most people?


> shouldn't you always decide to help the most people?

no.


Why?


Hundreds of book on utilitarianism have been published since Bentham (ca 1800) first argued 'why'. They argue the matter from evey perspective ad nauseam.

Check your public library.


Who shall we sacrifice for the greater good? Shall we sacrifice one child for two elderly? One healthy adult for two sick?


Whichever is worth more based on a subjective measurement

Protecting a small company's ability to pollute is not a valid reason.


There are valid reasons to oppose specific regulations not all.

Imagine I open a auto repair center and I perform oil changes. It would cost me money to have used oil hauled away or I could dump it down the drain. You probably support a requirement that I pay for the service.

I'm sure there are regulations that cause actual harm to small businesses that have little or no value but I wonder what percentage it would be of the total.


We're talking about environmental regulations. It is no more good for a small business to pollute than a large one, and it's precisely the poor who are most harmed by environmental pollution.


the largest unaccounted for victims of environmental degradation are our children and their children. given that we can't even keep from poisoning our own well water for our own uses today, it really does like on the whole we're failing to regulate sufficiently.

which isn't to argue that they shouldn't make sense. or that they should be used to tilt the playing field due to corruption, but on the balance claiming that we are currently overregulated is pretty indefensible.


Ah the old "it takes longer to learn how to cut hair than it does to become a cop".


The poor disproportionately bore the brunt of lead pollution.

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