Inciting violence against a minority group can do a lot more than make them sad. It can intimidate people. It can force them to leave town or prevent them from voting. Oh, and it can trigger physical violence, which... gets people trampled and killed.
You haven't really thought this through. Even for non-hate crimes, consider:
The difference for all of these is exactly "the reason you did it". The legal term is mens rea .
Hate crimes get an additional penalty because there's additional harm. It's an action against not just the person physically injured, but all the people of the sort of person hated. Slashdot-specific analogy: If a jock beats up another jock, it's just a fight. But if a jock beats up a nerd because he's a nerd then that will tend to intimidate not just the person he beat up, but all nerds.
Sorry, not totally following you here.
Are you talking about revenue neutrality for 1 and 2? That's irrelevant to the question of wasted time vs productive time. It's also irrelevant to knock-on effects (e.g., people traveling after rush hour who still encounter jams).
For point 3, if you're talking about a fuel tax, that doesn't maximize efficiency; load stays just as peaky. You need per-hour and per-route road pricing to shift demand to alternate times.
And regarding 4, allocating resources to economic need, you're talking like we aren't already spending billions on a highly complex system. It's just that the billions spent are in terms of lost economic productivity due to wasted time and fuel, rather than direct tax collected.
Not necessarily. For any change, there are short-term issues and long-term issues.
E.g., watch people complaining about how Apple is reversing the scrolling direction with the latest version of MacOS. Generally people grumble for a few minutes and then are perfectly fine with it. If you ask them at minute 3 whether it's a bad idea, they'll say yes. Ask them at week 3 and they'll say no.
He could just be saying that this is one of those things that people will be ok with when they get used to it.
That doesn't follow. That the Dutch ride more than almost any other country does not mean they're anywhere near the limit of the benefits that can be achieved by more ridership.
Four differences with a cash penalty for peak use:
1) The cash can be used for something else (e.g., road improvement), while time spent sitting in a jam is pure waste.
2) The penalty can be imposed directly upon the people actually driving in rush hour, without knock-on effects for others.
3) Pricing can be adjusted to maximize road flow. Traffic jams reduce throughput.
4) Cash biases use toward greatest economic need, rather than greatest willingness to waste time.
There's definitely a big difference, which is why I think the "any risk" standard you suggest is too extreme.
"Knowingly" is a good start. But there's a problem with that, too; it discourages knowing, or activities that lead to knowing, like investigation or research. A lot of the corporate criminals who caused the economic crash we're suffering from got away with it because they had plausible deniability. They just didn't know! And we happily ignored that they could have known, and probably should have known, and that they rigged things so that they wouldn't know.
We need corporate cultures that encourage investigation and honest reporting, but a standard of "knowingly" works against that.
This is the real reason why most large companies now have email retention policies and auto-delete everything after 30..90 days.
It is a cheaper "fix".
That is an incredibly important point. You could fix the email problem, but you can't fix people refusing to know. Almost everybody responsible for crashing our economy escaped accountability, and many of them claimed that they were blameless because they didn't know what was going on, after setting up companies in such a way that they were guaranteed to not know what was going on.
It's an endemic problem in corporate America, and we need to find a way to fix it.
Safety/security costs more up front, but costs less in the long term.
Not necessarily true. If you blindly make producers liable for all risk, and pile on top of that a substantial regulatory framework, you could create costs well above benefits.
I have a friend that makes jam. It's good jam. If she were to sell it at the farmer's market, people would happily buy it. And the sorts of people who buy jam at the farmer's market know what they're getting into. If by some fluke one of the jars doesn't seal properly, they'll deal with it. But in your world, she'd be exposing herself to substantial legal liability, plus the need to comply with a bureaucratic system that proves she has taken all possible steps to mitigate risk. Equipment, procedures, documentation, keeping up with regulations, filing reports. She wouldn't do that just to sell a few jars of jam.
For software, it's even worse. Regulating software creation uniformly is like regulating the creation of things made out of atoms: the variety is too wide to talk about it sensibly. The whole point of writing software is to do new things, which guarantees many risks won't be well understood. And software processes are moving to very fast cycles, where the goal isn't to completely prevent errors, it's to keep any impact very small. Regulation-induced ritual can wreck that.
Customers should generally be able to choose what level of risk they're accepting except where the risks are catastrophic and hard to understand (e.g., flying on a commercial airline). Without that freedom, we won't get small jam producers, we won't get companies that do bungee jumping or skydiving, and we won't get a great deal of the innovative software we now get.
That's the obvious solution to some, but it's not a terribly good one. If people were perfectly rational and had infinite thinking and observational capacity, your solution would work fine. But for the half-evolved monkeys that we are, it's much more efficient to solve some of the problems via non-market means. E.g., banning manufacture of pointlessly wasteful bulbs, or having government-run home retrofit programs.
Let me guess before I've read the article:
Larry Sanger, whose only claim to fame is a brief association with something that became impressive well after he left, is upset that people aren't deferring to him just because he has an official stamp of expertise in something other than the topic he is currently opining on.
If they aren't happy with the consequences of working for an organization that denies people their basic human dignities, then they should be looking for a new job.
Amen. Small-scale wrongness just requires some asshole. But ugliness in the large requires not just an asshole at the top, but a lot of compliant "just-doing-my-job" zombies at the bottom. We will never completely get rid of the assholes, but there's no reason to help them make the world worse. Even if it does come with a steady paycheck.
As if he'd use a script. I hear his plan is just to take prints of all his previous movies, blow them up with a lot of C4, and then take the frames that flutter down as the initial storyboards. Kind of like trusting to God, but Michael Bay believes only in Michael Bay.
(like dumping ALSA and moving back to the new OSS).
Speaking of which, what is up with Linux sound? I'm just an OS consumer these days, so normally I don't bitch about Linux issues. But for years sound has been at best a bit wonky, and often entirely fucked. And that's on mainstream hardware.
I ask because it sounds like you know some of the story.
Why didn't the promise of OO happen?
I wasn't around for it. But I'd say it's just another example of cargo cult programming.
It's much easier to say you're doing something, and maybe to observe some of the rituals, than to actually do the work. A lot of people working in OO languages don't even know what constitutes real OO. And I don't blame them; most intro Java books, for example, just give little snippets of procedural code with an occasional OO gloss.
You can see the same pattern happening today with Agile development. Some people get great results by deeply changing how they work. Others hear about it, adopt a fraction of it, and still see improvement. Then a lot of other people jump on the bandwagon, watering it down to the point where it's worthless, but in the meantime turning a big profit on certification, training, and consulting.
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach
