This short article offers wild opinions with no understanding of history or any meaningful analysis. The authors also clearly have an ideological axe to grind (I mean, come on… the CATO Institute?)
If there were any facts presented I’d say they lie, but since they’re just talking about a made up fairy tale, it’s only a silly piece of fiction. I feel stupid leaving a comment warning others.
Indeed, to write an article with "rise of transnational corporations" without a mention of East India company takes the cake for historically illiterate corporate propaganda.
China has four times the population of the US, a comparable GDP, and isn't finished industrializing yet. If anything, digital technologies have strengthened the nation-state in China. China used to be too big for detailed central government control. "The mountains are high and the emperor is far away." Today, high speed rail and networks cut through the mountains, and Beijing definitely is monitoring what's going on in the outer provinces.
Fifty years out, the US may be a comfortable but lagging backwater like the UK, living on memories of empire.
I use Libib as well. It has a blazing fast barcode scanner, though manual entry is a bit cumbersome. They seem like a good company, though longevity might be a concern. There is an easy export option, anyways.
The article pointed out -- at some length -- ways that the brave new gig job world is different: less training, more inexperienced drivers, more layers of contractors and subcontractors, drivers under very aggressive time pressure, drivers in vehicles with which they are unfamiliar, and drivers on routes with which they are unfamiliar. And for the coup de grâce, Amazon -- unlike Fedex, DHS, UPS, or the USPS -- worms out of liability for any of these accidents, eliminating pressure to reduce them.
Agree or disagree, but it's hard to see how you read the article and didn't see the extensive discussion of ways Amazon is more dangerous.
One of my chief complaints about the "gig" economy; large corporations get to avoid certain risks and (some) people ignore (or may be ignorant of) these risks which means society sometimes shares the burden. For example, not paying the extra insurance premiums when using their vehicle for commercial purposes.
I think of it similar to working under the table; some think "I get paid more than minimum wage and save money on taxes!" But the employer often saves much more and the worker is often to naive to realize what they're losing out on (social security contributions, potential workers compensation benefits, potential recovery of wages, etc)
> the brave new gig job world is different: less training, more inexperienced drivers, more layers of contractors and subcontractors, drivers under very aggressive time pressure, drivers in vehicles with which they are unfamiliar, and drivers on routes with which they are unfamiliar.
This seems to apply to Uber drivers in the UK - I've never been in one, but as a pedestrian they are terrible drivers compared to taxis, I frequently witness them driving through zebra crossings and red lights while pedestrians are using them... taxis are the complete opposite, they go out of their way to be nice to pedestrians, after all they are potential customers.
> taxis are the complete opposite, they go out of their way to be nice to pedestrians
You must be living in a different UK to me (and everyone else based on the general consensus of taxis)!
Uber drivers have to drive well else they'll be reviewed poorly. If someone leaves a 1* review for their Uber driver saying that they drove through a red, there will be serious repercussions. Try complaining about a similar thing to a taxi company and see how that works out for you.
> Uber drivers have to drive well else they'll be reviewed poorly. If someone leaves a 1* review for their Uber driver saying that they drove through a red, there will be serious repercussions.
I really doubt that, people riding in ubers are too busy on their phones... and often the drivers are too which is why they are so unobservant.
Taxis in between jobs are on the look out for being hailed, they have their eyes on the road and on the street.
This is empirical, if you watch enough of them while they are around pedestrian crossings see how attentive they are by comparison.
In terms of quality of drivers respecting other cars: regular car drivers > taxi drivers > Uber drivers.
Uber drivers are the worst to drive near to. They do all sorts of stupid things like pull over in spots where they SHOULD not, all to pick up or drop off passengers.
I see it time and time again. They prioritise their customer over the road rules and respect for other vehicles.
Taxi drivers also drive faster than Uber drivers, who seem to enjoy sitting well under the speed limit.
According to the Buzzfeed investigation, Amazon set it up so as to not require a more stringent commercial driver’s license, and Amazon was exerting such pressure on their contracted startup delivery companies that the companies were telling their drivers not to wear seatbelts and the culture was to pee in bottles. There were even examples of dispatchers telling drivers to flee the scene of accidents to make sure they made their deliveries.
Stressing and driving untrained people that hard has a lot more with the sad frequency of vehicular delivery crashes. If Amazon used established companies with trained drivers instead like Fedex, USPS, and UPS, which take safety much more seriously, we wouldn't be talking about this.
If you’re doing this argument, you should go the full HN and blame zoning.
Poor Amazon wouldn’t need drivers if only zoning rules allowed them to place warehouses anywhere. If silly regulations didn’t forbid Amazon from putting a container full of stuff in every driveway, rent free, countless lives would be saved.
Agreed. While I find minimum price thresholds and sin taxes personally annoying, there's lots of good research associating ease of access and low prices with alcoholism, which has high costs in terms of healthcare and individual suffering.
I hate it. It just more of Canadian government paternalism, taking away people’s agency: “you cannot be trusted to make the right decision, so we’ll make the wrong decision more expensive to do.” The worst thing isn’t even the paternalism, it’s the hypocrisy. “This tax is to protect you and everyone around you” but in reality “oh yeah please don’t stop drinking because it’s bringing in so much tax revenue.”
Sure, agency and personal responsibilities are important values. But if you were the lawmaker here, would you remove the sin tax?
Empirically, you should be pretty confident that removing the tax will cause deaths, illnesses, etc. to go up. Keeping it costs some people some annoyance, and reduces everyone's agency.
At the end of the day, you have to make a judgement on:
value(agency) + value(tax annoyance) > value(deaths, illnesses, etc., externalities of these on others)
So what do you do? You might think it's obvious. I'm genuinely not sure -- and I think `value(agency)` is pretty high. But am I confident enough in just how high it is /really/ to live with the possibility of being wrong? (And the, in this case pretty concrete, blood on the hands?)
(What I'm really getting at here is a way to think about this, not the actual problem. Things are extremely polarized these days. Calling something paternalistic/etc is asking for an emotional response. But if what this really means is just that someone thinks `value(agency) > value(X)`, and I don't... well, there's no immediate emotional response there. How confident am I in `value(agency)` and `value(X)` really? That seems like a path to much healthier discussion, at least to me.)
I agree. Lotteries and Gaming are even worse; they warn you one sentence "please play responsibly" and then with the next sell you "this is how all your dreams come true"
Legal weed is the next one. They could have just decriminalized it but instead play this game to maximize how much they can sell it for without creating a black market.
We're saddled with these vestiges of the early 20th century because of Prohibition. But that period has long since passed. The new reason for keeping them is the revenue stream. This is often justified by the "societal cost" of alcohol because it is more fashionable to use that as the excuse, rather than money.
Yes, that's what libertarian paternalism (see: Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein) is meant to do. Legal and abundant alcohol imposes high negative externalities on the rest of the population. Sin taxes reduce consumption because economic incentives usually work.
It's when things are outright illegal (see: prohibition, narcotics) or the cost of ignoring the law is de facto lower than the legal price that things become quite dangerous for consumers, like the sale of narcotics laced with cheaper, more potent compounds like fentanyl.
For better and worse, a regulated market that pushes prices upward is usually better than an unregulated market or a criminalized one.
Just when you think you've seen everything; someone actually came up with this term? Is this meant to try to convince libertarians as to the merits of statism and regulation?
I don't think it's good enough. It's just one situation, but there are others. Alcohol makes people more aggressive. It also makes them piss on the streets. A neighborhood I lived in banned alcohol sales past 10pm for those reasons.
The fact is there are social costs to alcohol and they have to be internalized somehow. Taxes are a pretty good way of doing that.
> there's lots of good research associating ease of access and low prices with alcoholism
Would you mind linking your favorite papers concerning this? Most of the ones that I could find did not include an evaluation of the prices.
I would only assume that such laws would have the biggest effect on people who are already alcoholic, lowering their quality of life as they would have to spend much more on alcohol and potentially having to avoid spending money on meals or rents.
In Chile, ersatz wine costs $2 a bottle, at the vineyard. That's what Concha y Toro (for one) pays vintners who sell excess supply that is undifferentiated in the wine market. Perhaps without taxes it would be cheaper, but it's somewhat more expensive to make than soda.
Wine, and especially local wine, would be a relatively expensive way to make alcohol. It would be more in the category of fresh fruit juice. Something like vodka on the other hand is mostly just industrial.
Not even in theory. I live in Germany and can get 500ml of average beer for around 0,50€. That's cheaper than soda in a lot of cases (ignoring the cheapest soda). We can also drink in public legally, and it is socially acceptable.
>there's lots of good research associating ease of access and low prices with alcoholism
Do you believe that you'd be an alcoholic, were it not for the high prices on alcohol, or the monopolies controlling sales in most provinces? This likely says more about you than it does those who are merely annoyed by the high prices.
Whether or not that individual person would have been an alcoholic is irrelevant. We have data to prove that raising alcohol prices reduces the number of alcoholics.
Do you believe you are immune to addiction? Because that says a lot about you, too.
>Do you believe you are immune to addiction? Because that says a lot about you, too.
Well I'm not an alcoholic, and it probably does say something about me.
A lot of these kinds of discussions come down to what one thinks the role of the state should be in trying to engineer behaviour. Even if you could prove that government-imposed higher prices lead to a reduction in dependency, some would prefer a freer society to such controls.
An alcoholic is not free not to drink alcohol in any meaningful sense. Restricting access to alcohol can actually make society freer if it reduces the number of alcoholics.
>Restricting access to alcohol can actually make society freer if it reduces the number of alcoholics.
That's a pretty scary way of thinking. I don't want to attack a strawman here, but it looks like you're trying to reverse the definition of "freer" to be the opposite of what most would think it is.
It's not scary at all. It's the tradeoff we've always been making.
Restricting access to slavery made society freer. Not giving anyone the freedom to buy and sell human beings actually made everyone much more free.
In the practical sense there are many freedoms which if they are restricted produce a net gain in freedom. Imminent domain encroaches on freedom to own land, but think of how much freedom a highway gives people.
When the government forces everyone to pay tax for national healthcare, it gives every single citizen much more freedom.
Freedom from alcohol's harms vs freedom to consume alcohol is a typical, valid, discussion to negotiate societal vs individual freedoms.
>Restricting access to slavery made society freer.
You mean removing the laws that enforced slavery made society freer? Because slavery in North America, at least, was backed by law. It took government to make slavery possible.
>Examples of government-backed theft (property and money)
We don't see freedom the same way. We will not agree on this matter.
>This is true in the sense that property rights always depend on law and the government making the law.
This rebuttal is getting recycled so often that I nearly addressed it before anyone said it. But since you've said it, I'll say that it is true only to the extent that government holds a monopoly over dispute resolution in matters of property. As it stands, indeed, any kind of ownership is dubious, considering that many are required to pay what amounts to rent (property tax), or lose their land. This is on top of the ability of the state to simply take land and other forms of property, based on whatever the local legal system allows (eminent domain, asset forfeiture, etc).
I'd add that this isn't necessarily an easy problem to solve, so I don't propose that anyone has a utopian answer to it all.
> But since you've said it, I'll say that it is true only to the extent that government holds a monopoly over dispute resolution in matters of property.
In any social system in which “property” can be a meaningful context, there will be either an entity or an aggregate of entities which together exercise ultimate power in dispute resolution in the form of a monopoly on legitimate violence, and whatever entity or aggregate does so is called “government”, and “property” itself exists as an application by government of it's monopoly on violence to constrain behavior of individuals contrary to the property rights it defines.
Yes, slavery is imposed by government through force—but only in the exact sense that all property relations are.
> As it stands, indeed, any kind of ownership is dubious, considering that many are required to pay what amounts to rent (property tax), or lose their land.
Fee ownership (whether fee simple which is the dominant modern form or others that have fallen from favor like fee tail) has usually involved such payments. Allodial title has not, but allodial title has been typical of direct holding by the sovereign.
>Arguments tend to get weaker if you omit half of them.
You made two arguments, of which I responded to one as I considered them to be quite separate.
>In what useful sense does an alcoholic have the freedom not to drink?
If alcoholics have no agency (which is a matter of some dispute as I understand it), then freedom (as most would understand it) isn't an issue for them anyway. It is for the rest of us (society).
> If alcoholics have no agency (which is a matter of some dispute as I understand it), then freedom (as most would understand it) isn't an issue for them anyway. It is for the rest of us (society).
I know what I wanted to express less than an hour ago. How can you possibly disagree with me on that?
By the way: My argument is that being an alcoholic makes one less free (they can come to the conclusion that they should stop drinking and make that decision, but being addicts, they cannot follow through). By preventing people from becoming alcoholics, you prevent them from losing their freedom, thus making society as a whole freer.
I thought it was obvious the way I phrased it, but apparently I was mistaken. Sorry for that.
> I don't think I did at all. It is likely that we're just not going to see eye to eye on this one.
> By preventing people from becoming alcoholics, you prevent them from losing their freedom
Why shouldn't it be their right to lose their freedom if they choose so?
Even if you argued that it should not be their right to control their body you would still also have to argue that the side-effect (which restricts the freedom of people that produce alcohol in a way that leads to everyone having to pay much higher prices) is acceptable.
> Why shouldn't it be their right to lose their freedom if they choose so?
No one of sound mind chooses to become an alcoholic. People might accept the risk in exchange for the effects or taste though, and taking that choice from them is a negative.
> Even if you argued that it should not be their right to control their body you would still also have to argue that the side-effect (which restricts the freedom of people that produce alcohol in a way that leads to everyone having to pay much higher prices) is acceptable.
The producers of alcohol are slaves to the market anyway. The reduced freedom of people who want to consume alcohol is an issue though. I dont know if restricting access to alcohol actually increases freedom. My point is that it is not obvious that it decreases freedom.
> In what useful sense does an alcoholic have the freedom not to drink?
In the sense that the state will not use the threat of force in order to make them drink and in the sense that there will not be any danger to their health if they do not drink.
> In the sense that the state will not use the threat of force in order to make them drink
That -- negative freedom -- is a useless concept. It does not matter whether you cannot choose freely because of coercion by the state or for other reasons.
> and in the sense that there will not be any danger to their health if they do not drink.
So you just refuted two potential reasons why alcoholics could not be free not to drink alcohol. They do not matter, because a third reason applies: That they are addicted to it.
The example you've cited, while good food for thought, is an example of replacing one horrendous law (slavery was once backed by the force of law in the US) with an admittedly much better law.
You dont need a separate law for slavery to exist. If 1. freedom of contract is unrestricted and 2. parents are allowed to make decisions for their children and enter contracts in their name, then:
* Someone can sell themselves into, or otherwise enter, slavery.
* When that slave has a child, the owner can order them to enter a contract in the childs name that makes the child a slave.
Serfdom started in a similar manner, at least in some places: A free peasant agreed to become a serf in exchange for protection, then their descendants inherited that status.
Not to turn HN into ebay, but if anyone wants to buy my Freewrite (modern version of AlphaSmart, as the developers point out below), hit me up: iqdupont.com
That's the curious thing: to an academic there's no such thing as "extremely boring Latin", especially when it comes to the Voynich. Why we're only given a tantalizing line is odd. Perhaps there is no single "universal" solution? Perhaps this is just a guess that happens to roughly work for a single line, but nothing else?
I agree. To claim a solution without writing out the whole thing so it can be analyzed in depth seems absurd to me. I'm also not convinced that the statistical analyses that have been thrown at it would fail to detect patterns of meaning that are obscured merely by abbreviation.
Agreed. It's a super strange article (sure, written like an academic, but even most don't bury the lede that badly!)
From the article it isn't clear if all or just a portion of the text is decipherable using the implied logic (ligatures of abbreviations of medicinal items).
