> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant
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 saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
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.
Reminds me of my time in a large dormitory. The first time the fire alarm went off at night without there even being a fire, I went outside. All the other times - and I lost track of counting - I just ignored it and went back to sleep.
On a finance level this is why correctly setting 'accidental trade limits' correctly is important. Otherwise traders see them so often they click through them.
And because of this, no browser of mine is allowed to send notifications, and also no app by default - they have to prove themselves useful first. Sorry fellow developers working on notifications, your work goes to the drain (mostly).
I recently unsubscribed from a grocery delivery service becuase they kept pushing adverts through their app. I gave them notification permission so I could see when my delivery is nearby, not so they could spam me. Voting with my wallet on this one.
(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)
In the US spewing all the alarms at the line level employees and fatiguing the shit out of them is a direct (and predictable, but of course everyone who complained in advance got sneered at by the usual demographics) result of OSHA policy. Same bunch of moronic incentives that result in there being a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally. Whenever you see an alarm fatigue workplace there's usually a rule in the rulebook that says they have to stop what they're doing for every alarm until it's triaged and documented. This is how the rules financially incentivize the company to act even if it's stupid and results in more screw ups.
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.
It’s the same in Romania where they use the system for every little thing from it’s raining heavily (often the alert comes during said heavy rain) or a nearby fire, or one infamous message saying something on the lines of “here comes the bear” when a bear was spotted within city limits. And it’s loud so a lot of people simply disabled the alerts altogether. But now that the real alerts are coming - see Russian drones entering the country, many people have them disabled
Taiwan has emergency messages, though not _that_ high frequency. There the main topics involve:
- 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
- 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...
> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.
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?
NK can just set up their own cell phone receiving SK alerts and know that they know and cancel the strike, making it into a boy that called wolf situation and possibly exposing agents.
I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem!
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.
I live in DFW Texas, use to be when you heard the tornado sirens you hit the deck. Now they go off, not kidding, for pingpong ball hail and “high winds”. That’s basically 1 out of every 4-5 spring/summer thunderstorms.
I mean, it is Texas; it's not unreasonable to expect thousands of heavily-armed people to form a posse and shot a few dozen people unrelated to the situation.
There are more granular controls, but the details are OS/phone specific and the selected threat level is ultimately at the discretion of the government bureaucrat pressing the SPAM button.
In the UK a few years ago, they tested the government emergency alert system, which was basically your phone turning into an air raid siren, regardless of what SMS filters you had set.
Every government should only put people who have worked in a SOC in charge of these systems. There's no way to take the cost of useless alerts seriously unless you've spent some time tuning them and living with the tradeoffs.
One can only hope the government has some klaxons stashed away.
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?
A good article, but missing one very important word: trust.
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.
> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing
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.
No, no, no and no. There's is right and wrong and there are evil people.
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 think "the right thing" implied by "civil" in "civil society" means equal say in legal matters, immediate calling out of corruption and full transparency requirements, rule by pre-established and mutually agreed-upon laws, absolute adherence to pre-agreed human rights that require total consensus to alter, etc.
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.
> 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." […] 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.
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.
> This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure...
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.
I think the right thing in this context relates more to every day matters that affects people and how they interact with the world.
Corruption, unsafety, tax avoidance, vandalism, not paying the bus/tram ticket, littering.
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.
But who decides which rules are neutral? Even this is relative and subjective. Laws are not inherently neutral. A pH of 7 is only neutral because it is bounded by 0 on the left and 14 on the right. In a different system, perhaps it would be from 10 to 30 and thus a pH of 20 would be neutral.
In that example the number on the scale is less important than chemical properties of the solution. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away and all that.
The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule":
"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.
I'd say expecting non-hypocrisy is also a top item. Someone says x behavior from a leader is disqualifying? OK, maybe that's their earnestly held belief and so worthy of consideration even if I disagree with their view. But if their behavior is the opposite/shows hypocrisy and suddenly isn't disqualifying? That should be a red line.
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".
What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It's okay for me to treat others that way?
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.
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.
> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing."
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.
Free markets do not resolve the tragedy of the commons. The fix is to not have 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.
You pay market price for oxygen. It just happens to be 0 right now. There isn't any reason in principle that price can't change (eg, if you want to go underwater getting the oxygen will most certainly cost you something, if you want your air at a certain temperature or humidity that costs you too). If we set up a moonbase or something then it might well be that oxygen would cost something.
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.
I fear that this conflates open and closed access with exclusive property rights. It isn't untrue that asserting exclusive property rights on something makes it closed access[0], but there are other mechanisms for achieving closed access of a resource, like enforced regulation.
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.
--
0: That is, unless the title holder grants license, but that's a whole other conversation.
> 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.
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.
I dunno, trust is a good foundation, and then you need some good ole fashioned checks and balances, required transparency & record-keeping.
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.
Trust is not a foundation of it, trust is a /resource/ that is produces by checks, balances, transparency and record keeping that reliably show how feedback function reliably catches up with most of the stuff that it's supposed to.
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.
Yes good point and in theory that's how it should work and mostly does. The interesting thing we're seeing is how it's playing out at a societal level with regards to the manipulation, gaslighting, cheating and bullying. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in individual interpersonal relationships, it sometimes takes a while for the victim to fully understand what's being done to them because the abuser is not only doing harmful things but then they also gaslight, manipulate, lie, etc. There's usually a lag effect for first time victims to fully understand what's being done to them, and now at a societal level it's taking a while for groups to understand the same pattern. The most unfortunate part of it all though is how many people and institutions are 'in on it' perse and continously prop up horrible behavior because it also suits them or in the case of bullying, they go along with the bullying so as to shield themselves from being the target.
Trust is a Continuum. I have relatives who grew up in places where you didn't need to lock the door at night and those who have to lock the door at night but that's enough and those for who that is not enough.
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.
Whether you mistrusted and were betrayed by that trust is binary, but that's like if someone says "radioactivity is a continuum" and you say "I either got hit by a gamma ray or not" as if that settles the question. Really the question was more like "what's the mean time to betrayal?" or "how big of a payoff can someone be trusted with before they have a 50% chance of betraying trust?" or "am I more or less confident that this person can be trusted in this situation?" or any of a dozen other obvious ways that people who seriously consider the issue of trust do so. If you think the binary states are absolute trust and absolute paranoia and there is no in between (as having any in-between makes it a continuum) then you've got a conception of trust that nobody else in the world finds seriously useful.
In the same society, some people personally experience that others are capable of robbery & much worse within days and some learn it within decades, and everything in between. Some may never have to confront this, all within the same city/state/country.
We could represent time-to-reality on a number line.
Maybe. There are a lot of online games where nothing is worth anything, but I don't think those are default high-trust societies. People will log in just to annoy the other players.
Beautifully said. I feel as if the society that we are living in does have a lot of implicit trust and if I may, I would like to add onto it with a few things.
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.
People have given up on the very concept of society. Everyone is racing to shred the Social Contract and revert society back to Do What You Can Get Away With lawlessness. We're replacing institutions with individualism. We're replacing "We're all in it together" with "We're in it for ourselves." We're replacing collective stewardship of shared resources with "I got mine, fuck everyone else!" One's Community has stopped being the fundamental atomic unit we organize around, in favor of their Tribe, their Family, or themselves as an individual. We no longer are capable of coordinated, collective action that benefits society.
>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 the UK is in long-term decline and despite what you may have heard, London is now safer than any US state.
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.
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?
But we have built so many enduring systems that rely on bad apples to function the way the do. See "insurance pricing", "private prisons", and "justice enforcement". In the real world, the ideal number of jails or homeless people is neither zero nor "all of them".
The ideal number of jails and homeless people is zero.
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 this is an attempt at humor, it is in very bad taste.
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.
I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything.
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
Has anyone studied why homeless people refuse help? It's usually because the "help" isn't help. E.g. "you can sleep here but only if you haven't used drugs in the last week, so we'll test your blood before we let you in"
How are you supposed to help a person like that thought?
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?
This is along the lines I mean. Or when shared households break up, and some stay, some leave, which one should you send to the asylum forever and why not both? Or to jail for the fights they both participated in? What of the deaths by a thousand cuts and no one at fault for the murder?
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.
You could also have "zero homeless" if you had a certain amount of cheap housing that even drug addicts and mentally ill people could afford. Or where the cost of helping them is not too much.
Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.
Some homeless people choose to not make use of such facilities, for example because they don’t want to get into fights with the other (ex-)homeless living there, or because of anxiety issues and the like.
>if you had a certain amount of cheap housing that even drug addicts and mentally ill people could afford.
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’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything
So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?
Honestly this isn't the right conversation to be having at all.
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.
And then there are people who aren't families, without the knack for conveying a moving story, or exceptionally good in every way but unfair circumstances.
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.
That's the plain truth, and I think it's unfortunate that we need to use sympathetic examples as a bridge. I guess I've accepted the premise that the privileged gestalt is profoundly distorted and that "charismatic macrofauna" are a necessary ladder to be kicked away.
The example is true, but to your point, isn't representative... and that doesn't matter.
Because there are places, where it's safe and reasonable to remain without a permanent home for an extended period of time.
Warmer areas of Australia come to mind, or Dominic van Allen (https://www.theguardian.com/society/audio/2023/sep/20/from-t...) from the UK.
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"
I knew someone who worked at some sort of homeless services clinic, and I asked how many people they were able to help get back on their feet in a sustainable way. The answer was 1; I don't know what the denominator was, but the takeaway is that most of the visibly homeless people you see are uncoachable and you really can't protect people from themselves. With a huge caveat that the visibly homeless is a subset of the homeless/impoverished population.
The implication (given that the US is an outlier here) is that prevention is much better than cure here; that means reform of healthcare and social housing so people are less likely to wind up in that trap.
In the real world the jails are for holding, the prisons are for convicted criminals and the homeless people (most of them anyway, because not everybody that is homeless is derelict, and the addicts) get whatever help they need. Because we actually can afford it.
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.
I think the ideal number of _prisons_ (as distinct from jails / pretrial confinement) is zero.
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/).
Some crimes are bad enough that the perpetrators don’t deserve second chances. I’m ok with punishment for its own sake in some cases even if it would be more “cost effective” or “productive” for society to rehabilitate.
Sure, again bad apples, but one size fits sentences to the same institution? They are not all of the people ever arrested, or all of the time, or even most, and still the fundamentally medieval violence we orient by.
I’d guess the downvotes are an aberration of today’s politics, because your account of the history is factually and legally valid. (keyword “restorative”)
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.
Is aberration for the ground you claim? My understanding is that in the west up until recently prisons were uncommon due to cost. The courts either fined you or they killed you. You might’ve been part of a Work gang, but the goal was to kill you.
I don't understand your question or your comments. I have not considered the relevance of execution to this discussion, but I do not see fines and imprisonment as the same categories of punishment/correction at all.
> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing.
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 think this worked out quite well when there was a societal expectation of conformity in various ways and so everyone's good actions was either directed to the good of everyone or the good of the tribe depending on the person and their sensibilities.
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.
It's a recipe for unhappiness to believe in either extreme: either that it's a waste of life to try and live by morals, or that one should shun wealth and influence to live a good life (and give up financial security).
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.
Having made similar experiences, I do have to say your conclusion to not be the good person isn't in your own interest, especially, but even otherwise, if your goal is power and wealth.
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.
I have also taken the black pill on society and trust. While I choose to remain true to my moral code, and attempt to improve the lives of those around me, I acknowledge that this is not rewarded in modern society.
What's a "good person" exactly? There are many wildly different definitions.
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.
Most people do try to live a life that contributes toward a positive future that we'll all benefit from, while choosing not to support the opposite of that. There aren't exactly large groups of people organising around the principle that they want everyone to be worse off. It'd be pointless and they'd get crushed; militarily if needed. Only very fringe groups organise around negativity. People aren't very good at bettering themselves & others but that is clearly the direction they're trying to go.
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.
Chances are, people are just expressing disagreement with you about what "positive" really means. And/or "benefit", "hatred", "ignorance" etc. Like, not what the dictionary says, but what in practice counts or doesn't count as an example.
No you were not lied to. and thank you for heeding the good advice to not be a jerk.
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.
Viktor Frankl's body of work deserves a plug. Meaning can be found in the worst conditions, it's quite subjective. With meaning comes contentment. Buddhist teachings also deserves to be mentioned. Suffering comes from clenching to what the external world should be instead of just accepting how it is.
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...
> Whether you see it or not, the vast majority of people /are/ generally good
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.
Not really sure if this was your intention, but you're making a very compelling argument to keep teaching a "moral code" in schools, churches and homes.
I actually think primatology is quite useful here. We aren't that different from other primates. We selfishly attach extreme morality only to things that impact us, which we would never do when we analytically study primates doing the same kind of thing (stealing and killing). To be frank, your kind of comment makes me more suspicious of human morality itself (as a social tool to mask resentment or overcome collective action problems towards some kind of aggressive action) than it does of humanity.
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.
Most people do want to be and think they are good people. People have very diverse understandings of what it is to be a good person. Very much rooted in tribalism and self-interest, like most any social animal.
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.
Paraphrasing from Plato's The Republic, when the rulers and their auxillaries raise children with proper balance in the body and soul, there will be no need to deliberate on what is the right legislation, for the legislators themselves will be just in their duties.
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.
Technology cannot solve social problems. Societies can solve social problems using technology, just as they can without using technology, but ultimately it is the society that solves the problem.
Hmm... technology sure seems to create, or at least to expose, a lot of societal problems, and does solve a lot of problems in exchange for a lot of money. Not sure the true rule is as stated.
Social media exposes weakpoints in human nature - mob mentalities, comparisons of global norms over local ones. People died and many more are likely disturbed and divided.
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.
If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too - the only modern tech industry we've ever known has been dominated by players attempting forms of lockin to capture rents and amass enormous fortunes, of course the technology of this society isnt generally helpful to the society at large.
> If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too
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)
Cocaine does solve a societal problem: the cult of performance pushing people to their limits. Without cocaine, there would be more burnouts and depressions (right now; I am not talking about long-term).
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.
I would argue the individual aspirations of the companies is somewhat irrelevant- even if we weren't profit oriented we'd have the same types/groups of apps (social media, etc..
Yep. The event in Egypt that this article opened with is an example of a state of exception, and it has been used effectively by rulers for a long time. Not just autocrats, but, even more importantly, by elected members of a government with checks and balances, as a way to bypass those checks and balances. The phrase was coined by a Nazi philosopher who proceeded to lay out the groundwork for the subversion of a constitutional parliament, which then worked effectively. It has been picked up by others like Agamben to analyze similar things throughout history (the Patriot Act for one).
”Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused…”
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.
> In truth, having experienced fire-starters, I'm not bothered about the contents of this latest message from the UK Government. Given the overstretched fire service and the imminent threat across most of the country, my personal opinion is that it is proportionate.
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"
> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:
> 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.
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.
It's really difficult to see what technologies will be enablers of state power. IMO, the techs ushering in 1984-levels of control are wifi, cheap cameras, and LLMs. The three technologies on their own are beneficial, but taken together they're going to make Big Brother seem impotent.
I think of it as, we've had a hurdle where computers were too slow to organize the data humans produced, but have since crossed it. LLMs and CV also enable analysis of fuzzy data, which hasn't been possible before. This makes me uneasy, to say the least.
I asked Claude to analyze and datamine all of my eleven thousand HN comments, plus my reddit comments, lobsters comments, mailing list emails, stackexchange content, etc. With this database it managed to create an entire dossier about me. It could psychologically profile me, and it had a better and more complete view of me than my literal psychologist. We identified things like weaknesses, social engineering susceptibility, likely scenarios. It got to the point it started digging into open source projects I made when I was a teenager and started making eerily accurate inferences about my childhood.
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.
I completely agree. I've done a similar experiment on this rather young HN account and it was already able to deduce some things that I never explicitly stated. It probably doesn't require much more than a megabyte of someone's Slack messages or emails to build a profile on them, and there's much more data out there than that. People can be linked by their footprints in big tech products, or more crudely by techniques like stylometry, which is fully accessible to foreign governments. LLMs will likely enable even more aggressive techniques for linking people's public data, let alone to analyze it.
> Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused - but I can't.
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.
I think that is right and with the way Ukraine and Iran is going, we will need smaller decentralised data centres etc too. Its coming from a sad, bad place but it may be better and more democratic, less centralised.
I’d go further, and predefine the available messages and bake them in - $place is {under attack|on fire|underwater|beset by the whooping palsy} etc. - and then the decentralised send no longer needs distribution of a message, just an ID and enumerated metadata, like location.
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?”
That works until you have a sudden and unexpected situation such as "There is an epidemic of black death, please remain indoors" which you didn't account for, and now you have to tell everyone that the country has been beset by the whooping palsy instead and hope the intent comes through
> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in?
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)
> Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused - but I can't.
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.
An interesting option that comes to mind would be having pre-specified codes that contain client-side (pre-baked in) messages, something like '1 - Wildfire alert: ...; 2 - Heavy rain; 3- ...; 1023 - False alarm: please disregard ...', possibly with another severity parameter to modulate messages etc.. Then at least no one could simply hijack the system to send arbitrary messages (only one of pre-chosen alerts).
"Sorry men with guns, the most we can do is send one of those messages."
You can't technology your way out of social problems. The conflicting requirements raised throughout the article are, indeed, ultimately unsolvable.
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.
The UK system has "severe alerts", which is what the wildfire alert was, and "extreme alerts" which is a higher category. Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me.
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.
> Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me
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.
An ordinary text message might well have sufficed in this instance from an end user point of view, sure. But there isn't an existing system to manage that.
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.
> it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.
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...
Not taking sides on the Egyptian situation or any other past or future conflict but as scary as men with guns may be, there are also men with information who use it in warfare to achieve similar goals.
It’s time like these that I wish technologists didn’t devalue social scientists so much as to effectively alienate them from forums like this.
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
> 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).
This article is painfully shortsighted about Egypt's moment in the Arab Spring.
(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.
> I'm not bothered about the contents of this latest message from the UK Government. Given the overstretched fire service and the imminent threat across most of the country, my personal opinion is that it is proportionate.
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.
I agree that there's no difference in principle between the government of the land you live on ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to everyone about wildfire danger; and ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country. This is simply what it means for a national government to exist at all - a local monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in order to enforce the law. Everything a government does, from laws regulating food ingredient labeling to collecting the social security tax from paychecks to organizing a formal military to fight a rebellion, is ultimately backed up by men with guns telling people what to do.
True, but let's talk about that word "legitimate" for a minute.
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.)
> 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.
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.
This will be my new go-to article whenever I talk to someone about how technology isn't a silver bullet and their thesis is that "yeah it is, we just dont have that technology yet".
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.
I heard stories from friends where such a system is used to broadcast ads to wide areas in South Korea, never had to deal with it myself but the way they described it made it sound like they were sent using that very same emergency message system.
Another interesting non-hypothetical example: many US states have so-called "blue alerts" which are used to send cell phone alerts whenever a police officer is attacked or injured. I used to live in Texas and blue alerts were a fairly frequent occurrence.
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.)
This kind of reminds me of how health care organizations were are are using non-opt out emailing which are suppose to be used only for alert related stuff to perform targeted marketing. As a Kaiser patient I received target vaccination emails with subjects lines like "Get vaccinated for flu to protect yourself for the holidays " during COVID. And its still going on afterwards.
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 generally turn off all emergency alerts completely, because anything I'd ever like to hear about, I would see from other sources, and generally, anything people try to force me to know is something I'm not interested in. I've experienced this phenomenon countless times: people generally push harder when they already know I wouldn't care. Anything actually interesting to me is self-evident and doesn't need to be pushed.
A few days ago I submitted what may have been the largest data breach in history. It got 1 upvote and vanished. I haven't even seen people MENTION the breach here.
I think one of the reasons is that it depends on the day and time you post things. I have seen submissions get nothing and the end of the day and have a better in the afternoon. And weekends seems like mornings are better.
I read this up until the movie trope and statement along the lines of "you can martyr youraelf but someone less moral will give in" but I'd say it's more likely they'll just find someone who voted for the other guy with the same knowledge as you.
Why waste the bullet?
I think the thought is that if they kill one guy who didn't vote for them, the rest of the guys who didn't vote for them will fall in line. They'd rather waste a bullet than lose institutional knowledge.
Last week I had boarded a flight at LHR and the crew were just starting their safety briefing when everyone's phones went off with that wildfires 'emergency' alert message.
I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.
My completely unsubstantiated impression is that it was the govt putting out a feeler on whether it should use the alert system more frequently (and afaik it was relatively unpopular)
I think answer in this day and age, is to invoke Skynet, and give an LLM control of the system. Glue a local model that works without Internet to it, and give it guard rails, and give it a bunch of system instructions defining the rules on what to let though. It wouldn't be perfect, but what system is?
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?
Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity.
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.
> What if armed thugs are sent in and the choice is send the message or die?
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.)
> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Lmao, which they will get around to after regaining and relosing the same Ukranian square kilometer 20 times for the next 12 months.,
We need large nation-states to make the modern world possible. The internet isn't just bits; everything depends on stuff that has to be shipped by sea. It takes a hegemon like the US and its allies to keep the sea lanes open. Navies are super expensive and a collection of small states wouldn't be able to build ships that could operate around the world.
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.
This tally only makes sense if you believe history started 2 years ago. The US literally re-opened the Strait of Hormuz itself back in the 80s during the Tanker War, at the very least for Kuwaiti oil tankers during Operation Earnest Will.
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.
What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates? What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B?
So you propose to replace the nation states with corporate governments. Okay, two questions: who gets to make the laws, including the property laws? and who gets to enforce those laws?
Given the vacuum left by pinhole-sized states, Vodafone could become the issuer of propaganda itself as it would have the airwaves and the power of a large state.
Well, I suppose my argument does turn on the scope on which you consider each of these 10 points.
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.
> The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to.
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.
>including their existence as cultural and ethnic groups
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.
The UK SMS decision also perhaps shows a misunderstanding of the British public these days: I had never smelled so many BBQs the day after that alert was sent and I'd heard similar reports of people being rebellious, fireworks etc
Yes, they used the SMS as a prompt to increase risk. People are awful these days
> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in?
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.
> But it is easy to see why some people feel this might open the gateway to messages which, at best, are irrelevant
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 saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
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.
Reminds me of my time in a large dormitory. The first time the fire alarm went off at night without there even being a fire, I went outside. All the other times - and I lost track of counting - I just ignored it and went back to sleep.
This also how a part of how a certain flagship got promoted to a submarine recently.
On a finance level this is why correctly setting 'accidental trade limits' correctly is important. Otherwise traders see them so often they click through them.
And because of this, no browser of mine is allowed to send notifications, and also no app by default - they have to prove themselves useful first. Sorry fellow developers working on notifications, your work goes to the drain (mostly).
I recently unsubscribed from a grocery delivery service becuase they kept pushing adverts through their app. I gave them notification permission so I could see when my delivery is nearby, not so they could spam me. Voting with my wallet on this one.
(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)
In France, we have a bed story for children related to exactly that: "Pierre et le loup" (aka your "crying wolf").
It may be a EU wide tale.
It's one of Aesop's fables, so it's probably widely known in all of Europe.
It’s a common tale in English speaking world as well, but we don’t use it as a bedtime story because of the ending.
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.
In the US spewing all the alarms at the line level employees and fatiguing the shit out of them is a direct (and predictable, but of course everyone who complained in advance got sneered at by the usual demographics) result of OSHA policy. Same bunch of moronic incentives that result in there being a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally. Whenever you see an alarm fatigue workplace there's usually a rule in the rulebook that says they have to stop what they're doing for every alarm until it's triaged and documented. This is how the rules financially incentivize the company to act even if it's stupid and results in more screw ups.
> a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally.
This is called "normalization of deviance" and generally should be avoided, because it often precedes a serious accident.
>This is called "normalization of deviance"
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.
Yeah, if only the government didn't regulate that pesky
checks notes
workplace safety, then for-profit companies could be free to act for the good of all, like they always do!
It’s the same in Romania where they use the system for every little thing from it’s raining heavily (often the alert comes during said heavy rain) or a nearby fire, or one infamous message saying something on the lines of “here comes the bear” when a bear was spotted within city limits. And it’s loud so a lot of people simply disabled the alerts altogether. But now that the real alerts are coming - see Russian drones entering the country, many people have them disabled
I got the bear one while on Transfăgărășan. Which is funny because the bears are totally expected there.
Taiwan has emergency messages, though not _that_ high frequency. There the main topics involve:
- 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...
Madness to me that a nation with a genuine need for emergency protocol spams their alert system.
> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.
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?
South Korean Intelligence and it's allies presumably have agents in the NK military who would give them advance notice.
NK can just set up their own cell phone receiving SK alerts and know that they know and cancel the strike, making it into a boy that called wolf situation and possibly exposing agents.
> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.
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
I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem!
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...
I live in DFW Texas, use to be when you heard the tornado sirens you hit the deck. Now they go off, not kidding, for pingpong ball hail and “high winds”. That’s basically 1 out of every 4-5 spring/summer thunderstorms.
What are they expecting a Texan civilian who gets this alert to even do? This is baffling.
I mean, it is Texas; it's not unreasonable to expect thousands of heavily-armed people to form a posse and shot a few dozen people unrelated to the situation.
There are more granular controls, but the details are OS/phone specific and the selected threat level is ultimately at the discretion of the government bureaucrat pressing the SPAM button.
In the UK a few years ago, they tested the government emergency alert system, which was basically your phone turning into an air raid siren, regardless of what SMS filters you had set.
I would imagine South Korea has a similar system?
Every government should only put people who have worked in a SOC in charge of these systems. There's no way to take the cost of useless alerts seriously unless you've spent some time tuning them and living with the tradeoffs.
Just a few days ago, I received one because of "the odour nuisance is no danger for the population"
People were calling the emergency hotline because the wildfires 200km away got so big that their smoke engulfed the city.
One can only hope the government has some klaxons stashed away.
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?
A good article, but missing one very important word: trust.
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.
> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing
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.
No, no, no and no. There's is right and wrong and there are evil people.
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 think "the right thing" implied by "civil" in "civil society" means equal say in legal matters, immediate calling out of corruption and full transparency requirements, rule by pre-established and mutually agreed-upon laws, absolute adherence to pre-agreed human rights that require total consensus to alter, etc.
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.
> 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." […] 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.
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.
> This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure...
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.
I think the right thing in this context relates more to every day matters that affects people and how they interact with the world. Corruption, unsafety, tax avoidance, vandalism, not paying the bus/tram ticket, littering.
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.
You don't have a society if half the population is fighting with the other half. Pretending that you do is not useful.
But who decides which rules are neutral? Even this is relative and subjective. Laws are not inherently neutral. A pH of 7 is only neutral because it is bounded by 0 on the left and 14 on the right. In a different system, perhaps it would be from 10 to 30 and thus a pH of 20 would be neutral.
In that example the number on the scale is less important than chemical properties of the solution. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away and all that.
The closest we have to a "neutral rule" is "The Golden Rule":
"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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule
I'd say expecting non-hypocrisy is also a top item. Someone says x behavior from a leader is disqualifying? OK, maybe that's their earnestly held belief and so worthy of consideration even if I disagree with their view. But if their behavior is the opposite/shows hypocrisy and suddenly isn't disqualifying? That should be a red line.
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".
What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It's okay for me to treat others that way?
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.
And lex talionis as a byproduct.
> But who decides which rules are neutral
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.
Those aren't neutral, they're just Schelling points.
[delayed]
> In any society, you're going to have diverse views of "the right thing."
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).
> selfish ambitions for power or money
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.
> You can only make money by pleasing your customers.
Are you sure?
How well do free markets resolve basic problems of resource distribution?
Like, say, the tragedy of the commons?
Free markets do not resolve the tragedy of the commons. The fix is to not have 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.
Are you saying I should have to bid for oxygen rights?
You pay market price for oxygen. It just happens to be 0 right now. There isn't any reason in principle that price can't change (eg, if you want to go underwater getting the oxygen will most certainly cost you something, if you want your air at a certain temperature or humidity that costs you too). If we set up a moonbase or something then it might well be that oxygen would cost something.
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 it's zero I'll just buy the entire planets worth of oxygen, please and thank you. That'll be $0.00.
I'm sure you're just being silly, but ok. Take what you can. That is pretty much literally how it works. I'm not stopping you.
Where can I buy oxygen rights?
I fear that this conflates open and closed access with exclusive property rights. It isn't untrue that asserting exclusive property rights on something makes it closed access[0], but there are other mechanisms for achieving closed access of a resource, like enforced regulation.
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.
--
0: That is, unless the title holder grants license, but that's a whole other conversation.
> 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.
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.
I dunno, trust is a good foundation, and then you need some good ole fashioned checks and balances, required transparency & record-keeping.
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.
Trust is not a foundation of it, trust is a /resource/ that is produces by checks, balances, transparency and record keeping that reliably show how feedback function reliably catches up with most of the stuff that it's supposed to.
The opposite state of affairs is /corruption/.
> trust
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.
Yes good point and in theory that's how it should work and mostly does. The interesting thing we're seeing is how it's playing out at a societal level with regards to the manipulation, gaslighting, cheating and bullying. I guess what I'm trying to say is that in individual interpersonal relationships, it sometimes takes a while for the victim to fully understand what's being done to them because the abuser is not only doing harmful things but then they also gaslight, manipulate, lie, etc. There's usually a lag effect for first time victims to fully understand what's being done to them, and now at a societal level it's taking a while for groups to understand the same pattern. The most unfortunate part of it all though is how many people and institutions are 'in on it' perse and continously prop up horrible behavior because it also suits them or in the case of bullying, they go along with the bullying so as to shield themselves from being the target.
It is kind of funny and sad that in the U.S. we've gone from corporations virtue-signalling to vice signalling in just a few years.
Having experienced vice signalling, I'm never going to complain about virtue signalling again.
They signal to whoever's in charge of the government. Sone people in charge respond to virtues, others respond to vices.
Trust is a Continuum. I have relatives who grew up in places where you didn't need to lock the door at night and those who have to lock the door at night but that's enough and those for who that is not enough.
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.
Sounds very binary, I don’t see the continuum. More like a steep cliff of shocking betrayal.
Whether you mistrusted and were betrayed by that trust is binary, but that's like if someone says "radioactivity is a continuum" and you say "I either got hit by a gamma ray or not" as if that settles the question. Really the question was more like "what's the mean time to betrayal?" or "how big of a payoff can someone be trusted with before they have a 50% chance of betraying trust?" or "am I more or less confident that this person can be trusted in this situation?" or any of a dozen other obvious ways that people who seriously consider the issue of trust do so. If you think the binary states are absolute trust and absolute paranoia and there is no in between (as having any in-between makes it a continuum) then you've got a conception of trust that nobody else in the world finds seriously useful.
In the same society, some people personally experience that others are capable of robbery & much worse within days and some learn it within decades, and everything in between. Some may never have to confront this, all within the same city/state/country.
We could represent time-to-reality on a number line.
You can turn a low trust society into a high one by just having nothing whatsoever worth anything.
Maybe. There are a lot of online games where nothing is worth anything, but I don't think those are default high-trust societies. People will log in just to annoy the other players.
So sayeth Epictetus after his prized lamp was stolen!
Beautifully said. I feel as if the society that we are living in does have a lot of implicit trust and if I may, I would like to add onto it with a few things.
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.
People have given up on the very concept of society. Everyone is racing to shred the Social Contract and revert society back to Do What You Can Get Away With lawlessness. We're replacing institutions with individualism. We're replacing "We're all in it together" with "We're in it for ourselves." We're replacing collective stewardship of shared resources with "I got mine, fuck everyone else!" One's Community has stopped being the fundamental atomic unit we organize around, in favor of their Tribe, their Family, or themselves as an individual. We no longer are capable of coordinated, collective action that benefits society.
Throwing something out to look at in the US at least--
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.
Much like people being arrested for online statements in the UK, while violent crime is swept under the rug or otherwise downplayed.
Which statements did people get arrested for?
Violent crime in the UK is in long-term decline and despite what you may have heard, London is now safer than any US state.
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.
No, we're in a vicious cycle where the police rarely do anything helpful about violent crime, so people have stopped reporting it.
The part I think people have given up on is the contract. There are no rights without obligations and there are no obligations with repercussions.
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.
Who, specifically, is "we" in this sentence?
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?
But we have built so many enduring systems that rely on bad apples to function the way the do. See "insurance pricing", "private prisons", and "justice enforcement". In the real world, the ideal number of jails or homeless people is neither zero nor "all of them".
The ideal number of jails and homeless people is zero.
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.
>Finnland for example has nearly eradicated homelessness. It is not literally zero but 0.08% which is pretty good.
If we had Finland's winters, I think we could eradicate homelessness by January.
If this is an attempt at humor, it is in very bad taste.
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.
Obviously the ideal number of jails is not zero, but why wouldn't the ideal number of homeless people be zero?
I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything.
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
Has anyone studied why homeless people refuse help? It's usually because the "help" isn't help. E.g. "you can sleep here but only if you haven't used drugs in the last week, so we'll test your blood before we let you in"
How are you supposed to help a person like that thought?
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?
Are you saying that drug users deserve to be homeless?
This is along the lines I mean. Or when shared households break up, and some stay, some leave, which one should you send to the asylum forever and why not both? Or to jail for the fights they both participated in? What of the deaths by a thousand cuts and no one at fault for the murder?
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.
Just make sure after each politician serves their term they get a year in prison.
You could also have "zero homeless" if you had a certain amount of cheap housing that even drug addicts and mentally ill people could afford. Or where the cost of helping them is not too much.
Like some housing that was built to be closer to "indestructible" than "nice" and was small, like 200 - 300 sq ft.
Some homeless people choose to not make use of such facilities, for example because they don’t want to get into fights with the other (ex-)homeless living there, or because of anxiety issues and the like.
They choose not to use these facilities because they can’t do drugs there.
Or the exact opposite of what you said.
>if you had a certain amount of cheap housing that even drug addicts and mentally ill people could afford.
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.
>That was absolutely free $0?
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
If it’s not in the city centre it will remain empty and if it is it will already be full
>I’m guessing there’s a bit of breathing room at the lower end of the system - there will be people who become drug addicts or have major mental health breaks and lose everything
So? Why can't a 21st century country provide them with some at-least pod-like homes, so they are not fucking homeless?
Because having homeless people is a deliberate choice, a feature of said country. Same with "illegal immigrants".
Homeless people are necessary so that poor workers can see what will happen to them if they stop working.
Honestly this isn't the right conversation to be having at all.
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.
And then there are people who aren't families, without the knack for conveying a moving story, or exceptionally good in every way but unfair circumstances.
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.
That's the plain truth, and I think it's unfortunate that we need to use sympathetic examples as a bridge. I guess I've accepted the premise that the privileged gestalt is profoundly distorted and that "charismatic macrofauna" are a necessary ladder to be kicked away.
The example is true, but to your point, isn't representative... and that doesn't matter.
Because there are places, where it's safe and reasonable to remain without a permanent home for an extended period of time. Warmer areas of Australia come to mind, or Dominic van Allen (https://www.theguardian.com/society/audio/2023/sep/20/from-t...) from the UK.
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"
We know most of them aren't choosing it though. They're "choosing" it by a creative definition of the word.
I knew someone who worked at some sort of homeless services clinic, and I asked how many people they were able to help get back on their feet in a sustainable way. The answer was 1; I don't know what the denominator was, but the takeaway is that most of the visibly homeless people you see are uncoachable and you really can't protect people from themselves. With a huge caveat that the visibly homeless is a subset of the homeless/impoverished population.
The implication (given that the US is an outlier here) is that prevention is much better than cure here; that means reform of healthcare and social housing so people are less likely to wind up in that trap.
Programs are watched carefully for embezzlement, not really accountable for positive outcomes.
Depends on your definition, but not everyone is necessarily happy (or at least, happiest) living under a particular roof.
Housing is a privilege, not a right, and not a requirement. Except, being a free country, in jail.
I said it is - I'm not saying it should be.
Then you should have said "housing is treated as a privilege" instead of "housing is a privilege".
Maybe it should be!
In the real world the jails are for holding, the prisons are for convicted criminals and the homeless people (most of them anyway, because not everybody that is homeless is derelict, and the addicts) get whatever help they need. Because we actually can afford it.
> Because we actually can afford it.
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.)
>There is an argument to be made
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.
How old are those systems in their present configuration?
What is the ideal number of unhoused people? And how do you arrive at that number?
Probably "fewer", and probably by providing step-up housing for more people to whom it is out of reach.
I think the ideal number of _prisons_ (as distinct from jails / pretrial confinement) is zero.
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/).
Some crimes are bad enough that the perpetrators don’t deserve second chances. I’m ok with punishment for its own sake in some cases even if it would be more “cost effective” or “productive” for society to rehabilitate.
Sure, again bad apples, but one size fits sentences to the same institution? They are not all of the people ever arrested, or all of the time, or even most, and still the fundamentally medieval violence we orient by.
That too. The check of "without due process" did not undo that rebranding or its many modern forms.
I’d guess the downvotes are an aberration of today’s politics, because your account of the history is factually and legally valid. (keyword “restorative”)
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.
Is aberration for the ground you claim? My understanding is that in the west up until recently prisons were uncommon due to cost. The courts either fined you or they killed you. You might’ve been part of a Work gang, but the goal was to kill you.
I don't understand your question or your comments. I have not considered the relevance of execution to this discussion, but I do not see fines and imprisonment as the same categories of punishment/correction at all.
> Civil society only exists when there is a collective general trust that most people are trying to do the right thing.
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 think this worked out quite well when there was a societal expectation of conformity in various ways and so everyone's good actions was either directed to the good of everyone or the good of the tribe depending on the person and their sensibilities.
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.
It's a recipe for unhappiness to believe in either extreme: either that it's a waste of life to try and live by morals, or that one should shun wealth and influence to live a good life (and give up financial security).
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.
Having made similar experiences, I do have to say your conclusion to not be the good person isn't in your own interest, especially, but even otherwise, if your goal is power and wealth.
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.
Pick up a copy of Crime and Punishment ASAP.
> which I would have been very good at
If you indeed lived morally you probably can’t know this.
I have also taken the black pill on society and trust. While I choose to remain true to my moral code, and attempt to improve the lives of those around me, I acknowledge that this is not rewarded in modern society.
What's a "good person" exactly? There are many wildly different definitions.
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.
> What's a "good person" exactly?
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.
Most people do try to live a life that contributes toward a positive future that we'll all benefit from, while choosing not to support the opposite of that. There aren't exactly large groups of people organising around the principle that they want everyone to be worse off. It'd be pointless and they'd get crushed; militarily if needed. Only very fringe groups organise around negativity. People aren't very good at bettering themselves & others but that is clearly the direction they're trying to go.
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.
Chances are, people are just expressing disagreement with you about what "positive" really means. And/or "benefit", "hatred", "ignorance" etc. Like, not what the dictionary says, but what in practice counts or doesn't count as an example.
People are good but you have an unrealistic standard for good
No you were not lied to. and thank you for heeding the good advice to not be a jerk.
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?
> 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.
Viktor Frankl's body of work deserves a plug. Meaning can be found in the worst conditions, it's quite subjective. With meaning comes contentment. Buddhist teachings also deserves to be mentioned. Suffering comes from clenching to what the external world should be instead of just accepting how it is.
Sending thoughts of hope.
I am reminded of what Fred Rogers would say in times like these.
> Fred Rogers often told this story about ...
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...
> Whether you see it or not, the vast majority of people /are/ generally good
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.
> Whether you see it or not, the vast majority of people /are/ generally good
No mate, the entire world is -not- like this. Thank your lucky stars you haven't had to deal with this.
Not really sure if this was your intention, but you're making a very compelling argument to keep teaching a "moral code" in schools, churches and homes.
I actually think primatology is quite useful here. We aren't that different from other primates. We selfishly attach extreme morality only to things that impact us, which we would never do when we analytically study primates doing the same kind of thing (stealing and killing). To be frank, your kind of comment makes me more suspicious of human morality itself (as a social tool to mask resentment or overcome collective action problems towards some kind of aggressive action) than it does of humanity.
I think the grass is always greener on the other side, and I'm glad that you're a good person.
> ... and I'm glad that you're a good person.
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.
Most people do want to be and think they are good people. People have very diverse understandings of what it is to be a good person. Very much rooted in tribalism and self-interest, like most any social animal.
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.
Paraphrasing from Plato's The Republic, when the rulers and their auxillaries raise children with proper balance in the body and soul, there will be no need to deliberate on what is the right legislation, for the legislators themselves will be just in their duties.
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.
Technology cannot solve social problems. Societies can solve social problems using technology, just as they can without using technology, but ultimately it is the society that solves the problem.
Hmm... technology sure seems to create, or at least to expose, a lot of societal problems, and does solve a lot of problems in exchange for a lot of money. Not sure the true rule is as stated.
Well, technology anyway is a way to trade one set of problems for another set of problems.
care to provide examples?
Social media exposes weakpoints in human nature - mob mentalities, comparisons of global norms over local ones. People died and many more are likely disturbed and divided.
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.
No, not really. I’m just questioning the axiomatic statement.
If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too - the only modern tech industry we've ever known has been dominated by players attempting forms of lockin to capture rents and amass enormous fortunes, of course the technology of this society isnt generally helpful to the society at large.
> If tech can cause social problems (there are multiple books on this) then it can solve them too
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)
Cocaine does solve a societal problem: the cult of performance pushing people to their limits. Without cocaine, there would be more burnouts and depressions (right now; I am not talking about long-term).
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.
I would argue the individual aspirations of the companies is somewhat irrelevant- even if we weren't profit oriented we'd have the same types/groups of apps (social media, etc..
Yep. The event in Egypt that this article opened with is an example of a state of exception, and it has been used effectively by rulers for a long time. Not just autocrats, but, even more importantly, by elected members of a government with checks and balances, as a way to bypass those checks and balances. The phrase was coined by a Nazi philosopher who proceeded to lay out the groundwork for the subversion of a constitutional parliament, which then worked effectively. It has been picked up by others like Agamben to analyze similar things throughout history (the Patriot Act for one).
It's fundamentally not a matter of technology.
”Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused…”
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.
That ignores the men with guns, who would probably say that their alert is very important.
Take a look at the article. The issue is more complex.
> In truth, having experienced fire-starters, I'm not bothered about the contents of this latest message from the UK Government. Given the overstretched fire service and the imminent threat across most of the country, my personal opinion is that it is proportionate.
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"
> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:
> 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.
> Requiring strong proof that the message is authentic before sending
"Before Sending" is the lynchpin here.
The receiver needs to be performing verification, and have the ability to blacklist sources.
Which requires distributed infra.
Some sort of chain... of blocks, that would require distributed consensus before the message would go out? Hmm...
Yep.
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.
But did it work?
It's really difficult to see what technologies will be enablers of state power. IMO, the techs ushering in 1984-levels of control are wifi, cheap cameras, and LLMs. The three technologies on their own are beneficial, but taken together they're going to make Big Brother seem impotent.
I think of it as, we've had a hurdle where computers were too slow to organize the data humans produced, but have since crossed it. LLMs and CV also enable analysis of fuzzy data, which hasn't been possible before. This makes me uneasy, to say the least.
I asked Claude to analyze and datamine all of my eleven thousand HN comments, plus my reddit comments, lobsters comments, mailing list emails, stackexchange content, etc. With this database it managed to create an entire dossier about me. It could psychologically profile me, and it had a better and more complete view of me than my literal psychologist. We identified things like weaknesses, social engineering susceptibility, likely scenarios. It got to the point it started digging into open source projects I made when I was a teenager and started making eerily accurate inferences about my childhood.
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.
I completely agree. I've done a similar experiment on this rather young HN account and it was already able to deduce some things that I never explicitly stated. It probably doesn't require much more than a megabyte of someone's Slack messages or emails to build a profile on them, and there's much more data out there than that. People can be linked by their footprints in big tech products, or more crudely by techniques like stylometry, which is fully accessible to foreign governments. LLMs will likely enable even more aggressive techniques for linking people's public data, let alone to analyze it.
Precisely, modern multimodal LLMs are a breakthrough in ultra high volume data processing, for all their flaws
And drones.
> Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused - but I can't.
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.
I think that is right and with the way Ukraine and Iran is going, we will need smaller decentralised data centres etc too. Its coming from a sad, bad place but it may be better and more democratic, less centralised.
I’d go further, and predefine the available messages and bake them in - $place is {under attack|on fire|underwater|beset by the whooping palsy} etc. - and then the decentralised send no longer needs distribution of a message, just an ID and enumerated metadata, like location.
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?”
That works until you have a sudden and unexpected situation such as "There is an epidemic of black death, please remain indoors" which you didn't account for, and now you have to tell everyone that the country has been beset by the whooping palsy instead and hope the intent comes through
> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in?
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)
Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders (the Nuremberg defence, “we were only following orders”).
"the answer is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights"
Egypt explicitly rejects this.
> Perhaps you can think of a way to design an alerting system which cannot be abused - but I can't.
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.
Can't believe it's 2026 and people still believe this nonsense about technology being neutral.
An interesting option that comes to mind would be having pre-specified codes that contain client-side (pre-baked in) messages, something like '1 - Wildfire alert: ...; 2 - Heavy rain; 3- ...; 1023 - False alarm: please disregard ...', possibly with another severity parameter to modulate messages etc.. Then at least no one could simply hijack the system to send arbitrary messages (only one of pre-chosen alerts).
"Sorry men with guns, the most we can do is send one of those messages."
Men with guns from the /other/ country rejected this design already.
You can't technology your way out of social problems. The conflicting requirements raised throughout the article are, indeed, ultimately unsolvable.
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.
The UK system has "severe alerts", which is what the wildfire alert was, and "extreme alerts" which is a higher category. Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me.
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.
> Both trigger the siren sound, but sending this in the second-highest category seems ok to me
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.
An ordinary text message might well have sufficed in this instance from an end user point of view, sure. But there isn't an existing system to manage that.
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.
> it’s bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.
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...
Not taking sides on the Egyptian situation or any other past or future conflict but as scary as men with guns may be, there are also men with information who use it in warfare to achieve similar goals.
https://xkcd.com/538
The bigger threat to our society is, that large corporations start to assume they are above the law.
We privatized much of the information backbone that keeps our countries running.
Most of the time there is exactly one corporation that is above the law in a given area simply as a result of them having the guns.
Yeah, but they’re allowed to use the guns and have a monopoly on their legal use, because they have the guns. Shut up, it’s not a tautology.
Right. They are the law - they help write them
It’s time like these that I wish technologists didn’t devalue social scientists so much as to effectively alienate them from forums like this.
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
Relevant here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/dictator-book-club-chavez
> 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).
This article is painfully shortsighted about Egypt's moment in the Arab Spring.
(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.
> I'm not bothered about the contents of this latest message from the UK Government. Given the overstretched fire service and the imminent threat across most of the country, my personal opinion is that it is proportionate.
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.
I agree that there's no difference in principle between the government of the land you live on ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to everyone about wildfire danger; and ordering the cell phone company to send a text message to honest and loyal men about confronting the traitors and criminals and protecting the people and honor of the country. This is simply what it means for a national government to exist at all - a local monopoly on the use of legitimate violence in order to enforce the law. Everything a government does, from laws regulating food ingredient labeling to collecting the social security tax from paychecks to organizing a formal military to fight a rebellion, is ultimately backed up by men with guns telling people what to do.
True, but let's talk about that word "legitimate" for a minute.
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.)
> 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.
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.
This will be my new go-to article whenever I talk to someone about how technology isn't a silver bullet and their thesis is that "yeah it is, we just dont have that technology yet".
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.
I heard stories from friends where such a system is used to broadcast ads to wide areas in South Korea, never had to deal with it myself but the way they described it made it sound like they were sent using that very same emergency message system.
Another interesting non-hypothetical example: many US states have so-called "blue alerts" which are used to send cell phone alerts whenever a police officer is attacked or injured. I used to live in Texas and blue alerts were a fairly frequent occurrence.
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.)
My work sends out stupid alerts like that, for bad weather, for crimes reported near the campus, etc. I disabled all of it.
This kind of reminds me of how health care organizations were are are using non-opt out emailing which are suppose to be used only for alert related stuff to perform targeted marketing. As a Kaiser patient I received target vaccination emails with subjects lines like "Get vaccinated for flu to protect yourself for the holidays " during COVID. And its still going on afterwards.
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 generally turn off all emergency alerts completely, because anything I'd ever like to hear about, I would see from other sources, and generally, anything people try to force me to know is something I'm not interested in. I've experienced this phenomenon countless times: people generally push harder when they already know I wouldn't care. Anything actually interesting to me is self-evident and doesn't need to be pushed.
Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49329384
Submitted many hours earlier, fewer upvotes, one comment, sank without trace.
Many such cases
A few days ago I submitted what may have been the largest data breach in history. It got 1 upvote and vanished. I haven't even seen people MENTION the breach here.
I think one of the reasons is that it depends on the day and time you post things. I have seen submissions get nothing and the end of the day and have a better in the afternoon. And weekends seems like mornings are better.
What's the breach/link you tried to share?
You can click their profile and see it
In esseph's submissions, I see only one, from 2025. This does not match their "a few days ago". So, no, I can't click their profile and see it.
Could you provide a link to what you see?
It looks like somebody else posted it before it did, so when I added comments it added it to that one.
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
I can't see anything?
responded above if you want to check out the link
The only way around this is to not to have any employees in the same country as the men with the guns.
I read this up until the movie trope and statement along the lines of "you can martyr youraelf but someone less moral will give in" but I'd say it's more likely they'll just find someone who voted for the other guy with the same knowledge as you. Why waste the bullet?
I think the thought is that if they kill one guy who didn't vote for them, the rest of the guys who didn't vote for them will fall in line. They'd rather waste a bullet than lose institutional knowledge.
Last week I had boarded a flight at LHR and the crew were just starting their safety briefing when everyone's phones went off with that wildfires 'emergency' alert message.
I was unimpressed with the message, along with the (non-UK) crew.
My completely unsubstantiated impression is that it was the govt putting out a feeler on whether it should use the alert system more frequently (and afaik it was relatively unpopular)
I'm puzzled why your entirely factual and relevant statement documenting your experience has been downvoted.
Would a downvoter care to explain themselves?
I think answer in this day and age, is to invoke Skynet, and give an LLM control of the system. Glue a local model that works without Internet to it, and give it guard rails, and give it a bunch of system instructions defining the rules on what to let though. It wouldn't be perfect, but what system is?
Technology is, of course, downstream of society.
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?
Always be wary of “of course” and “just” as they tend to hide a lot of complexity.
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.
Politics has always been unserious and based in spectacle.
The patriot act expired and was never renewed.
> What if armed thugs are sent in and the choice is send the message or die?
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.)
no amount of rules will correct for bad people
It is strange how few understand this. Its as they think that what is required is the right structure or set of rules.
They probably dont know that most countries have the exact same political structures with radically different outcomes.
tl;dr -- "all the hard problems are in humanities", including the problem of humanities people only being able to understand linear dependencies.
> How would you design a system that simultaneously achieved all these goals:
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Lmao, which they will get around to after regaining and relosing the same Ukranian square kilometer 20 times for the next 12 months.,
We need large nation-states to make the modern world possible. The internet isn't just bits; everything depends on stuff that has to be shipped by sea. It takes a hegemon like the US and its allies to keep the sea lanes open. Navies are super expensive and a collection of small states wouldn't be able to build ships that could operate around the world.
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.
>It takes a hegemon like the US and its allies to keep the sea lanes open
Sea Lanes Opened by the USA: 0 Sea Lanes Closed by US Interventions: 1
This tally only makes sense if you believe history started 2 years ago. The US literally re-opened the Strait of Hormuz itself back in the 80s during the Tanker War, at the very least for Kuwaiti oil tankers during Operation Earnest Will.
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.
>Operation Earnest Will.
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.
What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates? What happens when state A allows the dumping of pollution that flows into state B?
>What happens when China or Russia decides to stay a massive empire and starts conquering your microstates?
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.
So you propose to replace the nation states with corporate governments. Okay, two questions: who gets to make the laws, including the property laws? and who gets to enforce those laws?
Given the vacuum left by pinhole-sized states, Vodafone could become the issuer of propaganda itself as it would have the airwaves and the power of a large state.
Well, I suppose my argument does turn on the scope on which you consider each of these 10 points.
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.
You do understand that the communist party of China has very different ideas about networks, vetting and voluntary processes than you do right?
> The internet solves every problem the nation-state purports to.
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.
>including their existence as cultural and ethnic groups
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.
The UK SMS decision also perhaps shows a misunderstanding of the British public these days: I had never smelled so many BBQs the day after that alert was sent and I'd heard similar reports of people being rebellious, fireworks etc
Yes, they used the SMS as a prompt to increase risk. People are awful these days
They will then blame the government for their house burning down after they let off a bunch of fireworks inside.
The dailymail will join their campaign to seek justice for the victims.
> Should multinational corporations instruct local executives to be loyal to their parent company or the rulers of the country they live in?
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.
Seems logical that the best way to uphold a moral society is for everyone to take a modicum of responsibility for their own actions