Also, your account's posting history is egregious: https://news.ycombinator.com/posts?id=mdszy. This is not a borderline call. Accounts that post like that get banned here, regardless of what they're espousing.
I think I should have said "full-time" or "professional" landlord. I had thought that the word had a connotation of it being a full-time gig, but I was wrong.
"Every month a notable company goes public. Every week a hot startup raises millions of dollars. And every day moms, pops, and teens check on their stocks."
"Once the shoeshine boy and the taxi driver offer stock tips, it’s time to sell."
You have designated yourself as a moral authority by sheer force of your existence. I simply explained the benefit and risks of being a contractor. You have decided that I should not be allowed to sell my labor at a rate I and my client accepts.
Stores already do tons of stuff to try to thwart these.
I worked at a store years ago and we had all these things implemented:
- Limit on gift card purchase amounts per customer, per day.
- Stopped stocking Western Union cards because they were such a scam target.
- There was also a scam where scammers would call the store itself to pose as a "corporate employee" who was "trying to verify that the gift card redemption system was working" and would have the cashier activate a gift card, run it as cash, and read off the numbers. And apparently that worked well enough that every time we activated certain gift cards, a massive box popped up on the POS screen saying "IF THIS TRANSACTION IS HAPPENING OVER THE PHONE, HANG UP IMMEDIATELY AND CANCEL THE TRANSACTION."
At a certain point there's only so much that can be done by the store itself.
Gold plating is used a lot in electronics contacts to prevent corrosion, it's a pretty proven method that should work just fine without wearing away easily. As far as I understand it, the gold chemically bonds to the metal it coats, so it's not easy to wear it away.
I've also never seen a source for the claim of black-owned businesses being destroyed during these riots, I've begun to believe it's just intentional misinformation.
Is it that far-fetched to you that with the number of black-owned businesses there are and the number of businesses that were destroyed, that at least one of them would have been destroyed in the riots? I personally know of a black-owned business in Cleveland that had to shut down after being looted. Either you're underestimating the number of black-owned businesses, the number of destroyed businesses, both, or are simply being disingenuous
I'm disappointed by how much sympathy for cops was expressed in the video I'm about to link, but when Killer Mike tells me that the destruction of black-owned businesses is a problem in his community while wearing a "kill your masters" shirt[0], I sort of tentatively take his word that this is a real issue. I just think that some people are using it as a substitute for the issue they really want to raise, and it feels very disingenuous to me. Let's talk about precinct buildings.
"two main arguments: damaging a person is morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is worse than physically damaging an object."
I couldn't help but think "Yes? That's exactly correct. Who would ever think otherwise?"
The quoted argument may be true, but it is not sufficient to argue that psychologically damaging someone is violence.
It's a bit like affirming the consequence. If we posit that (physical) violence causes damage, and that a person can be psychologically damaged, it's not a strong argument to work backwards that anything that causes damage is violence.
With that path of logic I could also say: pan-frying food causes it to become cooked, therefore pan-frying is a form of broiling.
We're talking about language so of course we can overload the word "violence" to mean more than exclusively physical acts.
But without hard and fast boundaries, it becomes harder to communicate. And this article is talking about a reduction in clarity to a classification.
We can expect to find that for some number of people, their moral and legislative opinions about "violence" are strictly limited to physical acts. You may disagree with those people, and that's fine. But we can't change their opinions just by unilaterally altering the descriptive boundaries of the words they use to express their opinions.
Is the meaning of this statement independent of the symbols used? Can the meaning be found in nature, outside of our minds, or is it an artifact of our minds or language?
I wouldn't say that being found in nature means that something is not made up. Issus coleoptratus evolved gears long before humans invented them, yet gears seem purely phenomenal -- I wouldn't expect the noumenon to have anything directly corresponding to gears in it, "gear" is just a useful concept we have that lets us categorize part of an insect or a bicycle (both of which are made up themselves, of course).
There may be discrete math in the noumenon, but I'm not convinced of that. For all I know the noumenon could be dealing in something else entirely, and math might just be a really useful tool we came up with (like classical physics, and probably modern physics). Math is the simplest case you can make, but I don't see a compelling reason to accept it as a given.
> I wouldn't say that being found in nature means that something is not made up.
Then define "made up".
> For all I know the noumenon could be dealing in something else entirely, and math might just be a really useful tool we came up with (like classical physics, and probably modern physics).
Suppose it is merely a useful tool. This tool then necessarily has a structure that's isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon, otherwise it wouldn't actually be a useful tool.
Therefore, whatever structure it models is itself mind independent, as I said. The symbols and formalisms we use are interchangeable, but the structure revealed is not.
That which is not a part of base reality. If base reality were operating using the same rules as Conway's game of life then cells would be real, but gliders would be made up. Since Conway's game of life actually runs in a simulation on some computer or another, cells are also made up.
>Suppose it is merely a useful tool. This tool then necessarily has a structure that's isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon, otherwise it wouldn't actually be a useful tool.
Newton's equations are now accepted as an approximation; they are not isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon, yet remain useful when firing cannons. Myths and legends have been useful in compelling people to wage wars and donate to charities, yet we do not suppose that this usefulness means they are isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon.
Perhaps fermions and bosons correspond very closely to real parts of the noumenon, but they could also be a phenomenon which is emergent on top of something else -- as made up as chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics.
> That which is not a part of base reality. If base reality were operating using the same rules as Conway's game of life then cells would be real, but gliders would be made up. Since Conway's game of life actually runs in a simulation on some computer or another, cells are also made up.
So in your view, anything that is a composite of two or more primitives is by definition "made up".
Therefore, given a standard definition of natural numbers [1], any number except zero is made up?
> Newton's equations are now accepted as an approximation; they are not isomorphic to part of the structure of the noumenon
They are actually, within the domain for which they are valid. General relativity reduces to Newton's equations in the right context.
>So in your view, anything that is a composite of two or more primitives is by definition "made up".
Yes. If we start calling higher order configurations "real" then we have to contend with all of the potentially imaginable subdivisions of the noumenon and either grant them all realness or find some arbitrary criteria upon which to deny some of those subdivisions the property of realness. If we grant that an insect is a real thing then I get to make up a new word, say, "kokirombo," that describes the front two-thirds of a grasshopper combined with the left half of a ladybug, some air, a pinch of grass, and the rear bumper of a 1998 Ford Taurus. You can come up with some arbitrary standard by which your gerrymandering of reality is allowed and mine is not, but there isn't anything that makes your standard more valid than mine. In practice we typically use usefulness as our standard for categorizing things, but dogmatically claiming this as the criteria for realness leads to absurd positions.
>Therefore, given a standard definition of natural numbers [1], any number except zero is made up?
I still haven't necessarily accepted zero as not being made up, but I think your Succ function implicitly depends on one being defined as well.
>They are actually, within the domain for which they are valid.
Strongly disagree. If you believe in quantum mechanics then you believe that things move probabilistically. I'm obviously arguing that every scale except the smallest is made up, but even if we hypothetically accepted the validity of larger scales then we would have to admit that there is an ever-so-vanishingly-small chance that any given cannonball will spontaneously jump three meters to the left thus deviating from it's Newtonian trajectory. The fact that you could launch cannonballs from now until the heat death of the universe without seeing this effect at a scale you would typically notice is inconsequential, Newton's equations are still merely a useful approximation and they are not isomorphic to the behavior of the noumenon.
So giving someone a paper cut is worse than burning down someone's store in which their life savings were invested? Come on, these issues aren't covered by such trivial sound bites.
You should try harder to give people the benefit of the doubt - you can't expect people to list every single possible caveat for every opinion they express. The article, and the parent post, both do not equate such a contrived minor injury to destroying an entire business, and you absolutely know this.
> You should try harder to give people the benefit of the doubt - you can't expect people to list every single possible caveat for every opinion they express.
The position, as stated, is literally false which my argument by absurdity demonstrates. So what I expect, is that people attempt to make true statements, and where the truth value is contextual, then their phrasing also ought to reflect that nuance, ie. damaging a person is typically morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is typically worse than physically damaging an object.
There are no qualifiers in the original claim to reflect this nuance, and like it or not, people absolutely do believe unqalified claims until they are challenged on it. Why do you think slogans and propaganda are so effective.
I agree it's an "absurd counterexample". That's the whole point of a reductio ad absurdum. It shows the fallacy at the core of the argument with which you whole heartedly agreed. Precision is important in ethics.
Furthermore, even if I were to be maximally charitable in interpreting the argument as "damaging a person is typically morally more serious than damaging an object, and psychologically damaging a person is typically worse than physically damaging an object", not everyone would even agree with that, contra your post. I don't think you appreciate how broad ethics is as a topic; virtue ethics and deontological ethics both dispute the premises from which this argument is constructed.
Finally, discrediting an argument you agreed with does not somehow discredit or insult you as a person, so not sure where you got that from.
You quoted an ethical principle, then said it was obviously true. Now you're claiming that you don't actually believe in the ethical principle that you claimed was so obviously true?
If you're now claiming that the principle was "true" in some vague unspecified way, but not literally true, then like I said, say what you mean and mean what you say, and don't get bent out of shape when people point out the problems with this sort of imprecise reasoning.
It brings my heart such great joy to know that there are people out there like you who are willing to argue about trivialities that don't actually matter.
Not everything is a deep philosophical discussion that needs to get down to absolute true statements.
Sometimes it's just someone, like me, who is sick of black people being literally murdered by police and thinks it's absurd that white assholes get more worked up over some property than over black lives.
I literally don't give a single shit about absolute ethical principles.
Yeah, who cares about "trivialities" like "my ethical principles are inconsistent or absurd"?
Apparently, all the people who criticize the ethics of the police, the ethics of politicians, the ethics of racist economic policies, and so on. I mean, it's not like consistent ethical principles might go into devising something like a Constitution that recognizes people's natural rights and restricts government from infringing on those rights.
Amazing that you managed to turn this into a partisan attack on "your side" when all that's being discussed is the logical inconsistency of your own stated principles.
Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account, because it destroys what the site is supposed to be for.
>Black lives matter? According to black on black crime statistics and black abortion rates, they don't
>Willing to take the L for saying the truth on this one.
>Judging by how the protests and riots have settled down already in less than 2 weeks, they are finished making use of black lives to further their political goals.
You seem sick with hatred, not to mention casting yourself as a victimized underdog who knows the Truth.
I am indeed sick of political bullshit. One day, you may open your eyes and properly understand that I, as much as you, want something to be done for black Americans to right the wrongs. However, I can't help but call out the people who are simply using the death of one garbage man who threatened a pregnant woman at gunpoint to further their political goals, and then only after 2 weeks, they go back to their regular reporting after they've made their use of the movement to do their job. Nothing has changed. They've just milked the death of a man, like they did before with the other men before him. One day, I'd like to see a real organic movement that will enact real change. Until then, this is just a spectacle in our current clown world.
If your immediate reaction to statistics (which I am not claiming the accuracy of, by the way, since you provide no sources) is "oh, it's because they're black" then congratulations, you're a racist!
Furthermore, the protests have not died down, there have been events that sparked more protests in more places. They're just not being reported as much because "oh well that's old time to move on to the next thing", says the media.
Please stop posting flamewar comments to HN. You've been doing it repeatedly, and we ban that sort of account, because it destroys what the site is supposed to be for.
