It can look bad, but this is just an aspect of human behavior en masse that we don’t normally get to see. A long time ago there was an incident on a military base. A man had gotten up on a building to commit suicide, and while the officers tried to convince him not to jump, the drafted soldiers gathered underneath and started chanting “jump, jump” because of a rule that said witnessing the suicide of a fellow soldier cut down their draft length.
Anyway, point being, situations where group A can benefit by harming group B are always problematic with large groups of people. The internet has produced novel and worse things than this.
That story is most certainly an urban legend. There is a whole class of urban legends like that. Another common one among college students is that if your roommate dies you get straight A grades that year, leading to creative urban legends of desperate students doing terrible things to their roommates.
If we ignore that people are literally profiting from running the prediction market that happens to make it visible and giving incentive to uninvolved parties to have a STRONG OPINION about any type of event for the purpose of gambling, yeah, I guess that's a point.
The point is that such perverse incentives already exist in a lot of places. Polymarket style betting on the scale that it enables is new but it's just that, a difference in scale but not kind.
The reason I bring that up is to caution against an overreaction to treating it like it's a brand new thing that needs to be dealt with in some unique way. Instead, trying to figure out why the existing mechanisms that prevent the same kind of abuses might not work at scale is a better mindset, I think.
Because it’s one of many events that violates our belief in our selves more than the nature of human society and man as a social animal based on studies of what we actually are.
Yes - and further, even if something is "just human behavior", that doesn't mean it's never beneficial to humans to legally regulate the enablement or exploitation of that behavior.
I don’t understand your point. You’re saying that online predictive markets are bad, but perverse incentives are bad in general, so there must be worse things out there. While that may be true, the scale and reach of these betting sites is massive, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of daily users with tens of millions of dollars on the line daily. The fact that a small number of people cheer for bad things to happen is no excuse for a betting apparatus that has captured a significant chunk of the global population.
> Using AI to write content is seen so harshly because it violates the previously held social contract that it takes more effort to write messages than to read messages. If a person goes through the trouble of thinking out and writing an argument or message, then reading is a sufficient donation of time.
However, with the recent chat based AI models, this agreement has been turned around. It is now easier to get a written message than to read it. Reading it now takes more effort. If a person is not going to take the time to express messages based on their own thoughts, then they do not have sufficient respect for the reader, and their comments can be dismissed for that reason.
So to a large extent I appreciate that argument, however I feel this applied more to throwaway comments or sales outreach, writing with low information density. In this occasion the work that went into it is a lot, it would be lost or inaccessible to me otherwise, I am genuinely grateful someone stuck their work in an LLM, said tidy this up to post, and hit enter.
A “quality” jacket in the 1930s would cost 300-400$ or more inflation adjusted, it would also look less fashionable today, and feel somewhat less comfortable due to several concessions for durability in design. A durable quality jacket back then was also holding a majority market position, rather than being a niche good, which means that “quality clothes” do still seem to exist, but I’m always looking at 500-600$ for durable jeans or coats.
>but I’m always looking at 500-600$ for durable jeans
tf.
That’s clearly you looking for a specific fashion or intending to pay as much as you can.
Triple Aught Design jeans are $150 to $250 and I am skeptical you have anything that is outlasting them. Others brands surely as well. Seems to me you are still stuck in the “if it costs more…” line of thinking.
No, I am just buying import Japanese jeans from the folk that bought all of the original high quality jeans making machines when the Americans moved to the flexi stuff, the jeans I buy last with next to no damage for 10-15 years despite near daily wear.
I will grant you that I am paying a premium for both import, and a particular quality of fabric, but honestly I look like farmer Joe mostly.
I recently ordered some Levis that I'm happy with, but I think there's also a limit for me in that certain life-things can happen that will end a garment regardless of how much was paid for it or how much it was babied.
I'm pretty disciplined about wearing a bib in the kitchen these days, but you can still get a glass of wine on it at the dinner table, or sparks from a campfire, or a cycling wipeout. Those are annoying at the best of times, but particularly if it ends a garment that you paid 3-5x normal price for specifically so you could have it forever.
having burned though easily 10 pairs of Triple Aught pants of various designs, they are well made and attractive, but durability is not an outlier from my experience. each design consistently fails in the same area with regular use. i tend to repurchase the designs that fit and function well, but they all inevitably fall.
The problem is most data shows PTFE as having significant pyrolysis after 400-500c in reality it starts to break down enough to poison you around 260c.
In general though under those temperatures it’s not particularly problematic, ofcourse ideally we should just never make the stuff to begin with as it’s manufacture and its eventual breakdown are both horrible for everyone.
Having just finished renovating a 140-year-old home with solid brick walls that was slowly collapsing and deteriorating due to the aforementioned professionals’ application of modern and chemically incompatible materials to it… I’m not sure I agree. It’s also why a lot of the UK’s building stock is slowly rotting with black mould right now. Literally none of the professionals I hired, before I trained them, knew how to properly repair a type of home that represents 30% of the UK building stock.
“Degenerate gamblers” is the kind of stigma that stops people and their families getting help for addiction. Even if you believe it’s a moral failing, the families deserve better.
Very true. Although, I wonder how much of that sort of thing was going on in this case? Did people actually bet money they couldn't afford to lose on this crazy scheme?
No harsh belittling is what makes them quit, not accommodating their nonsense and excusing it. There should be a stigma with destructive behavior. The flaw is this decades-long trend of talking about stigmas and refusing to condemn bad behaviors.
I’m afraid we tried that for quite a few centuries, with very little effect. Infact most major world religions had phases with heavy punishment, condemnation, belittling, and you are going to hell stuff over gambling. Yet here we are.
Morality is a human construct and applies to humans, arguments that try to argue morality on the basis of applying naturalistic arguments to humans do exist, but I don’t think they have much credence in modern moral frameworks ?
If what you value most is performing IQ tests, or competitive chess, then yes there is good data on the 25 part. If what you value is complexity and richness of thought, not so much.
Actually you should look up the info there, you actually don’t which is what a lot of fansubs rely on, they mostly only will own your translation if they chose to formally translate and publish commercially a translation in that country. If they don’t, you can distribute your translation for free. There is a lot of variability on this per country too, with very interesting laws in greece and germany in particular.
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