I've been in the rationalist community for quite a while, this is the first time I've noticed you here on HN. It is really funny to observe how much people want to argue against you when you condense your point down into a terse statement. Looking through your past comments, it is a very common pattern of behavior.
syn0byte- the man you are replying to is fairly well-connected. I would take the words he said as a credible anecdote- he hangs out with plutocrats enough to know what he said.
Very, very particular plutocrats. I'm reasonably sure they're not representative... but still, they have money, and didn't seem to think it could be used to purchase university-agenda.
The expected steady-state outcome of this situation is that all website-owning educational companies will be targeted for lawsuits, many of which are valid, and many of which are not. The net effect of these lawsuits will primarily be a massive loss of productivity. It is very technically challenging and labor intensive to make websites accessible to the blind or otherly disabled, and doing so is to the benefit of a very small population, who will continue to primarily use other communication platforms anyway. Net effect: For every hour of time saved for the blind or otherly disabled, dozens of hours of time spent by others. A saner society would choose a different path.
I wish I could see actual statistics on this, I admit this is wild speculation on my part.
You're thinking short term. And you're probably right, short term. But we had the same set of concerns raised about many other ADA issues in the past, such as wheelchair-accessible ramps and doors. Over time, the standard practices (and what we'd think of as tooling and common design patterns) for new construction evolved. ADA lawsuits about websites create a similar incentive for long-term change.
and, hopefully, just as we've realized that ADA compliance benefits all of us, whether it's in the form of getting old or pushing strollers or nursing a sprained ankle, we'll get to the point where the improved information availability from ADA compliance becomes an intrinsic part of the power of the web.
There are bad actors in every domain, but cherrypicking one doesn't tell us much about the overall balance. (Heck, for every scummy lawyer who uses the ADA as their club of choice, there are probably 100 who specialize in extracting money using questionable torts claims. Prenda Law was infamous for being a pile of snakes, enough so that they justify their own wikipedia article [0]).
Countering anecdote with anecdote, here's an example of the importance of ADA lawsuits:
I think that even long-term the approach as described in TFA will always require many hours of work for an hour of time saved. The saner way to do it is probably have direct personal assistance for the blind. Phone call systems for the deaf and hard of hearing have been in place for decades, and many of these systems rely on direct personal assistance.
These laws definitely increase expense though, wheel chair ramps aren’t free in material and space. We do have to pay for it in the form of increased real estate costs.
For websites, either they will have to spend more money making them or make fewer of them using existing budgets.
Accessibility is much more of a design (to design accessible experiences) and legal challenge (to defend your experiences as compliant in the face of malicious litigation and vague laws) than it is an engineering one. Yes, we can solve the technical problem fairly easy, but that won’t reduce compliance costs very much, if at all.
Why would compliance costs differ greatly once the technical problem of tools that build for accessibility by default are commonplace? Maybe some minimal oversight to verify accessibility, but no much else. Or am I missing something?
Probably very little, and a fraction that goes down over time. The cost of making new construction ADA-compliant is very small [0]. Retrofits are more expensive, but there are thresholds to try to reduce the pain. As we move to more and more post-ADA construction, the overall share of construction costs becomes fairly trivial.
As to your student loan, again, probably very little. Let's say it cost a few hundred k spread over a few years -- at CMU, at least, adding 100k spread over 10k students is a molecule in the bucket.
You can make the same argument about many things in the ADA. It's not supposed to be "worth it", and I don't think it's insane to spend a disproportionate amount of time/money catering to a small minority of the population. We, as a society, decided not to be economically optimal on this issue, and I think that's a sensible choice to make.
> For every hour of time saved for the blind or otherly disabled, dozens of hours of time spent by others. A saner society would choose a different path.
Championing the rights of the disabled despite it being a net loss of productivity for humanity (which is my reading of your comment, and could be inaccurate) may look insane to a logic-less machine, but less so when reasoned through for a bit.
If you're suggesting we change the laws to avoid this kind of productivity loss, it may be worth wondering why all these government websites only reacted to the stick, not the carrot.
I expect the universities will outsource more and more of their IT departments, and write in 'accessibility' into the contract. This way, they can continue not care, while also pointing the finger. Inevitably, costs for IT will go through the roof for these universities.
Nope, really not that complicated. Where I work, they just hired on a specialist contractor for a year. That person assisted with the audit of sites at the same time they trained web developers in remediation for existing sites and methods for building new content.
If you expand the picture there are actually several photos including a shot from approximately the same location in 2004 that provides a useful comparison.
This really doesn't fit the definition of anecdote. It is a counter example. You can see other comments for direct reasoning why the data in the article is wrong. There's things like the statement about unemployment not considering that unemployment doesn't count those who left the workforce, which is also at highs. Or to things like that you can't compare elementary and high schools to college.
I know your comment sounds witty, but it is lacking real value and really adds to the problem at hand. Surprisingly things are extremely nuanced and we try to just point to "simple solutions" we generally make the problem worse. Frankly because we are not considering the system and distracting ourselves from solving the problem (calling it done when we've only just started).
I would argue that the primary mechanism is cultural changes effecting the fertility rate. Japan suffers a declining population not because of its technology, but because of its culture. Population growth rate peaked in 1968. Up until 1968, lots of evidence social scientists had to work with indicated that technological and social advancement increased the fertility rate (notwithstanding life expectancy changes and rich vs poor countries). Just because cultural changes over the past 51 years have been toward lower birth rates, does not mean that this will continue.
You cannot predict the direction that culture will change. Any predictions I make about this are extremely speculative, but it is easily imaginable that 20 years from now the zeitgeist reacts against the corpus of current culture to be more family-oriented. Think about how much you hear people complain against "the machine." Whether it's on r/latestagecapitalism, or r/the_donald, everyone hates the piss out of broad society, and may find solace in tight-knit families.
There's nothing "cultural" about birth rates.
Raising children is hard, sex feels good, given the option to have sex and not have children, most people choose to have sex and not raise children.
Atheist women choose not to have children, christian women choose not to, muslim women choose not to.
Give people the option not to have children, remove the stigma and maybe they have 1-2 children, but no more.
Given how many single people there are, how tight the fertility window is for women who have careers, how tight schedules are in big cities, how expensive it is to have children today, there's nothing we can reasonably do to increase birth rates.
You state that there is nothing cultural about birth rates and then list several cultural factors influencing birth rates. And then you state that there is nothing we can reasonably do to increase birth rates, even though most of the factors you mentioned are not set in stone.
I don't think the person being replied to necessarily meant that, but cultural is often used in this context as a racist term, as in: "Africans will always have many kids, it's their culture", where before the more overtly racist "nature" might have been used.
The implication being that the cultures of (some) people are unchanging and fixed. I think you'd agree with a statement like: Cultures and family values do change all the time, due to a variety of factors like better medical care, and economic empowerment, in reasonably predictable ways.
So it's not unchanging cultural differences between Africa and Europe that drive the different fertility rates, but rather different socio-economic factors that drive a different family culture. Changing the socio-economic factors will change the culture surrounding families, just as much in Africa as it did in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, etc... at various times in the last century and a half.
My argument was that all modern, technologically advanced civilizations will face these exact issues, so there is no point in calling those factors "cultural", because cultural facts are meant to distinguish between cultures.
I'm sure an alien species or a computer simulation having a few of the same basic drives as humans do (sex is very pleasurable, contraception exists, raising educated children is extremely expensive and hard, state provides pensions in old age, people are free to have or not to have children, child mortality is low, work provides money, money satisfies needs, quality work is abundant only in high density cities and a coupe of others) will arrive at same fertility problem we have arriven at.
My second point was that there is nothing we can reasonably do without a major overhaul of human traits or shutting down the technological advanced world we live in.
The guy that designed the flight control surfaces of the F-22 did so using an elaborate Excel spreadsheet powered by 4,000 lines of uncommented VBA filled with aerodynamics equations, and he retired 3 years ago.
>Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting
Do you have any data on this? If you look at how quickly things cool off at night, Earth's biosphere reaches steady-state thermal equilibrium over the course of a few days. Your claim is essentially that we've already set off an albedo forcing function that we can't stop, and which is also stronger than existing negative feedback loops. Seems unlikely to me.
"Even if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, global warming would continue to happen for at least several more decades, if not centuries. That’s because it takes a while for the planet (for example, the oceans) to respond, and because carbon dioxide – the predominant heat-trapping gas – lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years."[0]
Interesting, thanks. The mechanisms that cause such a delayed temperature response are still opaque though, figure I gotta read more in-depth technical stuff to really understand.
The delayed response is because the temperature rise isn't merely caused by the carbon we've emitted this year, but by all the carbon that has been accumulating in the atmosphere over the past 100 years. Carbon isn't instantly removed from the atmosphere when we stop burning it, so it's going to stay around for a long time. Plants absorb it, but we've been burning more carbon than plants can absorb for a long time.
And for all the time that there's more CO2 in the atmosphere, the atmosphere will continue to trap more heat from the sun, and temperatures will continue to rise.
Well, the CO2 in our atmosphere is too high, and it's been built up over the course of more than a century. It won't immediately drop back to normal levels even if we did somehow manage to stop producing any CO2 at all.
At night the temperature drops not due to a lack of CO2, but due to a lack of sunlight. If we were to be able to partially block the sun, or reflect significantly more sunlight back into space, we would indeed be able to lose heat more more quickly, but that would require engineering on a scale we've never done before.
So sure, paint the entire Earth white, but how? Or build a giant solar screen in space, but again: how? Besides, blocking sunlight will also have many negative repercussions.
You didn't make an effort to charitably interpret my question. My question is essentially about whether transient response to changes in albedo occur primarily over the course of days or primarily over the course of years.
The impact of albedo on this process can go either way. On the one hand, melting ice caps and higher temperatures can mean less ground covered in ice and snow, therefore lower albedo and temperature will rise even faster.
But warmer seas can also mean more evaporation, more precipitation and therefore more snow, higher albedo and a brake on rising temperatures, possibly even a new ice age. (It gets mentioned sometimes; an ice age is ironically a potential result of global warming.)
But it seems to me that effect will mostly be limited to higher latitudes. There's not a lot of snow around the equator, which receives the most sunlight.
But if we could somehow increase the Earth's albedo on a large scale, then that would absolutely have an impact.
I've been in the rationalist community for quite a while, this is the first time I've noticed you here on HN. It is really funny to observe how much people want to argue against you when you condense your point down into a terse statement. Looking through your past comments, it is a very common pattern of behavior.
syn0byte- the man you are replying to is fairly well-connected. I would take the words he said as a credible anecdote- he hangs out with plutocrats enough to know what he said.