My wife is Chinese and we go there quite often. Regulation of consumer goods and services is very light and easily circumvented, and as a result the consumer market is a cesspit of shoddy, dangerous products and deceptive practices. Its so bad one of the most prized gifts you can take there is baby formula powder, because the local versions have frequently been found to be cut with dangerous chemicals. I’ve seen and have family with experience of a deregulated market and it’s not at all pretty. Individual consumers just don’t have the resources to deal equally with big companies that have no reason to care about consumer interests, without the ability to exercise their collective power - which is what a representative government is.
I think what I’m hearing you say is that China’s government regulations are “light”... :)
China has 8 different agencies involved in food regulation.
A government that doesn’t allow its subjects to express freedom of speech to its citizens is not “light” in anything.
The dangerousness of items produced in China is a symbol of the corruptability of the monopolization of power by government, underscored by the fact that business in mainland China starts with payoffs to local government officials.
Meanwhile, in Florida, where people are free to package up food items for sale with no license of any kind and no commercial kitchen (up to a certain volume), I don’t hear about many cases of people receiving brain damage from lead poisoning after eating cookies from their local coffee shop.
People that don’t have a foot on their neck are typically not evil by default, because they don’t have to be in order to just survive. That’s why things just work here in the US.
People accustomed to oppressive control just don’t understand these things.
No, the turn of phrase used to describe “baby milk formula” in powder form. “Baby formula powder” implies a kind of powder that produces a baby. Hence, the off-topic comment.
Simple desire for profit drove adding melamine to milk formula for babies. In that melamine cost less than milk powder. And that it reacted like proteins in the simple test that was commonly used.
Melamine is (C-N)3 in a ring, with NH2 on each of the carbons. And all amino acids have C-NH2 on one end. Thus the name. I gather that the test scored all C-NH2 moieties. So each melamine molecule looks like three amino acids, and contains less other stuff than amino acids on average. Making it a very efficient adulterant.
Political freedom alone won't solve tainted milk in China. People don't have the time or energy to audit every food product they purchase, establishing minimum standards to prevent death or injury from harmful food is one of the least costly ways to deal with the root issue.
Political freedom can lead to elect officials who care about such issues and take actual measures to create and enforce regulations instead of the current ones doing nothing or accepting bribes. A monopoly on politics is not optimal.
Thats what i am saying. There can be no accountability of officials if you cant replace officials with due process with folks coming out of several parties and not just one.
This is a pretty ludicrous statement. We wouldn't need any consumer protection laws, anti-fraud laws, or a really a majority of business law if the default modus operandi was pro-consumer. The reason Apple is different here is because their financial incentive aligns with the consumer. That is not the case with many businesses regardless of government involvement.
That's why we never had to do anything to address rampant fraud, cutting food with dangerous materials, straight up lying about what you're selling, con artists, snake oil salesmen, or irresponsible management of hazardous waste, right?
Not that I support the OPs absolutist statement, but courts could and do handle quite a few of those (I mean fraud is handled almost entirely by the courts). Especially if the effort over the last century was put into strengthening the law and property rights, instead of creating endless agencies, government economic power brokers, and pre-emptive hoops for companies to jump through, which encourage state-backed oligopolies to flourish at the expense of competition and any firm small enough to not afford a team of lawyers. Not to mention measuring efficacy and ROI on each individual agency involved in market intervention is largely absent once the agencies are in place.
Unless you're conflating 'removing government actors' as completely removing the justice system and law enforcement? Which are two things which libertarians are very much in support of being government responsibility...Smaller government != no government.
Laws are regulations, the courts you’re praising didn’t pull the laws they enforced out of their asses. If you remove government agencies specialised in regulating specific domains, then that responsibility will just fall on general law enforcement or just go unenforced.
Of course there are costs to any system of regulation, but most consumer regulation is there to prevent companies doing things some of them absolutely did. Busses in London used to have “no spitting” signs. Now they don’t. Why the change?
In general you regulate because hard earned experience shows you have to, not because you just feel like it. If regulations become unnecessary, ok it’s time to revisit it, but managing this stuff is what we elect people for.
On what grounds? Caveat emptor was the rule for a long, long time. It was only later when regulation and standards started coming into play that it was a thing. The courts can't just declare a legal thing to be bad.
You can only be libertarian if a) you've never bothered to study history or b) it's a cover story for an ulterior motive.
The US was mostly a libertarian's paradise from 1850-1950. It didn't work. Federal agencies and government regulations were created because the courts were unable to adequately respond to ongoing problems. The proximate cause of death for libertarianism was the sequence of massive bank panics and depressions leading up to the final "Great Depression" in 1929, but there were many causes across wide-ranging areas of society.
To give just one example: The FDA was created (and later strengthened) in response to a long succession of disasters where well-established drug companies added known toxic (or lethal!) chemicals to their drugs, then placed them on the market without testing. Thousands of people were killed.
No legal decision can bring back the dead.
Most of these companies already had reputations to protect and judgements against them were expensive. Yet they continued to screw up royally.
We've tried libertarianism. It simply doesn't work. It has never worked. It will never work. It is always less efficient to force millions of consumers to extensively research every aspect of the products they buy, then seek redress in the courts after suffering injury. It will always be a net win to set basic safety standards (for established product categories) and force manufacturers to follow the standards.
If you're a rich oligarch who hates paying taxes then libertarianism is a convenient excuse to shrink government (regulations = expense) and/or foist as much of the tax burden onto others as possible.
Libertarianism is also attractive to people who have grown up in a sheltered society and so see regulations and standards as unnecessary restraints. They don't have any basis for comparison.
It's similar to anti-vaxxers: Vaccines were so successful that whole generations have grown up without watching their kids or friends die and be crippled by disease, so they don't value vaccines any more than they value oxygen in the air.
For that matter it is the same as the current Boomer generation's FYGM attitude: growing up in a post-war boom when the effective wage was ~$18/hr and college cost 1/4 as much of course it was easy to work part time while getting your degree. And with a growing population and society of course there will be plenty of jobs waiting for you. Like oxygen in the air or water in the sea such conditions are completely beneath their notice and thus later generations "must" be lazy moochers and "of course" they should just "work hard like I did".
Sometimes I think humans really are doomed. As a society every time we get a good thing going we completely forget the toil, blood, sweat, and tears required to get there.
> You can only be libertarian if a) you've never bothered to study history or b) it's a cover story for an ulterior motive.
While I somewhat agree and don't consider myself a libertarian, I'm much more of Thomas Sowell supply-side economics fiscal conservative and social liberal, I believe this smug, self-righteous tone, littered with broad absolute dismissives, ("We've tried libertarianism. It simply doesn't work") through-out your post perfectly typifies the problem with US tribal politics, especially the left-leaning sort.
You could easily change the wording and throw in some similar greatly over-simplfied examples, and you could say "We tried socialism and it completely failed", as a dismissal for modern big-government liberalism. Which is ridiculous and unhelpful.
These endless trite left vs right debates on the internet always seem to pigeonhole unique and complex historical moments (with distinct geography, historial circumstance, economic situations, cultural differences, broad incentives, birth rates, technological differences, etc, etc) into some ideal fantasy governments that never really existed or even marginally fit into the molds of ideologies being questioned.
I mean... even scale is a huge difference maker. I believe smaller country's governments function far better (see: Canada, Scandinavia). As do "early-stage" countries in the growth stage after being up-ended. To apply some generic economic political system broadly across every country, big or small, financially stable or not, old population, cultural work, etc) is not a interesting or helpful as people seem to think.
Example: I love hear people explain how "Iceland nationalized banks and look how great it worked", meanwhile Iceland has a total population of a small US city, 0.01% the size of the US.
So it's entirely possible you're right. A more pure form of libertarianism, which may have worked well in the past when the country was 5% the size with immature industry, is likely going to be a disaster if it was imposed today. That doesn't mean it's not a good or superior model more fundamentally as a guiding force when shaping current polcy, or even within the larger system in thousands of isolated situations (such as schooling for example). Nor does it mean it wouldn't be ideal for a different culturally or smaller or geographically distinct group of people or for certain states within a heavily federated system.
A few days ago I was pondering what it would be like if we treated government like a software project. You can never address all the issues at once unless you're doing a rewrite (at which point the old project is effectively dead). You just have to refactor as you go. Practically each section becomes organized in a way that more or less reflects the values and style of the author. Sometimes a codebse is able to maintain an overall style, but try as we might you can't delete the programmer entirely.
So then I had an idea for a "single focus president". This would be someone who is entirealy indifferent to everything except the one focus area they call out in their campaign e.g. healthcare. It's not that progress wouldn't be made in other areas it would just be entirely congressional and judicial. Once the president addresses their focus issue, they step down. There are probably anecdotes of how we've tried similar things and failed, but I know I would be open to considering a campaign on those type of grounds.
This argument can be used to justify any form of government as long as some share of extortions get invested for the benefit of extorted.
But I agree all of this is great if I only have to pay <$5K yearly but not so much otherwise. Not to mention having to emigrate to cancel "the services". That sucks too.
> The US was mostly a libertarian's paradise from [insert date range of the most prosperous human development in the US].
And, the great depression was a direct result of government and bank collusion. The Federal Reserve tightened the money supply exactly after the market crashed. Take the federal government, which sanctioned the federal reserve, out of the picture, and you have a much smaller crash that weeds out all the idiots who fell for the securities fraud perpetrated by the Shenandoah Corporation, which precipitated the crash in the first place.
In fact, get rid of the federal reserve banking system that was created by the federal government in 1913, and you don’t have any of the major crashes in the ensuing 95 years.
Go one step further and remove the federal government’s control over the money supply in general and you have a system of multiple currencies, all controlled by their constituent markets, many backed by silver and/or gold. and you don’t have a nationwide gold seizure by the federal government in 1933, whereupon our distributed sovereign wealth was gifted to internationalist bankers. You have instead a wealthy population of the descendants of the colonialists that conquered this country for us.
They don’t really teach this kind of stuff in stated-funded “school”, now do they?
Something that works really well but is pretty uncommon:
My 2016 Honda Accord coupe has a wide-angle camera on right mirror whose feed displays in a center display on when I turn the right blinker on (or manually turn the camera on).
Rather than actively do anything (like stear for me) or abstract anything (like warn me when there is a vehicle in my blindspot), it just gives me a plain view of the road to the right of me extending back hundreds of feet, with only the small augmentation of 2 added virtual lines on the road, one at a single car length back and the other at two car lengths back, to help me guage distance.
Simple features like this, which increases situational awareness without abstracting important dicisions away from the driver, are terrific and, despite only having anecdotal evidence of their effectiveness, I would bet my last dollar that improvements like this reduce accidents drastically. I don’t cut anybody off anymore ever, not that I ever did it intentionally in the past, but I am always extremely confident now in knowing whether or not I’m going to be pulling into a lane that has a speeding car approaching from behind or whether a car is in my blind spot, or somebody is about to change into the lane next to me from two lanes over, etc.
Unfortunately, the market seems to be rewarding features that attempt to replace, rather than augment, situational awareness.
> Unfortunately, the market seems to be rewarding features that attempt to replace, rather than augment, situational awareness.
So true. Shortly after back-up cameras came out, there was a terribly sad story in my hometown about an older driver leaving a church service that had gotten used to just looking at the camera instead of physically turning their head before backing up and wound up hitting and killing a child that was behind the car but not in clear view of the camera.
I guess that's good, but I've always found properly positioned mirrors, and turning my head to give me a good ability to assess if there is anything that I need to be aware of when changing lanes. It's a little unclear what value add the camera gives you. Blind spots can be very small if the mirrors are well adjusted, and then turning your head allows you to fill in the blind spot.
You answer your own question here, but since you might not realize you did... You said:
"Blind spots can be very small if the mirrors are well adjusted, and then turning your head allows you to fill in the blind spot."
Nevermind what a driver should do, features like Honda's system can save the lives of people who do not use best-practice driving techniques. This describes most people.
Honda LaneWatch (blind spot camera) is easily my favorite car safety feature.
Unfortunately, it's more expensive to manufacture, compared to standard blind spot warning systems, and the average customer does not appreciate it (by sales). Instead, Honda has received many angry complaints that the radio/media console is unavailable when changing lanes or when the user has left the blinker on.
Perl is “just as portable” in the same way that a motorcycle can just as easily drive under a steamroller... it’s not gonna be pretty and there’s no easy way out if you do it.
I write Perl scripts for Windows and Linux, and I don't find portability to be especially onerous. Of course there are platform differences to keep in mind, but is that any different from any other cross-platform scripting language?
Firstly, that was one of the most well written comments I’ve read here.
Secondly, I have seen part of this scenario play out exactly as you stated (hire contractor, fail to deliver, delute investment, repeat); it’s as as if there’s a program to be optionally run by stumbling founders.
Every person I know that uses an ad blocker (5, including myself) does it to prevent tracking.
In fact, I want to white list certain websites (a dozen or so) to continue seeing ads, but I don’t want to because I know that they are likely using Google for their ads and I don’t want Google’s little grabbling hands tracking me.
So 5 people out of how many million? Just Adblock Plus on Chrome has over 10,000,000 installs, and "most" of 10,000,000 is a big number. Even bigger when you say "not using it for ad blocking"
Whenever there is a big change by Apple, I always see a lot of relatively niche comments like this, and they're really important, IMHO.
These sorts of "great, now I can't use Mac for XYZ" problems might, at first glance, be dismissed as "well, looks like Apple out-grew your niche market... sorry."
Upon further investigation, however, it appears that Apple might letting go of too many niche customers whose needs will be met by niche products; niche products that will grow concentrically, and the Apple we know now will die (has already been dying) a death of 1000 cuts, and the shell that remains will the consumer tech toy company we see taking shape now.
The niche market of "software developer" is in an interesting position if you include developers who create the apps that Apple needs to sell phones. Clearly "iOS app developer" is only a subset of "software developer" but I think there is only so far down the "consumer tech toy" road they can go without doing longer term damage to their ecosystem
Even though I am a non-iOSdeveloper who likes using a macbook, I can see how it would make sense for Apple to push out a small group of power users if their requirements conflict with features that enhance the experience for the majority of their users, for example something like sandboxing the entire OS away from the user. This would (ostensibly) be good for security and would only be a dealbreaker for a small minority.
As long as iOS developers aren't impacted, I'm not sure what the incentive is for Apple to allow that kind of access.
They could make a Linux distro, a "yellow box" for Linux. I know it sounds totally ridiculous, but if Apple really doesn't want to make computers for software engineers, it doesn't stop them making an OS for software engineers.
I don't feel that the parent comment was "niche". This argument comes up every time anyone discusses a architecture switch, and the invariable response is that Apple has already done this twice before with an emulation layer.
And, if anything, it's easier now than in the past. Most code has been abstracted away from the bare metal, so it's more a matter of porting runtime environments over (V8, JRE, etc) than it is rewriting apps.
When you remove government actors from industry, except where absolutely needed (e.g., preventing monopoly) this becomes the default modus operandi.