Does your employer have an “infinite commitment” to pay your salary?
Of course they do, but it isn’t framed as such.
We’re talking about social support networks here basically, the majority of actually poor people have nowhere to turn (or too much pride to turn anywhere).
There are some people who will be a bottomless pit of investment, and it is because of those that we think social support cannot work at all. The drug addicts, the gamblers.
but for each of those, immediately visible and obvious deadbeats there are 2 or more of people like my mother, who had no family to speak of and was raising a child alone. Or someone like the sysadmin in this thread, who has gainful employment in the first world, but can never get out of his debt hole.
Are you able to understand the difference between taxes and slavery? If you can, try your hand at explaining why taxes and slavery are different. I'm am not merely asking rhetorically; I'm serious. It's a worthwhile exercise because it reveals something about your underlying model of the world.
Well, I suppose we should define what we mean by "slavery" first because one could simply argue they aren't the same by definition. If it's something like "someone captured, sold, or born into chattel slavery", than obviously a tax payer is not a slave.
But under a loser definition, it's fairly obvious that an entity which takes part of the results of your labor under the threat of violence at least partially owns you, and thus it's reasonable to consider tax payers as slaves to their government.
I'm actually more interested in your argument for why they are mutually exclusive concepts.
> But under a loser definition, it's fairly obvious that an entity which takes part of the results of your labor under the threat of violence at least partially owns you, and thus it's reasonable to consider tax payers as slaves to their government.
This is the difference between what I might call philosophical, or perhaps semantic, and practical discussions.
We can define slavery to mean anything we want, up to and including being born. Every human has to eat and breathe to survive, does that mean they're slaves in that way? Sure? Maybe? Who cares.
The practical discussion is how we want to live our actual lives and structure our actual systems of power.
When people talk about "positive rights" (and really, all rights) they are aspirational. Merely creating a law does not change reality. We can create all the laws we want saying that people should not be murdered, but people will in fact, still be murdered, even though it is now against the law.
Similarly we can create a law saying that people should have healthcare access or food, but people will still be unable to see a doctor or get food when they need it. Neither of those laws imply putting anyone into slavery.
At a practical level, human life is better when we band together in larger and larger groups and contribute to the common welfare, however you want to phrase that.
We can, of course, quibble over the size and type of those contributions and how we use them, thats how society should work, but it is incredible bad faith to accuse people who want to use those contributions for, say, healthcare access, of wanting to enslave people.
Well yeah, thats a problem with debates, if people are using different definitions then you end up talking around each other. I don't think the definition I use is unreasonable though. Slavery is fundamentally a matter of self-ownership, and taxation robs you of such self-ownership. Requiring resources to survive doesn't rob one of their own self ownership. Neither does working for a salary, although "wage slave" gets thrown around without much opposition to the term...
Anyways, rights exist a priori, regardless of the capacity for any power to enforce said rights. Negative rights don't actually require enforcement because they aren't coercive. Implying rights don't exist because people violate them doesn't make sense, it's irrelevant.
Think through your example about the doctor. If you (a doctor) and I are stranded on an island and I break my leg, the "right to healthcare" would imply that you are obligated to help me, and I have the moral right to coerce you (violently if required) to help me. Would you agree to this proposition?
Now of course most people who hold these beliefs haven't given it any thought beyond "I want people to be safe happy and healthy". But those who have, realise coercive violence is a base requirement and are fine with it, but obviously won't frame their beliefs in that way.
You keep attempting to shift terms to mean something they do not.
> Anyways, rights exist a priori, regardless of the capacity for any power to enforce said rights. Negative rights don't actually require enforcement because they aren't coercive
Prove it.
> Think through your example about the doctor. If you (a doctor) and I are stranded on an island and I break my leg, the "right to healthcare" would imply that you are obligated to help me, and I have the moral right to coerce you (violently if required) to help me. Would you agree to this proposition?
This a fantasy you've created by deliberately using the wrong definition of the words involved.
The "right to healthcare" means that your government should do its best to make sure people can see doctors and receive healthcare related treatment when they need it.
> you keep attempting to shift terms to mean something they do not.
> The "right to healthcare" means that your government should do its best to make sure people can see doctors and receive healthcare related treatment when they need it.
Yeah ok. I'm gonna bow out of this discussion now, since you're just accusing me of doing what you're in fact doing.
Like I said, you can use whatever definitions you want, but this is what everyone else means. You can disagree with reality all you want, but you won't become correct.
Can you explain how these work? Does the server send small subrectangles of the large grid when the user scrolls to new regions of the grid? Does the browser actually have a two-dimensional array in memory with a billion items, or is there some other data structure?
Yeah the server only sends what the user is currently looking + plus a buffer around their view. There's no actual checkbox state on the client. When the user clicks a checkbox a depress animation is started and a request is made (which the server responds to with no data and a 204). The user then gets the html for the next view down a long lived SSE connection that started when they first loaded the page. Because, there's a long lived connection, it has really good compression. Same thing happens when the user scrolls. If they scroll far enough a new view is rendered.
The billion items themselves are just in a server on the backend, stored in a sqlite database.
The difference is that you cannot choose who you're sharing a road with while you can usually choose your IT service providers. You could, for instance, choose a cheaper provider and make your own backups or simply accept that you could lose your data.
Where people have little or no choice (e.g government agencies, telecoms, internet access providers, credit agencies, etc) or where the blast radius is exceptionally wide, I do find it justifiable to mandate safety and security standards.
> you cannot choose who you're sharing a road with while you can usually choose your IT service providers
You can choose where to eat, but the gov still carrier out food heath and safety inspections. The reason is that it isn't easy for customers to observe these things otherwise. I think the same applies to corporate data handling & storage.
It's a matter of balance. Food safety is potentially about life and death. Backups not so much (except in very specific cases where data regulation is absolutely justifiable).
If any legislation is passed regarding data, I would prefer a broader rule that covers backup as well as interoperability/portability.
Losing data is mostly(*) fine if you are a small business. If a major bank loses it's data it is a major problem as it may impact a huge number of customers and an existential way, when all money is "gone"
(*) From state's perspective there is still a problem: tax audits, bad if everybody avoids them by "accidental" data loss
As I said, a wide blast radius is a justification and banks are already regulated accordingly. A general obligation to keep financial records exists as well.
It seems New Zealand is one of very few countries where that is the case, and that's because you guys have a government scheme that provides equivalent coverage for personal injury without being a form of insurance (ACC). As far as I understand, part of the registration fees you pay go to ACC. I would argue this is basically a mandatory insurance system with another name.
Interesting. According to https://www.wiz.io/blog/s1ngularity-supply-chain-attack the initial entry point was a "flawed GitHub Actions workflow that allowed code injection through unsanitized pull request titles" — which was detected and mitigated on August 29.
That was more than ten days ago, and yet major packages were compromised yesterday. How?
