I would assume that for most people, "spending time on your mental health" is not something you do in solitary as a 9-to-5 job. It is more likely to mean building friendships at work or elsewhere, working towards meaningful goals, and leaving time to rest your mind and body. If this precludes a 100% dedication to some startup idea, then that's just something to accept about onself. Everything else will just lead to nothing but burnout, which kills all capacity to contribute anyway. Stuff like having a positive influence on the people you meet can also be a contribution, and there can be personal value and gratification even outside of "contributions", such as simply learning something new (maybe even something without economic value). Personally, I feel like it's highly arguable whether yet another SV-style startup is likely to result in a net positive contribution to the world anyway. Often, the drive to optimize everything for productivity seems to stem more from a need to prove ones worth to oneself and a lottery player's fantasy of riches. I commend everyone that takes their inspiration from more than those things, in business or outside.
Its not merely prevention of one bombing. It is also prosecution and preventing future bombings. Otherwise the folks who plan these bombings are free to organize the next bombing.
People forget how much time they spent learning something when they were younger. I feel like a lot of adults give up and use age as an excuse for not trying new things.
I think this is one of the biggest points. Kids spend all day in school being forced to learn, they come home and do homework, and everything they're doing day to day is exposing them to something new. Every little thing they know feels like a huge accomplishment.
Adults are generally getting paid to do things they can already do and when we get home, we tend to piss away our time with things we know we'll like and aren't too unfamiliar. We can spend a week learning something, but in terms of our gross knowledge, it's comparatively nothing at all.
I'm not quite middle aged yet, but I'm working on learning my third language and started just a few months ago. I'm setting aside a solid hour a day + small 2-5 minute intervals throughout the day, and I'm learning faster than my second language due to the effort I'm putting in. I won't deny that it does get harder to learn completely new concepts as we age, but one benefit we have over kids is we know how to learn effectively and we have exposure with wide arrays of topics. Try to find ways to apply your other accumulated knowledge and discipline to new topics and you can learn faster.
And I mean, shit, you ever see kids try to learn Spanish or French in middle school or high school? Most can barely put together a basic greeting at the end of 1 or 2 years. A 30 or 40 something who reads a phrase book during lunch break and watches some 5 minute grammar practice videos at night 4 days a week will learn faster than 9/10 teenagers.
> I think this is one of the biggest points. Kids spend all day in school being forced to learn, they come home and do homework, and everything they're doing day to day is exposing them to something new. Every little thing they know feels like a huge accomplishment.
You’re far too kind to school. You can teach an illiterate 9 year old to read English in 40 hours, about the same time as it takes to cover the entire primary school math curriculum with a 12 year old. Homework in primary school has nugatory impacts on learning; it’s a theft of time from children and their families for ~0 benefit. You can take a native speaker of Mandarin from completely illiterate to grade level in reading and writing in three years and that’s either the most difficult or the second most difficult language after Japanese to write. If children actually retained what they were taught in school maybe it would be worth it but the average US adult doesn’t know each state has two senators. People do not retain knowledge they don’t use or find interesting.
School before 12 years old is an exercise in teaching children things slowly and haltingly that they are capable of picking up quickly and easily in a fraction of the time two years later, and things that genuinely help children like play time, especially unstructured play are forced out to increase test scores in earlier age groups when the increase washes out to nothing compared to those of two decades ago by the end of high school.
You are all absolutely correct, that it comes down to effort and practice, for the typical adult. If you treat language learning like a serious hobby, and practice it several hours a week, consistently, of course you can learn to speak a language. Practice with an ear to eliminating your accent, and you can minimize that, too.
Most people don't, or they look at how "easy" it is for kids (it's easier, but kids are also more fearless for just saying stuff and making noise), and they give up and say it's hard.
Allowing for some broad exceptions for people whose brains aren't wired to pick up a language, like people who struggle to learn math or music or painting...
I'd add another factor. Young children love communicating. They (no offense) have nothing better to do than trying to find ways, sounds and words to exchange. My theory is that this level of mind/brain engagement toward language is unmatched after 4 yo. You have other center of interests later on that would make a kid go mad if they tried to learn them.
Self incrimination is not the same as a false accusation.
Imagine if the person raped committed a different crime, unrelated to the rape, for which there was evidence of that on their phone.
In order to report the rape, they have to self incriminate themself for that crime as well? In this scenario any drug user, prostitute or other criminal has no protection from the law against being raped.
You also have an obligation to help the police solve the crime you reported by providing all and any relevant information.
The issue is that people don't always know what information is relevant / they think stuff is too minor to mention.
You wouldn't go to a doctors appointment and then say my body is private you cant examine me and expect them to go off just the info you provide. If the doctor asks to stick his finger up your rear to check your prostate you don't say er no thanks that's too private. You assume he has a good medical reason that he wants to do that and you let him confirm that you are healthy.
"If the doctor asks to stick his finger up your rear to check your prostate you don't say er no thanks that's too private"
If you don't want your doctor to stick his finger up your butt, then that's exactly what you do. They don't have a right to finger your prostate, even though it might be beneficial to you.
And like the doctor that cannot diagnose you with appropriate information, the police can't prosecute the accused without potentially backing or detracting details.
Isn't that the same though as if you have ill gotten funds / drugs, I steal them from you but you cant report that.
I've still committed a crime against you but you cant report it due to the fact you committed a crime in the first place.
Kinda hard to feel sorry for a criminal being unable to report a crime.....
You don’t feel sympathy for sex workers, who in many places are unable to report being assaulted?
Your example is having something you stole stolen from you. That’s not the same as doing something illegal, and having a completely different crime done to you. “I was jaywalking, and someone robbed me when i arrived on the other side of the street”. I can’t report it because I would have to explain why I was in the middle of the street without having walked past the shops on that side.
I know discussions here are often America-centric, but note that this depends on jurisdiction. E.g. in Sweden, the one selling sex is not a criminal, the one buying is.
I can’t make sense of your line of reasoning on this comment thread.
I thought we were discussing why society would want to incentivize (or at least not disincentive) reporting a crime, even if the reporter is themselves a criminal. The idea is to eliminate at least one act of criminality instead of none.
You’re argument seems to be: people who commit crimes shouldn’t expect protection under the law from other crimes. And when it was pointed out that not all crimes are equal, your reply is “but I don’t consider some of those things as crimes.”
When the grandparent said "Kinda hard to feel sorry for a criminal being unable to report a crime....."
The parent answered "You don’t feel sympathy for sex workers, who in many places are unable to report being assaulted?" -- as if that category was what the grantparent meant by "criminals".
It was obvious to me that this was not what the grandparent meant, and I chimed in to say that one can still find it "hard to feel sorry for a criminal being unable to report a crime" while still feeling sorry for a prostitute that can't report a rape.
It's easy to speak of "criminals" casually without including (into your concept of them) large categories of people that the law might still consider "criminals" (eg. prostitute, a teen that did some weed, a guy who hacked into a website for fun, somebody who gasp pirated some music, etc.).
That's orthogonal to what protection criminals should get or not. I can support the rights of a criminal (to a fair trial etc) without feeling sorry for them. I don't find feeling "sorry" necessary to support people's rights.
>You’re argument seems to be: people who commit crimes shouldn’t expect protection under the law from other crimes.
No, my comment meant to convey (a) that the grandparent's point that "Kinda hard to feel sorry for a criminal being unable to report a crime" is not some bizarre cruel statement, and it doesn't necessarily have to do with some special cases of legally considered "criminals" that are more like victims themselves like a prostitute.
What I didn't like was the uncharitable interpretation of the grandparent's comment.
Not trying to be uncharitable. I’m just stunned by the seeming hard-line black-and-white worldview in the parent post. I’m confused by the idea that the word “criminals” doesn’t include large categories of people who do things that are against the law. That is the _definition_ of criminal, is it not?
Official definitions (like etymologies) are not really relevant to actual language (though they are relevant to court).
It's the typical intended use / understanding of a term (as used casually), which can even change between contexts even when used by the same person, that matters.
> In Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland), prostitution itself (the exchange of sexual services for money) is legal,[2] but a number of related activities, including soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, owning or managing a brothel, pimping and pandering, are crimes. In Northern Ireland, which previously had similar laws, paying for sex became illegal from 1 June 2015.[3] Laws are not always strictly enforced, and there are reports of police forces turning a blind eye to brothels.[4] Many brothels in cities such as Manchester, London and Cardiff operate under the name "massage parlours".
A lot of stuff around prostitution that should be legal isn't.
But that won't happen. If you have evidence on your phone of a crime you committed you're not going to give the phone to the police to look at. Therefor we end up with no crimes solved instead of one. Ontop of that, because everyone knows that a criminal can no longer report a rape, there's a carte blanche to rape anyone who falls into that category without consequence.
I'm not sure how this criticism is supposed to be valid. If someone robs a heroin dealer of their product, and the heroin dealer calls the police and honestly explains their situation then of course the police are going to arrest and charge both the third and the dealer - regardless of the fact that the latter was a victim of theft.
Yeah, it does mean crime becomes carte blanche to do against criminals of a certain caliber. But that's the consequence of deciding to live one's life outside the law.
If the crimes discussed on the phone are trivia in relation to rape (e.g. shop lifting, drug use) I highly doubt the police would bother prosecuting those crimes. How many minors who were raped while.drunk got charged with consu ing alcohol underage? I don't know of any, and the outrage over doing so would be immense.
>Ontop of that, because everyone knows that a criminal can no longer report a rape, there's a carte blanche to rape anyone who falls into that category without consequence.
Could this serve as an incentive for less crime?
Frivolity aside, "raping criminals" doesn't seem a very viable endeavor. They are, you know, criminals to begin with, and they, or their criminal friends, can perhaps do your head in...
(Plus, blackmailing a criminal with evidence of their crime, sometimes for sex too, has happened since time immemorial - even between corrupt policemen and criminals-, it's not something uniquely enabled by mobile phones).
> Could this serve as an incentive for less crime?
Was this sarcasm, or are you actually suggesting that criminals should fear extrajudicial "justice" of having crimes committed against them and being unable to report them?
Neither, it's a fact of life: criminals do fear extrajudicial "justice" of having crimes committed against them and being unable to report them (and have it happen to them frequently, as I say on the second paragraph above).
We can argue about whether criminal law should focus on punishment or rehabilitation, but it should be completely evident that it's about punishing/rehabilitating the right person. Criminal prosecution isn't a game you're trying to win.
If the investigation surfaces any evidence at all that the defendant might be innocent (or hints at the existence of said evidence), it's a gross miscarriage of justice not to bring this evidence forward.
> The prosecution is under a duty to pursue all reasonable lines of enquiry in an investigation, and to disclose to the defence any material it uncovers which may be reasonably capable of undermining the prosecution case or assisting the defence.
> the prosecution does not have to search for and provide evidence that may exonerate the defense
Nobody said the prosecution had to do anything. Where do you think you saw that? But the police are required to investigate. It has been the police who have been at fault, and censored rightly so, for not finding this evidence in these cases.
No, but the defense can and probably will subpoena these things. As a prosecutor you’d be dumb not to look at evidence you guess will come out at trial anyways.
I was actually thinking about ethics a lot while I was doing this little project. By ethics do you mean morals or something different? What framework would you suggest for determining the ethics/morals of doing something like this, where we're playing by the legal rules by trying to optimize for our own benefit?
Think about it like this. The logical conclusion of people acting like you did is that credit card issuers increase interest rates to make up for their losses. That makes life worse for everyone but the people exploiting the loophole. You’re no different from the people who exaggerate their losses to insurance companies in order to claim extra insurance money. Because of them, premiums have gone up. You might see yourself as some kind of Robinhood figure, but ultimately it’s going to be the other people participating in your network that suffer.
Thanks for the reply. There is a clear difference between claiming extra insurance money and what I'm doing: lying to get more insurance money is fraud, while what I'm doing is exactly what the service is intended for (sending money to others for free).
But using your framework of, "if everyone did this, how would this affect the business and others using the business," then I (and many others) are doing a lot of other unethical things. Ad blocking and card counting (in blackjack) clearly would be deemed unethical under this criteria, but here's a bunch of other more tangible examples.
There's a popular pastry place that has 50% off sales on Sunday afternoon because they are closing Monday so they sell the remaining stock at a significant discount before close. I only go there on Sunday afternoons, but if everyone did that, then the prices would go up for all.
Another thing I do is using the books, video games, movies, and streaming services offered by my library and never buy any real media. But if everyone did this, then bookstores, theaters, and streaming companies would go bankrupt.
You may be following the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law.
The cashback was created as an incentive, you found a way to exploit the business model for personal gain in ways that can have an impact on others ability to enjoy the system while having a material impact on the provider of the service. Most in your position will say "but I am only a small piece of the cog" however, if a small minority starts to think the same way, it can have a real impact on a variety of things, including trust between parties.
Everyone tries to rationalize their actions, whether it is or becomes socially acceptable is another matter.
Well, everyone that takes a VC subsidized ride on Uber is also having a negative impact on their business. If the business makes rules that are unsustainable for their business, it’s their fault. They could very easily set limits to curb abuse.
Uber are obviously trying to get people to use their service. If using their service is bad for them, that's their fault because they were deliberately trying to encourage a behaviour that was detrimental to their business.
That is different from finding a way through the rules which is clearly unintended.
The best way I've seen businesses get around this issue is to just have an upper limit on the incentive like interest applies only to the first $x. Its often a nice bonus for people that were going to use them anyway but not enough for people to justify exploiting the incentive alone.
Interesting discussion. Certainly, some of this fails simply by not agreeing upon what is ethical. For instance, people can claim that blocking ads is an unethical action, but if the ads themselves are attempting illegal things (and some are), then blocking ads has a quite legitimate and useful purpose.
I’m going to preface what I’m about to write by saying yes I understand life happens and I’ve carried a balance on a credit card charging high interest at one point in my life.
- If you have a credit card with decent cash back/rewards program. The interest rate is going to be higher. If you are carrying a balance month to month. You’re doing it wrong.
- If life happens and you do end up with a balance and your credit is decent, you should be able to get a no interest for x months, no interest balance transfer.
Credit Cards aren’t a life necessity. Homeowners insurance and car insurance are. Taking advantage of the rules as they exist is not unethical. Insurance fraud is both unethical and illegal.
> The logical conclusion of people acting like you did is that credit card issuers increase interest rates to make up for their losses.
Actually no, they pay for it directly out of transaction fees levied on sellers (which are usually around 3-5%). Some of that they take for themselves, and some they use for consumer rewards. It's a great way to make a lot of money and keep consumers incentivized to use them.
Economically, it's sort of like crappy product/service things licensed to prisons (like video telephones) that charge hefty fees to the inmates and their families, and give a significant portion of those fees back to the prisons. They're taking advantage of the incentives they can provide to the decision makers (prison administrators, or consumers in the case of credit cards) to overcharge the other party (inmates, or vendors), and make a lot of money in the process.
Be careful with stuff like this. Credit card contracts typically require a fee for anything that amounts to a cash withdrawal instead of a purchase. Depending on the exact construction, it might be fraudulent to knowingly breach the contract to bleed the bank. If it’s not worth talking to a lawyer about it, it’s probably not worth doing.
A simple overall rule here is to consider what the intended behaviour was from the company offering this. Anything that fits the rules, but is outside what you would consider expected behaviour is essentially exploiting a bug.
A similar thing happens when someone offers "unlimited storage" for home broadband users backups and people start hosting many many terabytes of porn / isos / whatever. Sure, they're entirely within the allowed behaviour, but it's clearly intended to make it easy for people to backup their photos and documents without having to know if a gigabyte is enough or not.
I would say I feel like using something in a way not intended (even if allowed) that is detrimental to the person/people offering it is unethical when considered in isolation.
I'm actually a little surprised this needs saying, is this not a common view?
edit - I guess not if it was downvoted so quickly (I know, I know, I'm not complaining about the internet points, it's honestly very interesting to me). Are people that on board wit h heavily abusing systems just because it's technically within the rules?
Remind me to never offer free pizza at a HN event as someone may turn up, say "you didn't specify a per person limit" and walk off with the food intended for everyone.
I don't subscribe to your view at all, but I think this is an interesting discussion. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that users/customers should be trying to guess what the intention of the company is, and doing things not aligned with those goals is unethical?
My local gym and Moviepass (remember them?) expects people to sign up and rarely use the gym or watch movies. Otherwise, they would go out of business if everyone actually constantly used them. Is my using the gym or watching movies every day unethical? It sounds like you're calling lot of people unethical. Aren't people heavily abusing Moviepass by actually watching movies nearly every day?
In a more hypothetical scenario, let's say Facebook does not want people to use its platform to organize political/activism activities, because it makes the company look bad. It does not prohibit it, but let's say the CEO says on a talkshow that he wants people to use Facebook only for positive things. Would that make organizing on Facebook unethical?
It just seems like your view doesn't match how most of society views their social contract with for-profit companies.
> If I understand you correctly, you're saying that users/customers should be trying to guess what the intention of the company is, and doing things not aligned with those goals is unethical?
No, that's missing the key part that it has to be detrimental to the person offering it.
> Is my using the gym or watching movies every day unethical?
I don't think so, if you're using the service because you want to go to the gym every day or see all the films. The website for moviepass says "see it all" so it seems reasonable to go and see every film. Finding a 24 hour cinema and living in it because now you don't have to pay rent - seems unethical to me.
Imagine if moviepass said "see a film every week" but technically didn't say you couldn't see many every day. The underlying rules are technically the same - if you knew they had to pay most of the cost of a ticket, would you feel like the ethics of going every day would be different?
I said it was a simple rule, as there will be edge cases for everything and wider contexts (blocking a road as an act in isolation seems bad, but what if it's a protest, etc). There are though obvious answers to me, and getting eighteen grand a year for rapidly moving money back and forth is one that has an easy answer.
> In a more hypothetical scenario, let's say Facebook does not want people to use its platform to organize political/activism activities, because it makes the company look bad. It does not prohibit it, but let's say the CEO says on a talkshow that he wants people to use Facebook only for positive things. Would that make organizing on Facebook unethical?
Comes down to level of harm, just like anything else. Remove the brand Facebook from that as it's a vast empire. What if it were a small local service for residents to catch up, and political fighting would mean they'd have to shut down?
> It just seems like your view doesn't match how most of society views their social contract with for-profit companies
Is it ethical to go to an all you can eat restaurant and if there's no explicit sign stopping you then packing up all the food in huge bags and walking out?
If there's a sample table that says "free cakes" would you take all of them?
If you remove the editorializing, I don't see a bit of difference between "moviepass says you can see all the films (but if everyone did they would go broke, and they did go broke, leading to loss of service for everyone)" and "financial company says you can send money for free (and if everyone did they would lose money)" which is what the op did.
On a more meta level, I am concerned about an ethical view where different ethical rules apply if different actors are involved. It leads to one person basically not liking something (drugs, activism, etc.) and calling it unethical because of some broad claims about harm to society.
> If you remove the editorializing, I don't see a bit of difference between "moviepass says you can see all the films (but if everyone did they would go broke, and they did go broke, leading to loss of service for everyone)" and "financial company says you can send money for free (and if everyone did they would lose money)" which is what the op did.
The financial company didn't run a website saying "want to be paid thousands? Move money back and forth repeatedly with our services!".
> On a more meta level, I am concerned about an ethical view where different ethical rules apply if different actors are involved.
Different actors are different so I don't see why that's a concern. Different intent is also surely not an odd addition here? It's foundational in so many legal systems even.
I think it would be better to assume that any service you offer could be exploited, than to think otherwise. Lots of places run deals and sales on items with the condition "limit x per person per day" for that exact reason. Or an "unlimited" high-speed phone plan might have a restriction in the fine print where you're throttled after some amount.
Also "expected behavior" seems like it could be pretty subjective. Different cultures have wildly different values.
Somewhat disagree. Not only do these spending bonuses encourage endebtedness and consumerism, but don't forget that such bonuses likely aren't offered the the poor (read: bad credit score), and the credit card companies use and sell your information to advertisers (and probably hedge funds) while credit rating agencies likely do the same and are basically not held accountable (see Equifax).
If these are companies like JP Morgan - Chase, then let's also not forget how they were helped by the American taxpayer during the recession and that basically nobody was held accountable.
I'm also of the opinion that it is basically impossible for any corporation to do business ethically, so I largely have no problem with it.
Take a close look at the USA Hospital (/Healthcare) business model. No payment of property taxes ("Hey, we're a non-profit--nothing to see here"). They get all kinds of Free labor ("Volunteering is good for the community"). They solicit and receive Every manner of donation under the Sun ("We're a Non-Profit; please help us out").
They Make Billions and Billions of dollars... just sayin
"Teacher, billy punched sally and got away with it, that means I can punch johnny too!"
As for the ethics of this CC deal: fuck 'em. :) Global speculative capital makes money on arbitrage and legal fictions that produce financial instruments all the time, if a consumer can play that game, god bless em.
All true. Which makes it hard to understand how so many hospitals are in financial trouble. Like you said, low taxes, volunteers, donations, and charging $600 for an aspirin -- and many can't stay afloat. Strange.
The ideas in the article are dumb, approximately 0 people will upload their passport to a porn site or go and buy a pass from a newsagent.
The article makes out that VPN’s could be made illegal at some point, that’s not even technically possible. It’s like legislators have no clue what this stuff is.
Why is this joke submission Number 1 on Show HN with only 4 updates while there are lots of entries on /shownew with more upvotes that never reach /show?
