DoofusOfDeath

I made my original post as an invitation to discuss my current views (which I admitted weren't settled). I was hoping to find any faults in my views' logic so I could replace them with something more logically consistent and, hopefully, loving.

The fact that you call my initial exposition "despicable" reminds me that HN isn't a good forum for this kind of discussion.

I regret posting a comment that elicited this kind of discussion.

FWIW, I think you may have misunderstood what I was trying to say. I apologize for my post's confusing wording.

Thanks for that. It sounds like I did a terrible job of expressing my thoughts.

Perhaps one of my mistakes was using HIV as an example. If someone only skimmed my post, they may have pattern-matched on the whole "AIDS is punishment from God" trope, which is 100% not what I was trying to say.

> You can flip peoples' tribal affiliations on this topic by changing the disease to COVID. Do red-state antimaskers deserve treatment? Should responsible Americans pay for their reckless lifestyle?

Personally, I'm not sure. As I said above, I'm conflicted on the issue.

Regarding anti-maskers, I think it depends on the particular reason a person is anti-mask.

I'm working on the assumption that a lifelong smoker or someone who intentionally eschews safe-sex practices is generally aware of the risk they're courting. In my mind, this is "privatization of reward, socialization of risk" is similar to what we on HN often complain about regarding corporate bailouts.

In contrast, I could believe that at least some anti-maskers are genuinely misinformed about the risk posted by their behavior. I have less trouble feeling empathy for someone who's working from wrong beliefs, than someone who's knowingly being selfish.

Thanks very much for engaging the content of my post.

I was disheartened to have shared my inner conflict on the issue, only to be downvoted into oblivion.

From a now-dead comment:

> He’s a bigoted right-wing conservative who doesn’t want to hear about interesting scientific developments that he views as benefiting people with lifestyles that he condemns.

Perhaps not here, but I think this is a view worth discussing. I'm moderately conservative, and some of that comment's criticism resonates with my own thoughts.

With cases like HIV/AIDS, I find myself pulled between several competing virtues:

One one side there's mercy and compassion; I'd like to minimize the suffering of hurting people. Even if someone is in dire straights because of actions that I view as unwise (extramarital sex, recreational drug use, etc.), I still want to want what's best for that person.

On the other side, there's justice. I live in a society where everyone pays, to some degree, for individuals' unwise behavior. E.g., Medicare/Medicaid for smokers' lung cancer or HIV treatment for persons who chose to indulge in risky behavior. I'm not okay with forcing the community at large to cover the costs of (what I view as) individuals' selfish actions.

I don't know what the right balance to this is. More generally, I'm not sure if there are any good principles for finding the right tradeoff between two virtues. I wish I knew. I want to do good, but the path is often obscure.

Funny coincidence. Around 2000, I worked for a company that coined the term "Norway problem" for a different software problem.

Their product used an MVCC database (I think ObjectStore). One of their customers in Norway had a problem where updates to the database seemed to not show up. IIRC the problem was a bug in this company's software that caused MVCC to show an older version of the database content than expected.

Depending on the processor, it can also be the difference between instructions in a tight loop only needing to be decoded once (because of micro-op caching) vs. decoded each loop iteration.

> that is a stupid comment.

It's possible to strongly disagree with a comment without inflammatory language. E.g.: "I really disagree with that comment."

It helps keep the conversation productive.

I don't understand why the identity of the guidelines' author matters.

I would think their suitability is independent of that.

It's awesome how the spring reverb is a sneaky way to somewhat simulate polyphony beyond 3 voices.

Agreed. Hitachi makes a rather famous "muscle relaxer" called the Magic Wand.

IIUC, this particular article deals only with keeping a camera on the ballot box after it's been sealed, and on the subsequent vote-counting.

So I don't think this poses a risk to anonymous voting per se.

Amazon's proposal may be entirely reasonable. But I could easily imagine that it's part of a very sophisticated strategy on Amazon's part to ultimately undermine a legitimate vote.

I have trouble guessing which approach approach is more desirable in this situation.