pjlegato

Public transit is abysmal in SF. The fact that it exists by no means qualifies it as "good".

Private utilities are very common. There are many listed on the stock exchange.

Everything they do is heavily regulated. They cannot do things like cut off service for any reason whatsoever, or raise rates without justification.

In a socialist country, you would have a government entity building various qualities of housing.

The best houses in the best locations go to the nomenklatura, to the governor's cousin, to the nephew of the town party boss, and to black market operators who are capable of providing large bribes to those who decide housing allocations.

Normal people live three hours outside the city center in a low quality concrete highrise.

There was a DOS port of nethack, so likely it could be made to run on elks.

AI and machine learning aren't necessary at all. You 'just' have to empirically measure a few constants that describe and bound the various nonlinearities of different real pigments, and then plug them into a relatively straightforward paint mixing equation.

Paints have predictable mathematical properties in terms of what color they produce when mixed; they just mix nonlinearly, which is counterintuitive for people who have not practiced mixing paint a lot.

Photoshop and the other comparison programs on the page illustrate the linear mixing that most people intuitively expect.

Common misconception; Stoicism is not about curtailing or repressing emotions.

Stoicism is about not allowing your emotions to govern you.

Subtle but profound difference.

You said "yes exactly" when I asked if personal sentiment was the means of determining when an unfair power differential exists and ought to be legislated against.

Then you said "there is no point at which the process is 'complete' for a given policy and must be merely accepted..." This sounds very much like you believe it is both possible and correct to revisit any policy topic at any time, and with no particular criteria for when it is valid to do so -- it is always valid to do so, under that statement.

Thus, I asked for clarification -- it sounds like there are no possible objective standards for the lawmaking process in your formulation above; any law or policy can be revisited at any time, and without any objective criteria that leaves purely emotional arguments and whoever successfully gathers a bigger band of followers to their side as the main determining factor in what policy we get.

The lines for what is legal are not at all drawn arbitrarily in a constitutional legal system such as the United States.

So there are no objective standards possible or even relevant in the lawmaking process -- it's purely a question of might makes right, whoever can marshal the most people to their team through sophistry should win?

Interesting. Do you then view the lawmaking process as nothing more than a chaotic and never-ending expression of the randomly changing emotions of the people?

No ongoing rational standards, logic, or objective argumentation is required or even relevant -- just might makes right, anything goes, whoever convinces the most people to agree through sophistic "advocacy" wins?

I suppose that such a system could exist in theory, but it seems to be heavily at odds with the constitutional legal system that the United States uses.

Of course, and our laws have apparently determined that "gambling is OK."

Why ought we revisit and overturn that process in this case? Is there any objective criterion beyond "it seems bad to me, I don't like the result of our lawmaking process?"

This takes us back to the beginning: how shall we determine when the social process has failed, and what constitutes "improvement"?

Society has already spoken on this matter. It seems that your criteria amount to nothing more than "when I personally dislike the results of the social process, the social process has failed, and we ought to revisit it."

So I ask again the question you've begged: by what formula or philosophy are we to determine when a social decision such as "allow gambling" is bad? Is there anything beyond your personal feelings on a topic that we can turn to as a criterion?

We have such social systems, and they have already evaluated this specific case and determined that we as a society want to allow gambling.

Note that I am not agreeing or disagreeing with the merits of that outcome; I am just noting that the process you describe has already been done, and has determined in this case that "gambling is OK."

Why should we revisit that process simply because a few people dislike the result? By what right do you suppose your personal views ought to overturn this social process -- simply because you and a few others personally disapprove of the outcome?

Should social processes always yield results that you personally like, and be considered invalid when they don't?

You mean the way we passed the current laws that allow such gambling, which you are now complaining about?

By that standard, we're done, the matter has already been concluded in favor of "allow gambling."

How shall we as a society decide who is to be denied agency in this way, because someone else determines they are to be infantilized, deemed incapable of exercising full responsibility for their own -- entirely voluntary -- actions?

Can you propose a universally acceptable formula or philosophy? Shall we just consult you on a case by case basis to determine when and where a putative power differential exists, and exactly when such a differnetial becomes large enough to verge into "unfair"?