Also not a lawyer. To be covered by Germany's consumer protection law, you need show that you are end consumer of a commercial product or service. I don't see how that would apply to YC/HN.
If you could pull that part off, I think you could take YC to court in Germany, and even achieve a favorable judgement. However, I don't see any way how you could enforce the outcome, except if YC has assets in Germany.
The situation becomes clearer if you take a look at the traffic today with a human operator in each car. Also in this model, engineering and human failures happen. Engines break, tires get punctured, brakes fail, and humans make errors. We still accept the deaths and injuries caused by car traffic, and don't prohibit cars.
So it is more than sufficient if you can show that AVs - on average - cause less harm than human-operated vehicles.
To your specific question: when the AV loses connection, it would do the same as a human driver when a tire is punctured: turn on warning lights, slow down, and stop at the roadside. Like in other car failure situations, that might cause an accident in some cases. However, that is fine, as long as it is rare enough.
(disclaimer: I'm not working in AV tech, I don't know if current AV technology handles this case as imagined)
That doesn't make the situation any clearer. Coping with mechanical failures isn't the primary concern. The issue is how to handle edge cases where the AV software is unable to decide on any course of action.
It seems that falsifying would provide an escape route. Unfortunately it doesn't, because you would first have to establish - without a doubt - the truth of the contradicting statement. That works ok-ish for collapsing bridges, but it breaks down for less direct observations, e.g., when reading experimental data from a computer screen, collected to refute a Physics theory.
After the postmodernist wave, analytic philosophers have attempted to rescue the notion of truth. All those attempts, including the ones you listed, change the meaning of 'truth' significantly, compared to how non-philosophers use that term.
None of the listed options is so convincing that everybody using their rationality would immediately agree with the proposed model of truth. That seems to indicate that also for these options, rationality alone is insufficient to establish truth, and a belief/irrational/social factor still would be at play.
I'm not implying that the mentioned approaches developed by analytic philosophers are useless. They do deepen our understanding how reasoning and fact establishing works. But in my opinion they are still very far away of solving the Münchhausen Trilemma.
There is no dilemma. We agree that people can be manipulated to some degree. We also agree that - if they don't suffer from an illness - that manipulation only goes so far. Finally, we agree that we shouldn't force a lifestyle on anybody.
So now you can manipulate (or nudge) people either towards behavior which is considered as beneficial (regular exercise, healthy food, etc.), or you can manipulate them towards unhealthy habits (e.g., smoking).
It is a good idea to limit the ability of actors to nudge people towards unhealthy habits. That will help everybody except a few people who will earn less money. It is also a good idea to foster nudging good behaviors, even if there is no commercial value behind it.
The dilemma only starts to occur if we try to put all things into either the good or the bad box. Probably most ads are in the large grey area in between these extremes. However, ads fostering smoking addiction or obesity should be called out as bad for all of us. There is no downside of this call-out.
Now, by moving the goalposts, you lost your initial argument. Sure it might be the case that Swedish companies, at some stage of their growth, tend to incorporate in another country.
Still the benefits Swedish employees experience don't seem to be in the way of getting a startup successfully up and running in Sweden.
This was my point all along. You might be able to start a company in Sweden, but you won't be able to grow it there because of taxes and regulations.
It's funny how it took so long for someone to finally admit that I'm correct instead of being willfully ignorant about the realities of a socialist country like Sweden.
Even without psychedelics, persons suffering from psychological issues can have breakdowns in therapeutic sessions. Professional therapists are very careful to not unlock 'dangerous' memories and insights prematurely, they wait until they consider the patient ready to deal with it. They also have emergency plans in place, reaching so far as taking care that an overwhelmed patient is afterwards treated in a hospital for a while to safely recover. Do you have such emergency plans in place?
While I trust that you can give psychologically healthy people a good experience, I have a hard time imagining how you could give the necessary support to people with larger issues. And because those issues are often deeply hidden, it is hard even for professionals to detect that in advance.
Excellent question - and yes some (all?) issues can't be detected in advance.
I have a screening process before people get in the program. I mainly vet their intentions. If they have the right intention, I can trust them.
Then in the preparation phase, I have a THOROUGH questionnaire about their physical, emotional and mental health, giving me a good picture of what I could face.
But NOTHING can ever prepare me (besides my own experience) or the participant for what's to come. Entering the world of 5-MeO-DMT is opening Pandora's box. You never know what will come out.
But in the session, it all comes down to how well I can hold space, how well there is trust between the participant and me (hence a one month preparation process) and how well we both can conduct what is being released.
I also use EFT (emotions freedom techniques) to alleviate emotionally charged patterns & beliefs - BEFORE & AFTER sessions.
It is an intense journey but if you come with the right intention (heal, grow etc - & an attitude of humility & surrender), then there are tools to support you and in my experience, it all comes out alright.
> We have neural circuits that receive sense data, place attention, and record attentional memories.
From there, you can either go into the direction where we are just machines, and everything we do is predicted by how we are programmed. Then, free will, ethics, etc. are out of the window. There is then also just a machine named trevyn posting bit patterns on HN. In such a world, consciousness and free will don't actually exist, or only do exist as some kind of illusion/imagination. While this world view is somewhat consistent, it seems very hard to reconcile it with your own self-image. Why would you continue to strive for anything if you really believe in this 'clockwork' model? It sounds like a sad life, somewhat like taking the red pill and finding out you have no control whatsoever over your own life and can't leave your lifelong coffin.
The alternative would be a real explanation, i.e., assume that consciousness and free will exist as you experience them, and explain how neural circuits generate these effects. With this assumption, you so far only stated that neural circuits cause consciousness. But that is not an explanation yet. You need to explain how it happens. And that means, you need to connect the tangible, physical world with an intangible, non-physical phenomenon such as consciousness. I'm looking forward to see how you cross that bridge.
Everything where high interoperability is more beneficial for consumers than proprietary solutions by individual companies. As a rule of thumb, everything where standardization brings more benefits to consumers than innovation.
Note that as consumer, I can't vote with my money for standardization. I can only vote for one of the proprietary solutions. So if 70% of consumers stick to one option, and 30% stick to the other option (because of other product features), standardization will never happen through market forces, even if 100% of the consumers would want it.
It gets even worse when more than 2 options are on the market, and vendors gain an advantage by locking customers in to their proprietary option.
So it would be more beneficial that Apple is forced to make FaceTime interoperable and all messaging platforms. Should the government enforce that too?
It’s perfectly possible to have sensible hardware standards where doing so will not impede the market without insisting that all software be also standardised.
For the record I think it would be useful for Apple to have the built in Facetime client be able to communicate with other phone platforms. I don’t think Apple should be compelled to offer that currently.
Let’s say back in the day when Apple has the Apple Desktop Bus for low speed peripherals and Nubus for cards, would you also have been in favor of the government forcing Apple to use PS/2 and ISA?
The Android market is just like the PC market of old - a slow moving race to the bottom. Even today, most low end Android phones are still using Micro USB.
I have a hard time understanding the question. If something is overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone, I don't mind at all if market or government make it happen. I just want it to happen.
Again, to not be misunderstood, I'm not sure if charger standardization is indeed overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone. That is what I believe we should discuss here.
But there is never anything that is “beneficial for everyone” and the government does in the best case what is beneficial to their specific voters - even if it is detrimental to others. There is a very high bar for me to say that the government should step in. A powerful Government is more harmful than a powerful business.
Please make yourself familiar with a bit more modern economic theories. The belief that the unregulated market moves things to an optimum for all participants has been proven to be wrong by modern game theory. Not all economic games have their equilibrium at the optimum for consumers.
I leave open if this particular intervention on chargers is beneficial for the public or not, but you will have to argue about chargers to make a point, not about governments and markets.
And taking a look at history - even recent history. The government definitely doesn’t move things in an optimum way for all participants.
The difference is that businesses don’t have the power of the state to compel me to buy their products. I can change phones a lot easier than I can change governments.
Again, you need to show specifically that a uniform charger is less beneficial to consumers than letting Apple keep their proprietary patent-protected charger.
I want my iPhone and my Android phone and my tablet and my notebook to share the same charging port. I would definitely buy an iPhone with USB-C if the market would offer one to me. However, the market won't give that to me. Even if 90% of iPhone buyers would prefer USB-C over Lightning, Apple would not give it to us, because it is beneficial for their business to build their own walled garden.
I don't know if forcing Apple to agree with other vendors is a net benefit for all consumers or not. However, as you seem to have a very strong opinion on why that would be detrimental to consumers, you need to show where consumers would be negatively affected, specifically for charging ports.
This has nothing to do with what one thinks about governments in general.
What I am saying is simple. Giving the government more power without a compelling reason is always detrimental. Making things a little more convenient is not compelling.
But why stop at the connector? Why not force Apple to make AirDrop, FaceTime interoperable? Why not force Apple to port iCloud backups to Android or force Apple to allow backups to third party providers?
I think we have to agree to disagree. I assume that you are not living in the EU. Our experiences here with governmental regulation are not so bad. Companies are complaining, but consumers are not.
Making things a little more convenient for everybody is super-compelling if there is no downside. Freedom for humans is an extremely high value. However, companies are not humans, there is no inherent benefit in giving them as much freedom as possible. And I know economics well enough to confidently state that freedom for companies does not naturally cause well-being and freedom for humans.
And definitely: Every country regulated power outlets. Every country regulated landline phone connections. Every country regulated mobile phone transmission. EU even regulated mobile phone roaming prices. Now they are regulating chargers. And I hope they won't stop, but do everything to keep modern technology open. Industry loves to lock consumers into separate, proprietary, walled gardens. There is no viable strategy for individual consumers to escape. The only viable strategy to escape is by regulation.
No countries did not regulate mobile phone transmissions. The US licenses bandwidth to different companies but did not legislate the protocols. That’s why in the US you had things like push to talk and Sprints aborted 4G non LTE protocol. The market killed it - not the government.
As far as not being able to escape, before 2007-2010, everyone feared the Windows lock-in, technology and the market made that not as big of a fear. Before that it was IBM.
By the time the slow moving government finally made a decision about IBM’s mainframe monopoly that it started in the 60s - in the mid 80s - the market had made the case irrelevant.
As far as everyone liking the files of the EU - see Brexit.
Windows was lock-in in late 90s and early 2000s. That was not only a fear. EU forced Microsoft to open Windows during that time. And that was a good thing. I don't want to wait decades until that stuff is sorted out by obsolescence.
Where is the advantage in waiting for the market?
However, no one forces you to live in the EU. Even countries can exit it. Let us do our thing, and you can do your thing. The market will sort it out :-)
EU had no affect on the browser wars. How do you explain that Chrome took over in the US. Again, Google made a better browser while Microsoft was sleep at the wheel.
Microsoft is just as dominant with Office and desktop PCs as it was in the 90s. The web and then mobile just made the desktop less relevant.
Of course, everybody can interpret history as they like. The fine handed out by EU to Microsoft was of course also a deterrent against further similar attempts, and Microsoft afterwards changed their tactics not only in EU, but world-wide. Or did you not get the Windows browser choice menu in US?
No we not did not get the Browser choice in the US. That’s kind of the perfect control to show that government policy didn’t have any effect. Chrome took over in both markets.
Also it wasn’t the choice of browsers that made Windows less relevant. It was that everything moving to the web made Windows less relevant and that gave to the rise of the modern mobile platforms now that you could do everything on the web that most people cared about and then the app economy.
What do you really think had a bigger impact on even IE losing marketshare, browser choice or the most popular website destination - Google - giving prime advertising real estate to Chrome and Google bundling Chrome with third party apps left and right?
We also see from FB that the little fines that governments hand out don’t stop corporations from behaving in a way that the government doesn’t like.
If you could pull that part off, I think you could take YC to court in Germany, and even achieve a favorable judgement. However, I don't see any way how you could enforce the outcome, except if YC has assets in Germany.