Wife-beating and slavery were once acceptable: How will the future judge us? - <AUTHOR> http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10276/1091912-109.stm?cmpid=newspanel <comment><USER3> Terribly!

Here's some for starters:

\- our total misunderstanding of, and gross inflation of, risk, leading amongst countless other things to the total demise of intergenerational friendship and or knowledge transfer for fear of mostly figmented "predators"

\- our laughable superstitions about supernatural gods and demons which still manage to dominate our politics

\- our inability to use rationality, statistics and outcomes-based thinking to make decisions, instead resorting to emotion and worst case thinking, to disastrous effect

\- our idiotic ostrich-like "war on some drugs"

\- our barbaric indifference to the suffering of others

\- our continuing inability to distinguish between race and culture

Actually, typing that I realise how many of them are really due to the inability to estimate risk.

<comment><USER4> If these problems are rooted in our innate inability to estimate risk, then are they really likely to disappear in the future?

<comment><USER5> We'll have computers which will increasingly replace humans in risk estimation. People will just do what the computer tells them to do.

<comment><USER6> We already have expert systems that can estimate some categories of risk very well. People don't trust them anyway. Personally, I think the problem isn't accuracy, it's accountability. You can't fire or sue a piece of software that makes a wrong estimate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This reminds me of <http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html>

It's easy to pick stuff that a portion of society agrees with you on, like ending drug prohibition, gay marriage, abortion, or immigration. Even more controversial stuff like ending meat-eating or religion will get nods from a few people. I'm not going to mention anything really crazy, since I'll get downvoted as a nut if I do.

I don't blame most people for having the same beliefs as everyone around them, and I think the future will feel similarly. But while future societies may not judge us harshly, I think they'll contain things we would judge them for. This is because we don't have the future's technology, so certain decisions are already made for us. Most of us don't even think of them as decisions. For example, we can't easily increase a person's intelligence. If we could, we would have debates on how best to use this technology and whatnot. Then, maybe one day it would be considered a form of abuse to not increase your child's intelligence through drugs or brain implants.

<comment><USER8> > I'm not going to mention anything really crazy, since I'll get downvoted as > a nut if I do.

You mean like democracy?

Edit: Yup, there's the "downvoted as a nut" - I think voting on what your fellow man can do with his life might be seen as barbaric in the future. Maybe not, but the idea that 51% of people voting in the USA can enforce their will on all 300 million citizens is pretty scary to me...

<comment><USER9> _Maybe not, but the idea that 51% of people voting in the USA can enforce their will on all 300 million citizens is pretty scary to me…_

Luckily that's not quite how it works - we're not a direct democracy. But, even when a majority of representatives attempts to exert their will on us citizens, the scope of their will is limited to the powers explicitly granted them by the constitution and they, within those powers, are further restricted from infringing on our natural and enumerated rights.

Certainly, a reasonable argument can be made that the legislature does push the limits with regards to their powers, particularly with respect to the commerce clause, and we do more arguing in defense of our individual rights than I think should be necessary, but all-in-all we're not doing too bad. In any case, we've so far only needed to use our first three boxes [1] in the defense of liberty. I wouldn't consider it a failure until we find need for the fourth.

1\. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty>

<comment><USER8> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty>

Interesting link, thanks for that.

My view on governance has evolved as I've gotten older - these days I don't believe in one best form of government, and I think people should generally live under the government that they wish to.

Thus, I prefer to see rights reserved to the smallest groups of people practical to make a decision. I'd prefer a lot more decisionmaking to happen at local levels and state levels in the USA, which gives people more options for where they want to live and the kind of government they wish to live under.

Large scale, broad legislation almost always winds up with devil's bargains that don't quite suit anyone really well, special interests working in coalitions... it's bad stuff, in my opinion. Of course, everyone agrees with this for policies they'd like to see happen at a local level, and disagrees for policies they think everyone should follow. Drug control - local or national? Well, people who want decriminalization would prefer it locally decided, which makes it effectively almost legal. People against think it needs to be nationally decided to be effective. Labor laws? Pro-labor people want it national, people against want it locally decided. I'd prefer almost everything is locally decided, but of course, most people will argue that their favorite policies really have to happen on a national level that everyone must follow.

<comment><USER9> _My view on governance has evolved as I've gotten older - these days I don't believe in one best form of government, and I think people should generally live under the government that they wish to._

Truly, and this too is at the heart of our form of democracy - that our inalienable rights trump any government's power, and that we as a free people have the right to choose the government that best serves us. As our founders made clear when declaring our independence, it is a self-evident truth "that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

That we continue to have, as a people, the natural right and ability as protected by the second amendment to abolish our government when we see fit, is (to me) evidence that our founders chose well. That is not to say, of course, that their choice of government will always be the right one for us.

 _I'd prefer a lot more decisionmaking to happen at local levels and state levels in the USA, which gives people more options for where they want to live and the kind of government they wish to live under._

I agree, and this is the reason for my comment on abuse of the commerce clause. The states, and their localities as they see fit, have complete control over their governance _except_ where contradicted by federal treaty and law in pursuance of the constitution. Unfortunately, through the commerce clause the federal legislature, with precious few rebuttals from SCOTUS, has long managed to interfere in purely intrastate concerns.

 _Large scale, broad legislation almost always winds up with devil's bargains that don't quite suit anyone really well, special interests working in coalitions..._

Yes, agreed. The constitution makes it clear where authority really lies - <USER2> short of SCOTUS revisiting their commerce clause rulings, we'll have to effect this change on the soap box and at the ballot box, by finding, supporting and electing national representatives who want to govern us the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Consider the school system. I won't go into how bad it is because I bet a lot of readers here already understand that. What's terrifying is not how bad it is but how institutionalized it is. What little political will, what little realization there is that this system is fundamentally broken, becomes drowned in a sea of hopeless politics.

I think future generations will view our schools as archaic and somewhat barbaric, kind of like how things like corporal punishment and child labor are viewed today. Actually, teaching a child a trade is probably less harmful to his character than sending him to the average public school.

<comment><USER11> > Actually, teaching a child a trade is probably less harmful to his character > than sending him to the average public school.

This is not a new idea. It's called apprenticeship and was once widespread in e.g. Europe. Why it's less common now is largely a combination of changes in the economy (fewer stable, skilled trades) and society (teenagers being less willing to accept the obligations of being an apprentice).

<comment><USER12> Spending time in among adults and performing real work would have a great positive effect on kids.

It seems obvious why teenage culture is petty, cruel, and obsessed with fashion and status; the inmates, trapped in an artificial world and forced to do fake-work, turn on each other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Possibly the future will judge us by the irreparable damage done to the environment and our ecosystem and for all the species that we allowed to die out that they'll never get a chance to see, let alone conserve.

Possibly they will remember us as the ones that killed off the oceans but in that case there might not be anybody there to remember us at all.

Hopefully they'll remember us as the generation that got off their asses and decided to do something, that stopped the damage and the wars before it was too late and that was the first to expand beyond the Earth to avoid having all our eggs in that one basket.

I'm bullish on the future, now let's make it happen somehow.

</comment><comment><USER14> We are the last generation (or one of the last) that doesn't understand our own brains.

We have electricity, light bulbs and flickering TV and computers screens but we don't understand our sleep cycle and the circadian rhythm. We are a sleep- deprived civilization.[1]

Our scientists already know how learning works (semantic encoding and repetition are the key), but we still cram kids in Austro-Hungarian like classrooms.[2]

We are the last generation to waste drinking water. Water is already today a precious resource. In the future this will be even more pronounced.

Great article, got me thinking.

If you're interested, I recommend

[1] The Promise of Sleep: [http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Sleep-Medicine- Connection-Happ...](http://www.amazon.com/Promise-Sleep-Medicine-Connection- Happiness/dp/0440509017/)

[2] Brain Rules: [http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Rules-Principles-Surviving- Thriv...](http://www.amazon.com/Brain-Rules-Principles-Surviving- Thriving/dp/0979777747/)

<comment><USER15> The surface of the earth is 70% water. I refuse to believe that future generations wont figure out a cost effect way of turning this into drinking water on the required scales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This deserves another Paul Graham essay reference: "What You Can't Say". Graham details how each period of history has something different that we look back at and think of as horrible. He also uncovers some patterns between them.

Some excerpts:

"In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well. / In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one."

"To launch a taboo, a group has to be posed halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo."

"Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. Conventions also have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they dress."

<http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html>

</comment><comment><USER17> I believe in the future it will seem ridiculous that people from many countries are prevented from traveling to some other richer countries, while the people from the rich countries can freely move about as they please.

<comment><USER18> There seems to be a common belief, even among the educated, that the security of nations is somehow completely unrelated to the security of the individual.

In reality, one is the macro; the other, micro. They are solutions to the exact same problem at a different scale.

The same way that you lock your door, we collectively close a border. The same way that we call the cops on the drug house, we bomb << entity >> .

So, to re-phrase your future view a little: If you foresee us being able to dispel the notion of door locks in favour of trusting our fellow humans completely, you can imagine your border free world.

I am a little more pessimistic, to be honest.

<comment><USER19> The problem with this analogy is that while it's reasonable to think of oneself as the sole authority over one's own home, that concept does not scale in any meaningful way to the size of a country, unless the governing power is vested in a monarchy.

A great many political theses are advanced from all over the political spectrum in the format of 'You wouldn't tolerate X - so why does the government? We the people demand an end to X!' However, 'we the people', when taken as a whole, have a demonstrable tendency to disagree amongst ourselves, and almost never act in concert. There are all sorts of thing which we should find surprising or unacceptable within our own homes but whose existence we accept or at least tolerate within our county, state, or country because either a majority of our neighbors hold views which differ from ours or because constitutional or legislative power takes precedence over our own preferences.

A better analogy might be to consider the country as something similar to an apartment building or even a small town.You can exert a degree of security insofar as it serves the common good, but an absolutist approach of the kind you describe rapidly becomes self-defeating and unsustainable over the longer term. I might add that absolutism in this context refers to the idea of abolishing borders as much as to the idea of sealing them. After all, we have controls in between the borders of US states with limited powers to enforce prohibitions or requirements unique to that state, from carrying certain produce to wearing a motorcycle helmet, and these are not considered especially onerous.

Rather than abolition of borders, I see a trend away from a presumption of exclusion as the default and towards a policy of neutral vigilance - in other words, personal migration will come to be seen in the same light as other trade flows, subject to inspection and monitoring but requiring specific grounds for interference.

So, suppose you have a business importing silk from China, and the hacky part is that it's woven in conformity with 6502 assembler code or something. It comes into the US in a cargo container, and we all accept that DHS/CBP want to assure themselves that it doesn't include radioactive materials, smallpox, or marauding silkworm colonies. That done, we expect them to be indifferent to the question of whether 8-bit silken handkerchief designs will affect the US economy in positive or negative fashion - that's for the market to discover, not the customs inspectors, as long as there's no ongoing trade dispute between China and the US justifying their exclusion in accordance with treaty.

We already have such a policy in place for visiting tourists and businesspersons from other developed countries, and which is mostly reciprocal - you can grab your passport and fly to Japan on a whim for up to 90 days, and vice versa. Within both the US and the EU, the benefits of allowing migration between the individual member states seems to considerably outweigh the various costs; economics suggests that rational policymaking on international migration will go the same way sooner or later.

Of course, this isn't foolproof and the downside of such a policy is that criminals can exploit such openness to further their wicked ends. But insofar the number of such people/incidents is low - not least because more people appreciate the freedoms of the open model, and have a stake in its preservation - that risk is tolerable.

<comment><USER18> _The problem with this analogy is that while it's reasonable to think of oneself as the sole authority over one's own home, that concept does not scale in any meaningful way to the size of a country, unless the governing power is vested in a monarchy._

What are you talking about? The recognized governments of the world are the sole powers of the areas of land they control, in the same manner that I might be recognized as being the master of my domain; in fact more so!

In essence: enough other people agree that they are, so they are. I think you're reading too far into the analogy to assert that democratic governments as entities in and of themselves don't fit.

 _That done, we expect them to be indifferent to the question of whether 8-bit silken handkerchief designs will affect the US economy in positive or negative fashion - that's for the market to discover, not the customs inspectors, as long as there's no ongoing trade dispute between China and the US justifying their exclusion in accordance with treaty._

I'm not sure what part of the planet you live on where this happens. When and if we actually do establish it with trade, we can start worrying about immigration.

<comment><USER19> _What are you talking about? The recognized governments of the world are the sole powers of the areas of land they control, in the same manner that I might be recognized as being the master of my domain; in fact more so!_

The difference is that while it's relatively easy for you to make a decision and then act upon it, in a democratic country it's quite rare for the population to be so unified that the government of the day engages in completely unilateral actions. Not only is the government constrained by disagreements among the governed which affect its capacity for unitary policymaking, it's also usually constrained by constitutional matters which may prevent it from acting in certain ways despite the clear wishes of a legitimate majority.

That's why I suggested that scaling up the behavior of a householder to the size of a country is going to give you a monarchy of some kind. North Korea is governed by someone who seems to believe that the nation's security is best served by sealing off the whole country from its neighbors, but I rather doubt you want to live there.

 _When and if we actually do establish it with trade_

Well this is quite close to what we have now. If you or I decide to start importing stuff from China, the customs people don't give two hoots about which particular things are imported in most cases. Nobody, for example, is going to call you up and say 'we halted your furniture shipment because we don't like tables with built-in drawers, what the economy needs right now is a greater supply of chairs.'

<comment><USER18> _The difference is that while it's relatively easy for you to make a decision and then act upon it, in a democratic country it's quite rare for the population to be so unified that the government of the day engages in completely unilateral actions_

Did you miss the whole "Let's go on a desert adventure and finish what dad started" that happened a few years back?

 _Well this is quite close to what we have now._

No offense, but if you actually think this you are completely ignorant of world affairs in general, but specifically international trade. Things to Google: Softwood Lumber, Corn Industry subsidies, Farm subsidies, OPEC.

I could go on...

<comment><USER19> Get a sense of proportion. You are treating edge cases as the norm.

<comment><USER18> They are the norm. Free Trade accommodations are specifically negotiated and are in fact the real edge cases in the world of trade at the movement. Even when they do exist, there are often disputes.

Give me one example of an import/export international trade experience that has not been subject to protectionist measures of some nature and perhaps I can explore your point some more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It may also be possible that the future will hold us responsible for something that we are very proud of today. I recently re-read "The Lord of the Rings" and was surprised at the racist / eugenic undertones, which unfortunately date the book to some degree. One person's chief virtue is that he's of unadulterated blood, some nation is declining because of mixing of the races etc. Unbelievable as it may seem today, people once held racism and segregation as noble ideals. What will our time be known as - the age of political correctness, maybe?

<comment><USER10> Tolkien explicitly denied that anything in the Lord of the Rings was intended to be directly allegorical. As I recall, the books don't talk about mixing races in the sense of subdivisions of humanity; they talk about things like mixing men and _orcs_ , so it's not really the same as miscegenation.

edit: Apparently I didn't recall well enough. Oh well.

<comment><USER20> Yes they do. Aragorn is of the purest race of Westernesse, and his special abilities are in good part based on this. The subjects of prince Imrahil are sadly mixed in race, although the prince himself is of rather pure breed, etc. It's not about this being an allegory for England or whatever, it's about the general world view and the things that are considered noble and admirable.

<comment><USER21> And don't forget the barbaric men from the South and their backward ways.

<comment><USER22> Which reminds me that some of the comments in the book are made through the eyes of the characters. Of course enemy foreigners would seem "orcish" to a hobbit, because for him orc means evil and enemy means evil (and for the most part he would be right).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's interesting how cultures differ on some of these.

I was speaking to a friend who works in China. He says he often discusses with the locals their appalling treatment of animals, which can be genuinely shocking to Westerners. He says this is usually met by a swift rebuke "How on earth can you criticize us for our treatment of animals when your culture treats your elderly relatives - your own family! - so horrifically, shipping them off to be ignored in a home for the rest of their lives?". It's a fair point - people in glass houses...

<comment><USER24> Ehh... it's a _point_ , but IMHO not a good one. I'm Chinese and have heard a lot of this viewpoint from my "own kind" (I don't actually identify culturally as Chinese, but whatever).

"We're faultless because you've got faults" is a shitty argument no matter which way it's offered. Or more accurately "we're not going to engage in intellectual discussion about this issue until you yourself are perfect in every way". It's dumb and pointless, and is really just defensive nationalistic kneejerking.

Another common argument I hear from the Chinese is the "you had our turn, so we get to have ours". It's very common when it comes to environmental issues - the basic logic is that America was able to burn fossil fuel in a completely unrestrained way for decades, so why shouldn't China get the same opportunity?

<comment><USER23> I don't think the argument is that they are not faultless. It's that they see the Western faults (treating their elderly relatives so poorly) as so much worse than their faults in a related area (treating animals poorly). It's a valid observation - that our complaining of the poor treatment of sentient animals is rather undermined by our poor treatment of a much more closer to home sentient animal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Automobiles. I think the future will be horrified that people transported themselves around in two-ton machines that polluted the air and fatally crashed into things (and each other) a lot, especially when both before and after the invention of automobiles we had safer and cleaner options, and especially when a lot of people spend hours a day sitting in their cars in stop-and-go traffic.

I have an SUV myself, and the freedom and joy and romance of driving appeals to me as much as anyone, but at some point, if energy is expensive enough, all of that will be forgotten, and it'll turn into a horror story.

</comment><comment><USER26> As medical technology progresses, it seems obvious that abortion will eventually be seen as barbaric. A hundred years ago, a baby born prematurely would die, but now babies live when born at 7 months, 6 months? earlier? Laws in the US have begun to reflect this. The only logical limit is conception.

At some point, it will no longer be an issue of religion or freedom of the mother, just like wife-beating must have been the "right if a man."

<comment><USER27> Conversely, contraception technology may progress to the point that accidental pregnancy itself becomes a quaint impossibility, sidestepping the moral issues altogether.

<comment><USER28> Not entirely. People change their mind.

So the question will be (and mainly already is): when is too late to change your mind?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> _What are we doing today that our descendants might condemn tomorrow?_

Over 1M deaths due to US-led invasion of Iraq:

[http://www.projectcensored.org/top- stories/articles/1-over-o...](http://www.projectcensored.org/top- stories/articles/1-over-one-million-iraqi-deaths-caused-by-us-occupation/)

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Casualties_of...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War#Opinion_Research_Business_.28ORB.29_poll)

<comment><USER28> That number is ten times higher than many (I think most) other estimates. Is there a reason you prefer their methodology?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I think the future will judge this as a time of great confusion. Scarcity, the fundament of our economy, is becoming obsolete. Danger, the most powerful of human instincts, is largely irrelevant. Our technology gives us so much power that most decisions we make are no longer "can we?" but "should we?". We are more isolated than ever, and our nascent internet social models are rarely enough to sustain more than superficial relationships.

This is not true everywhere, but in most of the western world it is. Social change lags behind technological. The information age has done wonderful things, but I think we will be remembered as the first people to deal with the end of "natural" in any meaningful sense, and of a time spent struggling to find a replacement that is built, not handed to us by circumstance.

</comment><comment><USER31> Since no one mentioned it yet: The lack of right to die if you are incurably ill is shameful

A few countries and states already have euthanasia laws in place (Switzerland, the Netherlands) but in most other places you are still forced to die a painful and long drawn out death that is hard on the relatives too.

</comment><comment><USER32> Meat consumption - Vegetarianism.

"Slave" Labour - there are still 26 million slaves in the world.

Some prison systems, notably the U.S.

<comment><USER33> _"Slave" Labour - there are still 26 million slaves in the world._

Not just those 26 million, but there are far more if you count people who engage in temporary forced labor [1]. Many countries temporarily enslave their citizens, including Cuba, Denmark, Finland, Iran, North Korea and Israel.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription#Countries_with_and...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription#Countries_with_and_without_mandatory_military_service)

Some prominent US politicians have proposed the US should bring back the practice (we used to do this):

[http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dc/2010/07/rangel-still- run...](http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dc/2010/07/rangel-still-running- still-pus.html)

[http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-website-scrubs- mandatory-c...](http://www.prisonplanet.com/obama-website-scrubs-mandatory- community-service-call.html)

[1] This differs from slavery, in the sense that these people cannot be bought/sold and the duration is limited.

<comment><USER34> It differs from slavery, in the sense that these people are still legally people.

That's not some trivial fucking difference.

<comment><USER33> Suppose the US passed a law in 1850 saying that slaves are legally people, but no other changes were made (i.e., the legal person slaves were still forced to perform labor for their masters). Would that also be a non-trivial difference?

Being defined as a legal person is nice, but it doesn't change the fact that you are forced (under threat of violence) to work for someone else against your will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I'm very surprised that nobody has mentioned the domination of modern banking over our present society.

Most of the major nations of the world currently pay a fee to private banks for the privilege of circulating their own currency. Our current debt-backed money system is unstable and serves to exacerbate and deepen the gap between the rich and poor and lodges an enormous amount of power in the hands of a few men.

I believe that should humanity ever squirm out from under the thumb of 'big banking' we will view the stranglehold it has had on us for the past few hundred years as a great systemic evil to which we collectively averted our gaze for a long long time.

</comment><comment><USER36> Slavery is still acceptable, as long as it's out-of-sight and out-of-mind. Or do you expect Dell to have ensured fair wages and working conditions for every person involved in the resource extraction and manufacture of the machine on the desk in front of me?

<comment><USER28> Dell offers an opportunity to these employees which, while lousy by Western standards, is better, in their judgment, than the alternatives available to them. That's why they have voluntarily accepted the position. Dell has made their lives better, not worse.

Slaves didn't agree to be slaves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I have always thought abortion an act of barbarism against which both the past _and_ the future would revolt. Babies are killed for convenience and profit; it'd be over the top for comic book villains, and yet it is real.

It won't survive another generation, and will be seen as one of the darkest black spots in our history.

<comment><USER38> >I have always thought abortion an act of barbarism against which both the past and the future would revolt

Given that the use of abortifacients is well documented for the entire duration of recorded history, this seems unlikely.

<comment><USER37> Really! That goes strongly against what I think I know about mores and history. Do you happen to have details or documentation for that claim?

<comment><USER38> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_abortion> is as good a place to start as any.

<comment><USER39> > Given that the use of abortifacients is well documented for the entire > duration of recorded history, this seems unlikely.

From your link, it appears abortion has been _controversial_ for the entire duration of recorded history. It would be accurate to say that some past societies would view current abortion practices as barbaric, but perhaps not all past societies.

<comment><USER38> >From your link, it appears abortion has been controversial for the entire duration of recorded history

Hmm, okay, but I was thinking in terms of a comparison with our current feelings. It's still controversial _now_ , but it wouldn't really be accurate to say that 'our society' views the practice as barbaric - though of course many individuals do, and doubtless always have and will.

I don't believe that we are any more likely to choose abortion now than at any other point in history. The option is a lot _easier_ now, so the numbers presumably work out higher, but it's more than just a societal phase that makes it seem appealing (for want of a better word) to a lot of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> For their own good: locking children up in schools; telling them what to learn; coercing them in the name of health and education; punishing children at home.

These things won't happen eventually. Yet future generations will take education, health and morality _more seriously_ than we do.

<comment><USER41> > punishing children at home

We shouldn't punish children? Even for things they clearly understand are wrong?

<comment><USER40> It sounds crazy, doesn't it? Of course, the idea of not punishing one's _wife_ after she had done something which she understood to be wrong, once upon a time, also sounded crazy.

This applies to all moral progress. Any prediction about morality that doesn't shock at least _some_ people is unlikely to be both true and important.

<comment><USER41> I can, in sci-fi sense, imagine a world where we wouldn't need to discipline children, but it would take some pretty fundamental changes in our understanding of parenting techniques and probably involve some technology that doesn't exist today. That puts it pretty far away from "stop beating your wife" which just required you to... stop beating your wife. Are you thinking disciplining children instead would be a simple shift from today?

Also, would some acts, like murder, still be punishable? Or are you imagining a shift so deep that no one would need to be punished.

<comment><USER40> I believe in gradual change. Ending the extrajudicial punishment of children is not such a big step, because it entails only a small extension of human status (having already incorporated women, slaves, foreigners, etc.)

I doubt that judicial punishment of strangers is going to end anytime soon, but note how different that is to punishing a family member.

However, now you mention it, there is an interesting similarity. Why does punishment happen? Not for the reasons most people think. For instance, it doesn't (and can't) transmit moral knowledge from the punisher to the punished. Neither does it reliably cause obedience.

In reality, society punishes criminals in order to prevent greater suffering in the form of larger scale rioting and madness.

Similarly, parents punish children to prevent _themselves_ from going mad. But if knowledge spread of how to be a better and happier parent then this sort of punishment would end.

Such knowledge may already exist in basic form:

[http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/introductory_articles...](http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com/introductory_articles_about_TCS)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Personally, my bet would be that the extreme amount of effort we put in to promoting diversity in educational institutes and the work place will be something people eventually can't imagine being necessary.

Hopefully.

Edit: I guess I wasn't explicit enough as people took this the wrong way.. What I meant is that diversity will "just happen." I of course realize that it is a very important thing and that our efforts certainly are a good thing.

<comment><USER43> Seriously .. WTF? (You don't believe that diversity will be seen as something that's worthwhile, and you're hoping for this conclusion?)

Or, perhaps I've misread what you're trying to say?

<comment><USER44> Apologies for downvoting you, I did so based on your original post of just "Seriously .. WTF?". I don't see his post as being WTF-worthy even though I disagree with it, nor do I condone any such posts since they add nothing of value to the discussion.

I interpreted his/her post as not against diversity, but against "diversification" programs like affirmative action as opposed to letting social entropy run its course. I agree with the sentiment somewhat but I don't think it meets the criteria for looking back and asking "what was society thinking?".

<comment><USER43> That's okay. I saw the post had been downvoted as this led me to assume that the post was promoting a desire for less diversity .. although after re- reading I realised that might not be the case. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I was trying to think of things the future can look down on us for, but I can only come up with:

* Polluting the environment.

* Allowing people to day of easily curable diseases.

Seems like thinking outside of our own times is really hard.

<comment><USER46> * Gay marriage (lack of)

* Drug prohibition

...always immediately jump out at me; I'm sure there are many, many others.

<comment><USER47> Interestingly, the article didn't mention the first, and barely touched the second.

Their hypothesis on when something is surely to be condemned in the future requires universal lack of moral defensibility. Right now, the detractors on both of these issues are still claiming they are speaking from morality, so the article didn't list them.

That said, I agree with you. The article, however, implies that these issues are not yet inevitably going to be looked down on in the future. (whew, run on sentence much?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> On a smaller scale, I believe the future will judge us on our software. ie, bank websites with security holes in them the size of trucks. Software is still so young and has a long ways to go. The future might be amazed at how often we literally put our lives, finances, privacy, etc in the hands of really poorly written software.

<comment><USER49> Yeah, I'll buy this, too. Our software will be like the rounded rocks used in the Stone Age; people will see it in museums and wonder how people could have been so naive.

<comment><USER50> If the software even still runs...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> What makes us think that future generations won't be disgusted by _our_ wife- beating and slavery?

</comment><comment><USER52> How would the past judge us?

<comment> a-priori They would look at the vast regions of the world that are peaceful, and think we are foolish for being so trustful of our neighbours.

"Why is Washington not afraid of New York raising an army and marching on the capital?", they would say. Until the last couple centuries, that's something you'd have to be afraid of. Yet, that's something that people today would think is preposterous.

I'm an optimist. I happen to think this is a trend that will continue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Greed. Which arguably is the reason the other ills (except hatin on old people) listed in the article exist. But, honestly, believing humans will evolve beyond greed in the future is far-fetched.

<comment><USER54> I'd like to turn that on its head. I'd like to see an end to the demagoguery of greed.

In my perfect world, people understand that when someone makes money, it's because he's providing something of value to society. And the more money he makes, the more value he's delivering. The way to encourage people to work hardest for society is through the incentive of potential riches.

The only sin begotten by greed is the use of force and its little brother, fraud. So long people openly enter into agreements that they both believe to be beneficial to themselves, it's no one else's business.

<comment><USER55> _... when someone makes money, it's because he's providing something of value to society. And the more money he makes, the more value he's delivering._

I agree that people should receive reward in proportion to the value they create, but I don't believe that people who make more money are always delivering more value. The main problem with that idea is the difficulty in determining how much value a single individual actually generates.

There are plenty of terrible CEOs who destroy the value of the companies they manage, yet still receive huge salaries and bonus packages, and there are plenty of great teachers/engineers/others lower on the totem pole who earn a relative pittance. Is this because of the value they've created, or due to the CEO's direct proximity to value creation, an ability to convince others of their importance, and a relatively small supply side? I'd say looking at the ridiculous increases in the CEO-worker earning gap over the last few decades it has been warped by factors other than deservedness.

It may be true that there is a correlation between value created and income, but I think there are too many other factors at play to say that it is a general rule.

<comment><USER54> _I don't believe that people who make more money are always delivering more value._

Then why are people giving them money? What makes you think that you (or some regulator or something) could do a better job of evaluating their worth.

 _There are plenty of terrible CEOs who destroy the value of the companies they manage, yet still receive huge salaries and bonus packages_

I think this is a case of the normal human inability to assess the risk of rare, significant events (and hence our overreaction to terrorist attacks, child abduction, etc.). While the kind of thing you cite certainly happens from time to time, I submit that it's much rarer than many people seem to perceive -- the very fact that they make big news is evidence of how unusual it is. The hiring of a CEO is a very significant decision that is attended with a certain amount of risk. On one hand it's important to be able to attract the best talent available, but on the other hand the calculated risk may crap out.

Eliminating the risk of losses due to contract buyouts is (obviously, at least to me) not the solution. I know that I'm not capable of doing the job that my company's CEO does; I don't know anyone who is. Even if I were technically capable, I don't think I could handle the responsibility she shoulders, keeping us all profitably employed. I think she earns everything she gets.

 _I'd say looking at the ridiculous increases in the CEO-worker earning gap over the last few decades it has been warped by factors other than deservedness. ... there are plenty of great teachers/engineers/others lower on the totem pole who earn a relative pittance_

I think that much of that can be attributed to the fact that the market is not free to assign value as appropriate. For one thing, we have protectionism preserving low-skill jobs. While the value of an excellent CEO really is increasing, the value of a low-skill assembly worker is not. But tariffs ( _caused_ in part by the demagoguery of greed, I might add) prevent us from getting rid of those jobs, which would eventually lead to greater availability of high-skill jobs.

In the specific case of teachers, the mismatch of contribution to compensation is explicitly their own fault. The rules that their unions demand we adhere to disallow us from compensating better those with greater value. The same is true of other unions (which tends to correspond to those lower on your totem pole).

<comment><USER55> _Then why are people giving them money? What makes you think that you (or some regulator or something) could do a better job of evaluating their worth._

First off, I don't believe that we should impose a different system for valuing people's salaries, and I didn't mean to imply that if I did. I just think that there are obvious flaws in the current system. I wish I had an answer that would fix all the issues, but, of course, it's not that simple.

Essentially, my impression is that you believe that the market which determines people's salaries is entirely rational, and I disagree. As in most (all?) marketplaces, it's not really about the value, it's about the _perceived_ value. Some people (and they are not evenly distributed across all career paths) are better than others at convincing people they are worth a lot, so they get paid more. This is partly due to proximity to the money making process, which is one of the reasons that salespeople are paid so much (it's easier for them to make an argument based on "look how much money I've made you!").

In addition, people don't value CEOs (or anyone else for that matter) in a vacuum. They look at what other CEOs are being paid and are primed to base their valuation accordingly. If their pay was truly based on value-delivered, this wouldn't be the case.

I wholeheartedly agree with you that government involvement via tariffs and salary management is generally a bad thing. It only makes a messy situation messier. But that doesn't mean the free market is perfect, and examining and understanding its weaknesses can only benefit us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> I think he's missing world poverty. Whilst noone really supports it, it's entirely morally reprehensible that we don't do more as a society to eradicate poverty around the world.

</comment><comment><USER57> These are things that should change, however future generations will only judge us on the ones that progressive politicians are able to legislate away. The rest will be just as normal for future generations.

The good money is on environmental change. There are already tax incentives and other programs for that. How society treats both the young (education) and old (retirement and end of life decisions) will never change.

<comment><USER58> I doubt how we treat the young and the elderly will stop changing. Just look at child labor laws and social security, medicade/care in the US for one example of radical change.

<comment><USER57> The major changes you mention are from 40+ years ago. Social security is only played with when there is a funding problem on the horizon. I don't see what is changing for the better.

<comment><USER58> Well sure, but you seem to be scoping your statement down to recent events, in America, and only positive change. Before you were addressing any type of change in society as a whole, in the future. I was merely pointing out the vagaries of such over arching statements.

If we are to consider society as a whole, over time, i think things are moving in a positive direction for the liberties of children and the elderly. It's hard to predict what may or may not change in American legislation in the future, but I doubt it will be "nothing".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> The future will condemn our coercive parenting and our irrational, exclusive relationships (marriages).

If you think that sounds crazy, that means they are at least candidates for things people _take for granted_ that are bad (unlike, say, the environmentalism in the post which is an issue we're all aware of).

If interested, you can find arguments here: <http://fallibleideas.com/>

</comment><comment><USER60> That we were a culture that had it within our power to stop aging and age- related death, and chose to bury our heads in the sand and suffer and die instead. Ignorant suicidal barbarians, they'll call us.

[http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/09/the-scientific- de...](http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/09/the-scientific-debate-that- will-determine-how-long-we-all-live.php)

<comment><USER61> We don't blame the past for not discovering penicillin until the 19th-20th Century (there is debate on the exact date). The future won't blame us for not discovering {as-yet-undiscovered amazing thing} yet, either.

<comment><USER62> I (and many others) blame close-mindedness for holding back Scientific Progress and the fruits of the Enlightenment. Would Penicillin have been discovered earlier if people hadn't been so keen to label as 'heresy' what was just new, potentially valid hypotheses about the universe?

<comment><USER61> I can agree in part. We must hold people accountable for their beliefs, actions, and attitudes across time and place. On the other hand, I do not think that we should underestimate the degree to which serendipity influences the scientific endeavor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This is philosophy made relevant; there's no evaluation like self-evaluation.

</comment><comment><USER64> Rent and interest. Both are giant rivers of money from the poor to the rich that we accept without question.

</comment><comment><USER65> There are a bunch more to think about:

War? Terrorism? Torture? Are we to believe that for the rest of eternity we will have these 3 things?

Discriminating against gays? abortion (either that we allowed it at all, or that people fought against it, I don't even know which will prevail), income inequality, immigration laws.

</comment><comment><USER66> This article seams to propose that morality and civility improve linearly forever when in fact it's more like the stock market with frequent crashes and long periods of decline. I am maybe a pessimist but I think that modern society is near the peak of what we can achieve.

I personally think that it's not enough but I am the minority and my fellow citizens will simply vote against people who share my ideals. There is too many people hardwired to be assholes. Maybe if we start tweaking our brains (what could possibly go wrong) we could reach new milestones but otherwise I am not holding my breath.

<comment><USER15> Move to another country. The US has set up a perfect storm of a shockingly awful school system, dumbed down media from every angle, emotion in politics causing people to frame every discussion as "my side = save the US" vs. "their side = destroy it", etc. creating a large group of people who just can't be reasoned with.

<comment> a-priori While I agree these are all concerns, I am skeptical that this is a modern phenomenon. Were people a generation or two ago really less emotional, or less prone to black-and-white thinking?

<comment><USER15> I think they were probably the same they just didn't spend as much time thinking (for lack of a better word) about this stuff. It wasn't _that_ long ago that there was only 15 minutes of news a day on the TV. People were thinking about it less because they didn't have the option to plug into political hacks spewing nonsense literally 24/7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> I like to think that we will do away with the tragedy of the commons and actually find the solutions that are best for all of us and not just some of us. (And when I say 'us', I mean that to the widest extent).

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think the future is going to "judge" us anymore than we really judge past civilizations. We realize the mistakes they made were usually due to ignorance just as ours are.

The things they'll shake their heads about will probably be things like:

Having country policies decided by popularity contests instead of research and (where possible) science.

Spending most of our waking hours making people we don't even personally know rich instead of finding a way to spend more time enjoying what little life we had.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm fairly sure we'll be judged to some extent that we allowed Bush to be president, twice no less, and also that we spent the first decade of the 21st century in war.

</comment><comment><USER69> The fact that people did bad things at one time doesn't imply that what they did was accepted generally or approved by moral standards of the time. For example, many contemporaries opposed the tactics of the Inquisition (mentioned in the article as the advent of waterboarding).

Using the same logic we could characterize 20th-Century people as accepting mass-murder, because it was practiced by numerous nations on a never-before- seen scale.

</comment><comment><USER70> Hopefully in the future, people will be more free. They will look back and wonder why it was once acceptable for governments to:

* confiscate huge percentages of a person's work, thus effectively making working people serfs of the government

* conscript people for war

* conduct wars

* require licensing to practice certain occupations

* restrict freedom to trade and tax commerce

* tolerate public unions

* monopolize the education of children

* force working people to provide pensions and healthcare for non-working people

* imprison people for using drugs in their homes

<comment><USER71> I hope that I'm long dead before the time comes when society is wondering why it was once acceptable to tolerate free association between employees and to not let people starve who aren't working. I at least hope I have enough kids to support me once society has horribly failed in that way.

<comment><USER72> Violence does not solve social problems. Forcing people to feed unemployed people is violent. A future without forced "charity" does not mean people are left to starve.

<comment><USER71> >Violence does not solve social problems.

This is a straw man. Violence can help with social problems sometimes, which is why we have policemen.

>Forcing people to feed unemployed people is violent.

Agreed.

>A future without forced "charity" does not mean people are left to starve.

Completely false. In a future _with_ forced charity, there will exist people left to starve because of difficulties in execution, distribution, public will, or a general lack of resources. Leaving this entirely to the discretion of individuals will destroy equality of protection, creating a patchwork (which will likely largely exclude historically discriminated against groups), and will tend to work against economies of scale.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> Jared Diamond works with a similar theme in his book "Collapse" though he goes further and explores issues that might literally bring about an end to our societies.

The take-away from both pieces: we should regularly question our beliefs and values in a larger context - what may seem like a perfectly normal, decent and harmless thing to us may be doing our society irreparable harm in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER74> The use of violence as an economic and political tool - due to changes in communications, the tide is already turning.

</comment><comment><USER75> Recorded music. The most bewildering thing about us to our descendants 80 years from now would be that millions of people routinely walked around with headphones, tuned to radio stations, or walked around public spaces, _listening to exactly the same music over and over again_.

<comment><USER76> I don't see how this will change. 80 years ago, people were listening to the exact same songs over and over again. They only difference is that their players weren't portable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information-theoretic_death>

</comment><comment><USER28> Compulsory schooling is the top of my list, as any society which values freedom must value the freedom of one's own mind above all.

</comment><comment><USER78> Hopefully:

* War

* Garbage

* Pollution

* Taking your shoes off in airports :)

<comment><USER79> > * Taking your shoes off in airports :)

As someone who is not at all fond of flying, hopefully they'll judge the whole idea of tin cans hurtling through the sky, powered by highly flammable chemicals as being a bit primitive.

<comment><USER80> Looking at current research I would think that in the future plastic cans will hurtle across the sky, powered by more flammable but biodegradable chemicals. ;)

I think airplanes are here to stay for some time. There are few alternatives, one of them high speed rail, which has its own problems.

<comment><USER11> > ...high speed rail, which has its own problems

Oceans come to mind.

<comment><USER80> I was actually thinking about the absurdly high cost of high speed tracks (tens of millions per kilometer). But yeah, oceans are somewhat of a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Patents and Copyrights :D for starters.

</comment><comment><USER82> Technology addiction.

</comment><comment><USER83> polluters</comment>


Elite colleges fail half of the poor students they admit - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/17/18647250/privileged-poor-university-admissions-anthony-abraham-jack <comment><USER2> Vox with the misleading headline.</comment>


Largest South-Korean Blockchain. Live Panel Discussion [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90V8VzxgXmc <comment><AUTHOR> Do we have any Koreans here, to share how ICON is actually seen in their country?</comment>


The Brotherhood of the Ad Blockers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-10/inside-the-brotherhood-of-pi-hole-ad-blockers <comment><USER2> > Only a few years ago, even people who hated ads saw ad-blocking software as > akin to stealing.

I've been using ad blockers and NoScript plugins for longer than I can remember. Before that I was using /etc/hosts file based blocking. I've never felt like I was stealing nor do I know anyone that feels that way.

On the contrary, I've always felt that content to display, and in particular code to execute, on my device is my decision and mine alone.

<comment><USER3> Do you not believe that content creators have the right to set the terms upon which their content may be consumed? In other words, if you write an article, you don't believe that you have the right to say "you may read this article, provided that you also display this ad"? If you don't want to see the ad, simply don't read the article. What makes you think you have the right to the content, without abiding its terms?

I say this as someone who uses an AdBlocker daily. Of course it's stealing. You're violating the contract you implicitly agree to when you visit the site. This may or may not have legal force, but it's _clearly_ stealing. If you don't want to see ads, don't visit sites that have them. THAT is how you retain the sanctity of your experience and avoid stealing.

<comment><USER4> _What makes you think you have the right to the content_

The fact that my web browser received a 200 from the server. Server seemed to think it's okay to give it to me.

 _You 're violating the contract you implicitly agree to when you visit the site._

I will once again remind those that pull out this argument that the "implicit agreement" is that my web browser sends a request, and if the server thinks I am worthy of viewing the content, it sends said content along with a "200: everything is A-Okay! Happy to be of service!". If the server thinks me unworthy, it can send a 403.

If someone wishes to redefine the "implicit agreement", please include a reference to the relevant RFC. Because otherwise it's just some marketing person trying to redefine the world the way they wished it were. Should someone care to redefine the World Wide Web experience such that I do not control what my browser displays, well, maybe the WWW isn't appropriate for their business.

<comment><USER3> You seem to think technical implementations matter for some reason. I find that rather odd. Do you think that someone leaving their front door open entitles you to the contents of their home?

<comment><USER5> If they put up a public sign in front of it that says "come on in and take anything you want" then... kind of.

It's not that access implies consent, it's that the technical standard is the methodology by which a company grants consent.

The fact that there's ink on a piece of paper is meaningless by itself, but if it forms my signature on a contract, then it does have meaning. The fact that I can get to a server is meaningless by itself, but if the server returns a 200, explicitly designated as "yes, you can access this", then that's a different story.

Of course there are gray areas there. If someone faked my signature, or if someone accidentally made their server return a 200 code without meaning to or understanding what they were doing... then fine, I'll concede that they haven't really offered informed consent.

But that's not the position that any news site is in. No news site is accidentally returning a 200 code when my computer asks "can I have this content?"

<comment><USER3> > If they put up a public sign in front of it that says "come on in and take > anything you want" then... kind of.

Do you believe that putting up a website is the equivalent of that sign?

<comment><USER5> Yes.

[https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes/http- stat...](https://www.iana.org/assignments/http-status-codes/http-status- codes.xml)

It's hard to describe an HTTP status as anything other than a sign. If it was purely technical, we wouldn't distinguish between 402 (payment required) and 403 (forbidden).[0]

While HTTP status codes can be understood by a machine, they're also designed to be highly semantic and understandable by humans. I would argue that the burden is on people who argue that they are not contractual to justify why, in the same way that I would expect them to justify why a handshake isn't contractual.

 _Edit: Potentially interesting as well is a semi-recent court ruling about web scraping[1], where courts effectively ruled that once LinkedIn made their information public, they couldn 't block web scrapers from accessing that information, which suggests that the law also agrees with the web community on this one.

> "But Judge Chen concluded that the issue isn't so simple. When you publish a > website, you implicitly give members of the public permission to access it, > he ruled."_

[0]: Although admittedly, nobody really makes much use of 402.

[1]: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects- li...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/08/court-rejects-linkedin- claim-that-unauthorized-scraping-is-hacking/)

<comment><USER3> > It's hard to describe an HTTP status as anything other than a sign. If it > was purely technical, we wouldn't distinguish between 402 (payment required) > and 403 (forbidden).

I agree that the existence of those status codes does a good job at disambiguating representations of intent regarding payment. However, to my knowledge, there's no status code that means "Ok, as long as you don't use an adblocker". As such, any such provision has to be layered on higher up the stack. The current solution is to put it in the site's terms of service.

That seems pretty equivalent to an HTTP status code, no? I'd argue that you have contracts simply operating at multiple levels here. All an entity ought need to do is clearly communicate the terms of access to their interlocutor. If they have done so, and the client understands the terms, then they should be bound by them if they proceed.

> Edit: Potentially interesting as well is a semi-recent court ruling about > web scraping[1], where courts effectively ruled that once LinkedIn made > their information public, they couldn't block web scrapers from accessing > that information, which suggests that the law also agrees with the web > community on this one.

Haha, yes i'm quite familiar with this case, having written a LinkedIn scraper recently. LinkedIn still does not make this particularly easy, despite being compelled to by the courts. The nuances the judge seems to have settled on are a bit interesting. Apparently they're allowed to block access to stuff that requires you to login to see, but not stuff that doesn't.

<comment><USER5> > As such, any such provision has to be layered on higher up the stack. The > current solution is to put it in the site's terms of service.

But the problem is that I never signed that TOS. We keep on coming back to this, but putting a TOS somewhere on your site is not binding. You need to get my informed consent. In the same way, if I stuck up a contract on my public blog that said "by fulfilling any HTTP request I make, you grant me license to republish your content," I couldn't steal everyone's artwork off of DeviantArt and claim "well, we did have a contract."

We have a really good solution for this problem - put a 401 (unauthorized) page in front of your content, which is accurate because the site operator has decided that someone who hasn't agreed not to block ads is not authorized to view the content. Then require me to sign the TOS before you authenticate me.

That would be an enforceable contract. Ad blocking is a solved problem for anyone who's really willing to block requests and require authentication.

Of course, the vast majority of sites don't want to do that because it's incredibly annoying to the average user. But that's not a problem with the technology - informed consent is fundamentally annoying to procure in any context. It will always be more work to get someone to voluntarily agree to a set of conditions than it will be to just give them something. On the web, that's just more of a problem because quick, impulsive, uninformed clicks currently form the majority of web revenue.

So site operators have discovered that it is more profitable _not_ to get informed consent and just hope that nobody blocks your stuff. The downside is that you have no TOS to enforce because you never got anybody to agree to it. But, that's a downside many sites are willing to live with.

The conflict comes when courts rule that the implied contract that users believe they're agreeing to isn't the terms that ad networks wanted. I find that often what ad agencies want is to have legally binding implied contracts, but only in one direction and under terms that they can change at any time.

I'm all for contract law, but if it's the users responsibility to understand a site's TOS before they request information, shouldn't it also be the site's responsibility to understand a user's TOS and intent before they fulfill a request?

That's what web authentication does. It gives sites the opportunity to form a contract with a user, and to tell users who don't want to form a contract "sorry, but we have conditions before you view this."

<comment><USER3> > But the problem is that I never signed that TOS. We keep on coming back to > this, but putting a TOS somewhere on your site is not binding. You need to > get my informed consent. In the same way, if I stuck up a contract on my > public blog that said "by fulfilling any HTTP request I make, you grant me > license to republish your content," I couldn't steal everyone's artwork off > of DeviantArt and claim "well, we did have a contract."

Yep. Totally agree. Consent needs to be informed. In order for anything i'm saying to apply, the agreement must be meaningfully made. Personally, I consider a checkbox saying "I won't use an ad blocker" to be sufficient to declare that agreement valid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it me, or is pi hole way more popular than it should be? Compared to the alternatives, it's worse in almost every way. It only works on your local network, so good luck blocking ads while you're at work, using mobile data, or at a cafe. Browser based adblockers (which is available on most desktop browsers, mobile safari, and firefox for android) can block elements and url patterns, pi hole can't. Even if you're on a browser that can't use adblock (mostly android), you can still use VPN based adblockers (the ones that reroute your traffic through a local VPN), which work regardless of what network you're on. And worst of all, all of the alternatives are free, which can't be said for pi hole[1].

[1] I know you can run pi hole on your desktop OS, which is technically free, but you need to leave your computer on 24/7 which undoubtedly raises your electricity bill.

<comment><USER7> Pi Hole is free, unless you're counting the system you have to run it off of (like a raspberry pi) but you can run it off any device you want like a virtual machine at home for instance, so you only need to buy a Raspberry Pi if that's how you intend to operate it. The benefit of it, is it blocks a lot more than just ads. For instance, it blocks any attempts to "phone home" by my smart TV or by applications I use such as Nvidia Geforce Experience. It's more extensive than browser based ad blockers because it works for your entire network, not just web browsing (for example, blocks all youtube ads on my un- rooted mobile device). It also has a huge set of customizable community maintained block lists that block everything from simple ads all the way to pornography (if that's what you want).

<comment><USER7> Here's an example of some of the community maintained lists you can use to block more things easily. [https://wally3k.github.io/](https://wally3k.github.io/) Many of these are updated quite frequently as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I run a similar setup that downloads the blacklist from some guy named Steven Black who wants to make the internet better and then I pipe it through sed to include them on my unbound resolver. The file is configured as an include on unbound.conf.

#!/bin/sh

PATH="/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin"

rm -f /tmp/badsites

wget [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/h...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/StevenBlack/hosts/master/hosts) -O /tmp/badsites

if [ -f /tmp/badsites ]; then

        grep '^0\.0\.0\.0' /tmp/badsites | awk '{print "local-zone: \""$2"\" redirect\nlocal-data: \""$2" A 0.0.0.0\""}' > /etc/unbound/badsites.conf

        rm /tmp/badsites

fi

rc-service unbound reload

</comment><comment><USER9> Surely the next step is for websites to host their own ads again? They can even forward cookies on to ad networks etc.

<comment><USER10> Would be great if this would be an option, especially with the GDPR coming. But for small to medium sized publishers there are no ads you could host your own.

<comment><USER11> This is simply not true. i spoke two years ago with the CEO of a small publisher company (~3 employees). This company was focused on mobility, from train to skateboard, with cars being obviously the main focus. Affiliated links for small stuff like electric monocycles and/or sponsored tests for cars was enough to pay himself, his author, IT guy and tester.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've been running a Pi-Hole instance for about a year now, it's excellent. I could never get it to work with my router, but manually configuring the DNS on my devices to point to it works just as well.

One thing that became immediately apparent was how much faster browsing the web got after I turned it on.

<comment><USER13> Been running it myself for 5-6 months, and other than the occasional (actually, very rare) complaint from the Mrs. that a link she clicked won't go through due to a blocked tracker/analytics intermediary, it's been a peachy time VPNing into our home network so it works just as well on the go.

Our install Pi-Hole points its upstream DNS to 188.8.131.52, with uBlock Origin where possible installed on our devices. Can't imagine going back.

<comment><USER14> What advantage is there in using 188.8.131.52 instead of your own DNS resolver?

<comment><USER15> Some ISP-provided resolvers fraudulently replace NXDOMAIN responses with NOERROR IN As pointing to (ironically, in this context) advertisment sites.

<comment><USER14> I'm aware of the problems with ISP-provided resolvers. I meant running your own resolver, like named, which queries the root zones itself, supports DNSSEC response authentication, etc.

<comment><USER15> In that case: local resolvers involve actually installing and configuring a recursive dns server, which isn't everyone's idea of fun, whereas 1.1/126.96.36.199 can be set up with a one line config file edit and then forgotten about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wonder if the backlash against advertising and social and the web more generally will lead to more people buying these sorts of devices to try and own their own networks and information again. Surely the cloud providers and the platforms will suffer in this shift.

</comment><comment><USER17> Ever since I was given my first computer and was allowed on the internet, I've had NoScript and Adblock installed.

I installed a Pi-hole last week, totally worth. Best amount of time and money I've spent so far this year.

<comment><USER18> Here it is! That comment that makes you feel old!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think we are slowly gaining consciousness about the danger of ads. It's really pernicious but I think has overall terrible effects on people (self estime, food / alcohol consumption...). And not just ads, but also product placement in movies / TV shows.

I think it's terrible for our health and our minds.

<comment><USER20> Ads aren't innocent anymore. As technology gets better they are getting far, far more persuasive. It's gonna get weird once it hits a crucial threshold of effectiveness and basically make public opinion counterfeit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Publishers will target Salmela's software if it becomes anywhere near as > popular as AdBlock Plus, says Nicole Perrin, an analyst at researcher > EMarketer.

I'd caution about that claim. Google pulled AdNauseam[0], a uBlock Origin extension, from the Chrome Web Store since it was fundamentally disrupting Google's business model via click fraud. (It automates clicking ads in order to create noise in user tracking.) This was far, far before it became as popular as AdBlock Plus.

PiHole takes an even more aggressive stance against ads, blackholing entire networks. It poses as much as a threat to the ad industry as AdNauseam. So I'd wager that PiHole will get shut down long before it reaches the popularity of AdBlock Plus.

[0]: [https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

<comment><USER22> I disagree with you :

1) Unlike AdNauseam, Google can't do much to get in the way of Pi-Hole. This isn't within its ecosystem.

2) Actually, while it's not great for publishers, it's not that disruptive (at that scale) because it doesn't impact the advertiser's ad spend. No request > No charge.

Now if you wanted to create something that would be quite disruptive, you'd need to combine the 2, with a twist :

You could have a headless browser in a VM (for safety) that makes some of those calls and mimic a click + follow the redirect + stay on the landing page and browse another N pages.

Not every single ad obviously because that'd be easy to detect but at random, in an erratic way. That'd be like simulating an actual user.

Throw in there some cookie dropping / reset to mess with tracking and it could have some pretty interesting effects.

The reason why it'd more dangerous? Because it'd throw off performance of those ads and ML optimizations done by various vendors. Usually you expect a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.X % to maybe 2-3% and similarly an actual conversion rate in the single digits.

On a large scale, you'd see a a CTR that either go up or stay on par, but a conversion rate that is free falling and that would have some serious consequences for both the advertiser's marketing team and the publisher / ad network.

Take it one step further and have a TOR like network of those pi-holes taking care of that both to prevent device finger-printing and maybe coordinating a specific publisher / ad network / advertisers and you could see that advertiser looking at reducing its ad spend quite drastically when performance goes down the drain. And an ad network / publisher having to do some explaining.

Some kind of "activist" bot network to force specific advertisers to reduce ad spending or simply occur costs.

<comment><USER21> 1) This is true. Though, AdNauseam was originally a Firefox extension and is still available on Firefox. You can still install it on Chrome from source. Maybe I was too strong saying it was 'shut down' \-- I was more referring to the fact that action has already been taken against AdNauseam when it was still small. I'm curious for when Pi-Hole gets the same kind of treatment.

2) If the goal (of PiHole and other ad/tracking blockers) is to encourage a subscription model over an advertising model for publishers, I'd argue that making ads ineffective for publishers is much more important than directly attacking advertisers' profits. Without publishers willing to host ads, advertisers will lose anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > people who had an objection to capitalism in principle,

Yes, citizens, watch your daily dose of ads or else the economy crumbles! For the good of capitalism, watch ads, citizens, watch ads!

<comment><USER24> _Resume Viewing_

Gotta earn those 15 million credits!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does anyone know if there are performance penalties associated with using a Raspberry PI as your DNS server?

Also, a link[1] to the Pi-Hole page.

[1][https://pi-hole.net/](https://pi-hole.net/)

<comment><USER26> Slightly off-topic, but from the pi-hole page:

> Install by running one command:

> curl -sSL [https://install.pi-hole.net](https://install.pi-hole.net) | bash

installing arbitrary software off the internet by piping curl output to bash is a terrible idea. At the very least, I would have expected them to sign this script... considering this software has unlimited access to your internal network, and the ability to influence ALL network traffic into/out of your internal network.

<comment><USER27> Immediately below that line on the pi-hole site:

>Our code is completely open, but piping to bash can be dangerous. For a safer install, review the code and then run the installer locally.

<comment><USER26> And yet piping to bash is being advertised boldly as the 'one-liner install process'

In other news, eating rat poison might kill you, but there's a tiny warning printed on the back so no one will do ever do it.

<comment><USER28> What people do to install software 98% of the time is download a proprietary windows binary and executing it - occasionally also with elevated privileges.

Piping to bash is dangerous but it's not _more_ dangerous than software installation in general. I think this point is some times lost on e.g people who run software from vetted repositories like apt or often make their open source apps from source. Computer programs to most people means double clicking an exe.

<comment><USER26> > What people do to install software 98% of the time is download a proprietary > windows binary and executing it

Not people who avoid Windows. Every respectable Linux distro has package signing by default these days. And none support a default install process of piping arbitrary scripts from the internet to a shell.

There's no reason the pi-hole folks, who made a thing that runs on Linux, to ignore the security implications and recommend something dangerous for a device with a lot of potential power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Pi-Hole is different from using a hosts file in that, Pi-Hole returns 200 OK with empty content for any requests to the black-listed domains?

<comment><USER6> how does that work with https?

<comment><USER30> Just install nginx that answers to http and https and return empty gif or 204.

<comment><USER31> Would that fail because your sever can't provide the right cert? You'd probably have to install a custom root certificate on your machines that you https ad blocker could use to forge certs.

<comment><USER30> Yes, custom cert has to be used, otherwise browsing could be very annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> My essay focuses on Google and DoubleClick specifically: [http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick- mozi...](http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozilla- essay-final.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> Would it not be possible to code either an add on or even a proxy server that "accepts" the ads, but sends them to /dev/null while serving up a "clean" rendering of a page? I'm sure this can be done.

</comment><comment><USER34> I run grimd (alternative) in the cloud. Then I can point my router and dns app at it when I'm out and about.

The setup needs upgrading for DNS over https and maybe run it in Kubernetes?

<comment><USER35> Found it: [https://github.com/looterz/grimd](https://github.com/looterz/grimd)

Questions:

1) is this black hole concept sustainable? Or, does it require significant management, and is likely to be circumvented by serving content through a proxy anyway?

2) Why do you run this on the cloud? Don't you then incur significant bandwidth costs? Or, if DNS only are there speed issues with your EC2 instance lagging?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Personally I have no problems with ads _per se_ , it's the tracking, privacy, and security aspect I'm concerned about (and also the unbelievable bloatedness of ad-financed sites lately as ad prices race to the bottom). Personally I'd be fine with ads if we could go back to a content-oriented model where first- party static assets are served as ads rather than the targeted advertising we have now. I know others here who have zero tolerance for any kind of ads, though. Trying to grasp what a feasible business model for content creation could be, including paywalled content/micropayments as almost anything seems better than the clickbait and brainwash crap we have now.

<comment><USER4> _it 's the tracking, privacy, and security aspect I'm concerned about_

And that's what ads are, _per se_ , in the 21st century. "Ads", as the current implementation defines it from my perspective, are no longer general-purpose and static. No, they chase you around the web and then for weeks will try to sell you the thing you _just_ purchased. They'll load random executable code onto your machine. I, too, have no problem with a static JPG at the top of the screen, but that hasn't been what ads are in over a decade.

Now the counter-argument would be, "but TV and print ads are not like that, so not _all_ ads." Okay, fair argument though that might be, it's only because TV and print can't, and it's not for lack of trying. Print had the CueCat[0], TV has tried (and mostly failed), but those Samsung TVs are looking pretty creepy from what I'm reading.

So to me, it's like saying, "I don't have a problem with authoritarian governments per se, it's all of the spying, control of the citizenry, and propaganda I have a problem with." Well, that kind of defines an authoritarian government, ergo...

Anyway, I'm just being pedantic. Load up those ad blockers, and get Pi-hole running.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat)

<comment><USER37> And websites can sell static JPG ads that are impossible to block.

<comment><USER38> s/impossible/harder/

One of the first adblock tools I used relied on thevstandard sizes of banner ads to blok them.

Names of selectors, XPATH, explicit element whitelisting, denying all image content, etc, all are possible options.

On desktop I apply a pretty rigorous set of CSS customisations against numerous sites.

Plus the usual adblocking.

<comment><USER39> Are you thinking of Privoxy? I have good memories of using it - it was perhaps the second open source program I ever used after Firefox and really got me into coding in general because of how configurable it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> PiHole really needs to have a local DNS-over-HTTPS bridge. In some countries upstream providers do DNS poisoning for censorship purposes.

<comment><USER41> Something like this[0]?

[0]: [https://bendews.com/posts/implement-dns-over- https/](https://bendews.com/posts/implement-dns-over-https/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> "Alternative To /etc/hosts

You don't have to use the hosts file (or addn-hosts ), but performance starts to suffer once the list of domains gets past 120,000.

jacobsalmela says: June 24, 2015 at 06:53

It's partially due to the amount of domains on the lists controlled by the other sites. ~120,000 seemed to be the sweet spot. Once it got higher than that, the hosts format performed better. But a faster SD card can make a difference..."

[https://jacobsalmela.com/2015/06/16/block-millions-ads- netwo...](https://jacobsalmela.com/2015/06/16/block-millions-ads-network-wide- with-a-raspberry-pi-hole-2-0/)

The "list of domains" here is a list of domains to which the user does not want her computer to connect.

The author is suggesting list sizes over 120,000 begin to trigger performance issues, using this dnsmasq-based approach.

What about another "list of domains" that comprises all the ones to which the user does want to connect.

Would it be more or less than 120,000?

For over 15 years I have been running authoritative nameservers on the local network, using tinydns and later nsd, including a custom root.

cdb, the key-value store used in tinydns, on its own is useful for storing domain->ipaddr mappings. I can store lists up to 4GB.

If I understand correctly, the rough equivalent in Pi-Hole is perhaps serving /etc/hosts or some other list of hosts via dnsmasq. (I believe pdns_recursor can also serve /etc/hosts if I recall correctly.)

IME, controlling both /etc/hosts and authoritative DNS has made it very easy to block ads since they almost always rely on DNS.

However I use authoritative DNS as a substitute for recursive DNS.

/etc/resolv.conf lists authoritative nameservers, not resolvers.

As such, DNS is primarily used not to _block_ but to _selectively permit_. (To build the zonefiles, I use a separate method for "prefetching" needed IP address in bulk that does not use recursive DNS. It has worked beautifully for over 15 years. On the local network I have encrypted DNS lookups via authoritative queries to CurveDNS-proxied authoritative nameservers; no recursive resolvers are needed.)

Foregoing recursive DNS, the approach is similar to a firewall ruleset where the default is to block everything. The user then adds specific rules to allow desired traffic (or in this case domain resolutions).

In other words, the approach I chose was to determine what domains I _wanted to access_ instead of trying to identify every possible domain that _needed to be blocked_. Every domain is blocked by default until I allow it.

Although I have no need for Pi-Hole personally I would like to see it succeed. I am glad to see that other users taking an interest in DNS.

The reason I ask the question about the size of the "allow" domain list is that over 15 years I am not even close to reaching 120,000 domains. I wonder how many domains other users visit.

To rephrase the question again: If there are two lists of domains: 1. all the domains to which the user wants to allow and 2. all the domains she wants to block, then which is the larger list?

The answer will vary from one user to another.</comment>


Building a new city for the people of Hong Kong - <AUTHOR> https://www.city-journal.org/future-of-hong-kong <comment><USER2> This is both the most amazing and inadvertently-cyberpunk things I've read in the second half of this week.

The idea of a company setting up a for-profit city in a foreign country that would essentially have self-juridstiction in order to enable a mass migration from an oppressive government... that's a Gibson trilogy.</comment>


Show HN: I'm building a blog on how to build a remote team - <AUTHOR> https://nohq.co <comment><USER2> I'm building a remote team and I would pay for fantastic content and would absolutely pay $19/month for this, probably more.

However, after clicking around I wasn't able to justify it.

\- No social proof. There isn't any information on your skills at building well running remote teams. Why are you qualified to provide this?

\- Lack of value. #1 could be ignored if the content added value, but after reading through your blog posts the content is quite thin, and I didn't learn anything I didn't already know - and I'm only at one remote team member.

If you haven't built a remote team, you could have easily provided more value than you currently have by simply researching and curating how other companies are doing it - paying someone to curate this and surface it to me is worth $19/month.

Look at the type of content orgs like Buffer and Zapier are posting about their remote team building / culture for ideas on how to improve the level of detail and value.

Start interviewing founders and leadership of remote first teams.</comment>


Top Brands Favored Much Higher Among One Political Party or the Other - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/article?article_id=146663

<comment><USER2> Much of political alignment is about status signaling and lifestyle choice. Ditto brands. You would expect to see overlap.

Relatedly, you can predict someone's vote in the last election very accurately by asking whether they have consumed sushi in the last 14 days. (This works less well in my kitchen.)

<comment><USER3> Wait. What does sushi mean?

<comment><USER2> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi>

A particular style of Japanese or Japanese-inspired food which has become famous in America. In America, sushi consumption is a ridiculously effective proxy for political liberalism. A _landslide_ victory in the presidential election in the United States splits the country 53:47. The split among people answering "yes" to "Have you eaten sushi in the last 14 days?" is closer to 85-15.

Neither of the major political parties in the United States has any ideological commitment for or against sushi, but the coincidence that people in one tribe eat it and the ones in the other do not makes it a good example of political tribalism. Incidentally, since politics is a signaling mechanism, I have had people (on both sides of the aisle) profess to be surprised at my political leanings due to the perceived mismatch between them and my non- political preferences. (I _love_ sushi.)

<comment><USER4> I always assumed it's because liking sushi as a typical European-American means going outside your traditional comfort zone and recognizing othe ethnicities may have something different you can nevertheless agree with. This is totally the opposite of two Republican trends: conservatism (rejection of change bey default) and racism (I said trend, and it's true. I'm an Arizonan and McCain ads run: "Keep those murderous Mexicans out! I'm McCain.")

<comment><USER2> See, that is tribalism talking: they're evil, fish are good, of course they won't like fish.

<comment><USER4> Oh yeah, I also assume GOP members hate chocolate and puppies. (I don't think I said what you think I said.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This article would be a lot more interesting/revealing if it were what the submitter claims it to be (that's not a jab, just a sheepish admission of disappointment).

We have here the top ten brands for either political affiliation. Notably, some appear on both sides. While it's perhaps interesting that those brands do so well on either side, _it would be far more interesting to know which brands are supported almost entirely by one side or the other_. For example, say Dodge trucks have 90% Republican supporters and 10% Democrat. If that's the case, I want to know about it.

Edit: Sushi's a better example, and not just because mine was fictitious.

</comment><comment><USER6> Notice (as first comment points out) that the #10 conservative brand is trusted more (by conservatives) than the #2 liberal brand.

</comment><comment><USER7> With such a good service as Google, with all of their products/offerings, you would think if this study is in fact accurate (?) that Google would go after the other approximately 50% of the market. From a dollars and cents viewpoint it would seem like a good business move.

Going heads up against Bing without such a large portion of the market seems like unnecessarily making life harder for yourself. A high-quality service like Google offers is useful to everyone, and seems like a neutral moneymaker to me.

<comment><USER8> There's nothing here that suggests to me that Google is weak in the republican market; all it shows is that they are not in the top ten favored brands for that side. No other Internet companies are listed on the republicans' side either, so we don't have enough data here to draw any useful conclusions about how Google stacks up against their competition (unless Google is worried about losing customers to Fox News and Cheerios).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the equally important message, albeit not as shocking, is that 7 of the top 10 brands are shared between both political lines. This is not a small number. In other words, intensity of sentiment aside, there is not much fundamental difference in brand perception in regards to political allegiance.

</comment><comment><USER10> Google for Democrats and Fox News for Republicans. I wonder if those rank highly with their respective demographics as their leading source for "facts". Would help explain some of the polling differences that keep coming up, like, for example, belief in whether Obama is a Muslim, etc.

</comment><comment><USER11> Of course UPS and Fedex perform well for both groups. Aside from DHL and USPS, they don't have any other significant competition, and I think most people trust UPS/Fedex over the USPS any day of the week.

</comment><comment><USER12> Fox News should start a search engine!

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm a little surprised Apple isn't on there.

</comment><comment><USER14> In the greater context of available political stances I think that Democrats and Republicans are actually very similar, but you'll find great disagreement between the constituents similar to what you'd find between people who are big fans of both Coke and Pepsi, and how they'd insist that they don't taste anything like each other.</comment>


Show HN: Privacy Focused, Secure Chat Rooms for Secure Chatting - <AUTHOR> https://chot.xyz <comment><USER2> "Your chats were securely encrypted using SSL, messages will not be not stored on our servers, will not backed up. "

Is this an intentional double negative?

A bit more technical info on how keys are generated and stored would be a good start to get people to trust the platform

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice little idea and implementation. Since privacy/security is a goal, it might make sense to dive into one or more of the following, even if they're not on the main page:

\- The tech behind the encryption/privacy. One thing in particular is how is the "my room" feature being saved. I'm sure I could dig in myself but the average visitor may want to be assured that it's saved locally only. EDIT: Hmm nevermind it seems the chatroom name isn't being persisted. Could have sworn I left the main page and came back to the same chatroom but probably imagining things.

\- How you intend to keep the site running over the long term, funding, etc. Assure visitors that your incentives align with visitors' over the long term as much as possible.

\- Open sourcing would be another good trust signal.

I do like the XKCD-style chat room names. I don't think I've seen that before. It's usually random alpha-numeric. Also love the minimalism, single-use aspect of it.

Keep it up!

<comment><USER4> "Correct Horse Battery Staple" named style is indeed impressive.</comment></comment>