To use a computing metaphor, every animal has "buildtime" predispositions and "runtime" choice-making ability. That "runtime" decision making is based on exercising free will, but of course free will is a biologically built-in capability which executes on the deterministic "VM" that is our physical universe.
i.e., we have free will from the perspective of ourselves, but if you zoom out, that free will is just another predetermined physical phenomena.
I think the issue is 'could any other decision be made'.
In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?
I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective, just assume a choice is being made and roll with it. Don't get tied in knots about the question of free-will, we know we don't have it, but just assume we do in order to make our perspective work out.
> I think the issue is 'could any other decision be made'.
IMO, no.
> In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?
To me, there was a choice, but that choice was made by an entity which operates deterministically.
> I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective,
Kinda. I would only disgaree with the "illusion" thing. It's not an illusion: from our perspective we DO have free will, we ARE in control. Like everything else, free will is relative.
Realize that when we say "we", each of "us" is a facet of that deterministic universe. The universe is not some big external VM that controls us like zombies. It is us. We are the hardware, firmware, and software of the universe, operating and evolving with agency, modifying one another and the world around us. We're not sandboxed processes. You and I, we are two manifestations of conscious thought occurring in the same grand unfolding of physical phenomena. We see a clear boundary between ourselves and the universe, but that's a human point of view, not a physical truth. When the universe decides something, we decide something, and vice versa.
Maybe that's too far into woo woo land for your taste, but it's how I personally reconcile free will and determinism and it's resolved a lot of the existential dread I used to feel around this. ymmv
Not too woo woo. Hard not to get woo woo on this subject.
It's just that you frequently use the word 'deterministic'. -> "facet of that deterministic universe."
And then also talk about how we have agency.
Not sure how to square those both occurring unless you are just saying at different scales.
Like the universe is deterministic, but on our human scale we appear to have a choice. But that is just appearance because at our scale there are so many chaotic interactions that the world really appears random and we are making choices.
What I'm saying is that in the brain, you keep boiling down the science at each scale, and at some point you don't find any 'agent', each layer is explained, and every action is the effect of a previous cause.
Ads make money, but not that much. I'm not convinced they are enough to be worth the bother. To have ads you need to pay people in sales to sell them, people to install them (now that this is electronic it is easier than the old paper days, but you need a more expensive tech person to keep them working). At best they are 5% of your gross budget, so not very significant and they often hard harmful to your riders.
Transit in the US seems to be constantly on a starvation diet budgetarily speaking so I'm not shocked small sums of money get chosen over options that would be better for their users.
The MTA is a huge outlier but still gets less money for upgrades and upkeep than they need. They limped along for years on extremely outdated train tracking infrastructure and are just getting around to doing updates that needed to be started two decades ago.
What often happen is a a company comes into install and maintain the displays for "free", on the proviso that they can display ads and keep most/all of the ad money.
5% of a transit authority's budget would be a lot of money! Advertising made £158 million for Transport for London in 2019, much less than 5% of their budget.
I agree with your parallel to rent seeking. Rent seeking is indeed both (a) arguably immoral and (b) seemingly inescapable in a society which respects property rights.
The theory of Georgism [1] suggests a way that we could eliminate rent seeking: by taxing ownership of all common resources at the value of the rent they would demand. That way, property owners, telephone operators, etc. would be rewarded for their labor in development and upkeep of the property, but would not be rewarded for ownership of the property itself.
Rent seeking is not immoral. You own something. You choose to let others use it for a fee per month or per day. Some other person voluntarily thinks your deal is good and agrees to pay to use your something.
Sure, you can come up with some obscure examples of rent seeking being immoral, like charging a dehydrated dying person $1000 per glass of water, but that's not what we're discussing here.
If you disagree, let's make a deal where I get to use all of your stuff for free forever.
I’d argue rent seeking, whether moral or not, leads to a bad system with a class of people with vast wealth and no need to work, and a class of people largely without access to the same manner of income who have to labor for a living.
Bad comparison. I am not seeking rent on any of my stuff.
Now, if I hoarded a bunch of stuff that other people needed and then charged them for access to it, that'd be rent seeking.
> Sure, you can come up with some obscure examples of rent seeking being immoral, like charging a dehydrated dying person $1000 per glass of water, but that's not what we're discussing here.
This is in fact what we're discussing, and your strawman example is ironically very on the nose. Except it's not water, it's housing. People are being forced to move away from my city or sleep on the street because the average unit rent is $3400 a month. The beneficiaries of this system are property owners who spend some money on development and upkeep (which they deserve to profit from) but largely just rake in passive income from having been lucky enough to buy when prices were low.
You're misinformed. You're describing rental, it's an understandable mistake, but despite the shared etymology, rent seeking is something entirely different.
It is by definition any scheme which extracts wealth without providing value. Renting apartments, or equipment, is not rent seeking. Putting a barrier in a river and refusing to allow passage of cargo without a tax, that, is rent seeking.
If you agree with me that a scheme to extract the wealth of others, while providing no value in return, is immoral, then rent seeking is, in fact, immoral.
Did they? A lot of then were barely used, got damaged or vandalized, etc. And when the companies folded or communities outlawed the scooters, they end up as trash. I don't believe for a second that the amount of pollutants and greenhouse gasses saved by usage is larger than the amount produced by manufacturing, shipping and trashing all those scooters.
> the answer is WAY TOO MUCH, meaning the "eco friendly walkable cities" are not eco friendly AT ALL and they are also unsustainable since they can't evolve without rebuild witch consume much more and demand much big effort than spread areas of small buildings who can be re-built and evolved one at a time issueless for all the others.
This is absolutely inane. Destroying and rebuilding is the opposite of eco-friendly. Building to last is eco-friendly.
Those tightly-packed brick and stone buildings in dense walkable cities last longer and also tend to have less need for AC, since they were designed before that existed. And their use does evolve, from meeting places, to storefronts, to family housing, to condos... old buildings can do it all.
Cookie-cutter suburban homes are the exact opposite. Expendable, inefficient, and inflexible.
What? No. When you are 0, it is your first year. When you are 21, you have begun your 22nd year. In the US you are legal to drink in your 22nd year of life.
You are correct that nobody says "22nd year" in this context, but nobody says "21st year" either. The former is awkward but the latter is just incorrect.
It's just not true. You've completed being 17 years old on your 18th birthday, when you enter your 19th year and can count 18 years under your belt.
Consider a newborn. As soon as they're squeezed out they are in their first year of life. That continues until the first anniversary of their decanting, at which point they are one year old and enter their second year of life.
There is nobody, nobody, who refers to a baby as being in their zeroth year of life. Nor would they refer to a one-year-old as still being in their first year of life as if they failed a grade and are being held back.
The pattern continues for other countable things. Breakfast is not widely considered the zeroth meal of the day. Neil Armstrong has never been considered the zeroth man on the moon nor is Buzz Aldrin the first. The gold medal in the Olympics is not awarded for coming in zeroth place.
No one's saying it's true! All that's being claimed is that writers will often use phrases like "became an adult in their 18th year" or "was legally allowed to drink in their 21st year".
It's completely incorrect, but some people use it that way, and ultimately everyone understands what they actually mean.
The top response in your Quora link is that your 21st year "means you’re 20. You have had your 20th birthday, but not yet your 21st." That is the conventional definition.
People commonly make the mistake of thinking otherwise, but that's all it is. A mistake.
ChatBots that try to do too much and do it worse than real human service reps, like that one that wrongly assured a customer that their airline ticket was refundable
Deluge of low-value generated content taking attention and revenue away from high-value content creators
I know both pretty well, indirectly or not. Given how much they can influence your energy and "will to live" I don't think they'd pair well with having to fight for your life.
