Amazon's express delivery service rattles Paris authorities

Re:Amazon's express delivery service rattles Paris authorities by toyg on Monday June 20, 2016 @10:47AM (#11938362)

My mother works in a hospital and is constantly going on about the disproportionate amount of time and resources dedicated to older patients. European media is obsessed by the cost of pensions on public finances, and is equally obsessed with clamoring for all sorts of experimental cures (which disproportionately benefit the elderly) to be paid by the public purse. Old people are inefficient, and a weight on competitiveness. I bet Chinese pensions are pretty meager, right? That is, if they get one at all.

Follow those arguments with coherence, and you can quickly and painlessly reach the conclusion that older people "had a good life but it's time to go now". Why don't we do that? Because we hold other values apart from economic efficiency and other systemic measures. This is just a very quick and direct way of stating it.

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Re:Amazon's express delivery service rattles Paris authorities by mnx on Monday June 20, 2016 @10:58AM (#11938428)

Yeah, but going from "This seems like an anti-competitive intervention without much justification" to "If we are all about efficiency, let's kill old people" is an example of slippery slope fallacy, if I've ever seen one. It's unreasonable to assume I see economic efficiency as the only value. So it would be a better argument to point to what important benefits (not in an economical or easily measured sense) are gained from forbidding people to choose how they want to obtain groceries. Instead I feel like you are trying to attack me, and paint me as a ruthless homo-economicus, who eats babies, because they are nutritious.

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Re:Amazon's express delivery service rattles Paris authorities by toyg on Monday June 20, 2016 @01:07PM (#11939368)

> It's unreasonable to assume I see economic efficiency as the only value

Then it's unreasonable for you to assume any intervention to stop Amazon is unwarranted. You've already read the motivations, so there is no point in me re-stating them; but you prefer efficiency above Parisians' quality of life and economic stability. So I say fine, let's prefer efficiency above everything.

I've not attacked anybody, I've just shown you the limits of a system of thought based on economic efficiency. It's not my fault if they look bad.

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Re:Amazon's express delivery service rattles Paris authorities by mnx on Monday June 20, 2016 @03:06PM (#11940457)

>Then it's unreasonable for you to assume any intervention to stop Amazon is unwarranted

I do not assume that. Maybe they can figure out a reasonable intervention. But the reasons in the article just don't sound honest or strong to me.

>but you prefer efficiency above Parisians' quality of life and economic stability.

I don't. I think that giving Parisians the option to buy their groceries in more ways, should increase their QOL. And I don't see how it could significantly threaten economic stability. I would love to hear a real argument to the contrary. But it's also fine for me not be convinced, and for you to be.

>I've not attacked anybody, I've just shown you the limits of a system of thought based on economic efficiency.

Yeah, which no one in their right mind proposes, I certainly did not, and is therefore irrelevant, and an utter strawman. And, as I said before, a classic slippery slope fallacy.

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