TruthAndDare
What? I'm not saying I don't. It's just irrelevant to the issue.
> shouldn't be allowed.
That's like saying that "these people over here cannot be allowed to decide over their own neighborhood, because they might decide things that I find repugnant". Well, who are you going to trust with the power?
Yes, what if they do? Should they not get to decide because they might haver the wrong opinion? Who should decide instead? What if they have the wrong opinion?
> Why is xenophobia and NIMBYism acceptable in one case and not the other?
What two cases are you referring to?
Also, it's not obvious that NIMBY, as in "yes, do thing X, but not in my backyard", is relevant here, because it's not necessarily so that anyone is saying "yes, do thing X". For "NIMBY" to be a meaningful concept at all, it really needs to be about a situation when someone is pushing X onto someone else, while refusing to accept X in their own lives. If "NIMBY" used simply to describe a position of "no X, please", or even "no X, please, at least not in my backyard where I might have a say in it", then it's not useful, because those are perfectly reasonable positions to have about things.
On at least some level, I find it reasonable that the people who live in a certain place decide over that place. In any case, that is rather conventional, isn't it? It's particularly clear on the level of countries, which is why I mentioned it in my comment. Only citizens or residents of a country, not the rest of the world, get to vote in elections.
> The major question is what harm is being done to the local people by the existence of 50 story buildings
That's really a matter of their personal opinion. Some of us find such buildings repulsive.
Why is it paradoxical? Because they could otherwise have more buyers of their products?
That's a valid question for every law or other governmental decision. But we can think of an idealized case, where an entire town, or state, or country, agree that they don't want 50-story buildings, even if there exists outsiders who would like to move into such buildings. In this case, we need only recognize the right of the local people to decide what happens in their area, even if it is against the will of people from elsewhere.
That's something else, isn't it? The people who already live there might not want 50-story buildings, even if there are other people who would move into them if they were built.
That might be part of it, but it's not exactly obvious that you'd want to live in a place with 50-story buildings either.
Maybe you should set up such a site. All it would have to do is link to the articles and to the corresponding HN discussions.
Now, HN seems to have become like any other place, full of noise like politics, social commentary, and just regular news. I guess the commenters are still knowledgeable about technological subjects, though.
As far as I can see, that is orthogonal to the issue at hand.
> all this law does is to impose the costs on those who incur it.
We might consider littering to be immoral, and might therefore feel that we have a right to prohibit others from doing it, but it does not follow that we have a right to prohibit people from using, selling, owning or manufacturing bags (or fine or tax them for doing those things).
That would depend entirely on whether the bank and its customer had agreed upon it before hand or not, wouldn't you say?
In any case, I do think that we should strive toward having just a bare minimum of laws. However, it seems to be too much fun to make laws, once you get in a position to do so, for people to abstain from it.
So, do you mean that these people considered the outcome uncertain until it was tried?
Are you suggesting that the issue of debate was whether it would lead to less litter? That's almost obvious, isn't it? Surely, the question must rather be whether it is morally acceptable for us to impose such a rule on other people.
Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r73p95I-eE
Or like in any military force, unless there was coercion going on here.
Which makes it sound like there is a lower and an upper bound for this range. That's the issue.
What? Absolutely not. I'm just saying that it sounds reasonable to believe that burns increase with temperature, as opposed to being high in a range of temperatures and lower below and above that range. Figure 4 in your first link agrees with this common-sense guess.
I disagree. I think it's reasonable to expect that coffee and other hot drinks might be all the way up to boiling.
> in a temperature range making burns more likely
Is there a particular range for burns? Isn't it simply that the hotter it is, the more burns you get?
Do you think this post lives up to that? Aren't we setting the bar a bit low here? I don't see anything special about it.