regoldste

A few thoughts on this: (1) The City's attitude toward these mobile apps, which facilitate a market for public parking spaces, is that they are creating a "predatory private market for public parking spaces" by "hold[ing] hostage on-street public parking spots for their own private profit." But there's another way of looking at what is happening here. These apps aren't allowing drivers to "rent" public parking spaces--something which they do not own; rather, they are enabling drivers to sell their legal right to occupy the space. Perhaps this is just a semantic difference, but I find it irritating that they liken it to a predatory market for property they don't own.

(2)Regardless, it is clear that apps offering financial rewards for leaving a spot would violate the SF city code prohibition on contracts concerning the use of a parking space. I think these companies could easily avoid this legal snafu by adapting their model to provide other incentives for users to provide updated information about parking spots. Rather than offering to pay users each time they give a parking spot to another user, these apps should offer these users points--or "Parking Karma"--for each trade. Users with high Parking Karma could receive special benefits--like being the first ones to receive updated information on parking spots that become available in their area. They could also be given the option to message with other drivers in the area to discuss when they plan to leave a desired spot (and each successful trade would result in more karma points to both drivers who participate). There are many ways this could be executed, and I hope these apps pivot and adapt rather than shutting down. They provide such an important service by aiming to reduce the frustration associated with public parking and achieve a more efficient distribution of public resources.

To echo the feedback others have provided: your website makes it a challenge to understand what your product does.

Being obtuse about the point of your product is not an effective strategy unless you are in stealth mode and you have a simple landing page just to drum up intrigue.

I would clarify the problem and why your product's features supply the best answer.

I believe the European Court of Justice's ruling applies to all of the EU countries, not just to Spain. I think it's unimaginable that Google would stop serving the entire EU market on principle.

But you raise a neat question: assuming it was just Spain (or the next similarly sized country to reach this decision), what would happen if Google threatened to entirely pull out of the country--i.e., stop serving search results or supporting any Google services there? Are they powerful enough to influence national policy? It seems unlikely, but it's a neat hypothetical.

I intended my comment hyperbolically, consistent with my overall satirical tone.

To be clear, I don't believe this will kill the internet, and I don't think it is necessarily undermining European free speech protections. My concern is not as much with freedom of speech and the speaker's right to disseminate information about others; my concern is with the role of the government in curating the universe of "relevant" knowledge that we consume.

As I mentioned in a lengthier discussion of this issue yesterday (when I assumed a more serious tone), I am concerned that the EU's opinion is effectively denuding the internet of its power for disseminating knowledge quickly and cheaply, and thereby democratizing the processes of determining truth. The court has approved a pernicious form of content restrictions that will be based on the utterly toothless (not to mention absurdly subjective) standard of "relevance," and driven by individuals whose interests are contrary to the public interest in information.

"Gonzalez had his home repossessed 16 years ago. If you Google his name, you can still see newspaper stories about his debts. 'It hurts my reputation,' he says in Spanish. 'My debts are long paid, but those links were the first thing you'd see.'"

Congratulations, Mr. Gonzalez; now when people Google your name, your reputation won't only be defined by your foreclosure and past financial troubles--which is now discussed in 10,000+ articles (good luck with those takedown requests!)--but also for being the jerk who killed the internet for Europe.

You have to appreciate the irony...

I don't deny that the easy availability of mass amounts of information about people on the internet has serious, troubling privacy implications, has magnified the importance we ascribe to that information, and has made it more difficult to escape incidents in our past.

But this isn't a freedom with a long-standing history. Far from representing a break with history, this tradition--wherein reputations are sticky and inescapable--is consistent with how human societies lived for thousands of years. Until relatively recently (~100 years ago), the vast majority of people lived in the same town for their entire lives, and there was a collective remembrance of their character. Everybody knew everybody's business, and preserved it through gossip. At least partly out of necessity, our cultures evolved significant traditions of society-wide shaming; stealing an apple could be punished by public shaming in the stocks in the town square. Social acceptance and even livelihood was based on your character, and the punishment for even minor moral failures was severe.

I submit that reputations were only escapable in a meaningful way for maybe the past 75-100 years, when our cultures (at least, industrialized cultures) became increasingly mobile: people left home to pursue education on the other side of the country, to begin careers and new lives in new cities without a trace of their old lives and reputations. This ability to escape your past and reinvent yourself was a brief aberration. The size of our communities exploded in the last 15 years as the internet expanded, and it seems not that different from when we lived in teeny communities and everyone knew our business.

There isn't and never has been a statute of limitations for dumb and embarrassing things. Whether to create one now is a normative question, and regardless of how you come down on that, I just don't think you can justify robust privacy protections--particularly at the expense of transparency--based on supposed historical respect for privacy.

I envy you for being so well-adapted to the traditional style of teaching :) On the whole, most people learn better by listening or interacting or doing. I'm certainly the exception in this respect. My brain processes information much differently. It takes me 3x longer to process a sentence read aloud as it would to just read it. Lectures felt like a huge waste of time.

But do you really think that a lecture can cover material as thoroughly as a textbook? In my experience, lectures were supposed to cover part of the material (perhaps some of the trickier parts), but could never be treated as a substitute for reading.

As someone who learns almost exclusively by reading, I've always been bemused by the concept of lectures. I've never thought that a professor explained the material better than the textbook or other reading materials that prepared us for class.

To the extent that a professor is expounding on the reading materials--which is what you are really paying for in college--by applying them or synthesizing them, I think those lessons are often better taught through interactive dialogues with students. I'm probably a bit biased from my experience in law school, but I think the socratic method is a particularly strong pedagogical technique, and could be effectively implemented in many undergraduate courses.

Fair enough, you're correct that no new right was created in the EU. I was reading your comment as defending the concept of it as a right, and so I took issue with the notion that it should be a right.

Reading the opinion does not allay my concerns about the meaning of this opinion and the scope of its consequences. It is only "pragmatic and reasonable" to the extent that you agree with the policy underlying the opinion, which I certainly do not.

Taken at face-value, it would seem that the EU is effectively denuding the internet of its power for disseminating knowledge quickly and cheaply, and thereby democratizing the processes of determining truth. The court has approved a pernicious form of content restrictions that will be based on the utterly toothless (not to mention absurdly subjective) standard of "relevance," and driven by individuals whose interests are contrary to the public interest in information.

Like I said before: relevance to what? The fact that this opinion is issued in a case where the party objected to a record of his previous foreclosure--a fact with undeniable relevance to, e.g., future lenders or business partners or anyone else who needs to know someone's credit history--indicates just how high the standard for relevance will be.

In my view, giving government (or any powerful corporation or individual) the power to curate the information available to citizens is one of the greatest threats to a vibrant, functioning democracy. We should be extremely wary of any efforts by the government to be the arbiter of truth, and while I don't know enough about the case or EU law to predict how this will work in practice (in fairness to the EU, they very well could administrate this with considerable restraint), I think we should be wary of this opinion as well.

Thanks for the recommendation, atto, and congratulations on your launch this week! A few thoughts on your site:

(1) My first concern is about privacy. The idea that my search results would be curated based on my friends' browsing activity makes me anxious. Does the site link specific search results to individual friends? I expect that kind of public accountability would be inhibiting, making users feel pressured to conduct their searches and browsing much more carefully than they otherwise would, choosing only the most reputable sites and restricting the breadth of their search terms--as if someone was standing behind them scrutinizing every click and search. If Google auto-complete was only populated with search terms conducted in my social network, that would tell me a lot of very personal information about people. Even if you don't link friends to specific searches or sites, I think in many cases it would be easily identifiable, and could have pernicious social effects. Who wants to conduct a search about, say, a personal health matter, if it will fuel gossip among and invite ridicule from their friends? I think I'd end up using the site to search really erudite topics to impress my friends, and leave my personal/dumb searches (i.e., the dumb questions that makes the internet so useful!) to another search engine.

(2) Setting aside the privacy concern, I'm not convinced that the product itself--search results curated by my friends' searches--actually offers that much value to me. I like my friends but I don't consider them experts on many topics; and if they are experts on a topic, then (1) I'd probably ask them my question directly rather than searching about it; and/or (2) their internet searching about it is probably at a more technical level than the information I'm searching for.

(3) With that being said, I do think the idea behind the product--to curate search results based on the searches of actual experts--is a really good idea. While I wouldn't rely on my friends' opinions on, say, the best cardiologist in the city, or upholstery techniques, or Ukranian politics, I would greatly appreciate having my search results shaped by the opinions of actual experts on those topics. I'd appreciate a search engine that curated search results based on klout scores that accounts for how well-respected those sites are by people on the whole, and by experts in that area.

(4) To the extent that the site allows annotation on webpages (eg, highlighting to create a discussion, or adding comments on particular passages or pictures, etc.) I think that is an exceptional, disruptive idea that could really change the way people interact with content. But why limit those comments to just your immediate network? I don't always care what my friends think about a topic they know little about, but I'd care very much to see, e.g., what passages Bill Gates is highlighting in XYZ article about international development.

Anyway, those are just my initial perceptions. I'd be happy to chat more via email if you want me to elaborate.

You make a good argument about why she has an interest in not being found/identified with this information. To be sure, there are good reasons why she would want to distance herself from this event in her life. By the way, that is the reason that many newspapers (e.g., the NYTimes)have policies against reporting the names of rape victims, precisely because of the stigmatic effects on the victim.

But why is her interest in privacy sufficient to create a right protected by the law? What about the conflicting interests--including existing legal rights--of others to learn about and to publish that information? What concerns me the most is the unimaginably fraught task of administrating these rights. The EU Court suggested a highly problematic standard: data that is "inadequate, irrelevant, or no longer relevant" must be deleted upon request. Who decides what is adequate and relevant? Relevant to whom, and for what? Adequate for what? Is relevance now the standard for what information can exist online? Who is the arbiter of relevance?

And how is this administered as a technical matter? Does Google delete the entire article, or just redact the sensitive information? What if there is other important information in that same article/site/page? Does the public now lose access to the entire article, which surely contains other useful information?

This policy seems extremely ill-advised.

I agree. I might pay up to $5/month if they offered more than just bookmarking. EG, a powerful and comprehensive platform that automatically organizes the material that a user consumes across all devices. It would be especially valuable if it offered a highlighting service like diigo. I'm not sure how many people would pay $60/annually for such a service though.

If their goal was to bury it in mediocrity, I think that would be a good strategy. But I think their goal is to bring attention to a movie that distorted history in a meaningful way, then down-voting it is a pretty effective strategy. If you can down-vote it to the level where it has the worst score in the IMBD, or even among the ten lowest, it attracts attention and goads curiosity about what makes the movie so awful, which leads people to Google it and quickly find information about this social movement.

I don't disagree, but you are missing my point, which is a descriptive matter of American attitudes about food.

For the most part, I accept your point that old neighbor-cheese (and eggs and slightly-wilted vegetables and over-ripe fruit) is probably completely safe. But for better or worse, Americans just don't think about food this way. We have highly sanitized attitudes and expectations about food. I suspect this is largely because we are highly disconnected from the food manufacturing and chain of supply processes. We are uneducated about food, and as a result we throw it away if we have even the slightest concern that it is unsafe.

We have no problem using the same bacteria-infested, broken-bristled toothbrush for 6 months, but we have no qualms about throwing away a $9 block of gruyere if we detect the tiniest spot of mold. It's just how we are.

That article is about scavenging for packaged grocery store food that isn't fresh enough to sell, but is certainly safe enough to eat.

Don't you think there's a meaningful difference between a packaged, untampered-with Starbucks salad that was on the shelves just hours earlier, and a block of cheese from a stranger's refrigerator?

This is an incisive and articulate explanation of my reasoning. Ride-sharing and food-sharing are different in a few meaningful ways that raise doubt that a food-sharing app should be premised on this analogy. Not only is it the case that the lessor (donator) has basically no incentive to maintain the quality of the food, but the lessee (recipient) may have no real way to evaluate the quality, other than to trust the lessor. It may be obvious when the food has spots of mold or smells expired, but it's not always that easy to tell.

Luca, I don't mean to criticize your idea, which is a great attempt at solving the problem of wasted food. I just doubt that this model will really take off. I think you underestimate how squeamish people are about perishable food--even when it's their own food. I think people readily throw out food based on even a small chance that it is expired or smells "off." People don't want to get sick, and they especially don't want to make their families and friends sick. I think most people consider the risk of food-bourne illness (and the general ickiness factor of expired food) to outweigh the cost associated with wasted food.

I second the bartering system suggested above, which could improve the quality of the traded food. I think there's more of a market for an app that helps them keep track of when their food will expire, and to evaluate whether their food is safe to eat.

Anyway, congrats on launching your app, and I wish you the best of luck!

Has anyone found a review of how this app works in practice? It seems like it could work well for unopened perishable foods, but do the founders really expect that strangers are going to want to eat each others' half-eaten, saran-wrapped block of cheese? It sounds like a nice idea in theory, but in practice I think people are pretty turned off by eating strangers' food.

I think the founders would be better positioned for success if they marketed a social network component, which would facilitate friends and neighbors borrowing from each other.

The article is an incisive analysis of the pernicious effect of money on politics, though it mostly repeats arguments that Lawrence Lessig has been making for the past five years, and adds little new insight to the conversation.

Towards the end of the article Reifman proposes a thoughtful but perhaps overly-simplistic solution: a populist "culture war against the corrupting influence of financial power in government." But he doesn't develop this idea or offer any roadmap for how it would work. And it isn't clear that the culture war strategy which has been so successful for single-issue advocacy--e.g., marriage equality and marijuana legalization--would be a successful model for an abstract, theoretical, and systemic issue like campaign finance. Or at least, it isn't clear how this would work in practice.

Perhaps I'm underestimating the public, but I think it's considerably difficult to create meaningful conversations about the conceptual topics--e.g., theories of representative democracy--that are at the heart of this issue. While this issue is undeniably important, it is also--to all but the political science nerds among us--also undeniably unsexy, theoretically tedious, and difficult for the average person to relate to. I would be interested to hear him flesh out suggestions for how to develop a successful culture war that effectively educates and engages the public on these complex issues.

I think it's also occurring in part because of doctors who are prescribing aggressive and often unnecessary courses of antibiotics.

I expect this is at least one explanation for why (as the article notes) antibiotics are ineffective at treating more than half of urinary tract infections caused by E. Coli. One standard treatment for persistent, recurrent UTIs in women is to prescribe a prophylactic antibiotic to be taken post-coitally, which typically means that a woman takes a pill irregularly--either every time after she has sex or once a week. This can last for years, without the doctor reevaluating the necessity of the treatment. While this is completely necessary for truly severe, recurring cases, I've seen several doctors prescribe this casually to women who don't have recurring UTIs but request it anyway. This is detrimental for the community and the patient, who has a higher risk of developing drug-resistant infections.

I think one way to address this problem is making doctors more aware of the community-wide effects of aggressive courses of treatment, informing them about alternative treatments that don't involve antibiotics, and encouraging them to use aggressive courses of antibiotics (such as prophylacticly for recurrent UTIs) as a treatment of last-resort.

I think your moral arguments are sound, and I tend to agree, but I would just add that you should probably explicitly recognize the (implicit, I think?) premise that there is a meaningful moral distinction between the death penalty and other punishments.

If you can't draw such a distinction, then your argument proves too much. This is so because your points re:uncertainty of guilt and intractability of punishment don't just apply to capital cases, but to all convictions and punishments, which are entered on the same standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If you believe it's morally unconscionable to convict and sentence with less than 100% certainty, and to impose punishments you can't back out of, then how can any conviction achieved under this imperfect standard ever be considered moral?

Maybe your answer is that they can't be considered moral and we should limit convictions/sentences to cases where we have 100% certainty. But assuming you want some kind of functional criminal justice system for the punishment and incapacitation (oh, and the fictional "rehabilitation") of criminals, then I think you must accept the imperfect system, and distinguish the death penalty from lesser sentences.

This is a distinction you can sensibly draw. My point is just that it's logically important to explicitly do so. (Sorry if this is a tedious, semantic point!)

So how would you draw the distinction? If your concern is with avoiding very bad decisions that are intractable, would you draw that moral distinction to include not only the death penalty but also extremely long (eg, 30+ year) prison sentences?

Very interesting indeed. I think it raises many more questions than it answers about human behavior and the infectiousness of rumors in social media. I'd be particularly interested to see an analysis of whether sharing a false rumor has any effect on the reshare rate of a user's future posts. In other words: is a user's influence or perceived reliability (as measured by the relative rate of reshares of his/her future posts) diminished following the initial share of a false rumor? Reduced reshare rates could be a positive reflection of an increasingly skeptical and better-informed user community. Consistent reshare rates would be...a less optimistic sign.