> You don't own yourself. Everything you do is an interaction with the world (including your own body and mind), which belongs to everyone equally.
This is an extreme view. How can we even begin to talk about desires and rights under this assumption? If I don't own myself, how can I own anything? We have to throw out the idea of property, the concept of theft and so on. Is murder even wrong in this context?
Fundamentally, why shouldn't people have a right to privacy? Are you saying that there isn't any information about yourself that you'd want to keep private? Why are the details of my life anybody's business but my own?
> I don't see many people claiming their right to lie, their right to fraud, their right to steal. What makes privacy so different?
Well, for one thing, privacy is neither immoral nor illegal. How are these things even related?
I implement laziness "manually" all the time in Objective-C.
For example, imagine something happens which invalidates a property which must be calculated (say, a bounding box for a graphical object).
Instead of immediately recomputing it, just set it to nil, and only recompute it the next time the property is actually accessed.
This way you can harmlessly invalidate it multiple times without doing a potentially expensive calculation (which just gets thrown out by subsequent invalidations).
Sure, but his bitcoins probably aren't just sitting around either. The fear was that he'd be kidnapped/tortured in order to acquire them. If we're allowing for that, it seems like anyone with sufficient wealth would be a target.
Singer's book talks about finding and supporting effective charities. Here's one I now support that seems pretty direct: https://www.fistulafoundation.org
It also made me rethink what I am doing with my life/career. Is creating apps for well-off people with iPads the best use of my time? Is getting rich and donating most of your wealth a good strategy? What's the biggest problem I can personally solve?
"The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty" by Peter Singer. After reading this I dramatically increased the amount of money that I donate and began supporting several new charities.
"Lying" by Sam Harris. This is really just a long essay, but it changed the way I think about communication. It convinced me that honesty really is the best policy.
There's often a countdown timer as mentioned in the article. You know exactly how much time you have until it's a solid "Don't Walk". Usually, I will pass several people already in the crosswalk at my normal walking speed.
He was ticketed for starting during the flashing "Don't Walk" signal. That seems more like a yellow light to me. In other words, there's still plenty of time to cross if you're a fast walker. Don't walk too fast though, you might get a speeding ticket.