Clearly VW engaged in deception of the customer as they cheated their test results. Customers are protected from such deception by the law.
My point was to criticise the "Internet Dream" utopian fairy tale advocated by commenter TEMPORAL--where a user gets everything but pays nothing--and to explain that the internet's commercialisation is perfectly OK.
> The end result is that web is more spammed, my advantage disappers, and the new solution probably costs more than the old one, but now no one can go back.
These are not the only players in the game like you believe. Those who advertise more effectively on the web have more of an advantage over those who advertise via other media and those who don't advertise at all. And, as ads are more spammy and in-your-face, the advertised products get bought more whether all competitors are spamming or only some. Advertised products are bought more than they would be if the ads were mild or there were no ads at all.
PS: Thanks for the blog link it looks very interesting, I'll read it later.
> Satisfying someone's needs doesn't justify anything. Not all needs are meant to be satisfied - especially if they conflict with the needs of others, whether directly or by generating externalities.
What cases are you talking about? If a consumer pays for something, they want it. What is the evil of supplying a consumer with what they want? If they don't want it they don't have to buy it. If they don't like it they don't have to use it. Ultimately, the decision is up to the consumer for what is the for them.
It's not an editor, it's an IDE. Just look at the Python support they expect to add next year: "full intellisense, debugging, profiling, pkg mgmt, unit test, virtual env, multiple interpreter, Jupyter, etc. support.". All that in one program? You can't tell me that's not an IDE.
The problem with naming things "what they are" is that the scope of the project can change over the years, so that the name selected 5 years ago doesn't appropriately reflect what the project does now.
And there have been at least as many cases of political abuse of the police force, should we also cut down on that just because there is a potential for abuse? Many instutions that are intended to good can be abused or used as political weapons under a totallitarian government, but I think the potential for abuse is much reduced under a more benevolent political system.
> Your very insistence that you have the only right point of view on this makes me even more against ever allowing anybody who thinks like you the power to involuntarily commit anybody.
I don't know what made you think that I have the only right opinion. I'm advocating a view, and actually part of developing a well-rounded view is challenging beliefs you yourself hold--playing devil's advocate.
> That they can only be deprived of their rights through due process of law, as passed by elected legislature. Not a "scientific" book written by people who have no accountability to the population as a whole.
The part of the government that deals with health sets the policy on who should be institutionalised, and they are the ones that give executive power to do so to doctors. Actually, doctors and psychiatrists hold an immense amount of responsibility over the welfare of patients; they may not personally hold accountability, but the hospital or other medical instution does, because of the great potential for lawsuits in the case of mistakes (AFAIK).
> It may well already be true that a malicious individual with enough knowledge could look at your current lifestyle and find a justification for committing you and injecting you with things against your will. I'm sure that such a thing could happen under the rules that you seem to advocate.
This is rather unplausible; there is a mountain of a difference between my behaviour and of an unwashed, malnourished man who fails to communicate even basically with other people, standing for hours at road crossrods like a zombie.
> Which people? "Mentally ill" people aren't a homogenous group, and the fact that someone is mentally ill and living on the street does not imply that they are incompetent to make personal decisions due to their mental illness. The relation between mental illness, poverty, physical illness, etc. is complex.
I was referring to patients who lack control over their mental faculties at least to the degree of the man on which the article was written.
> There aren't simple answers, and this person isn't these people.
Yes, this person belongs to the general collective I described above. Clearly when I said "these people" I meant people like the man in the article I was talking about.
> Or was he, as he seemed, competent -- but voluntarily decided to discontinue the medication?
He may have been in the driving seat when he hypothetically decided to stop taking medication, but ultimately he lost control of the wheel. If a person is not taking care of themself and so out of your wits that you stand for hours at road junctions staring blankly forward, they need to be saved. The authorities must assume that though the decision to stop taking medication was voluntary, because the person lost control of their mind, maybe that person's decision was misinformed (or as you suggest, accidental). By analogy, ust because the driver of a car intentionally didn't buckle themselves in (maybe they wanted to die, or like the risk, or were just eccentric), doesn't mean that when they crash and their body flies out, that we shouldn't hospitalise them.
> And that's great, but its a mistake to project what you think you would want onto other people as their preferences.
Actually there is no mistake here: it's a fact that there are other people like me who want this protection from the state.
By "crazy action" I mean for 2 years wilfully undereating, not washing, living in filth, not responding to basic communication (even to your own daughter) and standing for long stretches of time at road intersections.
>And under what mental disorder should someone be institutionalised?
Under those that are responsible for causing a person to suffer and damage their own health and fail to try to recover, or seek help with recovery, as in the example above.
>All you've referred to is the DSM, so it's very unclear which illnesses and disorders you are referring to.
You've taken this comment thread on a totally different tangent. We're arguing a wholly different point now.
> Incidentally, are you aware that there is a difference between a mental disorder and a mental illness?
This already happens with homeless people: they become diseased, malnourished, get drunk and hurt themselves. Once the trauma has reached a certain degree that they require hospitalisation, they end up in hospital and released once they've recovered. Are you proposing we not help them at all and just let them fester and die on the streets?
Surely not. The "revolving door" concept, as you call it, is the middle-ground between not helping at all, thus letting a mentally ill person reach trauma more severe, and permanently confining those with incurable mental disorders (but those which can be controlled, and the patient able to live healthily outside the ward), which is both wildly expensive and harder to justify overruling the patient's will and freedom.
Not every mental disorder warrants institutionalisation; I never said that. My point was to clarify that a medically diagnosed person who does some crazy action should be institutionalised, whereas a person who does the exact same crazy action but has no mental disorders should not be.
>Homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder in the DSM until the mid-1970s.
The understanding of relatively highly-occurring afflictions such as PTS and schizophrenia is evolving to this day and it's a near-certainty that the DSM will be a different document 10 years from now.
Just because it had errors before doesn't discredit the document in its current state; it's the product of scientific investigation. By it's very nature it will make mistakes and then update the conclusions as time goes by. Yes, of course it will be different in 10 years, but currently it is our best understanding of mental ailments and the knowledgebase has come a long way.
> main transgression against the rest of society is making us feel uncomfortable when we look at them.
The main transgression is that the victims are trapped in a cycle of suffering because their brains are malfunctioning and are preventing them from recovering or seeking help to recover.
> But who decides who has control over their mental faculties? Who decides who is competent? The state? The family? The physician?
Who is the most competent to make this decision? The medical professional. Of course government (advised by medical professionals) will set the policy which will constrain the possible decisions.
> Can you imagine scenarios where the state, or the family, or the physician are incompetent, selfish, or malicious in determining the competence of a person? I believe there are MANY such scenarios.
This could apply to absolutely everything: evil police officers taking bribes and releasing criminals, doctors not prescribing expensive medicine to save their hospital money, etc. Does that mean we do away with police protection and hospital services entirely? No, as in this case, we have to accept the risk of the person in authority to make the good decision.
> Schizophrenia is a lifelong illness. Do you keep someone imprisoned for the rest of their life so that you can forcibly medicate them against their will?
No, until the mental disorder is controlled. After all avenues of curing are exhausted, and it's still not under control, then they can be released, provided there's no significant risk that they'll harm others or themselves.
These people don't have control over their mental faculties; they aren't competent enough to make a choice for what is best for them in the same way that minors aren't allowed to go truant or to consent to sex with an adult.
If you are all there in the head, by all means live on the streets, stay filthy, don't eat and ignore people, but this man has a brain disease that makes him lose control of his mind.
If he was forcefully taken to the hospital, forcefully given medication, and recovered he would exclaim "Thank you for saving me! I had a disease in my brain that lead me to believe in crazy things: to be paranoid of police and even medical personnel. I spent 2 years on the streets suffering like this with no place I believed could help me, but you cured me."
If I had a mental disorder that made me go crazy--so crazy that it doesn't even enter my mind that I need help--I would hope that my government would restore my sanity (as I am unable to do so).
My point was to criticise the "Internet Dream" utopian fairy tale advocated by commenter TEMPORAL--where a user gets everything but pays nothing--and to explain that the internet's commercialisation is perfectly OK.