> It’s worth noting that the policy these accounts violated, a prohibition against sharing “live location information,” is only 24 hours old.
It seems like a good rule, but in this case the application of the rule seems less impersonal than it could be
Let’s try to make a comment that creates less outrage than most…
This is why it would be interesting to post public information about politicians collected from the online spyware that tracks all of us. It would rapidly motivate new laws that at least somewhat improve privacy.
This always happens when rule makers are personally affected by a problem: the problem starts getting attention
That is what everyone has been saying for years. I mean, it turns out they were wrong and Twitter was actually colluding with government agencies to bypass the first amendment. But censorship and targeted suspensions were defended tooth and nail by internet commenters.
Is this a problem now only because people you like are targeted? Surely people wouldn't be so shortsighted?
They're just sick and tired of the billionaire hypocrite.
So if I read right, you think being a billionaire is unethical. Don’t know if I agree or disagree.
Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires? Should they give up their wealth voluntarily, or do we have some mechanism that say gradually taxes their wealth as it approaches a billion to ensure it can never exceed the threshold?
If we did such a think, do you think it would disincentivise entrepreneurs?
I did not intend to say this in my post. I said that a billionaire's capacity for harm is greater than that of other people, so it is worse to be a hypocrite. But I also do believe that simply having a billion dollars is unethical as well, or at the very least antisocial.
> Say you’re right, how do we prevent people being billionaires?
This is hard. But I do not believe that "enforcing a policy that prevents billionaires is hard" is a reason for believing that being a billionaire is pro-social behavior. It would be both difficult and probably unwise to create a policy that punished people for cheating on their spouse or (less seriously) flaking on a social engagement without notice. But I think it is thoroughly reasonable to still say that those things are unethical.
I think that the challenges of policy preventing billionaires are largely related to enforcement and management of illiquid assets. I do not think that such a policy would disincentivize entrepreneurs. I believe that few entrepreneurs get into the business for the purpose of becoming a billionaire. Ending up with 900M is not going to cause anybody any tears. And if it is the case that such a policy disincentivizes entrepreneurship, then it sure as hell proves that the claimed incentives like personal satisfaction, self determination, job creation, and providing value to customers are all bullshit.
I think it’s self evident that very rich people have more capacity for both good and bad, as they have more power in a capitalist society. To debate further there is a debate about capitalism, and whilst I’d like to see more social democracy and less laissez faire, going beyond capitalism is not something I want to jump into…
So I think ideally you’d like to see billionaires give up their wealth voluntarily, right? That seems internally consistent.
I think your last point is a good one, particularly a good response to those on the right who are always against progressive taxation: the cash should not be the only or perhaps even primary incentive. At least for entrepreneurship.
One issue with saying “900m enough” etc. is that often billionaires (or rich folk) are really just rich on paper. If your company is private it’s not necessarily easy to liquidate, for example. And maybe sometimes you want people to “own” lots of money in the sense that they need to steward it (maybe you want them to be an Angel investor, for example).
I guess I took you away a bit from “unethical” to “how do we solve it?” And it is still valuable to have ethics that cannot be enforced, because you want to be ethical yourself and be able to advise others.