These sorts of problems assume that actions have no consequences beyond the immediate decision. These tests, run in places which have higher long-term expectation of social connections, give different results than in the US.
In the world where <50% press blue, you know that everyone alive (the red pushers) would save themselves rather than take a risk helping you or those who aren't clever at game theory problems.
I don't want to live in that world, so blue for me. And it's the fault of everyone who pressed red should I die.
This doesn't seem to be a game that tries to be particularly clever--one button could kill you, the other certainly won't. Trusting that nearly everyone will avoid pressing the button that could kill them seems a reasonable assumption, and it's not necessarily an indication of a lack of altruism.
Let me frame it another way and see if you still consider it homicide:
There's a cruise ship that needs to have a certain weight in order to not capsize. That weight threshold happens to be at 50% of the population (for whatever population we're considering in the original question). If the ship capsizes, everyone on it dies.
You're given the option: either get on the cruise ship or don't. Not to take an actual cruise, not for some other intrinsic prize, just file on it for a minute and then get off.
I don't see how those who refuse the risk of dying on the ship are complicit in the deaths of those who willingly choose to hop on it knowing the risks involved
You don’t get to reframe the problem with different wording or circumstances to demonstrate your intelligence to others before they choose and you choose. That’s part of the thought experiment.
That knowledge isn't a "consequence" of the game. It's a symptom of a fact that's knowable a priori. Running the game doesn't make it true; running the game merely reveals something that was already true.
> The facial recognition system has been running since Disneyland began testing it in December 2025 [4]. But new signs explaining which lanes use facial recognition—and which don’t—only appeared at the Mickey & Friends Parking Structure on April 21, 2026 [5]. That’s roughly four months of face scanning before Disney put up directions at the parking garage.
> The blue signs inform guests that “Disneyland Resort park entries use facial recognition technology” and that “use of these lanes is optional.” Guests who don’t want their face scanned should look for overhead signage showing a person silhouette with a diagonal strikethrough [5]. If you miss the sign in the parking structure, you might not realize there’s an alternative until you’re already at the gates.
> This is a familiar pattern. Make the surveillance path the default. Make the opt-out technically available but practically invisible. Then point to the opt-out’s existence when anyone asks questions.
> physical labor, "blue collar", heavy chambray or something along those lines) of comparable quality & materials to what was in a Sears catalog in the 1930s
"If it’s a Hercules, it’s the best work shirt on earth! Sales prove it. Deep down in the mine, in the mills and factories, high on the lofty girders of a towering skyscraper, in fact wherever the work is rugged and the going is tough you’ll find Hercules shirts on the backs of hardy men. It is the undisputed choice of a Nation! This shirt is made of heavyweight chambray in closed front style."
87 cents, postpaid. https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ says that's $16.80 now. Fabric breaking strength is 62 pounds/inch. The triple stitched seams have a breaking strength of 58 pounds/inch.
The fancy version on that page is $1.00 -- just under $20 now.
"The toughest, ruggedest, man-size shirt we’ve ever sold. Packed full of more strength, stamina and comfort than ever before. Read every feature above! Sanforized Shrunk means perfect fit. All the washings in the world won’t shrink it. WHERE ELSE can you find such a shirt — such a price — such an opportunity?
Where indeed can I buy it now?
I ... think I want one.
Dress shirts were about twice to thrice as much, and up to $6 for "radium silk"; 1929 was likely the last year they used that marketing term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium_silk
"The Court finds that Plaintiffs have shown that their injuries are likely traceable to government-coerced enforcement for the following reasons. First, Facebook had previously reviewed the Chicagoland group, and Apple had previously reviewed Eyes Up. In both cases, Facebook and Apple had determined that the content met their requirements. Second, Facebook and Apple changed their positions and removed the content immediately after Defendants contacted them about it. And third, Defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content."
"Regarding the third element, and as alleged, Defendants’ actions can be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action against Facebook and Apple in order to suppress Plaintiffs’ speech" ...
"As the Seventh Circuit found in Backpage, although the defendant lacked “authority to take any official action” and did not “directly threaten the [third parties] with an investigation or prosecution,” the defendant still engaged in coercion where he “demand[ed]” rather than “request[ed],” and where he “intimat[ed]” that the third parties “may be criminal accomplices” if they failed to comply. Id. at 232, 236. Here, Bondi and Noem did exactly that. They reached out to Facebook and Apple and demanded, rather than requested, that Facebook and Apple censor Plaintiff’s speech."
>defendants made public statements taking credit for the fact that Facebook and Apple had removed the content
It feels if they were a slightly smarter and not had made an announcement that about such fact they would have gotten away with it hell, this probably happens all the time, but other administrations maybe were more discreet. Be that as it may, regardless of this decision, which can be appealed by the way, there is that saying: there is nothing more coward than money – and would argue power as well. A single discreet Trump meting with Tim Cook, and Trump saying "I would be really happy if you removed that app, and not tell anyone that I asked you for it", could have been enough.
It seems these sort decisions are fundamentally useless:
* It doesn't even force companies to reinstate such apps.
* It doesn't give any constitutional right for apps to be on the app stores.
* It doesn't force companies to allow people to install apps from whatever they want, which would be by far the best solution
The reason people are so shocked about the administration isn't the horrible things they do, but how they are so bad at it.
You can look at the financial blockade of Wikileaks as an example of how to get away with it.
It is impossible for the judge to change #2 as the 1st amendment freedom of association gives broad powers to Apple and Facebook to decide who to associate with. Also note there's no constitutional right to have phone service, so why should there be a constitutional right for an app to be in the app store?
I want them to actively seek foreign sovereign tech funding which come with stipulations that commit Mozilla to certain levels of privacy and anonymity.
I want them to go cap-in-hand to other countries and say "if you don't fund us then you are letting the US and surveillance capitalism get between your citizens and their government" and "do you really know what Chrome is doing with your data?"
I don't want to pretend they are simply part of a browser marketplace, but rather have them realize they are part of a civil rights effort, with powerful non-market forces they can ally with.
And I want those governments to commit to progressive enhancement guidelines like https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi... so new alternatives like Ladybird can start, and further require their agencies to test on a Firefox branch with no AI, no location tracking, full ad-blocking, etc. because while the market is free to ignore certain non-profitable users, a government should not be allowed to ignore some of its citizens.
There is a common misapprehension that the term "monopoly" can only be used when there a single supplier.
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly : "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises."
Or from Milton Freedman, "Monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it". https://archive.org/details/capitalismfreedo0000frie/page/12...
In the post-Borkian interpretation of monopoly, adored by the rich and powerful because it enables market concentration which would otherwise be forbidden, consumer price is the main measure of control, hence free services can never be a monopoly.
Scholars have long pointed out Bork's view results from a flawed analysis of the intent of the Sherman Antitrust act. For example, Sherman wrote "If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” (Emphasis mine. Widely quoted, original transcript at p2457 of https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/03/... ). Freedman makes a similar point (see above) that a negative effect of a monopoly is to reduce access to alternatives.
In it she quotes Robert Pitofsky in "The Political Content of Antitrust":
"A third and overriding political concern is that if the free-market sector of the economy is allowed to develop under antitrust rules that are blind to all but economic concerns, the likely result will be an economy so dominated by a few corporate giants that it will be impossible for the state not to play a more intrusive role in economic affairs"
Even if you support the Borkian interpretation, you should still worry about the temptation for the US government to "play a more intrusive role" with GMail accounts. I strongly doubt Google will follow Lavabit's lead and shut down email should the feds come by with a gag order to turn over the company's private keys.
"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right.
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).
My first >$20 burger dinner was in 1997. That's >$41.15 now.
EDIT: Ahh, here - price for a hamburger in the staffed dining car of a passenger train from Houston to Chicago, 1972, was $2, from https://archive.org/details/spacecity03spac_44/mode/2up?q=%2... while $3 gets you "grey sole with soup, salad, rolls, vegetables, and dessert." The author suggests the hamburger price is high, as an inducement "to observe formalities."
I could go back through my history to find the specific source I used, but it has absolutely no bearing on the point of the post, since even your McDonald's prices are higher than the current app+value menu prices, so I'm not going to and I struggle to understand why you wrote all that to not refute the central point.
Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?
Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".
My original comment was to mention that one of your numbers seemed rather high. To keep from it being a you-said-I-said thing, I gave supporting evidence. You didn't like the research I did, so I gave more supporting evidence that you are likely off by a factor of 2-3 for the hamburger prices.
Perhaps that means things weren't as expensive back then as you thought they were?
Like, while I can certainly find dresses in the $47 or higher range (you wrote "typical dress was $350") in this 1974 catalog https://archive.org/details/tog-shop-clothing-1974/page/n105... , that's from the Tog Shop, founded by fashion designer Paula Stafford, and with brands like Lacoste and the more expensive clothes list the designer or design house by name, which hardly seems typical at a time when Sears was selling dresses for less than half those prices and people made their own clothes to save money.
There's some great looking clothes in there, by the way.
And there were some expensive shitty things back then, like American cars which were soon to be trounced by Japanese imports that were both cheaper and better.
> Since the McDonald's burger is now cheaper (after adjusting for inflation) then is it also worse than it was in 1970?
Probably? I'm not going to assert it but I would be unsurprised.
> Because if it's the same or better than it sure sounds an example of why people may have acquired "some implicit feeling that everything ought to be getting better and cheaper than it used to be".
Again, what is your point? I'm sure there exists more than a few examples of things getting cheaper and better, maybe even most things? That doesn't mean it is a universal phenomenon that should be expected and cause anger when it doesn't happen.
Your multi-paragraphs about the dress... also doesn't refute the point that things were more expensive back then. There are many Temu dresses for <$10 which was $1.50 in 1970. The 1970 Sears catalog has most dresses around $10. Okay, great, the dress you prefer to compare is "only" 6.7x more expensive. You got me! Great work choosing cheaper examples than I did, for sheer pedantry! Muting you now as I don't find your post history otherwise valuable.
My point is that things weren't as dire in 1970 as you wrote. You can make your same argument without doubling their prices.
I think people are correct to be angry that RAM over the last year has gotten more expensive for the same quality.
I stopped buying jeans 20+ years ago when they started falling apart too quickly, even when I bought them from a Levis store. It may be possible to buy $212 jeans that have the equivalent durability of spending $25 on jeans back in 1970s, but wading through the dreck of expensive crappy jeans sold for brand recognition or where price is used as a false indicator of quality and durability is not worth my time.
That feeling of wasting my time is not captured by simply comparing prices.
In the world where <50% press blue, you know that everyone alive (the red pushers) would save themselves rather than take a risk helping you or those who aren't clever at game theory problems.
I don't want to live in that world, so blue for me. And it's the fault of everyone who pressed red should I die.
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