BiggerBoat posted:

I'm 100% totally opposed to the death penalty, mind, but were I ever to be on death row and face my maker, I'll take "heroin overdose, please" and feel like an opioid overdose might be some sort of happy medium.

I AM GRANDO posted:

I think most people who advocate for the death penalty really like the ritual aspects of it and would feel that it wasn’t really the death penalty if terror and pain weren’t properly measured aspects of it.

Rappaport posted:

This keeps getting brought up over and over, but anyway. If you absolutely, positively have to kill some people and don't want them to suffer, you could suffocate them using nitrogen. It does not trigger the physiological response a human being has to suffocating, since it does not involve messing with the carbon content of the blood stream. It probably isn't pleasant to pass out that way, but it's painless.

But the point of the death penalty is to terrify people, and satisfy the torture fantasies of others. This venn diagram probably has an area of over-lap, too.

Rappaport posted:

This keeps getting brought up over and over, but anyway. If you absolutely, positively have to kill some people and don't want them to suffer, you could suffocate them using nitrogen. It does not trigger the physiological response a human being has to suffocating, since it does not involve messing with the carbon content of the blood stream. It probably isn't pleasant to pass out that way, but it's painless.

But the point of the death penalty is to terrify people, and satisfy the torture fantasies of others. This venn diagram probably has an area of over-lap, too.

World Famous W posted:

there is nothing pleasant about oding

World Famous W posted:

there is nothing pleasant about oding

World Famous W posted:

there is nothing pleasant about oding

Zwabu posted:

I wonder what could possibly ever change someone’s alignment these days. Can the GOP screw up badly enough for people to decide they aren’t a Republican anymore?

Cranappleberry posted:

Yeah. It does eventually cause people to pass out but before that it's not fun. It also works by making the person stop breathing, which is horrific, even if they are unconscious.

Zwabu posted:

Edit: on reflection the nitrogen method might not be too bad because the main feeling of not breathing enough is due to not eliminating CO2 rather than being short of oxygen which mainly makes you feel faint. Since your breathing is unimpeded and you still eliminate CO2 freely, there might not be too much distress from the decline in oxygen, especially if it's rapid. But I'd still go for the IV method assuming not too much difficulty getting an IV in place.

Twincityhacker posted:

My Dad was a Republican for decades. I'm not sure when he jumped ship and started voting Democrat, but the absolute latest had to be 2008.

Phlag posted:

(Warning: discussion on suicide and specific suicide methods incoming)

On the topic from a few days ago of holding big tech responsible for their recommendation algorithms, here is a much more tangible example of how loosely monitored systems like this can go wrong, and why companies need to be liable. Amazon is being sued by the parents of children who died by suicide using chemicals bought on Amazon. Amazon was recommending what the plaintiffs call "suicide kits" through their "Buy it with" groupings (encouraging customers to buy harmful chemicals, a digital scale, medication to prevent vomiting, and a book on suicide methods all at once). Their auto-complete also recommended adding the search term "suicide" to people searching for these chemicals.
https://twitter.com/arstechnica/status/1579056836212273152

Young Freud posted:

I think this really comes down to regulating algorithms or at least putting a human in the loop to hit a button whenever these issues arise. The same thing happens with radicalization with YouTube videos or Facebook group and how that poo poo is being gamed to get more adherents to indoctrinate by abusing the traffic algorithms to those views. Like after a few hits, maybe have a manager come in and flag recommendations before getting they hurt more people.

haveblue posted:

Amazon is going to run into the same problem Youtube runs into- there are not enough managers in the world to keep up with how often the algorithm fucks up

Young Freud posted:

I guess at some point Amazon is going to have to do a cost analysis and see if costs more hiring content managers or paying out lawsuits.

Main Paineframe posted:

There's always a third option: stop using that algorithm altogether.

It's not like it's some super smart demonstration of incredibly machine intelligence. It's just querying the database for things that are commonly bought in the same transaction as the item the user is looking at. It's not an essential part of the shopping experience, it's just Amazon trying to nudge people into buying more poo poo.

The problems here aren't unique to automated algorithms. The well-known anecdote of Target sending maternity advertisements to an expecting mother before her own family knew about her pregnancy came as a result of a few marketing folks asking the company's statistics department whether there was a way to tell if a woman was pregnant. By the time anyone realized the potential PR risk, the stats department had already worked out product cues that could be used to track pregnancy and created a database query for it. The resulting backlash was so bad that the marketing department actually went back and made the pregnancy advertisements less targeted on purpose so that people wouldn't feel like Target knew so much about them.

That was mostly human effort, but it still points to the big problem with automating this stuff: when it was under human control, it was done for a few products and/or demographics that were considered especially important, and any Bad Idea decisions were signed off by a human who had specifically asked for that Bad Idea. With an automated algorithm, it's done for everything by default, ensuring it will find every possible bad idea through sheer brute-force. No marketer is ever going to go and ask the stats department how to target suicidal customers, but the algorithm doesn't have any idea what "suicide" is - it just knows that these products are often bought together.

Oracle posted:

On the other hand, they could keep this algorithm, not make it public, and instead include links to books about how to deal with depression for those making those purchases together and maybe a warning email to the parent-linked account stating their child was exhibiting danger signs of suicidality and to schedule a psych consult.

Oracle posted:

On the other hand, they could keep this algorithm, not make it public, and instead include links to books about how to deal with depression for those making those purchases together and maybe a warning email to the parent-linked account stating their child was exhibiting danger signs of suicidality and to schedule a psych consult.

Oracle posted:

On the other hand, they could keep this algorithm, not make it public, and instead include links to books about how to deal with depression for those making those purchases together and maybe a warning email to the parent-linked account stating their child was exhibiting danger signs of suicidality and to schedule a psych consult.

pseudorandom name posted:

The actual problem is that Amazon is selling how-to guides for committing suicide, not that the algorithm is correctly identifying people with similar interests and recommending products based on that similarity. This is the same problem with YouTube -- not that YouTube correctly categorizing neo-nazis as having similar interests to other neo-nazis, but that YouTube is even hosting neo-nazi videos in the first place.

Clarste posted:

Ah, the solution to the problem of blind statistics engines guiding our entire lives is to remove everything that could possibly hurt us, one by one. With an infinite army of moderators. What if it wasn't an explicit "how-to guide" but rather a short work of fiction that portrayed the steps in detail? Should we also remove anything that talks about suicide at all?

Ghost Leviathan posted:

As ever a key part is to identify what the problem actually is. YouTube continuing to host Nazi indoctrination material to the point where the algorithm actually promotes it to create more Nazis is the problem.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

As ever a key part is to identify what the problem actually is. YouTube continuing to host Nazi indoctrination material to the point where the algorithm actually promotes it to create more Nazis is the problem.

Oracle posted:

On the other hand, they could keep this algorithm, not make it public, and instead include links to books about how to deal with depression for those making those purchases together and maybe a warning email to the parent-linked account stating their child was exhibiting danger signs of suicidality and to schedule a psych consult.

quote:

A Call for Fairness, a Rule for Efficiency
The President nominated me to this position roughly a year ago. I spent a good bit of that time reading antitrust treatises cover to cover.

Doing that, I quickly read that the purpose of antitrust is to maximize efficiency. I read that the Supreme Court declared it “axiomatic” that the antitrust laws were passed to protect competition, not competitors, which is a way of saying that antitrust laws are not intended to protect the small and allegedly inefficient.

But I also used that time to read a lot of history, which told a very different story. I learned that small farmers pressed Iowa to pass the nation’s first antitrust law in 1888. I learned that when Congress convened in 1890 to debate the Sherman Act, they did not talk about efficiency. No, the most common complaint in the Sherman Act debates was that a cartel of meatpackers was cheating cattlemen out of a fair price for their livestock. In 1936, Congress spent months debating a bill to protect small-town grocers being driven out of business by powerful chain stores who got secret payoffs from their suppliers.

“What are we trying to get away from these chains?” asked one of the bill’s supporters. “What we are trying to take away from them is secret discounts, secret rebates, and secret advertising allowances. We are trying to take away from them those practices that are unfair.”

It wasn’t just 1890 or 1936. Five times in 60 years, Congress passed antitrust laws that in letter or spirit demanded fairness for small business, often rural small business. Yet today, it is “axiomatic” that antitrust does not protect small business. And that the lodestar of antitrust is not fairness, but efficiency.

How did this happen? What has this focus on efficiency meant for rural America? And what would it look like to return to fairness?

A Child in West Virginia
In many parts of rural America, independent pharmacies are the one place where you can fill your prescriptions, get your shots, and get answers to medical questions. Here’s a story I read on the website of the West Virginia state insurance commissioner about something that happened at one of those pharmacies.

A family walks into a pharmacy. Their child has cancer. The pharmacist has the child’s medicine behind the counter, ready to dispense. But when that pharmacist calls the pharmacy benefit manager, or PBM, for the family’s insurance company, they are denied authorization to give the family that medicine. Instead, they are told that the medicine can only be dispensed by the PBM’s own mail order specialty pharmacy. The family was to go home and wait up to two weeks to receive the medicine for their child in the mail.

How did this happen?

Picture a set of 39 companies. Some pharmacies, some PBMs, some insurers. Twenty years ago, these were all separate. Today, those 39 companies have merged into just three vertically integrated entities. And so today, when most people fill a prescription, just one of three entities mediates what medicine they get, what they pay for it, and how they will get it—and that corporate entity makes money by making sure that prescription is filled by its own pharmacy. Even, apparently, when it is cancer medicine. And even, apparently, when doing that will force a child to wait for two weeks.

How did this happen? This change from 39 companies to just three?

Merging companies usually predict that the merger is going to save them money by merging. They then predict that they will pass those predicted savings on to consumers via lower prices. For many years, however, it was not a mainstream idea that those predicted price reductions could offset the harm of a merger that increases market power.

That started to change in the 1970s and ’80s. The idea took hold within enforcement agencies that mergers, particularly vertical ones, were presumptively good for the economy and good for consumers. This idea was given the greatest weight for vertical mergers, the kind of mergers that help make it so that a pharmacy middleman has an interest in steering a patient to their own pharmacy.

There are certainly many factors in merger analysis. But it is inescapable that this presumption of efficiency significantly contributed to making 39 separate companies into the three vertically integrated firms that exist today.

Today, rural independent pharmacies are closing one after another after another. In Minnesota, from 2003 to 2018, 30 rural zip codes lost their only pharmacy.

Cattlemen in Iowa
I was in Des Moines for a conference; I asked our team to set up a listening session with some cattlemen and corn growers. It was about nine or ten people. Every one was in crisis.

The prices of seeds, feed, fertilizer, and farm equipment were going up. The prices of their products were going down. Farmers used to make 40 cents on every dollar spent at the grocery; they make 16 now. They are going out of business by the thousands. “We have a noose around our necks and we’re standing on an ice cube,” said one. “It’s like being picked apart by a chicken,” said another.

The group talked about a lot of factors behind these changes, but they kept returning to consolidation. Fertilizer, seeds, grain buying, meatpacking: There used to be dozens of firms, sometimes over a hundred, in each of these sectors. Now each is dominated by just four; depending on the region, there may now be just one supplier of a key input, or just one meatpacking plant.

What is it like to be down to just one place to sell your livestock? We’ve known since 1890 that it can depress farmers’ prices. But it’s more than that. One of the cattlemen described through tears how he had to gas a warehouse full of cattle when the one processing plant accessible to him was shut down because of COVID.

Another described animal abuse on the lot that he said was unheard of in competitive markets. A cow that he raised was bolted in the head, killed, dragged out of a trailer with a log chain, and dumped in the garbage because she had slipped in the trailer on the drive to the processing plant. The producer pleaded with the lot worker to take the cow home instead so she would have time to recover and heal, but the worker informed the producer that no livestock leaves the premises. The cow was given a couple of minutes to try and get up and was then shot.

But maybe the most shocking thing was how scared they were that something they said would somehow get back to their suppliers or their purchasers and that they would pay for it.

How did this happen?

The merger wave began in the 1980s. Tellingly, when farmers have raised alarms about the consolidation of input and product markets, economists have answered that the consolidation “unquestionably enhance[s] efficiency.”

When antitrust was guided by fairness, these farmers’ families were part of a thriving middle class across rural America. After the shift to efficiency, their livelihoods began to disappear.

A Grocer in South Dakota
That shift didn’t just affect farmers. It also affected the communities that depend on them and their products.

Like independent pharmacies, independent groceries serve places that bigger companies do not. The lower the income, the lower the population, the more likely it is to be served by an independent.

I recently watched video testimony of an independent grocer named R.F. Buche, who owns 21 stores in South Dakota Indian country. Mr. Buche’s family has been serving Indian country for 117 years. Many of his stores are the only place where locals can easily get fresh milk and produce. Many of them are over an hour’s drive from the nearest big box store.

Yet Mr. Buche faces challenges that those big box stores do not. Manufacturers sell products to the big box stores in sizes and packages that they don’t offer to him. When he is offered the same products, he cannot get the same prices for them. And that’s not because of quantity.

Like most independent grocers, Mr. Buche works with a wholesaler. By bundling the orders of multiple independent grocers, that wholesaler can often meet the order sizes of the big box stores. But even then, his wholesaler is not given the same price. That price is kept secret.

When the pandemic hit, manufacturers cut supplies to Mr. Buche and his wholesaler. “Picture this, please,” he told Congress. “Pine Ridge, one of the poorest counties in the nation, not having WIC items like formula for babies on their grocery store shelf.” Note that this was months before the baby formula shortages caused by the Sturgis plant in Michigan.

The only way Mr. Buche could keep products like baby formula, ground beef, or Pedialyte on his shelves was by driving over a thousand miles each week to move essential products between his low-volume and high-volume stores. Yet when Mr. Buche would walk into a big box store 50 or 100 miles from his own, those shelves would be full of those products.

What is happening to Mr. Buche is happening to independent groceries around the country. They are closing, by the thousand, creating food deserts across rural America.

How did this happen?

Efficiency happened. In 1936, Congress passed the Robinson-Patman Act, the law I talked about earlier that bans “unfair practices” like “secret discounts” and “secret rebates,” available only to the large and powerful. When it passed that law, Congress went out of its way to “keep open the door of opportunity for the small-business man as well as large.” For decades, Robinson-Patman was a mainstay of FTC enforcement. It arguably prohibits many of the practices Mr. Buche is experiencing.

Then, as efficiency gained ground in the mid-1980s, a view took hold among enforcers and then courts: First, that Robinson-Patman was an outlier among antitrust statutes because the Congress that passed it focused on harms to supposedly inefficient small businesses. Second, that the law raised consumer prices. Enforcement slowed to a trickle, and then stopped completely.

Those claims are unproven or incorrect. To my knowledge, some 86 years after its passage, there is not one empirical analysis showing that Robinson-Patman actually raised consumer prices. And none other than Professor Herbert Hovenkamp has explained that Robinson-Patman was not an outlier. According to him, the congressional debates around each of the other major antitrust laws were also “fairly dominated … by a strong desire to protect small business.”

A Return to Fairness
We need to step back and question the role of efficiency in antitrust enforcement.

If efficiency is so important in antitrust, then why doesn’t that word, “efficiency,” appear anywhere in the antitrust statutes that Congress actually wrote and passed?

If efficiency is the goal of antitrust, then why am I charged by statute with stopping unfair methods of competition, and not “inefficient” ones?

We cannot let a principle that Congress never wrote into law trump a principle that Congress made a core feature of that law. I think it is time to return to fairness.

People may not know what is efficient—but they know what’s fair. It may be efficient to send a child home to wait two weeks for their cancer medicine. We all know it isn’t fair. It may be efficient to force cattlemen to sell their livestock to just one meatpacker. It may be efficient for Pine Ridge to go without baby formula. We all know that that’s not what fair markets look like.

That visceral understanding of fairness has often been dismissed as ambiguous and “impressionistic.” I disagree. Because Congress and the courts have told us, directly and repeatedly, how to implement protections against unfairness.

Certain laws that were clearly passed under what you could call a fairness mandate—laws like Robinson-Patman—directly spell out specific legal prohibitions. Congress’s intent in those laws is clear. We should enforce them.

But Congress did more than that. As FTC Chair Lina Khan has explained, Congress deliberately charged the FTC to go beyond the limits of the Sherman Act. And then, the Supreme Court came in and repeatedly reaffirmed the idea that our Section 5 authority goes beyond Sherman. So I support Chair Khan’s goal to reactivate enforcement under our unfairness authority, and to issue a policy statement setting out the scope of that authority.

My own focus is on people living paycheck to paycheck. For me, that’s what antitrust is about : your groceries, your prescriptions, your paycheck. I want to make sure the Commission is helping the people who need it the most. And I want to make sure we don’t leave behind rural America.

evilweasel posted:

Ghost Leviathan posted:

You miss my point of identifying what the problem is. The Nazi youtubes should all be deleted and their creators identified, investigated and prosecuted as terrorists. That is entirely a different problem from the Amazon algorithm identifying and recommending item combinations used for suicide.

Clarste posted:

Why the gently caress is anyone defending the recommendation algorithm anyway?

evilweasel posted:

youtube wants you to think there is no option between forcing them to pre-approve each and every video uploaded to the site (in practice, largely ending the product) or allowing their algorithm to keep trying to find which flavor of extremist videos will get you hooked.

Paracaidas posted:

https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/1579472512735645697

For the many ills of the Biden administration (including some terrible nominees), he's also hit on some very, very good ones. Here's Alvaro Bedoya, who replaced Chopra on the FTC after he was named director of the CFPB, in a speech to the Midwest Forum on Fair Markets on September 22.

I strongly recommend clicking through if you find this topic interesting, as there are embedded links to more detail and citations throughout. Phoneposting makes those particularly challenging to embed in my post. It also has an audio version, if you'd prefer to listen rather than read.

Crain posted:

I answered my own question. Google/Youtube/FB/Amazon et al. do need it because the revenue will fall off a cliff if they aren't abusing the gently caress out of operant conditioning and addiction cycles crossed with invasive meta analysis of behavior.

Crain posted:

I answered my own question. Google/Youtube/FB/Amazon et al. do need it because the revenue will fall off a cliff if they aren't abusing the gently caress out of operant conditioning and addiction cycles crossed with invasive meta analysis of behavior.