If you don't like making those kinds bargains in the future, maybe next time don't upset the status quo[1] by starting a war that you then go on to lose[2], which forces you to bargain from a position of weakness.
Everyone in the DoD with triple-digit IQ knew that this would be the most likely outcome of starting a war with Iran, but all of those people got purged by Trump last year.
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[1] The status quo was that Iran was not in control of the strait, and all shipping traffic could pass through it.
[2] Iran has so far accomplished it's objectives in the war, the US and Israel did not. It didn't get regime-changed, and its in now in control of the strait.
I've heard this justification many times, but it's highly questionable. Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis; is this morally justifiable? What if their 'job description' does not include 'murder', but they do indeed have to murder an innocent person each month because of the 'rules and constraints'? What if instead of occasional murder, they just have to subject many innocent people to suffering because of 'the rules and constraints'?
> Imagine someone works for an organization, and 'the rules and constraints' require them to murder (without legal consequence) innocent people on a regular basis;
Several large corporations really are guilty of murdering innocent people on a regular basis. Even still, if you find a low wage worker in that company's mail room and beat the shit out of them to make yourself feel better it's you who are the asshole, and it does nothing to stop the killing.
This isn't a hypothetical, you're just describing social murder. What do people do about it? Usually shower the perpetrators with money and peace prizes.
Following your organization's data security practices is not immoral. To me, refusing to accept a PDF is no different than running a cash only store and refusing to accept credit cards as payment.
And how long would that store stay open with such a policy? That's the problem. The government has less competency than small businesses with 5 employees. And not just a bit less, a lot less. Its hard to believe it is just the bureaucrats. I think the leaders of those parts of the government didn't get their posts from merit. And they have no idea just how bad they are at their jobs. It also is probably a bit of too many cooks in the kitchen too.
> The government has less competency than small businesses with 5 employees. And not just a bit less, a lot less.
The US government manages a more diverse array of problems (critical, life and death problems) than any other US organization (and probably more than any other org in the world). Amazon has only a tiny fraction of the competence of the US government and is not nearly as reliable. Remember the last time a significant portion of the social security system went down? I can't, but I can remember the last time AWS went down.
Murder is one thing, some superior telling you you cannot accept random PDFs sent to you via email for whatever reason and you following that policy is another.
Imagine you run a cash only cafe and one of your baristas starts accepting payment via paypal as a convenience to your customers. Your customers would totally dig it and see it as the morally right thing to do. You however might see some justified problems with it.
If a government office cannot accept pdfs due to policy, the policy is at fault, not the person forced to carry it out. We do not want to live in a world where office clerks make there own rules and ignore policy, based on their subjective morality, with the exception of rejecting or subverting obviously morally wrong extreme policies. Not accepting PDFs is not extreme, it is just bullshit.
The problem with your proposed 'fuzzy divisions' is that they're not compatible with the zeitgeist of 'seeing the best compete', and 'drug-free' sports, as there's no reason to disallow performance-enhancing-drugs if we're already splitting into divisions.
Actually, you bring up an excelling additional argument for the sort of bracketing I proposed. It also works for drugs!
There is significant grey area wrt to "doping" too in the sense that a performance enhancing drug may express as a larger than normal amount of a naturally occurring substance. So did the person dope, or is that their natural genetics? In my scheme, WHO CARES!
Beyond that, I suppose there is the usual argument against more serious and non-natural forms of doping that it is physically detrimental to the competitors and by allowing it you are encouraging or pressuring people to essentially harm themselves.
Still, competition classes could be helpful in some of the doping grey areas.
This is probably a meek attempt at demonstrating compliance with Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) laws and regulations. Lawyers will often suggest this sort of thing, because the only cost is a slight inconvenience to the client, and it might suggest 'good faith' in the case of a prosecution or enforcement action.
CAFE wasn't 'dumb', it was designed to prevent the 'big three' from manufacturing (new generations of) small cars outside the USA (i.e. in Mexico), with non-UAW labor. CAFE was not designed to protect the environment or reduce emissions; that was just a PR veneer to make it more palatable. You're completely correct that it led to strange designs, perhaps most notably the PT Cruiser (which was classified as a truck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_PT_Cruiser).
And it killed a bunch of useful smaller truckish vehicles because they scored poorly. The Ford Ranger, the Chevy Astro, the Crown Vic and every other sedan with a big ass.
There are many jurisdictions where the companies are not allowed to ban 'winners', but the companies often respond by lowering those users' bet size limits.
There are actually a few exempted categories, such as test and measurement equipment (because something like a signal generator can obviously generate whatever the user selects).
Just to tack on, dentistry is an example of a somewhat freer market than 'healthcare', and veterinary care is an example of an even freer (though somewhat different) medical service.
>”How would one be okay with a private company's invasion of privacy yet not the government's? An invasion of privacy is an invasion of privacy regardless of the one doing the invading.”
‘Invasion’ is doing a lot of work in your comment, and I don’t think there is a clear and widely agreed upon definition of what constitutes an ‘invasion of privacy’. If you have such a definition, please do share it.
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