[ceejayoz]

> My flat is presently being let on airbnb and isn't suddenly unsafe because someone else is in it rather than me.

You might not have changed the smoke detector batteries in a decade, though. Fine if you want to risk your own life that way, but we've decided as a society that renting a hotel room means extra safety requirements and checks to protect the guests.

[noarchy]

>Fine if you want to risk your own life that way, but we've decided as a society that renting a hotel room means extra safety requirements and checks to protect the guests.

Sorry, how did "we as a society" decide that? Governments are deciding the things you're talking about. What we as a society can do, is post and read reviews on hotels and Airbnb rentals, and we certainly do this.

[Frondo]

You are engaged in the political process aside from once-every-few-years voting, right? That's how "we as a society" decided it.

If all you do is punch a ballot, yeah, that's lazy, and yeah, you're basically letting other people decide these things for you.

[noarchy]

>You are engaged in the political process aside from once-every-few-years voting, right?

I certainly have and do, and it is a pretty frustrating thing with which to deal. Thank goodness society is not bound by what government can do.

>That's how "we as a society" decided it.

I think that's a pretty low standard for judging society's opinion on anything. You get a lot more feedback on what society thinks by examining the day to day transactions and exchanges we're all doing.

[ceejayoz]

> Governments are deciding the things you're talking about.

Governments are made up of our elected representatives and those our elected representatives appoint/hire. If we're unhappy with those decisions, we vote for someone else and tell them to change them. See Trump and the EPA for a current-events sample of this in action - the Right feels things are too regulated, they won the election, and now we're getting a bunch of regulations removed (to our likely detriment, IMO).

[noarchy]

>Governments are made up of our elected representatives and those our elected representatives appoint/hire. If we're unhappy with those decisions, we vote for someone else and tell them to change them. See Trump and the EPA for a current-events sample of this in action - the Right feels things are too regulated, they won the election, and now we're getting a bunch of regulations removed (to our likely detriment, IMO).

This paints a rosier picture about the possibilities of change in such systems than I think are warranted, though I know some might argue that the sclerosis of politics is a feature as much as it is a drawback. That said, we make decisions, sometimes daily, regarding things we want in life. It may be as simple as which kinds of coffee to drink, or which laptop to buy, and those choices result in areas of society that can and do change with some speed.

[ceejayoz]

Those daily decisions are usually far removed from their externalities. Yes, people will choose the $5 shirt over the $10, but it's hardly a sign that people in our society endorse the child slave labor that's happening behind the scenes. Government regulation happens a lot when individual small decisions eventually lead to things society as a whole doesn't like.

[noarchy]

>Those daily decisions are usually far removed from their externalities. Yes, people will choose the $5 shirt over the $10, but it's hardly a sign that people in our society endorse the child slave labor that's happening behind the scenes. Government regulation happens a lot when individual small decisions eventually lead to things society as a whole doesn't like.

If people knowingly help that child labour scene to flourish, by what metric do we decide that "society" doesn't, in fact, like it, despite its actions? Election results? Pulling a lever or filling in a ballot every X years, by comparison, doesn't involve anything remotely close to that level of engagement and activity. Even writing the occasional letter to a legislator is a paltry amount of effort, by comparison.

I'm not intending to be glib here, I'm quite familiar with the arguments that equate society with representative government. I'm just interested in how representative such systems really are of said socieity.

[ceejayoz]

> If people knowingly help that child labour scene to flourish, by what metric do we decide that "society" doesn't, in fact, like it, despite its actions?

Completely false premise. They're not "knowingly" helping the child labor scene - they're just picking the cheap shirt. Walmart doesn't put up a sign "this stuff made with child slave labor!" - they might not even know themselves.