Re: Re: Taking a Stand in the War on General-Purpose Computing
  By: Mayayana to Richard Falken on Thu Mar 18 2021 10:55 pm

 >   No. Only in your role as consumer. No one is expected
 > to understand car mechanics. Nor is a home owner expected

Car mechanics are included in the driving license exam.

Then again I don't think you are supposed to be an expert when wading through
an specific field.

There is a lot of _bad stuff_ being placed in regulated products. Regulation is
not a substitute for education. I sell vitamins
and mineral supplements that are law compliant, but if you are not aware of
your personal circumpstances you can  make a mess
of yourself consuming them. It is your responsibility to known if you have
blood pressure problems or kidney issues and which
stuff can affect you negatively. You don't need to be a vitamin expert, you
need the common sense pointers.

I also happen to be an Engineer and I am not impressed with the local
Edification Technnical Code. When I was in college, the
guy teaching structure safety gave us a red marker and told us to cross down
half of it because the code was unsuitable for
buildings you didn't intend to collapse. Mostly typos and such, but those were
turned into law - actually, pseudolaw, since
it has been enacted by non-elected officials from a "deep state" suboffice.
What this means is that if you hire any of the
Engineers that got out of that class for building something, you are not
relying on the regulations that mandate that buildings
must not collapse, you are relying in their ability to design something that
won't collapse.

To this day our consumer-grade building methods are highly appreciated, by the
way.

The problem I see when regulation is priorized over education is that you end
up with regulations that fall short and don't
mitigate the thick of the problem but then you don't have a population capable
of sorting the issues out. It is usually because
the goal of the people making the regulations is more interested in making
personal profit themselves than anything else.

Your argument is that the average consumer of IT is not a technical expert and
must be protected via regulation. Let's assume
for a moment that the only way to use certain technology safely is by having a
minimum of proficency with it. What your
argument looks like is: "The average consumer of $technology does not meet the
minimum level of proficency for safe use,
therefore we must let a regulatory organism protect them."

This is exactly like saying: "The average consumer of cars does not meet the
minimum level of proficency for safe use,
therefore we must let a regulatory organism protect them." My opinion is that
if somebody is not able to drive a car safely, he
should not be driving a car. He should be hiring somebody who knows how to
drive a car or he should learn how to drive.

What he should not be doing is purchasing a car with an institutional Official
Safety Seal and thinking it is ok to drive a car
without having a clue about car controls. _Which is why I often find in lots of
fields_ and is exactly what happens when you
skip educating people. "Oh, see, this thing is CE marked so it is safe to use."
No, ma'am, no necessarily.

I think that treating consumers as retards and demmanding them to be pupetted
by a third party is troublesome. For one, it
gives power to the third party doing the pupetteeing, which is most likely not
a trustworthy agent. Then, it tells consumers
that it is ok to be retards because somebody else will take care of their
problems (which is lazy and often false).

I am not an _expert_ regarding all the products and services I consume, but try
to know what I use and I certainly don't expect
somebody else to take better care of me than myself. When I think a real expert
is needed I bring one.

And by the way, I do a lot of my own home repairs and grow a lot of my own
food, and need no comittee to tell me sodas suck.
Besides, I think I should be taking offense because you seem to imply that if
you use Unix-like systems you are a junk-food
sucker with no life experience out of that.



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