confidentcrescent
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User ID: 423
confidentcrescent
10d ago
Possibly! If we fix that problem, keep the body cameras, and the recruitment crisis goes away then the body cameras were probably an unalloyed good.
But as all three happened around the same time it's hard to untangle how much each of the former two contribute to the latter. Police certainly don't seem to have all-positive opinions of body cameras and I can see a number of reasons why even a good cop would hate wearing one.
confidentcrescent
10d ago
OTOH, the widespread adoption of body-worn cameras has been a nearly unalloyed good
I think it's a bit early to say that. Haven't a lot of places been starting to struggle with poor police recruitment on a similar timeline to rolling out body cameras?
It could be that the loss of privacy from body cameras isn't relevant to the recruitment problems. Body cameras could even be helping recruitment by reducing officer concern over false accusations. But until someone identifies and fixes the cause of the recruitment problems I'd be reluctant to conclude body cameras aren't relevant.
Personally, I think I'd find it quite unpleasant to have a camera and microphone active for most of the time I spend at work. Especially when those recordings could be released to the public.
confidentcrescent
23d ago
Based on the linked article I read, the couple was unsure about going forward with the surgery because it was unclear how much of the bill their insurance would cover. They got surprised with this last minute because their insurance dropped the ball.
None of the problems in this article are described as being caused by the healthcare provider and the author himself seems to think that these problems were at best only tangentially MSK's responsibility, including the following right after his criticism of them:
That said, MSK, like my wife and me, was downstream of UnitedHealthcare’s prior authorization system. The insurance company was the decider here, which puts the responsibility for quick and clear communication primarily on UnitedHealthcare.
Despite this, you spent most of your comment about prices in healthcare talking about doctors and providers. Why? How was this your takeaway from an article which almost entirely blames the insurance company?
You don't need to do this. You just need to ban pedophiles when people report them. Which Roblox seems to be refusing to do.
This seems trivial in theory but I encourage you to spend some time thinking about how this process would work in practice, keeping in mind that you need to deal with people who sometimes lie.
Do you just ban everyone who gets accused of being a pedophile? Trivial to implement but obviously abusable.
Do you just ban everyone who has documented proof of being a pedophile? People are willing to go to significant lengths to fabricate evidence, whether for their own fame and attention or to harm the target of a grudge. This adds a lot of work and I still don't think this would weed out false accusations at a satisfactory rate.
If you want a reasonably low false-positive rate I can't see a good way around actually investigating yourself. This takes a lot of work even if everything happened on your own platform. If the first step of the process is to establish off-platform communication and the bad behavior occurs there it's likely impossible to properly investigate.
Would you feel more comfortable with this process if we were able to produce date that illustrates that patients admitted with homicidal ideation are equally or more likely to kill someone as felons?
This seems to be a more specific group than previously discussed, so I'm not sure why data on them would matter to a discussion of involuntarily admitted patients as a whole. I also do not agree with rights being removed at a statistical level. Temporary violations of rights without due process are unfortunately necessary, but for a more permanent removal a just system requires an individual and adversarial process.
Fundamentally we need to establish what level of problematic behavior disqualifies from gun use.
I'm more concerned about the (lack of) process here, but given it's a right I'd accept taking guns away at the same level which would justify locking them up for an extended time. If you wouldn't feel comfortable tossing them in a jail cell for their behavior I don't think it's bad enough to take their guns either.
my co-workers [...] aren't going to abuse the commitment process for political reasons
Leading doctors in the US recently tried to distribute scarce health resources (covid-19 vaccines) by race. If that was non-political then non-political covers a lot I would consider political. I am concerned that some doctors will involuntarily admit a person for the purpose of getting them away from their guns long-term (i.e. past the immediate episode), and your word isn't sufficient to convince me that they aren't willing to do this.
Your usual crazy schizophrenic homeless person wandering around on the street was deemed safe to go home. How bad do you think the ones who get dragged in are?
I was under the impression these people do tend to get occasionally dragged in and involuntarily committed, then are eventually let go again.
confidentcrescent
2mo ago
Frequently (by no means all the time but often enough) that's grossly insufficient.
Why? You seem to be asserting that a risk of someone having a repeat episode while having a gun is unacceptable. I do not agree with this; disagreement with this is a primary reason behind why I'm against gun control. Freedom means authority figures should have neither the responsibility or authority to stop people from making shit decisions.
The modal involuntary patient [is] something like a schizophrenic who is so severe they just can't feed or care for themselves. Someone that disorganized isn't safe to own anything remotely dangerous, and if they had the financial ability to own a car (most don't) they probably shouldn't.
I agree this person is not safe to let out with guns, but the guns are irrelevant. The person you describe is not safe to let out, full stop. Not with guns or a car or even just their own fists.
The fact of the matter is that the vast vast majority of people who are involuntarily committed* really should not be allowed to own guns. Failures are rare. Should you find one (for instance someone who did a shit ton of PCP for ten years and then spent 50 years not using PCP and wants some guns) the expungement process works pretty well.
I do have disagreements regarding the place of suicidal people here, but I'll put those aside.
I don't trust that all of this is the case currently or that it will remain the case. The particular case described in the OP already does not look like the expungement process working well and I do not expect this to improve. There is a large group standing right behind your reasonable safety concerns who wants any possible excuse to keep guns away from people, and given your previous top-level post I'm sure you're well aware that doctors' politics lean heavily towards that group.
You're thinking of this system in the hands of an impartial party. I am expecting this system to be in the hands of an anti-gun crusader sooner or later and want it hardened against misuse.
confidentcrescent
2mo ago
I'd like the guy to go home to his guns after the medication works. This is a lesser violation of his rights than either option you have presented and no more complicated or expensive than the current system.
I can't speak for Nybbler but I read his comments as indicating he wants the same.
confidentcrescent
3mo ago
Enormously more efficient for the store, maybe. As a customer my perspective is that they just moved the cashier's job to you and gave you a shittier and slower interface to do it with.
The local self-checkout I'm familiar with requires you to scan items one at a time, takes a second to check the change in weight after you put each item in your bag, and if anything goes slightly wrong in this process you need the cashier's manual intervention which takes at least a minute. I'll usually take waiting for a couple people in line over that awful experience.
This whole thing only looks more efficient because the store isn't having to pay the customers to do this.
confidentcrescent
4mo ago
Removing these conditions makes for a very different argument than the original, which aims to sidestep the question of evidence for God by providing a chain of reasoning that assumes no evidence.
I'm less interested in going into a debate over whether the real world provides evidence for or against a God, but I've yet to see an argument that has moved me away from a position of ignorance on the subject.
confidentcrescent
4mo ago
I don't see how it could be otherwise than that they cancel out exactly.
Deciding a course of action is more likely than another action to get those infinite rewards would require some knowledge of God, knowledge that the Wager specifically excludes. The only state which is logically possible in our state of complete ignorance is therefore one where every action is equally likely to lead to infinite rewards. This would cancel out the infinite reward part when deciding which of two actions is better, as both are equally likely to get you there.
How would you go about figuring out which actions are more likely to lead to infinite rewards in this situation? Whence comes this knowledge about the unknowable?
confidentcrescent
4mo ago
Pascal's Wager is compelling because it claims to prove a benefit through logic. For the argument to still hold, may be possible isn't enough. I also have opposite intuitions and would find it incredibly surprising if we could logically go from zero knowledge to greater than zero knowledge.
If what you mean by more than one religion/source of infinite concerns is the modern version of Pascal's Wager that doesn't specify a religion and just says you should pick one, that version is still assuming a limited list of religions rather than the unconstrained list of any possible religion that a state of zero knowledge would require.
confidentcrescent
4mo ago
How can you estimate the probability space on a thing which, as the wager argues, is fundamentally unknowable through reason? Shouldn't every possible God be equally probable in a situation of zero knowledge?
The wager only works because it smuggles in the assumption that it's Christianity or nothing, but this is an unproven assumption.
confidentcrescent
7mo ago
I have trouble make an intellectual steelman of the people who are angry in the comments.
It seems obvious to me that they're angry because Scott just described them [opponents of PEPFAR] as being too callous to save a kid drowning in front of them.
"Do this thing you disagree with or you're a terrible person" is basically tailor-made to generate angry responses.
confidentcrescent
8mo ago
Good catch. I got mixed up between his mention of half leaving and timeframe of "gone in six months" to get an annualized 100% turnover. I'll edit my post to note that.
50% annual is better and a year makes the timelines a lot more reasonable for someone leaving post-training, but those numbers are still concerningly high.
Acquisitions usually have a higher turnover rate than usual, but a 100% 50% annual turnover rate is insane very high and I'm very doubtful that half your workforce immediately bounced from a job they were happy with just because they got some experience. Some people will absolutely do this the first chance they get, but having half a company made up of these guys would have to be the worst luck I've ever heard of.
In the end it's just the internet so I can't fact-check what you say, but training your employees only brings so much goodwill and I suspect that either the acquisition made their job a lot shittier or the job already had high turnover and you got suckered on the purchase.
The timelines are also very short here which to me also points to something more than just people getting poached with a better offer. People who already have a job usually take some time to find a good option when looking for a new one. That 50% who left within half a year either started looking immediately or wanted out badly enough they took the first thing that gave them an offer. For some of them, probably both.
To get back to the point about H1B workers, your post shows the problem with H1Bs very well. Your company is unable or unwilling to provide sufficient benefits to retain US workers, so you turn to cheap foreign labor instead. This is bad for local workers' pay and erodes the local talent pool as less locals can find jobs where they can gain experience.
Edit: Lewis2 below pointed out that the turnover was 50% over a year (I read the post as 50% over 6 months). Edited to strike a section and make a couple changes, but I still think the rate is high enough to be indicative of other problems pushing employees away rather than them just gaining new options.
confidentcrescent
9mo ago
I'm confused as to how you see his earlier estimate as better at all, much less vastly better. Are you saying you'd be happy with a price tag which consists of the range $4000 to $1500000?
The chance of hitting the $1.5m upper end makes this price tag functionally identical to "idk, could be anything" for most people. Unless you have millions in assets then 1.5 million is already enough to ruin your life and put you in a place where you're probably staring down bankruptcy. Whether the cost caps out at 1.5 million or 1.5 billion is irrelevant to people who can pay neither of those numbers.
confidentcrescent
10mo ago
I suspect they are entirely jury-rigged to make the 1 look infinitely more prescient than the 25.
I think the format is just inherently rigged, and in the opposite direction you'd immediately think. The implication of a 1 vs 25 is that the 1 is in the worse position (as in a physical fight), but I think when you have the real-time debate format the inverse is true.
Consider what participating from the 25-person side looks like. Unless you have a very non-real-time debate, the 25 need to share time between themselves and also need to carry on each others' arguments. They need to defend positions another person raised and follow through on a path of attack another person started. And being real time removes the main benefit of having numbers, which is being able to workshop a response and pull out the best ideas from all 25. The result is an inevitable mess.
In practice I suspect the single guy only needs to be moderately consistent with his own statements, not get stumped for a response on anything, and do a passable job of poking holes in the jumbled political positions of 25 people combined in an ad-hoc manner. These aren't trivial tasks but they're well within reach for an experienced debater.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
Not being able to persuade others to stop associating with a bad actor seems to be an overreach of a definition of cancel culture. Either you prohibit sharing anything negative or you end up trying to define what is a legitimate or illegitimate reason to call people out.
My opinion is that cancel culture operates at a level removed from the actual behavior you dislike and is more about interactions with third parties. To put forward my own definition: cancel culture is when you attempt to compel others who are not directly performing an objectionable behavior to disassociate from that objectionable behavior. Just trying to spread the reason you personally disengaged or persuade another party of the badness of a particular action is not cancel culture.
The type of behavior defined above is toxic because it puts people or organizations in the position of having to take sides in areas which may be completely unrelated to what they do. This is why many things are splitting towards either woke or anti-woke stances and neutral is becoming harder to find.
A real-world example of this is the idea that "if you have 10 people sitting at a table and one is a Nazi, you have a table of 10 Nazis." Cancel culture is the idea that some things are too awful to interact with in any way; not denouncing and disassociating from them is sufficient proof you hold objectionable ideas.
This definition doesn't require debates over sharing comments like "that reporter who you think is honest has published a bunch of lies" or "the leader of that animal welfare charity secretly kicks puppies" which I do not think any reasonable definition of cancel culture should prohibit.
As long as you can interact with someone who continues to read that reporter or support that charity despite what you consider bad behavior then you have a society where people with differing opinions can live and work productively together. While this does not prevent people from deciding as a group that they dislike a behavior, a world where people followed this rule would mitigate the worst effects where third parties are pressured into deplatforming while leaving the freedom for people to stop directly supporting things they find horrible.
From Scott's sets of examples, I think this definition would define as cancel culture A5 onwards (unsubscribing from content simply because it platformed actors you dislike), B1 (newspapers holding the university responsible for non-official behavior of an employee), and possibly C2 (holding Atlantic workers responsible could go either way for me depending on whether or not they're in an official capacity at the time). It also leaves me agreeing with P3.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
the GOP voted against it because…?
The moment Republicans vote for the bill it will be touted as a bipartisan solution/compromise to fix the border crisis. Giving approval to the bill puts their reputation on the line and having it then fail to sufficiently fix the problem would catch them in the fallout and relieve pressure on Biden.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
Most IoT devices are billed as, "You just plug it in, and it just works!" No one anywhere is standing at a store, looking at the baby monitors, seeing that one of the options lets them listen to it from their phone, and thinking, "Ya know, I really better not think about buying this and plugging it in unless I become an expert in network security."
Let's say you were in charge of fixing this from the advertising side of things. What warnings would you add to this device so that even tech-illiterate users understand the risks of e.g. connecting this baby monitor up to the internet? Simple stuff you can fit on a pop-up or side of the box, because the user isn't reading the 100-page manual that probably already warns about this.
A big part of why you can just hand a toaster to someone with no further explanation is that people actually do know a lot about electricity and household appliances and can avoid the biggest problems. Nobody's dumping a live toaster into the sink to clean it.
Manufacturers should probably take this lower level of knowledge into account, but it's not as easy as "just make the device idiot-proof, like toasters!"
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms.
If you haven't already done so, look into paying for a domain name and email hosting. There's a bunch of companies which sell these services, and owning the domain lets you change which is providing your email while retaining the same address. It's not all the way to hosting your own email but it sounds like it could be close enough for the problems you're worried about.
confidentcrescent
1yr ago
Do we know this is the case? Up until now I had assumed these tests got abandoned because much of the predictive power of the test was based on people not knowing how to approach this novel situation and having to figure it out on the fly. Once the secret got out and people learned a script for this type of question, answering got easier and more routine and the tests ceased to be such a good indicator.
I recall the timeline of the tests going away being shortly after everyone on the internet started talking about Google interview questions and specifically questions of this type, and I don't think that was a coincidence.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
e.g., regarding quotas, apparently MSP expected 100 stops per month per trooper. That's 5 per shift. Let me ask you something: how do you think police supervisors should deal with a trooper who, upon review of his shift, has been sitting under an overpass all day making zero stops and playing Angry Birds on his phone?
By disciplining him for not working during his shift, which has nothing to do with the number of stops and everything to do with him ditching work to play games on his phone.
You might object that measuring this is unreasonably hard and that measuring stops is a reasonable proxy to check for that. I disagree.
You can check electronic surveillance, which many police departments are already moving to for other reasons. Body cameras, car cameras, and car GPS systems are a lot more common and any one of these should make it trivial to check if a police officer is doing nothing all day.
If for whatever reason you don't think these tools are sufficient to identify police abandoning their jobs, there's another option that works for any job where workers have overlapping skill sets. You can switch up who does what work. Put the officer who think isn't working on a route where you know other officers regularly make many stops. Rotate a few officers who you know do good work to cover his route. If the pattern of few stops follows the officer who you're suspicious of, that's good evidence that he's not doing his job well enough.
confidentcrescent
2yr ago
an extremely harsh login wall that even Elon Musk has maintained, so even scrolling down on someone’s Twitter forces an unblockable pop up demanding sign-in
Just an aside, but I think that has actually been removed now. I don't have a twitter account and I haven't seen the login wall in months.
That doesn't match what I remember. Why did it take a national conversation to get body cameras in place if both police officers and reform advocates wanted them? Who else could have been getting in the way?
Additionally, unions in multiple large cities have demanded raises for wearing body cameras. This would be a very strange move by the unions if officers in these locations wanted body cameras.
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