marinuso
3mo ago
I wonder if black people ever think "If I act weirdly and get killed by police here, hundreds of people could lose their livelihoods dozens could die in the consequent rioting."?
They shouldn't, really. Riots don't follow deaths, but media coverage. Media coverage doesn't follow deaths, but political expediency.
US police killed 245 black people in 2023, near enough to one per workday, at least according to the Washington Post's data. The vast majority, we never hear anything about. The media does not need 4-5 such stories a week. A couple a year is more than enough.
Now, cops are always going to be people, so no matter how good the hiring and training are, some of them will fuck up every once in a while. Even if, by magic, we would lower police violence by 9/10ths without screwing up anything else in the process — at which point the US would have by far the nicest police in the world — still two black people would be killed per month. And the media does not need two stories a month. There aren't two a month now. If this 9/10ths reduction were achieved somehow, nothing would change.
This is not the fault of the woman who got shot, and it isn't really the fault of the cop either. Though the individual cop is at best as dangerously incompetent as the Secret Service, and should be tried for manslaughter, you can't blame him, let alone cops in general, for the fallout. That is, dare I say it, systemic.
marinuso
3mo ago
You can't fix it. For one, cops are people, so some of them will make mistakes, or panic, or even simply be malicious. You can, and should, minimize this with proper hiring and training, but it will never be entirely zero, because cops are people. Meanwhile, racial tensions are not driven by the deaths but by the media coverage, and the media coverage is not driven by the deaths either but by political expediency.
According to the Washington Post the police killed 245 black people last year. That's pretty much one per work day. We certainly don't get national attention for every one. That only happens when it's convenient.
Suppose we had some magic way to lower police violence by 9/10ths. By this point the US would have the nicest police in the world by far. But there would still be more than one black person killed by the police each month. Today, there is much less than one big news story per month even though they could do this multiple times a week if they wanted. One or two a month would still be more than plenty to keep going as they are going.
US police killed 1161 people in total in 2023. If it were lowered by 9/10ths, you'd save 1045 people a year (assuming this lowering of police violence doesn't just increase the rest of the violence), but you would otherwise change nothing. For context, 1045 people is about 9 days worth of US traffic deaths. So even that is only a small drop in the bucket. You can round that down to nobody. (After all, one death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.)
The actual police violence doesn't matter at all in the big scheme of things, and not even with literal magic could you do something about police violence and thereby change anything about society.
marinuso
3mo ago
but the null hypothesis here still seems to be "she just made something up in the middle of an investigation", which would mean it's at least some evidence of malice
I mean, not necessarily. Probably she spun a tale literally on the spot, just to have something to say. She failed the speech check this time. But when it does work, you don't notice. That's PR. No spokesperson is ever going to honestly say "we can't do our jobs well and I have no explanation."
Perhaps such an attitude technically is malicious, but no more so than any other PR in the history of PR.
marinuso
3mo ago
Height doesn't really matter in women as long as it is within the normal range, which 5'2" is. If she had been a man, it would've mattered at least a bit, but she isn't.
marinuso
5mo ago
This song isn't new, it's been going around for at least a year, and I'm neither German nor hip to the latest social media, so my guess is that by the time I saw it it'd been going around for a while.
marinuso
6mo ago
Will Elon throttle me if he finds out I’m short Tesla stock?
You probably meant this as a joke, but I'd be wary of buying a car from a tech company. What happens in X years when they shut the servers down that it wants to connect to? Or what happens if your account gets banned?
Tesla employees have been caught sharing videos from the cameras on the cars. That tells me that a) they can access whatever you can, and b) there isn't much stopping even individual employees screwing around with people's cars, neither in terms of IT security or company culture.
marinuso
6mo ago
The only times they're allowed to riot is when there's some incident with the US, the Belgrade embassy bombing for instance. Then they have the police put the kid gloves on and subtly stoke the fires, while trying to keep things under control.
To be fair, I think that Floyd was much more similar to this than you'd first think. It was completely supported by the mainstream media and institutions.
The power balance in the West is different from that of China; there isn't a single Politburo, the media and institutions are power centers in their own right. But there's still a group of people you can more or less draw a circle around and say, these people are the people who actually decide what happens. And those people supported Floyd, even not-so-subtly stoked it, and if they hadn't it would've never happened.
marinuso
6mo ago
The only people it really makes sense to assassinate are the other side's Supreme Court Justices while your side is in power. Then your side gets to replace them, and if you then don't pick octogenarians they'll sit for decades. However, that doesn't seem to be a tactic that has seen any use at all, while the President has been assassinated multiple times.
They got a bunch of Vietnamese, whose descendants are still there today. The equivalent of the Turks in West Germany, though fewer and better-behaved, which is why you don't hear about them much. The same is true of some other ex-Eastern Bloc countries like Czechia.
But no, individuals couldn't just go and move of their own accord. (The exception to that was Yugoslavia, at least at some times, but given the choice, they'd rather go to West Germany obviously.)
marinuso
6mo ago
A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media.
And industrialisation.
Whether you were a peasant in India in 1750 or a peasant in Britain in 1750 didn't matter all that much as far as living standards go. Whether you're a peasant in India in 1980 or even have a minimum wage job in Britain in 1980 however, matters a great deal.
marinuso
6mo ago
Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history.
Is that so? Medieval Europe at least did not have slavery in any great amount. That is actually fairly unique for the time period and for the kind of societies they had. The Roman Empire had chattel slavery of pretty much the same kind that would later be re-introduced to the European colonies in the Americas. It seems to have been an old pan-Mediterranean institution, that died out in Christian Europe and was reintroduced basically by cribbing from the Arabs, who had kept it.
marinuso
7mo ago
He'll be 82. There's a very good chance he'll be dead or otherwise incapable. Look at how fast Biden seems to have gone downhill - he seemed completely fine when he was VP during Obama's presidency. It can go quickly at this age.
the guidance and computers are the expensive parts.
Computers aren't at all expensive anymore in the grand scheme of things.
In the 1960s they custom-built a computer to send people to the moon. In the 1980s you could buy a more powerful computer for kids to play games on for a few hundred dollars. By now you can buy a much more powerful computer on a tiny chip for 30-40 cents.
marinuso
8mo ago
Right now it's an annoying popup, same as it has been since Vista. Maybe one day the default behavior is switched to not letting you run it at all. But it's ok, there is a toggle to turn on the old behavior burried deep in the system settings somewhere. Maybe a security submenu.
This is where Mac OS already is. If you find the setting and turn it off, it will automatically turn back on after 30 days. So every month you have to go in and put it back. That wasn't even the government, just plain old fashioned greed. Gotta pay Apple for a developer's license to get a key to sign your executables. And if you're paying for the license anyway, you may as well put it on the App Store too, which means Apple gets 30% of the sales.
The impact on random users has been zero, because they just get their apps from the App Store, so nobody cares.
And iPhones have famously been entirely locked down since the beginning, they started putting it in the desktop OS too when they figured out people would put up with it.
marinuso
8mo ago
Even from a purely economic viewpoint, international trade is great only as long as there are no supply chain disruptions.
Having at least some industry at home makes sense from a strategic viewpoint. Not only are you better able to handle supply chain disruptions in the short term, you also keep the necessary expertise around. As long as you are making cars, you are also teaching people to make cars, to run the factories and so on.
If the US stops manufacturing cars, and in 20 years' time it turns out the US can't import cars anymore for whatever reason, perhaps a war or something, they will have to restart from scratch. Scaling up is one thing, but if nobody remembers how to make a car anymore and has to dig up old books, and if there are no working factories around, it will take a very long time before anything is produced again, let alone anything of acceptable quality.
You pay for this with inefficiency in the here and now, that's true.
marinuso
8mo ago
I'd say it's less bad that one evil parent hurt his own kids, than that the cogs of bureaucracy chew up countless children who would've had loving homes, all the while the evil parents still hurt their own kids too.
Of course neither is perfect, but you're not getting perfection.
marinuso
8mo ago
I got one too. I don't even qualify. I'm not an US resident, I have never even been to the US. They could've figured that out automatically from the IP addresses associated with my account that they're no doubt logging, or they could've looked at the subreddits I post in. Yet they didn't even bother with that bit of obvious filtering. They must've sent it to literally everyone.
marinuso
10mo ago
It would probably be legit less of an escalation if Trump just had an "accident". At least you're not setting precedent that way. And he certainly wouldn't be the first one either.
marinuso
11mo ago
being spontaneous, doing something crazy, means messing up, and that messing up is unrecoverable.
This actually is much more true than it used to be. For example, my grandfather only went to elementary school and worked in a factory. He was considered poor even then, but he didn't have a bad life. He could raise a whole family on his factory wages, in circumstances no worse than many people today.
Today you would need both parents to hold a decent, respectable office job to have a similar quality of life. Anything below that, you're competing with the entire Third World (either through imports or immigration). Add to that things like stringent environmental laws. The mines are gone, the factories are almost all gone, and the EU is currently in the process of de facto outlawing agriculture. What'll even be left for you to do, if you don't get the respectable office job?
There are many more people, and there are fewer opportunities to achieve the living standards of a factory worker 50 years ago. And so, life has turned into a vicious, high-stakes game of musical chairs. There's no room for slip-ups.
We have this in the Netherlands too. When you first get a license you have to fill out a form asking about your health, and if you check 'yes' on any of the questions you have to go for a review process which, given bureaucracy and staff shortages, can easily take more than a year to resolve. It's no wonder that even official examinators will outright tell you to lie on the form. But there are cases of people having their driver's license revoked upon seeking help for a mental illness that has nothing to do with driving, even if they've been driving for 10 years and hundreds of thousands of miles without incident. I've known people to avoid getting even normal healthcare for fear of their license.
marinuso
1yr ago
It seems reasonable that a society that spends more of its time this way isn't spending it on, say, fundamental research and technology.
It isn't really. Fundamental research and technology is hard, and almost nobody can actually meaningfully contribute to it. It's only getting harder as progressively higher-hanging fruit is picked. Meanwhile, almost everyone can help the infirm. It's just manual labour. As long as you're not a psychopath and not disabled, you can do it.
marinuso
1yr ago
Covid wasn't on the order of WW2. It was very overblown, it was presented as a disaster when it was really almost a nothingburger. That kind of thing just lets the bureaucracy grab more power.
A true life-or-death situation like WW2, for all its awfulness, demands that you shape up. Look at the Soviet Union for example, after a few humiliating defeats, Stalin threw out almost all the ideology that had so dominated the 1930s. Poverty was no problem, even famines were no problem, ideology came first, but once the Nazis were threatening to conquer the whole mess, it really was a matter of survival, and Stalin stopped caring about ideology, only about what worked.
That said, you don't want such desperate circumstances instead of what we have now.
marinuso
1yr ago
Really, I can't convince myself any good reason to not "drive like an asshole".
You might get into an accident. The more you demand others react quickly to avoid you, the more likely it is that someone will fail to do so.
marinuso
1yr ago
Well, how about Native American reservations? And as for those: you can't, in general, move there, only the tribe that owns it can; but you can drive through and even stop at a restaurant. Any 'realistic' (for whatever value of that...) Ida-White would need to follow a similar model.
It wouldn't be in their interest to block or harass people who pass through.
It's the last straw that breaks the camel's back.
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