ulyssessword
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User ID: 308
ulyssessword
5hr ago
I don't see anything inconsistent with "It was valid self defense, and the person who was shot did not commit a crime to trigger it." It doesn't apply here (she shouldn't have obstructed the street or resisted arrest or fled or drove at the officer), but honest misunderstandings can have tragic outcomes with nobody at fault.
ulyssessword
5hr ago
To my eye, it looked like a failed three-point turn. She started forwards with her wheels to the left, but turned them continuously rightwards as she went. This angle (from here) is the best I saw.
ulyssessword
6hr ago
and that usually in these situations the LEO has put himself in front of the vehicle.
Did that happen in this case? All three angles are ambiguous, but it looks like he was off to the passenger side, she backed up and lined up with him, then she drove forwards and almost avoided him.
ulyssessword
6hr ago
The problem is that the police can convert actual fleeing into threats to the police through their own actions
No, they can't. They can remove the option of fleeing-without-conflict, but that's all. She chose to drive at the officer when she could've chosen to stop.
Are you going to claim that the police can convert a normal walk to the grocery store into assault on an officer through their own actions as well?
ulyssessword
11hr ago
It doesn't even need to be a car. Imagine a suspect is running away on foot. If the officer is off to the side or behind, they aren't justified in shooting. If they're in front, they can probably shoot the person charging at them.
I don't believe that suspects have the right to an escape route or that the police are bloodthirsty enough to manufacture an excuse to kill random people, so I don't have the same conflicted feelings as you.
ulyssessword
2d ago
There's not much point in trying to (retroactively) change a grading rubric and the paper's score so that the actual outcome, your preferred outcome, and the procedurally-fair outcome all match. As a result, practically nobody had that broad of a conversation.
There is a point to setting scientific research standards and Harvard's employees, so that the actual/preferred/fair outcomes all match (in the future, at least).
Also, getting a zero for a substandard paper is wrong, and getting fired for academic fraud is right. We should be keeping different halves of the double standards from those examples.
ulyssessword
5d ago
Do a pure mage, no economy run. No items, no selling, no looting (except spell books), no buying. Maybe cheat in some spell books for yourself.
Just cast spells, kill things, and move on to the next quest. You'll never be interrupted by checking for the last couple gold pieces in a ruin, or have to run back to town to sell things since the rules ban you from picking it up anyways. It felt a lot smoother when I tried it, even if I did end up as a stealth archer (Conjure Bow, Muffle, and sometimes Invisibility).
ulyssessword
5d ago
This is so remarkably and verifiably wrong.
Yup. Doesn't stop people from making that argument, either explicitly or by omission.
ulyssessword
5d ago
is she expecting the school to take action against this boy because it's who she and her friends "suspect" created the images without any hard evidence?
Based on other things I've seen elsewhere, probably.
The First Amendment protects free speech from infringement by the Federal Government, the Fifth guarantees due process in the courts, and so on. The principal is not a Fed and their office is not a court, so obviously the constitution does not apply. Do one little rhetorical slip, and suddenly the entire idea of due process is not a valid counterargument to your preferred methods of meting out punishments (anywhere short of a genuine Court of Law, at least).
ulyssessword
6d ago
You do know that these are the same side, right?
You'd think that, and it would be completely logical, but the "replace" side of the UBI issue is less prominent than the "add" side around here. One of the primary drivers of cancelling the trials has been the direct cost of the transfers (as opposed to administration costs, etc.), and the cited benefits boil down to more money.
ulyssessword
9d ago
This. "Unlimited" just means "at the supervisor's discretion", and I'd prefer at-will days off instead. At my current job, I have X weeks of vacation, and they ask us to book two weeks in advance. Some things I had happen were:
- On Monday, I learned about something for the coming Friday. I emailed the manager and explained that I wanted that time off, why I couldn't follow the regular procedures, and why it was valuable to me. (It was quickly approved with no issues)
- I had a normal vacation that I saw coming a month away. I filled out the request on the employee portal and was approved with no further scrutiny. (I told everyone what was happening via watercooler talk, of course. Community/interpersonal conversations are different than corporate/administrative ones.)
- I had an extra week, and they would prefer not to carry the days over to next year, so I took some more time off in December.
Under an "unlimited" scheme, I'd have to justify each day off (like scenario 1), and the reasoning for #3 is probably not strong enough to get approved without pushback.
ulyssessword
19d ago
That's kind of hilarious.
psychoanalysis glasses on Why does your book selection process send "angsty teen gets superpowers" Sanderson stories to the top of your to-read list?
ulyssessword
19d ago
Around the time Charlie Kirk was assassinated, there was a post here about actually consuming media before you make judgments about it, lest you be led astray by the memeplex (IIRC, it was a criticism of Joe Rogan that betrayed someone's ignorance, and they admitted they had never listened to a single episode).
The same thing's happening here. "Sanderson writes simple, consumable stories" combined with "'angsty teen gets superpowers' is a common consumable story" to lead you astray. You could make the argument for Mistborn (mostly the first book), Stormlight (only the first book, really), and Elantris. Warbreaker fits worse and could be excluded as an outlier without invalidating the argument. Looking at the rest? It just doesn't work.
ulyssessword
19d ago
It's a good one. I've been rereading every Christmas season.
ulyssessword
19d ago
The market (ﷺ) has determined that these vastly different items have roughly equivalent values. Isn't money wonderful?
ulyssessword
19d ago
I am self employed and work in ecommerce, and thanks to LLMs I can generate thousands of listings' worth of relevant keywords in plain English with great SEO in seconds.
Unfortunately, AI is coming to eat your lunch. Once AI agents get good enough (and people actually start using them), they will simply bypass your store and deny you your cut.
You may currently be providing a valuable service by connecting customers to the products they want to buy where they want to buy them, but AIs will soon be able to also do that at scale, and they demand a much, much smaller fee (often zero).
ulyssessword
20d ago
Good call: It turns out it was the same guy (though I suspect he drove).
ulyssessword
20d ago
Pretty strong, at least for political terror. Think about the selection effects in making it to the "planting a bomb" stage. The absolute dumbest or most impulsive are likely to get filtered out, one way or another.
There's definitely room for serious actors to have a clearer view of the situation, and for them to look beyond the vibes to see the base reality. I'm still worried about stupid people deciding to go for it anyways: A dozen people trying with 10% success rate each is (on its face) worse than one person trying with a 90% success rate.
The flip side is that a huge number of people have personal experience getting away with serious crimes.
The current vibes aren't nearly enough to tip that scale.
It's not one specific tipping point for the whole population, it's a sliding scale that includes more and more people. I worry that it's an S-curve shaped distribution, and the old 1/100M rate (approx 2 people out of the 200M leftest radicalest Americans) of crazies will slip to 1/1M or worse with small changes in the background factors.
(included from downthread)
about as well-founded as OP’s belief in BLM immunity.
They're about a million criminal charges short of losing "immunity", compared to J6. Do you really think 300 federal criminal charges is the correct number that a fully-competent justice system would give?
ulyssessword
21d ago
But isn't the fully based response that, ideally, you actually want shamelessly sexist/racist hiring in humanities jobs that produce cultural products for the US and for the world?
If they can make the case that there's a bona fide occupational qualification to be a certain race/sex/etc., then they can get their exception to civil rights laws, just like anybody else can. Actually, race can almost never be used in that way (the exception is for actors). Also, customer satisfaction doesn't count.
I'd sure like it if they took the fully-based approach. It would have stalled them for a decade or so as they tried to get new legislation passed, and optimistically we could have had a clear public debate about the merits of sex- and race-based discrimination.
ulyssessword
21d ago
How much do you think those vibes influence an honest-to-God terrorist?
Quite a bit. If someone who's disaffected by The SystemTM comes to believe that murder is a good path forward, then they might just do it.
Celebrating political violence and not punishing it is the easiest way to make it more attractive.
They have about as much connection to the actual risk:benefit calculation as tea leaves do.
Broadly correct. What do you think the connection between the actual risk:benefit calculation and the decision to go terrorist is?
ulyssessword
21d ago
I’d say there’s a categorical difference between protests, even ones that turn into riots, and bombings.
I can definitely see that lone-wolf vs. crowd-based violence is different, but they blend together enough to be judged in the same breath.
One particular person chose to throw a Molotov cocktail. The fact that he was within a supportive crowd at the time may have helped him make that choice, but I don't think it caused the desire to appear from nothing. Similarly, the "crowd" couldn't offer concrete support from home, but they could still offer moral support and encouragement.
Were there particular cases you had in mind?
No, explicitly not. This is a 100% psychological/sociological question because that's what drives people to act. If the vibes say you can get away with murder, then people will act like they can get away with murder, and (occasionally) commit murder. The ground truth of conviction rates only matters as far as it changes the perception (and prevents second offenses, I guess). Preemptive arrests are similar.
ulyssessword
21d ago
most multi-unit buildings require a key, and guests have to be buzzed in.
Is that an actual barrier, or a polite fiction? I've definitely seen people follow others into apartment buildings, or enter as people are leaving, or bypass the lock in other ways. I don't think it's a substantial barrier on the scale of an assassination.
ulyssessword
21d ago
No "but" there, that's in line with my point: Violent political attacks on the Left are an attractive option (literally: the option attracts people). If you can do a bit of doublespeak to hide what it is, then that's even better.
ulyssessword
21d ago
The ICE attacks have been groups, and they're awfully close to outnumbering those lone-shooter attacks.
Does fucking around so hard that they completely fail at their responsibilities and the Provinces take over international diplomacy and trade count? That was Canada under Trudeau for a while. Same with Saskatchewan unilaterally deciding it wouldn't pay the Carbon Tax on home heating.
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