Cadsby

Much of those funds come with stipulations on how they must be spent; namely, on military hardware from US Defense manufacturers. So the aid ends up back in the US ultimately and effectively acts as a subsidy to the Defense industry.

Native New Yorker here. Growing up in the 80's and 90's (when crime was at it's peak), it was common among everyone I grew up with to ride the subway/bus alone and generally explore the neighborhood alone/with friends. I remember my mother being slightly apprehensive when I started commuting to school alone in 4th grade, but it wasn't a major issue.

As many have pointed out, the culture has simply changed. Crime is way down, but ironically people are more afraid to let their children travel unsupervised than when I was a kid.

As a side note, I did get lost on the train once (while in the care of a relative. She got off the train and forgot to take me with her.) I was asleep and woke up at a stop I didn't recognize. While I remember being a little apprehensive, I simply walked over to the woman in the token booth, explained I was lost and had gotten separated from my aunt. She let me inside the booth and called my mom, who came and picked me up. All in all, it wasn't a huge affair. I think if that happened today police and CPS will probably turn it into a major incident of possible child neglect.

Most of the greatest inventions of the past 100 years have come from large businesses that had the man-power and capital to invest in significant R&D departments.

Your narrative leaves out the huge sums of public dollars that underpinned those innovations.

Given that the original search was blatantly illegal, the original citations were not in fact reasonable.

Law Enforcement generally gets away with this behavior, in part, because the public only pays attention to the end result (in this case "no insurance") and pays no mind to the fact that a search was never justified in the first place.

And yet virtually no ones does this.

America will be about the last place to attempt this

We came much closer than anyone seems to remember under Nixon in the 70's.

http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/guaranteed-income%E2%...

Generally yes, although the cashier might be momentarily confused when the machine prompts her to get a signature since everyone else just uses their pin.

The only place it won't work at all is self-service kiosk.

and started to mean "USA" in the heads of US citizens

You're being a little pedantic. It's usually understood to refer to US citizens by just about everyone outside the USA as well, not just US citizens themselves.

You are correct that there were many problems and no small amount of hypocrisy involved in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. (Much more so in the latter, but that's a different discussion)

But the point I was responding to was of the parent's usage of, what I interpreted to be, sarcasm quotes around the word trial; implying that the idea of trying Bin Ladin was ludicrous on it's face. I disagree. Despite all the valid criticism one can levy against any system of criminal justice, it's an important pillar of our society that when a crime has occurred, no matter how heinous or vile, the suspected perpetrators are apprehended, and evidence must be produced against them before punishment is meted out. We don't just take them out back and shoot them in the head, no matter how obvious we imagine their guilt to be. This process has value, despite it's many flaws in the way it's actually implemented.

Copy and past the headline into a Google search. Paywalls generally don't block links from social media or search engines.

Why did you put trial in quotes? (Genuinely curious) I was under the impression that that's what we did as a society with people suspected of major crimes. Even Nazi war criminals, people responsible for the suffering and death of untold millions, were put on trial.

Because while he was playing his little game, to "prove" that police profile people

I infer from your belittling description of his activities as his "little game" and putting "prove" in skeptical quotes that you don't see the value in this particular piece of journalism and aren't swayed by the evidence presented therein. So while I doubt you can swayed otherwise, I will say that I did find it to be valuable and his experience adds another anecdote on the collective pile of evidence that the cops and prosecutors treat brown and black people vastly different for comparable infractions of the law. And both as a native New Yorker, and moreover as a citizen of the United States, I think this is a very big problems worth paying attention to.

I'm not justifying that that diabetic guy who wanted his sugar pills should be denied his pills. I'm not justifying that the police handle the lower socio-economic cases more brutally, giving them bruises and cuts that the suburban white boy somehow was spared. I'm not justifying racial profiling.

Yeah, but you kind of are; in your very next paragraph in fact.

Yet, to walk a mile in their shoes, both the police and the criminal justice system as a whole, is to see the world a little differently from the average Atlantic Monthly reader or Hacker News reader.

We really need to get over the cops-jobs-are-so-dangerous-we-can't-question-anything-they-do mantra. The statistics show, in fact, it isn't nearly as dangerous as they'd like us to believe, and even if it were, it still wouldn't justify the kind of double standards the article was shining a spotlight on.

And for those that, quite frankly, don't really care one way of the other about racial profiling (I imagine because it won't ever affect them), I'd argue that everyone should care when the justice system clearly retaliates against a citizen for exposing problems in it's institutions. It shouldn't be okay for a judge to hand down a harsher than normal punishment because screw you for embarrassing/pissing us off.

I'm genuinely curious why you seem to emphasize "communist" in all your descriptions of China.

It's always "complex" when it's our (the US) government involved.

When it's the actions of others, especially official enemies, it's usually regarded in pretty straight forward right/wrong terms. For example, for those old to remember, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 80's was recognized for what it was, pure aggression.

Our military actions abroad? Well, it's complex, nobody's perfect, we all make mistakes, we had the best of intentions, etc, etc.

Because they're associated with high status, culture and sophistication. It's a way to signal that you are part of the affluent, upper class.

And no, I don't agree with the value/emphasis placed on it either.

> That is under the 4th Amendment land-line phone users have a reasonable expectation of privacy

This wasn't always the case. In fact the government argued the exact opposite for years.

> You lose it by exposing it to a third party

It's true that this has always been the position of the Federal government, but that argument has always seemed pretty weak to me, and I don't accept it on principle, no matter how pervasive it's become. People don't expect their email to be read by others, especially the government, period. The reality that they are in fact doing this anyway just means citizens have to push harder to affect a change in the law.

This isn't a new fight. The government literally used the same exact argument when telephones were invented. It took years to work in protections for phone calls, I see no reason why the same can't be done for new modes of communications like email.

> and introduce a guaranteed minimum income.

Nixon tried this in 70's. It came surprising close to passing on the grounds that it would be far more efficient and lead to better outcomes than the patch work system of social programs we currently have.

> The economy is not a zero sum game, where if the rich make a trillion more it comes out of the pockets of the workers. This notion is childish and wrong.

I'm genuinely curious about this point. Every dollar in pay I cut from my worker's salary is a dollar more in my company's pocket, isn't it?

A rate which virtually no corporation actually pays.

Judges are the ones with power over sentencing. But it should be noted that the overwhelming majority of the time the judge simply signs off on whatever sentencing recommendation is made by the prosecution.

Depends if you encrypt your backups or not. If so, passwords are restored to the device along with the rest of your data.

As someone who has been involved in the hiring of engineers at a large multinational corporation you might recognize, there is some truth to this sentiment.

Two of the main issues are that employers have been increasingly unwilling to train new employees, even if they're clearly eager, bright and have the proper basic credentials. Everyone wants to hire seasoned veterans, because logically those people reach a higher level of productivity much faster and require less development talent/skill set wise. While there is a specious logic to this, it's extremely short-sided. Everyone starts at the bottom and needs an opportunity to grow and get their initial experience from somewhere.

Even with experienced individuals, companies often don't want to pay the premium that substantial experience in a field will confer. There were some interesting news stories (don't remember the actual links, but they're easily google-able) about the large numbers of former NASA engineers laid off in the last year having tremendous difficultly finding new employment. The interesting part is that it wasn't that they weren't getting job offers, on the contrary many employers seemed to be eager to hire highly qualified individuals with 20+ years of high quality experience, they just didn't want to pay for it. These people were getting offers that were literally a fraction of the salaries they were commanding previously.

You can't have it both ways. If you want experience, pay for it. Or else invest in less experienced, but otherwise qualified talent.

Part of the rationale for cutting ties with Google Maps seems to have been to avoid being reliant on a major competitor for core functionality. Partnering with Microsoft would simply have been trading one competitor for another. Presumably this is the same reason they didn't partner with Nokia either.

Fingerprinting has negative connotations for many. It's typically associated with criminal behavior, as those are mostly the only people afforded such treatment. Not commenting on whether it's a valid practice which should continue, but it's easy to see why people, who as far as they're concerned have done nothing wrong, object to be treated in such a manner.

Also, there's the usual concerns about any state entity (particularly a foreign one, which the US is far as foreigners are concerned), amassing large amounts of biometric data. It's a black box which you can't see into, have no assurances how that data will be used, who can access it, etc.

It doesn't matter. All you have to do is suggest the plaintiff is an alcoholic, and let the jury infer the rest. Ad-hominen attacks are par for the course in trials, because they are incredibly effective.

I can't comment on the legal accuracy of that interpretation of the law, but as someone who has performed jury duty on a number of occasions I can say that whatever the letter of the law, character assassination, in lieu of objective evidence, is common and very routine.

I think on a principled level, many are becoming concerned about the ever increasing volume of data being collected on all of us. It isn't necessarily about any particular subset of data, or all the plausible abuses of it, it's just the idea that some would rather not have every move they make being recorded and logged into a system they have no information on or ability to influence.

More specific to insurance companies, the potential/plausible abuses to increase profit don't take much effort to ferret out. And to make matters worse the data they use will invariable flag a lot of false positives that you'll have little to no way of fixing. For example, my girlfriend regularly picks me up a pack of cigarettes on her way home from work. She usually uses her credit card instead of cash. Ok, now she's flagged in the system as being a chronic smoker and her rates get jacked up to holy hell. Except, of course, she's not actually a smoker and I'd be super skeptical about her ability to reasonably explain this to some random customer service rep over the telephone.

Data mining usage habits rarely result in lower prices for people making positive, less risky choices. Non-smokers will probably be giving a trivial token discount, but unlikely anything more.

That, as well as the story linked (which I read carefully), are really bad analogies, for what I think of obvious reasons.

I do think intent can matter at times. Perhaps what I'm more zeroing in on is that idea that I don't find saying you didn't mean to, when you repeatedly kill civilians in very large numbers, such that certain countries have a long history of being on the receiving end of American collateral damage, as an acceptable rational/excuse. (This last part is why I think you're examples are not particularly apt)

Your intent just stops mattering as much when the body count gets to a certain number and you show no signs of changing the behavior.

> You are in a very small minority there. Sorry.

I'm fine with that.

One last point worth considering - exactly what is the evidence that it is unintentional? None as far as I can tell other our leaders assert it constantly. And then turn around and do it again, repeatedly. To be clear, I don't think likely almost ever is. There's simply no advantage to it, especially in the modern information age. It's willful disregard in my opinion, which is debatably marginally better, but only marginally.

And the reason I focus on the actions of my society, the US, boils down to partly because it's my home, and there's no where you care more about than your own home. As much as I condemn the actions of Iran, or any other state, there's zero I can do about it. I'm not Iranian. I can, however, affect change here, again in the most powerful state, where it matters most. And the most fundamental principle of any moral framework is that you hold yourself to the same standards you seek to apply to others. More stringent ones, in fact, if you're serious about it.