bairrd

Can you give me examples of where police were actually defunded?

"I would strongly recommend you to reconsider wether thats truly the root of our problems - it's not." Can you back that claim up? "Try to understand the underlying systems that drive our behavior." Is the financial realities of scarcity, and the distribution of wealth resulting in potentially avoidable scarcities, that we all live under, not something that could be optimized? Are you not judging with your heart and blinding your brain to political/financial realities that are capital H Hard problems?

Needlessly politicizing a refusal to engage with science that doesn’t meet a pre-determined narrative of YOLOing freely to oblivion! How rude of me! Of course healthcare is political!

Risk mitigation whilst hospitals are at capacity? Nah, gotta live my life! Otherwise they might perceive me as weak-willed, and more important than my continued existence is to ensure I am not perceived as a weakling! Anything else is others being hysterical! Fuck doctors, am I right!

Willful missing of the point. Also not implying that the outcome is anything approaching a good outcome, just a grim Darwinian one, where thinking responding to covid in any way to improve life expectancies is just some sign of weakness. Our further atomization and slide towards a individualist society will leave us living shorter, less collaborative lives where we will try and treat cancer with a juice fast or some nonsense, instead of transforming our fundamental relationship to healthcare away from a not-for-profit one. But one is something a consumer can do, the other requires collective action, and that's only for the hysterical weaklings to dream of, so instead we will just virtue-signal our way towards dying at 30 on a bowflex machine after taking unregulated gym substances or whatever in a failed attempt to steel ourselves against our lack of societal fabric and collective ability to combat anything.

Flu season doesn't lead to insanely high excess death rates, and overwhelm hospital capacity, making things like biking now a much higher risk activity as any visit to a hospital due to a broken bone or something is far more likely to result in a lack of proper treatment. That we are in 2022 and still discussing this leads me to, very grimly, believe that we are in some period of hyper-darwinism, where this train of thought will only go away once the virus has incapacitated/killed those who seem to not understand what the word "excess deaths" means.

What would you define the events on that day as?

People are very quick to cry "someone should do something" when these extreme events happen. You offer the same people something, in the grand scheme of things fairly moderate like the Green New Deal, and they calcify back to their party affiliations. We're so doomed.

Enjoy the crime wave seems similarly inflammatory and impolite, but I find HN moderation frequently falls on a certain "if you say something rude/inflammatory but phrase it a certain way it's okay" which drives me up the wall.

I always am asked when I say we should reduce policing budgets, "have you ever needed police?" In my experience, they've always been either so late that myself and neighbours have had to get involved in breaking up a rape / other violent situations, or just completely useless when I've needed them for paperwork related stuff, i.e. credit card fraud. I think the police are asked to handle too many edge case situations, e.g. managing mentally ill populations, but are also grossly overpaid compared to other civil institutions, that if budgets were appropriately distributed, would lead to less of the issues police are required to intervene in. Also, among police put-maneuvering pregnant women, beating elderly bystanders just standing in Buffalo, or the myriad other documented instances of unnecessary police violence, there is a serious "bad apples spoil the bunch" issue in US policing due to the culture of other "innocent" officers backing their bad apples instead of weeding them out.

In any business, a department/team that isn't serving clients is usually re-evaluated, and budgets/resources re-allocated if they don't meet some performance plan. I don't see why bringing some business-world reasoning to policing in the US is so controversial, but I suspect that's more a framing thing of "defund the police" enflaming peoples emotions, as they get mad before reasoning.

No one in these situations ever talks about political capital. These shame based tactics arise from our powerlessness, as whether consciously or not, people who care about the environment realise that neither party, nor any private industry, will ultimately enact any true change on this front, so the only tool they have left is shaming. We are mired in plastic straws and twitter arguments purely because that is the only avenue left by those that actually hold the ability to change anything.

Those in lower socioeconomic classes are the ones I've known who've gotten it, mostly because they were forced to work in offices or some public facing role where they had to interact with a lot of people. There is a terror of small business owners who act like despotic lords of a fiefdom, that I find to be some of the worst actors in general.

Firing whistle-blowers is pretty egregious. If we can't try to fight for a better world after all this is over, what are we even doing besides just idly watching hundreds of thousands die?

May I ask why you hate linking to wikipedia?

Fiscally, yes.

These women were sex trafficked.

There's a difference between holding diverging opinions, and defending someone who had sex with a sex trafficed minor, right? If we don't uphold at least that as a society, what are we?

Yet I find the discussion focusing on the meta level of the conversation medium, and not on the higher-order level of society in general, and how a paid collective of actors can overwhelm the power of the individual, to be disingenuous, and potentially a distractionary measure from the far more important conversation around the role of large corporations controlling narratives in our society. It reeks to me of the same debate-club nonsense, where someone can be arguing about some human atrocity, but the second someone makes some sort of named argumentative slip up, the conversation gets recentered completely on semantics or the medium of debate, completely destroying the discussion of the actual higher-order issue effecting the meta-connections between humans and the structures we deem permissible in governing us all...

As Australia's "left wing" shift further right after their recent election loss, and the most popular newpapers reflect a right wing Murdoch perspective that seems to sell well, one which frequently decries any green party in Australia as unreasonable, and the majority of political violence being enacted by the right (e.g. the Australian shooter who flew to New Zealand and killed 49 that was quickly moved on from, vs the "left" being repeatedly berated for dumping milkshakes on politicians), is it reasonable to say that we live in a deeply suicidal age? The will of the majority appears to me to be deeply right-wing, and power, both through violence and politics, seems to be permitted only if it is appropriately right-wing. Are we headed towards the end of the human era due to a continued slide rightwards?

What does the continued distractionary tactic by those in power in government and the media, (especially in the UK relating to trans issues) of wringing hands over gender and sex have to do with a site ostensibly about hacker news, especially on a site where it seems wholly heterodox to suggest any sort of alternative societal structure might be needed to combat climate change, as that is quickly denoted as off topic, and something that market forces will eventually solve. I honestly could care less for the hand-wringing of academia in a field completely non-relevant to "hackers", and this simply feels like the sort of thing used to distract from broader issues at hand, and a way of us v them-ing society in order to manufacture consent for an impending climate catastrophe where those with massive pecuniary hoards will further divide society on identarian (sex/gender/race/location) lines in order to distract from the broader issues at hand.

I'd have to disagree about work strikes and riots, given how conditioned this country has been to lick the boots of the powerful, as a large chunk of this country sees itself as "temporarily displaced rich". Hacker News comments are frequently hyper individualist in a way that, outside a few coastal bubbles, makes up the political view of a majority of people in this country, including plenty of self-described liberals. This is only going to change after the massive inverted-pyramid generational demographics of this country shifts, and giving our increasingly anti-immigration policies and a below-replacement birthrate, I honestly believe this country is trapped in a death spiral. Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood...

I feel like the outcome of the case discussed here runs completely opposite to the outcome of the Marvin Gaye estate against Robin Thicke and the other writers on Blurred Lines, whereby the song, without any sort of similarity note-wise, was found to be infringing based on the "feeling" of the song, which seems incredibly problematic for anyone writing music nowadays. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blurred_Lines#Marvin_Gaye_laws...

What would you define as the third party in cigarettes? Smokers and cigarette manufacturers seem to not have some negative third party by your definition, yet I find it pretty hard to accept that the current legislation against cigarette companies hasn't done a world of good for humanity.

Why not both? People selling physical goods bake a certain percentage of shrinkange into the price of their goods whilst also finding new ways to prevent theft.

I find FT's reporting far superior to The Economist and the Wall Street Journal

I get your point, but isn't the parent to my comment equally as sarcastic a rhetorical response?

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Get everything in writing. EVERYTHING.

"Find an employer who doesn't use that operating system" might be a viable option if we lived in a world where healthcare wasn't tied to employment, teleportation made geographic realities feasible, and no borders existed. Free market solutions aren't feasible the vast majority of the time.

Can you explain why you think $1.5 trillion in defense spending stopped the US from being a third world country? With the state of infrastructure & healthcare in this country, and the absolute lack of over-site in military spending because of a blind 'support the troops/cops' mindset that leads to trillion dollar F-35s and small regional police departments having the capital to buy road-destroying APCs, I honestly can't fathom how spending $1.5 trillion to drop white phosphorus on random Yemenis is anything close to justifiable.