neartheplain

Thanks for the positive comment. I sometimes wonder what it feels like to be the parent of a child murdered in these communities, like the moms I see on Twitter occasionally doing anti-violence marches and rallies, and be told that your son or daughter's death is a "white supremacist talking point."

Lots of people in America, including black people, feel uncomfortable around poorer black communities because of the high rate of gun violence. Telling those people they're just uncomfortable because of "internalized white supremacy" or "white nationalist talking points" doesn't convince most and won't make them feel safe. This discomfort is the root of so-called white flight, social distance-keeping, school self-segregation, and other problems. If we fix the problem of gun violence in these communities, tackling other race-related issues gets easier. The first step is talking about it openly and honestly.

Centrist candidate for Governor of California Michael Shellenberger, who has interviewed many addicts on the streets of SF and has a credible plan to address homelessness and open drug abuse:

https://www.shellenbergerforgovernor.com/issues/homelessness...

Are those emergency telephones, or the "press big button, speak into mic" public safety call posts? Can't order a pizza or call a cab on the latter I'm afraid.

Dismissing what people living in Oakland, southeast D.C., and the north side of Milwaukee know from frequent painful experience to be true as "white nationalist talking points" says more about your views than it does mine. Try following crime reporters on Twitter for a few weeks, like D.C. Realtime News. It's a constant march of death in these troubled communities, almost entirely bubbled up and separate from the rest of America. You won't get it until you really dive into it. Then you'll wonder why the people who purport to care for black lives never say a word about it. The victims of this violence wonder that too, out loud and on social media, but not in places most HN users or policymakers try to see.

Backing up, there are two issues here which you're conflating, and which I didn't do a good job of separating: total gun homicides and mass shootings. They intersect but also have differences. I already went deep on total gun homicides. The weird thing about mass shootings is that 70 years ago, gun ownership was more widespread than it is now, yet mass shootings were an extremely rare occurence... until Columbine. Semiautomatic and even fully-automatic weapons were commonly available beginning in the 1920s (remember Al Capone's mob and their Thompson submachine guns? Bonny and Clyde with their BARs?), yet we didn't see this rash of mass shootings until just the last few decades. What happened in the 90s, and how to we fix it?

Side note, and I'm sure it's been covered elsewhere, but 99% of gun deaths in the US do not involve AR-15s or "assault weapons." 97% of all gun deaths are from handguns. Many mass shootings were carried out with handguns; they are deadly, concealable, and potentially also very high-capacity. Personally I support much stricter controls on handgun sales and ownership. I think that would be a reasonable starting point to approach both total gun homicides and mass shootings.

Canada is the U.S.'s neighbour and is probably closer, culturally, than any other nation.

Your point about cultural similarity holds true mainly for descendants of European immigrants. The shared culture here isn't just Marvel movies but values passed down among families from the Old Country like a Christian moral framework, Anglo-American law, the Protestant work ethic, Puritan attidues towards sex, etc. If you break America's homicides down by ethnic category, non-Hispanic whites have a murder rate per 100k of around 2.6 per annum [0]. Canada's murder rate hovers around 1.7. These numbers are roughly comparable, despite the many differences in firearm availability.

America's overall homicide rate is something like 5.7 per 100k per annum. This number is propped up by one ethnic group in particular, Afro-Americans, with a murder rate of over 20 per 100k per annum. This is not just a function of poverty. The white poverty rate is half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of 10. The Asian-American poverty rate is similarly half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of closer to 100 (10x less than that of white Americans).

Telling hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans to disarm themselves because of social, cultural, and economic problems largely confined to a small & largely separate social group is a losing proposition. But asking why that group commits so many murders, even as the first step in bring that number down, is a political third rail too so here we are.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/murder-homi...

His books all have a scientist doing evil because of their lust for grant money.

How unrealistic. Scientists like Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance would never do anything evil or untoward, such as using grant money to perform dangerous gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, demonstrably lying to the NIH about the scope of this research, and then misleading the public on the COVID-19 lab-origin theory while failing to disclose their financial and professional ties to the lab in question [0][1][2].

[0] https://theintercept.com/2021/09/23/coronavirus-research-gra...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/25/one-perso...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/lab-leak...

Here's how the actual executive order defines "inherently divisive"- seems worth a tip line to me:

For the purposes of this Executive order “inherently divisive concepts” means advancing any ideas in violation of Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including, but not limited to of the following concepts (i) one race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith is inherently superior to another race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith; (ii) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, is racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously, (iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, (iv) members of one race, ethnicity, sex or faith cannot and should not attempt to treat others as individuals without respect to race, sex or faith, (v) an individual's moral character is inherently determined by his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, (vi) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, ethnicity, sex or faith, (vii) meritocracy or traits, such as a hard work ethic, are racist or sexist or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.

Full text here:

https://www.governor.virginia.gov/news-releases/2022/january...

Did you know that iPhones also say "Made in China," and include Chinese-manufactured components?

Israel doesn't need Anduril. They have a large domestic drone industry with decades of experience and a strong export sector. Israeli drones gave Azerbaijan a decisive edge in that country's recent armed conflict with Armenia. By some estimates, Israel is the world's largest exporter of military drones:

https://www.haaretz.com/.premium-israel-is-greatest-exporter...

They have a strong anti-drone industry, one area in which Anduril seeks to differentiate itself:

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-08-...

And Israeli designed-and-built sniper drones have already killed people in Gaza:

https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/israeli-military...

You mispelled "Theranos."

The man is passing a Chinese RC toy as his own development.

Citation needed

Young developers often propose large-scale rewrites with little sense of the costs or risks involved. Changing old code often has unintended side-effects.

In what regard is Skyrim's gameplay emergent, aside from the OP link's fox example?

As I understand it, Radiant AI is a framework for fixed and relatively simple finite state machines, with states like "use the anvil at the blacksmith's shop during working hours" or "drink in the tavern at 9 PM." Don't get me wrong, it's leaps and bounds beyond the NPC AI found in earlier games, but it's far from the emergent craziness you'll see in a sandbox game like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. Dynamic behaviors like the one you mentioned are still all essentially scripted interactions. Dialogue, the core interaction between the player and most NPCs, is still 100% scripted conversation trees. The most interesting emergent events I remember from Skyrim (or Oblivion) were funny glitches like this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvuW2Jl5ZyY

I'd also like to hear the GP commentor's reply re: emergent gameplay in Morrowind. I haven't played that game as much as the others, and don't have enough in-game experience to comment.

At least in the US, military officers don't make a lot of money relative to similar positions in private industry. Their total compensation is often underestimated as it includes healthcare for life, a housing stipend while on active duty, and a pension in retirement, but you might make more as an entry-level software developer than e.g. an Army colonel with 20+ years of service:

https://www.federalpay.org/military/army/colonel

The real money in the military-industrial complex is made by defense contractors, spefically the executives and shareholders of companies like Raytheon, BAE, and Lockheed Martin. Corruption in the upper echelons of US military itself, while far from unheard of, is vigorously investigated and prosecuted by bodies like NCIS. "Fat Leonard"-scale scandals do happen, but are rare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal

Worthing noting that Morrowind, and presumably also this mod, is now playable in VR thanks to the OpenMW project:

https://uploadvr.com/play-elder-scrolls-morrowind-vr-openmw/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU0Gil2lov8

Twitter use is near-ubiquitous among journalists, politicians, and those who wield or seek to gain influence. Corporations fire people, companies terminate business deals, and universities expel students based on what gets said on Twitter. News agencies find leads and shape stories using Twitter. Most of what gets said on CNN, NBC, or Fox News is filtered through the lens of writers who use Twitter and care about how Twitter will react. Political fortunes can swing on bad tweets. Most Americans may not use Twitter, but I would say most are still affected by it, whether they know it or not.

How many times a year do you watch C-SPAN? How often do you browse the press release page for your local elected official, much less someone else's? Whatever you think of this particular Congresswoman, Twitter is one of the largest and most influential outreach platforms. It's like getting banned from radio in the 1940s and saying, "Who cares? There's still newsletters and speaking engagements." Getting banned from Twitter is a big deal for people who engage with mass audiences.

In terms of fashion, Japan's Uniqlo is quite popular in the US and continues to grow:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniqlo#United_States

Americans remain fascinated with all aspects of Japanese culture, from food ("Jiro Dreams of Sushi" and sushi/hibachi places) to clothing to martial arts to Marie Kondo. Haruki Murakami's books are sold at Wal-Mart. Judo and karate studios still populate strip malls. Pokemon's going strong more than 20 years on. I would say Japan's second only to the UK in terms of visible cultural exports here.

If you removed that button people would copy and paste or screenshot and share.

And this already happens, often between people who've blocked one another yet want to continue the personal attacks. It's all too easy to open a blocked tweet in Incognito Mode, take a screenshot, add negative comment, and hit post.

This is the third time you have misunderstood and misrepresented my thesis. I will not respond to a fourth time.

You said the reason we don't hear about those West African empires is that their wealth was built on the back on slaves.

Here is the sentence from my original comment which I asked you to re-read:

Personally I think it's history worth knowing, all the moreso if it shatters the myth that any one race is especially prone to the evil of slavery.

To be painstakingly clear, we don't hear much about the Mali Empire in popular discourse because their wealth was built on the back of slaves, AND the slaveholders were black. In the USA where I live, a dominant political framing device is that white people are responsible for slavery, period. The existence of rich black African empires built on slavery and conquest challenges this narrative. Therefore these empires, despite the examples they provide of black Africans building powerful, complex, and influential civilizations, are not frequently mentioned.

Since the gold was mined locally, it could not have been bought with the proceeds of slave trading.

It was mostly mined by slaves. See sources cited in that article I asked you to read. I said Mansa Musa's wealth was "built almost entirely by slaves", not "by slave trading." You're confusing your words for my own and responding to things I never said.

And since it was an activity of the people (not just the nobility) it is unlikely that vast numbers of people were forced to mine it as slaves.

I see we're at the part where you just make stuff up. Here is what actual historians say; from "African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa" [0] by Michael A. Gomez [1], a recent and excellent history of the Mali Empire:

Mali as a critical source of servile labor is overshadowed in the immediacy of the eighth/fourteenth century by its mineral resources, so much so that the extensive nature of slavery in Mali is not readily grasped. But from every indication, slavery was entrenched and ubiquitous, hidden in plain sight.

While estimates of the enslaved accompanying the mansā vary, all agree there were thousands upon thousands, with several reports particularly taken with the high number of females, perhaps as many as fourteen thousand. Given their vulnerability to sexual exploitation, they may have been viewed by Egyptians as a veritable harem in motion, a misogynistic moveable feast, the largest ever witnessed.

As for soldiers, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa reports the mansā was always accompanied by 300 armed slaves, while al-‘Umarī distinguishes between these 300 and the thirty mamlūks or “Turks and others” brought from Egypt.

The enslaved served in other capacities, working in the salt mines of Taghaza and, as Ibn Baṭṭūṭa records, both enslaved men and women (al-‘abīd wa-‘l-khadam) performed the arduous work of mining copper at Takedda (and maybe “Zkry”).

Yet another task assigned to the enslaved, male and female, was transporting commodities. As previously cited, Ibn Khaldūn mentions the Malians “use only slave women and men for transport but for distant journeys such as the Pilgrimage they have mounts,” a convention confirmed by Valentim Fernandes, who wrote that “each [Jula] merchant has with him 100 or 200 black slaves or more, to carry the salt on their heads from Jenne to the gold mines, and to return from there with gold.

This mostly qualitative evidence indicates slavery was rapidly evolving in the region, and while a more thorough analysis awaits the recovery of greater detail with the emergence of imperial Songhay, what can be stated here is that these differentiated servile deployments—from domestics to soldiers, and from office holders to their exploitation in mining and possibly agriculture—represent, in the aggregate, something distinct from earlier epochs in Ghana and Gao. There is a noticeable increase in their numbers as well as the variety of their occupations under Mali, further suggesting such expansion was part and parcel of the imperial project in West Africa, and predicated on such myriad mobilization.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/African-Dominion-History-Empire-Medie...

[1] https://csaad.nyu.edu/people/michael-a-gomez/

the other caused by mismanagement and frankly jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence which would also never happen in a country like Germany.

Are you sure? One example:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48527308

BER has become for Germany not a new source of pride but a symbol of engineering catastrophe. It's what top global infrastructure expert Bent Flyvbjerg calls a "national trauma" and an ideal way "to learn how not to do things".

You ignored the explicit meaning of my comment, rewrote it to mean something entirely different, and now claim to have disproved that version of it. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

As for this supposed "Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves", where's your evidence for that?

Again I'll refer you to my original comment, specfically the "before colonization" section of the Slavery in Mali Wikipedia link. It cites various books and articles written and researched by professional historians.

You've misunderstood. Read the last sentence of my comment again, the bit after the comma.

I'm a Midwest native and huge fan of the region. It's been great to see more big tech firms open offices here, in addition to a rising number of startups and software consulting firms. Was happily surprised to see that Tundra Labs, who recently launched a well-reviewed VR full-body tracking product, is based out of Green Bay, Wisconsin (I am not affiliated, just a Midwest VR enthusiast):

https://twitter.com/Tundra_Labs

There's also a full-fledged Google office in Madison, in addition to their offices in Chicago and (soon) Rochester, Minnesota. Working as a developer and living in the Midwest doesn't necessarily mean leaving Big Tech.

The Mali Empire is particularly fascinating. Mansa Musa, who ruled that empire c. 1324, remains by some estimates the richest man who ever lived. His net worth is estimated by historians at around $400 billion USD. Elon Musk's net worth today is around $280 billion, for comparison.

Mansa Musa's wealth was built almost entirely by slaves, who were forced to mine gold and made up much of the Empire's military. Slavery in Mali continues to this day with an estimated 200,000 people held in direct servitude to a master [1]. Maybe that's why we don't hear so much about the Mali Empire, or the Ghana Empire for that matter. Personally I think it's history worth knowing, all the moreso if it shatters the myth that any one race is especially prone to the evil of slavery.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Mali

There's a lot to be said for products which take traditional disposable alkaline batteries, such as my pair of older Bose noise-cancelling headphones. Alkaline cells don't spontaneously combust and may be packed in checked airline baggage. Products themselves are easier to dispose of and recycle without the concern of residual charge in an integrated lithium-ion power cell. If the user desires rechargable or longer-lasting lithium batteries, these can still be obtained in disposable battery form factors.

She cares for the students. They are all very underprivileged. The school system is driving her out.

I've heard this from close friends and family who taught. All were teachers, all loved teaching, all taught underprivileged kids at challenging schools, and all of them quit teaching before turning 30. Each quit due to the lack of support they receieved from uncaring, petty, and inept school administrations. Teachers can't teach when they don't feel physically safe, or are abruptly reassigned to different classes mid-year, or know their performance evaluations will be sabotaged by jealous senior teachers or administrators who are poor performers themselves yet impossible to fire. These experiences took place in the US, both in large costal and small Midwestern urban school districts.

The realpolitik perspective is that some countries demand allegiance from companies that operate on their soil (China), while others don't (USA). So Apple has a national allegiance to China in that country, and an allegiance purely to profit in the USA. It's easy to guess which country's citizens will receive more corporate philanthropy. See GP comment for the answer.

But you have a young person being driven to a counter-protest by a parent

This is where I stopped reading, because you're incorrect about basic facts of the case:

https://news.yahoo.com/kyle-rittenhouses-mother-did-not-1838...

He took a gun to a small business at the owner's request, per police investigation, photo and video evidence, and the sworn testimony of numerous witnesses. The riot came to him.