tertiary

It is interesting that all of the principles that I thought were fundamental to justice (like parties to a criminal investigation having access to all the facts, and not being able to hide them for their agendas) only really came about in the 60s. Really makes you think about how easy it would be for them to go the other way in the hands of a less understanding supreme court.

I think the last four years has exposed just how much policy can be swayed by a single elected official without much oversight. I don't care that the next four years will have a president closer to my political beliefs, I want to to see a reduction in executive power.

It's crazy, I feel like I'm just constantly being gas-lit whenever it comes to talking about Trump. "Don't believe the media, it's all rigged against him" "<x bad thing> is all just a myth, you've been duped" "Don't believe your eyes".

It's like, come one, I live in Portland. There's no media conspiracy and the city isn't burning down from "antifa terrorists" or whatever. Take a step out of your filter bubble.

The thing that will sit deep within me for at least the next few years is that, no matter how you slice it, a vote for Trump is complicit acceptance of his divisive and harmful behavior. Of course you don't need to be a racist to vote for Trump, but you do need to fear the other options so much that you agree that his behavior and the way that he represents our country to the rest of the world is tolerable compared to what might come after him.

I was on the phone with my mom earlier and one of her friends called her up. She's a republican, but they avoid politics. She asked her, genuinely afraid, if she thought that Harris would steal the presidency and convert the country to socialism. She's not an idiot. She's a physician, but was still so caught up in fear mongering that she genuinely believed that the government would steal her income and that there would be riots in the streets as we turn into a third world nation. I'm going to think about her differently after hearing that.

This is probably the first time in my life where I am going to look at people differently based on who they voted for and I hate that. However, I can't get it out of my head that they voted for a president that has so disgraced the highest office in our country and that they did it because of a fear of the future burning so far inside them that they felt another four years of Trump was preferable to even as bland of a change as a Biden presidency will be.

What's mask compliance like in Australia? I'm in a blue city within a sea of red. Everyone around me uses them, but drive 15 minutes away and you'll get looks for using one.

I don't know how I feel about this. I like the idea of complete transparency, but even without being able to capture dramatic photos of courtroom battles the US already has trial by media in some cases. I feel like adding photos and videos to that would throw gasoline onto that fire and turn our judicial system into a reality show. I almost prefer the system in some European countries where they are not even allowed to release the names involved in criminal cases unless they have been found guilty.

Yeah, I'm in my 20s and I regularly use it without any confusion from the people I communicate with. Maybe its popularity varies with region?

All you need to do is look at the name ("INFORMATION DOMINANCE CENTER!") to know that the design is more about playing star ship commander than it is about being functional.

The real operations centers I have been in are much more mundane.

I don't think so, at least not according to Ocasio-Cortez [1]. It is a pretty new idea though and is probably in flux, so it may have been different in the past?

[1] https://morningconsult.com/2019/05/06/ocasio-cortez-green-ne...

First off, you can have both. Green new deal doesn't ban reactors or anything.

Second, I'm on the fence over whether I support more reactors and not because nuclear==bad. I trust the technology, but my concern is whether we can maintain a stable political environment for the decades/hundred years required to responsibly take care of nuclear.

Buying into a fission reactor means you pay billions up front, but you also promise to pay billions in upkeep, and then pay billions for decomissioning. If you aren't willing to do that upkeep or clean up after yourself then you can cause a radiological disaster.

What happens if we have a majority government that refuses to believe in the long term effects of radiation damage even as scientists explain to them over and over again what will happen? They just don't see why we should be spending that amount of money on reactor decomissioning or on upkeep and don't want to be seen as the one spending taxpayer money on something so costly. What if they decide to cut nuclear safety programs in a political stunt? I wish I could say that I know that won't happen, but on the hundred years in the future scale I'm just not sure.

Nuclear is amazing and could solve all of our short term energy needs, but it's ultimately people and our political structures that I don't trust, not the science.

Yeah, and doing away with qualified immunity.

Either water down the second amendment ... or give the police what they need

That's a false dichotomy and misses the main point of the argument to reduce police militarization.

Nobody is upset when SWAT responds to a school shooting or a terrorist act. The problem (I suppose a really good problem to have after all) is that those things almost never happen, even though they are the ones we see on the news and can quickly retrieve in our minds. You're more likely to die in a plane crash than in a terrorist act in the US.

That begs the question: if militarized units don't have enough violent crime to respond to, but are still a full time unit then what do they respond to? The answer is why people are upset and it's because we are sending them to respond to drug offenses and to execute search warrants instead. Situations thay they inevitably end up escalating (on average) and killing people in.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...

Why does the Pentagon do it then

According to this [1] it was founded because of the war on drugs. It's purpose was very much to have militarized units that respond to drug offenses.

[1] https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/new-documents-r...

That's not true in the 80% use case of SWAT teams which is drug offenses and executing search warrants. This is the core argument for demilitarization, not the straw man of "I don't want police to have the equipment needed to respond to school shooters." Showing up with militarized teams to mostly non-violent situations just causes escalation after escalation and is why militarized units kill at a far higher rate than just the police alone.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20531680177128...

but those teams are only deployed in situations like bank robberies, hostage situations, school shootings, etc

That's not true and is the reason people are upset. Nobody disagrees with the use of SWAT teams for school shooting and the like. However, that isn't how militarized units are used in real life. There simply isn't enough violent crime in most areas to justify a full time force dedicated to it. Instead, SWAT is used to target drug offenses (often times w/o an indication that there will be violence). In fact, the federal 1033 program (which funnels military hardware to the police) was founded to help fight the war on drugs.

The other big use of SWAT is for search warrants where they have replaced patrol officers in 80% of cases, the vast majority of which don't involve any suspicion that things will get violent.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/new-documents-r...

The short version is that there is a global ring of powerful pedophiles that Trump is the only one capable of stopping who also happen to be anyone the far right hates... and also jews.

Exactly this. It has been frustrating watching basically any other news about this administration get flagged to death (or at least shoved off the front page) because "politics isn't allowed on HN." Then, we get an article like this and are expected to pretend that it isn't politics when it's happening in the context of the election being weeks away and while people are literally at the polls casting their votes as we speak.

There's loads of interesting news coming from the administration each day, but when only the items that least offend people's sensibilities make it through the flagging brigade, it acts as a politically biased filter.

I'm still surprised at how many "Sweden is a success!" stories keep showing up on HN.

The country had TEN TIMES the per capita death rate of its neighbors (IE the countries you'd conpare it to if you want to control for everything except the pandemic response). It also still has the highest unemployment rate of all the Nordic countries and its infected count is rising currently.

Not only that, but Sweden is already a country of "lonely conformists" and have been keeping six feet away from their neighbors long before the pandemic. They would have been the ones where a light lockdown was appropriate and it still didn't give good outcomes.

Trump is in multiple risk groups: his age, his weight, plus a high stress lifestyle. Implications of him dying weeks before the election are kind of scary.

Probably depends a lot on where you hang out. For me, it's more conservative than most of the internet I see (outside of Facebook). Probably has a good mix which is why you can get a lot of decent discussion here.

My assumption was that this is user generated flagging. It's not moderation. It's people saying "we don't want to see this stuff". Same reason people are down voting our comments right now :)

I'm confused why stories about Sweden's success keep popping up here. The country had TEN TIMES the per capita death rate of its neighbors and still has the highest unemployment of all the Nordic countries. Seems to me like the worst of both worlds.

I was going to say: adding the word "who" here is kind of clickbait.

That's a really interesting point that I didn't realize. Does anyone have a good history of how QI came to be like this? I can't imagine that it was the intention when this started.

Reading through, it looks like the flagging of people as 'deterrence' was already known. What's new is access to the data behind it and learning about the numbers here.

For those that don't want to click through: He is on the hook personally for hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that will come due next few years during his potential second term with no obvious way of paying it off. There's no way of knowing who has control of it.

Edit: and also from the thread, he owes > $1 Billion in total to lenders.

I think the most interesting angle here are the hundreds of millions of dollars of loans that will come due in his second term. That's pretty terrifying especially given that to get that amount of money would require questionable lenders.

I didn't know that. I'm just completely speculating right now, but I wonder if that has something to do with Jared Kushner's denied security clearance. [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/us/politics/jared-kushner...

For comparison, President Trump payed $750 in federal income tax in 2016 and 2017. I just looked it up and I, a graduate student who makes like $30k a year paid three times that amount last year.

This is a landmark article revealing information that people have been calling on for years to be released in a hotly contested presidential race. We are literally watching history be created and we should have the ability to discuss it.