yitosda

Fascinating data. There's a breakdown per-state showing that only eleven states have a lower homicide rate than Egypt.

Looks like Puerto Rico, District of Columbia and Louisiana are the worst as of 2012 (latest the set shows unfortunately). Puerto Rico is an outlier at 2x the next, but District of Columbia has improved massively between 2000 and 2012.

EDIT: This might be a bit misleading. While there is more recent data for the US (up to 2016), there seems to be no reliable data on Egypt post 2012. Additionally, the 2012 number (2.5) represents a 4x /increase/ in homicides since 2003 (0.6). Only 2011 (year of the Egyption revolution) was higher at 3.2. So there's a clear trend towards an increase in homicide rates that might not be accounted for.

That said, I guess it's unlikely that the number is much higher than the US average, even discarding the outliers mentioned above.

In a word, context.

Human brains are just context gathering pattern matching machines. We can't even count without all kinds of context being automatically bubbled up into our consciousness.

When we see other drivers, we can take all kinds of subtle hints about their behavior. We can easily tell if they have an unsecured load (not just if it's currently shaking). We can see the way someone is looking at the road to know if they are going to go, if they're hesitating, if they're high. We can know where the road is even though it's snowed out because of the approximate distance from the ditch you remember being 15 feet out alongside it.

There are zillions of cases like this in the long tail. Self driving cars leapt forward by being able to answer the vastly important contextual question of "what is this in my sensor?" -- but to do the rest, it's hard to overstate how much a computer would have to "be human". To be able to apply past experience, psychology and complicated inferences about "why is this in my sensor? what can I do about it?"

In the end, self driving cars will thrive, just in an environment that poses these kinds of questions as little as possible.

Or we'll actually get a breakthrough and be able to create NNs that allow machines to learn and apply a vast breadth of learned context to sensory input. Teach them vast amounts of unrelated things just as every human learns in the 16 years before they drive (and then some), and then effectively put extra-sensory humans on the road.

There's nothing wrong with this. Public/Private keys are for sharing secrets and proving identity.

Assuming you are using a sane cipher and mode, your risks boil down to any of a myriad of methods of stealing/bruteforcing your key or grabbing the unencrypted file.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You've narrowed down the scope of logic to apply to everything !good, which is some emotional value that exists outside of logic. In reality "good" is a vast trove of information which differs in the minds of every party to the problem.

Logic absolutely applies to this set of information!

Wanna-be technocrats should understand that exploring that vast trove of information (which they can't actually do, in practice) will allow a more widely accepted solution.

Accounting for all these various "goods" logically results in messy compromises which run exactly counter to the technocratic dream.

Democracy is an imperfect attempt to distribute the logical calculation of all these "goods" and come up with a big ugly messy solution.

(Some parallels with capitalism exist here)

I think we are both arguing that some people narrow the scope of arguments to the point that they aren't useful to the original problem, merely more amenable to logic. Let's call this "not useful scoping".

I further argue that useful scoping (isolating the problem in a way that solving it provides a solution amenable to all those who proposed the problem) often /is/ the hard work, itself a product of much time and logic.

Far from proposing a useful course of action: I simply lament that we will often choose our scope to support simple logic, rather than use complex logic to improve the scope.

No surprise either: each life only has so many hours.

I think we agree, but I appreciate that my wording wasn't perfectly clear.

"pare down to its essence" was a bad way of saying "disregard intersecting issues and focus on one logically resolvable issue." Your soundproofed room analogy is apt.

I also agree with applying pure logic to a scoped problem being not only possible but desirable... but I'd argue that properly scoped problems are rarely as useful to solve as the scoper might think. In many cases "merely" scoping the problem in a novel way leads directly to a truly useful course of action, and is most of the hard work.

I agree completely with emotions being something we should not deny, but rather be something to /include/ when trying to solve problems. (My complaints are around emotions being placed outside or opposed to the realm of logic, where accounting for them is "illogical")

That's true, but it doesn't really have much to do with my points:

* Common (current) culture around rationalism fantasizes about the human using it being able to choose the best course of action in every situation (and examples to the contrary are typically full of woo-woo about human emotions and souls). This is computationally impossible for the brain.

* Hacker-news-audience-types will often discard important nuance on a topic in order to reduce it to something that can easily be rationalized about.

If historical cultures may have "suffered" from the same delusions, it would be more interesting to see how my points did or didn't apply than saying that they existed.

There's a ton of (especially early) nerd culture idolizing many forms of what most people know as the "Spock" character (somewhat more accurately, Vulcans in general). This is typically contrasted with emotions, sometimes as a mystical part of the human soul that exists outside of logic, sometimes as the source of evil.

It's a constant bother. The only way to apply pure logic to any problem is to pare it down to a mockery of the real world problem. That's why we have "gut" or "emotions": We apply imperfect patterns to complex issues, otherwise we'd never make it through a single day; it's an optimization.

Tech/nerd/stem types absolutely love to do this. We take a problem, pare it down to its essence and then solve it. When no one listens and no logical counterargument prevails, the cries for technocracy start to ring out. A classic attempt to dissect this fallacy was the old blog post "What color are your bits?" [1]

As technology companies continue to grow in power relative to all other companies and governments, I'm very interested in watching how this plays out.

[1] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

It's odd that that page refers to the desktop client as "native". The parts of an electron app that are native to the OS (as opposed to the OS-independent HTML/JS) are irrelevant to most people's desire for "native" apps.

Electron is not native.

Your citations seem roughly in line with what I said and expected: Americans pay double overall, with a similar dollar amount of public healthcare.

Proportionately speaking, that means Americans are not taxed the same (higher incomes). Interestingly, based on what I'm seeing re: incomes, the /total/ healthcare expenditure is, as a proportion of income, the same between the US and western Europe.

Overall this seems quite unsurprising: healthcare is expensive, the US pays more and the government spreads it around less. Worth noting that health and lifestyle in the US is also "worse" (more cultural than healthcare related).

I think I misunderstood your original comment. I heard "paying for one's own expenses plus for those who can't afford it" (which is same in the US and the EU), where it seems you mean "paying from taxes plus out of pocket".

My uninformed impression is that in the US one does not pay proportionately the same amount of taxes towards healthcare (maybe you have citations to the contrary?).

I would (only from experience and anecdotes) guess that you're right about it costing double, however.

You're putting words in my mouth, complete with quotation marks. I never said anything about what anyone should do. I didn't even say that on the whole people in the USA pay less.

In the EU, people pay a varying amount (overall a greater fraction of their income) in taxes. In the US, people pay a varying amount (overall a greater fraction of their income) in healthcare. I think these are widely accepted facts.

The US healthcare system has endless problems, I was only commenting on the "double-dipping" part of my parent comment, not writing an essay.

Possibly, on average. Some pay (vastly) more, some less.

I don't see the double-dipping in the math though. EU has populations of people who aren't contributing in taxes much or at all.

We already know that prices are changed for different devices and browsers. It's not a stretch to think that choosing the Filthy Rich profile will cost you in online shopping.

Should be "deaths / person-miles" when comparing to driving.

As the sibling says, Signal really isn't that bad for convenience. I didn't have much difficulty switching my family to it. I suspect use of messaging apps other than Signal has little to do with the convenience delta and more to do with the network size delta.

It was frequently said that /at the time of release/ ie6 was better and more standards compliant than the other web browsers. Then it was left to rot for years.

Perhaps notably, it was actually faster and had lower memory usage than Firefox for a while (Firefox had many leaks). The issues were security, standards and NO TABS!

... Honestly if MS hadn't been so unbelievably deaf to users and web developers, Firefox and Chrome may have never succeeded. If Google doesn't completely screw up, Chrome won't go the way of IE. Maybe messing with adblockers qualifies?

I don't think the prevalence of hate groups is necessarily related to any countries' commitment to freedom and human rights.

Virtually everyone outside of the hate groups wishes they didn't exist, but it's precisely the commitment to freedom that makes it hard to shut them down.

Is this a human rights issue? Again, we agree that we don't want these groups to exist, but I don't think there's ever been a "right to not have people hate you". I don't see a direct line from human rights to lack of hate groups.

Try to create a new profile to compare nondestructively: "firefox --ProfileManager"

I can confirm both that newer firefox is notably more responsive than old, and that I (or an extension, though I don't have many) managed to get a ff profile into a state where it had inexplicably bad performance, esp. unpredictable long freezes.

Depends on how you define "the problem". Homelessness is a symptom of several other things widely considered to be problems.

If you limit the problem to "some people who want a house don't have enough money to afford living space qualifying as a house", then broadly speaking market solutions are possible because we can assume these people participate in the market via their "demand" and their ability to "supply" something in return. Obviously there's an active debate on many market issues here, whether around too much market regulation (eg NIMBY), or too little market regulation (eg minimum wage).

However, my understanding is that there is mounting evidence that the homeless population is composed of people who have either no demand for a house ("free spirits") or no ability to supply anything to the market (mentally disabled). Obviously in these cases the market is not very useful, and only functions insomuch as those outside of the homeless population include it in their "demand function".

Setting aside what will surely be a torrent of what-abouts, the parent's point about the US federal (lack-of-)authority seems like an example of a better system.

(First what-about: the election system is related to but distinct from the ability of the Federal gov to force state-level laws)

I think there's a bit of confusion about what exactly Google is doing. IIUC they use (and develop) gerrit.

Effectively this workflow means everyone is working on the same branch and the first commit to pass review gets in. The next guy will have to rebase.

In the end one wins as you said, but the level of detail is rebasing individual commits, not merging entire branches.

So this ends up being the age-old rebase vs merge discussion.

It looks like you're moving the verification goalposts away from what is actually running on the hardware and simultaneously walking this back from government to civilian uses. These are completely different discussions (though I might add that governments rely heavily on the private sector, so some pressure there is expected).

Another completely different line of discussion is whether I personally am concerned at all (I'm not), and what I should do about it (nothing, but governments certainly should build their own CPU).

We could achieve fairly strong security at an affordable cost

No. We cannot achieve strong security in a device that comes with software. You also cannot (at the time of this writing) prove that the actual hardware you personally are running is trustworthy without spending enough that the "affordable cost" becomes a moot point.

A wide swath of civilian uses can probably come out on top of the cost/benefit analysis just because their interests don't get in the way of governmental conflicts (or they can make enough money in the meantime). It's only from the perspective of a government that this conversation makes any sense at all.

I'd be interested in further details about the testing. If any manufacturer actively wants to backdoor their hardware I'm skeptical that anything but an extremely expensive teardown of an infected device would find it.

It is simply incorrect to imply that reading vendor provided source can usefully decrease the possibility of a targeted attack. Comparing (hardware provided?) software checksums is not a real improvement. Juxtaposed with your "interest" in the topic, such an argument naturally arouses suspicion (sorry).

There is obviously nothing "wrong" with being interested in this fascinating clash of powerful interests, the amount of interest each discussion gets shows you are not alone.

So I'm not just hammering at what you've said, I'll make my own statement: There's absolutely nothing you can do to defend against a motivated attacker providing you with complex computer hardware (let's say anything that has software/firmware). Corollary: It's a fool's game to use hardware from those whose interests conflict with your own.

China and the US have a massive conflict of their interests. Each should not use hardware provided by the other. The risk for each is real and unavoidable.

Huawei has completely opened its source code and hardware to several governments, including UK, Canada and Germany, for security testing. Their findings are much more informative and objective.

What does this even mean? If I give a batch of governments some of my super secret text files and pinky promise that's what's in the hardware I'm giving them, they should believe me?

The US can be trusted to advance its own interests. So can China. Everyone else had best evaluate their threat vectors and find out where their interests conflict with bigger and stronger interests.

Your comment history might have predicted that you'd comment on this topic. You don't have many other interests.

If The IBMs have no one left to scam, they are no longer IBMs.

They'll settle for some other kind of awful, I'm sure.

I doubt you need to account for a gap in work experience for a burger flipping job.

Calling it "minimum wage" seems like a marketing gimmick. I believe Amazon finds themselves needing to raise wages because the other large employers are as well.

In other words, the unemployment level has finally dropped far enough that employees start to feel the benefits of competition. This is good news for lots of people, but not really a paradigm shift.. ?

It's possible I've been living under a rock, but while I'm aware of rat being pejorative, I'm finding out in this thread for the first time about the anti-semitic undertones.

It's pretty clear that the difference is context, but I also don't think there can be clear guidelines if Twitter is expected to delve into the context for each tweet its users make.

In fairness, context typically doesn't provide smoking guns as pungent as this one. I'd still say it's not beyond reasonable doubt (and I'd guess most would be ok with that for a Twitter ban -- it's not prison or death).

So, sure, everyone should call it a dog whistle on the preponderance of evidence, but there were almost certainly better grounds for the ban. I doubt there will ever be a good ban target whose only giveaway is dog whistles.

Much of the point of a dog whistle (as I understand it) is plausible deniability. The parent comment stands: shutting it down over something that "may mean something" -- even though with context you may be quite sure -- is a bad look.

The next step is simply to point at the myriad of other times anyone called someone a rat on Twitter and Twitter is left to defend a position of shutting people down over what they were thinking when they wrote something.

They should have used one of the many better reasons they had for this this case.