a_large_rat00

Does your ideology radically change over your life? Why would theirs? They judge with their own biases, and are often out of touch with public sentiment. They're just people, and in case of at least one, a rapist with powerful friends.

A bigger court elected by the people could help solve that problem. Not lifetime appointments with zero accountability. The Supremes are just another fascist and anti democratic institution, like the electoral college or the party apparatuses.

Wish we had some scientists and engineers in there! Mostly we just have assholes.

Can you explain/rephrase? Are you just talking about surveillance in particular? If so, I apologize for not being clearer... I meant heavy-handed as in forced disappearances, labor camps, censorship, behavioral modification, etc. (or in the US, forced reproduction/sterilization, manipulation of educational curricula, etc.)

China's recent attempts to curb the influences of their Big Tech and online gaming sectors come to mind, vs the fuck-all we've done with ours over the past couple decades. Soon Facebook is going to become a supranational organization that can drive new laws just by enraging enough people through algorithmic manipulation... our watchdogs are whimpering puppies against that kind of power. Our government is way weaker in terms of its ability to regulate business or personal behavior.

And for the common person, sure, our government might know everything we're doing (they all do, these days), but by and large it does not really care. The data it collects is often so disorganized even its own agencies don't know how to share it with each other, much less use it to systematically oppress -- for now. Our discourse and dissent is THRIVING, free speech is alive and well, and we have so much freedom we've self-organized into alternate reality bubbles, absent state guidance and with a deliberate disregard of expert opinion. China doesn't allow its society to fracture like that. Ours has no choice but to allow it to happen, and our elites encourage that sort of fragmentation because it makes for easier power-mongering at the top when the commoners are divided against each other.

The Chinese are oppressed by a heavy-handed, paternal government. Americans are oppressed by a government so weak that capital, charisma, and convenience govern our society, not our supposed laws or values. Other developed countries, democratic or not, tend to fall in between those extremes, from the UK & Australia closer to us (weaker gov) to the Canada & EU (stronger govs) to the Nordic and Asian democracies (stronger yet), yet China's is way way way stronger than all of those.

The Supreme Court itself is a partisan institution, now more than ever, and every reading of the Constitution has been subject to partisan biases since forever. That's not to say we have no checks and balances, just that they are not independent. More like interdependent and part of a vicious cycle; biased legislators appoint biased judges who exonerate biased executives who reward biased legislators. I think the cycles of the last few years have made that abundantly clear, but any cursory reading of US history should reveal this is not a new pattern. It's just how the system has always worked, our folklore notwithstanding.

Apple is pretty dark-patterny about the subscriptions too. On Android the refund/uninstall button is right next to the open button in the Play store. You buy an app, don't like it, click a button and return it.

I just bought an iPad app the other day (my first), it didn't meet my needs, but I still can't figure out where to go to refund it. And Apple's subscriptions expire immediately if you cancel during a free trial, whereas the Google ones will still let you finish the term of your trial.

Apple's not really the good guy either. They're just the powerful ones.

One can be against heavy-handed authoritarianism both at home and abroad, while still seeing the (quite distinct) shades of gray between the US security apparatus and the CCP, or between the CCP and North Korea, or between the US and the EU. Different governments and processes give different weights to due process and human rights vs bureaucratic efficiency and national security.

It should not be controversial to say that the CCP is more heavy-handed when it comes to government reach into private lives. That doesn't exonerate the US by any stretch; our government does a ton of shady shit, much of it arguably unconstitutional or extrajudicial, from warrantless wiretaps to drone executions of US citizens. But these make the news, which indicates 1) at least there is a relatively free press and 2) they are unusual enough as to be noteworthy, as opposed to commonplace and not discussed.

China doesn't share the same values as the West. The individual is deemphasized for the collective good, as defined by the current CCP elite of any decade. That doesn't mean their political system is inferior or superior -- our fragile "democracy" is threatening to devolve into civil war and take down the whole country, if not world with it -- but it IS a very different government on a different part of an authoritarianism <--> libertarianism continuum. It's not useful to equate them in this context just because the West does shady surveillance on its own citizens too.

Where is this judicial fantasyland you live in with apolitical judges and independent laws? They're written, passed, judged, and enforced by heavily partisan actors, now more than ever. You're kidding yourself, and no one else, if you think the US judicial system is politically independent.

Why would you want to do this rather than using the built-in hillshader and 3D map view?

https://opengislab.com/blog/2018/3/20/3d-dem-visualization-i...

Hey, this is really cool. I've always wondered how this stuff works beneath the abstraction of high-level languages. Thanks for sharing!