What you wrote is "Per capita, the people committing the most murders are white." My original statement was very obviously made with reference to a US legal context, and in that context, your statement is completely false. If you want to use a definition of murder which is not accepted in the US legal context, be my guest, but it has nothing to do with what I wrote.
It's organic political opinion. For one thing, Germans feel very real guilt for their invasion of Russia in WW2, and they don't like the idea of aiding in a war against it. For another, the experience of the Cold War was much more traumatic for them than it was for the US, and they're not eager to start a new one.
I'm not dealing with war because it's irrelevant to the comment I wrote. You're bringing up war because you want to prove "white people are more violent in a general sense than black people." "Which race is, in general, responsible for the most violence?" is an inane, inflammatory question that I have no interest in interrogating. In my original comment, I used well-known crime statistics to make a very basic point about why it's silly to say that a large group of people is hypocritical because they, in aggregate, hold views that are in tension with their behavior, in aggregate. You got triggered by the racial aspect, assumed I was just being a racist, and tried to prove me wrong by demonstrating that white people are the cause of the world's suffering. It's bizarre behavior.
I'm guessing you're making some argument about war? If so, I'm not interested in sophistry. I'm not playing the "which race is better?" game. In the US, it's a fact that violent crime is not disproportionately committed by white people. If you take off your offense glasses and reread my original comment, you'll notice I am pointing out that despite there being lots of crime committed by African Americans, that community is not at all a monolith, and the vast majority of black people want desperately to turn the tides of violence that plague their communities, and support policies to that effect.
That's exactly the point I'm making. African Americans support gun control because guns are such a problem in their community. The people who want the guns banned are not the same people using them, so there's no contradiction between the statement, "African Americans use guns more than anyone," and the statement, "African Americans support gun control more than anyone." A person who says "Utahans say they hate porn but really they love porn" is falling prey to the same logical fallacy as a person who says "Black people say they hate guns, but if you look at the stats, they really love guns." In both cases, the person taking a differentiated mass of people and collapsing them into a unified whole, then complaining that the monolith they've created in their heads has incoherent views.
This is not the dunk you think it is. Consider: African Americans hate guns, and also murder more people with them, per capita, than almost anyone else. Does this strike you as contradictory in any way? If confronted with a black voter who said they wanted stricter gun laws, would your response be to sneer and say, "You only hate guns on paper"?
> hes lucky corporate brands and advertisers havent figured out they could start their own Mastodon instance for almost nothing, plug it until it becomes more popular than Twitter, and maintain all their existing brand safety controls in the process.
This is a very funny way of thinking which gets reality backwards. Corporate brands go where user eyeballs are. In the past the eyeballs read newspapers, and advertisers paid newspapers for space. Then the eyeballs went to Google, and advertisers paid Google for space. Then Facebook, and Twitter took over, and advertisers started paying them. Advertisers don't tell user eyeballs what platforms to go to. They follow the users.
> when the test fails it will be harder to know what actually happened.
Yeah, and if you write one assertion at a time, it will be harder to write the tests. Decreasing #assertions/test decreases the speed of test debugging while increasing the time spent writing non-production code. It's a tradeoff. Declaring that the optimal number of assertions per test is 1 completely ignores the reality of this tradeoff.
"Yeah, but computers can't be creative!" is the last line of denial for humans who don't want to face their impending obsolescence in a field. People said the same thing about chess engines, right before chess engines defeated human beings at the game conclusively, and forever. A creative brain is a million monkeys with typewriters, plus a subjective critic judging their work. Coming up with random shit and then discriminating among the results is what creative people do. If you think "creativity" is some magical human phenomenon that can't be learned by a sufficiently complicated artificial neural net, then you either don't get creativity or you don't get neural nets. Will a computer produce the next Rembrandt? Maybe not. But the average human painter isn't the next Rembrandt: they're a schmo with a bit of mechanical talent, practicing their craft.
The reason human painting will survive is very simple: because 1) people value human-made objects independent of those objects' objective qualities, and because 2) paintings exist outside the digital world, and there is no robot sufficiently dexterous to match the skill of a painter in applying paint to a canvas. That being said, as this technology matures, lots of currently employed digital artists will no longer be needed.
With Haiti, you don't have to go all the way back to the settling of the island for brutality. The closest analogue I've read to the behavior of the French who ruled Haiti was the treatment of camp inmates by the Nazis. Haiti was the worst colony in the Caribbean. It made the antebellum South look like a utopia in comparison. The life expectancy for slaves sent to Haiti was abysmal. Most of them died on the plantations within about 10 years of stepping on the island. So many died that in order to sustain the slave population, the French had to import tens of thousands every year. They wanted to create a native slave population, but it didn't work because they worked the slave women so hard that they made them infertile. They ruled by means of terror. The stories are sickening. They executed disobedient slaves by stuffing their rectums with gunpowder and blowing them up. They strapped them down and poured boiling cane sugar over their heads. They buried them up to their necks and smeared them with honey so that they'd be eaten by insects. For punishment, they cut off their slaves' limbs and poured hot wax on the stumps. This had gone on for a century prior to the revolution. By that time, there were about 500,000 slaves being ruled over by 30,000 whites (as well as, partially, 40,000 mixed-race Haitians).
It was not smart or good for Dessalines to massacre the 4000 or so whites that he did, but that act is so minor in comparison with the horror that the French visited on Haiti for 100 years that it's barely worth talking about.
Note that the "property" that the Haitians had confiscated from the French included, in the opinion of the French government, the Haitians themselves. So the French, in effect, forced the Haitians to pay for the right not to be slaves.
I don't know what makes you so so confident about your prediction, and what you've written about fusion's relationship to waste is, I'm pretty sure, inaccurate.
Down and Out in London and Paris is a great, great memoir. It's 50% Kitchen Confidential, 50% tramping in England during the Depression. I really can't communicate how readable and fun it is.
The most basic physics (e.g. the actual reactions involved) is solved but how plasmas actually behave in practice is not well modeled. A lot of improvements in fusion efficiency come from tinkering with settings and seeing what works. A caveat that I am not an expert in fusion, and am getting this from the book "The Future of Fusion Energy".
Okay. Not having taken London cabs, I cannot disagree with you. What I can tell you is that Ubers in NYC are much safer than cabs in NYC, and Ubers across Africa are much safer than their cab equivalents. To the degree that Uber's technology actually achieves something that cab companies cannot, it's punishing bad driver and rider behavior via the rating system.
In what markets did Uber decrease passenger safety relative to existing cab companies? I have literally never been in a locality where the cabs were safer than Uber.
That's fine. They don't have to be better everywhere for me to be happy they exist. People attack Uber without dealing with the very obvious problem that in many, many markets, for both drivers and riders, they're an enormous improvement over the status quo.
It's insane. Thank God for tech companies for disrupting one of the worst industries on the planet. Uber and Lyft are, IMO, some of the best examples of the virtuous nature of "move fast & break things" as a business philosophy.
Taxi companies operate with the advantage of state monopolies. They have lobbyists too, and they were so well-connected that they allowed exactly zero innovation for decades before they got blown out of the water by Uber.
What? Where are you getting this? I have no problem with rich people. My problem is with cartels of homeowners passing laws making it illegal for individuals to build higher-density housing on the land that they own. The city of Atherton is a legal entity granted certain limited legislative purview by the California constitution, and it uses that purview to impede the economic flourishing of the state of California. The California consistution gives the state every right to overrule Atherton's dumb zoning rules, and the state legislature should do so.
I didn't add the qualifier "passively." You did. I think it's great if people are contributing to the region's wealth via their work, but it doesn't affect my argument. The fact is that the locality of Atherton is full of people whose home values are high because of their homes' proximity of the tech industry (this includes Marc Andreesen), and they're not willing to liberalize their zoning ordinances because, as a housing cartel, town landowners benefit from restricted supply. You were acting like the reason there's high demand for housing in Atherton is that it has low density, but what distinguishes Atherton from a random, low-cost town like Muskeegon, Michigan is its location smack-dab in the center of Silicon Valley. You could replace all the mansions in Atherton with high-density condos and they'd get snapped up by tech workers in a short period of time. You'd end up with way more property taxes paid to the state, way more people housed, way more economic growth for the region, and way less pollution as people lived closer to their place of work. Not to mention, the locality wouldn't be suing the caltrain to prevent electrification, because its residents would actually depend on public transport.
It's amazing to me that you go from "Marc Andreesen lives there" to "it's not like Atherton's residents are financially benefitting from their proximity to the tech industry." Very, very dumb.
In what sense does it not match? The emotional content of my reaction is anger at the obscene hording of space by a privileged minority who benefit from the productive behavior of their neighbors and contribute nothing in return. The average home price in Atherton is $8.1M. There are 7,000 people there, benefitting enormously from the wealth generated by tech. But they won't build more homes. And they will sue to stop the Caltrain from being electrified because they don't think converting a diesel train to electric is "environmentally safe." I lived nearby Atherton for some time, and it made my life, and the lives of my friends and family worse. I think it's a selfish municipality and I don't respect its ethic.
Demand for housing in Atherton isn't high because Atherton's rules made Atherton nice. If Atherton allowed high-density condos to be built, demand for housing in Atherton would not decline at all, because Atherton's "character" has very little impact on its desirability. Demand for housing in Atherton is high because of its location, full stop, and its location is attractive because Bay Area residents started businesses in cities adjacent to Atherton, and because Bay Area taxpayers built a Caltrain stop in Atherton. People who own property in Atherton have massively benefitted from their proximity to the tech world, while refusing to contribute to housing its workers. Atherton houses 13x fewer people per unit area than San Francisco. Its landowners are like Hacienda ranchers, or feudal lords given exclusive rights by the government to manage profitable land to their own benefit, at the expense of the peasants who actually make that land valuable. Fuck their exclusivity.
The solution is to decrease the power of hyper-local interests whose incentives do not align with those of the broader polity. Small cities and even neighborhoods benefit from regional economic growth but would rather their distant neighbors pay the cost for it in terms of density. That's a recipe for dysfunction.
I look forward to hearing the argument that society should indefinitely bankroll large symphony orchestras at good salaries, but I am skeptical that it would actually convince people. It seems to me that outside of the very rich and the very old, the popularity of classical music has dramatically among audiences. "Think of the oboeists!" is not necessarily a winning campaign slogan. I mean it when I say that I hope this changes, but I don't see how it can unless classical musicians find a way to actually appeal to a broader segment of the public.
I'm working on this right now for sed :). It currently works with both GNU and BSD-style sed, either for BREs or EREs. I'm going to make it easier to install sometime soon and then hopefully expand the project to other languages.