It’s worse than that. In every jurisdiction, the police department is a revenue generating organization. Overtime, beats, and promotions are rewarded to the officers who pull in the most revenue from tickets and citations. You can check this for yourself. Officer of the year in many jurisdictions are those who have the highest parking tickets written, the most DUI arrests and impounds, or the most traffic citations. In general are not those with the most convictions, public service records, or positive feedback from the community. The accountability the organization and their reporting chain has is to revenue, not to the law.
As part of a large research organization, I was involved in multiple studies about increased traffic fatalities. This work began in 2020, and was part of a larger epidemiological effort. Our findings contradict the headline, but are in agreement with the body of text. The most significant causal factor we found was the rise of mobile device ownership and usage. In fact, mobile device usage is the reason for the inflection of year over year decrease in traffic fatalities in 2012.
The article states that 10% of the fatality increase can be attributed to vehicle size. This is far below the actual increase, and while a contributing factor, not the primary one.
Usefulness is here, and has been for a while time. I have been consistent in my stance that AGI will be achieved in the demonstration of iterative, stable self improvement. This can be demonstrated in knowledge creation or skill acquisition.
More automation may lead to more freedom in open ended exploration, stemming the dramatic decline that has happened in exploration. That would be a fantastic result.
And there is a distinct decline in open ended, personal exploration in academics. There are many reasons for this, but the syndrome is widespread throughout the West and throughout scientific disciplines. The first response to someone interested in recreating a published result or simply asking "What if?" is always "Who will pay for that?" Or more discretely, "Will it lead to a grant." Regardless if the cost is $100 in reagents and 8 hours of bench time in an idle lab, or $200 to machine a new reaction chamber the focus from administration is not enabling exploration but standing in line with your hand out.
To add to the collection of anecdata, your experience is similar to mine. I have been more exhausted recently by the complaints of AI submissions and pseudo analysis of AI comments than exhausted by the supposed AI generated comments themselves.
A good reason to allow it is because people want to do it and it is as relatively harmful as many other normative human behaviors.. A better reason is that it provides a means of measure real attitudes and opinions. The revealed prices afforded by prediction markets is interesting at the least, and possibly the best source of information for many of topics.
This is how I learned to code as a young age. I typed in every single program they had. The most challenging was the hex-based music machine they printed, which was difficult as someone who both couldn't type and didn't understand the mechanics of what I was typing.
My opinion is that we have little to no interest in what animals, plants, or even other people are thinking. The vast majority of it would be considered crude and offensive at best.
In at least one case it wasn’t released by management because it was absurdly embarrassing. Productivity compared between 2019 and 2023 had statistics similar to the following; average yearly CLs decreased from approximately 70 to under 10, significant revisions pushed in comparable products changed from 26 to 4, meeting time increased by a multiple, email volume decreased similarity. All this with significant increases in seniority and pay among the average employee. Contrapositive scenarios argue that there is a huge opportunity cost to the tech efforts from WFH.
Re: Mark. I agree. It surprised me to no end that he knew the staffing and open headcount of every team. I was a manager for most of my tenure, but his interactions with Lars, Chris and others were always insightful enlightening.
In my opinion yes. The quality of submissions and the top page is still high, but there has been a large shift from startups, tech and science to pop and politics.
The main change I have felt is in comment quality. While the amount of juvenile humor or AI assisted posts seems on par with Reddit, the quality feels to have the wrong derivative.
Every big tech company has tried to do this, replacing programmers and engineers with product management and designers. Depending on the company, the trajectory of growth and development inversely correlates with the ratio of engineering to non-engineering.
You should have talked to them instead of assuming it was out of necessity. My parents retired in n social security ten years ago. Most of their friends are doing fine with savings and retirement, but they get bored and take a job at Walmart or Applebees. For the most part they enjoy it.
This is an answer most should try. My relative is mentally disabled, but functional. With help from his family he got a used truck, and started lawn care and junk removal. Over time he built a business, and was able to afford his own home. The self esteem he earned for himself and for his family is something I greatly respect.
IMHO, Libertarianism fails not by collapse but by success. Any movement in the direction brings economic and social freedom, but in turn creates soft times in which a society's pendulum shift back to larger government is inevitable.
Corruption. It’s interesting how it happens across all human activity. There are mechanisms to reduce it, such as strict penalties (Singapore) or moving to a competitive for-profit model (USFS does rent out many park areas).
Absolutely agree. The libertarian view of tariffs is that they limit free trade, and are often used for inefficiently for market manipulation than as a funding source.
One question this US election cycle has brought up is how to best fund a government. Every reasonable person understands that a government needs funding to operate. But every mechanism employed has trade offs. But I have not found enough information to develop an informed opinion on under what conditions a flat tariff on imports be better than a progressive income tax, a flat income tax be better than capital gains, etc. Tax policy is adhoc, driven by a multitude of factors. If you or anyone can provide an interesting survey on some principle approaches to tax policy I would be grateful.
Could you elaborate? I have many years experience running a gas station. For five daily’s employees, handlung cash is about 4 hours labor a day. This is counting the till prior and after shift, validating voids and receipts, handling checks, cashiers checks, and bagging and dropping the cash. With cash there is always slippage, and it is never in the ledgers favor. So cash increases labor costs by 10% and incurs about 1% direct loss a day, prior to bank fees. Where as credit cards end up being about a 2.5% overhead.