cf141q5325

For what were the areas used before being turned into wood plantations? The sentiment in this thread seems to be that it was, or could have been, thriving green wildlife, but werent those areas formerly designated for commercial use as well? The article explicitly mentions farmland. Thats not really a functioning ecosystem either.

Sure if you are willing to invest that much into preserving the cultural landscape and identity. The trees planted there are chosen to be as economically viable as possible. Without that aspect the program might not get implemented.

I understand your point about the responsibility of a democracy but I do worry about the tech, I would also be alarmed if someone developed a biological weapon to extinct humanity, even if the usage was controlled by a democratic mechanism. Just dont develop such dangerous technologies with no positive use case. Dangerous being the combination of efficiency and scale-ability.

The argument also assumes that we will continue have democratic systems and the population not voting for such systems to be implemented. The reality is what ever means and information we currently entrust to governments later versions will also have access to. Not to mention the export of these technologies to "friendly" dictatorships. Its the old problem of census data in the Netherlands. They had extremely detailed census data involving peoples religious beliefs before the Nazis invaded and with the data available the persecution of Jews was extremely efficient. The resistance targeted the locations of these datasets but it didnt work good enough.

I also dont see how international borders need anything more then fingerprints. They are also far more accurate and reliable. Facial recognition has the only added benefit of being usable without the effected people noticing. Thats not a positive characteristic.

To come back to the central argument, we do already have other means of identifying people and facial recognition only differs in a few core issues from existing mechanics. The core characteristics of facial recognition are

* No need for a cooperative, consenting subject

* Not alerting the subject being identified and no protection against being identified without noticing

* Unchangeable identification characteristic

We already have reliable easy to use systems for characteristic 1 and 3, fingerprints, and I see how there might be a need for such systems at specific locations. For example at a police station or border checkpoints.

Then we have facial recognition which is a lot less accurate and its only additional benefit is point 2. Point 2 however has no positive use cases, its a purely totalitarian instrument aimed at its scale-ability. For not only being used in specific places but everywhere. You cant even make the argument which makes nuclear weapons a worthwhile technology to have, the possible usage for war against a foreign aggressor. Facial recognition is only beneficial to keep a population suppressed.

> the IRS doesn’t talk to the police for anything other than tax evasion.

Source?

I would argue against the first being obviously beneficial. The downsides of having such a system in place in my opinion outweighs any current or foreseeable benefit. One step further, I have yet to hear of a scenario where facial recognition would be a positive application. In my opinion the complete rejection is the right approach when it comes to facial recognition. Being able to automatically identify a person without them noticing or being able to prevent the identification in the future is in its very core dystopian. Its an application to end privacy, no different to the old scifi idea of getting a remotely readable identification chip implanted at birth. With the difference of the hypothetical chance to remove your scifi chip surgically. With facial identification the only realistic option is plastic surgery. We were lucky for a while that the technology wasnt ready yet, but it is getting more and more practical to utilize.

Its unfortunate that the idea of privacy is in such a downhill spiral, but the much more daunting question is, if privacy can so easily be abandoned, how will other stuff, like freedom of thought be treated in the future? What happens if technological development of surveillance could catch up some day? We are currently living in a society where no matter how horrific the methods, there are some who will find justifications to utilize them on other people. If the charges are heinous enough, human rights go out of the window. You only have to think of torture and look as far as Guantanamo. Differently put, in a society that preserves samples of eradicated plagues for possible future military uses and has no quarrels of threatening to torture the kids of enemy combatants, the research into and work on offensive capabilities with disastrous capabilities, like I would argue facial recognition is, is morally reprehensible.

Have you looked at any of the countries you listed recently? Everyone has had a substantial ISIS presence as the result of the involvement, that alone says it all. They are also all still active warzones.

Lybia is still a country in a bloody civil war with local warlords and militias fighting for power. The number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan is still growing yearly, with a ever increasing opium production and the Afghan National Police is also far from upholding law and order. And have you looked at Syria? Its a bloody proxy war with barely enough involvement to keep the conflict going at the cost of the civilian population. Not to mention the groups being supported by weapon shipments are fundamentalist Islamist, most notably splinter groups of Al Quaida. I am having a hard time as seeing it as anything else then a Afghanistan revival with the support of jihadist groups to keep the soviets busy.

In a defacto two party system with both parties agreeing in general that a large military is needed and see interventions to topple governments as a time honored tradition.

Also, a list of the nuclear weapons which got lost

https://interestingengineering.com/broken-arrows-the-worlds-...

There is a drove of stories around nuclear weapons, I also enjoyed

"Missile doors left open while Air Force nuclear officer slept" with the explanation, that they left it open for the food delivery guy.

https://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/23/us/air-force-nuclear-silo...

John Olivers episode on it is also amazing.

https://youtu.be/1Y1ya-yF35g

For a weird one meet one of the masterminds responsible for them:

https://youtu.be/1Y1ya-yF35g?t=439

Sadly nothing new. Remember when the Air Force outsourced their fraud and abuse investigation database to Lockheed Martin? Which Lockheed then lost together with the backups?

https://www.govexec.com/defense/2016/06/computer-crash-wipes...

Tbh I have the feeling search results get a lot worse as a result of google trying to guess what I am looking for. The occurrences of me not finding stuff where I know I used the right search terms increased a lot recently. If I search for cookies I want the results for cookies and nothing else. If the first few results ignore part of my search query something is seriously wrong.

There is an even deeper problem then surveillance, the results of search engines get more and more censored with more and more governments putting pressure on them to censor results according to their individual wishes.

The individuals might not survive that long. Or might not quietly accepts the situation if the majority votes for Trump regardless. I understand that dying quietly would be less of a hassle but dying on easily preventable causes rarely is friction less.

I would also suggest asking yourself why you view protests outside of peoples houses less civilized then them condemning people to death to make a bigger profit.

I am having a hard time to see how I can tell people who can no longer afford lifesaving medicine due to profit maximization to value a civil discussion culture higher then their survival. Or differently put to value my principles higher then their survival. And that is the current situation, a decades long discussion about how the right to profit trumps peoples survival. And that situation has a running tab in the form of people dying so that people profiting on that misery and despair are not confronted with the consequences of their actions. All of this not even touching the problem of neutrality in a life or death situation of out powered people. Desmond Tutus mouse and elephant come to mind.

>... or make more regulations, fewer people will sell drugs - at a higher price.

Which just doesnt happen in countries with stricter regulated medical markets. Quite the opposite, it happens in the US, thats what this article is about. Its a nice theory but not something that can be observed in reality.

Full title is >Climate change drives widespread and rapid thermokarst development in very cold permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic

But 80 character limit

Its the paper that went through the media recently

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/18/arctic-p...

People are taking one of those courses because universities in the USA are basically companies. As a result you get marketing to sucker people into buying stuff they dont need and cant afford.

That doesnt change the fact that we have those programs in the first place for the pursuit of knowledge in the hope that it will benefit society. That benefit doesnt have to be an economic one. A degree in your native language has arguably little financial value, but you only have to look to countries like France to see how much a society still collectively values their language.

Investing in universities is historically something nations afford themselves in the hopes it will be of benefit to society. The idea of individuals investing into themselves is a rather American one. I would argue the only reason a large amount of US universities exist is because they have a special tax status and people get to take special loans to pay for their services. Alternatively you would just have companies providing job training. From the outside it looks like much of the problems with the US system stems from purposefully not communicating that difference to new students

edit: To word it differently, the sole purpose of the teaching arm of a classical university is to enable the next generation to introduce novel ideas into their fields. Thats what a doctoral dissertation is. You advancing your field and adding to the collective knowledge.

The description of the STEM/MINT situation in German universities is far too generalized. You have quite a few STEM/MINT universities and programs which require a numerus clausus, its just up to the university to set the NC. Many classical STEM/MINT programs dont have a problem with having a few hundred students each year instead of a few dozen since alot of those will fail in the first years where students just have to learn the basics of the field. Those courses are generally easy to teach and require little interaction with individual students. In the most prestigious technical universities having 70 to 90% of the students fail specific exams is nothing special. And studends are barred from the program after failing the 3rd try. You are also not completely barred with to low of an average entry grade from school, you will just have to wait longer to start your degree. That part is the case for every university and every program, STEM/MINT isnt a special case here.

edited for more information

>The question is why are people completing unmarketable (or not sufficiently marketable) degrees?

For the pursuit of knowledge. Universities are not job training. You getting a good job with your degree is a bonus not the intend outcome for a university.

Just giving out a brochure "What are taxes and how do you pay them" would already be an enormous leap forward.

I would assume going into some of the topics you suggest would lead to school getting swamped by insurance sales people.

Germany has the same approach with the forms you fill out on Hotel check in. They are on paper on purpose and have to be achieved for a year in case the police wants them to identify people. You of course could do that digitally, but then you wouldnt leave your fingerprints and DNA.

German source https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article191846877/Hotelanmeldu...

Why do you assume that? I dont see any incentive to lower prices with higher demand.

Thanks a lot for the correction. I blame the lack of coffee...

Then dont publish and share your pictures and conversations with everyone. Privacy goes out the window the moment you share stuff with everyone on your own. If you want control over your content you need access control. Its the difference of actually publishing pictures of yourself online instead of being photographed in public. Privacy covers the second not the first.

>The most sophisticated attackers will still lease reputable Google accounts and mechanical turk time to bypass Recaptcha challenges, but it will be expensive for them.

You can also just pay people to solve recaptchas all day.

>that is a legitimate view.

Why?

I dont claim to know how her life would have developed. It simply doesnt matter. The outcome never justifies the means. You dont torture people against their will plain and simple.

Also to take her as an example, instead of terminal patients you also would be willing to deny assisted suicide, in her case it would have been directly inflicted torture to keep her alive via force feeding.

>This is the most aggressively anti-human thing I have ever seen, possibly even more than ISIS or cartel executions, because at least the perpetrators of those atrocities know that they are doing evil, even if they're unrepentant, which is more than can be said of the doctors in this situation.

I feel the same about people lobbying against assisted suicide. I have no other word for people who willfully condemn people to literal torture then simply monsters. I dont see a meaningful distinction to some psychopath predator in the absolute detachment from other peoples suffering. Forcing terminal people to live for a few more month or even years enduring absolute agony is just wrong. There are no two sides to this or ways to look at it. They are getting tortured because you think they should be tortured. Your motivation and intention doesnt mean anything, this is the naked result, there is no reason to sugarcoat it.

You are not other people. I am glad it worked out for you, but the arrogance to think that you know and should decide what others should endure is mind boggling to me.

The statement about the successrate is based on the following database

>To these ends, we constructed the Nonviolent andViolent Conºict Outcomes (NAVCO) data set, which includes aggregate dataon 323 violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006.35

>The NAVCO data set contains a sample of resistance campaigns based on consensus data ofscholars of both violent and nonviolent conºict. Resistance campaigns include campaigns for do-mestic regime change, against foreign occupations, or for secession or self-determination. Omittedfrom the data set are major social and economic campaigns, such as the civil rights movement andthe populist movement in the United States. To gain inclusion into the NAVCO data set, the cam-paign must have a major and disruptive political objective, such as the ending of a current politicalregime, a foreign occupation, or secession. About ten campaigns (four nonviolent and six violent)did not ªt into any of these categories but were nevertheless included in the data set. The codingscheme assumes that each campaign has a uniªed goal, but most campaigns have multiple fac-tions. The dynamics created by these circumstances will be further explored in a later study

https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/file...

https://www.du.edu/korbel/sie/research/chenow_navco_data.htm...

A while back I read "The failure of non violence" by Peter Gelderloos on the topic who argued for the opposite. Not an academic work but I found it interesting to read about a different point of view.

Why are you voting for politicians to save the environment if you arent vegan, keep driving your car and buy stuff packed in plastics? Do you know where the clothes come from you wear?

Its not realistic to get enough people voluntarily stop to destroy the planet, it is however feasible to get a government changing its policies to alter the structures that incentivize pollution.