cfmcdonald

Seems like an overreaction. No one has actually abolished any police force in the U.S., AFAIK. The Minneapolis city council made some noise about it, but most of them regret it and nothing has come of it.

Any guns you own are statistically more likely to kill/injure your family than protect them.

The U.S. used to have cigarette vending machines. I believe they were phased out due to the desire to enforce age limits for smoking more strictly, not because of theft.

My general impression is that the U.S. used to have more vending machines in general ~30-40 years ago. I remember soda machines being outside of every grocery store, but I don't see that anymore. Newspaper vending machines also used to be common. But I don't have any data to back that up.

I think that chart is misleading, 0 drinks in the last week does not mean "doesn't drink at all, " which implies total abstention. You can easily go weeks or even months without a drink as an occasional drinker who only partakes at social gatherings.

It doesn't matter, the technology doesn't provide any means for central tracking.

The U.S. has already tallied 145K deaths. It's not clear what % of the population has been infected but it's surely much less than 100%. So clearly 0.04% can't be the correct overall death rate.

If you check a dictionary, the top definition for "woman" is typically something like "an adult female person" or "an adult female human." So the claim that woman/man is a totally different thing from male/female is pretty novel.

Google still has an archive, e.g. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.music.misc

I believe it's based on the data they bought from Deja back in 2001 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups)

Yes, in 1976 Congress passed new legislation that forced them to pay up. By that time the cable industry was well-established and could afford it (and they had enough of an audience that the broadcasters had a strong incentive to make rights deals). If the same rules had been in place and enforced in the 50s and 60s, I doubt there ever would have been a cable industry.

Aereo's business model was almost exactly identical to how the cable industry started - capture an over-the-air signal and deliver it to customers over a landline channel.

If Aereo was in the wrong than the cable industry probably should never have existed.

The copyrighted translations are not thousands of years old, which kind of defeats the original point. I mean I understand it was a kind of exaggeration for effect, but excepting a very few 'evergreen' titles, the value of a publisher's back catalog tails off very rapidly with age.

But this suit alleges that even when they were, it was illegal.

But this lawsuit alleges that even the IA's previous lending scheme was illegal.

I think the publishers are using the emergency library as cover for a much more broad-reaching lawsuit.

Though he doesn't come out and say it, it's clearly framed as a reasonable estimate of the ultimate death count: 'This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from “influenza-like illness.” If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to “influenza-like illness” would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.'

None of that commentary makes sense except under the assumption that the author thinks the U.S. death total will be 10,000ish, and would have been unnoticeable without the availability of PCR testing.

> The data is slowly erring towards his (low) estimates

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Two months ago he estimated[1] that the total death count in the U.S. would be 10,000, and we're already 10x that.

[1]: https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

I can't help but wonder if there is a generational divide occurring in these censorship debates. Some contributors to the discussion seem to believe that everyone has a natural right to post a video and have it available to (if not see by) a global audience. As someone who grew up in the 1980s this is a strange point-of-view to me, but I can see how it might feel more natural to someone who came of age in the 2010s.

YouTube is perceived as a family-friendly, PG to PG-13 brand. It would be a very different, and much more niche, environment if it were a free-for-all of pornography, obscene language and graphic violence.

Actually it was mostly the populace who shut down business activity of their own accord, at least in the U.S. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/upshot/pandemic-economy-g...

Your response seems needlessly confrontational. I haven't even expressed a position on the original question of the Washington state policy.

> There's a huge difference between a private CC# that you voluntarily use, and a government issued id# that you are required to provide on entry.

No one has proposed requiring a government id to enter a store, AFAIK. The huge difference is mostly academic for most people. Very few people outside the criminal underground transact solely in cash/bitcoin so that they can't be tracked.

> It's ok though, I'm of the opinion that we (as humans) do not deserve basic rights such as privacy, because we're fools who don't value them. Didn't realize HNers would help prove my point, though.

"We're fools" - is this the opposite of the royal we, where we means you?

> So, are you willing to provide us with a list of every store you've visited in the last month? I'll be waiting.

I don't see how posting that list on HN in response to a request by someone unknown to me for no reason is analogous to providing it to my government in order to help with contact tracing. Anyway the list would be very short, since I've been avoiding public places... well, like the plague.

No, and neither did Nazi Germany. What the GP said was "Honestly, the history of the 20th century should be the closed book final assessment on why it's permanently a bad idea for governments to collect files on people." This is a much wider claim than "Subway shouldn't collect information on its customers on behalf of the government."

BTW most people already have a centrally tracked record of every store they've been in, their credit card records, which the government can subpoena.

It can work. There does need to be mutual trust between product leadership and engineering.

e.g. in the case you described, the engineers need to be able to communicate without fear that X1 and X2 are basically the same engineering work as X, and still can't be accommodated, and the other side needs to trust that they are not just being lazy.

That seems very optimistic. I wonder how they get to such a small number.

Okay, let's compare it to Australia then. Or South Korea, or Taiwan.

p.s. I don't think Americans collectively decided anything about what options we would use to combat the virus. The federal executive branch effectively decided to do nothing, or nothing coherent and consistent, and states have individually scrambled to come up with their own responses, with varying levels of effectiveness.

It seems that several countries have been very successful in containing the virus, starting with China. The U.S. has been very lax in its response to this virus, and now many people seem to be excusing that with the assumption that, well, it was impossible to contain in the first place.

I don't see how the at-worst number can possibly be 200K. If you're talking about the U.S. alone, we're at 75K deaths with 1.25M known cases. Assume there are actually 10x that of actual cases, that's still only 12.5M infected so far. With 125M infected (well under half the population), we would be at 750K deaths.

To get to 200K worst case deaths you'd have to assume we've already had something close to 100M infections.

(Also based on the excess mortality data, the current COVID death numbers are probably underestimates)

One reason could be that GP seems to assume that spread to herd immunity is inevitable, ignoring the countries that have had great success in containing the virus.

> For the same reason the telephone company isn’t allowed to arbitrarily cancel your phone service based on who you choose to call with it.

That's not an analogous case. YouTube is more like a broadcast medium like TV or radio, and those have never been treated as common carriers. A sexy phone call between two people doesn't affect AT&T's reputation, but pornography hosted on YouTube would affect theirs.

> This is precisely the problem. Before, the bar to be silenced was the law; now the bar to be silenced is arbitrary application of “mainstream social mores”. Surely you see the problem there? Have you never derived benefit from media or creative works that fall outside of “mainstream social mores”?

Being taken down from YouTube does not equate to being silenced. There are many other ways you can express your ideas and opinions, especially if you are willing to do so in non-video form.

And the bar to expression on someone else's publishing platform has never only been legal. Every medium has had gatekeepers, generally far more stringent than YouTube's.

> Even if you haven’t, YouTube’s been deleting videos of war crimes in Syria, making it harder for investigators to track them down and document them. How’s that for “mainstream social mores”?

I don't see why it should be the responsibility of a for-profit entertainment company to provide hosting for war crimes investigators, any more than I would expect Hulu or Netflix to do the same. It would make far more sense to me for journalists or NGOs or governments to provide a place for people to upload their video evidence. There is no need for them to host it publicly, which is the expensive part of YouTube.

> Suppose America goes to war with Examplistan. What does that mean for the Examplistanis? Will they get deplatformed as enemy propaganda? Will the internet become a propaganda machine for wherever those large companies are headquartered?

Isn't this already the case? You can post videos on YouTube encouraging people to join the U.S. Marines, but not Al-Queda. I guess I don't find this very disturbing. Why should Google be required to host data for an enemy state?

> What if Google was anti-LGBT? Would we grant it the same moderation powers? Would we be ok with YouTube removing or demonetising videos featuring homosexual displays of affection?

YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores. Had YouTube existed 30 years ago, it almost certainly would have done this, and most people would have been fine with it. If YouTube did this today, it would quickly cease to be the dominant video hosting platform.

My understanding is that iron weapons were not greatly superior to bronze, just cheaper/easier to make.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone.

A few of you mentioned Dwarf Fortress. I am aware of it, and considered adding a section on it after Elder Scrolls, but this was already twice the length of one of my usual posts, and I wanted to 'ship it.'

It was pointed out that I only presented two alternatives in my conclusion, but there's a third of a super-dense procedurally generated world a la Dwarf Fortress. I agree this was an oversight on my part. This points in the direction of an interesting subtlety about whether a rigorous simulation is what you really want at all - the DM 'simulates' a world in a way that is highly biased towards adventure, excitement and fun.

I may go back and revise to try to bring in some of these points at a later date.

One person mentioned the Mythic GM simulator, I'm aware of that also, but a) it's a very niche product and b) it still requires someone to GM, that person may just also be the sole player. It does provide a biasing function so that you can by 'surprised' by outcomes and guide your own adventure in unplanned directions. It actually is more in the realm of a DM aid, as some have mentioned this may be the most fruitful direction for AI, as an aid rather than a replacement for a DM.

This hasn't been my experience at all. And yes, there were editors more than 100 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_editing#History

I can say with certainty that your statements don't apply The Wealth of Nations. Its prose is of impeccably high quality.