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You're right about convincing society, but American society has conflated vengeance with justice to the point that they may be inseparable concepts.

I've suffered some significant injustice at the hands of another, and for what it's worth their punishment has provided nothing for me.

My experience has completely reversed my thinking about the way criminals are treated. Punishment compounds loss and has provided nothing to me or society. If prison could effectively protect society while providing rehabilitation I don't think any specific punishment would be necessary.

Right but on the other side, how many situations escalate because now they have an armed person with a few months of training on the scene.

"Do we expect a social worker to protect a child from an abusive parent?"

This already happens a lot. Often police can't do anything substantive unless there's a crime in action or some existing record. A social worker might be the only safe long-term presence around (and availability/quality of social workers is an enormous problem). Removing children from their homes can often put them in the foster system, which is also woefully inadequate and has funding/employment issues.

If it doesn't come from defunding the police, I think the major piece to take away from this overall conversation is that Americans are in dire need of better social programs that can better treat these things before policing is needed.

At the moment we have a weak mental health system and an overbearing policing system. It's no wonder our prisons are filled, our homeless have rampant addiction issues, and people are getting shot on the street.

Their iPhone chips blow everything out of the water so this is exciting.

Also adds more fuel to the merging of iOS/macOS.

My local police union has been called out multiple times for publishing racist things in their newsletter and literally nothing has come from it. They can openly publicize in print that they're racist and continue policing. They also blame "antifa" for any anti-police action without investigating.

It's absurd that it's taken this much to have a national dialogue about how problematic the "social services with a gun" approach is.

Sure, but it's commonplace enough to be understood (roughly) as September-December without much thought... yeah? I've always lived in a 4-season bubble that uses Fall and Autumn interchangeably so maybe I'm wrong.

It's an article published by an American university and 90% of the planet lives in the northern hemisphere, so it doesn't seem like much to be in a twist about.

Agree 100%, I've done the same things.

Add some ad blockers to the mix too.

That's not true at all! We have little idea how or why it influences us outside of the basics (sell ads, make money).

People are looking at these feeds, often daily, for a significant amount of time. We don't know if it's intentionally showing us more of our racist uncle's posts because we buy things when we're angry, for example... and that's just one small example in a vast sea.

We can't adapt because there are far too many unseen factors to be aware of. And I'll say it again... most people do not understand that every post on these networks is being fed through a biased algorithm. I've seen large numbers of developers on this site agree that Facebook should remain neutral when it comes to certain ads/posts, without acknowledging that neutrality has been gone from every post on Facebook for years and years at this point.

They know who you are, where you are, who you're with, and what you do. Data that spans billions of people. For people with Facebook on their phones they can essentially track your behavior 24/7 and have been doing so for years. This type of unseen influence could be dangerous even in benevolent hands.

I have not adapted because I don't know what to adapt to. I've just removed myself from the environment as completely as I can.

ISPs and telecoms are dangerous due to their level of control, but are significantly worse at using their data to influence the way you think. I strongly believe that the current political climate would be significantly more tepid if not for Facebook and YouTube alone... the scale is so hard to comprehend.

On the surface social media looks completely benign, but they have these far reaching insidious impacts. Our elected representatives don't even have a basic understanding of how these sites operate... yet you have the majority of the population being fed content by these algorithms that determine what you see when, and they're completely opaque. They've got scores of analysts and psychologists shaping this stuff full-time... no single entity in human history has had this level of data and reach into human behavior, and it's all proprietary.

Small intentional changes over time to such wide-reaching algorithms can literally shape humanity in ways that may be entirely impossible for an outsider to detect.

The logic is that you don't have to do business with organizations you don't like (outside of some very specific situations).

If you think police need reform and cause harm, then ethically you get to decide for yourself if you're ok with exchanging services with them despite the issues.

Why do people always look for hard and fast rules? If it's your business you can do what you want. No one's obligating you to do anything. In this case Slack's employees felt as though it's unethical. That's totally within their rights to do.

B and C probably both fit - police aren't inherently a net bad, but the policing system in america produces too many bad outcomes to lend blanket support to; it's arguably unethical to profit from such a problematic body of work.

It's not a witch hunt if there's an actual problem.

Just because there's a legitimate role doesn't mean that it's currently being practiced ethically. If it's not being practiced ethically the argument is that you can't ethically profit from it. That's the entire issue.

Understandable that they don't want to take this on, it's a massive undertaking beyond a lot of consumer products.

I do wish they could contract out some design or other manufacturers would consult with them. Reducing distraction with physical buttons on a steering wheel is so much more thoughtful than tossing in a touchscreen and pushing everything to software (I realize cars have some controls on the steering wheel, but it's not enough).

Every time I see a modern car I'm kind of shocked by how distracting the interior is. At least voice interfaces have improved somewhat.