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endogui

145 karma · joined January 16, 2020

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endogui··on Abolish the Cash Bail System
I mostly find your argument convincing, but keep in mind that there is no unitary "US government": most charges are under state law. This means that although the national government can know where you are down to the apartment number, you can be (legally) completely unreachable to the state that has ordered you to trial. The solution may be to just lock up the accused more liberally than in Europe, but I'm curious how Europe handles this problem in the Shengen zone.
endogui··on New study suggests handwriting engages the brain more than typing
You may find useful books from the early 1900s on the library of congress website.
endogui··on Additional steps we're taking ahead of the 2020 US Election
> If Bumble can do it, Twitter can.

If US banks and credit card agencies can't do it properly, why can Twitter?

endogui··on Police are requesting data from smart speakers
> Sure but there's probably provable ways to look for hidden stuff as well unless they are sending empty data.

Isn't this equivalent to the halting problem? Even with source code, there is a chance the compiler was compromised. In practice, these devices are closed source, so you would need to verify all the possible code paths.

Moreover, we know that NSA coerced phone companies into exposing metadata. What is the probability NSA has not requested backdoors of Amazon, Google, and the like?

endogui··on Bill introduced to promote prescribed fire intends to reduce fire risk
Two things can be true at once: fire season is coming earlier (climate change) and we have known since the 1990s that the West Coast needs controlled burns, but have not been doing them. (I saw an article about the CA wildfire and brush buildup problem in 1998.)
endogui··on The experiment that proved airborne disease transmission
> Corona-viruses from my understanding, do mutate.

Already, reinfection by different strains of COVID-19 has been documented (by DNA sequencing) in Korea. The more people who catch COVID-19, the greater the space of possible genetic mutations can be explored. Some of those mutations may decrease severity, but others are likely to merely increase the presympomatic contagiousness period.

endogui··on Color blindness
The poster's question should be interpreted as: can the color of the stars be distinguished with the naked eye?
endogui··on Color blindness
Also r/g colorblind, and that line surprised me. Apparently it is visible to the naked eye on the brighter stars:

https://earthsky.org/?p=2875

endogui··on Six months in, N95 mask shortages persist
What is the value of a life-saving commodity? How much would you pay for 2-year mask features in March 2020?
endogui··on SpaceX Starlink average speedtest is 42.3Mbps down / 9.7 Mbps up
HFT have installed microwave relays between Chicago and New York and between London and Berlin to arbitrage on the 47% fiber optic delay between the exchanges. A LEO satellite relay serves the same purpose. I can see London to New York, New York to Tokyo fiber connections being superceded by LEO satellite.
endogui··on Gallup: 81% of Black Americans Want Police to Retain Local Presence
If the staff in your local monopoly grocery store is underperforming, do you defund the store? How about your engineering company? In each case, the solution is to replace/remove under-performers while increasing funding, rather than to defund.

This is what Camden did when they "defunded": dissolve the city police, bringing the city under county sheriff jurisdiction, then pay for new staffing at the county level. They may have been able to save some money because they broke the police union, but in the long term funding increased.

endogui··on TikTok to Sue U.S. over Ban
ButeDance is a Chinese company responsible for complying with directives from the CCP. If one doesn't trust the CCP, then one should not trust ByteDance.
endogui··on TikTok to Sue U.S. over Ban
They don't even operate in China (blocked by the Great Firewall), so a pro-Chinese bias to their content is circumstantial evidence that the true purpose of the app is light foreign psyops.
endogui··on TikTok to Sue U.S. over Ban
If a publisher violates a tax law, it can be shut down without worrying about free speech issues. Same with a phone company or church in violation of federal laws (although large lawsuits are a given). Tiktok is not being shut down for its own speech, but for being an agent of foreign espionage and foreign contributions to political candidates (essentially). Thus the first ammendment issue is moot.

Signal isn't sponsored by foreign governments, so it is immune to this sort of attack. It looks like Briar has German funding. The encrypted and decentralized nature of both of those apps makes them much lower concerns for espionage and (election) interference, and of course neither provides content directly from foreign governments, so they cannot be called into question for campaign interference.

endogui··on TikTok to Sue U.S. over Ban
Rhetoric about US values has been empty since Guantanamo Bay started housing "foreign militants". Europe seems to be the only place in the West where a commitment to human rights is sincere.
endogui··on The Most Counterintuitive Recession Ever
From my personal contacts, it seems that those who can afford it are now moving out of the cities or acquiring rural "vacation" homes. The people I know who are buying are all upper managers or higher in salary.
endogui··on Fed announces details of new interbank service to support instant payments
The SSN is not an ID but a number: anyone with your number can claim to be you for the purposes of transactions. The number is only tied to name and birthdate, maybe address if you are of the age to pay taxes. This enables a lot of fraud: I once saw someone apply for a rewards (credit) card in a US store with SSN and no photo ID ("Oh I left my drivers license at home, could you take a student ID?")

Not sure how Europe handles this, but here in Korea phone numbers are tied to government-issued photo IDs. Sellers of phones have to fax ID scans to the central office for verification. Remote transactions such as signing up for a credit card require phone name + first half of ID + phone number 2FA at a minimum.

As a result, I'm not aware of any cases of identity theft. US infrastructure is so broken.

endogui··on The Most Counterintuitive Recession Ever
$180B per week would be $9.4T per year. Almost half of the economy in stimulus seems likely to be quite inflationary.
endogui··on Infrared thermometers to screen for Covid: more marketing than medical evidence
Reuse of medical masks is fine if people are careful:

1. Store reused masks in a designated spot to avoid cross contamination.

2. Wash hands after putting on and taking off used masks.

3. Dispose of masks which get wet or N95 masks which get folded.

This care can be achieved by PSAs in countries with functional governments.

endogui··on Microsoft and Bytedance Put TikTok Talks on Hold After Trump Signals Opposition
The first amendment doesn't preclude the government liquidating a news business or publisher for unrelated reasons, such as fraud or tax violations. In this case Bytedance is basically being accused of (being accomplice to) espionage.
endogui··on Microsoft and Bytedance Put TikTok Talks on Hold After Trump Signals Opposition
I haven't seen the EO, but didn't it cite section 230, which regulates how websites can filter content to maintain safe harbor status?
endogui··on The Toxoplasma of Rage (2014)
It seems to me that no volition is needed on the part of journalists: journolists need sympathetic and sensational stories, but a sensational story is more likely than an average story to be false. (Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence...). Combine this with the selection pressures on journolists for cutting corners in pursuit of a story/deadline, and you can pretty much guarantee that of any story type a disproportionate number of the biggest stories will be exaggerations published by unscrupulous reporting. This mechanic holds for every story type, not just rape.
endogui··on The Scourge of Hygiene Theater
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6928e2.htm

Tl;dr: When both parties wear marks, both cloth and N95 masks are likely sufficient for mitigating infections in enclosed spaces.

endogui··on Why do U.S. coins seem to be in short supply?
Why are coins more impacted than bills? Shouldn't a slowdown in the movement of cash throughout the economy affect both coins and bills roughly equally?
endogui··on TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months
It seems that GDP should only tell part of the story with respect to specialist incomes. A senior engineer in the US will have their salary and contribution diminished by regulatory requirements and business inefficiencies, and will lose a lot of their potential compensation to health insurance, investor compensation, and other rent-seeking. In China, someone with a skill the Party has designated as critical to national goals may have a lot of the bureaucracy and bullshit cleared for them, or may be offered zero-interest loans to develop their business. Or perhaps not... I have no experience here, but GDP is a terrible metric for how much opportunity is available to skilled engineers.

Furthermore, compensation for technically skilled individuals is significantly lower in the rest of the world than in the US: visa barriers are definitely holding US tech salaries up. Although China has even stronger restrictions on foreigners, for those who can get into China but not the US it may be a good deal.

endogui··on The CDC lost control of the coronavirus pandemic, then the agency disappeared
The US is filling the role of the Roman Empire, securing trade routes to allow efficient scales of tech expertise and production. If that military is scaled back or shown to be obsolete/ineffectual, then globalism itself will come into question.

The dark ages were caused by the localizing of production, with local feifdoms losing access to specialized technical expertise. To some extent, this is what we see now with companies moving produuction back to North America.

endogui··on Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone
No ad blocker, on mobile from Asia, and I see what you see.
endogui··on De-Escalation Keeps Protesters and Police Safer
Kneeling during the national anthem at football games should have been an issue between the players and the NFL, but the kind of people who attend football games disapproved of it.

In Minneapolis today due to the videos which were captured even those anti-kneeling americans largely recognize the problem and support solutions. But by allowing the rump to be violent (or equivalently, serruptitiously distribute bricks and gasoline) the activists are losing public support.

Roughly 200 mostly commercial buildings burned in the main shopping area for (working class) Minneapolis over the weekend. The food and pharmaceutical desert is going to kill far more of the poor and marginalized than police violence would have, in a city that already votes D up and down the ticket.

The violence is not necessary, nor productive, nor are the situations comparable.

endogui··on What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite
I can't be the only user who installs Cygwin just so that I can move files around, calculate hashes of files, and grep with regular expressions. Simple things Windows users don't get out of the box.
endogui··on If Rockets Were Transparent [video]
Isn't the escape tower designed to have a slight radial thrust component? The problem with avoiding an oncoming booster is the same when triggering the escape sequence for human passengers. I mean, there is an automatic self-destruct, but that must not be the only contingency.
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