1,458 karma · joined June 7, 2012
And of course that's assuming we use desalination for 100% of water use in the entire US.
Air pollution: down since the 1990s. [1][2][3]
Water pollution: down since the 1990s. [4][5]
Noise/light pollution: definitely up since the 1990s, agreed there.
Cancer: US deaths are way down since the 1990s, though it's cheating a bit since that was the top of the smoking-related spike in lung cancer. Still, other cancer deaths are way down since then too. [6][7] (Edit: worldwide this looks worse and things have increased lately, see: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-people-with-can...)
Heart disease: can't find long term stats on this quickly, but cardiovascular mortality is way down. [8]
Obesity, addiction, and suicide: certainly up.
"Much worse environmental impact," I think the decline in air and water pollution makes this debatable.
Climate change is a bit of a weird one, because it's definitely getting worse, but at the same time, the worst-case scenarios (greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated into the indefinite future) is becoming less likely. [9] So the derivative is bad, but the second derivative is good.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-air-poll...
[2] https://www.slowboring.com/p/wildfires-have-partially-revers...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-air-poll...
[4] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-good-news-on-americas-clean...
[5] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/water-and-sanitation?ta...
[6] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates-in-the...
[7] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates?tab=ch...
[8] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5268076/
[9] https://www.slowboring.com/p/people-need-to-hear-the-good-ne...
To be rational, we want to choose our goals wisely, and then act rationally and without emotion when it comes to the pursuit of those goals. Personally, my goal for the criminal justice system is not merely to minimize crime, but to ensure that justice is done.
In my opinion, if someone intentionally rapes and kills a child, for example, it is a positive good to remove them from existence. You simply do not get to commit such an act and remain on earth with the rest of us. If we lock such a person up forever, that is good. If we kill them, that is even better. To me, that's what justice means.
It's perfectly reasonable for hosts to charge more for a single night stay than for a 2 week stay. Turning over an AirBnB between guests is a huge hassle and has real costs.
AirBnB should make the true cost per night more visible, but eliminating cleaning fees altogether would be a loss.
Pretty incredible.
Of course it's totally valid to make whatever decisions you like, but there is something disconcerting to me about how we judge our hands clean as long as we pay someone else to do horrific things to animals. Personally I think I probably do worse moral harm than killing an elephant every time I buy a dozen eggs or a Costco rotisserie chicken.
EDIT: Yes, this really seems extremely fishy, see: https://twitter.com/Daniel_Laurison/status/14530269295110553...
> here's a quick reality check that @insidehighered could have done - took me under a minute to find this report. Less than 1% of applicants using the Common App said they were Native American in the 2 states I've looked at so far.
> Ok ok, on a bit of further reflection if this (48% of 34% of white applicants say they're native american) were accurate it wouldn't be 17% of all apps, it would be 17% of all apps that SHOULD say white. Which is at least 53% of all apps, probably more.
> 0.48×0.34×0.53 = 0.86 = at least 8.6% of all apps should claim to be NA (or 2 or more races). More to the point, if 34% of white applicants are saying they're not white, you'd expect some over-reprentation of "non-white" applicants, which is not what you see.
More here, same conclusion: https://twitter.com/JonBoeckenstedt/status/14528649227657830...
- drivers experienced with L2 assistance were the most aware of on-road events
- drivers inexperienced with L2 assistance were the least aware of on-road events
- drivers not using L2 assistance were in the middle
This seems like a quite positive result for driver assistance features - they increase situational awareness but take a bit to get used to.
The authors used changes in the terror alert level (which caused increases in police presence) as a natural experiment, and found that crime dropped significantly in the area when the terror level increased.
I think the explanation here is probably quite simple: an increase in the number of police officers in an area means that calls are responded to more quickly and for any given crime the criminal has a higher chance of being arrested. As we'd expect, a high likelihood of negative consequences deters crime.
This doesn't seem to be true. According to Wikipedia, there were 2340 domestic homicides in 2007.[1] There were 18,361 homicides that year.[2] So <13% of homicides were domestic. You may have read a statistic that most women killed in homicides are killed by romantic partners - but this is not true of men, who are the overwhelming majority of homicide victims.
Even if the rate of domestic homicides doubled it would mean only a 13% increase in the overall homicide rate, far less than what we've actually observed.
> people were home more and under a lot of stress.
This explanation does not seem to fit with the social mobility data presented. The pandemic struck in March, people were staying home far more in March/April/May than in June - but homicides did not rise until June. Why?
> An increase in murder can just mean the same number of people shooting each other as normal, but more of them died.
It could mean that. But no: shootings and shooting victims increased dramatically right along with murders:
- in Chicago: https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shootings-2020-shooting-crim...
- in NYC: https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-city-homicides-and-sho...
- in Portland: https://www.koin.com/news/crime/shootings-in-portland-more-t...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_in_the_Unite...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6203a28.htm?s_ci...
In my mind, "cancel culture" refers to the phenomenon where an outraged group (usually on social media) seeks to retaliate against someone over a (possibly inferred) political opinion. Firing union organizers or harassing whistleblowers is bad, but doesn't fit into my mental model of cancel culture.
A woman in Kentucky was fired after 20 years from her job as a Hearing Instrument Specialist after she said she didn't support BLM in a facebook video: https://reclaimthenet.org/tabitha-morris-cancel-culture/ (Her GoFundMe was also shut down.)
A high school teacher in British Columbia was fired after mentioned that he thought abortion was wrong, as an example of how personal opinions can differ from the law, in class: https://nationalpost.com/opinion/christie-blatchford-b-c-tea...
David Shor was fired after retweeting a black scholar's work on riots and election results: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-raci...
A Mexican-American utility worker was fired after someone filmed him making the "OK" hand and accused him of white supremacy: https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
A graphic designer was fired after the Washington Post published an article about how she wore a blackface-costume (attempting to make fun of Megyn Kelly) two years ago: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/why-did-the-washingt...
The operator of a campus cafe was fired after he posted an ad full of jokes, saying that he needed "a new slave (full time staff member) to boss around": https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/head-of-ontario-univers...
The founder of a charter school was fired after he was accused of "white supremacist language" in a blog post: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/11/ascend-cha...
An author withdrew her book because she was mobbed for being a white author writing chapters from the perspective of a Gullah Geechee person: http://elainemarias.com/2020/06/26/bethany-c-morrow-gets-ya-...
A Boeing exec resigned because of an article he wrote advocating against women in combat 33 years ago, when he was 29 years old: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boeing-resignation/boeing...
I can post more if you'd like. None of these people are celebrities. None of them committed a crime. Some of them have stupid opinions, some of them made stupid decisions, one of them cracked his knuckles in the wrong way.
But if you don't believe that "regular people" are at risk here, well - I hope your opinions are all non-heretical and that they stay that way for the next 33 years.
I think you're interpreting my comments, and the letter, as saying "there should be a blanket norm against calling for anyone's ouster for their opinions, no matter how vile." I'm not, and I don't think the letter is either.
I'm saying, and I believe the letter is saying, that we have become overly quick to reach for the tools of suppression in response to opposing views. That the spectrum of views which we interpret charitably is shrinking, and the spectrum of views that we view as fireable offenses is growing. It's not simply that the overton window has shifted and previously acceptable views are no longer okay (though I think that's clearly part of it). It's that the overton window has shrunk dramatically, even as we've moved towards much more brutal enforcement of it.
Anyway: thanks for the interesting discussion - I'm glad we've carved out this space for it! ;)
As I understand it, you're saying that people are advocating for the free expression of ideas - and yet, when people use that freedom to insult them call for their termination, they get mad. This seems contradictory and unfair to you. If I want the right to say whatever I want, then I have to accept that some people will choose to use that right to say things like "enoch_r is a despicable human being and his employer, family, and friends should all know about it immediately." Is that an accurate summary of your views?
In response, I am saying that norms like we have on HN (such as the principle of charity) contribute to the free expression of ideas. If we didn't have those norms, people wouldn't feel free to investigate controversial ideas, or have discussions like this one, and the intellectual climate would be impoverished.
Similar norms contribute to the free exchange of ideas in academia.
The letter advocates for such norms to be defended in academia.
If you understand why someone might defend those cultural norms on Hacker News, then perhaps you can understand why someone would defend those same norms in, say, academia, or journalism, or publishing, or the arts.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Are these good guidelines? Do you think they encourage better better discussions? Do you value having a community in which these guidelines are culturally accepted? If people started violating these guidelines en masse, do you think it would make sense to defend them?
Or would that be silly, because the answer to bad speech is more speech?
The way I see it, the answer to bad speech is more speech. But that doesn't mean there can't be cultural differences in the way we use speech - some worlds in which we more often misrepresent our oppenents, interpret their statements in the worst possible light, and use that to attempt to destroy their lives, and some worlds in which we choose not to. I view the letter as an attempt to move us towards the latter world - say, to push discourse away from Twitter-style and towards HN-style debate.
Imagine there are two college campuses. On campus A, when students disagree, the students in the majority say they felt unsafe, demand that the students in the minority be expelled, and on occasion succeed. On campus B, when students disagree, they... talk about the issue at hand with each other.
There is free speech on both campuses - after all, the government isn't involved here. Yet I think it's safe to say that orthodox thought (whatever it happens to be at the time of lock-in) is more secure at campus A than campus B. And I think it's reasonable to talk about the difference between the cultures, and advocate for one over the other.
The key is to pull it off your desk and put it in your lap. You end up typing with your hands on your thighs, which feels quite natural and relaxed.
In Oregon we just passed a law that lets cyclists treat stop signs as yield signs. I ride a bike as my main form of transportation and additional visibility and low speed of bikes makes this a no-brainer--it's quite obvious whether cars or pedestrians are approaching as you approach a stop sign.
> a bike plus adequate space around it is only a bit smaller than a car with adequate space around it.
Here is an example photo from a recent organized bike ride in my city:
https://images.app.goo.gl/S1Nh8d7zqfSEzqmH7
Here is another:
https://images.app.goo.gl/6hh7NAMtEFPZZyKA9
It's quite hard for me to square these images (not to mention my own experiences riding bikes) with your assertion.
2. I don't want cars to pass me within a few feet. That doesn't mean I feel unsafe when riding within that same distance of other cyclists. The relative speed is much lower, the mass is much lower, etc. Similarly, I will happily ride much closer to an immobile object (e.g. a curb) than I would like someone to pass me at 40mph. So I think the space taken up by a moving bicycle is larger than the bike itself, sure, but absolutely no way is it anywhere close to the size of a car plus following distance plus safety buffer.
So here, at least, these efforts are a terrible way to keep riff raff out, as they make your street far too attractive to riff raff using non-motorized transportation.
Not letting vehicles cut through a neighborhood street means the street serves one fewer purpose, but it means it serves every other purpose much better than before. Maybe it's worth it for some streets, maybe it's not for others. But your statement is a bit like saying you shouldn't need to pay taxes to maintain a school because you're not allowed to drive through it.