jhiska

There are decades of research studies on this topic in criminology alone that the NYT can tap into. Look up the field of "victimology".

On the other hand, the NYT is not a scientific journal. Supposedly, they know what makes people interested in a topic. They want to start a public conversation, and while that's innocent and beneficial enough, they're starting the conversation on the wrong foot, and commentators like me end up having to talk about what I talked instead.

It would also be interesting if they brought up women-on-men harassment figures, if only to point that the numbers are so much lower, and other data that suggests that this might be indicative of cultural differences between how men and women in the West are raised (and not some innate male proclivity to harass that supposedly has to be socially repressed).

Self-reported. Not a random population. The numbers are higher because most men (the ones who refused to take part) are intelligent enough to not denounce themselves to the NYT for serious sexual offences. Not reliable, and may do more harm than good, because it maximizes minor harassment, but minimizes the numbers of serious harassment.

>My whole life I was suckered into this idea that people will treat you fairly regardless of your skin color, your gender, your ethnicity, the country you come from, etc.

As usual in American discussions, class is forgotten.

A heterosexual, "white", cisman can also be working class or bourgeois, but for some reason -- probably because of the annihilation of Marxism in the US -- it's never brought up and this despite its modern relevance screaming at us.

Without class, one can't understand why Trump got the vote of so many working class people. Ethnicity (Caucasians are ethnic people from the Caucus region; modern biology only accepts one race and that is the human race; "white" is a culture, not a "race" or ethnicity, since Middle-Eastern Caucasians aren't considered "white"; "white" is better defined as a Caucasian of European origin that accepts Western culture), sexuality, sex and gender, religion... None of these explain the working class animosity towards the "ultra-wealthy elites" that are "out of touch with the common person" or why the promise of bringing back working class jobs was so tempting. Trump, while being a liar and actually damaging to the working class, played to their class heartstrings.

Social justice without class consciousness creates injustice, and that injustice is being exploited by the extreme alt-right.

One can't also understand why Bernie Sanders was as appealing as Trump unless one understands that both Bernie and Trump appealed to anti-bourgeois sentiment and both promised to help the working class. It was class rebellion, and unfortunately it turned out as badly as it did because Bernie was never put on the voting ballots.

Too little, too late.

At this irreversible point it's not actual actionable regret, but a merely symbolic act meant to save their conscience from hellish guilt.

Besides, the blame for the Facebook-surveillance state and "alternative" facts is dispersed over hundreds of thousands of people. No single individual is responsible. It's an out-sized ego with out-sized guilt that motivates him to write the article.

"Dark art" is really glorifying what those desk jockeys do.

It's just a bunch of organized paid trolls with fancy ideas about themselves and what they do, because it's all secret-y and covert-y, but really, they're incompetent people who after slamming their head against the problem many times have group-devised by trial-and-error rather nifty ways of manipulating online conversations.

Any place where you can add a comment is manipulable, but their manipulations only work if people aren't aware of their existence in the comments section and of their good-cop / bad-cop group tactics, the methodological flaws of anonymous online voting and why noise-flooding works.

I agree. I don't want the police using biased tools either.

OP has stated elsewhere in the comments that the reason they're interested in the tech is for testing it in some other unrelated area.

Both the iPhone and the Nexus 6Ps have horrible battery-swap design, but I still don't want to pay middle-men for what should be simple service I should be able to do at home.

You can go to a store and ask someone there to replace the batteries of your TV remote or battery-swappable phone for free, if you like.

I guess I could call them alternative facts, if you prefer.

Replaceable batteries increase lifespan.

The iPhone is a well-made phone which would have greater lifespan if the batteries were replaceable.

As it is, users who bought an older iPhone now have to pay middle-men to replace the battery or face degraded performance.

Sealed, seamless, performance-degraded, costly to service, with planned obsolescence.

It's quite obvious that it's a waste of money to pay middle-men to perform basic service on it for stuff a user can do at home with any other phone.

That is a fair point.

I worry for what transpeople -- who lack meat-world social choices -- are enticed to reveal about themselves online to the secret police. Our governments' thugs are happy to lend an unsympathetic ear to their problems.

What's your point?

Thank you for addressing the reasonable and consistent part of my unhinged rant.

I know what the real problem is. No rapport was established. You are in the defensive because you feel I corrected you as well and thus passed judgement. It's human relationships.

It is not easily replaceable as with any other phone.

The issue is not creating waste, but wasting one's money on middle-men for replacing one's phone batteries.

>I know every TV remote I've owned with a battery door eventually ends up with a rubber band around it, and I think that's pretty much a universal experience.

You're relating a supposedly personal story to make your spin claims more relatable. Maybe you're like the people in late-night TV commercials who seemingly can't open a can of tomatoes without massive bleeding? ;)

I guess that means all Samsung phones ("not sure which ones") are inferior to Apple phones, hm? ;)

It wouldn't. It would obviously increase the lifespan of it.

The spinsters are deliberately confusing "lifespan" with "resale value".

Somehow I am reminded of the lyrics "You spin me right round, right round, baby."

The spin, I feel, is that somehow being able to replace one's batteries is bad. Whereas having an iPhone with degraded performance and an expensive-to-replace battery is good.

You "bought a spare because you could" and "now it sits, waiting for you to recycle it", thus creating waste, but one can argue that anyone buying stuff they don't need creates waste, and that being able to replace one's phone battery isn't about saving the environment but saving one's hard-earned money.

You make a good point.

If you consider that you can't easily change the battery in an iPhone without voiding the warranty or paying a premium price to Apple Support then one can make a strong argument that it's sneaky planned obsolescence.

Then again, a battery that dies down after a few years and is so difficult to replace is also planned obsolescence.

One can argue that replacing real-life relationships with digital ones is unhealthy.

And digital lives are more easily monitored by governments -- not just the American or European governments, which is already bad enough. This too is dangerous.

Being able to go into a community of like-minded people translates in the meat-world to meat communities where your neighbors might have a completely different perception of reality than each other. This too is problematic.

I understand now that there is no company behind it. It's open-source and developed with good intentions, but as the saying goes, the graveyard is full of good intentions. I deeply distrust anything that entices me to reveal personal data in a medium monitored by the secret police.

How much these objections weigh for you depends on your priorities. Non-corporate, open-sourced social-media isn't significantly different for me to assuage my very real Internet privacy terrors.

Yet another social-media whatchamaycallit.

Somehow I end up not following my own advice and simplifying and making only one point per comment. That way people wouldn't focus on a minor thing about it and ignore the rest of it.

(The advice being: I think a good part of the reason why some one-line comments end up getting so many upvotes is because they say only one thing. The more things you try to say then the more reasons there will be for people to disagree and downvote you so no one else reads your message.)

Yet another social-media thing.

I thought the consensus in non-social-media media was that all social media was unhealthy.

Now we're getting an ad (or infomercial, if you prefer that term) from traditional media for an open-sourced Facebook / Twitter wannabe killer.

I guess they just take whatever stance that fits their unstated goals.

OP wants an open sourced, data-based statistical model of where crime might occur (methodological flaws and all), and not an unasked-for politicized preaching about the supposed virtues of a subset of people over another subset of people.

I'll withhold my judgement until they ship it.

Early reports (RoadToVR) say that the FOV is rather bad ("about the size of a VHS tape held at medium distance"). I'll wait.

uMatrix is better than the new NoScript.

You're right. It's yet another teaser. Not holding my breath.

The biggest impediment to a politician who in good-will wants to implement actually crucial policies is public opinion.

The problem is so bad that politicians don't actually talk about the hard work -- hours of reunions, negotiations, high-stake talks, etc --, because being honest and open has a detrimental effect on achieving their goals. Lies or half-lies are more effective, even when they are honestly doing what's best for us, because it's easier to accept an uncomplicated lie or half-lie than a complicated truth.

The problem, I guess, is that we have a representational democracy but representational democracies have operational flaws and that the will of the people sometimes leads to a mass grave for them. Sometimes our representatives are better educated and positioned to call the shots, but are held back by misconceived public opinion -- aggravated by the fact that the truth is never actually told by any side and debates are over who can "sell" the most convincing story based on "established" lies and half-lies.

It's a delicate balance of power. In a way, it is justifiable for the government (a faceless system where the responsibility is diffused to so many people that no one is almost ever truly individually responsible) to want to manipulate public opinion (or influence public opinion, in politically correct terms). In another, it is tipping the balance of power to the already powerful and this can cause problems.

You are asking the wrong questions.

Is morality powerful enough to stop actions?

Government thugs can survive with a guilty conscience.

Germany lost the war.

Although it's not true that the victors always write the history. There are cases where the defeated write books detailing all the injustices committed against them and it gets picked up centuries later after the tides of power have changed again, or so much time has passed that everyone involved is safe or dead -- I guess one can say that's how you know about the Native American version of American history and can talk about it safely.

Want an interesting thought? What in the horrors of hell is being done to Middle-Easterners?

> When will people learn that industrial control systems can't ever be safely connected to the internet.

When a disaster happens.

Politics as usual, and it's not the politicians fault (who are mostly limited by the whims of public opinion), but that there won't be enough political momentum for action until there's a disaster. The fault, like most things in politics, is of human nature.

It's unnatural for large groups of people to be motivated to take serious preventive action against something that has never happened before and has been up to then only a theoretical concern for experts.