mikedilger

Roland G Fryer's recent work shows that for every investigation over a white cop shooting a black person allegedly wrongly, 179 extra people die due to the severe reduction in policing (up to 90%!) over the next two years. Roland G Fryer is a black economics professor at Harvard. His papers are working papers for the National Bureau of Economic Research, and as such not peer reviewed. When he discovered in 2016 that (if you do the math properly) police are actually more likely to shoot a white person in a life-or-death situation, he said it was "the most suprising result of my career."

You might be underestimating the prejudice of the people calling things in to the police. Listening to police radio for just a few hours I was astounded at the things people report to the police: 1) A man and young girl walking down a country road... the man happened to be a minority, the girl was white. Police decided to check it out. 2) A man wearing camoflague and carrying a long rifle.. in a country area, during duck hunting season. Police decided to check it out.

When you say "..which leads to more crime" I'm going to presume you mean that it leads to catching a higher percentage of the existing crime, which leads to more police, which leads to catching a higher percentage yet again.... rather than the direct interpretation that police presence causes crime.

"It is not within the power of practitioners of demonstrative sciences to change opinion at will, chooing now this and now that one; there is a great difference between giving orders to a mathematician or a philosopher and given them to a merchant or a lawyer; as demonstrated conclusions about natural and celestial phenomena cannot be changed with the same ease as opinions about what is or is not legitimate in a contract, in a rental, or in commerce." -Galileo

I don't use a VPN as I'm pretty sure my traffic identifies me once it pops out the other end. But I do tunnel DNS with a server I trust so that my ISP only ends up seeing encrypted traffic (DNS over ssh, and HTTPS). I don't do DoH because there are only a few providers and so those are hotspots for espionage.

The color green, the imagery of leaves. This symbol clearly invokes the natural and warm feelings commonly associated with blasting things with nuclear radiation.

I also think discrimination based on political grounds is a bad idea. In NZ political opinion is protected. Human Rights Act 1993, 21 Prohibited grounds of discrimination (1)(j) "political opinion, which includes the lack of a particular political opinion or any political opinion" [An exception is made for employment of a political nature, see section 31]

I think that's a better situation than the U.S. model which essentially foments society-dividing political warfare by cancelling people from different political viewpoints. It just serves to divide your country even further.

If you disagree, answer me this: Are you okay with the fact that a racist employer can fire you for not being racist enough? Are you okay with the fact that a Christian employer can fire you for supporting LGBT rights.. (they cannot fire you for being gay, but they can fire you for supporing gays)? Are you okay with the fact that an employer can fire you for supporing BLM? If political opinion is not protected, you'd better hope your employer has the same political opinions that you do... or else you'd better stay very quiet (chilling effect).

Discrimination against an arm of the government itself (ICE) seems to me to be an advanced stage symptom of a systemic societal sickness. I have no idea how it will resolve, but I wish you all the best. Hang in there.

Except in Washington D.C.

I understand you see two roles that should be separated, and I won't weigh in on that - perhaps you are right. But let me highlight something that isn't so obvious in this discussion:

Job #1 for police is to keep everybody alive, even the criminals. Everything else is secondary. They are not primarily trained "for aggression with weapons", they are trained in deescalation, social resources, helping the community, etc. And contrary to most TV shows and movies, use of a weapon is a rather rare event in a police officer's career.

Whether police should or should not be armed depends entirely on whether the criminals are or are not armed. Here in New Zealand police have arms, but they are in lock boxes in their cruisers, and only brought out when necessary. Then there is a special "armed offenders squad" which comes in with sniper rifles and such and takes care of hostage situations, mass shooters, etc.

If the current 'abolish the police' sentiment intends to send the message you are expressing, it's not sending it very effectively. My fear is that police will quit/retire in droves and not be easily replaced. That will cause inner city gang activity to increase. As I understand it, there are a small number of powerful remorseless hardened criminals forcing inner city youth into a life of crime via credible threats, and using them as pawns to distance themselves from the day to day criminal activity. The police are the only ones powerful enough to fight this and to protect these kids.

Yes, they often do a shit job at it, and yes, they often are infected with racists and overly aggressive assholes, and even criminals using that position for the power it affords. But I think we'd do better if we focused on finding and weeding out the bad cops, rather than throwing out the entire institution.

Could you imagine if "youtube.com" were blocked and locked by IANA/ICANN/? because of reports that somebody posted a video with misinformation and phishing content?

I don't expect google appreciates how devastating this, but that would change quite immediately if it happened to them.

"Rebellion, uprising, or insurrection is a refusal of obedience or order." is the first sentence of the Wikipedia page for Rebellion.

Irrespective of the primary intent of the civil unrest [1], failing to disperse after being ordered to is an act of insurrection. I express no opinion as to whether insurrection is called for or not, just that technically it seems to be such.

[1] some people say 'protests', others say 'riots', I'm hoping 'civil unrest' is neutral but I'd happily take correction if it is not.

ssh-keygen defaults to RSA

Censorship "theory" is sound. And that's what is so pernicious and dangerous about the idea. The idea of removing content that could cause harm makes total sense. If the people making the censorship decisions were widely respected experts in the field and ideologically neutral, and used extensive and rigorous processes to determine what should be and what shouldn't be censored based on actual harm not political leanings, and were also accountable, then it could in theory be a useful tool.

But censorship practice is utterly corrupt. It's based on ideological goal-driven thinking, a form of thinking most of us use most of the time (unfortunately). The decisions are made by non-experts who are nameless, faceless and unaccountable. The result is dangerous and divisive.

I read Michael Holick's book (can't find it at the moment) he was the guy who discovered the circulating form of vitamin D.. IIRC you get vitamin D from the sun in rather large quantities. Just 15 minutes per day with only your face and hands exposed with the sun up at 45 degrees or more will be enough. I'm sure my data is not accurate, but it's in the ballpark. He has tables that depend on how dark your skin is and what latitude you live at.

I noticed the article in the WSJ about New Zealand. But I (a kiwi) haven't seen any local news indicating that the government has declared any sort of elimination. If you have seen one, could you link it? I'm currently skeptical of the WSJ article.

There were four new cases today. One confirmed by test and three presumptive cases which according to the experts probably have it. Plus there are hundreds of people in isolation/quarantine who are still sick. I wouldn't declare "elimination" just yet.

Even if new cases dwindled down to zero, that doesn't imply elimination either. There might be many asymptomatic people who are not spreading it currently because of the lockdown, but who will start spreading it once they start interacting with people outside of their bubble.

Might I suggest a line? Damage. Quantifiable damage that reasonable people could assess in a court of law. Stop and think about every exception to free speech that the US has: libel/slander, disclosing troop movements, breaking non disclosure agreements, perverting the course of justice, direct incitement of violence... they all fairly directly cause damage.

This line is not particularly fuzzy, and it makes some forms of censorship against speech that clearly doesn't cause direct quantifiable damage stand out as something entirely different than the other exceptions.

Some examples: hate speech does not cause damage that could be proved and quantified in a court of law. "Bad words" do not cause damage. Conspiracy theories do not directly cause damage (unless a court decided reasonable people would do things that caused damage based on the information, so there could be exceptions here).

Everything is indeed complex. But some ways of thinking about a problem can make the complexity more manageable.

The reason I asked was to learn more about UBI and other people's perspectives on it. Not to be chastized and offended. None of this comment was helpful. I'd explain why sentence by sentence but I doubt that would be a fruitful exercise.

I may have overstated, believing people on average are more like myself than they are. But I think you're likely doing the same thing in the opposite direction, believing people will keep working hard for little benefit when many of them wont. Let's just agree there are different kinds of people and they will behave differently, and my argument has some merit, as does yours.

There was no anthropomorphizing in my statements.

I get how losing a benefit if you start working could be an even greater disincentive than UBI. I wasn't catching that point previously, so thanks.

You're right about that guy. So I'll be more specific. The model that shows large numbers like 14,400 (not even 100,000) presumes we do NO contact tracing at all (not just slower contact tracing). I'd wager most people would agree that is an unreasonable assumption.

Then I suppose I projecting (psychologically). I would stop working. I'm barely working now. But I shouldn't assume I'm typical. Thanks for the feedback.

"Without fast case isolation after restrictions ease, modelling shows that the virus could spread exponentially and ultimately kill 100,000 Kiwis."

The left out the word "unreasonable". "Unresaonable modelling shows..."

See the Tailrisk analysis: http://www.tailrisk.co.nz/documents/Corona.pdf

I've not heard this. Can you explain how? And are you also suggesting that UBI proponents support abolition of other kinds of social insurance, replacing them with (not augmenting them with) UBI?

If you downvote me because you disagree, PLEASE share your thoughts on this. I cannot understand why you disagree if you simply downvote.

UBI to people outside of the workforce is entirely different. My argument against UBI is that it erodes the desire to work, and we still need nearly everybody of working age to work... until the robots catch up (they still have a lot of catching up to do).

I don't think there is any sort of unanimity regarding UBI. Being compensated for staying home is not UBI, because it is not ongoing.

I'm against UBI for reasons that became apparent while playing MMORPGs. Stay with me here and I'll explain.

Players of an RPG want a fun game. But they also want to succeed/win. These goals partially conflict. If they prioritize winning too highly, and pester customer support to make the game easier (nerf), the game loses it's fun. Even (in my estimation) to the people who pestered customer support. Because some people aren't self aware enough (kids) to realize that the challenge is what makes it fun.

In life, we want to be lazy. I certainly do. And that desire makes me think a UBI would be quite nice. But I also realize that I most certainly would be lazy. I'm already working less than 20 hours per week (pre-COVID) because my mortgage is paid and I don't really need the money anymore. With a UBI I might stop work completely. But as a society, if a lot of people like me slack off more, the real economy will suffer. Less hours will be worked, prices will go up, and the economy will be more depressed and sluggish.

Robots could save us but we are not there yet, not by a long shot. Maybe we are there in very specific manufacturing industries, but no robot is going to install a new roof on my house (for example).

So I think we should wait until after all the jobs are taken by robots (rather than thinking it's imminent when it's most certainly not) to institute UBI. Eventually. But not any time soon.

OTOH I'm perfectly okay with a means-tested payout to people who really need it.

I'm in favor of building things.

But we build in response to demand. Once people need more of something (e.g. PPE), production ramps up. That effect has been in place and has worked quite well for thousands of years. It doesn't require any policy or government, or even a new social movement, it's just an emergent property of humans being free.

You might argue that we could be smarter, and that we should build excess PPE before the demand hits just in case. This is reasonable to an extent, but probably to less of an extent than you think. The problem is that there are dozens of possible scenarios we should prepare for, and we can't know ahead of time which one is going to strike next. We have to prepare for them all: nuclear bunkers, asteroid deflection, global warming mitigation, sea walls, military capacity, etc, etc. Giving the competition among possible future disasters, it is often wiser to KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY (in capitals, because that is my main point) so you can respond to any of them after they eventuate, not before. This requires that we have the capacity to ramp up production quickly. That's not always a given, so I'm in favor of governmental action to ensure we have "stragetic capacity" to ramp up anything we might desperately need. But I'm not in favor of just building lots of things that we might need.

I hope this works for somebody, but I'm going to have to critique the whole concept of "timing' when baking sourdough bread.

After years of baking sourdough I find that I cannot predict precisely the timing. I have to judge the dough at each step and not proceed until it is ready. This is especially true in that I like trying new things, making tweaks, fermenting at different temperatures, and this alters the timing. The timing depends highly on temperature, where in the refresh cycle the starter is at (still rising? fallen and foamy?), but also very much on your particular starter. Some starters run slow (especially newly created ones). Others are fast. Using someone else's timing just never seemed to work for me. Early on when I started baking sourdough I made some absolute bricks because I followed the timing that the recipe specified, even though their descriptions of the dough seemed very different to what I was seeing. And if they said two hours, then eight hours must certainly be enough... but it wasn't enough. Yes, it really can be off by that far (especially with a new weak sourdough starter that wasn't refreshed properly).

Nonetheless, you have to have some sort of plan. Turns out that I can always make it work within a certain set of bounds if I am home all day on some given day. And that has driven me into the following pattern:

1. Remove sourdough starter from refrigerator the night before, and refresh.

2. Build dough in the mid morning with active starter

3. Bulk ferment (with stretches and folds) in a proofer until it is ready

4. Pre shape. Then shape. Then refrigerate in bags.

5. Bake the loaves (I always do two boules) early the next morning.

This is by no means the only pattern that can be made to work, but it's robust and flexible enough for anything I've ever thrown at it.

I've been picking off the green caterpillars and squashing them, but I've also ordered a butterfly net (unfortunately to my work address which is shutdown due to the lockdown here). Today there are tens of them fluttering around and I might makeshift some butterfly net out of clotch material and number 8 wire.

Potatoes are indeed the game changer if you need to survive off of your garden.