sky-kedge0749

> Here we go again with that troubling word at HN: “obvious.” Best to strike that from your vocabulary.

My fault for sloppy wording. I was supposing for the sake of the hypothetical that the police made it obvious to you personally that they would attack you if you fail to comply.

In any case the ACLU-type advice of "stay silent and don't consent to anything" assumes some strange middle ground, where the cops in front of you are hostile enough to be actively fishing for something to arrest you for, but not hostile enough to just beat you, plant stuff and lie. And, further, that I, a random person who rarely deals with the cops, will be able to correctly sense what sort of encounter I'm having, against police who do this dozens of times a day, who are very scary, and who might be specifically trying to trick me.

Or just to rephrase what you said, the ACLU-type advice is great if you're the sort of person for whom awful police encounters are unlikely and who can lawyer up right away if things go wrong.

> Anarchism (and any fully decentralized protocol) "works" for small N because the average node can keep all the other nodes of the society in memory. If you need something, you know exactly whom to ask. And if you do something wrong, everyone will remember and hold you accountable. This plainly doesn't work with millions of nodes.

This can work for large N because people fill roles. If you travel today to some other place and want to buy bread, you don't need to know the name of a bread seller in that place. You look for a store that looks like it sells food and ask if they have bread. If they don't, they will probably be able to direct you to a store that does.

If you do something wrong, this can either be tracked by something you're required to keep on your person such as an ID or a tattoo, or by some commonly accessible records.

Since this is a tech site, you can think of it like interactions between objects in object-oriented programming. A billion objects can interact with each other in all sorts of ways without requiring some central manager.

This is a pretty weird article given how much party politics changed in the 1970s. Membership between the two parties shuffled in response to civil rights and other legislation in the 1960s. The reconstituted Republican party invented new extreme positions on stuff like abortion and gun rights. The shift toward ultra-low taxation and minimal government moved out of the fringe and became Republican mainstream with Reagan in the 1980s. At the same time the Democratic party reacted against all that while slowly becoming more inclusive of various underprivileged groups.

I feel like the article plays into and tries to reinforce the idea that Republican conservatives represent good old-fashioned American values, but both parties today would be almost incomprehensible to most voters from the 1960s. I don't think it really matters how far voters in either party have drifted from positions staked out by party operatives between the 1970s and 1990s.

This is technically true, however, in many cases the government has already waived immunity through past legislation, or a court has already found that immunity doesn't apply to particular cases due to for example constitutional reasons. Crucially, it's not like everyone who sues the government has to beg a judge every time before filing the suit.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit....

I'm sorry that all happened to you, that sounds really bad. I'm not doubting your experience. However I think it's important for Americans in particular to maintain the distinction between "the Constitution applies and border police are acting illegally" and "the Constitution literally has no force in these situations" when discussing these problems in forums like this one. A lot of the recent creeping fascism involves the fascists treating the law as if it didn't exist, but when actually called on it they back off.

Of course as a practical matter anyone crossing a U.S. border should understand the risk of arbitrary violence, deportation, detention, or having all your stuff taken.

I'm not a lawyer but I've studied criminal law, am generally anti-cop and really sympathize with all the "don't talk to cops" videos and pamphlets out there. I understand that mens rea or premeditation can be argued and proven by a single stray comment you make to police.

However there's always been a big gap for me because, I mean, obviously there are some times where it makes sense to talk to police.

* The cops knock at your door, your neighbor has been murdered, were you at home last night and did you hear anything? And you were and you did but if you go all ACLU and say nothing while carefully keeping the cops out of your home, you're withholding information that might catch the real killer and in any case now the cops might be a lot more interested in you.

* The cops want to search your trunk at a traffic stop. If you hand them your keys that can be interpreted as consent. However if you don't, it's obvious they will drag you out of your car and beat you, take your keys, maybe plant some drugs or a gun because you got all uppity, and lie about it all later. So why not just hand the keys over and save yourself the trouble?

Etc. I feel like all the pamphlets and so on don't really get into these real situations.

That's not true, see: https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone. In fact "the Constitution doesn't apply at the borders" is what border cops want people to think, so repeating it is doing their work for them.

In the U.S. the law varies, see: https://bikeleague.org/sites/default/files/SidewalkRiding_8_.... A checkmark in the "is it legal?" box isn't the whole story though since, I assume, cyclists also always have to reasonably safe, which is what I've been talking about. Being legal means you can justify yourself to a cop if you move your bike onto a sidewalk to avoid a 40mph six-lane stroad, not that you can buzz pedestrians.

To be clear this isn't a competition. The reason cyclists ride on the sidewalk is because they don't have their own space and don't feel safe on the roads. You yourself just said you've had many near-fatal accidents over the past ten years. I'm all for making it safer for cyclists in bike lanes or on roads because riding on sidewalks is dangerous for everyone.

Based on my own observations I don't think cyclists always appreciate the risk to pedestrians. Cyclists can wear protective gear, are more maneuverable and can choose to bike only when healthy. Pedestrians might wear only a t-shirt and shorts and can have any number of invisible health problems. People die or end up in the hospital from simple falls, now imagine having a bad hip and being slammed in the back by an adult going fast on a bike and being thrown into traffic or head-first into a parked car, bench, pole or some random junk on the ground. Instead of arguing over whether being hit by a car on a bike is more/less dangerous on average than being hit by a bike as a pedestrian, I hope we instead can agree that either type of accident has a very real risk of serious harm or death, and better infrastructure for bikes would reduce both types of accidents.

I acknowledge it's very difficult to bike safely on the sidewalk. You need to assume you'll have to dismount and walk around every pedestrian. The exception is if the pedestrian clearly sees you, moves aside and signals you forward. If you can't or won't constantly dismount, you're putting other people at risk. That's just how it is. Dinging a bell or shouting "passing!" two seconds before reaching a pedestrian who is in the middle of the sidewalk, who might be wearing headphones, is not sufficient. Unfortunately a lot of cyclists put other people at risk instead of finding alternative transportation. I'm not saying you personally ride unsafely, of course.

I hear you, but my actual experience is that car danger is avoidable. I can, if necessary, stand at a crosswalk and wait as long as necessary for the road to clear, or walk behind an idling car if I think it might accelerate into me, or keep walking until I reach a safer crossing. My few close calls have all been because I got sloppy. Buses especially are slow, easy to see and easy to predict.

With bikes, there's not much I can do. I've had bikes pass me from behind at speed on the left on a sidewalk. If I had decided for whatever reason to step to the left at the wrong moment they'd have hit me full on. The worst street injury I've had was when a bike came at me from the front on a sidewalk in the dark from under some trees. By the time I realized it was a bike, it was too late, but luckily I lurched out of the way at the last second. I tripped over my feet and faceplanted at jogging speed but it could have been much worse.

The 2nd amendment as supporting collective rather than individual gun ownership is the traditional interpretation. The more maximal interpretation as supporting individual gun ownership is a recent thing. The ACLU has chosen not to defend that more maximal interpretation which was made law by the Supreme Court in 2008 in D.C. v. Heller. Reference: https://www.aclu.org/other/second-amendment.

For the 1st amendment, you might find this 2022 article interesting: https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w.... It refers to ACLU history and lists recent 1st amendment support they've given to Trump supporters, the NRA, people making homophobic statements and so on.

A big problem is that most people don't know how to handle that kind of freedom. The social world most people exist in won't accept it. I don't know your life but I think a lot of people who suggest things like your [4] imagine a sort of extended vacation, and maybe for three or six months or so, it can be. For the long or indefinite term a better analogy would be prison.

The ACLU is the American Civil Liberties Union, not the American Free Speech Union. It's consistent with their mission to decide to for example defend the right for trans people to get appropriate medical care, and decide not to defend the right for people to say transphobic things.

If an organization like FIRE wants to defend the one particular right of free speech to the exclusion of all others, that's more complementary than antagonistic to the ACLU's mission. Or at least it should be.

Cyclists are much scarier to me as a pedestrian than cars are. Cars can be erratic but they stay on the road and, at worst, I can wait them out or otherwise almost always avoid them. On the other hand I've had cyclists zoom around me from behind on a sidewalk, surprise me from the front in the dark, or buzz me while I'm on a crosswalk and they're on the road and then they shout "sorryyyyy..." as they keep going. There's nothing I can do about that, it's just a roll of the dice.

I often walk next to a bike lane that has some freestanding posts separating it from road parking and then a road. Cars sometimes knock the safety posts into the bike lane causing a serious hazard to cyclists. I'll move fallen posts out of the bike lane and up against the curb but the situation is ridiculous. This is in addition to all the other debris you mention.

People across the political spectrum got upset at the government. I remember being swept up at the time in the general nerd rage against the NSA. I particularly remember watching left-wing media about it from creators that were, around that time, partly sponsored by Russia's propaganda arm RT, though whether RT specifically sponsored pro-Snowden content from those creators I don't know.

However the actual political results were mostly favorable to Republicans. Trump himself popularized the term "deep state" and criticizing it was a key part of his administration's PR.

Russia benefited, not only by getting Republicans in power, but also by embarrassing and casting doubt on U.S. intelligence, a year before Russia's invasion of Crimea. Now in the current Ukraine war it's obvious how vital NATO intelligence is to resisting Russian aggression.

I don't think much actually changed at the NSA or any other agency. Trump didn't actually care about the ethics, he just thought it was some huge, personal injustice that he couldn't command everyone in the executive branch the way he could in his businesses. He didn't even pardon Snowden.

So overall the only changes were political and it all worked out great for Russia. Maybe Russia didn't plan it but they sure benefited from it, with the public and the media doing the heavy lifting. Something to keep in mind the next time some theoretically nonpartisan government scandal appears.

The need for school lunches is one lunch per child per day. Is there some more specific local need that the existing program is interfering with, like buying food from local producers or providing culturally appropriate meals? Or are you just stating support for some general libertarian position?

In an ideal world voters would rationally consider leaks, blame would be allocated appropriately, and the importance of the whole situation would be weighed against other concerns.

In the real world voters are at the mercy of cognitive and other biases, tend to blame the current government no matter what, and a leak's importance depends as much on media attention and trivialities like how close the leak is to an election as it depends on actual merit.

So, even true leaks can be effective tools to remove a government you don't like.

Suppose some government opposes the U.S. in some important way. That government then gets voted out at the next election due to a leak. Would you care if that leak came from a CIA mole? I would. I doubt the CIA would investigate and reveal foreign corruption or illegal overreach purely out of the goodness of its heart.

Capitalism usually means a small owning class and a large working class, which is the hierarchy. It doesn't actually require a pyramid scheme system of recruitment, you could just have an enforcer class that beats the workers into hopeless submission and consumption. The way it works now though is that workers at every level are led to believe they can rise up the pyramid. This is a good complement to the raw violence which is still there: this belief reduces enforcement costs, encourages consumption, and allows for some necessary meritocratic elevation to the educated technical/bureaucratic class.

I don't know. If a ton of news came out about shady stuff happening at the Coca-Cola company, I'd want to know if it was all coming from corporate espionage paid for by Pepsi.

We assume an impartial news organization will investigate Coke and Pepsi equally, so if the org comes out with a bunch of stuff about Coke acting badly, we figure that Coke really is bad, otherwise the org would have gone after Pepsi too, or both. On the other hand if a less scrupulous news org one day receives a mysterious package with a ton of bad stuff about Coke and just verifies and prints it, then Pepsi could be good or bad or anything, but most people will think they're good because of all the bad stuff only coming out about Coke.

Not GP, but here's an answer to your question in the form of a jigsaw puzzle: https://www.etsy.com/listing/739198964/crimethinc-pyramid-of...

The federal program reimburses local schools who are able to adapt to local circumstances. https://www.fns.usda.gov/disaster/pandemic/cn-2021-22-waiver... is a long list of associated waivers allowing local flexibility. What "unique needs" aren't being met here?

In this case we're talking about a program that directly feeds children who are, I hope we agree, the victims of and in no way responsible for any negligence due to "poor people [who] can't be bothered to prepare food." In fact the more we assume that "poor people" are lazy or whatever you want to say, the more vital free school lunches become.

This is a pretty restricted idea of what art is and can be. Creating art has been a human impulse probably since the beginning of our species, painting on cave walls, adding flourishes to pottery, tattooing and other body modification. Today you have people writing poetry no one else will read, singing songs no one else will hear, and that's art too.

Obviously art can be propaganda. Batman and Iron Man are capitalist billionaires with hearts of gold. Of course there's a message there. That's only a small sliver of what art is.

I suppose you can crunch some numbers and decide that higher arts funding at the high school level will result in an X% increase in romantic poems exchanged between lovers with a concomitant increase in worker productivity and the general birth rate. Maybe the animal paintings in the Lascaux caves reinforced cultural or religious bonds that improved the local group's success. Looking at things this way is definitely a choice though, and I don't think it's a healthy one generally, though I'm not sure how I could justify that to someone who doesn't already agree. What is the point of being alive other than to care for others and be happy? Making art makes people feel good.

> If people are still getting caught in this trap, though, I'd be interested to see more? (And potentially write more on why it's not a good application of EA thinking.)

A big problem for me is that the various huge income differences exist in large part due to systemic violence. A factory worker makes $N, a software developer makes $50N supporting ads selling the factory's product, and the profits are largely captured by the super rich making $100000N. Violence -- colonialism, authoritarianism, wage slavery, nationalism and so on -- is required to make this happen and keep it going.

I'm not involved with "effective altruism" as a movement, only as the general concept of giving money in a numerically effective way. So numerically the situation is that for every $1 a high income person in a developed country considers donating, they may have done more than $1 in damage to get it; or some part of that $1 was earned through some absolutely evil means; or both. This depends on the job but once you reach the bar of, let's say twice the U.S. personal median income, it's virtually certain. So there is no way to reach ethical parity: it would be digging your way out of a hole.

Existing people need to eat and live so they must participate in the system as best they can. But once the essentials are gotten along with some small treats like ice cream, things become much more difficult ethically. The extra money is blood money, and what can a person do with that?

This feels like a pretty standard critique though I don't know if it counts as a "misery trap" if that is a technical term. I'm sure it's been discussed before and would be interested in knowing how "EA" people resolve it.