SatanicNotMessianic @ SatanicNotMessianic @lemmy.ml

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1. That’s been done before. People were getting arrested for “public homosexuality” in the past 40-50 years. At this point, the homophobic cop might beat the crap out of you or charge you with something else, but not for holding hands with another boy.
2. This is obviously just conservative virtue signaling and not serious legislation. It’s going to be overturned instantly - I’m actually a bit tempted to fly over there and practice public homosexuality, but I’m pretty sure someone will soon enough.

I’ll like to ask the town’s council members how much of the town’s budget they’re setting aside to defend the law that they’re obviously going to lose, and whether they plan to raise taxes or cut services to pay for it.

Honestly, I grew up watching the original series and it was extremely formative. I can’t say that I’d never have become a scientist without it, but it did help shape my concept of myself and the way I relate to the world, and how I’d like the world to be. In fact, when next generation launched, I originally didn’t like it because I was such a fan of TOS.

However, looking at it objectively, I think that TOS holds mostly nostalgia value. I wouldn’t recommend starting there unless you have a thing for campy TV and mid century modern design themes. If you’re interested in seeing what all the fuss is about, I’d start with the second or third season of TNG or one of the later series like DS9. TNG takes about a season or two before the writers and actors start to figure it out.

If you’re really more modern-oriented, you could start with the JJ Abrams movies, which are modern action movies in the ST universe.

The main thing is this: you can start pretty much anywhere. There will be backstories or call backs that might slip past you or inside jokes that you miss, but it’s more important imo to get on board with the franchise by starting with the stuff you find enjoyable, rather than getting turned off by elements that are dated or don’t resonate. Once you have that context, you can move back and forth between all the series and movies and enjoy them more.

Think of it like Discworld. It’s a series of novels written such that you can jump in anywhere and read them forward, backward, or sideways. It’s not like Lord of the Rings where you really can’t just start with the last book because there’s a single story being told in multiple parts.

This is stupid. This is stupid like the cybertruck being made out of stainless steel resulting in a manufacturing cost that’s about 10x what the retail price was supposed to be because they have to be hand made and they’re still not ready for real life. This is renaming the brand that was by and large the only remaining valuable component of the company you paid $44B for because you fucked around and found out and then destroyed because you have no idea what you’re doing and you fired everyone who did.

Musk is a con man. That is his only gift. And it’s a gift that really comes from just winning the lottery. These people are injuring themselves for vaporware that’s going to do nothing but make Musk richer as he continues to eat that tasty government cheese and make tweets for a living.

That is not at all true. Being a cop in the US rarely crosses the line into the top ten most dangerous professions. The top ten most dangerous professions include being a fisherman, being a garbage colllector, being a professional driver, things like that. And just for some more fun, the danger levels of these jobs are radically skewed.

Here’s a report on job related fatalities in the US. I’m not sure why fishermen aren’t included in this particular one as they normally top these lists, but it says they selected from about 250 professions so they might have just been excluded.

In any case, the list starts with loggers at over 100 per 100k and airline pilots at over 50 per 100k. Scroll down past farmers, delivery drivers, construction workers, landscapers, and mechanics, and eventually you’ll find police at position 22, with 14 per 100k. These numbers remain pretty constant year to year, with the exception of Covid related fatalities.

The problem is that there is a specific school of training for police that amps up their perception of danger far above what reality actually shows. They escalate encounters which increases both the chance of themselves bringing injured and very much the chance that the person they encounter will be injured or killed.

I would pay to watch Musk and Zuck fight like this for ten minutes.

Not the OP, but since the post is a picture I’m going to make a guess that the meant they couldn’t shoot pictures, not shoot a firearm. Given the fact they’re calling the vehicle a ute and it has non-US plates, I think I’d go further and say that it’s extremely unlikely that the person is armed with a firearm.

• You have to define what you mean by “modern computer.” If we really break things down, an abacus of infinite size would be Turing complete. It would take a really long time to play Doom on it, though. It would also need a person (or people) to operate it. However, the technology to do so would have been available starting around 2500 BCE. It could even be much earlier, if you want to have your time traveller also invent the abacus. If you want something a bit more pragmatic, we can look to Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who are generally credited with creating the world’s first programmable computer with a number of functions still in use today. Babbage was working in the mid-19th century, but given knowledge of his work could probably be reverse engineered back a bit as well. If you want to go in the other direction and make it even weirder and less practical, you can perform computation with a large room filled with people passing slips of paper back and forth after doing a simple logical operation on them.

My point is that there’s the current state of hardware technology, which depends on a whole chain of technological advances, and there’s computation logic, by which we see the “universal” part of the universal Turing machine.

If you’re talking solely about hardware and modern electronics, there’s a whole set of dependencies on industrial engineering and chemistry that goes from gears to vacuum tubes to diodes, which is interesting in its own right. What I guess I’m saying is that the advancements in the theory of computation (elements of theoretical architectures and mathematics) is distinct from the hardware it runs on. If you were to go back and teach the calculus and the theory of computation to Da Vinci, I imagine he’d come up with something clever.

I’m surprised by that, because I’m having a hard time picturing a setup that was all that much hotter than, say, sitting on the tarmac in Phoenix in the summer.

Israel is claiming the explosion was caused by a misfire by a Hamas-fired rocket.

I suspect the skies over the area are absolutely blanketed with radar systems. While I well recognize the need to keep operational capabilities classified, it seems like there should be a way of showing the trajectory of the purported missile to show evidence of their claim. I know we do this with satellite and photo reconnaissance by making the pictures more blurry to hide the actual resolution of the system. We do the same with things like location data, where we reduce the number of significant figures to blur the data.

Radar detection of weapons like rockets is fairly sophisticated, because it’s used both for missile defense and for counter-battery fire. I know that things like buildings obviously clutter images of low flying objects, but from the footage I’ve seen the rockets are generally flying well above that level.

Also, given they’re fighting in such a small area against an unsophisticated force, I’m really surprised there isn’t 24/7 drone video footage that they could point to.

While I understand the need for secrecy, Israel is quickly losing the information war, so it’s baffling me as to why they’re not making stronger attempts to justify their claims if they are indeed innocent.

Of it was an Israeli misfire or mistargeting, they should admit it and say what steps they’re taking to start using more caution. If the building was occupied and being used by Hamas forces and so was deliberately targeted, they should say that.

Good.

Those who break the law face fines of more than $23,000 or 12 months in prison.

That’s a pretty significant crime if that’s the penalty - it’s certainly more than I would have thought.

To those who know more about Australian law than me, I have two questions:

1. Is this just a bad write up and that represents the maximum penalty (because it uses the phrase “more than”) and does it mean he will get one or the other? In the US the laws are generally written in the form of “up to $X and up to Y years in prison” or the phrase “no less than…”
2. What are the chances the charge sticks? I don’t mean he will be found not guilty, I mean is there a challenge to be made against the law itself? Obviously, in the US it would be challenged as an illegal restriction on speech. I think we should be able to pass hate speech laws, but the current interpretation of free speech includes protecting hate speech as political speech

I think you have three choices that represent different mixtures of your ask.

1. Just scan them. Most phones have either a built in or app-available function to take the burdens out of scanning documents and photos. With thousands, you’d be talking about stretching it over a few weekends, maybe, but you could do it while watching tv or listening to an audiobook.
2. Scan and edit. You can buy a higher end scanner that would allow you to have more control over the quality of each scan. You could also use photo editing software to color correct or make whatever edits to the hopefully only dozens of photos you really care about, while leaving the option to do so open if you suddenly need that pic of Aunt May at the picnic.
3. Pay a pro to do it. You can find services that are all over the place in price and quality (basically because they’re centered around either option 1 or option 2). If you go with a higher end place, you’ll get people with a much higher skill set in scanning equipment and using photoshop then you. Lower end is basically lie the clerk at the UPS store that sends faxes. I’d recommend against sending any really important ones through the mail, though, so this again might be where you’d want to sub-select on the ones you really want done well and the others that you’d only mostly want to keep.

I absolutely love statistical analysis and the inferences for policy. I love it to the extent that I have multiple papers on it and have taught it. Let’s dig into this one a bit. Fair warning, this is completely off the cuff and I have a nice big pour of whiskey next to me, but hopefully it won’t go off the rails.

Okay, so if I skimmed the article correctly, they found a single drag queen who was convicted of sexual assault on a child. Right there we have a statistical problem because of the small number of observations. It’s literally just noise and no inferences can be made from it. I’m not being pedantic here. The statistical difference between one and zero drag queens committing SA is basically zero. Other than an amusing headline, the only inference we can make is that there is no statistical correlation between drag and sexual assault of children that any statistics, including this one, has borne out. So, other than invalidating what seems to be the central plank of the Republican Party platform, it looks like a nonsense comparison.

In the other hand, perhaps we can derive meaningful statistics from our analyses if we expand our criteria of evaluation. We do know, for instance, that about 99% of violent sexual assaults are done by men, so there’s obviously a correlation there that should be more studied. Should we legally limit the interaction between men and children to reduce sexual assaults? That would actually be much more effective than limiting drag queens.

Daughters, stepdaughters, and granddaughters are the most likely family members to be sexually assaulted. Other majority statistics indicate that it’s sisters, step-sisters, and other female family members who lead the list.

In addition, in every age range, girls and women are the most likely to be sexually assaulted. That ratio ranges from about 65% for children under 10 to about 95% for the 15-19 age range.

So the vast majority (to the point of being virtually all) of rapists are male, and the vast majority of victims of rape in every age group are female. From this, we might speculate that the majority of offenses are heterosexual, if we want to apply that label to child rapists. Given that the vast majority of drag queens are gay cis males, we can tell that they make up a negligible proportion of people committing child sexual assault.

So, prevent straight cis men from interacting with children would be the most effective way of lowering the number of sexual assaults against children, especially if we include male family members.

We could dig more, but there’s not a lot of studies on things like the number of sexual assaults committed by Christian leaders versus the general population, or republicans versus democrats. We can dig deeper, of course, and look at between state comparisons and political distributions and see if there is a correlation there (spoiler: there is) and see how that correlates with things like religion or hostility to LGBT persons, but I think I’ve given enough of a general sketch here.

Let’s expand on that a bit. If we were to have had the footage of the My Lai massacre, or a reporter had foreknowledge of dropping a nuclear weapon on Hiroshima because of an intelligence leak, would that be participation in a war crime if they did not publish and make public the upcoming attack? If we look at the civilian deaths inflicted by Western countries, do reporters have a moral obligation to conduct what are essentially intelligence operations to disclose to the enemy that an attack is going to occur, or is it a passive obligation, or does it not apply because the army in question is on the reporter’s side?

You do know that there were US policies in place that any male between the ages of about 16-18 and 50-60 (very much just visually determined by the responsible units) who was killed as the result of an encounter was classified as an enemy combatant? Similar practices were performed in Vietnam and in other wars, and that does not count the deliberate or indiscriminate targeting of civilians done by overly enthusiastic methods of engagement. If we know that a Pashtun village has an Al Qaeda presence but also houses civilians, is it a war crime not to tell them that the Marines are coming and will be opening with a large scale airstrike (with a 100% chance civilians will be killed in both that and the ground action), or is that espionage or treason?

My point is that, as someone who was previously involved, the lines are much fuzzier than we sometimes think. Personally, I do think we need more control over public speech - hate speech in particular - and I believe that people tend to over interpret aspects of the first amendment as much as they do the second, but I have been trying to keep this as neutral as possible with regard to specific laws so that we can look at the moral rather than the legal issues. In other words, I am not philosophically a free speech absolutist, but I do think that the ability to report what is literally a both sides news story shouldn’t be compromised without very careful attention to the ramifications.

I think you didn’t follow my argument at all. It’s not talent. It’s luck and feedback loops.

There’s some really accessible books on statistics right now, including one written by Nate Silver, that consider questions on topics like why the Mona Lisa is considered by some the world’s best and possibly most valuable painting.

I’ve had drinks with several senior engineers and managers at Tesla. The gull wing doors that keep breaking? Elon’s idea. They initially pushed back, he insisted, then when they relented he didn’t like the design and so lent a hand and made it worse after not having participated in any of the design meetings leading up to it. Stainless steel cybertruck? Same deal. Killing off all of the brand equity associated with “Twitter?” Same.

In fact, Twitter gives us a view on the purest Elon, because he literally fires everyone who disagrees with him. Twitter shows us what Elon looks like when allowed to do whatever he wants.

But look: just start learning more about statistics, base rates, positive reinforcement loops, and such.

I agree. There is a ton of functionality and UX that can’t be addressed on the backend because of the limitations of the architecture. Those limitations come with some very positive tradeoffs, but the hit to the users could be hidden behind client-based functionality.

Just as an example, it’s okay and part of the design that the same article could be posted to seven different instances. However, we then end up with users seeing the same article seven times, some of which will be having discussions and others which are completely ignored. A client could allow a user to decide to consolidate them all into a single post and read cross-instance integrated discussions. For posts from non-federated instances (for the primary instance for the client), they could mark them the same way they do deleted or removed tags now. You could even communicate to the user that the post came from a non-federated instance and give them the chance to retrieve it.

Basically, users should be allowed to create a news community that consolidates news.whatevers and merges duplicate posts.

Are you serious? Does anything you’re seeing in the world today indicate that there is some kind of meritocracy in place?

Enron was super successful - they were seen as the smartest guys in the room. I don’t even have the time to list the number of major financial companies that have bankrupted themselves after decades of profits. Then there’s companies like Theranos.

But it’s not even really about people who are stupid, con artists, or both getting into power. It’s probability.

If you were to flip a fair coin ten times and it came up heads every time, you’d think you were pretty lucky (or that I was losing about it being a fair coin). However, the chance of that happening just at random is about 1/1000. If everyone in your town were to do the experiment, many people would throw ten heads in a row, depending on the size of your town. If we do it at the state or country level, some people will get 25 or more heads in a row. It doesn’t mean they’re luckier or better at coin flipping.

So what do we see in the case of Elon? First, he started out with table stakes. That’s rare enough. Then he got involved with a dot-com at the exact same time that everyone was doing that. Like with the coin flips, most of them failed and some were successful. But let’s recognize that the “success” was an acquisition and that he was fired shortly after his ideas were shown to be detrimental to the success of the company. When he was fired, he still had an enormous gain which again we can find several causal factors that have nothing to do with Musk being smarter than a chimpanzee.

But there’s a second dimension we need to account for. Under capitalism, success gets reinforced because actual statistics is hard enough for most people that they just go on re-enforcement of individual successes. The system is literally built on foundations that the rich will tend to get richer, mostly because they’re the ones weitong the rules of the game.

In Twitter, we see what Elon as an individual actually brings to the table, other than pockets full of cash. He took a $44B company and in a year turned it into an estimated $4B company. Jack Dorsey, $44B. Elon musk, $4B and falling.

When the bill comes due, when the cybertruck continues to not ship and is crap when it does, when the 18 wheelers continue to underperform minimal expectations and get plowed under by the rest of the industry, when they finally realize that FSD will never happen given Tesla’s limitations on the tech, it will start to fall apart. It’s a con game disguised as meritocracy.

There is absolutely a moral dimension to a person having prior knowledge of an attack not making an attempt to prevent it by alerting authorities, but there is still some sticky aspects to this. If a reporter is embedded with a US marine unit, do they have an obligation to warn the Pashtun villagers if it’s probable that people will be killed? If those two incidents aren’t seen as equivalent, then we risk falling into the morality hole where objective journalism still should be playing good guys and bad guys.

But we don’t even need to go that far. We’re talking about whether a payment to a terrorist organization to secure an interview should itself be considered as supporting terrorism in the sense intended by US and international law. I’m saying there’s a big difference between a NYT reporter paying expenses to get an interview with senior IRA officials and a person in Boston sending $1000 to the IRA to fund their operations. And my concern is that freedom of speech will be affected if we conflate the two.

Thank you for replying.

There seems to be two components to your reasoning. The first is to disincentivize that individual’s repeated behavior or to disincentivize via anticipation of it in advance with the threat of punishment. Most people think this is a positive ethical stance.

The problem is that there’s not a ton of actual evidence supporting the idea. There are numerous studies (the majority as far as I’m aware) that indicate that there is no relationship between the harshness of a punishment and the crime rate. Having the death penalty does not make the murder rate go down, for example. As a more general observation, the US has the highest incarceration rate and some of the worst prison conditions in the industrialized world, and still manages to have crime rates that are on par with, or even much higher than, those other countries. The same relationship holds true at the state level within the US. The southern states and those known for a harsh criminal justice system have high crime rates as well. Countries like Norway, for example, have prisons that are better than many US hotels, but they have lower crime rates and lower rates of recidivism. For the most part, there seems to be no causal connection from harshness of punishment and lack of crime. I can go into some amount of detail as to why that might be true from a biological perspective.

As far as an ethical philosophy of justice goes, though, deterrence is largely seen as being morally defensible as it exchanges a lesser harm (locking a person up) against a greater harm.

The second part is a bit more challenging to defend as an ethical position, as it boils down, essentially, to revenge for the sake of revenge. There’s some other interpretations (like trying to balance some cosmological equations via accountancy), but those usually have outside assumptions and this is already getting long. To be clear, I am separating the motivations of disincentives versus causing harm for the sake of causing harm (because of a harm already caused). Once that is removed, we are left with (as an extreme example) a father beating his daughter’s rapist to death with a baseball bat in secret rather than seeing the guy go to prison (or whatever). Again, it’s not about preventing that one man from re-offending (you could lock him in the Ritz with daily room service and be effective at preventing his raping someone again). It’s pure revenge. This is understandable (and again I can speak to the sociobiology behind it) but in the case that it does not achieve a larger objective (ie the greater good) as per the previous paragraphs, it’s less morally defensible. It relies on the idea that the offender (who we will assume for the sake of argument is the actual guilty one) has become a literal out-law, which means that the laws that protect people’s lives and freedoms no longer apply to them.

All of the foregoing assumes free will and rational actors, which does not generally have a lot of empirical support, and which may be why the punishment model tends to underperform our expectations.

So a question that raises is whether, if you could hop into your tardis and go back in time and help that rapist grow into someone who doesn’t rape, would that be a more just solution? Let’s say you know someone who is a serial child rapist who also raped your child. If you were able to go back into their own childhood and remove them from the home of their drug addicted single mother living in poverty and their crime-ridden violent neighborhood and give them a life of ease, sending them to the best schools and into a high earning and prestigious job, would you do it if you knew with god-like certainty that it would make them into a not-rapist? Would you view that as rewarding future-them for being a rapist?

Unlike the general lack of correlation between harshness of punishment and the rate of serious crimes, we do know with statistical certainty that there is a very strong relation between things like nutrition, education, and trauma, and the likelihood of committing crimes. That’s a fact we can hang our criminological hats on.

The question of free will is another discussion, but just going off of empirical evidence we can find correlations in one approach and a general lack of them in the other.

None of this is to say that people doing harm should be allowed to run around continuing to do harm. It’s really just presenting two ideas:

1. If the point is to reduce overall harm to society (murder and rapes and robberies and such), there are more effective techniques than making punishment more severe
2. If an individual does cause harm, there are more efficient ways of making sure they don’t do so again. If a person can be socially adjusted by education or medication such that we knew they wouldn’t re-offend they could be released as soon as the solution was secured. If that is not possible and they must be incarcerated for the safety of others, there’s no moral justification in creating more harm by making that incarceration any less humane than it needs to be (eg, locking them in their room at the Ritz), so long as it achieves the same society-level effect that would be achieved by sticking them in solitary at a supermax.

Does that make sense?

Can we discuss the purpose of punishment here, and the ethics that justify it?

I first want to establish that as an evolutionary biologist I think the desire to punish has evolved both genetically and socially. I’m more talking about slotting it into an ethical and scientific framework.

So, why do you think that you want this (or any) person punished?

I’m a strong atheist, vehemently ex-Catholic, and a member of Team Rainbow, just so that no one thinks I’m defending indefensible things. And I agree that this is going to make little change in the behavior of most parishes, especially in heavily Catholic countries. I don’t think that’ll be due to the pope, though.

The Catholic Church has always taken an openly violent stance against LGBT people. They still do. I consider even the position of more liberal Catholics who take the position that it’s just like any other sin and can send you to hell but still reject all the social war stuff as wishing violence, although they’re not really problematic.

But Francis has gone out of his way more than any pope I can remember to be a progressive reformer. I’m not comparing it to Vatican II or anything, but it’s significant progress on issues like women and LGBT. He’s resisted by a lot of the politics of the church, but as the chief god-person he has some flexibility. So I think it’s less about him speaking one thing in public and another in private, and more about a conservative institution that will not implement his orders (such as they are).