TotallyHuman @ TotallyHuman @lemmy.ca

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2

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73

Joined

2 yr. ago

If there's no zero in the dataset, then we don't have any zero about data. It could be, for instance, that some police have a large effect, but that you hit diminishing returns incredibly quickly.

It specifies who the protester was. If it was a Yellow Vest, they would have said that.

Small comfort to the reporter who got beaten up or SWATted or stalked, or the news organization that gets vandalized or DDoSed. If you're more likely to visit violence on your critics, people are less likely to criticize you. It's not fair, it's not right, but it's true.

Right-wingers are more likely to beat you up. Changes the calculus for photographers.

In terms of the trust problem, one easy way to solve it would be to just require real names. Instance admins (maybe also moderators) must post an address, a name, and a (redacted) ID. A registered corporation would also work. Then, they would provide escrow, taking the payment but only giving it to the seller once receipt has been confirmed. The concern would be fraud on the part of the purchaser. There's no foolproof way to fix that, but if both buyers and sellers have "reputation" scores it would be pretty easy to tell if someone's lying.

The admin could also skim 1-2% off every transaction, and then put that into a fund to pay buyers in the case of complaints. That way both the seller and buyer are satisfied, and reputation scores can be used to boot probable fraudsters.

Either way, the system would also allow buyers and sellers to arrange payment in-person, in which case there would be no guarantee needed and the admin wouldn't take a cut.

This system centralizes power in a small number of people who can be sued. Everyone else stays anonymous, and if they're bad actors the admins deal with them. If an admin is a bad actor, their name and address is posted publicly for the world to see. Obvious problem here is that fewer people would want to be admins, but maybe it would be possible to set up a corporate structure where the owner's identity is revealed only if they're being sued -- I'm not a lawyer and you'd have to talk to one. Maybe there could also be a way for them to post records of every transaction in a verifiable yet anonymous fashion, to prove they aren't skimming anything off the top (beyond whatever they say they're taking for server fees).

We can have perfectly secure online voting, if you're willing for all votes to be public. Or we can have perfectly secure and anonymous voting, if you're okay with some secret master list. There are very smart people working on cryptographic voting protocols and I think I would love to live in an online-voting-based direct democracy, but as it stands we don't know how to set that system up.

Maybe we could make publicly known votes work. Athens did it, the early US did it. But there are problems with both intimidation and incentivization, and we'd need some sort of framework to prevent that.

It's so long, especially if you get turned around. Which is easy to do, since it violates one of the core rules of combat level design: have a clear path forward. And it's interspersed with "puzzles" that are really just exercises in frustration.

There's a specific command to skip the ocean house, but I didn't mind that. I wish I could skip the damned sewers.

Who let the SCP authors write headlines?

The strategy that avoids the entire system being dismantled. Imagine if there were five congressional representatives from a new Social Democracy Party. Because those five representatives are the deciding vote if it goes along party lines, they can apply pressure on the Democrats to pass healthcare reform. Hooray, everyone loves the Social Democracy Party.

They might take a few more seats from the Democrats' safe districts in the next election. But in a contentious district where the Republican candidate has a good chance of winning, if half the people who voted Democrat vote Social instead, the vote gets split and the Republican gets in. So many of those people, who want to vote Social, will realize that if they do, then healthcare gets completely gutted. So they hold their nose and vote for the Democrat.

Politicians are motivated by re-election chances. Corporations are motivated by money. The question is not whether a Ministry of Truth would be objectively good, the question is whether it would be less bad than what we have now. And what we have now is a Corporation of Truth with no oversight and laughable regulation. Some oversight, some accountability, and some aligned incentives is better than no oversight, no accountability, and completely misaligned incentives.

We started deploying malaria vaccines!

Can't the Speaker shut that shit down? Especially since he's admitted exactly what he plans to do?

Mallory Chipman is wonderful.

We actually got more energy out than we put in recently, but that was in a research reactor and it will take some time to make it actually large-scale feasible. Fission would be completely sufficient on its own if not for the politics. Greenpeace has more blood on their hands than the captain of the Exxon Valdez.

Now we've gone from seconds to fix to hours to fix. If you wanted better I'd say to target pumping stations. If you could cause some serious damage to the pumps that push the oil, you could take the entire line out of commission for a good long while.

Of course, the pumping stations are guarded, and it isn't a good look for ecoterrorists to kill people. But maybe you could pull a Stuxnet.

I just fell off the couch.

Maybe just because we don't understand it, but the ancient Sumerian bar joke:

A dog entered into a tavern and said, 'I cannot see anything. I shall open this one.'

This would indeed result in no more war, at all. I fail to see the problem. (Besides that it wouldn't work, of course -- but it's a nice fantasy.)

Down 10% over 6 months isn't nothing, though -- if that rate continues for ten years prices will almost drop to one-tenth. It took us a long time to get into this situation, it might take a while for us to get out. This isn't a complete solution, but it's a good start.

Looks like it's people who report ownership on their taxes, i.e. legal owners. So either one or both parents would be a "homeowner", depending on whether it's singly or jointly owned, but other adult tenants wouldn't be (unless they were partial owners).