> Notice how things aren’t being stolen at this magnitude in China
Stealing from a Chinese museum would be extremely difficult. Cameras and security staff monitor exhibits during the day, and even after hours, extensive surveillance everywhere, makes it hard to get away unnoticed.
The risk is simply too high
There was a recent theft in a European museum. Smash and grab of jewels and coins with a hammer. They didn’t have a metal detector or any real security there.
You could make an argument some artwork is relatively less protected than its value but that at best still only explains China (per the OP). Why not other countries?
Formally-protected cultural heritage is disproportionately located in Europe compared to other continents, if anything because we effectively invented the practice. Italian, French, Greek, Egyptian museums store more artefacts than they can expose at any given time - we're talking 2x-3x.
Things I use the private inference machine on my local network for:
- Running queries on bank transaction data to figure out our home budget, savings and spending rates, etc. I don't want this data in the hands of AI companies.
- Joplin note-taking app LLM integration for searching, creating, summarizing notes. This is my private notebook and I don't want it leaking.
- Termux based phone assistant. I can use voice to ask it to add something to the shopping list or my notebook. Much faster than pulling up the app. Especially useful when out walking. Like a low-key home-grown Siri. I'm adding more skills to this as I need them.
- Building a little robot character in our home that people can use to ask weather etc. This is mostly an experiment so far.
- Various other one-off use-cases and experiments. Recently I've been testing out Clef which is like a self-hosted Jev that can read images. Response time of 300ms it's wild! Haven't found a use for it yet.
There was supposedly a "US intelligence report" which claimed that three workers at the lab went to a hospital for treatment for some kind of viral illness in November 2019, but it is not known what illness that was. According to journalists, within the US intelligence community opinions were mixed about possible viral origins, with some intelligence officials believing the lab had something to do with the origin of the virus while other intelligence officials considered that hypothesis implausible. There's not a lot of specific public detail about what information or analysis informed those opinions.
All sides of the question were heavily politicized. The Trump administration and the US GOP have heavily pushed a lab leak hypothesis and used it to argue against China and against scientists (e.g. turning Anthony Fauci into a bogeyman). On the other side, China has blocked investigations and tried to steer public statements by various organizations away from anything that would question their government's motives or competence.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The National Intelligence Council and four other IC agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2.
• ⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ The Department of Energy and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assess that a laboratory-associated incident was the most likely cause of the first human infection with SARS-CoV-2, although for different reasons.
• ⬛⬛ The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
• ⬛⬛ Almost all IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered. Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination. All IC agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon.
[...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ Several WIV researchers were ill in Fall 2019 with symptoms; some of their symptoms were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19. The IC continues to assess that this information neither supports nor refutes either hypothesis of the pandemic’s origins because the researchers’ symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19. [...]
⬛⬛⬛⬛⬛ While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in Fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.
Hacker News marketing skills tell people to leave a context comment on Hacker News. Don't complain about it too much, that is our way of figuring out who is lazy in an obvious way!
When someone makes a submission, the text field becomes a comment when the URL field is not empty. (but sometimes not?) It's a poorly designed form that should be redone.
> But that could have been prevented if the EU did not have an open-doors migration policy to start with. And to have listened to the people on other issues too.
I believe there are more nuances to this, then simply blaming it on immigration policies.
There are a lot of variables in place for why far right movements are and have been on the rise in the EU. And I certainly believe the issues could've been handled better by each member state.
Yes, immigration is a serious problem. Especially if member States doesn't increase budgets for handling said immigrants.
After all, why does immigration even happen in the first place? Aren't we as a western society responsible for the destruction and destabiliztion of the eastern countries?
To be honest immigration happened forever because people look for a better place to live. The able, hard working and entrepreneurial ones bring a lot to the countries they immigrate to. So, I do not see immigration as "a problem".
Additionally Europe's natality is not great, it needs people working. So many enterprises in Europe are happy with that.
Why is immigration presented as a problem? Because it is easy, does not affect directly any potential voter (I mean, if you say "rich are to blame", around half of the voters will not vote you, if you say "the poor are to blame" the other half will not vote you, but immigrants? No problem they generally don't vote) and because Europe has a tradition to seeing itself "above others". So if there are problems and you see dark people around, must be there fault, no? I really think they are (many) people that think like that (and I also met a couple)...
> To be honest immigration happened forever because people look for a better place to live. The able, hard working and entrepreneurial ones bring a lot to the countries they immigrate to. So, I do not see immigration as "a problem".
You allow onky the highly skilled ones who cannot reach their potential from where they come from.
> Additionally Europe's natality is not great, it needs people working. So many enterprises in Europe are happy with that.
False. No need for outside workers. There are about 500mm europeans, abs not all of them are old. You remove the benefits and all of a sudden you get a few tens of millions of able bodied people looking for work. Problem solved without importing people from other places.
> Why is immigration presented as a problem? Because it is easy, does not affect directly any potential voter (I mean, if you say "rich are to blame", around half of the voters will not vote you, if you say "the poor are to blame" the other half will not vote you, but immigrants? No problem they generally don't vote) and because Europe has a tradition to seeing itself "above others". So if there are problems and you see dark people around, must be there fault, no? I really think they are (many) people that think like that (and I also met a couple)...
Turn on the TV or read a newspaper to see how much crime is caused by wanton unchecked migrants invading Europe.
Even for places where we import migrant workers it does not take long until they start creating drug trafficking rings and resort to violence.
I am not blaming the poor. Europe has plenty of thise too. But at least we have cultural similarities and don’t resort to violence unlike the migrants that wash up on the shores of Europe, which conviniently all have smartphones ready to be used.
> Turn on the TV or read a newspaper to see how much crime ...
Amazingly on TV in Europe (watching 3 countries) I see how many women are killed by their partners (nicely born here), how politicians are (occasionally, mostly rarely) arrested for building mobster like organizations, how large enterprises (own by locals) avoid paying taxes.
The poor don't resort to violence? I wonder what blessed country are you in for the poor to afford to be nice. 30 years ago in the quite poor Eastern Europe (now part of EU, not that poor anymore) there was direct violence (sure, not concentrated like a terrorist attack) like mugging or rapes or just people beating others on the street because they "did not like how you look". All that without immigrants. So yeah, kind of hard for me to blame so much immigrants for all the violence.
And on that, 70s and 80s the was perfectly calm no? No terrorist attack IRA, ETA (found easy a reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ETA_attacks - 829 deaths), Italian mob and the like were "freedom fighters" probably...
I am definitely not for completely open borders. And immigration should be controlled. And some people should be deported. I just do not think it is the "largest" problem that it is presented, and I find discussing it avoiding other thorny, complex issues (energy, climate, education, etc.).
>To be honest immigration happened forever because people look for a better place to live.
I'd also want to go to SV, California, NY, Portland, etc as a better place to live, yet I need to do it legally, which I can't because of how hard getting a US work visa is, so I won't. Migration to the EU should be the same. Only accept people with a legal visa and nobody else. You're not entitled to be allowed to come in any country you want just because you want a better place to live. Those who do think otherwise, please open the doors of your house to everyone who wants to come in for a better place to live and take them in.
> The able, hard working and entrepreneurial ones bring a lot to the countries they immigrate to.
From various statistics from various EU governments you can look up, about half the migrants that they get via the open borders system are either unemployed or a general net negative to society, consuming more from the state via welfare than they contributor back via taxes. And that's when you don't even consider per capita crimes where migrants from some nations are overrepresented in jails per capita.
So how many are "hard working entrepreneurial ones" is the EU actually getting and does that offset the societal and lives lost due to migrant crime and terror attacks?
"Sure, your daughter doesn't feel safe alone at night and your wife got run over by a truck attacker, but just think of the GDP growth due to all the entrepreneurs that came with them"
Certain parts of the UK is using that exact same approach it seems like. They are gaslighting there own populace by bringing in immigrants to take over work that is being stalled by protests and the only people that are noticing are the people that are the activists.
>Especially if member States doesn't increase budgets for handling said immigrants
You don't need more budget for migrants, but less budgets for migrants, removing the welfare incentive so they stop coming.
Just be Like Singapore. They don't have a migration problem. It is really that simple. Stop funding NGOs that treat your welfare state like a charity for the entire planet to come and feast one. This is not part of the social contract of the welfare state, nor is it economically sustainable long term.
>Aren't we as a western society responsible for the destruction and destabiliztion of the eastern countries?
Who is this "WE" here? My and many countries in the EU didn't do anything to destabilize the word stage so don't try to pin this "original sin" on me and us. If some EU nations have some guilt they wish to wash due to their colonial past, it should be their consequences alone, but please don't drag everyone down with your sucidian empathy because this is how you guarantee the rise of the far right and how you destroy Europe.
They have a functioning society. And quite a high GDP.
You know, not all dictatorships are inherently bad. Look at the Gulf states: they have a high number of immigrants, but at the same time they don't have Germany's or France's problems. You do something there, you're jailed and after you finish your sentence you're on the first plane out. No drama, no years long court fights etc.
They are to blame because they allow people to cross their borders illegally. And in Spain's case, they're looking at giving them citizenship. And then they complain about crime.
> After all, why does immigration even happen in the first place? Aren't we as a western society responsible for the destruction and destabiliztion of the eastern countries?
1. My country never colonized any other part if the world.
2. This does not mean that say Germany or France must import millions of “migrants” because their ancestors made some terrible choices in the past.
3. If they want to import “migrants”, they should screen them and only import highly skilled to extrenely skilled ones.
