It is incredibly contentious on whether or not illumination does anything here - perception is not necessarily reality. Lots of studies show zero impact on crime, some show significant.
But even if it is true and we do need light, it does need to be stark white LEDs shining with huge intensity while unshielded.
Shielding prevents light from going directly into useless places for your purpose (e.g. up into the air, when you are trying to secure the parking lot or road or whatever) and polluting things. Not using bright white LEDs helps reduce the spectrum usage and also is just better for human night vision on top of being better for light pollution.
If an area is not basically universally lit, using stark bright lights to light what you can see actually reduces the amount you can see at night in total - those dark spots that under better (not brighter!) lighting would be able for you to look into and see end up becoming too dark because your eyes have had to adjust to expose for much brighter lighting.
So even if the premise is true - and it might not be - there are still huge huge huge improvements to be made on how it is implemented in most of the world.
I wish there were completely dark places outside of my city that were easy drives. It takes me about 2 hours to get to a b3. b1 is about 9, with a decent amount of speeding. And the difference between the two is massive.
If you go talk to professional astronomers about this, they're pretty practical, and thankfully, they can be. The single biggest improvement we can make is shielding the directionality of the lights - and not using harsh bright white lights. Thankfully, doing both of these actually improves the usability for the lights for their intended purposes.
Down at the Macdonald Observatory in Ft. Davis they have worked with surrounding cities, industrial compounds, etc., to get light pollution down. I was watching a presentation they gave on the subject and a large industrial complex moved from fairly un-targeted bright white floodlights to the more yellow/amber lights that shielded upwards reflection - the peak brightness was lower, but it covered things much more evenly, didn't impact your night vision as much when working in it, which then kept darker spots from being pitch black holes like they were with the bright white floodlights. They improved safety for their workers - measurably! - and significantly reduced the amount of light being polluted back up into the sky.
And no, the loss of dark skies is a real issue. The article points out multiple issues not even related to human enjoyment of dark skies, but literally impacting our ecosystems. These are real and measured and not debated. If you are going to accuse this of being clickbait, perhaps engage with the actual points in the article and point out how they aren't actually of concern and why?
It is certainly enjoying collaborating with the clouds to prevent me from finishing up all of my hours of OIII integration for my WR-134 project. If the combo between it and the clouds keeps up, I might have to wait until next year to finish it, lol.
This simply isn't true. I do astrophotography, including traveling to dark skies so I can do wideband and not just narrowband. Plenty on the narrowband captures at home in b9 skies, too.
The long exposures pick up far more of them than I can see why my eyes, but I still end up seeing plenty of starlink satellites just looking up, even at 2 or 3 in the morning.
Some googling indicates that they're high enough that light refracting across the atmosphere will still hit them, and yeah, the moon, and also just some reflections from earth and airglow.
I've not done any real research here - it didn't seem odd to me that I could see them, so I haven't done any investigation at all here until these comments.
What do you mean you don't get to question how fair the elections are? The sitting president of the entire country has questioned and investigated them. No one has stopped questioning and investigating them. People literally stormed the capital over it and had effectively zero real long term consequences in the overwhelming majority of cases. Dozens and dozens of lawsuits, none of which amounted to anything, even when they were in front of Trump appointee judges.
The precedent, if anything, is that we will tolerate people upending the whole public discourse and portions of the government for years over nonsense that never had any evidence of anything occurring on a level that would impact the elections.
Meanwhile, Trump has spent the entire administration trying to restrict the ability for demographics that won't vote for him from being able to vote. Openly. Sometimes honestly, but mostly also blaming all of it on the election he lost and claiming it's to stop the voter fraud that never actually occurred.
The precedent that was set is that questioning the election can become dogma for a political party no matter if there is absolutely zero evidence of what they are saying happened.
If it frees humans up to pursue whatever we desire instead of having to work to generate more value for someone else than myself, then I'm happy.
Now obviously, hell is more likely than a utopia, but this is the sort of advancement that would be required for us to reach that point. Something has to do the work.
Obviously there were plays from the dotcom era that just were not going to work on the timeframes expected because the rest of the infrastructure also hadn't caught up - not just internet, but shipping in general took a long time to catch up, and Amazon having to basically build their own logistics empire shows that ecommerce just wasn't going to be able to be The Thing at the speed those investments required.
But let's say you invested in the NASDAQ at it's peak during the bubble - late 2010s you're whole, inflation adjusted. Obviously, not ideal, but a decade and a half isn't the worst turnaround to make your money back if you just sit. Lots of trades that have gone far, far, far worse.
Smartphones overtook regular cell phones ~2013-2014 as the majority of owned cell phones in the US.
But the NASDAQ started on clear trajectory up and up since 08, several years before smartphones became big.
Smartphones accelerated it, but obviously the internet was going to keep growing and growing and everyone could see where it was heading well before smartphones. A huge amount of the value generated by the internet is on the business side. The amount of productivity from making it basically frictionless to collaborate from anywhere in the world is hard to understate.
Because rent is expensive and options are limited, we've promoted the sigma grindset culture to an insane degree, and people like to cluster together socially, especially when doing something that scares them, like trying to launch a startup. Save on money, be around people experiencing the same things you are, potentially be able to collaborate if you end up working on the same thing, etc.
... but yes it's still weird from an objective standpoint and only makes sense when you insert yourself into the bizzaro world bubble of SV.
Yes. This idea that there's some third option, where you just uh.... spend all your life grinding hard to someday maybe make it big while sacrificing all of the other stuff you might otherwise enjoy in life. Because, you know, you're some third other option that doesn't care about the stuff alpha and beta males care about.
But sexual assault is the one area that is almost always taking two parties at their word, and very very frequently, the only court is the court of public opinion. That makes it rife for abuse in both directions - people doing it believing they'll get away with it because it comes down to their word vs. someone else's if it ever even comes out, since so few people go to the police, and people know they can lob an accusation out there and do a lot of damage without having to prove anything.
I think the former happens far far more than the latter, but I'm also not going to wonder why people discuss the latter - it's real, and it happens. People discuss getting attacked by sharks whenever sharks come up, too, even though that's almost certainly not going to be something they need to worry about, either.
This sort of list is exactly the sort of place where those false accusations can be really easily inserted with minimal vetting. I'd also bet it is an almost entirely accurate list.
I'm not able to view the video, but based on the description, I don't know that it's relevant - I'm not claiming testimony isn't evidence, because it very clearly is?
My comment is almost entirely about the court of public opinion side of things, though, not what happens in the courts themselves - because the topic is about a list as an alternative to the prosecution of these people.
These things can all be true, sure. What’s also true is what the GP points out: the only time the preemptive doubt rolls out is for accusations of sexual impropriety, which can’t be disentangled from the fact that most accusations against the powerful of sexual impropriety come from women.
And given how abysmally low the rate of false allegations is maybe we should all do a bit better and stop running interference for our oligarch class, especially since sexual impropriety seems to be how they operate in a lot of domains, not just with adult women.
> These things can all be true, sure. What’s also true is what the GP points out: the only time the preemptive doubt rolls out is for accusations of sexual impropriety, which can’t be disentangled from the fact that most accusations against the powerful of sexual impropriety come from women.
Sure. But there's a variety of tones discussing this - there are some that are quite expressly political in nature of a certain bent, and those I would be skeptical of. There's more than one comment in here that gives me the ick. But that's not everyone, and lumping them in together isn't productive.
> And given how abysmally low the rate of false allegations is maybe we should all do a bit better and stop running interference for our oligarch class, especially since sexual impropriety seems to be how they operate in a lot of domains, not just with adult women.
How low do you think the rate is? Because its' hard to pin down, but ~10% seems to be a pretty defensible number based on the data we do have. That's definitely a minority, but 10% is enough that I am going to consider it every time. If 1 out of 10 times I lit my stove it would explode if not examined, I am still checking my stove every single time I use it.
I don't disagree that we have a lot of sick fuck oligarchs. I don't disagree that sexual assault is one of the things the ultra rich and powerful turn to for a variety of reasons.
But a rational position is a rational position. I'm not going to abandon it because some people will misuse it to cast aspersions on people. I don't think women are inherently more moral than men, and we have many many many examples of men using deception to harm others for their own advantage. I don't think women are incapable of doing the same.
I would also never suggest that the default is to assume every accusation is a lie. My general assumption is that any given accusation is probably true, but that if you're going to have an opinion on which way the outcome is, it's best to have as informed of an opinion as you can, rather than just assuming anything one way or the other. And in a court of law, presumed innocent, because that's a whole different thing than public opinion.
I mean you’ll never fully remove politics from the powerful conceptually, it’s just not possible, they’re too close to the levers of power. That said I think it’s a cop out of sorts to say because people “have political opinions” about the subject of an SA accusation that that would necessarily bias judgement. The real problem is the lack of investigative resources for these accusations, which itself leads to lists like these being published: when people can’t seek justice from the justice system they will do so in other ways.
We’ve had the Epstein lists for how long now? And how many on it have seen justice?
I mean, I'd argue that one party pretty expressly wants to protect the interests of these people. Largely the one that has been sitting on the Epstein lists despite campaigning on releasing them. Meanwhile, I can go read hundreds of pages of investigation on Clinton getting a blowjob. And yeah, he's a scumbag for that too, obvious power imbalance, etc., but it's pretty telling what gets released and what doesn't. I'd also argue there's one side that just generally gives less of a fuck about the rights of women.
But yes, if we could actually make going to the police an effective, safe, and as painless as can be process for the victims, it would solve a whole whole lot of this, and we really could go 'well why are you putting it on a list instead of going to the police and getting the scumbag put behind bars,' whereas there's a billion and a half legitimate reasons someone might not want to go to the police today.
But even if it is true and we do need light, it does need to be stark white LEDs shining with huge intensity while unshielded.
Shielding prevents light from going directly into useless places for your purpose (e.g. up into the air, when you are trying to secure the parking lot or road or whatever) and polluting things. Not using bright white LEDs helps reduce the spectrum usage and also is just better for human night vision on top of being better for light pollution.
If an area is not basically universally lit, using stark bright lights to light what you can see actually reduces the amount you can see at night in total - those dark spots that under better (not brighter!) lighting would be able for you to look into and see end up becoming too dark because your eyes have had to adjust to expose for much brighter lighting.
So even if the premise is true - and it might not be - there are still huge huge huge improvements to be made on how it is implemented in most of the world.