So you basically want to make it illegal to offer AI products (and search engines too), without including a human in the loop that will verify every line of output for scams (and not miss a single one)?
> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?
Yes, you should be disallowed. Otherwise every online store will upcharge you based on IP. There can be exceptions for small businesses or individuals, but that's it.
The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary.
Homicide rates may be under-reported for political reasons.
Homicides are also a fraction of violent crime, let alone all crime.
Also, SK suicide rate is like 70% higher than US, and 50x their homicide rate; as a collectivist culture, it's not unthinkable to suspect that some of the people who would have been murdered in other countries are just shamed into taking themselves out instead.
And, FWIW, SK's 25+0.5 per 100k suicide/homicide rate eclipses America's 15+5 (roughly). If you don't want to die a violent death at the hands of a human being, the US is safer than SK.
> The reliability of underlying national murder rate data may vary. Homicide rates may be under-reported for political reasons.
The reliability of incarceration data can also vary, but you didn't dismiss that. In fact, all data is unreliable, so should we just give up on comparisons entirely? Unless you have a specific reason to think US/SK numbers are wrong (and by how much - we're not giving up on comparisons over 1-10% errors, when the difference is 10x), what you've done is provided a fully generic counterargument: "well data isn't perfect, therefore I am right and you are wrong."
> Homicides are also a fraction of violent crime, let alone all crime.
Typical feigned intellectual helplessness. Knowing nothing else, if the homicide rate is 2x higher, the most reasonable extrapolation is that violent crime in general is also 2x higher. And we use homicide because it's harder to fudge - if I used crime in general, your complaint would have been over-policing or different definitions instead.
You presented the data as authoritative when it's clearly not, by the admission of its own compilers. This is a simple thing to disclose if you're certain that the portions your argument relies on are sound. Burden of proof lies with you.
>, if the homicide rate is 2x higher, the most reasonable extrapolation is that violent crime in general is also 2x higher.
Not at all. Different societies have different net values (e.g., violence as a political tool or as a means to some economic end) which will influence the deadliness of violence. So will the nature of the weapons that are available. It's reasonable to expect a trend, but lockstep is unreasonable, and you always have to question if perhaps the situation is unintuitive and higher homicide rates don't go hand-in-hand with higher crime rates for a particular example.
>How is suicide relevant to the incarceration rate?
It isn't, but the incarceration rate was put forward to advance an argument about the relative virtue (and implicitly the relative safety and suitability for a dignified living) of American and SK societies. Suicide rate is relevant. Do you want to make it to your next birthday or not?
> And nationally, schools in predominantly nonwhite districts receive $23 billion less in annual funding than their heavily white counterparts, according to a 2019 analysis by EdBuild [0].
As is typical for the NYT, their articles include carefully constructed misinformation. The methodology for that analysis [1] has two serious issues.
First, they don't include federal funding, which in 2023 was $120 billion [3], eclipsing the funding disparity. The Title I federal funding budget for 2026, which is specifically for low-income schools, is set to be $63 billion [3], all excluded from this analysis.
Second, "All of the revenue figures presented are cost-adjusted to convert per-pupil revenues into figures that account for variation in the purchasing power of a dollar across different regions." So because more whites live in the middle of nowhere where rent is cheap because nobody wants to go there and there are no economic opportunities, academics launder that into "higher PPP-adjusted school funding".
Correct for those, and you find that "on average, both Black and Latinx total per pupil expenditures exceed White total per pupil expenditures by $229.53 and $126.15, respectively. This is anticipated due to the strong relationship between race and poverty and the increased federal funding targeted toward students in districts with concentrated poverty." [4]
Finally, it should be noted that the US spends a lot per pupil - in PPP, according to the OECD, the US was #4 in the world in 2023 (year the data is from, not when the article as published) [5]. No matter how you slice it, you can't blame funding for poor school quality. Where "school quality" is usually a sneaky term to say student outcomes, as if swapping the students between two schools (all the students), you'd expect the students swapped to the "good" school to suddenly start performing, and the students in the "bad" school to have their grades tank and develop discipline problems.
Not that I ever expected the NYT to include such context with their misinformation.
I'm less interested in the quantity, and more in the content of those packets. Do they contain my GPS movement history? A list of installed and opened apps? My contacts list, messaging text log, and list of visited websites?
The data I really care about protecting would fit into a few kilobytes, so knowing the phone sends, for example, a minuscule 2 MB/day, brings me no comfort.
You still want to know the extent of that 'moderation' that is totally not censorship. E.g. Facebook and Instagram ban white nationalism, and Youtube has banned American Renaissance, meaning we can infer Google bans white nationalism too, as American Renaissance is guilty of nothing else.
You may agree or disagree with the ban, but surely you agree that we should be aware of such Overton window enforcement?
The most pervasive censorship is who and what social media companies decide to block or suppress. Even in places like China. It's deliberately harder to measure, but any censorship measurement that omits it is like measuring war casualties, but ignoring those on the front lines.
Not to minimize the impact of social media censorship, but one should really live in a country like Iran to grasp what pervasive censorship is. Most people born and raised in the relative freedoms provided in modern democratic systems have no clue what it feels like when you have such dictatorships. I say this because, looking at the current trends, we _could be_ heading in that direction, and the comparison is apt.
I'm curious what trends you see towards censorship?
Elon presumably being an exemplar for current trends: Twitter is unarguably far less censored than it was before (though censorship is still present). And Meta took note and also turned down its censorship significantly in response.
The Epstein files, while far less than hoped for by many, are another example of a trend towards sharing far more sensitive info than has been typical by past administrations.
There are many good examples you could point to of increased authoritarianism, but censorship in particular seems to be on the backswing, if anything.
Edit: oof, it's extremely concerning that the comment below was flagged
Multiple jurisdictions have tried to play the stupid games of "we'll make a dumb fuck law that creates problems for you, the website operator, and if you don't conform, we'll sinkhole you at ISP level". Platforms like Xitter and Telegram being the common early targets.
The "age verification" push is a big move in that direction in Western countries. "Think of the children" is an evergreen excuse for authoritarian measures.
It’s too soon for such a conclusion IMO. The pervasive Iran-like censorship I was talking about will rear its ugly head when those authoritarian regimes are established. It’s a tool and I can assure you it will be used extensively. This is nothing new really.
P.S. the Epstein files were just a cruel joke! I wouldn’t list it there.
There’s nothing simple about authoritarian control.
Who says we have less censorship? Sure people can tweet all kind of stuff without getting banned. Fine, but at the same time US president is removing news networks he doesn’t like from press briefings. That’s just one example. To say the censorship is in decline is baffling.
>Twitter is unarguably far less censored than it was before (though censorship is still present). And Meta took note and also turned down its censorship significantly in response.
A publisher making editorial decisions is not censorship. You have no right to demand Twitter publish your speech. If you don't like their editorial policies, you are free to go elsewhere. You are not prevented from speaking or even prevented from reaching an audience. None of these platforms is a monopoly.
For my money, I would prefer to hang out somewhere where people don't openly celebrate the murder of my family. Would you deny me that right? If so, you are not on the side of freedom. I don't object to the existence of forums like /pol/ or today's Twitter; if you object to the existence of moderated forums like Twitter in its prime then you are the one restricting speech.
Today, we see flagrant examples of the literal government literally prohibiting people from speaking their minds. Literal masked thugs with literal guns are literally grabbing people off the streets. This is censorship like the Soviets did it.
Twitter has certainly relaxed its policies on racism and violence in recent years, and perhaps you think that's a good thing. But point out that they're paying Nazis to post about their hatred of Jews (an undisputed fact even if you object to the framing) and they'll file SLAPP suits to try to bankrupt you. They very much go in for censorship (the real kind, backed up by guys with guns) when it benefits them.
> A publisher making editorial decisions is not censorship.
Are you really going to conflate publishing with operating a social media platform? Regardless, if those editorial decisions are meant to suppress a viewpoint, it is censorship - government censorship is only one kind.
> You have no right to demand Twitter publish your speech.
Nobody argued that what social media do is illegal, only that it counts as censorship.
> A publisher making editorial decisions is not censorship. You have no right to compel other people to publish your speech. If you don't like Twitter's editorial policies, you are free to go elsewhere
When a social media deletes users posts because they cross a political line, it may not be government censorship, but it's very obviously still censorship.
It's very hard to take opinions like yours seriously because I know exactly how you'd react if all your HN posts were deleted because you're calling people "Nazis"
I exclusively use websites that "censor" their users. Millions upon millions of people are with me on this. Would you deny us our right to organize as we please?
>It's very hard to take opinions like yours seriously because I know exactly how you'd react if all your HN posts were deleted because you're calling people "Nazis"
If you deny that there are literal and unabashed Nazis on Twitter these days, you are wrong. I am not using the term as a pejorative; I am using it as a straightforward descriptor for people who post pictures of swastikas and SS officers, start their posts with "Hitler was right", have "1488" in their bios, and write my name (((like this))) every damn time. These sorts of people would not be offended by being called Nazis and are not shy about their desire to see me gassed to death. Twitter paid them to say these things and then tried to censor people who criticized them for it, and that's a fact.
> Would you deny us our right to organize as we please?
So you must really hate laws like the Online Safety Act and the Digital Services Act, that force platforms to censor vaguely-defined hate-speech, without a court order, or face ruinous fines. Literal government censorship, men with guns forcing private companies to silence citizens, denying you the right to organize as you please.
I mean, I assume you hate them. Based on your complaints about government interfering with individuals organizing as they please, you should hate them, but then you speak as if those laws don't exist, and you praise as exemplars of free speech and free association the very services those laws forces to censor. Maybe you just didn't know about them? And now that you do, you're going to protest these laws as fervently as you're protesting the other violations of free speech you mentioned in your posts?
> You don't know what it feels like not because you're so free, but because you agree with the ruling regime on what it considers the most important questions.
We don’t know what it feels like because we collectively participate and decide what should be considered and what not _periodically_ and it’s possible to change it, evidently, with various degrees and velocity by voting.
> I would much prefer the dictatorship-style censorship, because our censorship is far, far more effective.
Case in point!
I’ve lived under both and can guarantee you don’t know what that dictatorship you so much yearn for has in their bag for you until it’s too late.
I guess he is not yearning for dictatorship, the style of censorship is the question. Preventing access to information is bad, but likely less harmful than deception.
Its true, all usually highly conplex world events are dumbed down to an insanely infantile level that carefully omits anything that may poorly reflect on corporate interests.
Also obvious is that all news is made in a short list of countries. Everywhere else the best you can hope for are terrible events.
You will only get opinions from a small list of talking heads.
One might imagine populating the media with nothing but professors. Each field has new stuff every week. In stead you get Adam Savage. The name isn't by acident.
Not a single one of my examples was committed by the government (except if you count funding Carnegie Mellon and MIT). But even in cases when they are, voting rarely helps: https://www.woes.blog/p/tgr-democracy
> you don’t know what that dictatorship you so much yearn for
Re-read my sentence. I don't yearn for a dictatorship, I yearn to blunt and make obvious the current secret, subtle censorship regime.
I repeat - you agree with the regime. You're floating in the river, letting it carry you where it pleases, while telling those swimming upstream that there is no current, nothing to struggle against.
Edit as reply because "posting too fast":
> How did all of these social media companies made a 180 suddenly after power shifts in Washington?
None of the racist or right-wing or white nationalist subreddits got unbanned, American Renaissance is still banned off Facebook and Youtube, Facebook still explicitly bans white nationalism, and other social media ban it implicitly as "hate speech", TikTok bans "white lives matter" [1], and promised to ban even more [2] (under Trump's 1st term), while wikipedia doesn't even bother to mention that as censorship [3]. All of this is still the case under the current Washington. The only exception is Twitter, after Musk bought it - there, American Renaissance got unbanned.
And a 180 would imply that these things are not only unbanned, but their opponents are banned.
So if you're going to just make stuff up, i.e. lie, then I won't waste my time with you.
> In an honest discussion there's an assumption that the other person won't straight up lie to me so if someone shows me ten examples for why my argument is wrong I may be inclined to believe them.
Careful. Someone sufficiently knowledgeable can cherry-pick enough examples to convince you, without lying. They could even be unaware of what they're doing, and the cherry-picking was done by their teachers, or their teacher's teachers.
> However, across the entire policy, FAQs, and changelogs, there is not a single mention of silently packaging and uploading entire workspaces and full Git histories.
So this is criminal hacking, right? It will be prosecuted as criminal hacking? Not in civil court, but criminal court. Because if not... then are we totally done pretending, and we're just openly admitting that computer security law only applies to individuals, and corporations are exempt?
