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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • Well, maybe not useful to you. But to hackers, which at the government level are military, it can be very useful. They can use AI to exploit a publically disclosed exploit faster than people can patch thier systems. That can give one country access to the sensitive data of a different government. And of course, hacking utilities and infrastructure can give one country a lot of power over another. Why do you think a Russia is working to enable itself to isolate it’s internet from the rest of the world. Can’t hack what you can’t connect to. And of course, it doesn’t even have to matter if it is useful, as long as the governments of the world think they can’t let other governments get ahead of them.






  • Yes, but… what makes 18 a magic number. Brain development doesn’t finish until a person’s 20’s. Feels like there should be more categories. Prepubescent, during puberty, post puberty, full adult. This would clearly fall in the post puberty range. In that range, some consideration should be made for the extra impulsivness and bad decision making. But showing a history, kinda dulls that defense. I think straight up jail is probably only retribution serving in the case of non adults. But confinement with a heavy dose of rehabilitation seems reasonable. Until rehabilitated, he should not be free to reoffend. The public should be protected. And probation only until 19 is absurd. Should be more like 25, when brain development most likely is done, and he can be assessed for the likelyhood to reoffend. The point of the system should be to protect the public and rehabilitate the offender so that the public no longer needs protection from them. The current sentence doesn’t do either. The “aggressive” schedule of therapy just means it happens over a short period of time. Very few things work better that way. Therapy certainly isn’t one of them.





  • The issue is… how do you accurately determine the poverty line without just taking some number and multiplying it. Because not only do costs vary by location, so does their ratio. So you really need a set of costs per location added together, then averaged based on the density of population in the area the costs were pulled from. And of course at that point the finaly number is probably true nowhere. So what is the use of it anyway. Each specific area needs it’s own poverty line. The smaller the area the more useful and accurate the number will be. But you can’t just say “fine, we will do it by zipcode”. Because zipcodes have significant variation of sizes. It needs to be done intelligently and constantly as things shift. So in the end, there simply is no reasonably accurate poverty line unless a human calculates it for a specific address.




  • On the visa and Mastercard thing I very much agree. In theory they are a business, and can chose who to do business with. But the free market pressures don’t exist to impact the decisions they make. So instead of them being influenced by customer sentiment, they are actually influenced by large organization with an agenda. That agenda is usually just a BS reason to build the organization and make specific people rich. It doesn’t represent the will of the people. So… they should be treated more like a utility. Places are refusing to take cash these days, so it is an easy argument that they function like a utility.


  • Interesting point. But in general, who are the people complaining in the wrong spot. I suspect people basically are complaining in thier echo chambers… social media. And likely noone cares. But then the media jumps in and picks it up. So is the media to blame? I read a story about a lady in Britain I think who had like 89 followers and made a statement. It went viral. Suddenly her statement to her echo chamber was in the news. It ruined her life actually.
    So are we saying the media should be banned on reporting what is said inside echo chambers, or are we saying public posting of opinions should be banned?