> No one is likely to be looking up my license plate and looking at my movements, because I don't do anything that would warrant that kind of attention.
Want to spend an hour on the side of the highway while the police search your vehicle?
Github has been the best example of a brilliant UI, presenting a large database of code for easy browsing and consumption, withoutrequiringjavascript.
That was/is its killer feature. This is what locks me in.
Github has deteriorated since the takeover, to be sure. I would estimate its noscript usability to have regressed from 95% to maybe 80% today. The Ruby-on-Rails backend services have faltered a bit. Markdown files in the repo tree are no longer auto-converted by the server into html, but the main readme still works.
Have you ever visited a Gitlab project with javascript turned off? Worthless!
The timing of this article's publication is provocative, don't you think?
Isn't there a pending Executive Order in the works that would move marijuana from the federal Schedule I list, making it a Schedule III (less restrictions)?
As near to a federal legalization as you can get without rousing rabble to react with a Just Say No!
I would love a peek at the NYT editorial calendar to see when this piece got, um, scheduled. And I wonder what it says about their editiorial intentions.
(As my old buddy Jethro used to sing, I'm just Wondering Aloud.)
I sort of thought that too; we've known it can cause myocarditis for years, it was the basis for people avoiding the mRNA vaccine (i.e. "clot shot"). Still though I'm happy to see people continuing to research this instead of just avoiding politically tense fields all-together
HN automatically redacts what it considers unnecessary words from titles. It doesn't inform you that it's doing so, you're expected to notice and edit the post again if the change is unwarranted. Most people don't, because most people aren't even aware that this "feature" exists.
There were indeed early warning signs that Facebook was shady.
I remember being delighted with FB initially. It was a wonderful way to keep in touch with extended family and wayward friends.
But then I discovered how difficult it was to control my 'timeline/newsfeed' or whatever they called it. There was a small menu attached that allowed you to Sort By Latest or some such... but it wasn't sticky, and so you always had to select it, and it eventually disappeared completely and... you saw what they wanted you to see.
Originally FB would send you an email whenever someone sent you a message on Messenger, and the email contained the contents of the message, so you didn't even need to login to FB, and I enjoyed having that... But that too didn't last long. When they turned that feature off I realized they were all about themselves and their goal of user engagement, and the value-added (for me) dropped to zero.
Sometime after '15 I disengaged. I left the account alive but haven't been on but thrice in 10 years.
I campaigned for a while, within my family and circle of friends, trying to get them to rally around an alternative (I started by offering Slack, feebly) but I was unconvincing and unsuccessful.
I remember the horror of Thanksgiving 2016, as I stood in the living room of my niece's apartment, and pondered the array of five family members before me. Easy chair, couch x 3, easy chair... each of them engrossed by their phones. Nobody was talking, everybody was comfortable, there but also somewhere else.
Law enforcement is mostly mundane repetitive boring work.
It can't be easy sitting alongside a highway for hours on end, waiting for someone to do something that requires your intervention.
Police engage in shared fantasies. Which can lead them to hallucinate. They often end up wanting a crime to be committed just so they can intervene and exercise and validate their skill set.
Civilian behaviors will be observed, recorded, and matched: against a theory of a crime which may or may not have been committed. Depending how bored and unfulfilled the coordinated LEOs are, a dark fantasy of ongoing crime can be enabled, and confirmation bias follows immediately, with every civilian action (or inaction) being re-interpreted through the lens of an understandable rampant LEO desire -- They want so much to catch the bad guys that they will actually manufacture probable cause from stretched whole cloth, so they can believe a crime is in their purview and they're righteously on the case.
Otherwise it can become a really boring gig.
Advances in surveillance technologies and predeterminations of crime probabilities via automated software will only serve to add fuel to the fire of the aggregate LEO imagination.
What we witness here in Texas is the result of a shared fantasy. Remember that shared fantasies become more real the longer they are shared and sustained... even the "trace" amounts of imaginary drugs on which Max the dog alerted become a part of the now-permanent interdiction team's backstory.
This kind of thing is happening all over America, all the time. We face a crisis of fantasy addiction. So many are unhappy with reality that they are constantly fantasizing something better for themselves.
Not to pick on the LEOs, but they are supposed to be the best of us, holding the line, and not compromising their integrity for the transient satisfaction of an imagined felony stop.
>Not to pick on the LEOs, but they are supposed to be the best of us, holding the line, and not compromising their integrity for the transient satisfaction of an imagined felony stop.
I mean for the most part this has never been the case. Cops themselves have not been very far about the criminals they are supposed to stop historically. Almost all improvements in policing have been forced upon LEO from outside organizations.
>is the result of a shared fantasy
One hundred percent. When I was younger I was around LEO quite often and they'd sit around and pass stories back and forth on how bad everyone else is, and how everyone was out to get them. Now they have the internet to sit around and feed each other bullshit, and worse, be propagandized to.
I'm elderly now, but in my distant youth I had many encounters with police officers. Every single one of them was a blessing to me. Of course, I am a white male, and my encounters with police were probably affected by my (traditionally) privileged status.
I do not blame LEOs for the growing encrouchments on my (our) personal liberties. I view them as bona fide public servants, motivated mostly by genuine generosity of spirit, wanting to help people.
But police culture is another matter, and it is the culture than corrupts. Because it is such a boring job (for the most part), management is always seeking new ways to keep their officers engaged, enthused, gratified.
That job, sitting alongside the highway, is less boring if there's an ongoing story that you're part of, a team that you serve, that's counting on you. So you're going to do your part, hold up your end, carry your weight, even if that means you need to do something that makes your conscience go squiggly, it's okay, it's just the compromise expected of a player, taking a little one for the team. That corruption is something that management enables, and wink nod encourages. And management does it, and gets away with continuing to do it, because a large portion of the public are okay with it too.
What are the chances that the next mistaken AI-assisted surveillance conclusion is going to capture you in its crosshairs? It's a small probabilty, right? Just don't drive near the border, don't drop any women off at motels, don't drive I35 in Texas: you'll be okay.
>I'm elderly now, but in my distant youth I had many encounters with police officers.
Was that pre war on drugs or just pre 9/11? Either way that world doesn't exist now.
Yeah, there's workplace dynamics to it and the individuals my not necessarily be bad but but the whole institution is rotten, mostly a reflection of the governments that they serve IMO.
To the average person interaction with the cops represents nothing positive.
LEOs are basically municipal clerks with guns who are expected to also do violence as needed.
IDK why it'd be any surprise when they start acting all capricious like municipal clerks dealing in BS paper pushing issues of no real consequence. "This guy looks sketch, no permit for him."
A big part of the problem here is that they're tasked with enforcing a bunch of what amounts to petty bullshit that only exists to legitimize the state in the eyes of the people who want to see petty enforcement (taillight out, are you f-ing kidding me? A $100k/yr employee doing taillight out stops?).
Like for all their ills you don't hear about "serious police" like swat teams and the like behaving quite so badly so regularly (not that they don't do plenty of bad stuff).
I contend that American Unhappiness is manufactured and sustained by the constant onslaught of misinformation, broadcast by special interest groups, all of whom have it in their general plan to make you feel an unmet need, a base emotional response, a tickle in your amygdla.
Likely, your life is not that bad.
Likely, the fear you feel, waiting for a cab outside your favorite bistro, is a response to programming you ingested from the culture that tries to nurse you into a permanent state of semi-consciousness.
Fear is sensational, a proven sales tool, a political football, click-bait 'journalism'. There are whole armies of professional and amateur fear-mongers out there, who make it their life's mission to plant the seeds of fear into your imagination, to sell you a product, a candidate, a policy.
>> fulfillment requires more than material wealth,
Agreed, but...
>> which in our quest for more stuff, we have forgotten.
Reject the programming. Whether it is fear or desire that the advertisers/liars attempt to trigger in you, recognize the effort aimed at making you feel wants/needs that do not actually do you or our society any good at all, and reject the unhappiness they are trying to program into you.
It is an individual responsibility. An individual has authority over their own emotional states. Defend yourself from the onslaught of lies and liars.
> Society needs to feel safe for people to truly feel happy.
I don't disagree with this. But whose is responsible for 'feelings'?
Yes. The forced two-party system inevitably leads to an us-versus-them mentality. Everything gets divided into Good Things done by Us, and Bad Things done by Them. There's no room for nuance, everything has to be pushed to the extremes in order to get a handful of voters to flip.
In a healthy democracy with at least a handful of political parties the small groups of lunatics aren't going to poison the entire spectrum: they are mostly contained into the tiny extremist parties served by heavily biased extremist media. The vast majority of the population, however, is served by more moderate parties and more neutral media - where misinformation and blatant corruption is heavily frowned upon.
Turns out when people have a genuine alternative, they don't just stick with whatever shit they are trying to pull this time just because "the other guy is even worse".
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