VecGS
Chaotic good
No bio...
User ID: 599
The issue isn't that race is central to fare evasion, but any difference, or perhaps even more importantly, the perception of differences in the prosecution of fare evasion, will be used to show that this is a racist policy.
I spent around seven years living in Seattle. There are a few gangs in Seattle, generally based in the southern area. As it turns out, most of the participants of the gangs happen to be black. This led to the black gang members being arrested and prosecuted for crimes in a disproportionate way compared to the overall population of the city. Seattle's solution to this was to disband the gang unit.
Seattle Police’s Gang Unit was revised to the Gun Violence Reduction Unit (GVRU) in 2020. GVRU does not actively track gang data within Seattle. GVRU conducts the majority of investigations regarding gun violence, whether or not its gang related. Gang specialist Gabe Morales says several local gangs are still active in Seattle. (https://www.kiro7.com/news/investigates/monday-530-gangs-still-plague-puget-sound-especially-among-teens/57BJEHV4IVA65IT2NHPZYI7LGM/)
The criminal irony of this style of thinking is that the (in the case of Seattle) primarily black gangs tend to commit violence predominantly to the black community itself. By not dealing with the problem of gang violence, the black community is being further set back. It's all in the name of "equity" in terms of punishment since there doesn't happen to be any prominent white gangs.
Now apply the same to fare evasion. The moment you have blacks being arrested for it, even if it is proportional to the population, you'll have the activists protesting that this is racially motivated. The end result is that certain crimes go unpunished -- and once that happens, it's defacto no longer a crime. It gets compounded when the individuals involved know they're not going to be prosecuted so they continue to break the law even more.
VecGS
Chaotic good
1yr ago
My sub $1000 drone (DJI Mini 4 Pro) can fly for over half an hour with the default battery (keeping it under the 250g weight limit where other rules kick in) and around 45 minutes with the slightly heavier battery. It has a range of around 20-30 miles if you maintain line-of-sight.
It's actually rather remarkable how cheap some of this stuff has become.
VecGS
Chaotic good
1yr ago
Absolutely! Anyone can spend their money however they please, and no one has a say in that matter. If I want to fund a study on if meth makes earthworms horny, I should 100% have that right. But insisting that the taxpayer spend that money (in whatever country) is bordering on insane, in my opinion.
VecGS
Chaotic good
1yr ago
Sure, string theory is kind of a gimme.
Other things that I would include for being either dumb or dangerous:
- Cosmological theories that cannot be tested
- Pathogenic gain-of-function research
- All of the *-studies fields where there is a focus on theoretical abstraction that doesn't mesh with reality (and usually is pushing a pre-determined angle to push an ideology anyway)
- Many of the departments focusing on behavioral studies and psychology that are simply publishing gibberish
I would also take a hard look at the publish-or-perish mindset of academia that is leading to the reproducibility crisis in journal submissions across the board.
The last bullet above is a part of this, and I want to elaborate further. This is one of the things where "studies" are being cranked out that don't advance, and in fact pollute and damage the fields. A good example would be Jonathan Pruitt's publications on spider behavior. It also begs the question that even if the spider behavior studies were valid, what useful information would we glean? Similarly, pulled from recent news, why would anyone spend a million dollars on studying if cocaine makes Japanese quail more sexually active?
This doesn't even touch the insane level of administration positions found in academia, which should also be trimmed, but that's not the focus of this thread.
(If you want to watch a longer YouTube about the spider issue, I highly recommend Angela Collier's telling of the tale: https://youtube.com/watch?v=qlas3TOi_CQ. She's a physicist and a great (IMO) storyteller and educator.)
VecGS
Chaotic good
1yr ago
I agree with that. I suppose my snark got out of hand.
Similar arguments can be said for other fields of academia as well. Take theoretical physics, for instance. You have an entire field of research like string theory, which makes few predictions and offers no ways of testing validity. The few predictions they've made have all been proven categorically wrong once we acquired more data. Underlying these styles of "study" seems to be looking for pretty math without considering reality. We're five decades in and nothing of value has come of it. This is similar to folks "studying" multiverses or what happened before the Big Bang.
They've fallen into the same trap as the social studies programs: doing something because it feels good, not because it's productive.
If some of these things were taken out as a degree and perhaps packaged up in a class in the philosophy department, I think people would be a lot happier.
I'm not talking about not doing research and science for the sake of it. But it's important not to mix up things that are real vs. philosophical discussions. Philosophical discussions should certainly happen! Hell, that's most of the reason for this site's existence.
Of course, there are also things like esoteric maths (number theory, graph theory, etc.). They tend not to be very "real," but they do have applicability in things like cryptography, computer science, or related fields. Graduates with those degrees can typically find jobs FWIW.
VecGS
Chaotic good
1yr ago
The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
I'm not sure how this would be possible. The departments are all staffed by True Believers and I would expect not much to really change. The past 40 years of "research" in the field has been concentrated on Critical Theory as a way of advancing their field. Without using that as a crutch, I'm not really sure what even is left. All that would be left is demographic studies that is more statistics than anything, and I don't think you need an department to do that.
Even from an ideological perspective, I'm not sure the field makes sense. What is the point of "Women's Studies" when one can't even pin down what a "woman" is, for instance?
Even more broadly, the underpinnings of Critical Theory assumes that various groups are homogenous and can be talked about in aggregate. This might make sense in large populations. However, much of the *-studies fields then perverts this concept into looking at individuals and tries to apply the same analysis techniques without the law of large numbers coming to its aid. It's a house of cards that is built on something I don't think is even rational to start with. You are left with "research" that is unprovable, unfalsifiable, and based mostly on feels.
VecGS
Chaotic good
1yr ago
The differences between 3.5, 4o, 4o-mini, and o1-preview are pretty amazing. The "poisoned" state is pretty much still there -- the "draw a picture, but make sure there isn't an elephant" problem.
That said, there are ways of getting around this from an API perspective. I was toying with the idea of doing an RPG just for fun. The thing is that you can't have all of this in one giant chat because it will, as you've experienced, go off the rails eventually.
If I got off my butt and did this, the way I perceive as the most likely to succeed is to use it in conjunction with a wrapper to keep memory and a better sense of history. The reason I think this is because the number of tokens used for input (which is the entirety of the chat) is a really inefficient way to capture the state of the game. I think it's similar to running a game yourself. You have the adventure you're playing, and have a couple of pages of notes to keep track of what the players are doing.
The prompt per turn needs to take into account recent history (so things don't seem really disjointed), roughly where you are in the adventure (likely needing some preprocessing to be more efficient), and the equivalent of your pages of high level notes.
Running this with 4o-mini might actually work and be reasonably cheap.
VecGS
Chaotic good
2yr ago
Guilty as charged. I was excitedly a progressive when I moved to Seattle 12 years ago and moving there to be at one of the epicenters was cool. I even donated to Bernie... It turns out that living in a city that is so one-sided in beliefs as well as politics was a real eye-opener. The backlash from when Trump was first elected and doing nothing but just about literally doing the opposite of whatever Trump was for was maddening. You could almost see people ignore their own underlying beliefs to show to their neighbors they aren't Trump supporters.
I left Seattle five years ago as a conservative and moved to a rural outskirt of Nashville. I was equally excited to move this last time.
VecGS
Chaotic good
2yr ago
And cannabis is just a plant you can grow. Easily in fact. It even requires fewer tools and resources than making alcohol.
VecGS
Chaotic good
3yr ago
It's the other way around. Reddit was getting that much directly from me. I paid for Apollo years ago, which was far less than the new charges that Reddit would be charging Christian on an ongoing basis. Overall, his bill would wind up being around $20MM a year based on historical usage. That's far less than the money he's ever made on it.
I was establishing an upper bound for Reddit's average annual customer value.
VecGS
Chaotic good
3yr ago
21 days ago I got this message from Reddit when it auto-renewed my annual subscription:
Hi VecGS,
Thanks for being a Reddit Premium member!
Your yearly Reddit Premium subscription has been successfully renewed and you’ve been charged $29.99 (USD).*
You should expect a fresh delivery of 700 Reddit Coins every month.
If you have any questions about your subscription, feel free to contact us or check out the Reddit Premium FAQs.
Don’t forget, your subscription automatically renews each year. That means you can cancel your subscription at any time from your Subscription Settings. Just make sure you cancel at least 24 hours before your subscription period ends to avoid getting charged for the next year. You won’t be refunded for any remaining time on your subscription.
That $30 per year cost eliminates ads for me. That's around $2.50 a month. That's far smaller than the bill that the Apollo creator would be getting for my usage when I'm on mobile. I'm pretty sure that sets up a very convenient upper bound for what Reddit's costs are. Even with that, I would expect they make a profit on me.
This is nothing but a clear attempt to kill 3rd party apps in my opinion.
The provable lying that the CEO is doing is leaving a very bad taste in my mouth.
I guess it was a good run while it lasted.
I don't disagree. However, I doubt something like this would ever get made while the folks signing the checks are the same people cheering on the DEI, et al. initiatives.
Honestly, I'm hoping there's going to be sea change in the coming years and we get back to something more normal. There are so many changes going on all over the western world with people getting fed up with their governments. Who knows..?
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