quiet_NaN
10d ago
I am not sure that government providing long detailed lists of how to do security is going to help anyone.
My solution would be to simply make vendors liable for damages caused by security flaws of their devices, up to say 10 times the sticker price. Or impose a fine per vulnerable unit per day. An authentication bypass for a cloud-enabled webcam might cost 10% per day it is known for an exploit which allows recording if the fact that the camera is recording is visible from an LED, or 30% if the camera-on LED can be bypassed.
In Germany, the BSI is a federal agency tasked with enhancing computer security (except for when they are tasked with breaking computer security). The gist I get from German IT blogger fefe is that most of their security recommendations serve more to cover the backside of the company than actually prevent incidents. 'We were running two different anti-virus programs plus a Cisco Firewall, and our Windows+ActiveDirectory network was still compromised by ransomware. This simply shows the immense criminal energy of our attackers, we are the victims here!"
Again, laws should not try to specify the process, they should specify the outcomes. In this case, minimizing the time a device is exploitable.
Ensure software integrity
In practice, this will mean Tivotization. Personally, I am following the philosophy of "if you did not install the operating system, it is not your device". Owning a mobile phone is a lot of hassle. First you pick a vendor which supports OEM unlocks at all, then you find out that their dreadful unlocking process does not actually work, send the phone back, order a phone from a different vendor, request the unlock code, wait a week and finally unlock it. Give me a PC with a legacy boot option or a RasPi any day instead.
On the other hand, if it is no longer possible to sell Rasbian in the UK, I will consider that a win. "Let us just put a default user+password usable via fucking ssh on the image, YOLO" is so far from any responsible security mindset that I can hardly fathom it.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think that the issue with "unrapeable" is that it is not a tag that was applied to all of the classmates, the implication being 'the primary thing that keeps us from raping people (apart from strategic concerns regarding law enforcement) is people being ugly'.
If the boys had rated their classmates on a scale of one to ten, this would still be in poor taste imho (as it would be if the genders were reversed, like in that South Park episode), but probably not make national news.
Also, the one-dimensional scale of female attractiveness is certainly an oversimplification. Looking at porn categories, I think it is safe to say that while there is a common axis of attractiveness, there is is also a lot of variation in preference among men.
Finally, your physical attractiveness should mostly matter in so far as your goal is to bang all your classmates or find a partner who prefers a high status mate to underline their own status among their peers, neither of which sound like very worthwhile goals.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
If the weather seemed especially treif/haram this weekend, it is probably due to all these flying pigs. The guardian published an article on antisemitism in the US student protests which actually tries to be somewhat balanced.
They acknowledge that there have been unambiguous incidents of antisemitism.
Then there are gems like this:
“There is a distinction between being unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. It’s very notable to see the discourse around this issue because the right in this country that’s been talking about woke culture, and how young people are snowflakes, are suddenly adopting this narrative around safety, which is really a narrative around comfort,” he said.
“People do not have a right to feel comfortable in their ideas. This is a university. This is a place to challenge people’s ideas. Discomfort is not the same thing as danger.”
Of course, if issue one is "a work of literature containing rape" and issue two is "an Israeli student encountering protesters who say stuff like 'Zionists don’t deserve to live', I have my own ideas which of these I would classify as "making one feel uncomfortable" versus "making one feel genuinely unsafe".
Even so, Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish American political scientist who is a strong critic of Israel, advised the protesters to reconsider the use of slogans that can be used against them. Finkelstein went to Columbia to praise the students for raising public consciousness about the Palestinian cause but he advised them “to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message”.
[...]
Once Finkelstein has finished speaking, a protester took the microphone and led a chant of “from the river to the sea”.
I think that this illustrates nicely how most of the protesters are in it for the signaling value. This is not uncommon, after all, many things we do are mostly for the signaling value. My own position that Israel should do more to minimize civilian casualties while they crush Hamas is probably something a majority of US voters could get behind, but boy is it lackluster from a signaling point of view. A student protester expressing this opinion would not get any respect for their bravery from their peers. On the other hand, calling for an intifada might be utterly devastating to the aims of the protests, but it will earn the one expressing it a lot of respect for being so brave and likely get them laid.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
crushedoranges wants to imply that men are mostly picking women for their physical characteristics.
I think that while physical attraction governs who men might want to have sex with, there might be other considerations for long term relationships. At least some men would prefer a spouse who shares their interests, views et cetera, and having a similar degree of education might serve as a proxy for those.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The whole point of a queue is to facilitate quick embarking. Queuing on the wrong stop seems counter-productive in that regard.
Of course, betting that the queue is wrong about where the front door by a meter and starting a new queue on that spot is probably not very English. (Ideally, there would be marks on the floor where the queue ought to start.) But if there are two bus stops, it is reasonable to assume that the other queue wants to get on a different bus. In that case, starting a queue for your own bus stop seems ok.
Of course, we Germans don't queue for the bus. To get us to stand next to strangers, we would require greater rewards than simply slightly more efficiency when entering the bus.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The issue with lithium ion batteries is that they contain rather a lot of energy. I would always prefer to use a prebuilt charging circuit rather than relying on building my own, just like I try to avoid building anything complicated which directly interfaces with mains power.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The problem is that almost anything which would be widely useful can already be found for less than you would pay for the parts on aliexpress, and will likely offer better battery life and miniaturization. Especially the latter is a big deal for wearables -- while you can certainly use an ESP32, a EKG chip and some flash memory to build a two channel 24/7 Holter EKG, it will certainly not have the neat chest strap form factor but something much bulkier. Also, most of your students probably don't require an EKG in any case.
Home automation is one area where DIY can thrive, especially for cloud-skeptics like me who don't like to surrender control to Amazon or Google. Devices there can often be mains-powered and a bit larger. Commercial products often are not very great on generic interfaces and instead prefer for you to download the app and use their cloud.
All of the devices which I have build which ended up being useful are for very specific things in the lab. A tester to check if there are sixteen diodes connected to specific pins of a DSub25 connector is not exactly an item you require in every household.
I personally would not worry if student electronics projects end up in some drawer. It is the same with most smaller student software projects. Nobody would want to hang whatever pictures I was forced to draw in high school on their walls, and most student essays don't enter the canon either.
Regarding buying electronic components, I have found it really helpful to have the backing of a corporation or institution. Most of the electronics vendors like farnell, mouser, digikey, buerklin really don't like to do business with private individuals. This means that for plenty of chips there is not even a good way to buy them at all on your own. When purchasing through an institution, I can get the products from at least two of these vendors within a week or so. Of course, if you want really exotic sensors you might have to buy directly from the producer, but the palette they offer is rather large.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Personally, I did have parents who would would probably have talked me out of philosophy or medieval German. But with STEM, the assumption is that you find a job other than taxi driver. Physics is kind of good because it keeps your options open between software development, labwork and a zillion other occupations. If anything, I might have spent more time thinking about the if, why, what field and what school regarding a PhD. I am still okay with how it is likely to work out, though.
Regarding housing, I know of few tenants who spent more food/eating out than on rent. Typically, the rent is more than half of your paycheck. Again, in Germany, most of jobs (in, say, IT) and most of the infrastructure are in the big cities, where housing is crazy expensive. For people living in the big metropolitan areas the decision 'let us have three kids' would necessitate finding another job somewhere else where rents are cheaper, dropping out of their social circle and all that.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Regarding not having a plan for a career, I have to say this was always the case for me. I am finished school because it seemed the default thing to do, then studied physics because I thought it was interesting (and to keep my options open with regard to kinds of jobs), then went for a PhD. Me being in Europe, living a modest life-style and being supported by my parents meant that I came out without debt at least. I am not sure if I would have been more careful about my career choices if I felt that I was less employable.
--
Another thing which you touch is that it takes money to raise kids, especially if one wants more than one kid, at least by contemporary Western expectations (i.e. one room per teenager). Typically, there are places which have affordable rents and places which have jobs. In previous centuries, a husband in his twenties could start working and earn enough to feed his family and eventually even buy a house. Today, plenty of people feel they need two post-grad incomes to even consider kids, and few have delusions of being able to afford to own a house from the money they will ever make.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
Antisemitism has less to do with people not liking jews and more to do with people being annoyed with things jews do. Pogroms weren't caused by abstract hate of jews, it was caused by people being fed up with how the jews were behaving. The best thing jews could do would be to stop provoking people around them and stirring up conflicts.
So I take it that in your view, the Holocaust was because all these evil Polish Jews were meddling in German politics.
I hate to break it to you, but Jews do not act as a coherent group. If you find Jews on two sides of an issue, that is not because they decided to infiltrate both sides, but because they genuinely believe in different things. In any somewhat meritocratic system, some Jews will likely come out in the top 1%. Some Jews will be doctors, lawyers and so on. Some will be intellectuals all over the political spectrum, from the fringe left to conservatives (if the Nazis and their ilk were not rabidly antisemitic, I am sure that some Jews would have joined them as well). A lot of them will have perfectly normal middle class jobs. Of course, some of the rich ones will throw their money around trying to influence politics. Or commit sex crimes. Good thing gentile industrialists never do that!
For Germany 1933, antisemitism was the placebo therapy. Plenty of poor people found capitalism wanting and were disillusioned with democracy. Rather than waiting for a communist revolution (which would have been terrible for other reasons), gentile industrialists were funding Hitler. There were Jewish bankers and industrialists, and the Nazis managed to convince enough of the population that rather than the Jewish banker and the gentile banker being the problem (as the commies would see it), or unbridled capitalism being the problem, the Jewish banker and the Jewish barber were the problem.
host population
That phrase is Problematic.
Charitably, you want to suggest that the Jews are guests to the host population. This is wrong, Jews are members of their nation states as much as anyone. German and French Jews both did their share of foolish dying at Verdun, same as any other Germans and French did. Some US Jews lived there back before it was independent. The trope of the faithless, nationless Jew is from old European antisemitism. In reality, it was the other way round: whenever a monarch was feeling particularly Christian, they would banish all the Jews from their realm.
Of course, less charitably, you know exactly what phrasing you are using and the word opposite to the host is "parasite", which is also an old antisemitic trope.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
I think it is uncontroversial that societies at similar tech levels can have vastly different amounts of inequality.
There is inequality ("oppression" in modern parlance) both in ancient fucking Sparta and modern day Sweden, but the amount of inequality matters.
Despite coming from the traditional left, I believe some inequality is actually beneficial: if Elon Musk collected the same UBI as everyone, this would not make the world a worse place (except for Twitter, perhaps). On the flip side, taking the land away from aristocrats and redistributing it to the peasants may likewise stimulate the economy as well as lowering the Gini coefficient.
Who is on top and who on the bottom only matters to me as far as their economic policy might differ due to their background.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper
While I do not think that ASI in this century is overly likely, I do not think that the present AI boom is over. It could be that we will look back on 2024 in a decade deep in the next AI winter and say "this was peak AI, we tried for a few years to throw more hardware at the LLMs had little to show for it with exponentially increasing costs"
But even then, the equilibrium with today's AI technology will transform our work lives at least as much as the digital revolution. Looking at security cameras and seeing if something bad is going on was a job, or at least a huge part of a job. Driving a truck for hours along the highway was a job. Converting a text to bullet points and back was a job. Making thematically appropriate illustrations to text-heavy articles was a job. Writing articles based on a press release was a job.
It used to be, human brains had cornered the market on general purpose neural networks. If it was to complicated to train a dog to do it (which would be another human job) you used a human.
AI does not have to become a better writer than Scott Alexander or a better narrator than Eneasz or a good programmer to put a good portion out of the population out of a job.
Perhaps we will find other niches because we have greater adaptability (i.e. require far less training) and have good manual dexterity and tend not to freak customers out. Or perhaps we will simply not return to the state where the vast majority of the adult population works. In which case governments may decide to pay people off to keep them from burning all the robots. Post-scarcity is a scale, and from the viewpoint of history we are already moving along that scale, even if we do not have a free Mars rocket for everyone and may never have.
And with regard to the paperclip maximizer, I feel it is premature to declare victory. If neural networks ever reach the same level of maturity as plumbing, where the pipes are generally the same way they were four decades ago, then you can tell us doomers that we should calm down because obviously nothing is going to happen any time soon.
quiet_NaN
21d ago
I would argue that being a serf was better than being a slave, but only marginally. Yes, you could not be sold away from the land, or be fed to the dogs without any pretense of justice, but mostly your lord captured all of the surplus and you survived on his whim.
So I would argue that your lord being your brother in Christ did gain you something as compared to your lord being a a warrior god who taught might makes right.
I concede that the Roman Empire was probably more unequal, though. For northern Europe, being a slave to some Germanic tribe was shittier than being a serf in the medieval age. But I would argue that the former societies were not very rich to begin with, so the from a Gini coefficient point of view the middle ages were probably worse.
quiet_NaN
21d ago
Many also claim that Christianity was created by Jews to control Whites.
How would that even work? The Jews (who back then would not have been under any genetic pressure to be cleverer than similar societies) develop Psychohistory a la Asimov around 100-30 BCE, see that they will eventually annoy their eventual Roman occupiers enough that they will destroy the Second Temple, and while they can not prevent that (e.g. by trying to rebel less against Roman rule) because reasons (???), they can at least sow the seeds of their revenge. They create Christianity as a memetic superweapon and task their Agent Jesus with spreading it. For three centuries Christianity survives in the underground before finally Constantine converts (exactly as planned!), leading (as per a straw-Gibbon) to the inevitable decline and fall. (Ok, East Rome managed to hang on a bit longer despite being 'handicapped' by Christianity. And the slave mindset of Christianity did not prevent Europe to colonize most of the world. Details, details.)
Of course, in this silly fantasy history the target of the memetic weapon would still be the Roman Empire, not the descendants of various Mediterranean and barbarian states who would eventually self-identify as Whites. To get to that point one would have to go totally batshit crazy with the plot. Like "Evil reptiloid aliens give the Jews time travel technology" or something.
quiet_NaN
22d ago
I can not help but notice that the first people who substantially increased the number of non-white, non-native humans in the US were the slave owners. Some flavors of Christianity played a substantial role in the abolition, but few people today would say "having a non-white population is fine as long as you don't treat them as human beings", so blaming the abolitionists is rightfully not done.
Christianity is not a religion tied to a specific ethnic group. Any human can become a Christian, and at least at that point hope to be treated by other Christians as a human being.
This is not to say that Christianity demands equality. Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history. The serf and the lord might or might not be equal before God in some abstract way, but if God made the world so unequal then the serf should accept his lot. Given that Christianity is compatible with inequality in general, I think it is equally compatible with racial inequality specifically. I mean, the slave owners were Christians of some flavor.
I think the case is similar with Islam, which is also open to all humans. While it has certainly endorsed societies which were very unequal along racial and other lines, you can say that it is not intrinsically racist.
Judaism for example is designed as a religion for one ethnicity. The conversion process seems more like an add-on, fundamentally it is not about converting other humans.
I don't really know about Hinduism, but given that you are already stuck with your caste for life (afaik), I do not think that there is much emphasis on a process to adopt heathens into one of the castes.
quiet_NaN
22d ago
I was speaking generally. I feel that (would-be) genociders such as Hamas come as close as you can get to being hostis humani generis without leaving dry land.
But not all non-state actors who ever take up arms against a country are that evil. For example, I do not think that the US civil war would have been improved if the North had decided that since the South represented no state they recognized, they were free to kill Confederate soldiers like dogs in the street. Or if the Brits had adopted that stance with regard to the US during the war of independence.
So a stance of "well, these gunmen are not representing a nation state, no reason to give quarter to them" would have predictably bad outcomes whenever you are not fighting Hamas or the like.
quiet_NaN
22d ago
From the other discussion, I nominate "free will".
Intellectually, I know that human minds are messy things partly driven by drives hard-wired by evolution plus perhaps a bit of capacity to rationally consider hypotheticals and pick an option based on that in a very imperfect manner.
Yet when interacting with others, it is a very convenient frame of reference to assume that Bob was free to pick any option when he punched you instead of modelling him deterministically.
quiet_NaN
22d ago
Do you have an experiment to determine if an individual exhibits free will as opposed to just making decisions based on its incentive landscape plus perhaps internal sources of randomness?
If humans have free will, do dogs too? LLMs? Frogs? Insects? A ball travelling through a Galton board?
How is free will compatible with a physics world view? The old "brain as a quantum computer" number? Does that mean that other quantum systems whose state we do not know would also exhibit free will? Or are the responses of our neurons remote controlled from our souls?
quiet_NaN
23d ago
it’s unclear whether executing enemy combatants would even be a war crime in this case, since Hamas does not follow the rules of war, does not wear uniforms and so on, so their fighters can’t be considered legitimate PoWs but instead partisans, who are allowed to be executed.
The US position from the the GWB era is of course that these would be unlawful enemy combatants who could be subject to torture without any violations of international law. I do not share this position (because I detest torture), but emotionally I would have no problem with any Gazans found carrying a firearm or explosive device being presumed partisans and getting a short court-martial followed by a long drop.
Intellectually, I recognize that executing your opponents at will because they are not uniformed soldiers of a recognized nation state might not be a good policy because one man's terrorist is another one's freedom fighter, and having certain humanitarian standards makes conflicts with non-state actors less gruesome. Then again, being a partisan has always had its perils, not matter if you were fighting Nazi occupation in France or for a communist revolution in Latin America.
Still, as far as armed opponents are concerned, my preferred frame of reference is to see the Gaza war as a police action against especially murderous bandits in a border region which is not a matter for international law. If any country wants to make it a matter of international law, I would encourage them to ship grant their passports and uniforms to Hamas.
The only options are to do nothing, to ethnically cleanse Gaza (politically impossible), to pummel them into submission to the extent they don’t rebel again (almost impossible in the Middle East where birthrates are high and these kinds of blood feuds last millennia) or to do as much damage to military infrastructure and kill as many fighters as you can and then leave, which is what Israel is doing now.
My frustration is that that I do not see any winnable end game in that strategy. A majority of Gazans seem to be happy with Hamas. Kill 90% of their fighters and they will just come back in a decade.
One thing would be to invite an international peace keeping force. But even if you find any countries outside Iran who would be willing to participate, this would mostly bring in a lot of weapons while at the same time limiting the tactical options of IDF to respond to future attacks on Israel.
Or they could try a carrot and stick approach. Split Gaza into ten zones separated by borders. Able-bodied men are restricted from passing between zones, while everyone else can move freely around unless they are carrying goods. Each zone gets assigned a cooperation level. At cooperation level zero you only let the goods in which humanitarian law absolutely requires. Water pipes can be turned into rockets, Rebar makes for makeshift weapons, so you get to live in tents and carry your water. That is the stick. Any zones which manage not to shoot rockets at Israel, rats out Hamas fighters to the IDF and elect a leadership which does not want to drown the Jews in the sea moves up on the cooperation level. They get more privileges. Houses out of concrete, zone transition privileges for able-bodied men, shorter waiting times at checkpoints, vehicles, work permits for Israel, ultimately perhaps an Israeli passport (with limited franchise if you want to preserve the Jewish ethno-state, whatever), or broader rights of self-determination. That is the carrot.
Perhaps seed one zone by requiring any able-bodied man wanting to enter to publicly renounce Hamas in a way which will get him on their kill-list. Or with known IDF collaborators.
My theory is that given the choice of maintaining eternal animosity towards Israel and living in a country which is not a total third world shithole, most people might eventually relent on their Antisemitism. As you pointed out, the 20% Arab Israeli mostly manage to suppress any urges they might have to slaughter their Jewish neighbors and instead enjoy a life as second-class citizens in a country which offers an amazing quality of life compared to its neighbors.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
The media is solidly pro Israel as is the entire foreign policy establishment.
Do you count the Guardian as part of the media? That was the second most prominently placed story at the time I read it, if I recall correctly.
What about the German Sueddeutsche Zeitung, which reports roughly the same (even if I get a bit more of a balanced vibe from them as opposed to the Guardian)? I did not cherry-pick here, this was really the first source I checked (after stumbling over it on the Guardian, which I read for the math puzzles or something).
If I go to the NYT, paywall aside, or CNN, or BBC or god-help-me Fox-News, is your prediction that I will only will not have reported it because of their 'blind support for Israel'?
quiet_NaN
23d ago
I am as anti-Hamas as they come, but the moment the IDF goes full Einsatzgruppen on Gaze (like Hamas did on Israel), my sympathy level for the Israeli state will drop to similar levels as I have for Hamas.
If the government of Israel had wanted to genocide Gaza, the 'best' option would have been to turn it into a radioactive parking lot on Oct 7. It is not a 'great' option, there is a reasonable chance that the US would stay out of it if Iran attacked in retaliation (which it might), and wiping out a population with nukes might be harder than it sounds.
Of course, me-the-non-genocidal-voter would also be furious about that. I would probably support withdrawing all Western military aid until such a time as Israel has sent every singe person involved with the nuking decision to stand trial in the Hague and their military forces being put under the command of a less genocidal country which allows a Palestinian state in the West Banks, but I generally do not support genociding populations as reprisals for government action, which would be the long term outcome if Western support was just withdrawn.
From a would-be genociders frame of mind, it is always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. If Hamas had killed their victims at a rate of 100 per week instead of most in a single day (which is not a realistic hypothetical for military reasons), I would basically have supported whatever it takes to stop the killing. In our world where their victims were already dead, fighting Hamas is still paramount, but not especially urgent. A slow genocide by IDF through mass executions would not be strategically sound for similar reasons: the backslash will stop the act long before you manage to murder a non-trivial amount of the population.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Another day, another Guardian article.
Palestinian civil defence teams began exhuming bodies from a mass grave outside the Nasser hospital complex in Khan Younis last week after Israeli troops withdrew. A total of 310 bodies have been found in the last week, including 35 in the past day, Palestinian officials have said.
“We feel the need to raise the alarm because clearly there have been multiple bodies discovered,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokesperson for the UN high commissioner for human rights.
“Some of them had their hands tied, which of course indicates serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and these need to be subjected to further investigations,” she said.
[...] Medics working for Doctors Without Borders described how Israeli forces attacked Nasser hospital in late January before withdrawing a month later, leaving the facility unable to function.
I have no doubt that the IDF commits some human rights violations. But if the UN high commissioner for human rights is disturbed about reports of mass graves, the subtext to me is "this is another Srebrenica". And I am rather sure that Israel does not systematically carry out mass shootings of prisoners. The optics would just be terrible, and in the age where everyone has a phone with a FullHD camera and some fraction of IDF soldiers presumably do not want to see every last Palestinian dead, the inevitable backslash would negate a thousandfold any perceived strategic advantage by reducing the population of their enemy. Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
From reading the executive summary from MSF, you would think that Hamas is a collective hallucination of the IDF, who find it necessary to lay siege to a hospital instead of just walking in to the front door and asking if it would be possible to search the basement for the existence of any secret tunnels really quick before moving on, looking for further windmills to tilt against.
Mithridacy is the art of misdirecting by omission without telling outright lies, and of seeing through them by noticing what is only implied instead of stated outright. If there was not a single armed Palestinian on hospital grounds, that would strengthen the story by making the IDF attack on the hospital a war crime. The fact that MSF does not claim that explicitly makes it unlikely to be true. While artillery shelling always carries the risk of collateral damage, snipers generally see whom they kill. If IDF snipers were systematically targeting civilians (doctors, elderly, kids, etc), that would be outrageous and well worth mentioning. The fact that the article does not mention that suggests that at least the primary victims of the snipers might have been some of the hypothetical Hamas fighters in the hospital.
Likewise, if the bodies in the mass grave all featured gunshot wounds to vital areas, which would be a clear indication of mass executions, you can bet that both the "Palestinian civil defense teams" (I am always amazed at the level of benevolence Hamas has shown in handing key functions of the Gazan government to decent people instead of consolidating all of the power in their own hands ) and the Guardian would go out of their way to tell you about it. So the fact that they do not mention it is somewhat strong evidence that it is not the case.
Also:
[...] Shamdasani said her office was working on corroborating Palestinian officials’ reports that hundreds of bodies had been found at the site.
So she has confirmed that there have been "multiple bodies" discovered, and also that some of them had their hands tied, but is still hedging on the total number of bodies claimed by Ham^H^H^HPalestinian officials? I would assume that if you have a trusted source in Gaza, you could confirm the latter quickly enough.
Also, I do not think that Hamas would lie about that. The Health Ministry numbers may be exaggerated, but they should certainly be able to find 310 bodies to put into that mass grave they discovered after two months. Or perhaps they legitimately found them and someone buried them afer the Nasser fighting.
More broadly, I wonder about the long term strategy of Israel. Assuming that Nasser was an important point of access for the Hamas tunnel system, they went in, smashed it, and left again? Why not occupy it long term, turning Gaza into an open air prison in earnest, with checkpoints and curfews, eventually establishing an alternative structure of government? Gaza is not exactly Afghanistan in size, after all. Going in, kicking Hamas a bit and then have them disperse hidden among the civilian refugees seems like it would cause a lot of civilian hardship without accomplishing the legitimate goal of wiping Hamas from the Earth.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
What I would like to propose is to regulate payment processors in a similar way as ISPs. Either they become common carriers, which means that they are required to do business with any to-their-best-knowledge legal endeavor (and open themselves up to court cases if they refuse) and are shielded from liability, or they remain free to pick their customers and will remain fully liable for any damages causally downstream from their transactions ("What do you mean, you did not know that the car rental agency would lend a car to someone who might run over some kid? You decided to do business with them.")
Of course, this will not happen because the current state of affairs is not an accident. Remember Wikileaks? I am sure that the US government would have loved to lean on the ISPs to get them to voluntarily stop routing to their website. Fortunately for us, this was not a realistic option without causing a big stink. On the other hand, going to the credit card processors and telling them "Did you notice that you are barely making any money from processing transactions with Wikileaks, but on the other hand irritate us quite a lot by it?" was enough to convince them that it was not worth it.
quiet_NaN
24d ago
To be clear - everything I said only proves that even race-blind policies (as opposed to segregation, a different justice system for different races, ethnic cleansing, etc) would be anti-White.
Following your argument about Blacks being more likely to be criminals, I think you misspelled Anti-Non-Black, as these policies would affect Asians, Hispanics and Native Americans just as much.
He's not quite right - as Walt points out, you can't just do race-blindness without addressing the inevitable racial disparity.
I think you can, and in fact the US criminal justice system mostly does, I would argue. There is no affirmative action in prison, where we sentence the odd Asian criminal to terms ten times longer than e.g. a Black criminal so that the incarceration rates of different races match the population rates. Race-blindness is very different from equality of outcomes. This could be due to HBD, or economics (I am sure poor Whites commit more crimes (in prison-years) than rich Whites), or more exposure to lead during childhood or whatever. While left-wing people might argue that some of the disparate incarceration rates are due to selective enforcement of laws based on skin color, I think that this is not the case for more serious crimes like murder. There might be the odd case of a corrupt police department deciding to frame the odd Black gang member for a murder to increase their clearance rates, but the median murderer you find in prison is there because they did indeed commit a murder.
Another aspect which Walt did not mention is if the HBD crime hypothesis is true, then the biggest victim in all of it is the Black community, because the lion's share of crime is intraracial. I am a utilitarian. I do not particularly care for the race of a rape or murder victim. Most Blacks are not criminals, and they do not deserve to be raped or murdered any more than a white person. Hell, not even criminals do deserve to be raped or murdered.
Take trigger-happy police shooting unarmed Black men. Utilitarianism to the rescue again. What we want to minimize is the number of innocent fatalities from both cops and innocent civilians. So we want to adjust police trigger-happiness to the point where the first derivative of the total death with respect to the trigger-happiness is zero.
Let us assume a two person interaction. A cop stops a car with a civilian. He has a certain level of suspicion that the person in the car might shoot him based on heuristics such as race, type of car, neighborhood etc. If he shoots and is wrong, one innocent (the civilian) dies. If he does not shoot and the civilan shoots him, he dies with some probability q because he is wearing a bullet-proof vest. If p is the Bayesian probability that the civilian will try to shoot him, and f(p) is the probability that he shoots first given that evidence, the total amount of innocent lives lost in the interaction is:
T(f, p) = f(p)(1-p)+q(1-f(p))*p
Then the first derivative is dT/df = (1-p)+q*p
If we set this to zero we get the point p=p0 where we are indifferent between the cop shooting and not shooting. (1-p0)+q*p0 = 0 p0=1/(1+q)
The optimal f(p) would thus be a step function which is zero for pp0.
Crucially, p=p0 is the point where a cop is just as likely to die from not shooting first as shooting an innocent civilian. Most innocents die at this point, the case where p is almost zero (a cop stopping a woman who is shopping with some small kids) or almost one (cops stopping the getaway vehicle of a bank robber) are unlikely to result in the deaths of innocents because a cop made the wrong call with regard to shooting.
I also think it is fair to ask that cops should act in a way which protects their lives not more or less than the lives of innocent civilians. (If you don't want to put your life on the line for civilian lives, get job at Walmart.)
Let us stretch our assumptions a bit and assume that p is roughly constant in frequency in that region of death near p0. (This is kind of a big assumption. It may very well turn out that most cops getting killed in traffic stops are getting killed in events where there is no warning sign and p is one in a thousand, far below p0 which is at least 0.5.)
In that world, a well-calibrated police force would carry as many cops shot by Black men as innocent Black men shot by cops to the morgue from traffic stops. It also provides an excellent incentive structure. If you shoot an innocent, the price is not that that you lose your job or spark race riots or anything, but that your police force will be made to behave less trigger-happy to the point where that will kill one of your fellow cops, maintaining the balance.
Under these circumstances, and with the relevant statistics provided by the police department, I as a proud grey tribe utilitarian would be totally fine with innocents of one race or gender getting more frequently shot than a different race or gender, just as I accept the fact that I am more likely to get shot by a cop when I get stopped at 2am in a run-down car in a bad neighborhood than I am if I get stopped at noon in a upper-middle-class car in a rich neighborhood.
Just cap the liability costs at 10x the costs of the device. This should be enough to get vendors to take security seriously without having to worry about black swan outcomes.
Also, a hospital getting attacked by ransomware should obviously not only be liable for the ransom they elected to pay, but be fined on top of that if it turned out that any patient files were accessible to attackers.
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