Centrist candidate for Governor of California Michael Shellenberger, who has interviewed many addicts on the streets of SF and has a credible plan to address homelessness and open drug abuse:
Are those emergency telephones, or the "press big button, speak into mic" public safety call posts? Can't order a pizza or call a cab on the latter I'm afraid.
>Canada is the U.S.'s neighbour and is probably closer, culturally, than any other nation.
Your point about cultural similarity holds true mainly for descendants of European immigrants. The shared culture here isn't just Marvel movies but values passed down among families from the Old Country like a Christian moral framework, Anglo-American law, the Protestant work ethic, Puritan attidues towards sex, etc. If you break America's homicides down by ethnic category, non-Hispanic whites have a murder rate per 100k of around 2.6 per annum [0]. Canada's murder rate hovers around 1.7. These numbers are roughly comparable, despite the many differences in firearm availability.
America's overall homicide rate is something like 5.7 per 100k per annum. This number is propped up by one ethnic group in particular, Afro-Americans, with a murder rate of over 20 per 100k per annum. This is not just a function of poverty. The white poverty rate is half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of 10. The Asian-American poverty rate is similarly half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of closer to 100 (10x less than that of white Americans).
Telling hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans to disarm themselves because of social, cultural, and economic problems largely confined to a small & largely separate social group is a losing proposition. But asking why that group commits so many murders, even as the first step in bring that number down, is a political third rail too so here we are.
You are dodging the issue with white nationalist talking points. The issue at hand is not the black murder rate. The discussion is should we restrict assault weapons, limit access to who can purchase firearms (via licensing, safety training, etc.), limit ammo capacity, etc in order to reduce mass shootings.
Texas has a strong gun culture, Christian culture, NRA approved and funded government, extremely lax gun control, concealed carry, and children are still dying needlessly. Texas removed firearm permit requirements last year making it easier to obtain assault weapons.
Australia undertook strict gun control measures nationwide and essentially eliminated mass shooting deaths.
Australians also got forcefully corraled into Covid-19 camps as a result of having no means to protect themselves against a tyrannical government.
You seem to misunderstand the situation here. Guns are not and will not ever be going anywhere. Mass shootings can be prevented, and the solution has nothing to do with gun control.
Dismissing what people living in Oakland, southeast D.C., and the north side of Milwaukee know from frequent painful experience to be true as "white nationalist talking points" says more about your views than it does mine. Try following crime reporters on Twitter for a few weeks, like D.C. Realtime News. It's a constant march of death in these troubled communities, almost entirely bubbled up and separate from the rest of America. You won't get it until you really dive into it. Then you'll wonder why the people who purport to care for black lives never say a word about it. The victims of this violence wonder that too, out loud and on social media, but not in places most HN users or policymakers try to see.
Backing up, there are two issues here which you're conflating, and which I didn't do a good job of separating: total gun homicides and mass shootings. They intersect but also have differences. I already went deep on total gun homicides. The weird thing about mass shootings is that 70 years ago, gun ownership was more widespread than it is now, yet mass shootings were an extremely rare occurence... until Columbine. Semiautomatic and even fully-automatic weapons were commonly available beginning in the 1920s (remember Al Capone's mob and their Thompson submachine guns? Bonny and Clyde with their BARs?), yet we didn't see this rash of mass shootings until just the last few decades. What happened in the 90s, and how to we fix it?
Side note, and I'm sure it's been covered elsewhere, but 99% of gun deaths in the US do not involve AR-15s or "assault weapons." 97% of all gun deaths are from handguns. Many mass shootings were carried out with handguns; they are deadly, concealable, and potentially also very high-capacity. Personally I support much stricter controls on handgun sales and ownership. I think that would be a reasonable starting point to approach both total gun homicides and mass shootings.
Thank you for honestly stating the issue. Often times I see people get defensive or reactionary and jump to calling racism when simply stating these facts. How on Earth do you expect to solve an issue if you can't even admit it.
Thanks for the positive comment. I sometimes wonder what it feels like to be the parent of a child murdered in these communities, like the moms I see on Twitter occasionally doing anti-violence marches and rallies, and be told that your son or daughter's death is a "white supremacist talking point."
Lots of people in America, including black people, feel uncomfortable around poorer black communities because of the high rate of gun violence. Telling those people they're just uncomfortable because of "internalized white supremacy" or "white nationalist talking points" doesn't convince most and won't make them feel safe. This discomfort is the root of so-called white flight, social distance-keeping, school self-segregation, and other problems. If we fix the problem of gun violence in these communities, tackling other race-related issues gets easier. The first step is talking about it openly and honestly.
>His books all have a scientist doing evil because of their lust for grant money.
How unrealistic. Scientists like Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance would never do anything evil or untoward, such as using grant money to perform dangerous gain-of-function research on coronaviruses, demonstrably lying to the NIH about the scope of this research, and then misleading the public on the COVID-19 lab-origin theory while failing to disclose their financial and professional ties to the lab in question [0][1][2].
Here's how the actual executive order defines "inherently divisive"- seems worth a tip line to me:
>For the purposes of this Executive order “inherently divisive concepts” means advancing any ideas in violation of Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including, but not limited to of the following concepts (i) one race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith is inherently superior to another race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith; (ii) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, is racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously, (iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, (iv) members of one race, ethnicity, sex or faith cannot and should not attempt to treat others as individuals without respect to race, sex or faith, (v) an individual's moral character is inherently determined by his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, (vi) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, ethnicity, sex or faith, (vii) meritocracy or traits, such as a hard work ethic, are racist or sexist or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.
Israel doesn't need Anduril. They have a large domestic drone industry with decades of experience and a strong export sector. Israeli drones gave Azerbaijan a decisive edge in that country's recent armed conflict with Armenia. By some estimates, Israel is the world's largest exporter of military drones:
And me being in electronics industry, working on 5 drone projects so far, with one more fixed wing in making.
These are exactly same parts of heli drone sold by one the biggest RC toy makers in China — Fly Wing (also apparently some cooler looking SAB, and MKS parts) lobotomised, and wrapped in a sci-fi looking sheet metal skin.
Young developers often propose large-scale rewrites with little sense of the costs or risks involved. Changing old code often has unintended side-effects.
In what regard is Skyrim's gameplay emergent, aside from the OP link's fox example?
As I understand it, Radiant AI is a framework for fixed and relatively simple finite state machines, with states like "use the anvil at the blacksmith's shop during working hours" or "drink in the tavern at 9 PM." Don't get me wrong, it's leaps and bounds beyond the NPC AI found in earlier games, but it's far from the emergent craziness you'll see in a sandbox game like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. Dynamic behaviors like the one you mentioned are still all essentially scripted interactions. Dialogue, the core interaction between the player and most NPCs, is still 100% scripted conversation trees. The most interesting emergent events I remember from Skyrim (or Oblivion) were funny glitches like this one:
I'd also like to hear the GP commentor's reply re: emergent gameplay in Morrowind. I haven't played that game as much as the others, and don't have enough in-game experience to comment.
I would not call any behavior in Skyrim emergent either, hence my use of the word "dynamic". I am a big fan of Dwarf Fortress, in fact I spent most of today so far playing it with my son, so I know the difference.
But when most people say emergent it is often simply dynamic systems or context sensitive scripts they mean, so I assumed that was likely what they meant.
Skyrim has a number of these: NPCs you've charmed can leave you inheritance if they die, inns and shops can change owners in similar fashion, some scripted events like towns being captured in the civil war cause officials to be killed or exiled and replaced, ...
I wanted to know if there was more of that type of dynamic world behaviour to Morrowind than I could remember.
At least in the US, military officers don't make a lot of money relative to similar positions in private industry. Their total compensation is often underestimated as it includes healthcare for life, a housing stipend while on active duty, and a pension in retirement, but you might make more as an entry-level software developer than e.g. an Army colonel with 20+ years of service:
The real money in the military-industrial complex is made by defense contractors, spefically the executives and shareholders of companies like Raytheon, BAE, and Lockheed Martin. Corruption in the upper echelons of US military itself, while far from unheard of, is vigorously investigated and prosecuted by bodies like NCIS. "Fat Leonard"-scale scandals do happen, but are rare:
There's plenty of taxpayer money distrbuted to various military actors overtly and as bribes. To see who gets the most benefits you'd have to wait and see who steps in when US government looses ability to tax people or tries to enact something that reduces money stream into military complex significantly.
It's way more educational to look at countries where it already happened at least once.
Sometimes military removes government, sometimes it sides with government and kills enough people to quench the unrest.
The military in the US is a great opportunity for young people (just out of high school) who can't afford college. They identify and promote talent. I know several ex Army guys who served and they are top notch people to work with. The Army paid for them to get masters and phd degrees. They also turned them into great managers who get things done. If you are young and poor but have ambition and drive, the US Army is a great choice.
I also admire the overall benefits program. Great health care, pensions and perks such as USAA memberships are really valuable. So it's difficult to put a number on their total compensation. It's much more than it seems and passes down (somewhat) to future generations. For example, my children can be USAA members because my father was in the Army in Vietnam (50 years ago).
https://www.shellenbergerforgovernor.com/issues/homelessness...