Police could switch to using VIN for tracking of warrants and such, which can be obtained after a car is pulled over.
Modern technology allows for every citizen to be tracked more comprehensively than the most wanted mob bosses or suspected soviet spies just a few decades ago.
Or simply outlaw the mass collection and sale or sharing of the data. We already outlaw sharing copies of music or movies, so I don't want to hear any complaints about enforcement- sure there'd still be some data floating around from random photos with a car in the background, but you wouldn't have repo tow truck drivers scanning 20,000 license plates a night or cameras in parking lots and such.
Peter Attia is a graduate of Stanford medical school and spent 5 years in surgical residency at Johns Hopkins, and his podcast is largely using his expertise to give context to recently published research. His opinions are always pretty directly linked to peer reviewed research and he updates his stances as new research becomes available and explains why (eg, his shift away from fasting).
He really shouldn't be lumped in with the general "health and fitness Youtubers".
Often, there's a recruiter or HR person (or piece of software) that's doing an initial screening against those "requirements" though, often with zero understanding or context.
Recruiters hiring for a Java role will pass on a candidate with 10 years of C# experience, or other similar tech-stack-swapping scenarios where the skill set is 95% transferable because they don't know anything about the actual technologies or understand the work.
And of course, the lack of honest feedback makes the whole system inscrutable. Did you get ghosted because the job was fake? Because your resume lacked some key words? Because they had a referral? Because they preferred more diverse applicants? Because they never even looked at your resume? Because you have too many years of experience? Too few? Who knows!
As a non-aphantasia person, this just seems like a really, really bad "test".
Famously, there's a psychology experiment where a person in a gorilla costume walks through the middle of a scene and beats their chest before walking off the other side of the screen, but people who've been given a challenge of tracking a ball being passed around will completely miss the gorilla. They'll laugh in shock on watching the same video a second time, amazed that they didn't "see" the gorilla on first viewing when their attention was on the ball.
In your simple test, focus is going to be drawn to other components - "fast", "zipping" and "windy" make me pay attention to the curves of the road, the wheels, the trees or cliffs causing the road to wind. The color of the car is irrelevant, so I don't pay attention to it.
I can't tell you what color the car was, but when I watched the gorilla video (without knowing in advance about it) I didn't know a gorilla had walked through the video either.
I believe both that aphantasia may be a real thing, and that the vast majority of discussion about it online is plagued by so much imprecision and variety in use of language that it can be hard to say how many people who think they may have it, actually do.
Consider attempts in this very thread to compare conscious visualization to visualization in dreaming. Someone who isn't in a critical frame of mind or doesn't know about the limitations of vision in dreams and how our brains trick us about dream-sight (or the fairly different limitations of real vision and how our brains also trick us about that, as you mention) may follow a train of thought like, "well, I 'see' just fine in dreams, and my conscious 'mind's eye' is very similar to that, so sure, by the transitive property, I can 'see' about as well when I visualize as I actually see things with my real eyes"
Me, I go "well dream vision for approximately everyone is total shit but with a layer of trickery on top, and my 'inner eye' is similar to that except with the trickery dialed way down so I can tell where the seams are and if I try I can be aware of when I've just invented some detail that was 'always there' but actually wasn't a moment earlier and I can tell that I'm not actually seeing with my eyes (unlike a dream, where I think I'm 'seeing'), so yeah those two are pretty close for me, and the ways in which they differ are basically just how much my brain's lying to me so arguably aren't 'real' differences anyway, but both are entirely unlike actually seeing, so no, I don't 'see' when I visualize the same way as I 'see' with my eyes, though it is close to how I 'see' in a dream except I'm less-fooled about how bad it is"
... and I propose that these two responses could come from people with identical actual capacity for mental visualization.
When one of the former meet the latter, it might end in the latter thinking they have aphantasia or at least lean farther that direction, without any difference in their actual experience of or capacity for visualization.
....
I've seen a supposed set of autism test questions (I don't know if they're really used in autism diagnostics) that include something like "would you rather go to a party, or stay home and read a book?" and supposedly the "autistic" indicator is asking follow up questions or excessive hesitation. Meanwhile I'm very sure you could find people who instantly answered "go to a party" but actually choose that far less often when presented with the real choice involving those two things (necessarily with a lot more details and context filled in). I don't think they're lying or deceiving themselves! I think they're regarding the question very differently from how some others do. I think something similar is going on here, with two "tribes" with different perspectives on the question itself trying to communicate and talking right past one another, leading to much confusion.
(Meanwhile, I do think it's entirely possible aphantasia is real, I just also strongly suspect a lot of the people who've been led, by online discussion, to believe they're far from the median in this regard, actually aren't)
As mentioned elsewhere, researchers have done brain scans while asking people to imagine something, and for the majority of people the visual cortex lights up, but for a small number of people the visual parts of the brain are not so active.
This is very much a real thing, but largely goes unnoticed because it doesn’t really affect anything, except for people going about their lives thinking that the word ‘visualise’ is a metaphor.
You might want to read up on how interactions between police and various groups in the US tend to go. Sending the cops after someone is always going to be dangerous and often harmful.
If the suicidal person is female, white and sitting in a nice house in the suburbs, they'll likely survive with just a slightly traumatizing experience.
If the suicidal person is male, black or has any appearance of being lower class, the police are likely to treat them as a threat, and they're more likely to be assaulted, arrested, harassed or killed than they are to receive helpful medical treatment.
If I'm ever in a near-suicidal state, I hope no one calls the cops on me, that's a worst nightmare situation.
As a naturally curious person, who reads a lot and looks up a lot of things, I've learned to be cautious when talking to regular people.
While considering buying a house I did extensive research about fires. To do my job, I often read about computer security, data exfiltration, hackers and ransomware.
If I watch a WWI documentary, I'll end up reading about mustard gas and trench foot and how to aim artillery afterwards. If I read a sci-fi novel about a lab leak virus, I'll end up researching how real virus safety works and about bioterrorism. If I listen to a podcast about psychedelic-assisted therapy, I'll end up researching how drugs work and how they were discovered.
If I'm ever accused of a crime, of almost any variety or circumstance, I'm sure that prosecutors would be able to find suspicious searches related to it in my history. And then leaked out to the press or mentioned to the jury as just a vague "suspect had searches related to..."
The average juror, or the average person who's just scrolling past a headline, could pretty trivially be convinced that my search history is nefarious for almost any accusation.
Sometimes you are better off not invoking your right to a jury trial because if there is straight up evidence in your favor, it's easier to get a jury to ignore that for emotional bullshit than a judge.
DAs for bigger departments are likely well equipped, well trained, and well practiced at tugging on the heartstrings of average juries, which are not average people, because jury selection is often a bad system.
I'd imagine for most of us, our professional lives are less interesting to the general public than other things.
If I were writing about my life, there'd be roughly a single line saying "I worked in tech, which gave me the disposable income and free time to ..." and then a description of all the things I've done which are actually interesting, unique or worth sharing for the sake of advice. If I waste my final days talking about my jobs, that's a clear sign that my mind is already gone.
There are probably some HN users who are working as research scientists on clean energy or vaccines, or at Doctors without Borders or similar, who have interesting things to say about their career. For 99% of us though, we sat at a computer and did meaningless drudgery in exchange for a paycheck.
+1. I have no career achievements worth including in an obituary. My life will be measured, hopefully, by the help I was able to provide others with the output of the meaningless work, and those I was lucky enough to connect with during our shared journey on the timeline.
> they are free to do anything and everything they like with their lawns
In this case, what they're doing is clearly going beyond their lawn and negatively impacting you.
It's weird to suggest that "spraying poison on your neighbors" is deemed acceptable, as long as you're standing on your own property when you do it. If they were standing on their lawn throwing rocks at your apple trees, or shooting a gun at your apples, we wouldn't say they're free to do whatever they like. Heck, we don't even let people play loud music if it disturbs their neighbors.
We really need to update our mental models of harm and violence to account for modern possibilities. We should treat harm from pollution exactly as seriously as we treat harm from projectiles. Dying from cancer from your neighbors incidental pollution is just as bad as dying from a bullet from your neighbors errant gunshot.
In the earlier post about apple trees, I'm assuming what they mean is that the neighbors have decimated the local pollinators so their trees are not fruiting. It is still frustrating, even if they are not having direct exposure to the poison.
I'm actually back in the same California neighborhood I grew up in, which has adjoining open space. In the 50 years of cumulative time my parents or I have been there, we've never needed exterminators. At most, a can of ant spray from the supermarket was sufficient to treat around a door or window in a problematic season. I'm talking about such events once every 5-10 years. Meanwhile, exterminator vans are seen in the neighborhood quite frequently. I think some folks just see a bug, absolutely freak out, and want to nuke it all from orbit.
I think it's nearly a mental illness, how people want to detach from the natural world. As if their self-image is not that of a complex animal but of some sort of sterile abstraction.
> Sometimes, communities are angry landowners hosting infrastructure will be paid, but neighbours and those further afield may not
Hilarious.
When a fossil fuel company started fracking near me, not only did I not get paid, but I also got poisoned tap water that's no longer safe to drink, earthquakes, and subsidence cracking roads and house foundations.
The double-standards are appalling. I'd rather have a solar farm or wind turbine next-door than be within 500 miles of a fracking operation or coal mine.
> it’s generally accepted that requiring some level of skin in the game from those that benefit does a decent job of doing this
"Generally accepted" by who? Based on what?
Sometimes the reactions on this site are silly. We're talking about community college here. The people going to community college are trying to transition their life from minimum wage retail job to useful careers as things like dental hygienists, nurses, IT workers and daycare workers.
Their own increased future earnings will offset the subsidies through higher taxes and reduced burden on social services, and everyone in society benefits by having people in the types of jobs that community colleges prepare students for.
Community colleges are just a massive benefit to society at large, regardless of whether you're leftwing, rightwing, rich, poor, young or old. Literally everyone is benefiting here.
Off the top of my head, so may not align exactly with formal definitions, but economics is the study of allocation of resources and how incentives play a large role in how human behavior is influenced by those incentives. I prefer Sowell for a primer but if he’s not to your liking try google, keywords economic incentives and resource allocation.
i have plenty of personal experience with community colleges and those close to me have gone from penniless immigrant to making more than the average tech bro because they attended one while working full time, and paying full tuition without aid. what kept them going was a reasonable roi . the i was their investment of hard earned dollars that they used to pay for their tuition and gave them the incentive to stay in. they had skin in the game so they endured. getting something for free doesn’t instill any obligation, and that’s a common lived experience.
But using student debt, as an incentive to study hard, as justification that debt is good, is bit of a stretch.
There are plenty of students that do well without pressure.
Programs that are trying to pull in people on the fence will inevitably have some that don't make it, the goal is for a net positive. If local employers have 1 extra qualified employee at the cost of 2 or 3 that don't make it, it still balances out. The state is out the money for a few tuitions for students that didn't make it, but the lifetime earnings of the one that made it is greater.
Police could switch to using VIN for tracking of warrants and such, which can be obtained after a car is pulled over.
Modern technology allows for every citizen to be tracked more comprehensively than the most wanted mob bosses or suspected soviet spies just a few decades ago.
Or simply outlaw the mass collection and sale or sharing of the data. We already outlaw sharing copies of music or movies, so I don't want to hear any complaints about enforcement- sure there'd still be some data floating around from random photos with a car in the background, but you wouldn't have repo tow truck drivers scanning 20,000 license plates a night or cameras in parking lots and such.