chroma

I wasn't born in the US. I've lived in other countries. There are other disadvantages to places like Europe or Australia (or Japan or China, where I've also spent time) that make the tradeoff not worth it to me. The biggest issue is that you'll always be a foreigner. Even if you jump through the hoops to become a citizen, you won't be accepted the same way that Americans accept immigrants. US conservatives are painted as disliking immigrants, but that's only true for immigrants who don't culturally assimilate. Conservatives have no problem electing immigrants like Winsome Sears, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Young Kim. The mayor of Helena, Montana is a refugee from Liberia. The state with the most foreign-born governors is Georgia. Anyone who claimed that these people aren't "real Americans" would be shunned and shamed across the political spectrum.

There's also the issue of employment and compensation. My skills are worth far less in other countries. I make over $250k/year in compensation, and my taxes are low enough that I've managed to accumulate "fuck you" money before the age of 40. I could retire, but I want to maximize my family's quality of life. It'd also be nice to have an aircraft and a cabin on some land in the middle of nowhere. My chances of accomplishing those goals in another country are much lower. (I'll probably have the cabin in a few years. The aircraft... well, we'll see.)

If I wanted to move to an area with low crime, I could choose from plenty of places in the US. I don't live in those places because, similar to other countries, I'd have to take a massive pay cut. As remote work becomes more commonplace, that could change.

I'm asking for facts. Surely if there are thousands of examples, three exploitative companies shouldn’t be too difficult to find.

I've moved lots of times. In terms of crime, the SF bay area was by far the worst. The Bronx was second-worst, but I hear it's gotten a lot better since I lived there. Portland has gotten pretty bad over the past few years but at least I can legally carry a gun there.

When you're 5'6" and 120lbs, criminals will target you.

You don’t have to execute them, just lock them up until they’re too old to be a threat.

I’ve been a victim of violent crime at least a dozen times in my life. I wasn’t the first victim for any of my attackers. Far from it. And I wasn’t the last. Every single one of them escaped. They probably got caught on some other occasion, and maybe they spent some time in prison for that crime. And then they got out and continued robbing and assaulting innocent people. They’ll keep doing this as long as they are physically able.

I don’t really care what happens to them, because they’re basically constantly-exploding bombs that force the rest of us to pay more in taxes for police, invest in more security systems, avoid certain areas at certain times, and generally worry about safety much more than we otherwise would. Most criminals have been given countless chances to not commit crime, and they keep doing it. The sooner they’re separated from society, the better off we’ll all be.

Ok. If there are thousands, can you give three examples of companies that are designed to profit off of incarcerated individuals rather than rehabilitate them?

Apologies. I read a news article about him being charged with carfentanil possession and assumed the conviction referred to that. Apparently the carfentanil was found in his apartment and he was later caught with the other synthetic opioid.

That’s true of everything in an economy. It’s also true that Norway’s prisons rely on, and provide revenue to, companies specifically designed to profit from the prison population. Is a prison suddenly better if a government worker builds the bars rather than a contractor?

He was convicted of possessing 30 grams of carfentanil while on parole for his previous conviction. A lethal dose of carfentanil is 2mg, so it was at least 15,000 doses.

1. https://www.doj.nh.gov/news/2017/20171011-preston-thorpe-sen...

Recidivism rates are astonishingly high in all countries. Norway has the lowest at 20% within 2 years. The real rate is higher because most crimes aren’t solved. So in the best case, rehabilitation makes someone 300x more likely to commit crime than the average Norwegian.

Cruise has now done over 4 million driverless miles on public roads.[1] That figure doesn’t include miles with safety drivers.

1. https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1690050803283922944

Cruise said they shared all the video from the crash with government agencies including the DMV, and the DMV says Cruise didn't because they managed to get an additional video from another government agency. So how could Cruise be hiding the video if another government agency has it? It seems much more likely that Cruise shared everything and there was some mix-up with the California DMV. I've encountered that situation many times. The most egregious example was them fining me for not paying registration fees on a vehicle I had sold over five years earlier.

I know there's nothing that will ever convince you that autonomous vehicles are safe, but please think about what safe autonomous vehicles would look like if they were rolled out. These sorts of stories get tons of eyeballs, so journalists are trying to find any example of an autonomous system harming people. Even better if you can blame tech companies for being negligent or irresponsible. So every single incident, even if it's caused by a psychopath hit-and-run driver, is blamed on the machine. And every detail is exaggerated and misconstrued to make the machine (and the manufacturer) seem as terrible as possible. So the stories simply don't matter. The figure of merit is fatalities per passenger mile. Currently, Cruise's is zero.

Cruise employees are riding in these vehicles, as are their family members. They walk near these vehicles every day. If they actually believed they were unsafe, they'd deploy the vehicles far away from their homes.

Incorrect. The pedestrian was dragged for 20ft because that’s how long car took to stop. The slower the car would have been to react, the more the pedestrian would have been dragged.

And humans get confused and have people pinned under their cars all the time. Nobody wants to continue running over a person (even if it’s the best course of action in hindsight), and they often get out of the vehicle to check before even noticing that someone is underneath.

It’s incorrect to say that Cruise severely injured a pedestrian. The pedestrian was hit by a human driver (who then fled the scene). The first collision knocked the pedestrian into the path of the Cruise vehicle. The Cruise vehicle tried to swerve to avoid the pedestrian, then slammed on the brakes and stopped within 20ft. A human driver in the same situation would have done the same or worse.

The vehicles seem to be incredibly safe when compared to human driven vehicles, so what’s the problem? Cruise has caused zero deaths. In that same time, 144 people have been killed by vehicles in San Francisco.

Ok but you’re not the only person on the internet. Other people have different preferences, and in fact some even enjoy personalized ads. Nobody is forcing you to look at ads on the internet, so why is it fair to force others to not look at ads on the internet?

> Compared to private entities, the government is very restricted in what it can do.

Companies can’t point guns at me and put me in a cage. They can’t go into my home without my permission and search my stuff. And if I don’t want to deal with a company, I can simply stop interacting with them. If I don’t want to deal with a government, I have to emigrate and renounce my citizenship.

That’s not the type of bias that gets people upset. For example companies want their hiring process to be statistically biased in favor of selecting competent candidates.

It's not just about matching imprints on the bullet to the barrel. They likely also checked the ammo against what was in the magazine, and I doubt Teran had the same ammo as the police. It might be the same caliber (9mm luger) but there are many different brands of ammunition and bullet types. Atlanta police use Winchester PDX1 147 grain. Most people use lighter hollow points that cost less. Also Atlanta police use Gen 4 Glocks, which have polygonal rifling. Bullets fired from polygonal rifling have very different imprints than those fired from traditional rifling with lands and grooves.

So what do you think happened? Did the Atlanta police place the gun at the scene and hope that the GBI would lie about the forensics results? Did they lie about the purchase records too? Did they shoot one of their own to justify murder? If they wanted to kill an activist, they could just say he was pointing a gun at them. No need to almost kill a state trooper to cover it up.

Cops get too trigger happy all the time, but in this case the activist had a gun that forensics matched to a bullet in a state trooper’s stomach. From the GBI’s press releases [1]:

> Today, the GBI received confirmation from a firearms transaction record that in September 2020, Manuel Esteban Paez Teran legally purchased the firearm that was used in the shooting of a GSP trooper.

> The handgun is described as a Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 9mm. Forensic ballistic analysis has confirmed that the projectile recovered from the trooper’s wound matches Teran’s handgun

1. https://gbi.georgia.gov/press-releases/2023-04-14/gbi-invest...

He was so committed to nonviolence that he purchased a handgun and somehow one of the bullets from that gun ended up in a state trooper’s abdomen.

From the Georgia Bureau of Investigation [1]:

> Today, the GBI received confirmation from a firearms transaction record that in September 2020, Manuel Esteban Paez Teran legally purchased the firearm that was used in the shooting of a GSP trooper.

> The handgun is described as a Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 9mm. Forensic ballistic analysis has confirmed that the projectile recovered from the trooper’s wound matches Teran’s handgun.

1. https://gbi.georgia.gov/press-releases/2023-04-14/gbi-invest...

Here’s the summary of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s findings: https://gbi.georgia.gov/press-releases/2023-04-14/gbi-invest...

The protestor had a gun on him. The model and serial number matched that of a gun he purchased in 2020. The round recovered from the state trooper’s abdomen matched that gun.

The guy had a gun on him. The serial number matched that of a gun he legally purchased in 2020. The bullet in the officer matched that gun. Do you think the cops shot him, then shot one of their own to make it look like self-defense? If they wanted to get away with murder they could simply claim the guy pointed the gun at them.

You forgot to mention that the activist was killed because he was shooting a cop.

Yeah and they also fall over all the time. And when that happened, it leaked gallons of gas. It increased the amount of pollution and created a fire hazard.

The device didn’t improve emissions. It was designed to try and prevent gas fumes from coming out of the tank. It technically did do that… but only if the bike was upright.

I don’t think all manufacturers follow CARB for all the cars they build. When I lived in California I knew several people who bought their cars in Arizona because it meant they’d have more horsepower and fewer parts that could break. Also I removed the extra California emissions junk on my motorcycle because it caused the bike to leak fuel if it fell over.

The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" metaphor was coined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr in the Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States, in which Holmes and the majority of justices sent a man to prison for distributing flyers protesting the draft in World War I. Anyone today who references the metaphor without sarcasm reveals themselves to be ignorant of the history of the First Amendment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

I believe this guy’s story, but the article in question doesn’t link to the source of the quote, and that quote directly contradicts the experience of every Tesla owner.

There would definitely be a conversation in the owner’s service history where he sent them photos of a cracked casting, along with Tesla’s response.

I get that the owner doesn’t want to reveal more about themselves than is necessary, but the reporter could confirm whether or not those messages exist.

Anyone who owns a Tesla knows that isn’t true. The Tesla app lets you see all kinds of history related to any service requests. I can see plenty of feedback in text form, including cancelled appointments because the service center couldn’t fix my car. (I had to take it to a body shop.)