Ah, you’re right! The German tank problem was based on reading the serial numbers I think.
1,926 karma · joined July 10, 2022
- Netherlands, WWII: The Dutch civil registry meticulously recorded religion. It’s a major reason ~75% of Dutch Jews were killed, the highest rate in occupied Western Europe (vs ~25% in France, where records were poorer).
- US, Japanese internment: The Census Bureau provided block-level data on Japanese Americans in 1942 despite confidentiality guarantees; 2007 research showed individual names and addresses were shared too.
- Rwanda, 1994: Belgian colonial administrators had put ethnicity (Hutu/Tutsi) on national ID cards in the 1930s. Sixty years later those cards were the primary tool at genocide checkpoints.
There’s loads more. Europe may be safe now so it feels safe to give government this information. However, as shown in all the instances above, the information was collected for one reason and used for a wholly different reason when times changed.
Who knows what kinds of ethnicities, beliefs, behaviors or personal histories will be the focus of future regimes? It could be Roblox users, HN commenters, people who religiously repost x.com links as xcancel.com ones, anything. Whatever it is, they will have access to all the data on any system we allow them to record. This isn’t even a totally made up hypothetical from far away places, multiple governments in Europe were doing this kind of thing just decades ago. Historically speaking, we are all currently living in an unusually peaceful era, that will likely be temporary for many of us.
- it implies that error could be increased n-times, but a 15x _increase_ in 9% error would be an error rate of 135%, which is nonsensical.
- a reduction from 90% error to 20% error is clearly a bigger improvement in rightness to a reduction from 9% to 2%. One is “almost all wrong to almost all right”, the other is “more right”, but they are both a 4.5x reduction in error which means that the 4.5 quantity doesn’t have a constant meaning.
The answer is something like log odds ratios, but that introduces the additional need for a reader to know what that is, and that would be unusual.
Congestion pricing is a regressive tax.
Right now there are people in the world that are super into the idea of going to Mars. There’s no reason why anyone has to do it, but they’re into the idea of it and they’ll find whatever rationale they need to explain the desire.
> Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
- CS Lewis
Look, the windows not supposed to fall off, for a start. These things are built to rigorous aeronautical engineering standards — cardboard’s out, cardboard derivatives, no cellotape, no string. So chance in a million, really.
And to be clear, the plane that the window fell off was flown to safety. So there’s nothing out there but birds, air, wind and clouds… and the window that fell off.
It does annoy me that it’s harder to find 24-hr dials with noon at the top and midnight at the bottom. They all put midnight at the top for some reason.
I’m not looking for an emotional painkiller to keep me subdued and isolated.