469 karma · joined March 12, 2019
If you look at footage from before COVID-19, I'd say that mask usage in general was much closer to 5% than 50%:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpXcG9Nfvos
> I saw punks. Literal goth punks, with the boots and the tats and the piercings and the black clothes and the mohawks wear masks.
Dressing like that doesn't mean they're anti-social or edgy. It's just fashion.
https://opensource.org/osd.html
As a result, the license would be incompatible with copyleft licenses.
Of course, you could kindly ask your "customers" to please pay for a license in case they're using the software for some purpose. Good Luck with that.
For one, Japanese are significantly healthier on average, including many of the risk factors for COVID-19. Even a slight difference in average can make a huge difference at the tail ends, that is the number of people that actually die, as well as the people that develop no symptoms whatsoever.
Another possibility is that those deaths are simply not counted. Japan did notoriously little testing in the beginning. If a couple of 90 year olds die a bit sooner, few would suspect foul play.
However, you can have parts of a codebase be FOSS licensed, if the license is compatible with non-FOSS code. BSD, MIT and Apache licenses allow this, copyleft licenses like the GPL don't.
Yes, I accepted that from the outset, and I gave you the reason: Lack of freedom of movement. Poverty in the USSR was spread out further across the countryside.
Either way, it's easy to show that, by the soviet states own admission, poverty even in relative terms was greater in the USSR:
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/29/world/soviet-openness-bri...
In absolute terms, the difference is far greater. Living below the poverty line in the US was materially better than in the USSR.
> Even today, I live in a big Central Asian city, and I see a lot less despair and disparity than what I saw in Philadelphia and NYC.
What you see is not a statistic. If all that despair may be hidden from plain sight, how do you know it doesn't exist? Just because there's few people suffering in the city doesn't mean there aren't people suffering in the countryside.
> There was no horrible segregation policies...
I beg to differ:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_Soviet_Union
> ...women till 1980-s had a lot more rights...
Sure, because that happened to be part of the ideology. A particular women in the USSR may have had some rights that a woman in the US may not have had, at that time. Within a communist regime that limited rights in general, of course.
> ...there were so many things not to like in the US and some other western countries to counterbalance the abundance of western supermarkets.
And yet, of all the people that managed to emigrate to the US, few would return.
> While it is true, you could not easily move out of a village into a big city, both my grandparents were from poor rural families, and both got PhDs and lived in major soviet cities.
I think that's the crux of it. The soviet system treated you relatively well, brought you "progress". I'm aware that in central asia, support for the Soviet Union was the greatest even at the time of its dissolution, while other more developed countries couldn't wait to leave.
However, the USSR dissolved for a good reason: It was, overall, an dysfunctional system. Surely there were people who profited, many peasants were turned into great mathematicians or musicians. I wouldn't deny that.
We can compare the US system with the soviet system all day, either has had winners and losers, either has had done certain things better than the other. However, the soviet system is dead and gone, and communist parties in former soviet countries rarely form a democratic majority.
This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union, the system prevented people from the countryside to move into the city on their own accord, unless they happened to fit within some quota for laborers.
None of this is propaganda, it is historical fact that you seem to conveniently choose to ignore.
No, you weren't.
Well, obviously not.
> ...but a two-second search on drug-related crime would answer your question, with many links...
So, a minority of offenders claim they did their deed "because of drugs" and if drug legalization were to happen and we suppose that 100% of these candidates now stay on the good side of the law, we can expect, at the very best, a 30% reduction in crime.
That doesn't answer the question about career criminals. Let's say drugs are free, that's great, no more crime for drug money. What else do people want to buy with money they can't earn legally? What about status symbols like jewellery or sneakers? Don't you need these to be free too? But then how could they be status symbols?
I have no doubts that drug legalization will reduce some amount of crime that is tangentially related to drug use or trade. However, there's no clear correlation between drug prohibition and crime, some countries with very strict prohibition (Japan, Korea) are low on crime, others are high in crime (Phillipines).
I reiterate, if you have a bunch of gangsters and take away their most lucrative and (arguably) most benign stream of income, they need to move on to other venues. I'd rather have them sell weed and coke and maybe get into the occasional turf war, rather than having them double down on robberies and home invasions.
> Drug legalization is not about ending all crime, and nobody is saying it would, so I'm not sure why you keep saying this.
I'm not saying this.
> I'm not even sure what you're arguing here, but it seems to be that you think the drug trade only negatively affects drug users...
Read it again, maybe you'll figure it out. Drug trade mostly affects drug dealers, users and their peers.
Certainly you must recognize that there's a tradeoff here - legalization of all drugs would be a big experiment with lots of unknowns.
If I can do it, so can you.
Really? What's the evidence for that?
I'm not necessarily in favor of criminalizing drug trade, but it stands to reason that absent that "line of business", criminals would be under higher pressure to make money otherwise.
Drug trade at least is more likely to only affect those involved with drugs, whereas these other crimes are more likely to affect "bystanders".
Oh, you mean legalize robbery, extortion, theft and burglary too? What do you think gang members are going to do if just one of their most lucrative streams of money dries up, get a job at McDonalds?
Yeah, no. He belongs in jail. Maybe not specifically for murder, but certainly for some of the other stuff he has been involved with.
Maybe we should ask some of these slum inhabitants if they'd prefer to be allocated a menial job, be deported, or keep living their lives in the slum.
However, if you sell, say, artisanal hot sauce, you'd pay more to target an affluent person that likes spicy food, rather than some random person that may be just be googling how to make macaroni and cheese.
Some companies are willing to pay that much more for the prestige of showing up in the "real world", just like some brands might maintain unprofitable flagship stores.
Another reason is "because they have to charge that much". Which means that if fewer companies are willing to pay that much, more classic media outlets go out of business, as they can not lower prices further.
Lastly, you can't accurately measure how inefficient these forms of advertising are, whereas online advertising makes it easy to see whether ads are a net loss or not.
High-value advertising revenue generally comes from very specific brands targeting very specific users.
Of course you can do certain kinds of targeted advertising without user profiles, but I don't see how that would work on Facebook.
However, even if that was the situation, "death" is strictly worse than "near-slavery", so you're still contributing to the lesser of two evils.
Indeed, starving people don't make for good builders.
Instead, the starving people were the peasants who had their produce expropriated, which was sold to acquire the imported materials and machinery that the soviets could not yet produce themselves.
> ...and it's humiliating to the amazing architects and builders of these buildings to nullify their achievements like this.
It isn't, unless they had any say in the matter and a view of the big picture, which they didn't, but if they did, all humiliation would be justified.
If you're buying a phone, or some produce, or pick something out of a shelf, you don't have blood on your hands, you have contributed to someone's life being a little better than it would otherwise have been.
I think that's actually impossible. I often try to check my confirmation bias, I can make myself consciously aware of it, but I can't undo it. Like an optical illusion, you can't unsee it. Like riding the bike, you can't unlearn it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots#Grammar
Seems more like somebody is upset that no true Scotsman is the chief contributor to Scots Wikipedia. Either the true Scotsmen must be finding that this guy has done an adequate job, or they can blame themselves for not correcting it.