helloworld11

>Obviously there are crime issues in certain parts of the city but most of the people I hear loudly complain about it are old white people that don't live here anymore.

So you've spoken to a large number of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who live in the neighborhoods most plagued by crime and know that they don't complain about it? It just has to be some derogatory classification of subgroup such as "old white people", As if the hundreds of murders per year were little more than something for them to whine about?

>Chicago has a significant crime delta between neighborhoods that, if one were to read about it, can only be thought of in terms of extreme racial injustice.

"Only" in terms of racial injustice? So those violent crime numbers by neighborhood are entirely the fault of the aforementioned white people? The people actually committing them in these neighborhoods have no agency or fault in what they do to their own neighborhoods? This logic just keeps getting more twisted in the absurdities it has to push to sustain itself. Doubtless there is racial injustice in a U.S. city with a famously corrupt police/civil administration like Chicago, but in recent decades Chicago has had multiple black mayors and a large percentage of its government and police are staffed by African Americans or people of color in general. Yet they somehow have had no say or co-responsibility for anything that has remained problematic?

The USSR. (I know, doesn't exist anymore) but I can't think of a single year of its existence in which it wasn't occupying, invading or repressing some subject foreign nationality or population in some way, usually many of them simultaneously.

I happen to live in a country where civilian ownership of guns is strictly controlled and mostly forbidden. Despite this, in this country, many kids die because of gun violence, more than in the U.S in both absolute numbers and proportionally. "In a way that happens only in America" is simply misleading and shows how the media narrative I mentioned in my original comment influences your thinking.. All things have tradeoffs, even those that can sometimes be tragic. You're basing extremely broad generalizations on emotional reactions to what really are isolated tragedies.

>That's the problem with any superintelligence story; they are by definition hard to write without being superintelligent. As Vinge was famously told, "you can't write this story. No one can." If a chimpanzee could write a story about a human expert of any sort, the other chimpanzees wouldn't understand it: it would either be gibberish, or dumbed down to superficial analogies that give an illusion of understanding. ("Then he used his rifle -" "what's a rifle?" "it's a stick which is like throwing a rock. Anyway, he traded some bananas for it with another monkey off the Internet." "What's an Internet?" "uh...")

I'm not entirely sure if that's true. It might be, I honestly don't know, but my personal suspicion is that there's such a thing as what I'll just go ahead and call a threshold intelligence level. In other words, a level of cognitive capacity beyond which a creature that attains said level can functionally conceptualize things far above its actual ability to understand them in detail. This allows discussion and exploration of certain extremely advanced concepts well enough to form a narrative without falling into complete incomprehension.

Chimpanzees might be far enough below this threshold level that even a basic story would cause them difficulty no matter how learned they are educated or bred to be, and a complex story about, say space ships or high performance aircraft would be completely outside their conception. Humans on the other hand might be able to stretch their imagination much further towards the extremes of conceptualization. However, I also think it might have its limits, namely that there are things which if explained to us would leave even the brightest humans as befuddled as a dog being lectured on internal combustion mechanics.

I don't know. That would depend on whatever number is necessary for it to register in a statistically significant way.

Tongue in cheek aside, it's incredibly stupid to make sweeping, broad, categorical judgments of certain things because of isolated, exceedingly rare incidents. It's even dumber to make broad, sweeping laws around emotional reactions such as yours to such events.

Every school shooting is a grotesque tragedy, but means of fighting them exist that don't require gun ownership to be banned for the millions of people who not only peacefully use guns but also in some cases need them for an assortment of reasons. "What about the children?" has rarely been a good or honest argument for anything, particularly for badly considered laws pushed forth by bouts of moral indignation and self-righteousness.

One thing I do that makes my cell phone work well for exactly the opposite isto install en ebook reader app in it and use it to read more books than I previously did, on the go, whenever I have spare time. Some people can't handle this with their eyes, granted, but in my case it's never been a problem so far.

Also, I don't have any chat apps in my phone except whatsapp. Definitely no facebook app and even instagram, though present, is completely silenced. I also silence all notifications in general except phone calls.

All together, these things have helped keep the phone handy without it turning my brain to mush.

Gun violence stats in the U.S. have little to do with easy legal access to guns itself. Other factors, especially demographic ones, influence. Note that many states with very light gun laws have little gun homicide, other states with strict gun laws have high gun homicide rates and sometimes it's completely vice versa. Furthermore, if you look at the FBI's uniform crime statistics, the picture gets a bit clearer still, showing that the vast majority of gun crime happens in very specific areas of certain cities and particularly occurs among the African American community. I'm simply stating the numbers as they appear here, not making any judgments on any ethnic group per se.

People love to point at the U.S and its gun crimes as a direct result of the country's gun laws in particular, but overall, when certain very specific factors, population areas and very specific geographic regions are excluded, much of the country where guns of all kinds are easily available is barely more violent than your typical Western European country. The school shootings that people refer to are awful things, but statistically, they don't move any needle so much as an iota. They do however get enormous amounts of media attention. Other countries with very strict gun laws also have mass shootings and mass killings, both with guns and without guns, but again, less media focus because it doesn't fit certain narratives about the U.S being violent as hell because of gun posession.

So, if you thought it was shitty when your Gmail service abruptly gets suspended for no clear reason or means of recourse, imagine how wonderful it's going to be when your entire range of cloud based medical services and remotely updated internal gizmos goes down the drain because some algorithm decided so....

Aside from grossly misdefining poverty by the U.S definition as "abject poverty" (it isn't even close and most certainly abject poverty doesn't apply to 18% of the U.S. population), your argument here boils down to. This factual accounting of a reduction in poverty doesn't fit with my completely arbitrary ideal of how much reduction I want to see by now, so it's "blowing sunshine up my ass". Huh?

As another reply here said, By all means, explain how you'd make poverty stand at 1%. Also explain what system you'd have that's so much better if you like.

Basic point. It's easy but disingenuous to compare the real world's changes with those of our limitless notions of the ideal. The valid thing is to compare something now to how it was previously for genuine perspective.

Nonsense. The conquistadors were indeed appalling in many ways, but no they did not go for full on genocide. The diseases that came with them killed off possibly 90% of the New World population regardless of what they did or didn't do. They were slavers for a time and even that was fought against quite vigorously by a surprising number of other Europeans (read for example about Bartolomé de las Casas). Much of the modern narrative mixes up an essentially unstoppable and non-deliberate mass die-off from European diseases with genocide. The two things were not the same even if the conquistadors also did often butcher native populations in specific contexts. As for the Aztecs, they truly were barbarous to their subjects. Their culture, for all its sophistication and many fascinating aspects, was based on an enormous amount of ritual and practical violence across many areas. There's no white washing this for PC reasons if you read even a moderate amount of literature about their empire. Even the Spanish didn't practice the ritual slaughter of over 20,000 people in just a few days simply for the sake of a religious festival. The Aztecs did indeed do this at times.

Fair point about the naming origin, but I think it's worth elaborating again:

The ideals of the French Revolution were themselves very problematic. The French Jacobins adapted these "ideals" of the French Revolution in their most extreme, taken to its conclusion form, and the result was a blood bath. Ergo, those very ideals, applied to messy human beings, created a murderously greater mess. It's tiresome to see an endless stream of justifications for extreme socialist leftism with the notion that it only went wrong because "people didn't live up to it". People shouldn't have to live up to an ideology. The ideology should realistically adapt itself to fundamental aspects of the human condition, especially if not doing so means killing innocent human beings and destroying much of their peaceful social organization.

If someone were to say that Nazism would be great "if only all people were blood and soil aryans", it would rightfully be considered grotesque. With extreme socialism, the expectation of people to act completely at odds with our non-collectivist nature (because we're not ants) is taken as a defect os us instead of this woefully, deeply wrong line of thinking. Again, it's grotesque and hypocritical.

To those criticizing the (mostly) absurd arguments of this website that so un-ironically crams in all the same commercial incentives it criticizes of the supposedly terrible private internet, remember that Jacobin is a very markedly left socialist magazine with a long history of throwing shit on anything market oriented. Some of their arguments are valid and decent, others are just ridiculous and not to mention hypocritical considering that the magazine itself is owned by a corporate entity and very much dedicated to its own bottom line of revenues and earnings.

edit: I mean, what would you expect of a magazine that named itself after a bunch of "heroes" of the French Revolution whose own extreme, fanatical leftism was a pioneer for mass murder of civilians in the name of ideological purity.

If you're the owner/founder of a startup and have employees, there will be little common purpose at a fundamental level. Your priority is making the company as successful as possible at least reasonable cost, theirs is usually extracting as much value from their job for themselves at least effort. This doesn't apply in all companies absolutely but most of the time talk of "we're a family" or "team effort!" is PR drivel, that more often than not goes out the window in a hurry when things get down to the squeeze. If the owner/founder didn't want to have the priority I mentioned above, they could have started a sincere nonprofit, not a money making investment venture. Likewise for staff.

I came expecting horrendous kitsch, and left feeling pleasantly surprised..

Have you used paypal extensively? Have you not read the MANY horror stories about its arbitrary blocks, lockouts, outright thefts of funds or at least months-long freezes and so forth? All of these things happen with many other corporate platforms. Sure, they also work for millions of people but it's good to at least have an alternative that can be called on for when things go bad or you live in a place where banking isn't as smooth as it often is in interconnected western countries. What's wrong with having that? One doesn't need to be an NFT hustler, cryptobro or shitcoin scammer to appreciate these basic benefits of a means of wealth transfer that it's very difficult for governments to control.

Well how wonderful for you to be part of a certain privileged subset of people whose banking is fully accessible, easily usable, flows smoothly and has no political obstacles binding it. There are many others for who this isn't the case and all shills, NFT hustlers and cryptobros aside, the basic functionality of cryptocurrencies allows an excellent, hard-to-block workaround of these possible problems that many people I personally know have used to save their own assess in countries such as Russia, Mexico, Venezuela and (oddly perhaps) Hong Kong.

I don't understand that logic in your counterargument (and it's common among many people who hate on crypto btw. I don't single you out on this). It amounts to, "I can do this in this way and I love it, so I'm going to shit on alternative means that others might have to use for doing the same thing because they can't use my method" Really?

Let's be serious. Have you never once spoken to a crowd of people that self identifies as woke or some combination of qualities that amount to the same essential definition? I have, with many of them and yes, among quite a number of people, the dominant narrative is of constantly making reference to "Eurocentric hegemonic" historical cultural destruction/oppression with disdain for any mention of the very well established historical facts of many other cultures doing exactly the same things. None of this is to minimize the long European history of colonial oppression, but it's certainly not trait that's particular to that continent or its different cultures.

Why anyone would deliberately use a sync or backup provider that openly reads your data and pries into the very meat of what you store with them is beyond me. Even if it's an algorithm doing this instead of a human makes it no less disgustnig to tolerate. It's as flatly insulting that these companies think this okay and many users don't mind as having someone rifle through your personal diaries and documents in your house just because they come to do housekeeping.

Alternatives easily exist, and im not even talking about self hosting. There are plenty of zero knowledge sync and backup services and if you're really stuck on using Crapbox or Google Dreck, you can use any one of a number of encryption services for your data first, so that these bigcos can't snoop worth a shit and randomly punish you for what they find.

Agreed. This is a sick and denigrating attitude to take towards people, who might just maybe, possibly have prolonged lapses of other priorities in life besides improving bottom line value for others during half their day. And it shouldn't need some sort of rigorous justification as if one were a peon who had better make amends for not worshipping "hustle" every year of their damn adult life.

No. Whatever qualities, privileges or detriments that ignorant others ascribe to my skin color are not my fault or my responsibility to feel guilty over. This applies in all cases for anyone of any color.

What's more, your simplistic, ignorant color-based dismissal of an entire and enormous range of historical, cultural and personal history differences between certain eastern Europeans and certain other Europeans is no less insulting than the kind of low key racism that some people apply by labeling all blacks or brown-skinned people the same. The differences in both cases are emphatically not negligible. That you openly think this way is likely only because it's been instilled as politically acceptable. It sure as hell has no real merit.

That some so-called progressives often think this way today is a sad reminder of how old stupidities can come full circle to infect new generations.

>E2E privacy has a lot of uses. ZCrypto has none.

>It’s just an enabler and hotbed of a variety of scams. T his just keeps getting trotted out again and again on HN as if it were a dying circus horse, but with no real merit. Even analysis by companies that spend all day, every day tracking cryptocurrency use and transactions estimate that only something like 2% of them are criminal. Even if we add in fraudulent/criminal funds that were laundered well enough to hide their origin and purpose from these tracking services, the percentage is still almost certainly a small minority.

Add to that a couple things: First, that not all "criminal" transactions are morally wrong just because they're illegal. No doubt there are anti-Putin Russians right now trying to get their money out of country with crypto and breaking a law or two. Are they scum?

Secondly, yes, there are many, many normal people using crypto for many things. I personally know many who do this, for work payments, difficult transactions because of some regulatory bullshit, remittances and even in one case as payment for contemporary dance services while living overseas. Anecdotes, but I have no doubt that they're extremely widespread, because my friend circle isn't one of crypto bros and money launderers. It's of ordinary people.

How fucking tedious to see so many on a so-called hacker site shit so repetitively and with so much categorically dismissive ignorance on something many of its readers emotionally dislike. It's not hard to verify how exaggerated or just worng some of these dismissive claims are.

Yes, I'm sorry if I came across as at all pointing a finger at you or your family, not at all the case and it would be foolish given the rest of my comment narrative. Just mentioned the Arabic history of slave trading as a general counterpoint to a dominant narrative of it being a European custom above all else.

>So far with crypto the only use cases seems to be criminal. To buy illegal stuff and for ransomware.

This just keeps getting trotted out again and again on HN as if it were a dying circus horse, but with no real merit. Even analysis by companies that spend all day, every day tracking cryptocurrency use and transactions estimate that only something like 2% of them are criminal. Even if we add in fraudulent/criminal funds that were laundered well enough to hide their origin and purpose from these tracking services, the percentage is still almost certainly a small minority.

Add to that a couple things: First, that not all "criminal" transactions are morally wrong just because they're illegal. No doubt there are anti-Putin Russians right now trying to get their money out of country with crypto and breaking a law or two. Are they scum?

Secondly, yes, there are many, many normal people using crypto for many things. I personally know many who do this, for work payments, difficult transactions because of some regulatory bullshit, remittances and even in one case as payment for contemporary dance services while living overseas. Anecdotes, but I have no doubt that they're extremely widespread, because my friend circle isn't one of crypto bros and money launderers. It's of ordinary people.

How fucking tedious to see a so-called hacker site shit so much and with so much categorically dismissive ignorance on something many of its readers emotionally dislike.

I don't speak for your family history in a personal sense and I get your main point about the ridiculous absurdity of racial groupings, but Islamic states and kingdoms which include the Arabic peninsula, were also notorious slave states for centuries. Again, despite many PC narratives, slavery was hardly the exclusive province of European colonial powers working against oppressed others around the world.

Again though, these modern PC culture groupings that make reference to "white privilege" for all Caucasian looking people fall into the ignorantly ridiculous, or obtuse. I'm Eastern European, from the Balkans, my family and me were war refugees who never had much serious privilege in our lives but I've had people lecture me about white privilege as if I somehow have fault for an arbitrary genetic manifestation on the skin and am thus little different from any caricature of self indulgent wealthy, institutional white business men (not that there's anything specifically wrong with them either by the way).

Ironically, in my direct "privileged white" family, a paternal grandfather was a concentration camp inmate and a maternal great grandfather was an ostarbieter for the Nazis, deported to the Reich during the World War as.... a real-life 20th century slave.

As of 2018 (and it's gotten a notable bit worse since then if we look at absolute numbers per year), it stood at 29 per 100,000. This is four times higher than the U.S homicide rate by the way, and the U.S homicide rate is itself considered high by the standards of other developed nations.

In the other hand to be fair, Mexico isn't in the top ten of most violent countries by murder rate. Most of those top ten aren't war zones either, while Mexico technically is.

No, not outraged, just derisive. Change is indeed innate to the human experience and to the course of civilization, but the kind of bubble mentality you display with your comment is if anything especially brittle against practical realities. In a genuine catastrophic climate change context, do you really think your privileged urban lifestyle will be better suited for adaptation? Maybe, I can't be sure, but maybe circumstances cause you to rethink your current idea of change being beautiful.

That aside, it really is absurd to dismiss the needs and complaints of hundreds of millions of diverse vehicle-owning non-urban dwellers based on how smugly easy you think it was to not own a car in London of all places. There's nothing psychologically obtuse about pointing out the closed mindedness of your notion. Yet you speak of identification and its effects.

You're kidding right? For one thing, these statistical odds do nothing to change the tragedy of death or disappearance for the families of any of those people. Secondly, the numbers don't include unreported murders and disappearances.

Even if you still try to minimize these factors with dry presentation of statistical odds with these additional causes of death/disappearance included, remember that certain activities dramatically increase the odds of being a victim. These activities are far from strange things. They include things like frequent travel, driving or travelling alone, especially at night, walking certain areas at certain times and so forth. The dangers are very real and affect people's behavior in many unfortunate ways that don't easily show up in a trite statistical summary.

I'm not trying to be dramatic. over 120 million people in the country live their lives every day and millions of them still do lots of interesting recreational things, but there is a shadow across much of what in other places would be much safer.

Sustainability is almost always subject to circumstances and context in a practical sense. Many people who decry "unsustainable" practices seem to forge this despite all the lessons of history.

250 years ago, it would have been completely unfathomable to imagine feeding 8 billion people with the technologies of the time. I'm not just talking about it being unsustainable but temporarily doable, it would have simply not happened without maybe two thirds of the world rapidly dying of hunger. Yet, here we are today, with the lowest relative proportion of the world in recorded history in danger of famine.

This of course slowly isn't sustainable WITH present technologies being widely used. If those technologies change however, it could indeed become sustainable, just like what we have now is far beyond the capacities of previous centuries. Instead of default leaps to new prohibitions in environmental and climate change discussions, more focus should be made on promoting new developments that let us both live well and in large numbers while harming the world less.

The self indulgence of your comment is laughable (aside from the ugliness of a philosophy in which "you'll adapt" is a good reason for being subjected to restrictions, regardless of their deeper merit).

Because you live in one of the densest, oldest and most public transit-packed urban areas in Europe, you think that your easy shift to not having a car is worth a damn to hundreds of millions of people who don't live in London, or another big, dense, highly developed city like it? A Texas farmer or Louisiana fisherman isn't just being a selfish, green-hating ass when he or she says that they NEED their truck or car. They really do, to live, and almost every day. What kinds of mental bubbles do some of the privileged people who comment on this site live in?

Useful for knowing the language, customs and basic ropes of social risks sure, but 36,000+ native Mexicans per year still die from the abomination of violence that has swept this beautiful country. If anything, being a foreigner offers some marginal protection due to criminals avoiding an added risk of police and political scrutiny from diplomatic pressures. Marginal protection, and only sometimes. Nothing to rely on.