I don't think it would be that difficult to reconcile suicides between G20 countries. Outside of that, sure, data collection methods and quality heavily differ. But many people are interested in the varying levels of happiness among the G20 and there it doesn't seem that difficult to compare.
> Google Gemini was never in the mix, never on the table and still isn’t. Every one of our engineers has 1k a month allocated in Claude tokens for Claude enterprise and Claude code.
Does that mean y'all never evaluated Gemini at all or just that it couldn't compete? I'd be worried that prior performance of the models prejudiced stats away from Gemini, but I am a Claude Code and heavy Anthropic user myself so shrug.
Most Asian cultures with suicide problems acknowledge and try very hard to bring those rates down. It isn't just a cultural norm and is in fact a good indicator of the happiness of a population.
Here's [1] the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare's page on preventing suicides. The motto is 誰も自殺に追い込まれることのない社会の実現を目指して or "Aiming for a world where nobody must deal with suicide"
That's a straw man; There are many cultures that have a strong emphasis on honor/shame mechanics, which in turn drive suicides in those cultures. And which match cultural expectations in a grim kind of way.
The fact that people want to change their culture is possibly an early indication of a shift, which could take decades or centuries to actually occur. And such a cultural shift can also lose momentum and be still-born.
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I find counting suicides innovative. But if you do it in a global context without looking at the cultures as confounding factor: It's wrong.
There are many other confounding factors, such as a forgiving national (personal) bankruptcy regime. The USA has a pretty forgiving regime compared to other countries. But that doesn't mean you can say it correlates with how happy people are. Because - like suicides - the number of people that go bankrupt might not significantly correlate to the average happiness rate. Because a (small) minority of people go bankrupt / commit suicide.
It's in fact perfectly reasonable and possible to suppose that a country with higher average suicides and harsher penalties for bankruptcy still ends up higher on the happiness index. Because perhaps health and social-contact / family factors impact the rating more, on average.
The substack references Nilsson et al [1] in regards to criticisms of the Cantril Ladder. It's a pretty easy to read paper so I highly suggest just reading it.
I don't know. To me this seems like an energized minority trying to use technology to make a lot of noise; much like social media activism. In our city Flock cameras are very controversial but both the PD and transparency reports have shown benefits from Flock. We're not a wealthy, well-to-do suburb though. I imagine heavy ALPR presence is a lot more silly in those areas.
I feel if you have a camera on your property with a view of public spaces they have a losing argument. I doubt none of that holds water constitutionally. This is first amendment protected. If you are filming a public space with no expectation of privacy the government has no constitutional authority to restrict you if you are retaining the data private and never sharing it.
So far the only legal area that matters is the government itself being regulated in how they use ALPR since they are the entity that can actually infringe upon constitutional rights.
> if you are retaining the data private and never sharing it.
"Never sharing it?" What? Free speech is literally defined by the fact that you can distribute information. Publishing your video feed (a la news helicopters, etc.) is clearly a protected activity - possibly even more so than collecting the data to begin with.
Yes, I agree, but I am saying there are virtually zero grounds to legislate the use case I provided. They try to weasel it on "privacy" grounds and "transparency" when you share the data, but yeah. I agree.
Nearly every right is limited in some way "for the good of society". You can't take pictures of the entire contents of a book and publish it. You can't run into an airport and yell that you've got a bomb. We, as a society, put limits on what we allow people to do because doing so is better for society as a whole.
I expect there are plenty of cases where you can't publish your video feed.
You are of course correct. There are always limits on speech. In this area, however, we have already decided how it works. You cannot regulate what private citizens record in public spaces with no expectation of privacy and you definitely cannot regulate what they do with that data.
> You can't take pictures of the entire contents of a book and publish it.
Copyright is "mostly" civil law, not criminal.
> can't run into an airport and yell that you've got a bomb.
Right: now try and argue that a license plate intentionally designed for public visibility is somehow subject to the same restrictions. All 50 states have legislation requiring public display of these objects: what tailoring of the First Amendment would legally be consistent with past case law?
> I expect there are plenty of cases where you can't publish your video feed.
Legally these cases are few and far between, and none of these exceptions apply to the situation being discussed. You're welcome to try and cite a case or explain relevant case law - good luck.
Freedom of the press is extraordinarily broad and is one of the more difficult things to limit using criminal penalties.
> > You can't take pictures of the entire contents of a book and publish it.
> Copyright is "mostly" civil law, not criminal.
Does that matter? Seriously - doesn't the 1st Amendment also protect against the government raising civil complaints?
I think the better point here is: Disney suing you for copyright violations is not a First-Amendment case, because Disney is not the US government - so this isn't a Free Speech issue at all.
I fail to see how passively recording a space that you don't own is "first amendment protected". Passively recording a space isn't in and of itself speech.
I can photograph and publish whatever I am allowed to see in public (with very few exceptions - think Naval Air Station Key West), this has been affirmed and reaffirmed by countless courts.
The best part about publishing? You have no right to question when, how, or if I am going to do it - that discretion is also free speech.
Reproducing information is within the legal limits of "speech and press".
You don't have to have a physical, lead-type printing press to be protected by Freedom of the Press, and you don't have to physically vocalize to be protected by Freedom of Speech.
> If you are filming a public space with no expectation of privacy the government has no constitutional authority to restrict you if you are retaining the data private and never sharing it.
This a shitty argument from a time where mass surveillance wasn't possible. If you have "no expectation of privacy in public spaces" than Governments could force you to wear an ankle monitor and body camera at all times since you have "no expectation of privacy".
You are mixing up the duties and rights a government has vs. the duties and rights citizens have. The one area I might start to agree is corporate personhood and giving corporations the same rights as a private citizen in this regard because their interests are very different from a private citizens. The whole point of the constitution is largely what the government can't do to its citizens. The goal is to protect citizens FROM its government by carving out our rights. These of course apply broadly, but I can't, for example, as a private citizen really violate your 4A rights very easily.
You (personally) can't stop me from photographing you in public, Ms. Steisand.
And Freedom of Speech has no sensible connection to being forced to carry objects. Your argument also assumes no one ever goes into private houses, where 1A doesn't apply.
Here's an interesting hypothetical: if we don't trust law enforcement to operate these things, then consequently we don't trust law enforcement to enforce laws in a more physical manner (which is pretty true given 2020 protests against police brutality), then how do we enforce laws?
(This is a hypothetical because obviously in reality there's no easy philosophical through line from ideas to policy.)
We don't! I mean, the police don't do so today. No tabs? OK! Expired tabs? OK, too! No license plates? Who gives a shit? Not the police.
And that dives into more impactful crimes such as property theft which when reported to police nothing comes from it.
Hell, I have dashcam of a cop going home roughly at 11 pm going 80+ on a 60mph highway in his cop Ford SUV. But everyone routinely speeds, 7+ over post-COVID. The legislature is trying to do something about it, but no one really cares.
State Patrol is likely the only ones performing any real traffic enforcement anymore.
You sound like you're talking about Bay Area politics given the dialogue around CHP vs local police and property theft that I'm aware of.
If your solution is to continuously neuter the police because you perceive them to be ineffective then I'd challenge you to think of the endgame of that logic. If you think it can't get worse than it is now, well, we politically disagree.
> if we don't trust law enforcement [...], then how do we enforce laws?
Indeed.
Abusus non tollit usum.
To elaborate on the general problem, I am not claiming that abuse cannot occur, or that it doesn't occur, as some people seem to think I have (and for which I was no doubt downvoted). I am not naive. My family lived behind the Iron Curtain where the police were significantly more brutal than what we have in the US. I am also aware, more than most, how methods of control in democratic states operate (tl;dr. they need to be more sophisticated, relying more on information control and psychological techniques than physical brutality, in order to shape the "consent" needed to legitimize rule). I am the last to deny that power can be abused and that it can be an awful thing.
But I do find the liberal tradition of obsessive paranoia tiresome. Yes, governments can go wrong, and they do. Anyone who denies that is a fool. But that doesn't mean they go wrong all the time and it doesn't mean that abolishing imperfect institutions or rendering them impotent is a solution. Yes, you must be prudent about such things, but you aren't left with a better situation through institutional castration or by creating institutional Mexican standoffs. Justice doesn't just materialize or emerge magically without intention, because we have created a separation of powers (a common myth unsupported by the actual evidence). Justice requires authority, that is to say, the marriage of justice with power. When authority is abolished, we are left with naked power. Naked power is what is destructive, but it is also self-destructive. You need at least the appearance of authority to keep up that ruse.
We can see how things actually work in the current arrangement. We have separate institutions (intended to limit institutional power through some alchemy of opposition), but nothing in principle prevents them from colluding, and because there is a considerable gap between institutional interest and personal interest, what you are actually left with is partisan jockeying for power.
Instead of operating from some kind of anabaptist or Quaker presumption of corruption, it is better to presume virtue on the part of an institution and deal with corruption as it occurs, as instances of shameful failure. The advantage is that this presumption sets a norm and an expectation against which the people in that institution are judged. They stand to disappoint us, as it were. To quote Baldus, “No authority whether of the emperor or the senate can make the emperor other than a rational and mortal animal, or free him from the law of nature or from the dictates of right reason or the eternal law. Nothing is presumed to please the emperor except what is just and true." This isn't some New Right brand of nihilism that believes that might makes right or that justice is meaningless or merely a mask for power. No, the presumption of the "emperor's" virtue is just that: a presumption. That, by itself, is a psychologically and socially powerful force, as we can see in the examples of Vespasian, Henry V, or Louis IX, sophistic, dissolute, or ill-tempered in their youth before assuming the throne.
Lord Acton's famous quip that power corrupts as some kind of rule is not actually borne out by the evidence. Maybe sometimes it does, and certainly corrupt people are more likely to seek out power, but power itself does not systematically corrupt.
> But that doesn't mean they go wrong all the time
They do, in fact, go wrong all the time, or at least, all the times that the actors involved are sufficiently confident that they think they can both gain something and get away with it.
Which is why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance, both to limit the occurrence of the conditions in which they go wrong, and to identify and correct the points where that prevention fails before they become a positive feedback loop.
There's an asymmetry with cars and traffic calming. You can spend a few thousand on putting in speed bumps (well, when you can; most municipalities put in obnoxious restrictions to "justify" a speed bump), road diets, buffered bike lanes, etc. But you only need one car to run a red light and hit a pedestrian crossing the street to kill them.
The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.
I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.
I don't think it's a growth in drivers as much as it is a shift in policing away from traffic enforcement, something that's only gradually being unwound as people realize how much they hate lax traffic enforcement.
This probably depends on municipality. I think that's part of it and a hangover from concerns around traffic stops in the BLM protests. But also I think LEO salaries are getting higher and VMT is increasing. That and a post COVID norm of not following traffic laws in general. At least that's what we've seen in our municipality.
Use the Tor Onion Service [1] for Reddit instead. You never leave Tor so you don't have to deal with the usual exit node problems. No need for a commercial VPN.
I doubt autonomous car makers will offer this themselves. They'll either partner with existing insurers or try to build a separate insurance provider of their own which does this.
My guess, if this actually plays out, is that existing insurers will create a special autonomy product that will modify rates to reflect differences in risk from standard driving, and autonomy subscriptions will offer those in a bundle.
Bundling a real product with a financial institution is a time tested strategy.
Airlines with their credit cards are basically banks that happen to fly planes. Starbucks' mobile app is a bank that happens to sell coffee. Auto companies have long had financing arms; if anything, providing insurance on top of a lease is the natural extension of that.
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