Fascinating data. There's a breakdown per-state showing that only eleven states have a lower homicide rate than Egypt.
Looks like Puerto Rico, District of Columbia and Louisiana are the worst as of 2012 (latest the set shows unfortunately). Puerto Rico is an outlier at 2x the next, but District of Columbia has improved massively between 2000 and 2012.
EDIT: This might be a bit misleading. While there is more recent data for the US (up to 2016), there seems to be no reliable data on Egypt post 2012. Additionally, the 2012 number (2.5) represents a 4x /increase/ in homicides since 2003 (0.6). Only 2011 (year of the Egyption revolution) was higher at 3.2. So there's a clear trend towards an increase in homicide rates that might not be accounted for.
That said, I guess it's unlikely that the number is much higher than the US average, even discarding the outliers mentioned above.
Human brains are just context gathering pattern matching machines. We can't even count without all kinds of context being automatically bubbled up into our consciousness.
When we see other drivers, we can take all kinds of subtle hints about their behavior. We can easily tell if they have an unsecured load (not just if it's currently shaking). We can see the way someone is looking at the road to know if they are going to go, if they're hesitating, if they're high. We can know where the road is even though it's snowed out because of the approximate distance from the ditch you remember being 15 feet out alongside it.
There are zillions of cases like this in the long tail. Self driving cars leapt forward by being able to answer the vastly important contextual question of "what is this in my sensor?" -- but to do the rest, it's hard to overstate how much a computer would have to "be human". To be able to apply past experience, psychology and complicated inferences about "why is this in my sensor? what can I do about it?"
In the end, self driving cars will thrive, just in an environment that poses these kinds of questions as little as possible.
Or we'll actually get a breakthrough and be able to create NNs that allow machines to learn and apply a vast breadth of learned context to sensory input. Teach them vast amounts of unrelated things just as every human learns in the 16 years before they drive (and then some), and then effectively put extra-sensory humans on the road.
There's nothing wrong with this. Public/Private keys are for sharing secrets and proving identity.
Assuming you are using a sane cipher and mode, your risks boil down to any of a myriad of methods of stealing/bruteforcing your key or grabbing the unencrypted file.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You've narrowed down the scope of logic to apply to everything !good, which is some emotional value that exists outside of logic. In reality "good" is a vast trove of information which differs in the minds of every party to the problem.
Logic absolutely applies to this set of information!
Wanna-be technocrats should understand that exploring that vast trove of information (which they can't actually do, in practice) will allow a more widely accepted solution.
Accounting for all these various "goods" logically results in messy compromises which run exactly counter to the technocratic dream.
Democracy is an imperfect attempt to distribute the logical calculation of all these "goods" and come up with a big ugly messy solution.
I think we are both arguing that some people narrow the scope of arguments to the point that they aren't useful to the original problem, merely more amenable to logic. Let's call this "not useful scoping".
I further argue that useful scoping (isolating the problem in a way that solving it provides a solution amenable to all those who proposed the problem) often /is/ the hard work, itself a product of much time and logic.
Far from proposing a useful course of action: I simply lament that we will often choose our scope to support simple logic, rather than use complex logic to improve the scope.
No surprise either: each life only has so many hours.
I think we agree, but I appreciate that my wording wasn't perfectly clear.
"pare down to its essence" was a bad way of saying "disregard intersecting issues and focus on one logically resolvable issue." Your soundproofed room analogy is apt.
I also agree with applying pure logic to a scoped problem being not only possible but desirable... but I'd argue that properly scoped problems are rarely as useful to solve as the scoper might think. In many cases "merely" scoping the problem in a novel way leads directly to a truly useful course of action, and is most of the hard work.
I agree completely with emotions being something we should not deny, but rather be something to /include/ when trying to solve problems. (My complaints are around emotions being placed outside or opposed to the realm of logic, where accounting for them is "illogical")
That's true, but it doesn't really have much to do with my points:
* Common (current) culture around rationalism fantasizes about the human using it being able to choose the best course of action in every situation (and examples to the contrary are typically full of woo-woo about human emotions and souls). This is computationally impossible for the brain.
* Hacker-news-audience-types will often discard important nuance on a topic in order to reduce it to something that can easily be rationalized about.
If historical cultures may have "suffered" from the same delusions, it would be more interesting to see how my points did or didn't apply than saying that they existed.
There's a ton of (especially early) nerd culture idolizing many forms of what most people know as the "Spock" character (somewhat more accurately, Vulcans in general). This is typically contrasted with emotions, sometimes as a mystical part of the human soul that exists outside of logic, sometimes as the source of evil.
It's a constant bother. The only way to apply pure logic to any problem is to pare it down to a mockery of the real world problem. That's why we have "gut" or "emotions": We apply imperfect patterns to complex issues, otherwise we'd never make it through a single day; it's an optimization.
Tech/nerd/stem types absolutely love to do this. We take a problem, pare it down to its essence and then solve it. When no one listens and no logical counterargument prevails, the cries for technocracy start to ring out. A classic attempt to dissect this fallacy was the old blog post "What color are your bits?" [1]
As technology companies continue to grow in power relative to all other companies and governments, I'm very interested in watching how this plays out.
It's odd that that page refers to the desktop client as "native". The parts of an electron app that are native to the OS (as opposed to the OS-independent HTML/JS) are irrelevant to most people's desire for "native" apps.
Your citations seem roughly in line with what I said and expected: Americans pay double overall, with a similar dollar amount of public healthcare.
Proportionately speaking, that means Americans are not taxed the same (higher incomes). Interestingly, based on what I'm seeing re: incomes, the /total/ healthcare expenditure is, as a proportion of income, the same between the US and western Europe.
Overall this seems quite unsurprising: healthcare is expensive, the US pays more and the government spreads it around less. Worth noting that health and lifestyle in the US is also "worse" (more cultural than healthcare related).
I think I misunderstood your original comment. I heard "paying for one's own expenses plus for those who can't afford it" (which is same in the US and the EU), where it seems you mean "paying from taxes plus out of pocket".
My uninformed impression is that in the US one does not pay proportionately the same amount of taxes towards healthcare (maybe you have citations to the contrary?).
I would (only from experience and anecdotes) guess that you're right about it costing double, however.
You're putting words in my mouth, complete with quotation marks. I never said anything about what anyone should do. I didn't even say that on the whole people in the USA pay less.
In the EU, people pay a varying amount (overall a greater fraction of their income) in taxes. In the US, people pay a varying amount (overall a greater fraction of their income) in healthcare. I think these are widely accepted facts.
The US healthcare system has endless problems, I was only commenting on the "double-dipping" part of my parent comment, not writing an essay.
We already know that prices are changed for different devices and browsers. It's not a stretch to think that choosing the Filthy Rich profile will cost you in online shopping.
As the sibling says, Signal really isn't that bad for convenience. I didn't have much difficulty switching my family to it.
I suspect use of messaging apps other than Signal has little to do with the convenience delta and more to do with the network size delta.
It was frequently said that /at the time of release/ ie6 was better and more standards compliant than the other web browsers. Then it was left to rot for years.
Perhaps notably, it was actually faster and had lower memory usage than Firefox for a while (Firefox had many leaks). The issues were security, standards and NO TABS!
... Honestly if MS hadn't been so unbelievably deaf to users and web developers, Firefox and Chrome may have never succeeded. If Google doesn't completely screw up, Chrome won't go the way of IE. Maybe messing with adblockers qualifies?
I don't think the prevalence of hate groups is necessarily related to any countries' commitment to freedom and human rights.
Virtually everyone outside of the hate groups wishes they didn't exist, but it's precisely the commitment to freedom that makes it hard to shut them down.
Is this a human rights issue? Again, we agree that we don't want these groups to exist, but I don't think there's ever been a "right to not have people hate you". I don't see a direct line from human rights to lack of hate groups.
Try to create a new profile to compare nondestructively: "firefox --ProfileManager"
I can confirm both that newer firefox is notably more responsive than old, and that I (or an extension, though I don't have many) managed to get a ff profile into a state where it had inexplicably bad performance, esp. unpredictable long freezes.
Depends on how you define "the problem". Homelessness is a symptom of several other things widely considered to be problems.
If you limit the problem to "some people who want a house don't have enough money to afford living space qualifying as a house", then broadly speaking market solutions are possible because we can assume these people participate in the market via their "demand" and their ability to "supply" something in return. Obviously there's an active debate on many market issues here, whether around too much market regulation (eg NIMBY), or too little market regulation (eg minimum wage).
However, my understanding is that there is mounting evidence that the homeless population is composed of people who have either no demand for a house ("free spirits") or no ability to supply anything to the market (mentally disabled). Obviously in these cases the market is not very useful, and only functions insomuch as those outside of the homeless population include it in their "demand function".
Looks like Puerto Rico, District of Columbia and Louisiana are the worst as of 2012 (latest the set shows unfortunately). Puerto Rico is an outlier at 2x the next, but District of Columbia has improved massively between 2000 and 2012.
EDIT: This might be a bit misleading. While there is more recent data for the US (up to 2016), there seems to be no reliable data on Egypt post 2012. Additionally, the 2012 number (2.5) represents a 4x /increase/ in homicides since 2003 (0.6). Only 2011 (year of the Egyption revolution) was higher at 3.2. So there's a clear trend towards an increase in homicide rates that might not be accounted for.
That said, I guess it's unlikely that the number is much higher than the US average, even discarding the outliers mentioned above.