I'm into rockets, and clicked the link earlier today. I shared the suggestor's view, but didn't bother to post. I came back now, saw the comment thread had updated significantly, noticed that OP had addressed the suggestion, clicked again -- and noticed, hey wow, there are cool screenshots now, these are a lot more interesting, this is better than I thought!
>The license plate, combined with cross border surveillance data providers, is enabling dragnet surveillance and enforcement of unconscionable law. [snip] Stop trying to play down how tech is enabling authoritarianism.
Yes, that's the whole point of tech used by law enforcement: to enable the enforcement of law. If we don't like the law (and I don't), we should change it!
But focusing on the ALPR here is just silly, as a quick glance of this partial list of other technologies used by law enforcement officers in the course of enforcing the law will show:
* cars
* guns
* phones
* handcuffs
* computers
* the internet
* notebook and pen
All of these can be used to "enable authoritarianism", and indeed, any authoritarian regime would be hard pressed to run without them. Some of them are more important than others, and ALPRs are definitely a major improvement in the "who is going where" part of law enforcement -- but the problem is the bad law, not the enforcement thereof.
Your argument reduces to "some laws are bad, so we should have weak enforcement mechanisms, because otherwise people will be unable to evade prosecution for breaking bad laws, and that is bad, because the laws are bad and therefore those who break them should not be subject to prosecution." This is not as helpful a move as it might seem, since it just sends us back to the original question, which is "ok, what laws should we have?"
For better or worse, we have a setup in which we have one branch charged with answering that question, and another charged with enforcing whatever laws we happen to have. Trying to undermine one branch in order to compensate for the stupidity of another is unlikely to help.
Many HN readers with an interest in HFT will find the Sniper in Mahwah blog excellent reading. No longer publishing since 2019 as far as I can tell, but it was great while it lasted:
I don't begin to understand why the bank should have to "justify" its decision to replace workers with AI in the first place. Maybe it works better? Maybe it's worse? Who cares? Shareholders bear the risk of getting it wrong, and can fire management if they think they aren't doing a good job of getting it right.
If the humans are in fact more expensive than the chatbots, it's not like the shareholders just say "oh, ok, I guess we'll just take lower compensation for slightly more risk". Instead, they'll pressure management to pass the higher cost on to the customer.
If you want to "protect workers" by making sure they get paid x amount regardless of whether they're the most efficient way to achieve y goal, why not just do that through taxes? You're basically taxing bank shareholders and subsidizing employees, but with a lot of extra steps. Plus, the employees have to actually show up to work every day, which I understand can be kind of a drag.
> A union carpenter with one year of on the job training will run circles around a veteran carpenter from the south with 15-20 years of experience who never had access to such training.
Can you elaborate on this point? What is it about the union that makes their on the job training so effective? Veteran carpenters with 15-20 yrs of exp have, in general, a very strong skill set -- what is the union doing that makes people catch up so fast? And if that's true, why do more people not defect from the union?
Spinnaker might be great - I don't know them - but if you're in the market for sailing lessons in SF Bay I can highly, highly recommend Club Nautique out of Alameda[1].
The quality of instruction is very high, with a focus on safety and building a strong foundation of knowledge. Especially if you ever might want to charter in remote locations or sail across oceans, it's really an excellent foundation.
That letter from his wife, Naomi, contains a link to her website[1], which is itself fascinating. Its About page contains the following, which made me think her particular brand of value-add in the world is of the kind that will survive:
> I fill-in the details of the couple in each Ketubah by hand, with ink and pen, as Jewish scribes have done for thousands of years. Nowadays, most Ketubah artists use fonts and fill-in the texts by computer rather than by hand, because many have not studied calligraphy, an art which takes much time and practice to master. I, personally, like writing the details by hand, though it is not easy work, because it is traditional, and because it connects me in a personal way with my clients and my prints.
This is the best thing I've seen on HN or indeed on the internet in general for quite a long time. Excellent work and thank you for brightening my day.
> 2. We can't even take care of Earth. I'm no expert but I have to believe it would be far cheaper and easier to solve Earth's problems.
This is a popular view but I think it is wrong. Yes, we have problems on Earth. But if you compare Earth today, in terms of "carrying capacity for human beings", or "utils generated per day" or some other metric you like, vs pre-human Earth, I don't think it's a close contest.
The few early humans were hungry, naked and vulnerable to all manner of dangers. Now there are billions of us, and most live in relative safety, comfort and material luxury. If we can do for Mars what we did for Earth, that will be the best thing that has ever happened to Mars.
>To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the relationship between dietary creatine intake and risk of depression in a nationally representative U.S. sample. We found that MDD prevalence among U.S. adults follows a step-wise decrease corresponding to an incremental increase in dietary creatine consumption. Depression prevalence was 42% higher among adults in the lowest quartile (0–0.26 g) compared to adults in the highest quartile (0.70–3.16 g) of creatine consumption. In comparison, depression prevalence among persons with low creatine intake mirrors what has been estimated among persons with chronic medical conditions such as Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus50. After controlling for demographic and lifestyle variables, the risk of screening positive for depression was 31% lower among adults in the highest, compared to the lowest, quartile of creatine consumption.
This might be right, but I'm not so sure. Public perception is that dealerships are adverse to customers because of information asymmetry + price haggling, and that online sales will hurt them -- but in many conversations with multiple different car industry insiders, they all say that dealers make almost no money car sales, and instead make almost all of it on financing, service and parts. That you can almost model the car dealing parts of a dealership as lead gen for the service desk / finance desk.
I don't know if that's right (anybody with more info care to comment?), but it's at least enough to give me pause on the "dealers will hate nonnegotiable pricing" claim.