Indeed. The success of even one such prosecution means that the second someone in government wants someone out of the way, they can efficiently be imprisoned for anything rising to the level of... "offensive."
"offensive" actually has a relatively solid definition based on how judges have ruled on it in the past. This includes hate-mongering against protected characteristics, which I see a lot of from the USA right now.
Huge numbers are for political speech. It's not just prosecutions. Child protection is abused to force far left wing beliefs on the population.
A former Marine was charged with inciting racial hatred after describing some migrants as “scumbags” and “psychopaths” in a 12-minute video posted on Facebook following the murders of three children in Southport, which sparked riots around the country. He was then banned from coaching his own daughter's football club. A jury cleared him in 17 minutes, but Wales is run by the left so they kept the coaching ban in place because they believe right wing people are a threat to children.
In another case a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that "Britain is still a Christian state"
There are lots of cases like this. Especially if you expand to Europe. The German Chancellor has personally prosecuted thousands of speech cases against people who insulted him. Merkel established a general rule against insulting politicians so now people get police visits and their devices confiscated for saying things like such and such a politician is a dumbass.
> He was then banned from coaching his own daughter's football club. A jury cleared him in 17 minutes, but Wales is run by the left so they kept the coaching ban in place because they believe right wing people are a threat to children.
Who is the "they" in this? The football club? If the situation is essentially that he called certain groups scumbags, but the footbal club has members of that group, its not surprising he would be banned.
Being rude gets you banned from things. I don't see a problem with that. He wasn't thrown in jail, he said something that offended some people and as a result they decided they didn't like him anymore. Freedom of association is also freedom to chose not to associate with people you don't like.
> In another case a teacher was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that "Britain is still a Christian state"
I mean, that sounds like a dick thing to say to a child or to anyone. And not particularly true (yes there are some vestiges with the church of england, but you are allowed to be any religion in england)
Was that person prosecuted or just fired?
> The German Chancellor has personally prosecuted thousands of speech cases against people who insulted him.
Well the PCB design isn't my strong side either - I am completely self-taught in that regard and I'm sure people who have studied that will tare me apart for any decisions I've made(also valid for all of my projects involving PCB's in the past, even more so considering I make the PCB's at home with a diode laser). Likewise, software is my domain.
I wonder how many different federal and state bureaucracies govern the manufacture & operation of commercial aircraft.
All it would take is for one of them to require senior leadership to take a certain number of flights (per year, let's say) on each new model of aircraft they ship. This would be solved immediately.
> All it would take is for one of them to require senior leadership to take a certain number of flights (per year, let's say) on each new model of aircraft they ship. This would be solved immediately.
They've done this in the past after the prior -MAX issues. It's a pretty meaningless gesture and it can be tasteless at times ("my flight went fine unlike those victims!"). It is very rare for these defect(s) to cause malfunctions during any given flight. The likelihood becomes significant when many of these planes are making many flights every day.
Test pilots aren't employees (or at last not exactly) that would have an agenda, nor are they evil (at least on average I suppose), so any program manager with a vested interest in the plane would happily fly on any that leave the flightline. Any manager that would purposefully conceal or downplay a defect obviously believes the plane is "safe enough" to fly.
The issue lies in "safe enough". Any production aircraft is safe enough to fly according to someone. Program managers know the BIG money involved has already been spent ten times over, so they might draw their "safe enough" line with a tiny bit of leeway because hey, what are the odds?
We can fix it conclusively in one fell swoop; remove the limitations on liability for executives and active shareholders.
If the executives in charge at boeing had to show up to court every time one of their planes crashed, this wouldn't be an issue. If they were facing criminal liability for negligence, you'd never even see them in court. The problems would straight-up just disappear.
Same goes for Pharma and oil execs. If your actions can be punished, you will do a better job of controlling yourself when you see dollar signs, rather than just do literally whatever and face the "worst-case" scenario of being fired with a golden parachute.
That's the hypothetical half of the equation. The tangible, measurable half is how many people the FDA has killed by denying access to life-saving treatments. A number of studies[0] have been conducted on this topic.
Right, of course. Any preventative treatment is difficult to justify, as it's a risk waylaid, whereas treating symptoms has a visible direct impact on problems faced today; nevermind that it costs 500x as much and has worse outcomes.
“See, right here is the public record of how you were fooled into buying a worthless NFT. Then right here is where you converted USD into Crypto Bux so you could earn an impossible 25% interest rate… for a month… until Bux went to zero…
right here. See? Can’t be a scam! It’s all public!”
> The drop in price has a great deal to do with improving technology not simply competition driving down prices
And this improved technology was an inevitable, foregone conclusion?
People make arguments like this as if it was some passive thing, as opposed to thousands if not millions of conscious decisions to improve turbines, airframes, and myriad other technologies, then actually implement them in real aircraft, then acquire and deploy a commercial fleet.
People made these decisions because they were incentivized to trade time and money today for material improvements tomorrow. Why do you think that might have been?
Hint: think about industries where there isn't much competition. Do we see similar improvements there, usually?
There very much was global competition in the airline manufacturing market in the 1970’s. US airlines also weren’t the only people buying aircraft at the time so those regulations didn’t actually impact manufacturing very much.
As to improvements without competition, it’s surprisingly common. AT&T was a huge hotbed of technical innovation when they were a monopoly from ever improving switches and fiber optics etc but they even produced one of the first commercial Unix System V. They also played a surprisingly large role in early satellites literally owning the first commercial communications satellite used for the first live transatlantic television signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar
Monopolies often spend huge sums on R&D outside of their core business. Google’s self driving car is exactly the kind of investment you see when companies have more money than they know what to do with. Xerox for example developed the desktop UI mouse included when they held a huge monopoly, not that it helped them but it did push the industry forward quite a bit.
AT&T may have innovated in their labs, but they were glacially slow pushing innovation out to consumers. AT&T launch the push button phone in 1963, but it wasn't until the 80's (deregulation in 1984) that a majority of dial phones had been switched over to touch tone. One didn't their home phone, they rented from AT&T, so what was their incentive to innovate?
That’s not a lack of innovation, that’s a slow rollout. Innovation is the creation or introduction of some new thing not its takeover of the market.
Your primary care physician is in a competitive market yet presumably still makes appointments over the phone rather than allowing people to schedule online. Such technology has existed for decades and some doctors let you, but adoption is still slow.
It stifled innovation in the home phone market - everyone had the same phone for 40 years. When people were allowed to own their phones, you immediately had innovation. Some stupid consumer aesthetic innovation, but also more real changes like cordless phones, answering machines..
Except they did actually innovate headsets several times including inventing the push button phone. They were even working on Cellphone technology as they were broken up.
AT&T was hardly the only phone company in that time period, people just didn’t really care. Phones just cost a lot and spending more to have buttons just wasn’t considered worth it.
Even into 1982 most people were still renting their phones from the phone company: “Some resistance to buying phones might be evident in the response to the sale offers made in New York, California and Oregon. In New York, those who now rent a plain rotary dial phone pay $3.03 a month and have the option of buying it for $35, which means that the phone would pay for itself in reduced bills in one year. The return on some other models is even faster.
Even into 1982 most people were still renting their phones from the phone company:
Exactly! You had to. 1982 is a very relevant year, the last year before AT&T was broken up. People did want to own their phones, and they wanted choice, and they wanted fun weird phones, or cheap phones, or whatever. Monopoly quashed that.
From 1960 -> 1980 phones barely changed. Compare that to the changes from
You seem to misunderstand, this is months after the breakup and people still rented the phone. It stopped so quickly because the practice was literally banned by the FTC.
It seems strange today that people would rent phones, but they used to be very expensive items even outside the US. The practice ended because prices fell so far not because people’s preferences changed.
practice ended because prices fell so far not because people’s preferences changed.
As if prices aren't a part of preference? As if innovation isn't lowering costs? That alone torpedoes your claim - why wasn't AT&T innovating on lowering prices? Obviously because they were a monopoly and how no incentive.
What you you may not know, is that people didn't switch from renting to buying the same boring phones, the market exploded with phone options. Where was the AT&T cordless phone pre-1982?
> think about industries where there isn't much competition. Do we see similar improvements there, usually?
I can't think of an industry without competition where said industry doesn't try to improve their product or production for more profit. Maybe something in the medical space that I'm unaware of, but this definitely doesn't fly for aviation or transportation in general.
> but this definitely doesn't fly for aviation or transportation in general.
Precisely because those fields are in a high economic (and consequently technology) competition, you see innovation as you noted. The parent comment is that you cannot throw away the competition and still expect innovations to happen.
And my question is what industries that don't have competition also don't innovate? I am not aware of nor can play devils advocate and try to imagine an example.
Had deregulation not happened for airlines in the 70's, why would we expect that they wouldn't innovate to produce less expensive and more reliable aircraft? Any sort of improvements there makes a bigger profit and avoids killing customers (also pretty good for profit).
There are plenty of examples. I will give one in transport, as we are discussing here.
Seoul and Tokyo have the most extensive subway systems in the world. Both have both privately owned and de facto government-owned lines through government business entity. The innovation here is connecting key areas in the city. The new lines that connect new city centers that emerged are privately owned; they care about profit and they are incentivized to provide popular, convenient services by connecting new city centers. Also, there are other innovations like self-driving trains in those private lines (see Shinbundang Line, the newest in Seoul). A government line with legally guaranteed profit is less poised to innovate although some innovations happen due to popular demands or government initiatives.
It's not that government-led projects have zero innovations, but they tend to have less momentum than well-motivated well-aligned private corporations. Well-aligned (with the public's interest) is the key here.
I don't know if particular examples prove anything, but you asked for examples, and here it is. We do have decades of economic research that competition generally leads to innovation in services and technology.
I love how you start with critical thinking, essentially asking for evidence, only to then turn around, put on your cheerleading outfit and make heaps of implications and assumptions in favor of deregulation and capitalism without so much as a notion of evidence.
You didn’t even bother to argue against the points raised by the article itself, which goes as far as to say that the benefits you attribute to deregulation hasn’t occurred beyond the first few years after deregulation.
Sure, but the point is, a halfway decent type system will eliminate whole classes of errors—consequently eliminating whole swaths of things you would ever need to write tests for.
What's more, though, is that a good type system will help you 'Make Impossible States Impossible'[0]—even more behavior you don't have to test because bad behavior is simply not representable in your program.
Tests are strictly more powerful in the small, because they can be arbitrarily complex, but I would say a (really good) type system is more powerful in the large, because you get way more leverage in terms of overall program correctness.
A lot of my personal projects are in Elm (yeah, yeah, bring on the hate)—the models are really well-defined, but the test suites usually only have a handful of tests of behavior I really want to verify. Haven't even played with the property checker yet, but again, that's something that is strictly more powerful than unit tests, but you can only get it* if you have a type system.
For whatever it's worth to you, I don't think of myself as easily impressed. I saw Ted give that demo at a small conference around 10 years ago. I was impressed.
Whatever part you played in that, well done, and thank you.
I got to speak with him briefly afterwards, and to say that he had a chip on his shoulder would be putting it too strongly, but there was definitely some kind of an 'edge' there.
It was fine. There's a number of related projects that are all incredibly minor who had similar demos and somehow were also managed by similar personality types. I've worked with many people over the years but somehow they get their own special group.
Sometimes you run into them at SigGraph, they're these emperors where their kingdom is their mind. They have those messy sprawling websites that read like Doc Brown's scrapbook.
It's an archetype I feel certainly adjacent to and fearful of.
Regardless, about 6 months ago I left my job trying to catch up on all the AI craze because I think that might be the missing piece in moving this class of projects to the next step.
It's going slowly, motivation is hard and this is still kind of a moonshot.
The information organization required to make these memex inspired thought navigational systems truly useful was fleeting, subjective, and labor intensive. AI can do that, pretty well actually, and in personal, subjective ways.
VR and AR can as well and I explored that enough to conclude it's too complicated. You can certainly express the dimensionality needed and tune things accordingly but it's too complicated to be useful.
There's a cognitive limit on the amount of dimensionality and complexity that most people can handle.
There are certainly some brilliant people who don't seem bound by these limits but that's not the point here. It's about taking the information that usually only brilliant people have access to and expanding that so that merely average people like myself can gain competence in it as well.
Chat bots are fine but that's not going to get you from 0 to say, abstract algebras, modern quantum physics, or field theory, which I strongly believe should be accessible to say, 40-60% of people motivated enough to learn it and I strongly believe it currently is not because of the cognitive limits I expressed above by the traditional linear instruction methods.
Getting to the next paradigm is something more people should be working on
Turning the Internet into a true learning machine needs more work and hopefully AI can help
1) That AML creates a massive honeypot of data for hackers, housed at institutions which historically have structural challenges with technology investment
2) The real, material downsides felt by non-criminals, as expressed by many others in this thread
3) That the sum total financial activity of criminals who would benefit from the lack of AML is likely a rounding error compared to money laundering carried out by banks like HSBC
4) The philosophical position that governments are entitled to dragnet surveil law-abiding citizens in order to combat crime
I've worked at a number of financial institutions including two banks.
No idea what you are talking about with AML creating a massive honeypot of data for hackers. If a bank's internal systems were to be widely compromised then stealing a few graph datasets would be the least of their worries. You would have dozens of attack vectors to steal significant amounts of money without the bank finding out quickly.
And compliance issues by HSBC et al is a direct result of a lack of proper AML/KYC systems and processes. So you're making the case that we should roll them out.
> I've worked at a number of financial institutions including two banks.
I spent 5 years in fintech and touched over a dozen financial institutions. You're not thinking creatively enough. Plus everyone has to do KYC/AML, including two-bit money transmitter startups.
> And compliance issues by HSBC et al is a direct result of a lack of proper AML/KYC systems and processes.
Hah, okay. Even if that were true, just keep walking down the menu: JPM knew Jeffrey Epstein was their customer, too.
- 1 isn't necessarily true if certain techniques are used, and those techniques are indeed used (there's a bunch)
- 2 feels overblown by the other users here, to the point that I believe many who are opposed to AML efforts here are acting in bad faith and have other intentions
- 3 seems doubtful given modern Chinese and Russian money laundering efforts in the west
- 4 is a bigger discussion to be had, and in my opinion, can be justified given the societal consequences of not acting against money laundering. We've already seen a big consequence of it with real estate prices
