PSNI had one single firearm discharge in the two year period covering October 2023 - September 2025.
Plus 948 uses of irritant spray, 496 uses of their baton, and 38 taser discharges in the same period. And 23,489 uses of "unarmed physical tactics".
That's for a population of around 2 million. By comparison, SFPD had 10 "officer involved shootings" in the past year for a population of 800k, a rate fifty times higher than that in NI.
Yeah, it was very different back then. And not just the police - we had the army on the streets with weapons drawn, routinely aiming at passersby.
The political situation in the late 1960s provided plenty of kindling, but it seems clear that most of the sparks that actually caused the conflagration came from the barrel of guns held by soldiers and the police. They were directly responsible both for the death of the civil rights movement and the collapse of the government, and without the heavy-handed response it's likely that the settlement of the late 90s would've happened 25 years earlier.
It's actually a great example of why the militarisation of policing should be resisted at all cost.
The one thing I'll say in defense of American cops is that they are police a population that's vastly more likely to have their own guns, too.
Of course it's not like American cops have recognized the danger that poses and politically aligned themselves with reducing or restricting access to guns, so they lose a lot of credit there, but they are genuinely facing a better armed and therefore more dangerous population.
To be fair, guns aren't exactly unknown in NI, either!
There are 153k people who have legal firearms (so about 10% of the adult population, vs about three times that in the US). That's largely farmers with shotgun licenses (NI is pretty rural by European standards) plus licensed "weapons for personal protection" for people exposed to threats for whatever reason as a legacy of the Troubles.
And then there are some unknown number with illegally-held guns - the main armed groups put their weapons "beyond use" as part of the decommissioning process in the 2000s, but inevitably some will have been missed, and then there are the dissident groups who still hold significant amounts of weaponry.
Hard to put an exact figure on it, but if you guesstimate it at a weapons ownership rate at about half that of the US you probably wouldn't be too far from the truth.
So even after accounting for the differential in gun ownership, SFPD are still shooting people at ~25x the rate of the PSNI.
If Canada is like New Zealand, which also has a similarly high rate of gun ownership - it's largely different types of guns - that is, guns for hunting, not for killing people - very hard to conceal a rifle or shotgun compared to a pistol.
I fail to understand why you cited ChatGPT in the first comment instead of just linking the sources in the first place. That was obviously the critique of your comment, and it seems bad-faith to claim it was because they "just don't like the numbers".
Wikipedia is easily viewed by anyone, and their sources are right there for further verification.
“Source: ChatGPT” frequently doesn’t include the link to the original chat, so is hard to verify that is the actual output, and we all have experience with ChatGPT wholesale making up facts when it is led towards the conclusion, or just inventing facts and sources.
I personally treat ChatGPT “facts” like “facts” from Reddit or Meta. There might be a grain of truth in it, but treating it like an actual source is a fool’s game.
Dan Bernstein took that attitude back in the 90s - I think his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain", which ran counter to the mainstream position of "if it doesn't have a license, then you have to treat it as proprietary".
And, sure, djb wasn't actually likely to sue you if you went ahead and distributed modified versions of his software... but no-one else was willing to take that risk, and it ended up killing qmail, djbdns, etc stone dead. His work ended up going to waste as a result.
I doubt the lack of license was the reason DJB's projects didn't take over the world. Most of them required heavy forking to break away from hardwired assumptions about the filesystem and play nice with the OS distribution, and DJB is himself notoriously difficult to work with. Still, qmail managed to establish maildir as the standard format and kill off mbox, and for that alone I'm eternally grateful.
Well, there were always plenty of patches available - it's just that lots of them conflicted with each other, and that was a product of the licensing.
Agreed with the rest, though. I relied heavily on qmail for about a decade, and learned a lot from the experience, even if it was a little terrifying on occasion!
These days one would just most likely create a fork on github. Vim was also maintained through separate patches for a long time, but Bram was a lot more accepting about integrating and distributing those patches himself.
> his personal theory of copyright went something like "if it doesn't have a license, then it's obviously public domain"
I mean philosophically and morally, sure, one can take that position ... but copyright law does not work like that, at least not for anything published in the US after 1989 [1].
I'm a big fan of cheese and have researched this a bit. The consensus seems to be if two cheeses were made with the exact same process except for using past/unpast then you might be able to tell a difference (especially for younger cheeses) but one isn't necessarily better than the other. Over the years cheese makers have learned how to get the best flavor out of the base milk. So a pasteurized brie will be just as good as an unpasteurized brie but made slightly different.
I've tried doing taste comparisons between past/unpast but there's so much variation for even the exact same cheese that I've never been able to detect a meaningful difference.
Yeah sorry I was a little careless there. For the cheeses we were sourcing it didn't matter, and for most of the raw milk cheeses they are done that way out of tradition and because the process is reliably safe enough.
For some unwashed aged cheeses it does truly seem to matter but those the production is so closely tied up with the local agriculture, aging in specific natural conditions etc it's really not a process to try to emulate in your cheddar at your dairy that averages an outbreak every 18 months like the one in the article.
It's a false analogy because Adobe doesn't actually create child pornography for their users. Nor do they distribute it publicly.
In the case that we're discussing, xAI is accused of using images of these girls to create and distribute child pornography.
The girls are American, and the case is being heard in California. I'm not sure why you're talking about the Adobe and British people, when neither are involved.
>Adobe doesn't actually create child pornography for their users
Nor does Grok. Users have to create it themselves. I think this is the fundamental understanding others in this comment thread have had in that they think that Grok itself is doing this.
>I'm not sure why you're talking about the Adobe and British people
I have brought Adobe into the conversation as the develop a competing photo manipulation tool to Grok. I brought British people into the conversation because this article was posted to the BBC. I am disappointed to now learn that the reporter is American and is trying to advocate for such censorship.
The user doesn't create the image, Grok does. With photoshop, the user does the work, and the resulting product is a function of the user's design skills and manual effort. The distinction here is pretty obvious.
Data from consultancies tends to show that WFH and hybrid work patterns are correlated with a significant increase in billable hours compared to 100% in-office. My understanding that a similar pattern can be seen in law firms.
The "RTO is more productive" thesis tends to come from industry sectors where quantitative measures like billable hours aren't so readily available. At best, it seems vibes-based - but, like you, I suspect that it's actually disingenuous posturing.
My ~6 year old Jabra headphones connect to two devices simultaneously, and can easily switch between a total of five at the touch of a button. My Pixel Buds do the same (called 'multipoint' and 'audio switch').
Yeah, things were more awkward in the mid 2010s, but I'd expect everything from the current decade to be able to do it without issue.
That's not really true. The UK has run an open economy for almost 200 years and has long had one of the most diverse sets of trading arrangements of any country in the world.
For domestic energy, it has never relied on Russia. Natural gas supplies are a roughly equal mix of domestic production, Norwegian pipeline imports, and LNG imports (primarily from the USA, but with no restriction on switching to other providers if needed). Yes, there was a spike in global LNG prices due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine but that was driven by other countries seeking to replace Russian imports.
The same goes for the other areas you mentioned - food, transport, communications, and manufacturing. All have vast diversity of supply, with robust supply chains. None of them are remotely close to being dependent on a single external source.
Clearly that’s not good enough. We’re still not out of the last cost of living crisis and we’re going into the next one. We should be more self-reliant. Diversity doesn’t work in such an interconnected global economy.
They may have been introduced in Windows 95, but they didn't actually become particularly common until years later. They weren't originally intended as a long-term feature and, in Win 2000, Microsoft started recommending that people use custom Control Panel objects or MMC console snap-ins instead. But the MMC wasn't an option in Win98/Me and, by the time MS finally managed to produced a consumer variant of NT, use of the system tray had become entrenched.
I'm not sure what Windows is like these days, but in MacOS they're patently absurd. My corporate Mac laptop has twelve of the fucking things, and I've never actually had genuine need to click on any of them (and 5 of them are from Apple and so of course use 4 different corner radii between them - the 3rd party ones are at least a little more consistent).
Sure, but blocking Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi, Qatar etc from exporting through Hormuz has a much bigger effect on global oil prices, and that can be resumed immediately if/when the war stops.
PSNI had one single firearm discharge in the two year period covering October 2023 - September 2025.
Plus 948 uses of irritant spray, 496 uses of their baton, and 38 taser discharges in the same period. And 23,489 uses of "unarmed physical tactics".
That's for a population of around 2 million. By comparison, SFPD had 10 "officer involved shootings" in the past year for a population of 800k, a rate fifty times higher than that in NI.
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