LukeZaz's recent activity
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Comment on Weekly Middle East war megathread - week of October 21 in ~news
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Comment on Weekly Middle East war megathread - week of October 21 in ~news
LukeZaz (edited )Link ParentYou sound like someone who doesn't believe Israel has done anything wrong the last year. I don't really want to talk about this with someone who believes that, especially after all that's happened...You sound like someone who doesn't believe Israel has done anything wrong the last year. I don't really want to talk about this with someone who believes that, especially after all that's happened as a result of the IDF. So I won't.
I will, however, speak to others reading this on one thing:
A lack of escalation is absolutely beneficial to Israeli citizenry. A lack of escalation means less likelihood of regional wars, which tend to have negative impacts on local populaces. It does nobody in Israel any favors to be in open war with their neighbors, save perhaps for warmongers who seek a casus belli.
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Comment on Weekly Middle East war megathread - week of October 21 in ~news
LukeZaz Link ParentNot the person you replied to, but it could be considered that it's the escalation itself that is unreasonable, not that it is a particularly unreasonable form of escalation. We want wars to end,...Why do you think this is an unreasonable escalation?
Not the person you replied to, but it could be considered that it's the escalation itself that is unreasonable, not that it is a particularly unreasonable form of escalation.
We want wars to end, after all. If your opponent says "This was the last attack, and we're stopping now," and you have reason to believe them,1 it's beneficial to everybody to not fire back over a desire for chest-thumping revenge.
1. Whether or not this was the case is up to you.
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Comment on Lawsuit: City cameras make it impossible to drive anywhere without being tracked | "Every passing car is captured," says 4th Amendment lawsuit against Norfolk, VA in ~tech
LukeZaz (edited )Link ParentA slippery slope that has time and again been proven to be a very real thing that happens when more cameras are added in more places. Suburbia in much of the U.S. has already become a surveillance...A slippery slope that has time and again been proven to be a very real thing that happens when more cameras are added in more places. Suburbia in much of the U.S. has already become a surveillance state due to nearly ubiquitous doorbell cameras that cops are freely allowed to check whenever they want without a warrant.
I can't even leave my house without being on one of these cameras. And you want there to be even more of them. If both our arguments rely on hypotheticals, then at least mine's trying to advocate for kind solutions rather than an honest-to-god police state.
I'm out.
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Comment on Lawsuit: City cameras make it impossible to drive anywhere without being tracked | "Every passing car is captured," says 4th Amendment lawsuit against Norfolk, VA in ~tech
LukeZaz Link ParentAn expensive solution that takes time is still better than one that solves a problem by creating a bigger one, and if we're going to start arguing for preferred answers based on what people hate,...An expensive solution that takes time is still better than one that solves a problem by creating a bigger one, and if we're going to start arguing for preferred answers based on what people hate, then there sure is a lot to be said on speeding tickets.
But it all boils back down to the fact that you are stating preference for an option that works by hurting people and imagining an idealized version of it that would never occur, all while writing off safer and kinder options just because they're not as easy to slap down in a short time.
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Comment on Lawsuit: City cameras make it impossible to drive anywhere without being tracked | "Every passing car is captured," says 4th Amendment lawsuit against Norfolk, VA in ~tech
LukeZaz Link ParentThe crime is hypothetical because you are not talking about any specific instance of it, but instead the general idea that speeding will occur, and then using it to justify furthering a...Speeding isn't a hypothetical crime lol. Traffic cameras have huge amounts of experimental evidence showing they effectively reduce speeding and save lives by making people drive safer.
The crime is hypothetical because you are not talking about any specific instance of it, but instead the general idea that speeding will occur, and then using it to justify furthering a surveillance state. Other techniques, such as traffic calming or public transportation, reduce dangerous driving far more effectively and need neither aggressive punishment nor the treating of drivers as inevitable criminals.
For privacy concerns, it'd be relatively easy to configure them to only point at license plates and keep no other records (there are problems with this approach, but it's possible).
Tools like these are practically guaranteed to be abused, so you can expect the probability of responsible usage like this to be approximately zero.
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Comment on Lawsuit: City cameras make it impossible to drive anywhere without being tracked | "Every passing car is captured," says 4th Amendment lawsuit against Norfolk, VA in ~tech
LukeZaz Link ParentTo justify invasive and harmful policy like this by way of fearmongering about hypothetical crime would be to make for a society that treats people as evil by default.To justify invasive and harmful policy like this by way of fearmongering about hypothetical crime would be to make for a society that treats people as evil by default.
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Comment on Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of September 30 in ~news
LukeZaz LinkI don't mean to restart discussion of it (the lock was justified, I feel), but is this still being considered? It's been a while.I don't mean to restart discussion of it (the lock was justified, I feel), but is this still being considered? It's been a while.
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Comment on Up to a quarter of US rental inflation could be due to price-fixing in ~finance
LukeZaz Link ParentSays who? I'd really appreciate if you could back this up with something, because it doesn't make the least bit of sense to me. What good is it to sell a house you own when you plan to spend your...Your parents' concerns make sense though many homeowners don't think like that.
Says who? I'd really appreciate if you could back this up with something, because it doesn't make the least bit of sense to me. What good is it to sell a house you own when you plan to spend your life in it? You'd end up with a big influx of cash, but a worse living situation. It's not like you can move to a better house, because that house's price probably went up too.
The only scenarios in which selling your only home is a truly beneficial option are niche ones that I can't imagine most people preferring.
That's why proposition 13 is so popular in California since it limits property taxes,
I rather suspect this is more to do with the preferences of landlords than the preferences of the common man.
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Comment on Up to a quarter of US rental inflation could be due to price-fixing in ~finance
LukeZaz Link ParentFrom the Wikipedia article on U.S. homeownership: Combine this with what OBLIVIATER has mentioned with regard to homeowners who intend to live in their houses not particularly benefiting from...You have to remember about 65% of American households own their home,
From the Wikipedia article on U.S. homeownership:
The name "homeownership rate" can be misleading. As defined by the US Census Bureau, it is the percentage of homes that are occupied by the owner. It is not the percentage of adults that own their own home. This latter percentage will be significantly lower than the homeownership rate. Many households that are owner-occupied contain adult relatives (often young adults, descendants of the owner) who do not own their own home. Single building multi-bedroom rental units can contain more than one adult, all of whom do not own a home.
The term "homeownership rate" can also be misleading because it includes households that owe on a mortgage, which means they do not fully own the equity in the home they are said to "own." According to ATTOM Data Research, only "34 percent of all American homeowners have 100 percent equity in their properties — they’ve either paid off their entire mortgage debt or they never had a mortgage."[10]
Combine this with what OBLIVIATER has mentioned with regard to homeowners who intend to live in their houses not particularly benefiting from rising housing prices (since they don't exactly want to sell) and the idea that homeownership rates are the biggest contributor to housing prices doesn't hold up so well.
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Black cops won't save us
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Comment on Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of September 16 in ~news
LukeZaz Link ParentOf course. It'd generally be frowned upon to, say, murder people, as some at Jan 6th came to try and do. But that's not what we're talking about, here. These students weren't protesting their...Of course. It'd generally be frowned upon to, say, murder people, as some at Jan 6th came to try and do.
But that's not what we're talking about, here. These students weren't protesting their wannabe-dictator losing an election, they were protesting a genocide. And I rather consider barricading a lecture hall to be significantly less of a concern than anything that happened at January 6th.
We're not talking about protesters hurting people, here. We're talking about protesters being hurt because the way they protested made things too inconvenient for a select few.
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Comment on NYPD officer lands $175K settlement over ‘courtesy cards’ that help drivers get out of traffic stops in ~news
LukeZaz Link Parent(Late reply, but this is hardly an impolite ask, so I wanted to oblige. Sorry about the wait.) I have several issues with policing overall, from its U.S. history of strikebreaking and...(Late reply, but this is hardly an impolite ask, so I wanted to oblige. Sorry about the wait.)
I have several issues with policing overall, from its U.S. history of strikebreaking and slavecatching, to the modern day idea of enforcing the status quo by violent acts such as tear-gassing protesters to evicting the poor to enforcing laws that attack the homeless just for existing. To me, it is not possible to be a good cop, because you either have to be a good person (and be bad at your job) or be good at your job (and do horrible things). You can't do both, so you can only succeed by quitting.
Many people will argue that cops should be changed to do milder or more helpful things, like being trained to better handle domestic issues or mental illness. But to me, either this is doomed to fail because it's still cops with guns doing it who will always be prone to violence, or you do it by extricating all the violence and thus it stops being cops altogether. Paramedics, social services workers, and crisis intervention aren't cops, because they do not inherently wield or further state violence.
Still, the most important factor is and always will be that innumerable better solutions are on offer. So to answer your question, there are two things in particular stand out in my mind as examples.
The first occurred on another site. I'd mentioned I was fine with very literally abolishing the police,1 and someone responded by saying:
Someone has to take care of the person who stole a car and is speeding down the freeway going 100+, crisis councilors aren’t going to be driving trying to perform a PIT maneuver.
...to which I responded:
This could be solved by replacing cars with public transport, such that people don’t really have so many opportunities to go 100+ to begin with, or by using traffic calming techniques to make it feel too unsafe for anyone to want to try, or using alternative road layouts to make it significantly harder to pull off at all (e.g. roundabouts). There are many options, almost all of which are better – and less punitive – than the police.
Thinking like this can be applied to a great many things besides traffic, be it drugs, murder, etc. People are not ontologically evil, so it does no good to treat them as such. By and large, many crimes occur because of various reasons typically borne from societal ills, such as financial hardship or a lack of access to things like therapy. Fix those, and you can prevent a lot of crime from even being considered.
The second example was here on Tildes. A while back, this article on American air safety was posted here, and I found it a very compelling and concrete demonstration of how things could be better. It opens by describing a horrific crash that killed several dozen people, and then delves in to how and why it happened, and how the investigation occurred. I highly recommend reading it in whole, as it's a very good article, but the important parts are this:
In the aftermath of a disaster, our immediate reaction is often to search for some person to blame. Authorities frequently vow to “find those responsible” and “hold them to account,” as though disasters happen only when some grinning mischief-maker slams a big red button labeled “press for catastrophe.” That’s not to say that negligence ought to go unpunished. Sometimes there really is a malefactor to blame, but equally often there isn’t, and the result is that normal people who just made a mistake are caught up in the dragnet of vengeance, like the famous 2009 case of six Italian seismologists who were charged for failing to predict a deadly earthquake. But when that happens, what is actually accomplished? Has anything been made better? Or have we simply kicked the can down the road?
It’s often much more productive to ask why than to ask who. In some industries, this is called a “blameless postmortem,” and in aviation, it’s a long-standing, internationally formalized tradition.
[...]
The [National Transportation Safety Board] does not assign fault or blame for an accident or incident; rather, as specified by NTSB regulation, “accident/incident investigations are fact-finding proceedings with no formal issues and no adverse parties…and are not conducted for the purpose of determining the rights or liabilities of any person.”
When liability is not a concern, an investigation has leeway to draw more meaningful conclusions. In the case of the disaster in Los Angeles, if you listen to the tower tapes, you can easily identify the moment Wascher cleared two planes to use the same runway. But if you remove her from the equation, you haven’t made anything safer. That’s because there was nothing special about Wascher — she was simply an average controller with an average record, who came into work that day thinking she would safely control planes for a few hours and then go home. That’s why in interviews with national media her colleagues hammered home a fundamental truth: that what happened to her could have happened to any of them. And if that was the case, then the true cause of the disaster lay somewhere higher, with the way air traffic control was handled at LAX on a systemic level.
In my mind, this is how it should be. And it is why institutions like police are an abject failure. They seek to blame and punish, and when you do that, you solve nothing. All you do is hurt more people, and empower others to do so themselves.
By contrast, here's what the NTSB investigation got us:
[...] as a result of these findings, genuine safety improvements have been made, including more reliable ground radar at more airports, automated ground collision alerting technologies, and a national ban on clearing planes to hold on the runway in low visibility. None of these improvements would have been made if the inquiry stopped at who instead of asking why.
Real, meaningful change, that has no doubt saved lives. And all that without punishing anyone at all, because this is a design that works with people instead of against them.
Police don't do that, and they never did.
The fact that Wascher made a mistake was self-evident, as was the fact that that mistake led, more or less directly, to the deaths of 35 people. The media and the public began to question the fate of Ms. Wascher. Should she be punished? Should she lose her job? Did she commit an offense?
[...]
Cutting straight to the case, Wascher was not punished in any way. At first, after being escorted, inconsolable, from the tower premises, her colleagues took her to a hotel and stood guard outside her room to keep the media at bay. Months later, Wascher testified before the NTSB hearings, providing a faithful and earnest recounting of the events as she recalled them. She was even given the opportunity to return to the control tower, but she declined. No one was ever charged with a crime.
As the aviation industry has learned through hard-won experience, that’s usually how it should be.
1. To be clear, I also said: "This doesn’t mean we should replace the police with literally nothing — obviously things investing in social services and crisis intervention would be great. It’s just that I find it hard to do worse than what currently exists."
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Comment on Weekly Israel-Hamas war megathread - week of September 16 in ~news
LukeZaz Link ParentYeah, that's what a protest is. Disruptive. That's the point. Otherwise it's a parade. Things don't change when protests aren't disruptive.Any sufficiently motivated small group could shut down anything if there's no established boundaries,
Yeah, that's what a protest is. Disruptive. That's the point. Otherwise it's a parade.
Things don't change when protests aren't disruptive.
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Comment on NYPD officer lands $175K settlement over ‘courtesy cards’ that help drivers get out of traffic stops in ~news
LukeZaz Link ParentIt does not, in fact, do any of this. State monopolies on violence mean the state gets to dictate what kinds of violence are acceptable, and they have. Police abuses of power are very much the...As others have said, state violence provides the opportunity for accountability. There are abuses, but they are not the accepted norm.
It does not, in fact, do any of this. State monopolies on violence mean the state gets to dictate what kinds of violence are acceptable, and they have. Police abuses of power are very much the accepted norm; we just pretend otherwise.
State violence is also an equalizer.
This tells me you've lived a privileged life, and/or never had a truly bad run in with the cops before.
Look at the violent labor battles in 19th century American company towns to see an example of what happens when brutal police forces are accountable only to a single person or business.
You mean the labor battles that state violence helped perpetuate? Stuff like the Battle of Blair Mountain, which the U.S. government participated in on the side of the companies?
I'm pretty liberal and I obviously think a healthy democracy needs to stamp out abuse of power every single time. But when I hear my hardcore leftie friends start saying that police shouldn't exist, I struggle to understand how they think their idealism is going to mesh with reality.
This is because you've grown extremely accustomed to the society that exists today, to such a degree that you have difficulty imagining what radical change would even look like. A great many are like you. It's not unusual.
But cops are an antagonistic solution, and are designed as such. For this reason, they will never be justice.
I will not be responding to any further comments, as I have no interest in continuing a debate when this site's consensus appears to be that state violence is perfectly acceptable.
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Comment on NYPD officer lands $175K settlement over ‘courtesy cards’ that help drivers get out of traffic stops in ~news
LukeZaz (edited )Link ParentIn a job designed to perpetuate state violence, there is no such thing. The only good cop is the one that quits. Edit: I expected to get responses I disagree with, but "state violence is good,...The cop that sued seems like one of the good ones.
In a job designed to perpetuate state violence, there is no such thing. The only good cop is the one that quits.
Edit: I expected to get responses I disagree with, but "state violence is good, actually" was not among them. I think it's time I filter out the politics tag.
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Comment on Annapurna video-game team resigns, leaving partners scrambling in ~games
LukeZaz Link ParentThe idea of Annapurna being abusive is not a surprise to me at all, honestly. I remember a Twitter thread I found a few years back that discussed the predatory nature of most indie publishing...The idea of Annapurna being abusive is not a surprise to me at all, honestly. I remember a Twitter thread I found a few years back that discussed the predatory nature of most indie publishing companies. Annapurna was one mentioned, in the context of how the predatory behaviors are invisible to most players: You hardly ever see the developers themselves – instead seeing Annapurna, Devolver Digital, etc, advertised – and so you don't notice when the people who actually made those games go out of business afterward.
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Comment on A message to our community: Unity is canceling the Runtime Fee in ~games
LukeZaz Link ParentAfter this, I really don't care how much Unity changes. They'd have to become FOSS for me to consider them. Unity had market share and a powerful host of features, at the cost of bugs and an...After this, I really don't care how much Unity changes. They'd have to become FOSS for me to consider them.
Unity had market share and a powerful host of features, at the cost of bugs and an inevitable enshittification down the road. But now Godot has largely caught up in featureset, and said enshittification has caused Unity to squander its own market share, so why bother with it now?
Godot can do so much nowadays, all with more stability, and you can trust it not to stab you in the back later. I can't say the same for any for-profit company, least of all Unity. They've fallen off the trust thermocline, as far as I'm concerned. It would take a miracle for them to come back from this.
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Comment on NHTSA proposes new vehicle safety standard to better protect pedestrians in ~transport
LukeZaz Link ParentThis will not happen. This is very rare, usually replaced with a breath test, arguably less invasive for many since it is one-time (rather than constant) and people do not often have to worry...There's no reason this can't be done fully locally in the car.
This will not happen.
For example, you can be required to have blood drawn for testing if you are suspected of drunk driving, something that is infinitely more invasive.
This is
- very rare,
- usually replaced with a breath test,
- arguably less invasive for many since it is one-time (rather than constant) and people do not often have to worry about the contents of their own blood,
- quite possibly illegal in most scenarios due to search-and-seizure laws, and lastly,
- two wrongs do not make a right.
Bad driving, including driving under the influence, can be easily prevented without having to resort to a surveillance state. Advocating for one to be implemented because you're afraid of other people's driving is insane.
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Comment on NHTSA proposes new vehicle safety standard to better protect pedestrians in ~transport
LukeZaz Link ParentI would much rather fight that trend than just lay down and take it.I would much rather fight that trend than just lay down and take it.
And Iran can now claim they have justification to escalate even further and attack again. This is not how de-escalation works, and thus, this is not how safety works either.