The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. What specific regions or poltical jurisdictions do you think count or do not count as part of the civilized world?
I am sorry I don't have the precise statement about relative rates of gun deaths and mass shootings in the US vs the rest of the OECD. Here's a data point to ponder, firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761
I wa surprised by this, because Mexico is in the OECD. According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/..., the firearm-related death rate (including suicides and accidents) in 2022 in Mexico for children and adolescents (age 1-19) is 4.9/100k, compared to 5.9/100k in the US. But the overall homicide rate is 6.5/100k for Mexico vs 4.7/100k in the US. So this is consistent with Mexico being a more violent society than the US, but using somewhat fewer guns in the process (and the numbers are still pretty similar). There's also questions about how reliable the Mexican firearm homicide data is - a lot of these are presumably happening in cartel-controlled areas where Mexican government state capacity is limited, including the capacity to properly gather statistics.
The Encyclopedia Brown story I remember reading as a kid involved a Civil War era sword with an inscription saying it was given on the occasion of the First Battle of Bull Run. The clues that the sword was a modern fake were the phrasing "First Battle of Bull Run", but also that the sword was gifted on the Confederate side, and the Confederates would've called the battle "Manassas Junction".
The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Bull_Run says the Confederate name was "First Manassas" (I might be misremembering exactly what this book I read as a child said). Also I'm pretty sure it was specifically "Encyclopedia Brown Solves Them All" that this mystery appeared in. If someone has a copy of the book or cares to dig it up, they could confirm my memory.
> How did we end up with this mess of disjoint chat systems each with their own userbase? Doesn't it indicate that this market desperately needs regulation?
Why do you assume that the regulation that would actually get passed by the actual government would result in effective chat interchange between different protocols, and not just entrench some existing platform while making it technically illegal for another organization to try to compete with them?
> Either you provide message interchange with any other message system operating in a specific country or you can't advertise or sell anything in this country (also app stores must country wide ban).
Would this make it technically illegal for me to use F-Droid to install an open-source implementation of a novel chat protocol that doesn't support interchange with existing chat platforms yet? Does this make it possible for me to force existing chat platforms to be suddenly illegal by releasing a novel open-source chat protocol without coordinating it with those platforms?
> Would email look the same if it was left to be invented by the corporations?
Probably not, but email is a heavily-flawed protocol, so I'm not sure that's a good thing. Also, although email was invented in the 1970s, making it one of the oldest internet protocols still used, it's been extended over the years, and I'm sure at least some of those extensions were developed by various for-profit companies (perhaps ones which no longer exist).
> When US-Americans go on social media, how many of their fellow citizens do they expect to post harmful content?
Just because an American citizen sees something psoted on social media in English, it doesn't mean that it was a fellow American citizen who posted it. There are many other major and minor Anglophone countries, and English is probably the most widely spoken second language in the history of humanity. Not to mention that even if someone does live in America and speak English and post online, they are not necessarily a US citizen.
My prediction is that it was a random home invasion robbery committed by someone with multiple previous felonies who had no idea that the person living in the house they were trying to rob was a MIT professor.
But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.
Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).
In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.
Yea even in the US where there's a rather lot of home invasions (~million/yr), even amongst the ones where the occupier is injured-or-worse (~250k/yr), very very few of them are fatal (<500/yr).
Other possibility; a disgruntled investor who poured millions into dead-end fusion research and now wishes they had invested in AI research instead? Blames the professor for persuading them to invest in fusion.
This basically never happens, about 100 people die a year in the US during a “burglary gone wrong”. People think it’s common, though; it’s the go-to cover story in almost any Dateline episode.
This logic does not follow from or to "That's 100 times more than I thought." You can be both horrified at something and also understand that it is thing that happens.
Tangential but I think that's a terrible way of making your point because intuitively we don't look at digits of a numbers and think log scale. That looks more like 1/3 instead of 0.000029%.
It's a reasonable guess, but 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery. Usually they're committed during the day when people are at work, and if not that then deep in the night for maximum cover. 8:30 is almost like the ideal time if you actually want someone to be there and answer the door at an hour where it wouldn't cause enough alarm for them to answer the door with a weapon.
When it comes to small-scale crime like this, the smartest thing is typically not to do it at all. So the people who do it will generally not be very smart.
When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.
Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.
BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.
Did the thief take transit, though? We had a similar NIMBY argument in the area where some totally-not-racist people said thieves were going to bike from a predominantly black neighborhood 15 miles away to steal TVs, and it was so blatantly wrong that the local chief of police noted that the burglars they catch use stolen trucks or SUVs for the cargo capacity.
I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.
The spirit of my comment is that they wouldn't take public transit to come steal TVs because nobody would intentionally schlep a giant stolen tv via public transit, they most likely would use cars.
yeah it turns out everyone else read the end of that sentence one way and I went the other. Although the image of a train car full of straphanger burglars with a tube TV between their legs, reading a newspaper folded into 1/8ths with their free hands is kind of funny.
The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.
In the context of discussing a hypothetical murder committed during a home invasion robbery and murder, implying that a smarter criminal would become a CEO instead so they could legally kill people is an attempt to equate running a firm with committing home invasion robberies and murders. This is an extremely ideological statement, not neutral in the least; and the specific ideological framework grounding it is a certain type of leftism.
They don't become a CEO so they can legally kill people. Both types are committing the crime to make money. The killing is just a side effect. If you have the sort of mindset where you'd stab someone while committing a robbery, but you're smart enough not to commit petty robberies in the first place, then you probably won't have much ethical trouble with emitting deadly pollution, maintaining unsafe working environments, and that sort of thing when you're putting your talents to more legal uses.
It's not equating running a firm in general to committing home invasion robberies and murders. It's equating running a firm which kills people in the pursuit of profit as worse than committing home invasion robberies and murders. There are examples of such firms, so that part is just factual. The second part is a value judgment, but a simple "X worse than Y because X kills more people than Y" doesn't seem very ideological to me.
The neutral viewpoint, I think, is that "some CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and some get away with it."
Although yours is more neutral than "CEOs do nasty things that get people killed, and get away with it" which you often hear from the same populations that cheered the assassination of a CEO that did nasty things and most definitely did not get away with it.
It's definitely become more politically charged in the wake of the Luigi event, when framing CEOs as violent people implicitly authorizes "self-defense" cheered on by what is usually associated with left-wing leaning actors.
I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers. And right now, it is far right who is having genocidal rhetorics.
I might catch some flack for calling Putin right wing, but he's definitely further right than any of the major killing events I can think of that have happened in modern times. He's certainly way further right than Hitler, who took control of the capital and the means of production and relegated capitalists to basically being token pieces who produced what and when the Nazis order largely at the price Nazis ordered on behalf of the "German people" in a totally "non-socialist" socialist party that just happened to practice the core tenants of socialism when it came to economics.
Actually, already Hitler. The numbers are tight and Hitler did not finished his project. He was stopped by force. His plan was to exterminate Slavic people in the next generation too.
And right know in America, it is squarely fascists and racists who win the numbers and are on the path to add some.
Numbers are nowhere near close. Just Mao is responsible for at least 3 times for what Hitler was responsible for. Under Pol Pot a quarter of the population was erased. Stalin's numbers double that of Hitler.
If I had a nickel for every time I replied to an HN comment to give the blindingly obvious example of "Adolf Hitler," I'd have two nickels. Which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice.
Sure, you got one and he is way bellow the most successful far left dictators in terms of numbers. First you claimed numbers are higher for far right and then you said they are close. Why would you even make up such nonsense?
I wasn't the one saying the numbers are higher for one side or the other.
I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others. Seems to me they're similar. Estimates are way too loose, and attribution way too sticky, to say definitively who's higher, but they're around the same magnitude.
Parent: "Or leftist politicians, where they can do it on an industrial scale by the millions in death camps, in the name of progress."
You: "I would point out that when it comes to these, right, far right and fascists win the numbers."
>> I am curious how you conclude that Hitler is "way below" the others.
Looking at various estimates by people who were researching this topic. The numbers are usually in ranges and vary between researches. But the highest estimate for Hitler was always lower then the lowest estimates for Stalin and nowhere near Mao's lowest estimates.
From a quick search, the lowest estimates for Stalin are about 6 million, and Mao about 15 million. Are you saying Hitler killed less than 6 million? Even 15 million would be way too low.
10-15 vs 15-20 is definitely comparable in my view, considering how fuzzy the numbers are.
I'd put Hitler much higher, though. That figure must be excluding a lot of war deaths. For non-war deaths, there are 6 million Jews, maybe 3 million non-Jewish Soviet citizens, 3 million non-Jewish Poles, plus a bunch of other groups with smaller numbers. Taking just those big ones, that gets us to 12 million non-war deaths.
But surely we should count at least some of the war dead. Deciding what to attribute to who is very subjective. Starting with the strongest case, 3 million Soviet POWs were killed in captivity, hard to blame anyone else for that. That's up to 15+ million. There's a good case for including Allied military deaths in the European theater, since they were killed by Axis forces. The vast majority of those are the Soviets, which accounts for another 5-8 million (not double-counting the POWs killed). I'd also include Axis military deaths under the general principle that you get credit for what happens when you start a war. That's another 5-6 million. That puts us at 25-37 million.
Then you can get really fuzzy. There's many millions of Soviet citizens who starved due to wartime disruptions, do they count? There's around a million German civilians killed during the war, or died in the immediate aftermath due to the Allies, do they count?
Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.
It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.
> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.
The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.
If we are doing random predictions based on scant evidence, mine is a professional hit. Neighbor said he heard 3 shots. If it was a "pop pop...pop", that's 2 in the body, 1 in the head. Professional assassin.
My prediction: time traveler. Guy goes back in time to prevent an unspeakable tragedy that happened in the future. The simplest solution to alter the course of human history was this attack. We'll never find the killer because as soon as his work was completed, he vaporized into the ether as his timeline was culled.
"Better" depends on what you care about. _konniti-wa_ (which is the Kunrei-siki romanization of こんにちは, _konniti-ha_ is Nihon-shiki form that preserves the irregular use of は as topic-marking /wa/) and _susi-o_ (again, Kunrei-siki ignores a native script orthographic irregularity and romanizes を as _o_ not _wo_ ) are more consistent with the native phonological system of Japanese. In Japanese coronal consonants like /t/ and /s/ are regularly palatalized to /tS/ and /S/ before the vowel /i/, and there's no reason to treat _chi_ and _ti_ as meaningfully different sequences of sounds. Linguists writing about Japanese phonology use it instead of Hepburn for good reason.
Obviously, being more transparent to English-readers is also a reasonable goal a romanization system might have, and if that's your goal the Hepburn is a better system. I don't have a strong opinion about which system the Japanese government should treat as official, and realistically neither one is going to go away. But it's simply not the case that Hepburn is a better romanization scheme for every purpose.
I don't see how kunrei-shiki is useful at all. If I want to write Japanese words so non-Japanese speakers can pronounce them approximately, then Hepburn is the way to go. If I want to write Japanese words so Japanese speakers can read them best, I'll write them in actual Japanese. This isn't 1975, and computers are perfectly able to render hiragana, katakana, and kanji. What do I need kunrei-shiki for? I've been living in Japan for years now, and have never found a use for it.
People bring up the concept of disincentivizing cars all the time. Many activists in local politics in urban areas have ideological problems with mass car use, and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies.
The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).
I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.
Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.
> and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies
If you're lucky. Sometimes you just get anti-car. I'd love to not need a car at all, but where I am now it would mean Ubering instead because they've made driving worse while transit isn't expanded to fit the gap.
