some_random

It's a (as described in the article) conservative belief so it must be condemned and disavowed especially if it has merit.

wtf would that discussion even look like?

Strictly speaking, the point of the article is to drive clicks for ad revenue and the title was optimized to do just that.

Chicago has a long and well documented history of corruption and machine politics.

No one really cared when we were at full employment, the problem is that CS is the new liberal arts degree and it looks like it might only be getting worse.

You're welcome to own nothing and be happy, you don't get to force that "freedom" on others.

Haha, I get where you're coming from but I still disagree. It's a question of the baseline risk, if COVID occurred naturally then there's a much higher chance of similar pandemics happening again and risky research like GoF makes sense. But if it was a lab leak, then it's harder to justify. There are other parts to if of course, if you think that covert bioweapon research is common then it probably doesn't matter.

Can we really? Can we really have a discussion if suggesting that COVID-19 may have come from a lab leak at a top tier virology lab doing cutting edge GoF research gets one labeled a racist?

It's because The Experts (specifically those in the public space) made it clear that they Had Spoken and that COVID had come from a wet market. From there, any dissent was met with incredible vitriol that still lasts to this day.

This is the exact reason that the Lab Leak vs Natural Origin question around COVID-19 matters. If it was a Lab Leak, then we should probably be scaling these labs down and restricting what they can research. But if COVID really did come from a wet market, then the risk is probably worth it.

No, I certainly don't think so. The problem is that fighting people pushing the surveillance panopticon by lying about their motivations doesn't work.

The balaclava thing is stupid, but you're missing the point that they're already doing something illegal. If you think anti-ebike law is stupid then that law should be repealed, not ignored.

Finding these people is not the hard part, they're walking around everywhere. The police either don't care or aren't allowed to enforce the law.

Schools decided to try this experiment in post-liberal ethics where violence is simultaneously never justified under any circumstance including self defense, while also failing to punish the worst offenders in a meaningful way. This is one of many results of that experiment.

YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok (especially) are becoming stricter and stricter about the kinds of content they allow to exist and spread on their platforms. Right now I think an alternative is non-viable but it's increasingly possible that won't be the case in the near future.

Oh then of course robbery is down, why bother sticking someone up for pocket change no one carries when you can just steal their phone and escape on an ebike?

I don't know how these terms are defined exactly, but the BBC claims 71k reported stolen phones in 2025 vs a population of 9.2 million which gives a rate of 7.7 per 1000. There has definitely been improvement but that's obviously above 6. Maybe phone theft isn't counted as robbery?

In any case, recovery rate is the other important metric here especially for justifying a surveillance state, and that has been absolutely terrible.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdx4762znr6o

Didn't they have that whole thing a year or two ago where criminals were snatching phones out of peoples hands? Where the police response was to blame the victims and tell them to just pay more attention to their surroundings next time?

Probably because their employers require it and getting a new remote job with a good salary right now is quite hard?

Well, this has become one of the most pro-china forums around so it shouldn't be too surprising.

There is a societal consensus that driving is a privilege which can be restricted or revoked, not that you give up your rights by driving. In fact the opposite is true, the courts have found that drivers have fourth amendment rights for instance.

Hope you all are excited for the most important parts of the internet to be completely unusable by default on Linux in a few years.

Even today, every member of the Canadian military swears fealty to the King of England.

Medicare alone costs $1.21 Trillion, I find that extremely hard to believe.

Is is possible that some technologies could have longevity trade offs and not be "planned obsolescence"?

That's exactly what it is, and it's pretty important to run

Selective enforcement is just tyranny, but what I think they were getting at is a minimum size enshrined in law. I don't think it's a great idea, really highlights how arbitrary this all is and presents a risk of advantaging the worst actors more than real makers, but it's a valid way forward.

The only time iPhones were $199 was when they were subsidized by lock-in contracts, they were never actually that cheap.

It's the same game that's been played since the invention of commerce.

If the Chinese look like a beacon of hope you then you really should be looking closer.