From this article and a one a month back(0). Simonis seems to have some major bias against law enforcement. As they participated on one side of the protest (not as am independent watcher) and even got arrested at the protest.
Regardless of that, what percentage of the gas canisters where HC?
To say that the protesters where completely peaceful and didn't deserve anything is really dishonest. I am not saying that the officers were completely peaceful either.
Straw man from the article made me question the intent of the study.
“The degree to which law enforcement believes Black lives do not matter is shown by their willingness to use known toxic hazardous waste chemicals indiscriminately,” Simonis says. “Now I don’t go around the feds without a gas mask.”
At a high-level it’s simple: Cryptography combined with peer-to-peer routing. Cryptography provides private communication and sovereign identity, and peer-to-peer overlay routing provides censorship resistance. The technology already exists for direct, verified, and private communication between peers over any network topology.
The challenge is combining the aforementioned technology into an accepted standard and intuitive user experience. The business model would be straightforward hosting. A major barrier is the lack of funding to get it off the ground.
Could this be the same as a tit for tat measure like with tariffs? China has banned a lot of US services and forced US corporations to pull content from their stores too [0] [1].
Genuinely asking and want to remain open-minded about this.
It definitely mirrors the kinds of restrictions China puts on US companies with joint ventures, censorship of sensitive topics, and keeping data on Chinese servers.
However, I think why this feels unsettling even if it just mirrors what China's done is because up to now there was a sense that the US has a stronger economy, society, and culture than China, and these restrictions China put on US companies reflected their weakness and insecurity. But now the US is doing what China's done for decades. It shatters that aura of American superiority, implies that China's been right all along on matters of national security, and foreshadows a future where previously sacred assumptions of American democracy become obsoleted by new technology. I'm reminded of hand weavers smashing machine looms during the dawn of the industrial revolution.
Great point, the US should take the high road and allow the free flow of information regardless of the host of that info (friend or foe)
To give some push back:
Currently the US is in an election year and both the left and right are concerned about foreign interference.
Being said Tik Tok is a Chinese based company and following priority Chinese law. Couldn't they propogate direct election interference under the precived guise of being a US private corporation bc of US public's consumption and get away with it?
A counter point could be made for an actual US corporation doing the same thing, but a nation state doing it would be a different issue entirely.
The US seems to have been fine shrugging off the Golden Rule and giving China a pass for decades because it felt like it was the bigger man. Now, we're seeing the US admit that the gap has closed.
Just consider this: You have FB and other stuffs and can influence the world with it. They are very valuable propaganda channels and political tools and you can push whatever message on them to influence hundreds of millions of people.
Now someone else banned those channels so that you lose the edge. Not only that, the other guy also creates something similarly popular and wait -- it is not under your control!
This has the potential to backfire hard if other countries decided to use the same reasoning against FB to demand data, feed algo, management and employee localization in country.
> Could this be the same as a tit for tat measure like with tariffs?
It certainly hopes to provoke a cycle of retaliatory escalation, because it's an election year stunt looking to distract from, well, a whole lot of other things with a manufactured international crisis to create a rally-around-the-flag effect.
It will probably fail as a political strategy somewhat less spectacularly than “let’s avoid having a national strategy to control the COVID-19 pandemic and behind-the-scenes obstruct state efforts because the early impacts are in Democratic-governed states and we can leverage the impacts for political gains by blaming the governors.”
And what will be the retaliation? China has already banned just about every major US equivalent. It's mind numbing how many people are crying about trade reciprocity finally reaching China.
The article's beginning and very ending was very informative and made clear nuance of the situation of keeping kids/college young adults from school.
The author lost me completely when they started injecting in one sided political perspectives and hindsight bias:
"...opposition to public-health guidance."
Which public-health guidance? Not all of the "opposition" was bad. Example: Any guidance from the W.H.O early on in the pandemic [0]
"Had Trump implored his supporters to wear masks and be patient, case counts might well be dropping across the country. "
Author chooses to show a particular political bias again and fails to mention the other major event that caused a uptick in cases (nationwide protests).
This whole section seems very out of place with the rest of the article, almost like The Atlantic had a requirement to show a left leaning bias to be published...
There are tons of people in the protest not wearing masks. It's politically dishonest not to assume some spread came from massive gatherings, especially where protesters were gassed. I know it's dangerous to say anything negative about protests but we need to be consistent and honest in order to maintain our credibility.
The point is that despite the article's callout of Trump, his political opponents weren't patient either, and flooded the streets while public health officials were still worried it wasn't safe. Selectively grumping at people for being impatient is unfair, and more importantly degrades the social trust that's required to make pandemic restrictions work effectively.
> Author chooses to show a particular political bias again and fails to mention the other major event that caused a uptick in cases (nationwide protests)
So far the data says otherwise. It seems to be a combination of three things that made spreading at the protests low.
1. They were open air events where people were moving around a lot,
2. A large percentage of attendees were wearing masks, and
3. Not many attendees were infected.
Health officials did heavy testing at several of the protests or of people shortly after they attended. In Minneapolis 1.8% were positive. Seattle was less than 1%. Boston was 1.1%.
If you encountered an infected person at a protest, #1 alone greatly reduced your chances of being around that person long enough to get an infectious dose unless they actually were coughing or sneezing on you.
Then you've got the masks making it even less likely.
With only 1-2% infected, you probably won't encounter enough infected people serially for all the little exposures to add up.
1. "...moving around a lot"
Yes, in some cases, but it's not a great point to make because there are also lot of cases where protesters are huddled together for a long period of time [0], [1].
2. I do agree on this point (based on live feeds I observed), but we wouldn't be getting the full story if we just talked about the protesters and not the tear gassed rioters, indoor looters and police officers who didn't wear masks. [2]
3. I have some differing perspectives on this point:
Most of the attendees that were tested statistically were a younger and less vulnerable population [3], this cost time, effort and money. How would this not have a direct impact on the future testing capabilities and resources that some of those cities needed for more vulnerable populations and rising cases [4]?
More than 3300 people who participated in the protests in Minneapolis got tested and 1.4% (now 1.8%) of them had the virus. This is needs to stated along side of the 7 day average infection rate that week of 3.7% out of 13,000 people. [5]
It's also fair to mention the most populated city in the US and the one that had some of the highest protesting wasn't asking people if they attended the protests when they got tested. [6]
I am sure there were other indirect impacts on virus patients like emergency response time and hospital services during the peaceful protests and non-peaceful protests that.
> Author chooses to show a particular political bias again and fails to mention the other major event that caused a uptick in cases (nationwide protests)
I'm tired of having to constantly address this point. I had hoped that people on HN would be able to do independent research, but I keep encountering this claim. No, the nationwide protests did not cause an uptick in cases. Multiple studies [1] [2] [3] seem to indicate that the coronavirus doesn't spread nearly as well outdoors as it does indoors. In fact, studies have indicated that one of the greatest surge predictors is card-present transactions in restaurants [4].
That is partly why here in Texas we're seeing such a strong resurgence. We reopened our bars and restaurants with reckless abandon and the result is a massive increase in cases across the state. At this point if you're claiming that the protests were the reason then you're showing your own political bias at play.
Most of the "resurgence" in cases in Texas is from about 3 counties, all in the border, all of them treating individuals crossing the bitter for better treatment.
If course, we could say the rest of the cases are simply from anyone now using the healthcare system who is being automatically tested even if they are being seen for something non covid related.
Of course if you really wanna get in the weeds, you could probably say that the median age for covid is about 36 and the death rate is about .04% for those under 50, well below a seasonal flu. Of course you still have democrat governors letting the bodies hit the floor among elderly nursing home residents. But children who are statistically unaffected by covid remain locked down with their parents, who are also minimally affected.
> There would then be a vacuum where other actors to fill
> if there's an opportunity, people are going to take it.
Good, we need more platforms (preferably decentralized) to cultivate free thinking and public form. Not a centralized entity that bends to the will of domestic and foreign governments and angry mobs.
You might be right, although I don't think it's nearly so certain. Why wouldn't each niche community just become an even greater echo chamber when they are decentralized and don't have to follow the same community guidelines? Seems to me, you'd be looking at a lot of communities like /r/thedonald.
I think the action taken with /r/thedonald contributed more to what you are warning against (echo chambers) [0].
"Community Guidelines" can mean anything or whatever confirms to the CEOs biases.
From the article
"Current CEO (and Reddit co-founder) Steve Huffman stepped in as CEO following Pao's departure. He's had his own tussles with r/The_Donald: in 2016, he admitted to modifying posts from users on r/The_Donald after they repeatedly sent him expletives. "
And
"Others on Twitter have taken issue with Huffman's letter regarding Black Lives Matter as well, with the Twitter account for r/BlackPeopleTwitter quoting Reddit's tweet with an image of a Guardian headline that reads, "Open racism and slurs are fine to post on Reddit, says CEO."
No, you can't just shoot someone in the leg to disable them. You have very high chances of hitting main arteries anywhere (arms and legs).
Shooting a human being is not like it is in Hollywood movies. Once an officer pulls out his/her firearm and use it they know it means killing the person. That's why they go through other means of less lethal force before drawing.
Another explanation[1] that shows how it's not just the cost of escaping Earth gravity (which is high enough already) but the delta-v required to de-orbit. It's easier to throw the garbage out of the solar system than it is to descend into the Sun.
Regardless of that, what percentage of the gas canisters where HC?
To say that the protesters where completely peaceful and didn't deserve anything is really dishonest. I am not saying that the officers were completely peaceful either.
Straw man from the article made me question the intent of the study.
“The degree to which law enforcement believes Black lives do not matter is shown by their willingness to use known toxic hazardous waste chemicals indiscriminately,” Simonis says. “Now I don’t go around the feds without a gas mask.”
0:https://pamplinmedia.com/scc/103-news/485705-390928-highly-t...