Correct. Not more, not less. Question is what the default assumption is. With enough BS thrown around, the public seems to tend to tilt to "something is fishy" without any (non-debunked) evidence having ever been presented. Doesn't mean it never will be, but until then, a lot of debunked falsehoods shouldn't create more bias than just silence. Sadly, something always sticks.
Sorry but you are blurring the lines between an actual malicious attack and a badly designed driver.
The first is what the original claim was, screaming "Russians!" and "Chinese!" at the same time with poor technical understa ding.
The second is what actually happened. It's no worse than inserting a CD-ROM and installing a driver. As bad as that is, and to be criticised in its own right, it's qualitatively different from the first.
Let's not muddy the waters by conflating the two and make the (IMO legitimate) criticism of one of them wade into a conspiracy theory about the other.
I like when people put their thoughts so out in the open. Makes it much easier to know whom to not work for, since the work culture must be terrible, if they even publicly express themselves that way.
I've lived in sweden for a while, I have family ties. People there care, compared to US. I've seen people pick up some random trash on an otherwise spotless sidewalk. I've seen people point out to somebody misbehaving that they are out of line. I've seen city council adjusting sth on a sidewalk within a week after some people living there pointed out a minor issue. People care.
Not everywhere, bot everybody. But enough for me to notice.
A lot of wildlife, like birds, bats, insects etc. are really confused by white light. There are some nordic countries which are experimenting with red street lights in outer districts which are showing great promise. (Don't have a reference atm but should be googleable)
When you invite a girl/guy over, do you say "let's meet at my place" or "let's meet at the place I'm renting"? The possessive pronoun does not necessarily express ownership, it can just as well express occupancy.
> Seems like a pretty standard "free markets/Econ 101" argument to me.
Hm I think I see what you mean. It's a free market argument that includes that some regulation is in place which keeps A in business and keeps D out of business.
But wouldn't the free market corollary then be to remove that regulation so the market can be more free? That's hardly the suggestion coming from the left-leaning perspective, which instead proposes to add more regulation. So the end-to-end argument (including s corollary for what to do) doesn't actually sound free market to me.
It's sad because the HN crowd is technically maximally (?) literate and should be one of the last communities to even remotely buy the debunked story.
It's scary because if even those in the know are not resistant to such BS, who else is going to shield the general public from populism-fueled pushes to anarchy or worse? Detoriation of trust in media is one of the building blocks of that, and if even the experts of subject areas are fooled and/or don't care enough, all hope may be lost.
The silver lining though is that the HN submission got pushback in terms of comments and an eventual flagging.
Yeah, for a substantial fraction of people, this case will stick to their minds as "oh the chinese
.. again" It's both sad and scary. It was even submitted to HN. Flagged by now, but still. Many people won't have read this follow-up, especially since it doesn't come as a 1-sentence TL;DR..
And a great example that truth is complicated, expensive and uncomfortable. It's much easier to postulate an evil nation-state entity with a bad plan (without evidence) than to dig through the thicket of this article. It's much cheaper as well, certainly in terms of time and knowhow. And it's also much more comfortable to claim you're the victim and have uncovered a conspiracy, rather than realize this was just the result of the patchwork typical of engineering.
More seriously, nowhere of course, but if the risk is manageable (a fluffy term to mean predictable and not too high) then you'll find an insurance that covers you. Those natural conditions are dynamic though, so where such insurance is available can be (and is) subject to change. Predictably so. Nobody will provide you with the same car insurance when your car is new compared to 40 years later (same car). Things change. If you don't want your insurance to change, negotiate a 40-year term. Forcing them is nuts.
> the narrative of “insurance companies bad” is incredibly prevalent among left-leaning perspectives,
Perhaps it is, I don't have enough insight to know. It's obvious (to me) that this is clearly over-simplifying things.
> Ironically (because it's a free market argument), it’s a not-uncommon argument that if insurance companies can’t provide their services for no more than some arbitrarily-decided amount annually, they’re being inefficient or greedy and should go bankrupt and let a new competitor take the market.
Is it actually a free market argument? Maybe it's not possible to provide that service at that price point. I'd think that the free market argument is that the price is already as low as possible, otherwise such a competitor would already exist and have outcompeted everybody. Such an argument has other issues though, like inertia, scaling effects, price-fixing and such, all of which are working against a free market though. Which is why a truly free market needs regulation, otherwise it ceases to be free.
> I really dislike playing the “both sides” card, even for a moment
Honest question: Why? I've found that reality is complicated. It's rare to find saints on "one side" and "pure evil" on the other. The truth is often times that there are many issues, many interests, many world views, and typically even more than two sides. Uncovering the truth usually requires avoiding partisanship and have an open mind about understanding the interests of every involved party. That necessarily leads to "both sides" arguments. Not common in hyper-polarized discourses, unfortunately.
That depends on what you mean with "pull out". Typically you pay a premium and that means you are insured for a certain
period. A year or so.
Everybody who is insured at the moment of course needs to be paid by the insurance under the terms they had agreed to. The insurances should not be allowed to "pull out" of this responsibility.
But what about the next year? If no insurance wants to offer you another term, especially not for those same conditions, then it's their choice to "pull out" in that sense.
> The government banned insurance companies from raising prices. They used tax payer money to subsidize this for a while which increase home prices. Eventually insurance companies stopped offering insurance.
Obviously. Such a move by the government is just plain stupid.
> When state actors even dabble in socialism disasters happen people die.
No need to overgeneralize. Not every stupid move is immediately "socialism" and everything smart is "capitalism". It's obvious to every socialist that this move was stupid. In contrast, it's pretty clear that a purely market-based health system costs lives. Nobody is claiming though that "whenever societies dabble in capitalism it results in deaths". Pick your optimization target and then the right tool to reach that target. Sometimes that tool is to let prices regulate risk, sometimes it is laws to regulate risk, and sometimes it's something else entirely.
I don't understand the downvote. I think this hit the nail on its head.
People whine about insurances pulling out. All they want is for somebody else to pay for their risk. It's their choice to live in that area, they should bear the consequences. It's not like it is or has ever been a secret. Climate change is known for decades now. Many people just chose not to "believe" in it. Well, their choice, but now that sh* hits the fan, they shouldn't come whine that everything gets sprayed with poo.
The term "uninsurable" is not linked to "too expensive" or (equivalently) "too high risk". It's linked to "unpredictable".
The business insurances are in is a business of statistics. As long as you can model things giving you an expected value and a standard deviation, you can offer an insurance policy which gives you X amount of profit with Y amount of risk, and the insurance premiums are adjusted such that the insurance's risk for negative profit is negligible, according to the model.
What does it mean for climate change? Current insurance models apparently don't work well, so they don't dare to offer policies in certain areas. But just like city planners need to adjust (build further away from shore, higher up, build in flooding protections) and home owners do (AC, think twice if you want a basement) and farmers (choice of crops, irrigation systems), so do insurances by finding better models that allow them to have better statistics.
My expectation in the long run is that insurances will be offered again, but with so high premiums for certain areas (of high risk) that it will just be too expensive to live there. Which is fine. Nobody lives on the moon either. And the public shouldn't be paying for somebody's privilege to have a nice waterfront property in a hurricane area.
TL;DR: The current public discourse about this topic conflates predictability with cost when talking about "insurability". They are very different things.
Anyone relating LLMs to school kids cheating hasn't seen programmers be 3x as fast using it and journalists churning out articles 3x as fast by focusing on what they do best (gather and sort facts) and leaving the tedious make-easily-readable text writing to a machine.
One can certainly have opinions about how some people use it and how they check the quality of what comes out, but as long as it's not used to make up facts but merely to do the primitive busy work, like machines are supposed to do, I don't see how that's not just as revolutionizing as the fax/telex comparison you are giving.
> LLM based GenAI on the other hand has been around for long enough that we know that it's main use case is limited to [...]
Sounds exactly like what Bill Gates said in the early days of the internet. I don't have the exact quote, but I'm sure typing half a sentence full of grammar and spelling errors into ChatGPT would give me the quote including a link to its source. I should got get it fast before that tool disappears when the hype is over and we are back to old school google searches, like God intended.
Correct. Not more, not less. Question is what the default assumption is. With enough BS thrown around, the public seems to tend to tilt to "something is fishy" without any (non-debunked) evidence having ever been presented. Doesn't mean it never will be, but until then, a lot of debunked falsehoods shouldn't create more bias than just silence. Sadly, something always sticks.