The cops said they had been tracking the car for days. So just once they should have looked at the license plate, and seen the full 7-digit number, which does not match the 5-digit number reported as stolen.
Instead they just blindly trusted Flock's identification of the vehicle.
The problem with giving a free pass to the lazy and incompetent cops who didn't do the least bit of due diligence before surrounding a couple with 4 cop cars in a manner that could have resulted in death, is that you can apply such flimsy excuses to everyone in the chain, and end up excusing everyone, because each link is only partly responsible.
Yes, I'd also blame the city for deploying constant warrantless surveillance.
Yes, I'd also blame Flock.
Yes, I'd also blame the Sergeants who set officer incentives and don't punish lazy cops, and prosecutors and judges who rarely hold police accountable.
But also blame the 4+ lazy and incompetent police officers, not one of whom bothered to double-check the pictures against the report and say, hey, this license plate has 7 digits...
An engineer friend of mine, after a decade in industry where he rose to management, decided to go get an MBA at a top ten management school. Compared to engineering, he said it was easy, since everything they teach you is obvious common sense.
I thought that meant the degree was worthless. But he said just the opposite. Even though it's all obvious common sense, it really helps to have someone lay it all out together and remind you to think about those obvious common sense things as you go about managing a business.
That's why democracy shouldn't be worshipped as the end-all be-all key to good government or good society. Or as Churchill put it, democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Freedom and liberty should be the foundations of a healthy society. Democracy should be reserved only for those things that must be decided collectively and universally enforced.
What kids do on their phones doesn't even come close. Let parents and vendors decide what their kids and customers can do. I've met plenty of well-adjusted kids who aren't on social media because their parents don't let them.
Years ago the US government allegedly proposed prediction markets, in part to encourage the exact kinds of behavior that the US Special Forces soldier exhibited. Of course they wanted it from adversaries, not from allies.
By creating prediction markets with points rather than dollars, Meta probably avoids a lot of the legal issues current prediction markets are facing. But it also loses the one real value of prediction markets: when people put their own real money at stake, their decisions should be based more on actual knowledge and estimation than wishful thinking.
So what use is a prediction market of points for anyone?
It depends on a lot of things. If they've also applied to another college that's better suited to their ability, admitting then to a school where they'll likely fail is not really doing them a favor.
I used a discount buyer's agent and it worked great! We viewed houses on the internet ourselves, went to open houses ourselves, and arranged showings with seller's agents ourselves. Once we had it narrowed down to two houses, we brought our buyer's agent to look at both houses, offer suggestions, and do all the bidding and purchase paperwork.
The realtor cartel still enforced a 6% commission, with half to the seller's agent and half to the buyer's agent. Our contract with the buyer's agent refunded half of his commission to us. So basically we got a 1.5% home discount. Our buyer's agent still made 1.5% but didn't have to babysit us while traipsing through dozens of potential homes, so it feels like everyone wins.
Or, the world needs more of your field because it's now cheaper.
I've often heard of house painting as an example of this. It used to take a crew of 8 with buckets, paintbrushes, and ladders to repaint a house. Then paint rollers came along and it got easier. Then sprayers came along and it got even easier. Costs fell, so now people want their houses painted far more often. Landlords now nearly always fully repaint apartments between tenants. As cost fell, painting demand rose.
> The FDA has approved bemotrizinol (PARSOL Shield). This is the first new sunscreen ingredient approved in over 20 years, offering superior UVA and UVB protection... an advanced sunscreen filter that has long been used in Europe and Asia.
The FDA statement makes this sound like something we all should be pleased with. Somehow this 19,000-person bureaucracy is popular on Hacker News, but I like to remind people that the FDA's primary job is to prevent Americans from buying medicines.
A more accurate summary might be something like:
> After many decades of successfully preventing Americans from buying the same safe and effective bemotrizinol sunscreen that the rest of world has had for years, today the FDA finally relented and stopped blocking Americans from buying it.
It seems obvious in retrospect, but the fact that SpaceX will be "valued" at $1.75 trillion after the IPO is irrelevant when only $75 billion worth of its stock will be publicly traded.
$75 billion in float-adjusted market cap puts it around 180-190th in the S&P 500. So sure, it will likely get in there eventually, but there's no rush to bend the rules to get it in right away.
A friend gave AI access to his accounts to summarize his finances.
On reviewing the AI-generated report, he spotted a $500 monthly loan payment that he didn't recognize. He asked AI where it came from, and AI admitted that it was a mistake.
Perhaps in its training data, most people have a $500 loan payment, so AI just stuck one in there.
A late 2024 international report https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-demand-from... predicts that by 2035, datacenter electricity usage will increase from 2024's 1.5% to 2-4.4% of global usage. Currently about 1/3 of datacenter electricity usage is for AI (0.5% of that 1.5%), though that will presumably increase.
LLMs are software. They take inputs and produce outputs. What humans choose to do with those inputs and outputs is up to us.
Getting the pope involved makes it all seem more mystical and magical than it is. And these remarks only further feed that delusion. Regardless of intent, it seems to just feed the AI marketing and hype.
The article is thin on details about the sharing of names. If US companies responded to US government inquiries about speech regulation by forwarding the emails they received from Dutch regulators, those would unsurprisingly include regulators' names.
The article title seems like click bait, even though the article content goes on to have interesting details about EU attempts to reduce dependence on US technology companies.
> We've seen how irrational and ignorant stock traders are from other publicly traded space companies.
Absolutely true, but ignorant stock traders making irrational trades only matters if company management pays attention to them. Musk will maintain complete control of SpaceX even after the IPO, so he can focus on long-term value rather than short-term ups and downs.
Of course, over time, if more shares are issued, this may change.
Stallman tried to introduce the term "intellectual monopoly", which fits better, since they really are monopolies granted by the government for limited periods of time, intended to promote progress in science and the useful arts.
"Property" was chosen specifically as a bait and switch. It tries to get people to take a concept that has been understood for thousands of years for physical objects, and apply it to this novel century-or-two long experiment for encouraging the production of easily-copyable things.
> However, I have sadly come to feel that many journalists who write about science, and perhaps even some scientists, see their role as activism toward a specific outcome rather than discovering and describing reality as it exists.
That's not a feeling, for journalism anyway it's an explicit fact. The Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC) - the primary agency that reviews and accredits journalism programs across the United States and whose mandates directly shape the curricula of over 100 universities - has changed their standards over the years away from emphasis on truth and towards emphasis on advocating change to institute certain policies. See https://www.acejmc.org/about/strategic-plan . They still mention truth, but almost tangentially among long lists of outcomes that journalists must pursue. The current generation of journalists were trained by these principles.
The Associated Press (AP) StyleBook https://www.apstylebook.com/ similarly polices the language that journalists use to favor certain policy outcomes, with some news organizations requiring compliance as a condition of employment.
Instead they just blindly trusted Flock's identification of the vehicle.
The problem with giving a free pass to the lazy and incompetent cops who didn't do the least bit of due diligence before surrounding a couple with 4 cop cars in a manner that could have resulted in death, is that you can apply such flimsy excuses to everyone in the chain, and end up excusing everyone, because each link is only partly responsible.
Yes, I'd also blame the city for deploying constant warrantless surveillance.
Yes, I'd also blame Flock.
Yes, I'd also blame the Sergeants who set officer incentives and don't punish lazy cops, and prosecutors and judges who rarely hold police accountable.
But also blame the 4+ lazy and incompetent police officers, not one of whom bothered to double-check the pictures against the report and say, hey, this license plate has 7 digits...