they want to isolate gay and trans children from other gay and trans people. don't you know, there's social contagion afoot, but if we protect y^Wour children from this inherently sexual (and thus adult) content, we can prevent it. this is enough to make me oppose age verification wholesale. I don't care if there's fancy ZKPs, it's still going to be used to isolate and harm hundreds of thousands of vulnerable trans kids, who are already experiencing astronomically elevated suicide rates over the past few years. they don't need more of this.
In Denver, they'll be expanding once they have budget. Also as soon as Axon finishes developing their integrations with civilian cameras into their Fusus product. They've also got natural-language queries in the pipeline ("find red trucks near here"), and they already have integration with the hundreds of existing non-ALPR LEO cameras. It's not better.
It's different. The primary harms of flock come from their horizontal integration into a nationwide surveillance network, working with ICE etc. Axon (formerly Taser) has strong vertical integration, which is new and we haven't thought through as much yet. (This is the position of city councilmember Sarah Parady, who's been part of a working group to research+draft ordinances about surveillance technology, and whose speech at the meeting voting on the contract I really respected. I think it's available online.)
The Axon contract is smaller than the Flock one, 50 cameras instead of >100, but that's because it's all they could get budget for, and they want to expand. DPD owns the data and is theoretically not supposed to share it with federal agencies, but there are lots of legal ways to make them comply. They're setting a 21-day retention period for data that's not part of an ongoing investigation, but I think that's missing the point, and it's not codified into law. The Axon cameras can be switched into a mode where DPD can view live feeds. Most of the contract provisions that the mayor's office added because of significant public outcry I would call "token." They're not addressing the real issues, and it's still contributing heavily to the development of the surveillance state.
Overall, it's an improvement, in the sense that breaking your leg is better than breaking both your legs. But don't get me wrong, they're coming for the other one as soon as they can.
Hi, I'm in Denver. They're already doing this over on Colfax. It's a significant change vs the existing halo cameras, because they use the drones to follow people.
We have ceded too much ground in this debate. When I say "trans women are women" I mean that, ontologically, it is really true that trans women are a subcategory of the general class "women."
Like you say, we are searching for outliers. We don't cut women that are too strong or too tall. We shouldn't cut out women that happen to be trans. If all the top levels of women's sport end up dominated by trans athletes (something I don't see occurring, and that isn't supported by the data), then good, outliers found. We love to see women succeed.
(To avoid perverse incentives, though, the HRT requirement is critical. Otherwise you have trans women having to choose between being more competitive and receiving necessary medical care.)
It's being built as we speak. I attended at a city council meeting yesterday, discussing approving a contract for ALPR cameras. I learned about a product from the camera vendor called Fusus[0], a dashboard that integrates various camera systems, ALPRs, alerts, etc. Two things stood out to me: natural-language querying of video feeds, and future planned integration with civilian-deployed cameras. The city only had budget for 50 ALPRs, and they stressed how they're only deploying them on main streets, but it seems like only a matter of time before your neighbor is able to install a camera that feeds right into the local PD's AI-enabled systems. One council member raised concerns about integrations with the citizen app[1] specifically (and a few others I didn't catch the names of). I'm very worried about where all this is heading.
It's already happening. Someone local to me seems to be spray-painting over ring cameras and leaving flyers about the ring-flock-ice connection. I can't say I agree with the methods, but it is sending a message.
Oh, this will be very useful. My current solution is incredibly hacky, I run an unauthenticated SSH server on the Kindle (key-based wasn't working), port scan to find it, and SFTP new files. At home, at least, I have a static IP. The whole system falls apart enough that I usually just connect to calibre's remote server and send books that way, though. I wonder what the battery impact of running tailscale on a Kindle is.
Right now the solution that makes the most sense to me is intentional communities. If anyone reading this has experience living in one, I'd love to chat. Email is in profile.
A few years ago, I was part of a neurodiversity ERG, and we were gathering recommendations for the new office that was going to be built. I found "Designing a Neurodiverse Workplace"[0]. It is a fantastic design document that told me about things I didn't have the language to express that I needed. One of the points it makes is "have a variety of types of spaces and let people pick and move between them", which the author touches on with regard to hybrid work. Everyone (not just ND people) gets overwhelmed by sensory stimuli sometimes, needs to be alone sometimes, needs to be around people and noise sometimes. I kinda knew "yeah yeah accessibility benefits everyone" but I didn't really get it until then. Highly recommend reading this.
It can be relevant in the context of "this is how I work best, this is how to work with me best, these are the areas I'd appreciate a little more patience from you on." If you know what ADHD is, someone saying they have it is pretty good shorthand for all that.
That said, I still haven't brought it up with anyone at work because of the stigma around it. It's tiring pretending it's not a problem for me though.
I think you're right that it's a generational thing. More people know what it is, are less judgemental, or know they have it themselves. Also, a lot of people don't see it as about mental health in the same way e.g. depression or BPD is. (Unsure if that's what you were implying though!)
I don't want to go into specifics, but I spent time on some of the more unsavory parts of Reddit for a while. It got me into trouble with friends and family - I said some truly mean and hateful things. I was going deeper and deeper into it. But when Reddit banned those communities, I just... moved on.
I'm ashamed I ever let myself fall into the decaying orbit I did, but when the attractor was removed, I didn't seek out a new one. I didn't even have to install tor if I wanted to: they had just moved to Voat. Still, that tiny barrier to entry caught me. And I'm glad it did.