In my opinion, it's quite similar to Brexit: maybe you can get a majority coalition to disapprove of the status quo, but good luck getting them to actually propose a more popular alternative. Much less proposing an actual procedure for getting that alternative onto ballots.

Structurally and functionally, our political systems are not set up to run anyone other than the person who won the primary. Changing a presumptive nominee this late in the cycle is fraught with potential complications, but can be done if there's sufficient support for a specific alternative candidate. Realistically, it's Biden or it's Harris. There's no feasible way to get someone else at the top of the ticket.

Singular "they" is older than singular "you." And note, of course, that the pronoun "you" is conjugated as a plural, and we deal with it just fine.

Hmm, is this a new take on the "Stop Doing Math" meme?

I remember reading an article or blog post years ago that persuasively argued that the danger of AI is not going to be that it ends up doing things better than humans, but that it causes a lot of harm when entrusted with tasks it actually isn't good at. I think that thesis seems much more plausible now, watching people respond to clearly flawed AI systems.

The Twitter deal got canceled, so the interview was posted to YouTube instead. Which, honestly, is the better service for long form video.

I don't think that's right.

The way we operated the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had much, much more consideration to the humanitarian toll on civilians, compared to how Israel is currently running their military operation. Even before either invasion, too, the US military knew there was going to be complex and difficult "nation building" afterward.

Take, for example, the way the US and UK troops cleared out Fallujah: leafleting and warning of the assault and specifically letting the civilian population leave before aggressive bombardment. There was controversy about whether military aged males were improperly identified as combatants, but women and children made it out.

The controversy about a cease fire in Gaza is exactly that: letting civilians avoid the places where fighting is happening. The US devoted resources to making that possible, but Israel isn't protecting those goals to the same degree or manner.

As long as no one is getting hurt I don’t really see the problem.

It'd be hard to actually meet that premise, though. People are getting hurt.

Child abuse imagery is used as both a currency within those circles to incentivize additional distribution, which means there is a demand for ongoing and new actual abuse of victims. Extending that financial/economic analogy, seeding that economy with liquidity, in a financial sense, might or might not incentivize the creation of new authentic child abuse imagery (that requires a child victim to create). That's not as clear, but what is clear is that it would reduce the transaction costs of distributing existing child abuse imagery, which is a form of re-victimizing those who have already been abused.

Child abuse imagery is also used as a grooming technique. Normalization of child sexual activity is how a lot of abusers persuade children to engage in sexual acts. Providing victimless "seed" material might still result in actual abuse happening down the line.

If the creation of AI-generated child abuse imagery begins to give actual abusers and users of real child abuse imagery cover, to where it becomes more difficult to investigate the crime or secure convictions against child rapists, then the proliferation of this technology would make it easier to victimize additional children without consequences.

I'm not sure what the latest research is on the extent to which viewing and consuming child porn would lead to harmful behavior down the line (on the one hand, maybe it's a less harmless outlet for unhealthy urges, but on the other hand, it may feed an addictive cycle that results in net additional harm to society).

I'm sure there are a lot of other considerations and social forces at play, too.

Young people tend to be more persuadable before 30, and tend to bake in their political views around that age. So big events in one's 20's tend to lead to lasting partisan affiliations for life after that.

FDR's presidency won over a lot of people to the Democrats in the 30's and 40's. Eisenhower's presidency shifted people over to Republicans in the 50's. Nixon pushed people away from Republicans. But by the 70's Democrats were losing a lot of voters, and then Reagan won a bunch of people over to the GOP. Then 9/11 won people over to Republicans, while the Iraq war pushed them away.

But each of these things had an outsized effect on those under 30. So Boomers who remember getting fed up with Democrats in the 70s and crossing over for Reagan (and then voting Republican in every election since) just thought it was the effect of age, rather than the effect of that particular political moment in 1980.

And even though this data and the analysis is mainly for Americans, it's probably reflective of how people shape their own political beliefs everywhere.

The US has basically all 4 major healthcare insurance systems in a single country.

The Beveridge model, used in the UK for its National Health Service, is essentially socialized medicine where the government literally owns the hospitals/clinics and employs the doctors and other professionals who work within that system. It exists in the U.S., too, in the Veterans Health Administration system, and the military's own hospitals, plus a few smaller systems like the Indian Health Service.

The Bismarck model, common in much of continental Europe, is essentially an "all payer" system where private insurance can still exist, but where all the insurers are paying the providers the same prices for services. Providers are private, but the highly regulated price structure means that private providers can't just demand their own prices (lest they get cut out of the insurance system entirely). Insurers can be private, too, but all plans must offer specific features, in a way that ends up pushing the pricing and coverage to be fairly uniform throughout the system. This exists in the U.S. in the employer-provided health insurance system, or the "Obamacare" ACA exchanges, where most states regulate what insurance coverage there can be, what prices they can charge, and then all the providers and insurers negotiate prices that end up looking pretty similar. Realistically, someone who gets Aetna through their employer doesn't have all that different of an experience from Blue Cross Blue Shield or Cigna or United.

The Medicare model, or single payer model, basically puts everyone on one public insurance plan and has that insurance system negotiate prices with providers as a monopsony. Doctors and other providers don't have much room to just opt out of the system, because in a society where everyone has insurance for no or low out of pocket expenses, doctors won't be able to charge significant out of pocket expenses for normal services. It's what Canada has, and what the United States has for everyone over the age of 65, as well as everyone under the age of 18, and most people below the poverty line.

The chaotic market-driven model, where patients and providers essentially shop around and negotiate one-off pricing for services, is basically what remains for anyone not covered by the three models above. It might be how markets work for most other stuff in the western world, but among developed nations only the U.S. uses it in a significant way for health care markets.

Single payer, or Medicare for All, is at least something that one can envision for the United States, but I think it's far more likely we end up with something like the German/Swiss model, which probably would be the easiest transition among the 3 major universal health care models. One disadvantage is that it doesn't really look like what we see in other English-speaking countries (Canada's single payer, UK's socialized medicine), so there aren't as many people explicitly calling on the U.S. to adopt models already implemented in other countries.

The article alludes to this problem, but Amazon has basically forfeited the consumer goodwill they used to have. It used to be that their reviews were trustworthy (and relatively hard to game), and ordering products "sold by Amazon" was a guarantee that there wouldn't be counterfeits intermingled in. Plus they had a great return policy, even without physical presence in most places.

Now they don't police fake reviews, and do a bad job of the "SEO" of which reviews are actually the most helpful, they're susceptible to commingling of counterfeit goods (especially electronics and storage media), and their return policy has gotten worse.

It basically makes it so that they're no longer a good retailer for electronics, and it's worth going into a physical store to avoid doing business with them.

It's kinda liberating to peek under the hood and confirm that society, like the internet, is mostly held together with figurative duct tape, that someone put there as a temporary fix that became semi-permanent. The concept of technical debt for software and technology projects exists everywhere, including in the backlogs of what our government agencies, court systems, and corporate organizations are doing (and what they simply haven't done yet).

But the whole thing is still pretty resilient. The individuals who make the decisions that feed into the unimaginably complex web of interdependent relationships and rules might not actually understand every detail, and mostly aren't even benevolent actors who want the best for everyone, but the system as a whole still trudges along, mostly making life better than if the system didn't exist at all. And once you learn how at least some parts of it work, you can make some changes here and there for the better, either for yourself or for the people/issues you care about or for the entirety of the system.

Exactly. There are legitimate concerns about whether law enforcement should be able to subpoena "third party" records (including video recordings) with a process less than a full blown warrant supported by probable cause, as determined by a neutral judge, or whether government should be able to compel the retention of records for a later after-the-fact search. That's a discussion worth having.

But voluntarily recording and retaining video means that the person who controls those records can choose to do what they want with it. Imagine if some homeowner had these cameras, and had their own home burglarized, and tried to turn over the video evidence of the crime, but the courts were like "whoa wait did you get a warrant for that?" It doesn't really change anything to have it be cloud hosted, or easily shared with a button, because that "share" functionality works for non-police recipients, too. Doorbell camera footage gets shared all the time on social media, sometimes because it's funny or interesting or otherwise worth viewing.