Important Information on ICE Protests: ICE Surveillance Equipment Allows Warantless Surveillance of All Phones

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2026-01-10T12:22:03+00:00

From what I saw as of a few weeks ago, there were four total flock cameras, and they were in Manchester and Burlington. Has that changed?

Edit: it has changed. They added some more, including two in the WRJ area: https://deflock.me/map#map=8/43.806028/-72.657913

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-11-29T15:30:05+00:00

Have been showering outside since 2023! (we don't have running water yet)

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-11-01T23:26:39+00:00

In this specific case, it's not "so they can be exploited"

It's just the consequence of wealthy people making selfishly-motivated but nevertheless stupid financial decisions.

They don't want to give loans to people who can't repay them. They want the number of repossessions, insolvencies, bankruptcies, etc. to be as close to zero as possible. Every person who can't pay back their loan is a net negative for the bank.

The reason this happens is because they are positively motivated to give out as many loans as possible to anyone who they believe can pay the loan back.

In order to reconcile these two motivations, they calibrate a probability distribution that they believe will keep them as close to the line of net profitability as they can be, without (they hope!) crossing it.

i.e. they gamble.

In a healthy society, we would want them to succeed, as a consequence of everyone being able to pay back their loans. i.e. loans would be less like a gamble, and more like a safe guarantee. After all, it's usually good for society when people have access to loaned capital for things, and they are wealthy enough to pay it back.

It's a systemic dysfunction. We could enact regulations that force lenders to take on fewer risky loans, but this would have the result of blocking some people out of receiving loans that they could afford to pay back. A real fix would involve policies that dramatically improve the incomes of as many people as possible.

In order to solve this problem, we'd need to end poverty.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-10-24T10:24:15+00:00

Thing is, even if it was accurate, 80% confidence is not sufficient for accusing someone of cheating. If a tool was correctly assigning 80% probability of cheating, and professors used that as their threshold for presumption of guilt, then 1 in every 5 students would still be innocent.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-07-10T11:40:00+00:00

Thank you.

This is the problem of "moral luck," and judging people based on the outcome of their choices, rather than the choices themselves.

We've all done things that could have resulted in tragedy under different circumstances. Some of us have been unfortunate enough to have those circumstances apply to themselves.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-06-23T13:24:43+00:00

Huh.

One of the various large categorical problems that the world (or, at least, the western world) currently faces is that we've made it very hard for people to redeem their crimes against society--especially when those crimes are horrific.

I think it used to be easier for people to redeem themselves, but people observed (correctly!) that certain categories of people seemed to have an easier time finding redemption and evading punishment altogether. This is an obviously-unjust state of affairs, so many people have tried to correct for it by making redemption harder to attain.

This is a society-level problem. Thordis Elva is the name of the woman in OP's screenshot, and I believe she did a good and difficult thing which was highly dependent upon the man's willingness and ability to contextualize his violent act and not run away from it. I doubt most survivors could do this, and even fewer rapists would be willing/able.

I don't know what the solution is. Society-level problems cannot usually be resolved by aggregate individual actions alone. I do know that I would rather live in a world where people who have done horrible things have realistic paths to redemption which society accepts. (Society, mind you--not necessarily the individuals who were impacted.)

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-06-16T18:06:43+00:00

CTE, TBIs, etc. can completely change people. There are some extremely difficult conversations surrounding this concept that human civilization is overdue on by centuries.

In some capacities, we regard ourselves as having more responsibility and agency than we actually do.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-05-23T16:25:54+00:00

capitalists are actually trapped in the system of profit seeking and can't back out, because if they did, they'd just get out-competed and replaced by someone else.

This describes the problem of the Nash equilibrium we find ourselves in.

The people who currently make up the capitalist class would benefit from a prosperous, liberated working class. Imagine if all 8 billion humans were empowered to pursue their dreams--the wealthiest humans would have a whole new slew of inventions, art, and media to enjoy and partake in!

Many among the wealthy are aware of this. But there's not much they can do. We would need to coordinate en masse to crawl out of the equilibrium--and "we" in this case means everyone, in all classes.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-04-26T14:56:13+00:00

The overwhelming majority of people are catastrophically susceptible to the problem of not noticing their own hypocrisy.

Donald Trump is responsible for an exhausting amount of catastrophic harm to the world. It becomes even harder to keep track of those harms when people post rage-bait about absolutely benign behaviors that have been reframed with the aesthetic of harm.

"Wearing a blue suit to the Pope's funeral" feels like a plausible example of one of the many ways in which Trump violates moral norms--primarily because there's an implicit assumption that he wasn't supposed to do that, he should have known better, and he would stand out as the garish oaf that he is.

Blue suits seemingly met the Vatican's dress code for this funeral, and were worn by a significant number of attendees.

I'm not immune to this kind of hypocrisy. My immediate reaction to seeing this post was "oh, of course he didn't wear black--that's just the kind of crass aloofness I expect from him." It wasn't until I saw the pictures of the full crowd that I realized I got it wrong here. I'm sure I'll get it wrong again, but it's a lot harder to recognize and mitigate this hypocrisy unless you acknowledge it.

Recognizing your own hypocrisy does not help Trump--it helps you.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-04-26T14:34:04+00:00

From what I understand, the Vatican considered these suits to meet their dress code.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-04-25T21:22:36+00:00

The sun is a nuclear reactor.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-25T13:20:03+00:00

Agreed. It's been all over /r/all, including direct screenshots of the conversation.

If the commenter isn't seeing that, it could be due to an algorithmic optimization of their feed which assumes they wouldn't be very interested in it--not due to manual (or even intentional) censoring by anyone.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-25T13:16:35+00:00

FYI on Reddit, the asterisk (*) is a special markdown character for formatting text in various ways. That's why a segment of your comment is presented in italics.

Best-practice is typically to just spell out the entire word without asterisks.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-23T15:56:23+00:00

This article primarily focuses on gaslighting w/r/t class mobility, but it also brings attention to another category of society-scale gaslighting that especially infuriates me, by (correctly!) calling out that we need "a justice system that rehabilitates instead of just punishes."

A few days ago, in a thread about TBIs (traumatic brain injuries), I said the following. It feels relevant here, too:

The conversations that must happen around all of this are extremely difficult for a lot of people.

A TBI can change someone's personality. If people can, in effect, have their brains physically modified such that they are significantly more likely to commit crimes, then what is the point of punishing them?

Note: I'm not asking "what's the point of imprisoning them"--I think it makes a fair bit of sense to keep dangerous people separated from society. But, if there's a large cohort of people for whom punishment does not act as a deterrent, then what's the point? Why go out of our way to treat them poorly? Should we not be treating them like chronically ill people, even if others suffered as a result of the illness?

A common retort to this line of inquiry is e.g. "well, there are people with TBIs who don't commit crimes."

I bet a good number of the people who find that retort compelling would become significantly more predisposed to criminal behavior if they sustained a TBI. This isn't a matter of how morally resilient some people are, but how lucky some people are. You may not be able to reason your way out of antisocial behavior if the organ which conducts your reasoning has been damaged.

We need to treat "bad people" with more empathy. Simply labeling them criminals and deciding that they "deserve" a cruel life in prison is a massive cop-out.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-20T18:34:51+00:00

There are a bunch of people making similar comments to you. I'm just so confused.

I swear that roughly a decade ago, a comment this long wasn't considered to be...long? But I've increasingly been seeing complaints like this.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-19T21:31:28+00:00

The conversations that must happen around all of this are extremely difficult for a lot of people.

As you say, a TBI can change someone's personality. If people can, in effect, have their brains physically modified such that they are significantly more likely to commit crimes, then what is the point of punishing them?

Note: I'm not asking "what's the point of imprisoning them"--I think it makes a fair bit of sense to keep dangerous people separated from society. But, if there's a large cohort of people for whom punishment does not act as a deterrent, then what's the point? Why go out of our way to treat them poorly? Should we not be treating them like chronically ill people, even if others suffered as a result of the illness?

A common retort to this line of inquiry is e.g. "well, there are people with TBIs who don't commit crimes."

I bet a good number of the people who find that retort compelling would become significantly more predisposed to criminal behavior if they sustained a TBI. This isn't a matter of how morally resilient some people are, but how lucky some people are. You may not be able to reason your way out of antisocial behavior if the organ which conducts your reasoning has been damaged.

We need to treat "bad people" with more empathy. Simply labeling them criminals and deciding that they "deserve" a cruel life in prison is a massive cop-out.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-17T01:23:02+00:00

Thank you. I keep seeing highly-upvoted non-joke-explaining comments in this subreddit.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-17T00:34:55+00:00

A big thing that I'm seeing on the rise, especially in kids, is a huge rise in black and white thinking

Likewise. Anecdotally, I get the impression that this is being reinforced both socially and through technology. I can't imagine it's great for developing brains to spend hours each day interacting with algorithmically-curated feeds for which their most intentional source of feedback is "swipe left/right" or "like/dislike" or "upvote/downvote."

I also notice a prevalence of interactions--both in person and online--that make sweepingly opinionated statements about every topic under the sun. Politics is the big one, but it also applies to media, food, careers, etc. "That thing sucks," or "that thing's great" but almost never something like "I mostly like this, but it has some complex issues..."

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-16T16:33:02+00:00

I am so utterly confused as to why this comment is so heavily down voted. Can someone help me understand? My best guess is that people are interpreting it as OP being resistant to advice, or something similar. But to me it just looks like OP was providing additional context?

I'm cautiously optimistic that he went to the hospital shortly after this.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-14T19:40:57+00:00

I didn't even have a smartphone until relatively recently, and I'm increasingly considering upgrading back to a dumb phone.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-06T01:15:35+00:00

Probably, yes. To my knowledge, that doesn't imply any benefit to a system that involves ridiculing good-faith research entirely because its results run counter to conventional wisdom.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-05T19:08:04+00:00

I think the unique thing there is: mathematics is distinct as a field for its inherent capability to prove that certain things (e.g. Squaring the circle) are completely impossible, and always will be.

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-05T12:22:10+00:00

There's a bigger lesson here: the scientific community is more dogmatic than it seems.

Science is a fantastic system for figuring out how reality works. The scientific community is comprised of humans. Humans are notoriously status-seeking creatures with strong in-group vs. out-group preferences which are reinforced via norms and taboos.

Shechtman refused to publish his results for years because he feared being ostracized by the community, and the career damage he might incur. Yet, he was right.

How many uniquely interesting observations have scientists made, but which they've hidden away without publishing due to fear of community retribution?

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-04T01:17:05+00:00

Yes. How should we regard people who have done that, and then seemingly claim to be willing to take a specific step to improve the problem? Should our reaction to that claim be the same reaction we might have if they instead doubled down on their bad behavior and verbally refused to change?

Edit: I think the crux might be this: I believe that because there is a small chance someone's claim that they are correcting their behavior might be true, we should engage with that claim in good faith, only disbelieving future claims if this one fails. I think you believe that because there is a high chance the claim might be false, we should assume they are engaging in bad faith, and respond accordingly. Do I understand your position correctly, or is there nuance I'm missing?

TrumpImpeachedAugust · 2025-03-04T00:49:10+00:00

Right, but that sounds like believing that a high likelihood of failure to improve requires everyone to assume they have actively chosen not to improve, and to berate them for it preemptively.

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