- For Talos Principle 2, Croteam switched from their own engine to UE5. The description was "It would be like attempting to sprint and catch up with a train that is already far down the track and accelerating even faster.". From a user's perspective, observe the graphics of Serious Sam Siberian Mayhem and Talos Principle 2: Same company, released at a similar time. Talos Principle (UE5) looks dramatically better than SS. (In-house engine)
- Jon Blow rolls his own engines (and lang), and releases games very slowly
- Expedition 33 recently released as a phenomenal game that leaned heavily on features in UE5 (Face/body, graphics, map/terrain gen etc.) They focused on the game itself, and let the engine do the heavy lifting... to a superb result.
From my own anecdotes in graphics programming: Producing a simple engine is easy. Producing something that's photorealistic etc is massively more difficult. Let along all the other things an engine provides for you. Modern games have so many complexities the engine abstracts out; we don't need to roll a new engine for each game or studio, each trying to have optimized netcode, human characters, photorealistic lighting, GUI map editors + terrain gen etc.
I use my own graphics engine for my scientific programs, but it has much simpler requirements than a game engine.
Not a gamedev, but I think a huge thing in a modern studio context is being able to parallelize effort. With UE5 you get authoring tools up and down the stack, so your artists and storyboarders and level designers can all start creating the world and setting up the scripted events and cinematics, even if key assets or behaviours aren't in place and are just placeholders. The developers are basically writing plugins into this system in collaboration with the design process.
Very different world from 20-30 years ago where the initial "game design" was happening in paint programs or even graph paper notebooks.
Did you play the Talos Principle Reawakened? They took a great performing game made with their own engine, re-released it with UE5, and now it performs like doggy doodoo.
I did. Was kind of underwhelmed by the graphics too. Although that may be in line with a remake. Ie, I gave it benefit of the doubt since I don't know how much effort they put into it beyond "making it work".
Jonathan Blow seems to stand very strongly on principles, and yet be extremely pragmatic while executing them, which I feel is a good balance that still results in shipping games. That said if he didn't have the work ethic that he does, it probably wouldn't have been a winning strategy.
Not sure there is anything to take away from Talos Principle 2. It was a puzzle + philosophical musings adventure. Could have achieved the same effect with Quake level graphics. So much needless vast (pretty) landscape you had to circumnavigate just to get to the next puzzle arena.
Compared to generic Serious Sam like maps of TP1, I found beautiful environments of TP2 really added another level of appreciation to the game. Those and the music surface up in my memory couple times a week, very few games had this effect on me - maybe only TES3. The game is magical and I'd love more of that.
Oh it was definitely beautiful, it just never seemed relevant to what was happening. More like the art team run amok. TP1 at least had an in universe explanation for the shape of the world.
Spoilers…kinda
I guess Athena and crew have invented literal universe manipulation powers? Allowing them to craft whatever beauty they see fit. Yet, their living quarters always seem to be some dingy basement lab with power cables and other miscellaneous garbage strewn about. The wondrous environments seemed fully disconnected from everything else in the world.
If they had the time and the budget, go nuts, but the game would have been perfectly suitable with significantly lower fidelity graphics.
A lot of the game was spent walking from puzzle to puzzle. I think prioritising graphics was a good choice, because one was forced to notice the landscape.
Then again,UE5 has massive criticism leveraged against it- for pushing exotic and hyped up technology, that is not really production ready and demands you tailor your whole workflow around them. Held against last gen custom engines - ue5 almost always looks worse.
Jonathan Blow also makes games at a very slow pace; e.g. his Sokoban games. There are other factors at play, but his pace is consistent with the speed drawback of rolling your own engine.
It's wild to come back to this after a day away and have the takeaway from my attempt to answer the question with punditry about the size of my codebase from people who don't have any idea what my device does.
Answering this question directly puts me in an awkward spot because I realized last fall that there was absolutely no way that I could talk about what I'm working on in a way that can be associated with my product because there's so much anti-AI activism right now. That sucks, because I'd like to be "loud and proud" but I have a family to feed. I strongly suspect that versions of my story are playing out for hundreds of entrepreneurs right now.
Here's what I can describe: it's an ESP32-P4 based consumer device with about 45 ESP-IDF components that all communicate over an event bus. There's a substantially modified LVGL front-end with a 3D rendering engine and SVG-like 2D animation in front of a driver for a customized variation of the ST7789. There is substantial custom code for both USB host and client functions across various modes of operation. There's custom drivers for several sensors and haptic feedback. There's a very elaborate menu UI system which is also backed by a BBS style terminal configuration system for power users. There's an assignable action system with about 40 actions that all have their own state machines and a lot of mutex locking. There's a very involved and feature-dense trigger scheduling system. There's a very flexible data stream routing matrix. There's a full suite of command line scripts for most functions. There's a self-hosted web app for configuration that also implements a screen share functionality via an HTML canvas object so that I can record videos of what's happening on the device with OBS without having to point a DSLR at it from a gantry.
Honestly, I could go on and on, but all of the people who think that 600kloc is a lot [sight unseen] are following YouTube tutorials and can eat me.
I responded to you because you asked politely. I hope it was an interesting reply.
> “Autonomous Proxies for Execration, or APEs,” Pluto said.
> “By typing in a few simple commands, I can spawn an arbitrary number of APEs in the cloud,” Pluto said.
> “I have hand-tuned the inner loops to the point where a single APE can generate over a megaBraden of wide-spectrum defamation. The number would be much larger, of course, if I didn’t have to pursue a range of strategies to evade spam filters, CAPTCHAs, and other defenses.”
“Have you tried this out yet?” Corvallis asked.
“Not against a real subject,” Pluto said. “I invented a fictitious subject and deployed some APEs against it, just to see how it worked in the wild. The fictitious subject has already attracted thousands of death threats,” he added with a note of pride.
“You mean, from people who saw the defamatory posts seeded by the APEs and got really mad at this person who doesn’t even exist.”
Make a fictitious subject with all the traits of the person you really want to attack (Subject X). Have your social media bots attack Subject X. Anger spillover on social media will begin attacking your true target by trait association. The real target will have a difficult to impossible time coming at you via legal channels as there is no direct association.
I love Rust for mathematical and scientific tasks (I am building the structural bio crate infrastructure), and I love Mathematica and have a personal sub. I should be the audience, but... What makes Mathematica great, IMO, is the polish and overall experience created by consistent work with applications in mind over decades. So, I look at this project with skepticism regarding its utility.
Sure, but you've got to start somewhere! And with the amount of progress I was able to make in just a few weeks, I'm very optimistic that the polish will come sooner rather than later.
Based on the list of contributors to your project, I am not sure this starting location is optimally suited to the task of building a foundation for polished, reliable, expandable software.
I have no dog in this fight, but simply claiming a count of tests get you anything is like saying your code coverage is 100% - it sounds really good until you think about what 5000 unreviewed tests actually... do.
If I go by the contributor numbers on Github, I see Claude has committed something on the order of 300,000 lines of code. I don't think it's reasonable to review that much code, even in weeks worth of time.
I haven’t needed to do such a thing in a while, but my “rule” for explaining how unreasonable is to say “if I only glanced at each line of code for 1 second, without bothering to understand the details, it would take me 3 and a half full 24hr days non stop to simply look at”. So it’s definitely more than 1 work week because presumably other stuff is going to need to get done in that time too. Actually understanding it is going to be at least a multiple of that, and probably the multiple is ~30x.
It's a defense mechanism. I was guilty as charge as well initially. Suddenly most of your l33t skillz are trivialized and surpassed by an inhumane actor. It's a tough pill to swallow.
i'm curious if you intend to reimplement highly optimized numerical algorithms, symbolic algorithms, and so on, accumulated and tuned in mathematica since its 1988 release?
it's a huuuuuuuuge amount of technology in the standard library of mathematica, beyond the surface syntax and rewrite system, i mean.
I am not sure Octave ever had to put on that much polish. It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license. If it can drop-in run the code that has been keeping the lab going for decades, good enough.
MathWorks offers a huge list of "toolboxes", domain specific extensions that cover a lot of features in each domain. Replacing Matlab isn't about the core language alone.
The price tags are wild for sure. But the sheer number of supported features is what makes them attractive. Cloning that completely is practically infeasable.
If you were using everything in the toolboxes, it would be absolutely worth it. As it is, you often need an additional toolbox for basic functionality and pay for everything in it.
I did my PhD with Octave. Sure, I did not have this nice convex optimization toolbox. But I had everything else I needed and did not need to wait because people arrived earlier in the lab and grabbed all floating licenses of, for instance, the communications toolbox.
However, I switched to Python during the last years.
The notebooks were THE thing of Mathematica, at least to me.
12 years ago, as I was finishing my PhD in quantum optics, I wanted to migrate to the stack used in industry - and picked Python. Also, that way I was an early adopter of Jupyter Notebook, as it captured what was need + was open.
Now Mathematica notebooks (still remember, it is .nb) do not have the novelty factor. But they were the first to set a trend, which we now take for granted.
That said, I rarely use notebooks anymore. In the coding time, it is much easier to create scripts and ask to create a visualization in HTML.
Mathematica's notebooks are the only environment where I can do some computation to arrive at a symbolic expression. Copy the expression from the output cell into a new input cell. Then manipulate it by hand into the form I want. Then continue processing it further.
Also, symbolic expressions can be written nicely with actual superscripts and subscripts, and with non-latin characters.
(AFAIK, you can run Mathematica sessions in TeXmacs, get proper typesetting, and can copy/paste expressions for simplification by hand or using other CAS sessions in the same TeXmacs document).
I disagree, the language itself is one of the more elegant parts of the system, and enables a lot of the rest of the elegance.
From a purely programming language theory, it's pretty unique.
I once tried to find a language that had all the same properties, and I failed. The Factor language is probably the closest. But they are still pretty different.
The relevant programming paradigm is string/term rewriting, which is featured in other programming languages such as Pure. It seems to have few direct applications outside of symbolic computing itself, compilers and related fields such as PL theory. (Formal calculi and languages are often specified in PL theory as rewrite rules, even though the practical implementation may ultimately differ.)
First I believe there is no such thing as the Mathematica language, it's Wolframscript which is useful in a bunch of different applications. And second, if you don't have access to a $1000 / yr wolfram subscription, this would be the next best thing.
The opening sections including graphs do not match my experience. I think they only apply to certain workflows which can be described as "work we have to do because software has a history of poor integration". I.e. repeating solved problems.
Claude will, when given a task off the beaten track, churn through tokens for a while, then produce a completely incorrect answer. (Most recent anecdote: fixing a barostat in an MD sim)
Specifically: How does Spotify, a music streaming service, improve due to AI agents producing code all night? What is improving or being fixed which needs that much abstract code and problem solving? I am guessing the AI code is just building more messy architecture on top of the messy architecture which is causing so much work to be generated.
I do it because coffee shop employees get paid poorly, and get little respect or status from the job. That's not fair!
I second-guess it not from losing money, but by tipping, I may be incentivizing this low wage. I.e. I don't like the idea of tipping, but it's an easy way to contribute back to people who are getting hosed by our system.
This breakdown in rule of law is unfortunate. Ideally, this would be handled by, in order of desirability:
- Flock decision-makers and customers holding ethics as a priority, and not taking the actions they are due to sense of duty, community, morals etc
- Peer pressure resulting in ostracization of Flock execs and decision makers until they stop the unethical behavior
- Governments using legislation and law enforcement to prevent the cameras being used in the way they are
Below this, is citizens breaking the law to address the situation, e.g. through this destruction. It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
What has worried me for years is that Americans would not resort to this level. That things are just too comfortable at home to take that brave step into the firing lines of being on the right side of justice but the wrong side of the law.
I'm relieved to see more and more Americans causing necessary trouble. I still think that overall, Americans are deeply underreacting to the times. But that only goes as far as to be my opinion. I can't speak for them and I'm not their current king.
You won't get to the kind of change you thought you would see until food runs low and the economy stalls. The American Revolution was rare in that it didn't need to happen. The Founders were just being giant assholes (j/k). While the French Revolution just a few decades later was more status quo. A lot of starvation and poverty just pushed the population over the edge.
I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad. Seeing the death toll statistics and even the direct effects through a screen is not visceral for many folks.
Starvation isn't avoidable and you can't ride it out. There isn't any chance that starving to death could be less severe than getting a bad flu. Nobody can avoid not eating for an extended period of time. If there is not enough food, it will affect everyone directly.
>I disagree. You can escape a disease, even during a global pandemic. And not every person that got COVID was on a ventilator or even felt that bad.
Propaganda works.
The knowledge worker class often believes their training will afford them some level of protection against it. Even then, with those warding effects, they're still susceptible. Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than they are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
Since the government harnessing that discontent has no real desire to fix that problem, all they need to do is maintain the perception that they're the solution, while not addressing the problem itself.
>Propaganda won't contest that starvation is occurring. It will claim that the reason for the starvation is a specific foe, internal or external e.g. It's China's fault we're starving or the immigrants have caused this food security crisis and once they're gone we'll have enough food for our own people, etc. They'll workshop and see which ones poll well, then run with the talking point that seems to perform best.
I don't know if China will work. It's not halfway around the world, but that's the mentality many people have of it. They won't buy that a country on the other side if taking food from their local grocery store.
But it doesn't matter. they blame it on: everyone gets hurt. People fighting on the streets, charital servings overran, private businesses raided, governmental buildings having doors banged on (assuming the soldiers don't simply desert their duties). Then that escalates to riots and perhaps small skirmishes for remaining resources.
When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach. And I don't think America has a true famine to point to as an example. That's pretty much why it's the one thing all politicians will avoid at all cost. a famine will make a depression seem like a cloudy day.
America had a true famine; the dust bowl resulted in mass displacement, and the government took exceptional steps to create remediation programs to address the plight of those affected to maintain relations. The policies included measures that would be considered exceptional by today's standard, including the creation of a national organization to provide stock for relief organizations, buying out cattle herds above market value, other bailout measures for farmers, a massive work effort to create an erosion barrier and more. Most cultural histories indicate that these bailouts prevented widespread unrest in these communities.
You can take a look at the global hunger index; countries with less food security are certainly less stable than those that aren't, but by no means are countries like India and Pakistan undergoing constant revolution. By contrast, countries with comparatively solid food security like Egypt underwent revolution that toppled the government sparked by changes in the (comparatively affordable) price of food. Hunger itself doesn't tell the story. It's how society perceives it.
The zeitgeist matters more than whether or not everyone in society can eat, and you can change the zeitgeist with propaganda.
>When you're truly hungry, nothing is beyond reproach.
When you're truly hungry, you can't plan a revolution. Anti-government efforts are generally spearheaded by groups that are fed, connected, and have the incentive to incite rebellion. It's more Navalny and less Oliver Twist. This means that both pro and anti-government groups will be engaged in a similar recruitment effort. The two groups will have competing accounts of why the hunger is occurring, complete with different evidence regarding the magnitude of the issue, the source of the issue, etc. Hunger doesn't short circuit that process, and propaganda doesn't lose it's force because it's a more persuasive and simpler motivator than, say, discontent over tax burden shifting or some other policy point.
Slightly off topic, but this strategy of blaming a crisis on some other cause is pervasive. It's especially useful when you are the reason for the crisis.
For example, consider climate change. Climate change causes draughts, which causes food shortages in countries heavily dependent on their agricultural sector. This, in turn, causes famine.
A certain western power will blame that country's government for mismanaging their agricultural sector instead of pointing out the unusual and dramatic weather changes contributed to the famine. This is, of course, because the western power does not publicly admit climate change is real in order to avoid taking any responsibility for their contribution to this climate change.
This post is propaganda for the idea that whenever you think that immigrants are causing a problem, you're actually incorrect and are being manipulated by some conspiracy.
> Consider further that most people in society are significantly less educated or trained in epistemological functions than [knowledge workers] are - a large portion of society is defenseless against a liar with a megaphone.
The only thing I'd add is polarization adding impetus to never seeing someone on my side as a liar, whatever they claim.
When democracy becomes a team sport, its collective intelligence lessens: perhaps the biggest hole in the US founder's future vision.
But then again, "voter" had a very different definition in their time. And I don't think you can fault them for not enshrining anti-party ranked choice et al.
People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax either so I'm not sure how that's a relevant analogy. The response to Covid was far more disruptive to my life than the disease itself, which would obviously not be the case with starvation.
As the husband at the time of a military critical care nurse who worked local ED in a major US city and deployed to New York -- yes, there were absolutely people who denied they had COVID even as they were being intubated.
Most people tended to accept reality when their body started failing, but there were a non-zero number that refused to believe they were infected with coronavirus to the end.
Politicians and social media click farmers spouting lies do influence people, and not everyone starts with a basic understanding of biology and/or science.
People with first hand experience offering counterpoints like Dr Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi did but unfortunately their videos explaining their side of the story were conveniently removed from places your YouTube -- while conveniently leaving the videos remaining to hear the kind of stories you heard.
many people i know personally who, to this day deny covid was real, they personally knew people who died or were hospitalized and ventilated. yet they still deny it was real.
one of my family members who was in a coma for over a month and in the hospital for months still denies it was covid despite multiple doctors telling him otherwise. some people live in a very real state of denial entirely separated from reality.
sadly i’m not sure the person you replied to is too far off.
Same here. The extreme politicization of the disease, plus the social isolation, plus over reliance on inflammatory social media as one's only channel to the outside world, fully broke some people's grip on reality. Permanently for some.
> People largely weren't on their deathbeds with covid claiming it was a hoax
There were actually lots of people doing exactly this. Perhaps "largely" is the key word here but there were plenty of people dying of covid and refusing ventilators because they believed it was a conspiracy theory.
Apparently the virus was able to ruin cognitive function that people struggling to breathe thought they're fine. (Ok, it seems too convenient that the virus can do this...).
Nobody (OK, maybe a few very special people) is saying that COVID was a hoax. What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.
Ah yes you say, another psycho. He probably eats ivermectin for breakfast and chases it with bleach. But I ask you, after a chlorinated burp: how come Africa didn't die out? Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California? Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
> What is true - and one wasn't allowed to say - was that the measures intended to prevent COVID weren't very effective and did more harm than good.
But yet here you are saying it. Whether it's true or not probably requires a great deal of analysis, but your self-applied "psycho" label may be accurate enough if you've managed to apply lots of cognitive biases to end up with your "truth".
I'd agree the governments overreacted in many sense, but a non BoJo/Trump-government has a duty to be overcautious rather than a flippant attitude of "So what, x% dead is acceptable". Some other rules are based on dumb science: two meters distance from each other is probably a joke, a compromise between "keep everyone at home!" (what China did when there was a breakout) and a "Keep going to the pubs!", my own theory is that if you could smell someone's cigarette smoke from 2 meters away, virus particles being exhaled from their lungs would reach you too. Later we figured out getting the virus from surfaces is very unlikely, but people were still wiping surfaces down anyway...
Because it's an airborne virus and Africa isn't 1) as connected with the world to begin with and 2) as closely concentrated as urban areas. That's before really looking into Africa's response compared to other countries.
>Why was the death rate pretty much the same in Florida and California?
Because we didn't isolate fast enough between Trump trying to claim it being a hoax early on and desperate political attempts to keep "essential workers" running business. The locality doesn't matter for an airorne virus; just that people continue to go outside and not develop herd immunity.
>Did the EU really need to buy enough vaccine for ten-plus years?
I don't have a crystal ball into 2030. But yes, people still can catch COVID in 2026. Buying only enough for 2020-2022 would be reckless.
I had the same reaction. I thought things were getting bad before COVID, but I thought that, generally, when push came to shove, sanity would prevail.
Herman Cain denied COVID's severity right up until it killed him, and them even after he died, his team was still tweeting that "looks like COVID isn't as bad as the mainstream media made it out to be." When I saw that people were literally willing to die to "own the libs", I knew shared reality was toast.
Could also say that over half the population finding such ridiculous mandates justifiable: lockdowns and demands that employers enforce vaccination compliance for all employees, ordoned non democratically by a senile; in a country with constitutional rights likely meant we would not see activists engaging in vandalism anytime soon.
>> I would have believed that before 2020, but after COVID, I fully believe that if the food ran out, half the country would say it's a fake hoax. People would be on their death beds actually starving, and deny it was happening with their last breath.
We're in a K-Shaped Economy right now and half the folks will deny there is any K and insist everything is amazing.
The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes. The poor are often indifferent to politics because they're focused on survival. The middle classes, who own things they don't want to lose and have free time to aspire for more, are the ones who start revolutions. The poor only came in after being whipped up by the interested parties, and don't necessarily join the revolutionary side.
> The American and French revolutions originated in the middle classes.
I don't know about the american revolution, but that's wrong for the french revolution.
I'll link to french wikipédia pages since they are far better on the subject.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tats_g%C3%A9n%C3%A9raux_...
Here we can see the first National Assembly was half nobility and clergy.
The third estate was the other half.
Were the middle class, but what people think of middle class today, doesn't apply to what it was back then.
> The bourgeoisie are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a " middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted with the proletariat by their wealth, political power, and education, as well as their access to and control of cultural, social, and financial capital.
Yes, the proletariat has been brainwashed and convinced that they're the middle class, while the middle classes have become the new aristocracy. The disappearance of hereditary nobility and rise of liberalism (which brings along separation of church and state, which removes the power of the clergy) made the old distinctions less useful, so we have the modern lower (proletariat), middle (skilled workers), and upper (bourgeois) classes.
Three critical differences the American Revolution had: (1) the middle class had some extremely well educated people, (2) the communication technology among the colonies was pretty fast whereas the comms between the colonies and the British rule across the Atlantic was slow, and (3) the empire tried to clamp down on the colonies ability to export to any market other than the mother country, killing lots of profit which previously made those markets strong.
Well one of those is already on the fast tracking to happening (economy stalling).
Unfortunately, I don't have much faith that people will turn against the administration during any kind of major depression/food scarcity. I foresee people turning against each other for survival instead.
It's like when management does something stupid and then engineering works overtime to keeps the system working. Of course management learns nothing and all outside observers don't even notice something went wrong.
There is a limit to how much engineers working overtime can do to offset management stupidity and when you reach the limit the bottom falls out. Of course then everybody blames the engineers...
It's being heavily supported a bubble. We'll see how resilient it is when that pops. As it is, the average person's finances and future prospects are getting worse all the time regardless of whatever the stock market is doing.
> Quite impressive just how resilient it seems to be.
I watched a few analyses on this and it really comes down to faith.
I really wish it weren't kidding. The resistance against this economic downturn comes a large part due to conservative skewing financiers who believe "Trump won't let the economy crash". And that faith somehow keeps people pushing their chips in in times where they'd have probably long pulled out of Biden.
2025-6 will truly be a "vibe-cession" in so many ways.
Yes, tbh I would not have thought that you could take a sledgehammer to the economy as if you're say Elon Musk buying a communications platform and yet, here we are, 1 year in and we're still hanging on.
Interestingly y'all Americans pay much more tax now than you did to England back in the day. Turns out King George was right, and it was just about changing who the tax was paid to.
It's also rare to just "discover" an entire continent that is basically free for the taking since Europeans annihilated native populations through disease and technological superiority.
Much of what makes America unique is tied to this essentially once in a generation event that will never happen again on this planet, a contingent confluence of Earth's parallel geographic and biological evolution... it's fairly easy to rebel or become a superpower when other powers have to contend with peer conflicts right on their borders. A break with England was inevitable why take orders from people an ocean away in the age of sail?
It's worse than that; within a few generations our linguistic and biological systems will begin to diverge under conditions with little cross-pollination and different selective pressures. We will become aliens in the sci-fi sense very rapidly if we attempt to create a foundation-like diaspora of settlements.
I think the skepticism warrants more work than that. Darwin's finches are an entry-level concept to learn when learning about biochemistry and genetics. Separate planets would act to separate groups into distinct genetic populations which would then have different selection pressures put upon them. Even without selection pressure, genetic drift in both populations would result in differences compounding over time.
Humans aren't the endpoint of evolution. Something will come after us, and if we're spread out on a ton of planets, there would need to be explicit counteracting forces (genetic modification, tremendous volumes of interstellar human travel, etc.) to make sure whatever comes after us is uniform among our interstellar backyard.
No, most genetic drift that ends up being reflected in wildtype populations happens during those periods, because small errors taking up a sizable percentile of the allelic distribution is easier when there are less alleles.
When it comes to neutral mutations, we can literally see constant variance creation in plenty of non-coding areas of DNA over time.
Drift occurs at a fairly consistent rate that reflects the intrinsic error rate of the particular replication machinery that a given organism uses. You can measure the statistical error rate of different ribosomal complexes.
Different planets are going to have different selection pressures. They'll have different conflicts. Different crises. Different cultures. Different reproductive preferences. Imagining that these populations will converge on the same wildtype by sheer chance is lunacy.
Not really a secret. The slogan was "No taxation without representation" not "no taxation."
The degree to which legislation in the US is bought by big companies and rarely reflects democratic desires we may be in another "no taxation without representation" era.
Even if the needs of the American people weren't being ignored over the wishes of corporations and the ultra-wealthy in terms of numbers alone we have less representation than ever before because the number of people who are supposed to represent us hasn't kept up with the growing population.
Throw a constitutional conventions so that the slave owners could get their votes in (not the slaves, of course, though the owners should get to vote FOR them).
I understand that the civil war was about a lot of things, but the precipitating issue was slavery. Slavers should be obliterated by war if they aren't willing to give up their slaves unconditionally.
I know what you mean but there were so many other possible outcomes that would have resulted in banishment of slavery from North America just as well.
If the southern agricultural states didn't want to be with the free states in the Union any more anyway, it might have been the only opportunity to withdraw without a war.
Individually, without a confederacy, which instead quickly amounted to a large vengeful adversary where there didn't have to be.
It would have been a tough decision for each state to make, under non-emergency conditions, whether they wanted to remain with the country that possessed Wall Street or not.
After all it was Wall Street companies who were often financing the plantations to begin with, before stock traders escalated to funding the slave trade once its human cargo became more lucrative than most.
As it turned out, besides all the death & destruction suffered by all states, Washington itself went into such deep debt to Wall Street in order to fully vanquish the Confederate States, that it set the stage for untenable "permanent" debt where the lenders never got paid back real well for so many decades.
Wall Street has possessed Washington ever since.
Otherwise there would never have been a FED as we know it.
Slavery destroyed the roman republic just like it destroyed the American republic. Slavery and republican government are fundamentally incompatible because it devalues the labor and vote of the citizen. Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government. No longer did the government need to compromise, they could simply do whatever they wished by force.
Today millions of new wage slaves flood into the country to further devalue the citizens labor and vote.
Think about how it was in a state like North Carolina in the 1850's where they were building textile mills which could add great value to the cotton before it was shipped.
This was enough of a threat to Northern manufacturing without their factories having to compete with unpaid labor. They were not happy campers, they had always been making way more money per ton of cotton in the well-established Northern textile mills than the plantations had ever been. And banking it just in case.
In the factory it would be a lot higher-skilled labor than down on the farm, it was still unpaid but never without cost. A dollar would go a long way back then but everything was still relative. Imagine that $10000 was the annual cost of having the labor in a factory without any wages. Accommodations, family support, infrastructure and things like that are what makes this total.
1859 rolls around and the guy in the green visor adds it up and shakes his head, "sheesh it's $11000 this year, when is it going to end?"
War comes & goes eventually, slaves are freed like they should/could have been the whole time, the dust settles and after a year of actually paying wages for the first time to laborers, the guy in the green visor about drops out of his seat because his total labor cost is now $15000. All he can say is "when is it going to end?" Where have we heard that before?
Same thing with the guy in the bank in New York whose employer had been raking it in from all their investments in Southern companies. It just wasn't the same and never was going to be that way again.
It is convoluted but very few people recognize this as well as you do, regardless of how obvious it is:
>war simply made everyone a slave
The same thing in my message, from almost the reverse point of view, how the way some factory-working slaves were turned into employees by the same war in the 19th century.
What's the difference anyway?
The difference between wage slave and fully-owned has been based mainly on freedom-of-movement and payment for labor, which have always been big enough to destroy a republic.
But not big enough for any difference in tasks or financial considerations to be the major thing for something like a government or corporation.
In some ways not much more modern than the Romans.
For the elites, they have always benefited most from a majority of subjects whose wages, if wages were involved, were not that much more significant than zero when it comes to the bottom line.
> "Instead of ending slavery the civil war simply made everyone a slave to the government."
Look, I hate the elites as much as anyone and bemoan their outsized power over regular citizens, but to compare literal chattel slavery to the post-civil war U.S. is wild. Actual, real life, slavery was a deeply integrated part of their culture. Our democracy has a ton of problems, to be sure, but I find it very hard to blame that on the civil war.
We need to change it to 'no representation without taxation' and ban lobbyists for any industry/company/interest that doesn't pay an equal percentage of their income as the average 'taxed on labor' American.
No, lobbying should be banned even if they pay tax. The only way corporations should have access to representation is by having their role formally defined by an amendment to the Constitution. As in, this government is formed by citizens who have these rights, and corporations that have these rights. Make it official and open, not the subversive manipulation where we act like they aren't there.
Just like how all we had to do to shut down Guantanamo Bay was vote for President Obama, right? So glad that that worked out. By and large, our institutions are not democratic, in that they are not responsive to 'popular opinion'; while there are certain arenas where, for one reason or another, the will of the majority does sway the day (e.g. the influence of scandals on individual elected officials), by and large most things are decided by non-democratic factors like business interests and large donors, and the media just works to get people on-side with whatever comes out of that.
To quote a well-known study on the topic: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”
Not closing Guantanamo is, unfortunately, an example of democracy working. Public support for closing it has never been anything close to a majority. Obama got elected despite, not because, of that promise. Congress blocking his attempts to do so was a reflection of the will of the people, even if perhaps coincidentally.
This is ahistoric. No-one ever said we had to "just vote for Obama" to close Guantanamo Bay.
Frankly, Obama _tried_ to close Guantanamo Bay. He significantly shrunk the population of inmates, but it was ultimately Congress, and the courts that prevented the closure
Obama spent a huge amount of time and political capital trying to clean up Bush's messes.
Obama only tried to close Guantanamo by moving the prisoners to the United States, which is arguably worse than having them in Guantanamo. It would mean that you could hold prisoners in the United States indefinitely without trial.
What he should have done was give the prisoners fair trials or release them.
Having prisoners in the US is a lot more hassle and subject to scrutiny than keeping them tucked away on some out of bounds military prison where few have access to, which was probably the reason to put prisoners there in the first place. Anything could be done to prisoners on Guantanamo, including torture.
What he’s saying is that you need to vote with a consistent message. Voting for Bush, then voting for Obama, then voting for Trump is unlikely to make any lasting change
That’s the separation of powers at work, which is desirable. Congress has to (and can) do it. Obama, unlike Trump, would sometimes back down when he met the edges of executive authority. That’s how it should be.
I wanted Gitmo closed, but I don’t want it closed in a way that further expands the executive branch by once again nibbling at the edges of another branch’s authority.
Plenty of countries that are well-run democracies don’t have separation of powers between the legislature and the executive — the UK is one of many examples.
Separation between the executive and the judiciary is important, but separation from the legislature doesn’t really seem to be.
Even among countries that do have such a separation, the US is unique in making it so difficult for the legislature to pass anything, which IMO is the most serious flaw in its system. The permanent deadlock is what creates such a temptation for the executive to circumvent the rule of law and try to seize power wherever it can.
At ~all times for a long period of time during Gitmos operation, there was at least one (revolving) prisoner that no nation on earth would take. I think that was the biggest challenge for someone who actually wanted to close gitmo, to close it. Not clear where you would put them that wouldn't be yet another prison.
I guess now that the US has normalized relations with the Taliban, maybe they'll end up sending them to them, not sure who else will take the last ones.
They should stand trial in a US court, and if they’re acquitted, they should be set free, like anyone else. That’s a pretty fundamental principle of the rule of law.
If they’re indeed innocent and can’t be deported because nobody will take them, then they have to be allowed to stay in the US. That’s unfortunate but not really their fault given that the US brought them into its jurisdiction against their will in the first place.
It seems transparently unfair to capture someone and then keep them forever because nobody else wants them.
A lot of them were captured for things like simply having an F91W watch and also being proximal or familial to a terrorist. They were initially wanted but then once 'cleared' the problem became once accused as a terrorist no country on earth wanted to take them even if they were cleared as likely innocent.
Obviously it was also politically infeasible to admit them into the general US.
They were able to slow down the inevitable trajectory, they did nothing to reverse course. Doing anything different would be too "radical" for Obama or Biden.
The trajectory in question was pretty well laid out in Bush’s Patriot act. If the Democratic Party at any point wanted to reverse course they would have opposed the initial legislation (like the general public did), and subsequently championed a policy which abandons it and corrects for the harm it caused.
I think you vastly undersell how much of the US voters supported extreme measures in reaction to Sept 11.
There was a social panic to “protect us against terrorism” at pretty much any cost. It was easy for the party in power to demonize the resistance to the power grab and nobody except Libertarians had a coherence response.
I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong. The general public mounted a much more significant opposition against this policy then the Democratic party did. Some members of the Democratic party did some opposition, but the party as a whole clearly did not oppose this, and therefor it was never truly on the ballots.
To be clear, I personally don‘t think stuff like this should ever be on the ballot in any democracy. Human rights are not up for election, they should simply be granted, and any policy which seeks to deny people human rights should be rejected by any of the country’s democratic institutions (such as courts, labor unions, the press, etc.)
> I don‘t think it really matters how much people supported these extreme actions. This policy was clearly wrong.
This is wrong and ignorant of how we select elected representatives. They have no incentive to do “what is right” and all of the incentives to do “what is popular”. The representatives who stood up against the Patriot Act, the surveillance state, “you’re either with us or either the terrorists”, etc were unable to hold any control in Congress.
The reason we have stereotypes of politicians as lying, greasy, corrupt used car salesmen is because their incentives align with those qualities.
I am exclusively discussing the _is_, not the _ought_ (which is where I would agree with you)
If politicians did what was popular, the USA would have a public health system a long time ago. They just pretend and do things they're paid to support, that's it.
I was stating an opinion, not a fact, and I was interpreting history according to that opinion. That is I am arguing for a certain historical framework from which I judge historical moments.
I also don‘t think mine is a widely unpopular opinion either. That scholars of democracy and human rights agree that a democracy should not be able to vote them selves into a dictatorship, that human rights are worth something more than what can be ousted by a popular demand. So I don’t think this is an unreasonable historical framework, from which I judge the actors of this history of.
Not sure if you are aware but we rarely directly get to vote on these things. You vote for a representative and hope they vote in a way that serves your interests. But now, we have omnibus bills. And it's 50/50 loaded with things we want and things we don't. The same bill that funds Pre-K will also have a section to fund a kitten shredding machine. But if you vote against it all voters will hear is how you don't want to fund education.
The omnibus bills aren’t blackmail, as much as a symptom of the failure of Congress to be able to do what it is supposed to: debate.
There is 1 funding bill per year which only requires a 50% vote instead of a 60% / 67% to pass that all other spending bills require.
Every member with a goal tries to attach it to the big annual funding bill. The bill becomes so large that nobody likes the bill as a whole, but everybody has something in it they will defend.
And the old filtering process (committees which recommend the content of bills) are dominated by majority party leadership. This is maybe the closest symptom to blackmail.
I‘m not (yet) a citizen of the USA, but I’ve lived there for a while. As I understand it, there is hardly any political opposition in this country. I would actually describe it as a controlled opposition. A lot of people here tend to think the only role of the opposition is to run the right candidate and win the next election. As such, there is no real resistance when the majority government oversteps their boundaries.
To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates. When they do voice support for or opposition against bills, those bills are often stuff related to their industry, and seldom do they actually oppose an over reaching government by threatening general strikes etc.
The press here is also very right leaning. All the big media are owned by capitalist conglomerates and as such most people never hear real challenges to the capitalist power structure. As long as the government class acts favorable to the capitalist interest, then the press has aligning interest, and is thus heavily incentivized to never challenge the government to much.
> To make matters worse, labor unions are equally politically inactive, and most often their only political moves are endorsing candidates.
This isn’t true, UAW almost got Biden to transfer wealth directly from taxpayers to them via the union made EV credit bonus, laundered through government motors
IIRC FDR pioneered the contemporary use of this to ram through progressive legislation, in particular social security by essentially packaging it up so the needy would get nothing in other programs if social security wasn't passed.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if the idea goes back to Roman times.
In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
The local government officials in charge of allowing these to be installed.
It also represents an opportunity for upstarts. If you want to get into local politics, this is a single issue that will unit voters and bring them in.
We had a city councilperson elected on the sole issue of replacing the purple street lights. She won decisively and her entire campaign was literally signs everywhere promising to fix the purple streetlights. (yes, they were fixed).
Seattle voted for Katie Wilson as mayor partly because she seemed to oppose surveillance cameras. She now seems to have changed her mind is is speaking in favor of them.
Badger your city council, work with like-minded residents in a way that can credibly threaten their re-elections, find and support privacy-conscious candidates who won't sign-onto Flock's agenda, create ads based on council meetings when councilors support surveillance in a way most voters will reject. Put their quotes on billboard with their picture, etc
Ok, you do all that work at home and manage to block flock in your area. It doesn’t matter because the next city over where you work installed them so you get tracked anyway.
Then 2 years later a new city council gets elected and they install flock cameras in your city too. You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
> You can never get rid of them because it already passed and nobody wants to relitigate the same thing every couple of years.
Those who care about their privacy should relitigate at every opportunity. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance"; if you're not willing to fight for it, you will lose it, and deservedly so. Those who give up in advance are beyond fucked, because they'll have to take whatever is sent their way.
Our city voted out the cameras so the feds just installed flock cameras on every bit of federal property in and near town, plus they're at private places like hardware stores.
We turned over seats on our city council for the first time in decades and the new, "liberal" council members voted with the rest, unanimously, to install more Flock cameras.
Your voting system is shit. It results in a two party state. If one party fails to present a coherent offering and the other one is infiltrated by nut jobs then the system breaks down. After all, if it was such a good system, why didn’t you impose it on Germany and Japan when you won WW2? (This comment is politically neutral; who the incoherents and the nut jobs are are left to the reader’s discretion)
The US is a semi-democracy, notably due to its hyper-polarized two party system that completely forbids (in the 2020s) any crossing of party lines for compromise.
The single biggest improvement to American society would be to implement multi-member districts for legislature, OR to implement STAR voting - any kind of system that promotes the existence of more parties, more political candidates, to break the two party cycle.
Far too many people fail to vote or research candidates due to how shitty our democracy is. Far too few candidates exist as a blend of values, and we are stuck with "every liberal policy" vs. "every conservative policy".
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To that end, it seems the cities that are banning Flock for proper privacy reasons are all in liberal states and cities. Conservative/moderate areas seem a lot less engaged on the topic. "That's just how it goes, of course government is going to tread on us, what can be done about it".
I think more people would bother with voting if they felt their vote mattered, but between the two party system (where both options suck), the gerrymandered distracting, and other voter suppression tactics people have been conditioned to feel powerless over the outcome of elections.
I'm entirely unsurprised if the majority of places taking a stand against flock cameras are liberal. From what I've seen conservatives tend to fetishize police and punishment. There's a lot of boot-licking going on for a group of people who posture as being rebels and anti-government, but I think there's also an assumption that only (or mainly) "others" will be targeted and punished. To the extent that it's true, I sure wouldn't expect it to stay that way.
This argument was viable 20 years ago, but we are way, way beyond “both options suck” at this point. It’s more like “one option sucks and the other option is absolutely catastrophic — also, the second option may be the last choice you ever get”.
Unfortunately, studies undertaken by MIT over a decade ago show that when it comes to law writing and passing, voters have no statistically measurable input at the federal level. (Since citizens united)
It’s all just identity politics. I will say that Trump has proven the exception to this rule, enacting a whole lot of policy that circumvents the law and has real effects. (And is likely mostly unconstitutional if actually put to the test)
So while locally, voting can be powerful, it’s mostly bread and circuses at the federal level since regulatory capture is bipartisan.
It shouldn't be a surprise that a willingness to violate the law works quickly when congress is unwilling to do anything to stop it. The ability for the law and constitution to be ignored when all three branches of government collude to do exactly that is a huge weakness in the system
Seconded. Democracy is the only transcendental political system: you can have any ideology you want (so be careful or you'll be voting only once). To survive, it depends on civic spirit - i.e. participation. Democracy always collapses into authoritarianism eventually. Then (if you want it bad enough), you have to claw it back, slowly and painfully. All just as Plato foresaw.
It really bothers me that so few people in the modern West understand just how lucky they are. If you didn't have the control you already have over your government, you'd be fighting for it.
Every time I hear this I cringe, whether this subject or any other. The people did vote and this is what they got - not necessarily what they specifically voted for. Different people hold things in different importance. Flock security cameras (or similar) generally don't even get noticed by the people voting on taxes, guns, abortions, etc.
Besides, establishment Democrats aren’t exactly for the common man, they’re just not as cartoonishly evil as the Republicans. Democrats would likely still be in favor of Flock cameras.
The age old tactic of vilification. It's easy to overlook all the nuances on all sides; it's a whole spectrum with plenty of overlap.
My hope in the US is that folks at least take the time to evaluate their options and/or candidates; voting a straight ticket just because someone calls themselves something can lead to undesirable outcomes.
Not to mention that most of the most upending, consequential changes and events in America were not only not voted on, but were wildly opposed by the populace, yet were imposed anyways and today, after decades of government “education”, people vigorously support and defend those tyrannical impositions.
Voting doesn't work as well when there's billions of dollars being spent to influence the votes to make billionaires richer, while the working class that could vote against it is too busy working 3 part time jobs just to survive.
There is a lot of truth in this but I'm not convinced sortition is going to work either.
But what you could do is vote with a string attached and a penalty for being recalled that is going to make people think twice about running for office if their aim is to pull some kind of stunt. The 'you give me four years unconditionally' thing doesn't seem to work at all.
I've been mulling over a system where there's a legislative body composed of citizens picked through sortition and another legislative body that's elected like normal legislative bodies of today.
The twist on that body however is that voting is mandatory and ballots have a non of the above option on them. If a super majority (say 60-75%) vote none of the above the election is a do-over with all the people on the ballot being uneligable to run for that seat for say 5-10 years.
I like the idea, but I worry about choosing random members of the public when so many people are unprepared for it. Any kind of government made up of "the people" requires that those people be literate, educated, and informed. With things the way they are today I'd worry that your secondary elected legislative body would end up doing everything and you'd either end up with a figurehead who'd be out of their depth and ineffectual or one being used/manipulated.
I could also envision an endless cycle of elections with 75%+ of the population voting "none of the above" because of issues like "Not my personal favorite candidate" or "eats the wrong mustard" or "I hate the idea of government"
That's super-interesting experiment, but I wouldn't start it in such a large country as USA.
Why won't humanity test it on a smaller scale?
In Belgium (Ostbelgien) the German-speaking community has a permanent sortition-based Citizens’ Council wired into the parliamentary process; In Ireland they've already run national, randomly selected Citizens’ Assemblies on high-stakes constitutional topics.
These are basically production prototypes - maybe we should ask ourselves why they don't push it further?
On the contrary I think Americans are reacting about the same as any other set of people would react. There are always going to be people who, as long as their personal lives are stable, they are not going to do anything to put that stability at risk. America is also huge enough that even if one part of the country is having a crisis, millions of fellow citizens will not hear of it or have any 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand connection to the matter.
But also if a small portion of Americans disparately plan to do stuff like sabotage surveillance camera, it's still newsworthy.
The only people whose lives are stable in this economy are the ultra wealthy. Even those who we would normally consider "middle class" are a couple of medical emergencies away from financial ruin. Whole classes of jobs are disappearing.
Let’s be clear though - it’s not that Americans are clinging to some deep stability that brings them comfort or relaxation, it’s that they’re on the edge already. The vast vast majority of people are barely able to afford the basics of life, while we’re bombarded with an ever more shameless wealthy elite’s privileges.
Politics is like water boiling - it’s just going to be little bubbles at first but all of a sudden it will start to really rumble.
Is that really the case? It seems to me that the vast majority in the US can fairly easily afford a fair bit of material luxury, mostly because material luxuries have become incredibly cheap (by historical standards).
The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
"Among the 37 percent of adults who would not have covered a $400 expense completely with cash or its equivalent, most would pay some other way, although some said that they would be unable to pay the expense at all. For those who could cover the expenses another way, the most common approach was to use a credit card and then carry a balance, and many indicated they would use multiple approaches. However, 13 percent of all adults said they would be unable to pay the expense by any means (table 21), unchanged from 2022 and 2023 but up from 11 percent in 2021"
An informative data point. To provide some context regarding my earlier comment, a brand new full size memory foam mattress can be had for less than $200 shipped in the continental US. A computer capable of playing modern AAA video games can be had for less than $400. Material luxuries in the modern day are cheap to an almost absurd degree.
I think maybe we need a new CPI metric for HCOL areas that takes the form of a ratio. Something along the lines of midrange laptops per studio apartment month.
I wouldn't call these material luxuries, just like big screen TVs are no longer a luxury. Being able to visit a doctor or a dentist on the other hand...
By "luxury" I mean approximately "anything beyond bare survival". My point is that the vast majority of material possessions have become absurdly cheap by historic standards. However that doesn't preclude severe societal dysfunction (housing, children, retirement, or as you note doctors and dentists).
Thank you for clarifying. It is true that many of such possessions have become incredibly cheap (and therefore affordable) especially when it comes to media consumption and other forms of escapism, but they do very little to address our fundamental needs (physical safety & health, financial security, emotional stability).
True luxuries (not having to worry, not having to waste time) are increasingly out of reach for most people.
Stuff is cheap, but basic security is expensive. Everyone pints to the stuff, but income vs rent and asset prices has only gone up and up!
Buying housing is utterly unaffordable for a very, very large percentage of young people even educated professionals in in-demand fields. Covering expenses is awful. That famous Emirati quote of “my father had a camel, I have a Land Rover, my son will have a Lamborghini, his son will have a Land Rover, his son will have a camel” - our parents had the Lamborghinis. The majority of my generation (milllenials) are worse off than their parents. Very few have kids because they can’t afford to have them. There are exceptions everywhere but if you just listen or see the culture it is a given that our future is fucked unless something radical changes - income inequality is the highest it’s EVER BEEN. Higher than the time of the French Revolution. Higher than the “Gilded age”.
It’s foolish to think that people are okay or that nothing will come politically of this. Go look out the window in any major city, the stark differences are there for anyone’s eyes to see.
I can only hope what people will decide make trouble about is also what I consider necessary. If we could all agreed what was necessary to make trouble about there wouldn't be nearly as much to be making trouble over. It's a very double edged sword which does not necessarily do a very good job at bringing any more clarity of what the moral path was to the country.
That would be an incredibly risky escalation, and it would be a stupid ultimatum to issue.
The people, or even states, could escalate in response. The worst case is escalating to violence; ICE isn’t trained, equipped, or numerous to deal with deploying into a violently hostile area. The army could, but then we’re in full blown civil war.
A more realistic middle ground is that it pushes people or states into nonviolent non-compliance by eg refusing to pay federal taxes. Frankly if California and New York alone stopped paying federal taxes the system would probably crumble.
I agree. The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control. If America actually becomes an "authoritarian" country (seems almost likely) I imagine all these Flock pics with other data mining techniques will be used to send Communist Progressives to reeducation camp.
America is an authoritarian country for decades now.
It first dawned on me when i visited NYC some 30 years ago. I stepped over some arbitrary yellow line I wasn't supposed to - the uniformed cop that noticed that went from 0 to 100 in 0.1 second and behaved as if I just pulled a gun. Zero time to reflect and assume I might have made a legitimate mistake. Since then I've visited U.S. >150 times, and in my experience it was always thus in the U.S. - the law enforcement is on hair trigger and the populace has seemingly grown used to it and considers this behaviour normal. Geez.
(Go live in any northern european country for comparison. Any interaction with law enforcement is almost certainly going to be pleasant, cordial, and uniformed police typically does not rely on threats of violance for authority).
I know, I've been to many places, and met lots of fantastic, friendly people. But the attitude towards police - the dead seriousness of any and all interactions - no wrong moves, or else - is frankly frightening.
NYC police seem insane lmao. For some reason various precinct accounts have made it into my social media feed, and the last time I saw the they were bragging about stealing some old ladies less lethal defense weapon.
> The amount of cameras and tracking has gotten out of control.
The UK looks at the use of cameras and feels threatened for its Nanny State title. We Yanks have laughed at that name while the water around us slowly came to a boil.
Some cities and/or states have banned the use of cameras at stop lights to issue tickets. Not really sure what caused that to happen, except the cynic in me thinks some politician received a ticket in the mail from one of the cameras.
Mass unemployment would/will be the catalyst to mass uprising. All of the fuel is in place (ICE, Epstein, rising costs of everything, unaffordable housing, general lack of hope and faith in the government, etc.) High unemployment numbers will be the spark that sets it all ablaze.
General strike! Close the ports, close the airports, steal dozers and park them on railroad tracks, teachers on the streets in front of their schools to protect their students, blockade the grocery distribution centers, so that the shelves go bare, just stop everything, everywhere.
When it hurts the billionaires, they will tell their politicians to invoke the 25th.
It's the only way, we've lost our democracy, but we still have economic power.
Disrupting basic functions of the economy will hurt ordinary people a lot more than it will hurt billionaires.
Also under these conditions of food distribution and transportation being actively disrupted, why would anyone be at school? Huge numbers of American schools are unsafe and unpleasant places for kids to be in ordinary times, and a massive disruption to ordinary life is not going to make that situation any better.
>You? Only people that politically agree with you?
the next sentence after they mention "necessary trouble" is literally:
"But that only goes as far as to be my opinion."
they are just stating their opinion.
everyone decides when the time for "necessary trouble" is individually, based on their accumulated experience, opinion, etc. no arbiter required, just a critical mass of people with aligning opinions.
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for gay rights?
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for civil rights?
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for womens' rights?
Who was the arbiter of the trouble necessary for the rights of handicapped people?
Indigenous people?
Immigrants?
American society was created for the benefit of straight white Christian men alone. Every right held by any other group, every ounce of political power, every bit of basic human dignity, has had to be taken by force of "necessary trouble." There is no "arbiter." How could there be? An arbiter presupposes an objective moral ideal and a just society, neither of which we have. In the end, America can only be trusted to live up to its principles at the point of a gun.
Is it not literally true that he is calling for action from the populace without doing it? You all can only lift a finger to downvote a literal call to action lmao
While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.
The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.
So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.
I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)
Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
Having lived or spent time in a lot of 3rd world shitholes, including a civil war, I've only really felt freedom in places with lawless lack of government, never places with 'rule of law' -- that always gets twisted for the elite.
Of course the same happens in lawless regions, but power is fractured enough, there is a limit on power they can wield against the populace, as the opposing factions ultimately are a check on any one side oppressing the population to leave. They can't man machine guns at all the 'borders' and ultimately corruption becomes cheap enough that it is accessible to the common person which arguably provides more power to the common man than representative democracy does.
I think this element of factions in competition was part of the original genius of the '50' states with the very minimal federal government. But the consolidation of federal power and loss of the teeth of the 10th amendment and expansion of various clauses in the constitution means there is now no escape and very few remaining checks.
This is a personal preference and not some universal axiom.
Living under a tyrant at least tends to provide predictability and stability of a sort. The kind of violence that exists in a lawless society tends not to exist. State sanctioned violence, sure, but that's more often than not targeted.
Basically, given the choice of Somalia or North Korea, there will be a diversity of opinions as to which someone prefers. I'm not saying I prefer one to the other, just that "Somalia" is not an objectively correct choice.
As a note on Somalia: Somalia outside the state-like entities (Somaliland, Puntland, Al-Shaabab caliphate, and FGS / federally controlled somalia) is governed by xeer law.
It's actually not lawless, it just uses a decentralized (polycentric) legal system that is poorly understood by westerners. They've had better outcomes under this system than under democratic government of FGS, which led to all or nothing tribalism influences coming into office.
This is sort of a distinction without a difference.
Any long-running human society will over time crystallize into some structure that resembles having a legal system. When people say a place is "lawless" it doesn't mean someone can just murder their neighbor in broad daylight for no reason, and all the other neighbors just shrug and say "well, gee, darn, I guess there was no law against that".
The real meaning behind the original comment I replied to is that in both the lawless and tyrannical governments, it really comes down to "might makes right". In the "lawless" society, anyone can gain might and use violence against others if they have accumulated enough power. In the tyrannical society, the State has gained this power and uses is capriciously and unpredictably.
The question is really "would you rather the main source of potential violence against you be the armies and police of a dictator, or would you rather have to deal with your local warlord, while having the potential to become your local warlord?".
In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government, this just means that people with some strong opinions can subject the rest of the citizens to their desires. This is the universal veto on societal order. We can see that the desire for governments to "live in fear of the governed" usually rapidly disappears when people start destroying water lines and power lines. After all, 'the governed' and 'the government' are the same people just with different factions distributed in power.
A government that can't do anything to police unions is also the government living in fear of the governed. A government that can't rein in (say) PG&E is also a government living in fear of the governed. When political representatives are shot by a right-wing anti-abortion terrorist that is also (and perhaps even more viscerally so) a government living in fear of the governed. And I'm certainly not 100% okay with this.
> In a country like the US with a fairly democratic process at various levels of government
How can you look at the current state of affair and say this with a straight face... It's a mafia, they're all millionaires, they're all friends, thay all go to the same schools, they all work for the government and instantly bounce to lobby for the private sector, they all use their insider knowledge to profit, &c. Only someone who went through the American education system can believe the US is anywhere close to what you described, it's a farce
The thing about that is the governments who most fear the governed are often extremely draconian. I actually do not think that it is constructive and it is precisely that fear that is driving things like voter suppression in the US.
You are unfortunately, for whatever your reasons you have, barking up the wrong tree. The people already made a law, the supreme law in fact, called the Constitution.
In fact the capital criminals in this matter are the people violating and betraying that supreme law; the politicians, sheriffs, city councils, and even the YC funders behind Flock, etc.
It is in fact not even just violating the supreme law, but though that betrayal, it is in fact also treason.
I was confused by the "barking up the wrong tree" opener because the parent commenter was not contradicting that line of thinking either. Though destroying property is not going to get anyone anywhere, that I can agree with if that's GP's point.
All of this presumes that residents in municipalities with ALPRs don't want them used the way they are. That's not true! These things are broadly pretty popular among a broad set of residents.
I am in favor of them. There is no expectation of privacy in the public setting. I can record anyone on a public street w/o their permission.
If these license plate cameras are making the streets safer and helping to reduce crime, why not? Sure there may be some mis-uses here and there, but for the most part they seem to be working and in places where they are deployed, crime is being reduced.
They're only popular because people are routinely lied to. We see this same issue time and time again in "free markets".
If you tell people this will help stop crime and that's it, everyone and their mama is gonna say yes.
If you tell people the truth, that police don't really care to look at the data and this surveillance is going to be used to target innocent people for unrelated "crimes" on the taxpayers dollar, then everyone would say no.
This is also why 99% of surveys are broken. You can get people to agree to literally anything if you just lie a little. After all, Adolf Hitler got elected by promising to fix the German economy and, in a way, he did.
In what way are voters in these municipalities being lied to? We got logs of all the searches, and incident reports of every time they were used to curb another vehicle. We know how well they did (or didn't, in our case) worked.
I don't know what "surveys" have to do with this. Voters voted on it; it was a campaign issue in our trustee election.
The lie comes from the intentionality. Voters are told the intention of these tools are to prevent crime, but that's not true. The intention is enrich a select few and expand the surveillance state, chilling dissent and empowering authoritians.
Once again, we look at Adolf Hitler. He told voters his intention behind power was helping the German people, but that was not true. That was just a tool he used to grab said power.
We see this with a lot of things in the US. The intention behind giving ICE tens of billions of dollars and a license to kill and ignore due process is "your protection". But that's not true.
You might say we don't actually know anyone's intention, and that is technically true. But I prefer not to play stupid, and even if you're correct, it's not worth the risk.
These things bring huge amounts of risk with them. Even if everyone involved is perfectly benevolent, which I don't think even a child could believe, there's no guarantee it will stay that way. We are building out infrastructure that practically begs to be abused. And when you say it's okay, you're essentially saying you believe everyone will stay good forever. That's quite bold, no?
When phrased that way, your position does not seem reasonable. You have to understand, this is how some people see it, and when you understand that perspective, you can understand what you're actually asking for.
My guess is the vast majority of the 80,000 or whatever cameras are uncontested politically. Local board meetings for most towns are boring and quiet affairs, and those are also the most effective venue for these concerns.
If you are a taxpayer in a local jurisdiction with Flock cameras and you want them removed, show up to every single meeting and maximize use of public comment time.
Local government is a place individuals can actually be extremely effective but also almost nobody ever actually does.
How is flock cameras existing, a breakdown in the rule of law? As far as I know they are not technically breaking any laws, even though I disagree with their use in principle.
Some might think it is somehow a Fourth Amendment violation, but I'm pretty sure it has already been ruled on enough times now that there is no expectation of privacy on government-owned roads, except for what's inside your car.
If the law "if you shoot an arrow with no mind to it's direction or destination existed you are guilty of negligence and liability of any damages" existed and then guns where invented you can argue either that the law needs to be updated or that case law will follow the spirit of the law and establish that it also applies to guns. If you are prescriptive and do not believe in the spirit of the law then a new law would have to cover the case of guns. Many would say there is a breakdown in the rule of law if it turned out people could just fire those guns willy nilly and the arrow law did not apply to them.
Similarly if there is a law that says the government can't build cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking. Many people believe there is a breakdown in the rule of law when The government can pay someone else who has built cameras everywhere to track you 24/7 without a warrant then post facto get a warrant to justify the prior tracking.
Dan Carlin, on his Common Sense podcast several years ago, said something that really stuck with me (and he probably was paraphrasing it from someone else).
Society is like a pressure cooker, with built-in safety release valves to prevent the pressure from getting too high. If your solution to the safety release is to block off the valves, with authoritarian surveillance, draconian laws, and lack of justice for the elites committing crimes, it just moves it somewhere else. Block off too many, and it explodes.
When laws no longer serve the people and you have a lawless government doing whatever it wants, they are merely strongly worded suggestions. We give laws their power so I don't think this government realizes just how poorly things look with the DOJ now and how little trust there is for anything coming out of the federal government.
> It is not ideal, but it is necessary when the higher-desirability options are not working.
You are simply imposing your own views on others. Just because you disagree with Flock doesn't give you the right to destroy license plate readers that my tax dollars paid for. Who appointed you king?
I view this breakdown in law similar to the marijuana situation. It’s kind of a villainous administration, green lighting villainous things. The law doesn’t hold water in this case. The people have to do something drastic to get that across.
We either have out of control govt or civil unrest and only people who don’t know what the latter looks like cheer it on. We’re screwed unless someone unlocks the economy. Right now it’s not happening.
I mean, that's excellent wishcasting, but the reality is that current economic incentives combined with a lack of social ("cancel culture" got cancelled because "uwu too mean"), regulatory ("uwu can't hurt Capital or the rich people won't make jobs no more"), and criminal ("uwu can't hold Capital accountable for their actions when they do crimes or people will lose jobs") accountability means that this was always going to be the outcome.
More people need to understand that the system is working as designed, and the elimination of peaceful, incremental reform based on popular demand, along with mass manipulation of human emotions through media and advertising, means that this sort of resistance is the sole outcome left before devolving into naked sectarian violence.
Say what you will, but the anti-Flock camera smashers are at least doing something beyond wishcasting from a philosophical armchair in comment sections or social media threads.
Peer pressure is apparently not even effective in getting billionaires who could easily hire whatever variety of escort they want from having sex with trafficked children, so I'm not sure in what world it's supposed to stop the billionaires from installing cameras.
Doesn't breakdown in rule of law happened when a corporation (surely) bribed local officials to install insecure surveillance devices with zero concern for the community living near them?
How many homeowners install mystery-meat Chinese cameras on their houses that feed the data God knows where? Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
Beyond any discussion of “vigilante” / “criminal” destruction of cameras, there’s a clear difference between giving domestic corporations (who act hand in glove with your local government) access to cameras on your property vs. giving foreign corporations (working hand in glove with an adversary government) access to cameras on your property.
It really comes down to whether you consider an individual’s right to privacy more important than your state’s security. Neither is really a perfect options in this case, but having the Flock camera means some part of your property is under the panopticon of local law enforcement that could arrest you (loss of privacy).
Going with chinese tech, you are probably more private in regards to your own government, but you’re probably having some negative effect on state security based on the marginal benefit of CCP surveillance/ potential malware in your network.
The dichotomy is false. People could have cameras which report to no one, but that’s less useful for all governments involved.
ok so let's just put aside chinese companies! ring is an american company, should people's ring cameras be vandalized because ring might share their data with the american government?
I have not vandalized any Ring cameras, but I have paid to replace those installed by friends and family and have those replaced shredded as part of an electronics recycling waste stream. "Think globally, act locally" sort of thing.
i don't think the people destroying flock cameras are open to the idea of going through the legal process to replace them with alternatives that have better privacy, something (maybe the fact that they currently are vandalizing them) tells me that they are just interested in vandalizing them
Flock cameras are different, they take advantage of laws that have not kept pace with technology while being colocated and operated in public spaces, to where you are forced to live in a corporate surveillance state for Flock Group's enterprise value and potential shareholder returns. And so, destruction of the devices is all that is left available to them (if their jurisdiction opts to not remove them, as many have done [1]). Somewhat silly to blame humans who want privacy (arguably a human right [2]) just so the CEO of Flock can get wealthy (and YC can get liquidity) at IPO, no?
The human is doing what you would expect the human to do when faced with limited options in an operating environment that is not favorable to them. Crime has been trending down for some time [3], Flock cameras are a business driven on fear like Shotspotter, where the results are questionable at best and you're selling to the unsophisticated.
i've never found this type of "humans were left with no alternative" argument in defense of destruction of property convincing, some of the things that separates humans from other animals is the concept of private/public property, rule of law, etc, you know? there are alternatives, contrary to the alarmism found online the US is very far from actual dictatorships where people have close to 0 way of achieving change through the legal system, immediately jumping to violence without an imminent threat is something i'd expect from lower primates, not from homo sapiens.
You're free to your opinion. Property is just property, it is nothing special. Rule of law is highly dynamic and a shared delusion. Damaging or destruction of property is not violence, it is a property crime at best. In the scope of Flock, it is well documented as having been misused, illegally in many cases, by law enforcement and those with access to its systems [1] [2] [3].
> there are alternatives
This does not consistently appear to be the case in the US unfortunately.
> Damaging or destruction of property is not violence.
you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
is it not violence to, for example, burn down a business where people work in if you do it at a time where no one is around to get immediately hurt as a consequence? can i not call the financial damage caused both to the workers and the owners of that place violence?
I fail to see the equivalence between taking out a surveillance camera that is violating people's privacy with the other things that you list. Arguing like that is simply not going to work.
the person i replied to made a broad "destroying property is not violence" claim, the scope of the conversation is more than just that
also, i consider a security camera in a place i live to be security infrastructure, you should not be able to come into a place and do act like a vigilante imposing your view on what should and should not be recorded through force, if you have a problem with the way things work you should try to work within the law
again, this is what separates civilization from chaos
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence?
Very obviously not. Words have meaning. You are misusing words to garner emotional support for your preferred political position.
Burning down anything (including a business) is arson. Not violence. It only becomes violence if people are present and at imminent risk of physical harm.
Financial damage is not violence. Speech is not violence. Please take your doublespeak back to reddit; it doesn't belong on HN.
I agree with your basic position, but most definitions of the word violence that I could find included the notion of: destroying things with intent to intimidate through fear of harm, threats such as brandishing weapons, and so on. It's not as simple as 'you didn't touch me so you didn't do violence' - and it makes sense when you consider the case of robbery at gunpoint.
That being said - the destruction of flock cameras is in no way violence. No one sees that and takes it as a threat of harm - at least no one acting in an honest way.
Isn't that the difference between a threat of violence as opposed to violence? Which is directly adjacent and thus treated similarly by the law.
Brandishing a gun at someone is a threat that you'll shoot them but, importantly, is not the same thing as actually making good on the threat. (From the victim's perspective the distinction is rather important.)
how did you jump from property damage and arson to speech? non sequitur much? financial damage absolutely can be violence, you can ruin someone's life if you take away their job by burning down the place they work at and it could lead to something horrific like them taking their own lives or not being able to pay for their medication or not be able to pay for their child's education, etc as a direct consequence of your act of destroying that place. destroying infrastructure people rely on to stay healthy/safe/economically stable/etc should be considered by civilized people as a violent attack on them, you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
a case where you can argue speech can be violence would be a verbal threat to hurt or kill someone, but that has nothing to do with what we're talking about, i don't know why you're bringing up speech, are you trying to say that destroying these cameras is a form of expressing freedom of speech? (not accusing you of this btw, just genuinely curious what you meant by that)
> how did you jump from property damage and arson to speech?
I included speech as an example, the same as your bringing up property damage, arson, and financial damage. It seemed relevant given the general shape of what you were expressing.
Someone being driven to suicide or unable to pay for medication is not an example of violence. It might be many things but violence is most certainly not one of them.
> you cannot pretend that disrupting someone's livelihood is not at all related to attacking their liberty and/or life
Indeed it is _related_ but that does not magically make it "violence". Violence is direct physical harm. Not indirect and not anything other than physical.
> a case where you can argue speech can be violence
Speech is _never_ violence. That's about as close to definitionally impossible as you can get. (Here's a fun related observation: violent rhetoric is not itself violent.)
Respectfully, you seem to be having extreme difficulty comprehending the fact that words have meaning. It's impossible to engage in meaningful discussion with someone who either can't or won't conduct themselves in accordance with that fact.
Your first example, no. That is a threat of violence and is illegal literally everywhere (even in the US). However it does not become "violence" until you commit a physical act.
Your second example is inciting public panic. Again, not violence. And again, illegal literally everywhere (at least AFAIK).
> serious physical harm that's resulting directly from your action
That's the thing, the panic was the direct result. The physical harm was indirect. Once again, words have meanings.
Perhaps you should seek to learn more about the law. You might find that, in addition to words having meaning, society has been dealing with "problematic" behaviors for as long as it has existed and is honestly pretty well equipped for it in general. These things have been catalogued extensively. Referring to everything as "violence" is no better than labeling every other crime "terrorism".
> you wouldn't consider someone vandalizing your home or the infrastructure in your neighborhood to be violence? of course it is violence, an attack on the place i live (whether that's limited to just my home or to the larger community i live in) is an attack on me
No, I file an insurance claim and move on with my life. It is just property, and almost all property can be trivially replaced. Your property is not you. It is just property. We simply see the world differently, that's all. Good luck to you.
I'll personally send my DNA and weekly blood work straight to Xi Jinping address and pay for postage myself before letting my own government spy my every moves. Thés risks of anything bad happening are much lower
As long as they're not pointed at the street that should be fine. If they are pointed at the street then, depending on where you live, that may not be acceptable.
Well, not in the US since filming in public is (at least AFAIK) constitutionally protected. It's weird though, somehow two party consent for audio recording (even in public) seems to be accepted by the courts. Although it's entirely possible that I have a misunderstanding.
It is actually kind of hard to look this up: I get lots of search results about the right to record police being protected constitutionally. And the lack of an inherent right to privacy, when in public. But, this doesn’t seem to preclude a locality from creating a law that disallows recording of public locations, right? You may not have a constitutional right to safe air, but as far as I know states can pass their own environmental regulations…
> Should their homes be vandalized too for their lack of concern for the community?
If enough people can be convinced that those cameras are somehow helping Trump, you’ll find a lot of people in here and Reddit saying “yes”, I’ll imagine. Before this we had people vandalizing Teslas because of Elon.
The real breakdown in the rule of law occurred when the US Supreme Court made the specious decision that amoral business entities (corporations) had the same rights in a democracy as citizens.
All this shit flows downhill from Citizens United.
Supreme Court decisions are not a deterministic process like you get with code. Justices twist and contradict precedents to suit their ideological goals all the time; these days they don't even try to hide it much. The Citizens United decision wasn't something that had to happen, it was a deliberate choice by conservatives.
FWIW the "rule of law" is a reference to the idea that the law should be applied equally to everyone regardless of their position in society, and has nothing to do with the crime rate.
No. Catching murderers (for example) is a basic function of the justice system. Of course the US justice system does have many flaws and in some ways much worse lately, but compare with Somalia or Haiti and you'll see that there's quite a long way down. It could get much worse.
It's not about crime rate or "many crimes" still being taken seriously, it's the fact that we all know now that there are certain crimes that, depending on where you are and who is in charge, simply don't count. Furthermore, depending on where you are and who is in charge, the authority may simply choose to not adhere to the law whatsoever.
What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
I don't like all this surveillance stuff, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and "direct action" against Flock is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it's hard to contain the scope of their activity.
>What other social issues should be solved with vigilante justice?
Everything you said is true, but I suspect, also irrelevant, because options short of vigilante justice aren't going to be seen by the public as viable for much longer (if they're even seen so now). America's social contract is breaking, and existing institutions make it clear, daily, that they will strengthen that trend rather than reverse it. And as JFK said, 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.' That doesn't make the violence laudable, or even desirable. It is simply inevitable without seemingly impossible positive change from an establishment that is hostile to such.
This is a nice description (i.e "where is the limit on this type of action?") of a reason why this approach is low on the list, and why ideally we would solve it with one of the other options.
You don't want to give people "moral license" to do this broadly, but we've hit a point where there are no options available that don't have downsides. Stated another way: Taking no action can also be unethical.
Man, I really emphasize with this, and that immediately raises my "motivated reasoning" hakles. There's a lot of people in America with deeply held views that I strongly disagree with, and I would be very worried if they began taking matters into their own hands; to pick a hopefully-uncontroversial example, bombing abortion clinics. They, too, would say "to take no action is also unethical". The purpose of society is to arbitrate these kinds of disputes...
I agree but will point out that abortion is an example of policing activity that does not affect oneself. Adding an additional clause reflecting that aspect seems to fix many of the issues that might concern you.
For me, Flock installing these cameras and other people taking them down are two sides of the same coin. One group puts cameras up in public without people's knowledge or permission, the other group takes cameras down without people's knowledge or permission. I find it kind of beautiful, like the ebb and flow of the tide.
I believe in surveillance, but Flock is just the tip of the iceberg and rolling out mass public surveillance is just as likely to backfire as it is to lead to changes. More importantly, once you give folks moral license to do this stuff it’s hard to contain the scope of their activity.
the threat of vigilante mob justice is required for the law to work. its the tension that makes sure the rich and powerful want to stay involved, and be held accountable by it, rather than skipping over it and making it irrelevant.
the threat has to be credible, which is where things like this, and luigi are quite valuable
- For Talos Principle 2, Croteam switched from their own engine to UE5. The description was "It would be like attempting to sprint and catch up with a train that is already far down the track and accelerating even faster.". From a user's perspective, observe the graphics of Serious Sam Siberian Mayhem and Talos Principle 2: Same company, released at a similar time. Talos Principle (UE5) looks dramatically better than SS. (In-house engine)
- Jon Blow rolls his own engines (and lang), and releases games very slowly
- Expedition 33 recently released as a phenomenal game that leaned heavily on features in UE5 (Face/body, graphics, map/terrain gen etc.) They focused on the game itself, and let the engine do the heavy lifting... to a superb result.
From my own anecdotes in graphics programming: Producing a simple engine is easy. Producing something that's photorealistic etc is massively more difficult. Let along all the other things an engine provides for you. Modern games have so many complexities the engine abstracts out; we don't need to roll a new engine for each game or studio, each trying to have optimized netcode, human characters, photorealistic lighting, GUI map editors + terrain gen etc.
I use my own graphics engine for my scientific programs, but it has much simpler requirements than a game engine.
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