If cheap labour is no longer possible/desirable, then near fully autonomous factories driven by next-gen AI and robotics becomes significantly more viable.
From Mozilla's point of view its probably that people might get confused between the old and new themes and wonder why all the highly customisable themes we use to have no longer work. So we have to have a new the colourways name so Mozilla can market the 'new' feature and sidestep the problem.
RSE's can and often absolutely should be involved at the PhD level. In my experience, collaboration between the scientist and engineer in the process of research iterations almost always produce better results. Each has insights the other may not, likely leading to better outcomes for the research, final product/tool and time taken.
The scientist just wants to focus on their research and once they have a barely working proof of concept, hand it over to the engineer to figure the rest out. The engineer wants a well specified design and prototype that they can lightly refactor to clean up, scale up and turn into a product/tool.
The reality is that approach makes it way harder for both, though most often harder for the engineer as they are generally at the end of the chain in Academia and have little power. For example, the code or spec from the scientist is often terrible, so the engineer needs to start from scratch and keep going back to the scientist to spec out the design as they were not involved at any stage prior. They may even find edge cases or flaws the scientist had not considered that are fundamentally problematic to turning it into a viable product/tool.
This is why the big corporate/industry research labs often have high level RSE that are involved in the research process and get their names in papers (they sometimes have PhD's themselves). They are not optimising for the scientists time, but for the companies resources
Yeah let me be clear. PhD students absolutely should get guidance from experienced engineers (so I was a bit over-zealous with "assist" in my parent post). But this should be more like understanding best practices, and they should feel free to ask questions and figure out how to write better code. There are initiatives to do this called Software Carpentry.[0] However, RSEs should not be writing code for students doing PhD level projects in my opinion, for exactly the reasons you mention.
I know some of the big research councils do this in the UK. For example STFC has a program where they'll work with universities and companies to production-ise research code.
> The scientist just wants to focus on their research and once they have a barely working proof of concept, hand it over to the engineer to figure the rest out. The engineer wants a well specified design and prototype that they can lightly refactor to clean up, scale up and turn into a product/tool.
As you say, this is a great idea in principle. In reality I think that it's really difficult to make it work.
I don't think its about best practices, its about good design and communication. Even if we are just talking about PhD students, the majority of them are fresh graduates. They are no different than fresh grads in a company. Those grads work with experienced senior software engineers to guide them and provide design advice (not just best practices). Those engineers are often the ones writing the complex/difficult areas of code.
> RSEs should not be writing code for students doing PhD level projects in my opinion
So should a mechanical engineer PhD be designing and making all their own robot parts? Or should the shop engineer help them? The few mechanical engineer PhD's in robotics I know made a few early prototype test parts themselves with help from the shop engineer, but the shop engineer made and even helped design most of it, especially the final prototype.
> As you say, this is a great idea in principle. In reality I think that it's really difficult to make it work.
The point I'm making is that it does work and its proven to work very well (which is why the major industry labs do it). In my experience its Academia that doesn't like it. Anything which appears to take power/freedom away from scientists and gets in the road of their research is rejected. Though I think the core reason is (as other comments have mentioned), there is no incentive for Academia to make it work. The funny thing is that having a RSE working with them would actually help the scientists in the long run and allow them to focus more on the research because they wouldn't have to do everything themselves.
> I don't think its about best practices, its about good design and communication.
I would argue these should be included in best practices for software engineering.
> So should a mechanical engineer PhD be designing and making all their own robot parts? Or should the shop engineer help them? The few mechanical engineer PhD's in robotics I know made a few early prototype test parts themselves with help from the shop engineer, but the shop engineer made and even helped design most of it, especially the final prototype.
This is an interesting example. Every mechanical engineer I know has huge respect for their in-house machine shops. Everyone has a story about some design they submitted for fabrication, only to be told by the machinist that their design was terrible and they should do it another way. Generally machining jobs are very well-defined though, you have to submit CAD documents, tolerances etc.
The shops in universities I've worked in have a strong incentive to help people optimise designs because they're the ones doing the manufacturing, and they know what sort of things will work and what won't. But by and large this is informal. Usually this comes in the form of "have you thought about designing this another way, because this is really difficult/expensive/time-consuming to machine". Maybe this is just a cultural thing for machinists?
The PhD question - if your project is to design a new type of part then you should probably do the design. Should you make it though? It depends if the project is specifically looking at fabrication. Otherwise it's normal to dispatch this to a workshop.
In my opinion, it comes down to what your PhD is training you for or what you're hired to do as a postdoc. If your job is data analysis, then I think you should be writing code, but you should be able to get guidance and support. If you're a field biologist with no coding experience and you want to develop an app to take measurements, then that's a case when contracting it out to an in-house development team makes sense. I'm not saying it can't work, but the make in making it work is important.
If you incentivize RSE's properly then their time will become expensive and we need ways of figuring out how to maximise their impact.
Well I think the best way would be for RSEs to maintain a project and PhDs should then contribute to that project via pull requests. RSEs can then point towards proper coding styles, test development, etc.
That would ensure that the contributions of the PhDs does not get lost and they learn how to properly contribute to a project.
See my sibling comment on this. I think this is an ideal case for an RSE: if you have a shared codebase that ends up being contributed to by multiple members. That avoids legacy problems where someone contributes, leaves, someone else modifies, none of it is in source control etc. However, this assumes that you have a group that is structured around some common IP or library - and sure, there are lots of places where this applies. This is generally more mature research, not something that a PhD student has just come up with.
There are of course scenarios where someone comes up with some very high impact work, and there's an obvious need to make it robust or user-friendly, spin-out, etc.
It works less well for groups where everyone works on different or loosely related projects. That's not an efficient use of an RSE's time, in my opinion. Though of course you can have a situation where lots of people do random projects using the lab's core code. In both cases, there is a use-case where RSEs embedded in a university can train students on good coding practices.
Interesting. When compared to places like Australia, where guns are highly regulated and barely anyone owns a gun, such that there have been no mass shootings for 35 years, the solution really is obvious.
That is blatantly not true. There have been several mass shootings in Australia such as the 2002 Monash University shooting and the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis since Port Arthur, which inspired the modern Australian gun control system. Port Arthur was also 25 years ago, not 35. Australia also only had a handful of mass shootings before Port Arthur; mass shootings have never been a major issue in Australia.
A mass shooting in which, by the sound of it, a gunman killed one hostage? Then when "police...stormed the café ...[a hostage] was killed by a police bullet ricochet. ..[The gunman] was also killed. Three other hostages and a police officer were injured by police gunfire"
In the 2002 Monash shooting, 2 people died. Seems like there hasn't been a mass shooting of >5 people in Australia since Port Arthur (1996), except in 2018 when a grandfather in WA killed his whole family including himself (7 people).
Yep, my mistake its 25 years, not 35. Though the difference doesn't negate the point that its been decades since a gun related massacre.
That linked source is for all massacres, most of which are not gun related and have < 6 deaths. Even if you include the 2002 Monash University shootings, its still 20 years.
If you look at [1], when the Australian gun laws came into effect, a year later the per capita number of gun related deaths halved. 25 years later and its halved again and the trend continues downwards. For reference the US numbers are here [2]. What is interesting is that when comparing the number of firearm possession per capita between the US and Australia, the US has roughly 10 times more guns [3]. Based on [1] and [2] the US has roughly 10 times the number of gun related deaths per capita. The reason why Australia has historically had less problems than the US with gun violence is that even at Australia's peak, it had 5 times fewer guns [4] than the US [5] did per capita.
I'm Australian, and I don't even know about about the Monash University shooting, despite being in a University in the same city at the same time. I had to look it up, 2 people died.
The Sydney hostage crisis only one person was killed by the gunman, who was carrying a shotgun. If he had an automatic weapon it very likely would have been more.
> Interesting. When compared to places like Australia, where guns are highly regulated and barely anyone owns a gun, such that there have been no mass shootings for 35 years, the solution really is obvious.
I don't understand at all what you say about those graphs. Homicide has gone down from 750+ to about 400, which you describe as "little correlation between stricter gun laws and fewer number of dead people". No idea why you say that.
Sexual assault has gone up, according to the graph, about which you say "shows a slight negative correlation between stricter gun laws and sexual assault". Uh what? That graph is nothing to do with gun laws, is it?! Strange. Hmm I can only guess maybe that where you live, sexual assault is usually/often done by someone with a gun? I would guess that's very rare in Australia.
> I don't understand at all what you say about those graphs. Homicide has gone down from 750+ to about 400, which you describe as "little correlation between stricter gun laws and fewer number of dead people".
The decline in dead people is not correlated with fewer guns.
The decline is a trend going down over time that did not start when the guns were taken.
The argument of "fewer guns == safer society" needs to show that when the guns were taken, a decline in corpses resulted. That did not happen.
Ah ok thanks. Yes, from the graph seemed like it was always going up, then 5 years after Port Arthur peaked and has been going down ever since. I wouldn't call that "little correlation" but sure, who knows.
Anyway, this is a weird topic. It seems only in the USA that "fewer guns = safer society" is not extremely obvious to everyone.
> Anyway, this is a weird topic. It seems only in the USA that "fewer guns = safer society" is not extremely obvious to everyone and where people are straining hard not to see the obvious.
Well, that's because it isn't obvious. I limited my data lookups to Australia because OP presented Australia as an example of where it is obvious that fewer guns == safer society.
In the example that is provided as evidence (Australia), the data does not support the assertion. Maybe it will in other examples, but the OP presented this example and so I only checked the stats for this example.
As I mentioned in my other comment, the gun related deaths halved 2 years after the gun laws [1]. Furthermore, in 1996, the gun deaths per capita were 2.84, the homicides were ~650 per capita. So of course you will barely see a difference with the homicide graph. The real difference is that there have been no mass shootings for 20 years.
So yes, it really is that simple and completely obvious.
Your data doesn’t show what you think it shows. Homicides is not gun deaths, because in Australia the number of gun deaths is so small. There are other ways to Kill someone.
> Your data doesn’t show what you think it shows. Homicides is not gun deaths, because in Australia the number of gun deaths is so small. There are other ways to Kill someone.
It shows exactly what I think it shows: just how much safer (or not) a place is after enacting stricter gun laws.
The whole point is that the parent tried to imply that stricter gun laws make the society safer. The data for his example shows no real correlation.
Well, from a different programmer's perspective, ideal scenarios ("ending" or "eliminating" bad things) are rarely a reality.
We can reduce car related deaths by regulating automotive vehicles and driving behavior. Speed limits, seatbelts, max BAC...
We can reduce sexual diseases by educating people on safe practice.
We can reduce homelessness through welfare systems.
And based on the experiences in virtually every other first world country, the US can probably reduce gun-related deaths with tighter regulations on gun ownership.
But why stop there? Why not ban cars completely? That will reduce car deaths even further.
We can reduce sexual diseases even further by regulating who you can have sex with. If you've ever had or transmitted an STI, you're on a permanent banlist. You can obtain a license by proving you have no history of reckless behavior and have a clean record of health.
We can also reduce homelessness even further by finding every homeless person and forcing them into a government house. Homelessness is a travesty that must be reduced as much as possible, isn't it?
Hey, there aren't any ideal scenarios but we can reduce it further, can't we?
This is not entirely true. You're arguing for prohibition, and in many cases prohibition will lead to black markets and other undesirable outcomes.
In a country like Spain or wherever in Europe where people haven't been owning and open carrying guns for dozens of years it is not unreasonable to think bans wouldn't have an effect on people. But if you try to ban something outright, something that people are used to, you're going to get problems.
Banning sex has, by the way, been tried. If you ask a religious person what's the best way to deal with teen pregnancy they are going to say abstention. It doesn't work.
This should led you to believe that there is, in fact, a sweetspot between regulation and prohibition and that's really how most competent politicans should look at these issues. I don't think a gun ban is reasonable in the USA; but I would argue you definitely need more and progressive regulation so that the population is slowly disarmed. But how can you do that when it is literally in your constitution?
So what's the sweet spot for regulating sex? Some people get permanently banned, others don't? You have to check in with the government on who you can have sex with, but they'll only enforce some checks? Some people get "STI PreCheck" conditional on good behavior, but others are subject to more scrutiny? What's the plan to progressively ramp up sex regulation so that the population is slowly de-sexed?
I appreciate your honesty about your motives: you want the population to eventually be disarmed. That's a non-starter for a lot of Americans who believe it to be a civil right, not something to be negotiated and progressively removed.
They had a literal civil war, and the fascist public won. I have to admit that I don't know much about 1930s Spanish gun law but I suspect they were available; certainly once the war started all sides were being armed from outside.
What's more "positive" than the ability to defend yourself? You're just preaching to the choir if you don't accept other sides' perspectives on the value of guns.
Which is why so many (mostly pro-2A) people are saying that the root cause is mental health in America, and addressing that should be the focus of our efforts rather than burning man-hours arguing over the symptoms (gun violence).
Broadly this is what the downthread "Americans have chosen this" means. An armed, radicalized populace is one that's forever carrying out acts of lethal violence against strangers.
Disarm the populace and you get less lethal violence. (The UK has quite a lot of nonlethal violence, mostly alcohol related. We don't need to re-litigate what happened when trying to ban alcohol.)
If you rule out disarming, how about de-radicalizing? Many mass shooters leave behind helpful manifestoes detailing their reasoning.
>If you rule out disarming, how about de-radicalizing? Many mass shooters leave behind helpful manifestoes detailing their reasoning.
That requires much tougher questions to be asked and a level of cultural self awareness that most people don't have.
Look up the history of prohibition. People thought that they could just ban booze and that would be the easy button that would greatly reduce all sorts of adjacent societal ills.
Guns are the same way. People don't want to ask themselves why some youth are so disaffected they go postal. People don't wanna accept that gangs and traffickers mediating business disputes with bullets are basically doing a sloppy version of what courts do for "real business" disputes with extra steps. People don't wanna ask why so many people are taking their own lives. So they bury their heads in the sand and advocate for various flavors of "ban the guns and everything will be happy." Would it have some marginal impact? Certainly. Will it have the impact that advocates say? Lol.
If I was a civilian in a large scale war between the United States government and its civilian population I’m pretty sure I would rather the civilians have access to cars than to guns if it was one or the other.
A conventional war between civilians armed with small arms against the full United States military is a completely unrealistic scenario for what armed resistance would actually look like.
More realistic scenarios, based on historical examples, include:
1. Armed resistance of local or federal authorities/law enforcement (e.g. Battle of Athens, Bundy Standoff)
2. Guerrilla warfare against a superior military force (e.g. Afghanistan)
3. Full civil war between the states (would probably look something like Russia-Ukraine war happening right now)
In the first two scenarios small arms are absolutely effective. In the third scenario, access to more advanced weapons and logistics would be split between the factions (and possibly supplemented by outside forces).
Law enforcement entities become much less willing to play fast and loose with their use of force when there is a good chance that kicking in a door at 4am will get you shot back at which could result in one of your guys being killed and then tough, potentially career limiting, questions being asked about why they chose to kick in that door under those circumstances.
You see an increase in crimes against people when the equalizing force of guns is removed: assaults, muggings, home invasions, rapes, etc. Guns can (and do) allow smaller men, women, and the elderly to defend themselves with lethal force — against stronger aggressors.
You displace guns primarily harming suicidal people and criminals into harms to innocent victims, via unchecked violence — potentially without reducing suicides.
You also see an increase in totalitarian behavior, eg, the Australian lockdowns compared to the US lockdowns.
And the argument for removing rifles ignores that they’re rarely used in crimes — more people are killed by hammers or fists than rifles.
> You see an increase in crimes against people when the equalizing force of guns is removed: assaults, muggings, home invasions, rapes, etc. Guns can (and do) allow smaller men, women, and the elderly to defend themselves with lethal force — against stronger aggressors.
So by your argument crime should be lower in states with less gun control. That is not reflected in reality, in fact according to [1 ], the states with the highest crime rates have actually amongst the laxest gun control laws.
Your first paragraph makes me realize how messed up reality appears to be. A mass shooting every now and then is the new normal. A worthy trade-off for being able to defend yourself and keep the government from issuing lockdowns.
If someone broke into my house the default assumption has to be that they're armed and I should fear for me an my family's lives. So I better be armed myself, and better armed then the burglars. Just don't accidentally shoot a family member that you mistake for the home invader in the heat of the moment. But that would never happen to you anyways, only to other, stupid and irresponsible people - who pretty much then deserve to live with the consequences. Compare that to any European country, where burglars always wait until nobody is home, and even if that goes wrong you at least don't have to fear for anyone's life as they'll either beat it immediately or you calmly hand over your cash and be happy you're alive and well.
This is an incredibly bad faith response which creates strawmen I never said.
You’re welcome not to own a gun if you feel like that would be a better choice for you and/or your family. Nobody is making you.
What I’m saying is that you don’t have a right to take guns away from other people because you find them scary — even if that is occasionally abused, leading to tragedy. People have a right to defend themselves.
> A worthy trade-off for being able to defend yourself and keep the government from issuing lockdowns.
Over 100,000,000 people died to democide in the past century — around 70 times the current US murder rate for 100 years. (That is, 7000 years of the current US murder-with-guns rate.)
Guns also protected Black Panthers, Afghani insurrectionists, and Ukrainian militias.
I’m sorry that the world isn’t as friendly and happy as you would prefer it — I find that disquieting too.
Yes you did, and you even repeat it in your reply.
> You’re welcome not to own a gun if you feel like that would be a better choice for you and/or your family. Nobody is making you.
Yes, they are pretty much making you in parts of the US, because things are so bad.
> What I’m saying is that you don’t have a right to take guns away from other people because you find them scary.
Not just because "I find them scary", but because they are literally dangerous. They are made to kill. That's their only purpose.
And yes, you absolutely have the right to take them away from people - just like you have the right to declare certain substances illegal to sell, consume or own, and limit people's freedom in a dozen other ways for the sake of society's well being as a whole.
> even if that is occasionally abused, leading to tragedy.
So where's the straw man again?
> People have a right to defend themselves.
And we arrived at the knee jerk reaction. Taking the arms race as a given. Don't even question why things are that fucked up in the first place. Might have to fear for my life any time of the day, so better have a semi-automatic rifle at hand. It's just so very sad.
> Over 100,000,000 people died to democide in the past century
In the US? Or Europe? Or might it have been in some really unstable chaotic parts of the world? Why you would even want to compare this to a civilized first world country is beyond me. A more reasonable approach would be comparisons with countries that are socially and structurally similar to the US but have different gun control laws, but that comparison wouldn't really fly with your views I guess.
> I’m sorry that the world isn’t as friendly and happy as you would prefer it — I find that disquieting too.
> Yes, they are pretty much making you in parts of the US, because things are so bad.
Where cause I live in that scary city called Chicago that people like to mention and have never felt the need to have a gun. We do have a lot of shootings but we also have a lot of people. If our metro area was a country, we'd be more populous than >50% of all countries (139/235).
> Not just because "I find them scary", but because they are literally dangerous. They are made to kill. That's their only purpose.
Or you know, sport. I find shooting clay pigeons or just general target practice to be fun.
Speaking of rights, what happened to "well regulated"? There seems a lot of interest in "Shall not be", but far less the further into the paragraph you go.
I can't see "totalitarian" used on that page. I'm confused what your point is. The story is about 3 people escaping from "one of Australia's main quarantine facilities for people returning to the country" and being arrested when they were caught. That sounds like very unremarkable news to this Australian, but it seems that to some people it sounds like totally unacceptable totalitarianism, no idea why. Not the first time I've seen people post similar unremarkable "news" items on HN accompanied by extravagant claims that Australia is suddenly like the USSR or something.
I feel like the key to you seeing great significance in these reports are your unspoken premises, the beliefs you have, how you are framing this, which you will have to say out loud for me to know why you're posting this stuff.
I feel like you’re intentionally avoiding the point by saying things like “I don’t see the word totalitarian” and then ignoring the obvious implication that the article describes camps which are forcibly quarantining people who never traveled, including taking measures like searching unrelated cars who happen to be nearby.
I think you’re responding in bad faith because it would challenge your view of yourself and your nation to admit that forcible imprisonment in camps for quarantine is what people mean when they say “totalitarian”.
On the other hand the US has the highest incarnation rate of any western country by a large margin. So I guess the guns don't help against the totalitarian tendencies of their government.
No I'm saying that your argument is that putting people into forced quarantine if the disobey requirements is totalitarian and that it would be prevented by higher gun ownership. I'm saying that the US is putting a much larger fraction of their population into jails (for disobeying requirements), which should be considered just as totalitarian and the armed populace is not preventing it.
You don’t see a difference between jailing people who commit crimes versus forcible quarantine of people because they caught a highly communicable disease?
Or why forcible internment in camps for a disease might remind people of other atrocities in history?
I clicked through to the news story because I assumed from your comment that the BBC story used "totalitarian", evidently I misunderstood. For doing that I'm intentionally missing the point, ignoring things and responding in bad faith?
> forcible imprisonment in camps for quarantine is what people mean when they say “totalitarian”
I think I understand that it's what you mean when you say "totalitarian". I'm not interested in communicating further, after your unfriendly accusations.
I don’t know which country you are talking about but I haven’t heard about prison sentences for not respecting lockdowns, only fines. At least in the EU.
And while those laws were pretty stupidly implemented they were just the outcome of improvisation from unprepared governments, not some totalitarian vision. Even citizens from countries with a strong culture of disobedience understood that.
> You see an increase in crimes against people when the equalizing force of guns is removed: assaults, muggings, home invasions, rapes, etc. Guns can (and do) allow smaller men, women, and the elderly to defend themselves with lethal force — against stronger aggressors.
Sorry but to my european ears, this "equalizing force" theory sounds plain stupid. I get that it is not that easy to ban them because we have different traditions and background, and I get that it is really hard to ban something when people is used to it and that it could lead to unexpected consequences (black market, etc).
But defending guns as an "equalizing force" is just stupid, given the stats.
Comedy gold. We shouldn’t base policy around outliers of outliers but we should have a policy of arming the populace in case they need to lead an insurrection which is itself an extreme outlier. Or the chance of needing a gun for self defence which is also quite the outlier particularly if you drill down into the actual risk factors rather than using broad statistics.
So far this year more school kids have died from being shot in the line of duty than cops who are routinely armed. So it doesn’t strike me as that much of an outlier. In particular kids should definitely be safer from gun violence than a police officer. That seems like a reasonable goal?
Or the fact that the incidence of school shootings means kids are more widely impacted than just those who end up on the wrong end of a gun.
So you’re saying it’s perfect reasonable for more kids to be violently shot to death than police? On the whole my expectation is that the officers should be protecting the kids but this attitude certainly explains the behaviour of the officers on the day.
You say guns can be used by weaker people to defend themselves (not sure if you consider children weak), and the argue that rifles kill less people than hammers. Yes rifles, handguns on the other hand kill >30 times more (and there is a large unspecified firearm category which kills ~10 times more than hammers). So are you suggesting weaker woman should take a rifle to their date in case they need to defend themselves.
The bigger issue is however that I'm very certain there are more events of a fun being used to attack a weaker person, than od a weaker person defendinf themselves with one.
The rifle point was that while most murders are by handgun, most gun laws restrict rifles — which was a specific, second thing I was calling out.
> The bigger issue is however that I'm very certain there are more events of a fun being used to attack a weaker person, than od a weaker person defendinf themselves with one.
My point is that is more equal than when violence relies on knives and bats and fists.
No, rapes would not go down if guns were removed. Guns don't prevent rapes and actual rape and domestic violence victims ended up in prison after trying to defend themselves with guns.
It is simply not true that women, and the elderly would defend themselves with lethal force all that often, besides aggressors are the ones who are quicker at obtaining guns and using them.
> You see an increase in crimes against people when the equalizing force of guns is removed: assaults, muggings, home invasions, rapes, etc. Guns can (and do) allow smaller men, women, and the elderly to defend themselves with lethal force — against stronger aggressors.
So show us the statistics that crime rates in states with high gun ownership are lower.
> And the argument for removing rifles ignores that they’re rarely used in crimes — more people are killed by hammers or fists than rifles.
Your own link shows that two thirds of homicides are committed using guns. That’s your only citation and hardly a compelling one to back up your claim that the US has a far lower crime rate thanks to all the guns
No, I pointed out that the quoted text made an irrelevant distinction between different kinds of guns while the entire rest of the comment (and the ones it is replying to) are about guns in general
I accept your apology for making a bad assumption that ignored the actual text of my post and which assumed bad faith on my part, since that link supported the nearby text which described data from that report.
No, I assumed you were engaging in good faith when you mentioned rifles. Instead you were responding to strawman argument no one made about how banning rifles (but not pistols) wouldn’t work.
Just having a gun in your home increases your risk of being shot - virtually always either by your angry spouse, or yourself - by 50%. The idea that having a gun make you safer has no sound basis.
> Just having a gun in your home increases your risk of being shot - virtually always either by your angry spouse, or yourself - by 50%. The idea that having a gun make you safer has no sound basis.
So? Just having a swimming pool in your home increases your risk of drowning, but people have them anyway.
Also, I think you pulled that 50% number out of the air.
Stanford published a study following handgun owners from 2004 to 2016 [1]. From the results: "Overall rates of homicide were more than twice as high among cohabitants of handgun owners than among cohabitants of nonowners. These elevated rates were driven largely by higher rates of homicide by firearm."
But we could also reduce that down to "if you're specifically in an assault". Surely you're safer right? If you're in an assault and in possession of a gun, you are over 400% (4 times) more likely to be shot then if you do not have a gun. [2]
While having a swimming pool in your home does in fact increase the risk of drowning - in fact, it increases the risk of all the kids of your neighbors drowning as well (this is why I don't, and never will in fact have a private swimming pool in my home)...nobody puts a swimming pool in and says "this will stop me from drowning". In fact they go to considerable lengths and there is considerable regulation surrounding preventing exactly that.
> But we could also reduce that down to "if you're specifically in an assault". Surely you're safer right? If you're in an assault and in possession of a gun, you are over 400% (4 times) more likely to be shot then if you do not have a gun. [2]
From the paper itself, the TLDR is that those numbers only apply if you're in a gang. The cohort that is 400% more likely to be shot is, according to the paper, 400% more likely compared to non-illicit activity individuals.
> "However, compared with control participants, shooting case participants were significantly more often Hispanic, more frequently working in high-risk occupations1,2, less educated, and had a greater frequency of prior arrest. At the time of shooting, case participants were also significantly more often involved with alcohol and drugs, outdoors, and closer to areas where more Blacks, Hispanics, and unemployed individuals resided. Case participants were also more likely to be located in areas with less income and more illicit drug trafficking (Table 1)."
It's a good argument for better social services, not for restricting non-gang individuals from owning firearms.
Surely there are confounding variables? For instance, if one does/does not have a criminal record, has/does not have a propensity for violence, or maybe most importantly does/does not have curious children in the house.
US reasoning is so weird. It's ALWAYS safer to have no gun than to have one? I'd even say that you have less chance to get shot unarmed than you do armed. Is there any data to back this up?
I was born in the US to Italian immigrants - so I don't particularly feel it's just "US reasoning". We didn't live in the greatest neighborhood growing up (about 2-3 miles from where the Buffalo Tops grocery store shooting occurred.) My father had a .22 caliber rifle. One late night (2-3 am) when we were asleep the doorbell rang. My father answered the door with his rifle in hand. Two people claiming to be Buffalo Police Officers were "looking for a missing child" and wanted to come in to ask questions. My father felt something was amiss and didn't let them in. He subsequently called the police and they had no such report of a missing child in the area, nor any police officers going door to door at that hour of the night. In this case I feel it was safer to have a gun than no gun. You can't plan for such events, the best you can do is being prepared for it. There are consequences to gun ownership and consequences to not owning a gun. Ultimately it's the law of the land that allows you to make that choice for yourself.
A defensive use of a firearm doesn't mean you actually need to fire the weapon. The mere presence of a gun can act as a deterrent.
How often do people use guns to defend themselves against violent crime, and how often do people kill themselves or others with guns (accidentally or intentionally)?
There are roughly a million violent crimes a year. It is not credible there are 3x as many defensive uses of firearms that are somehow being missed.
The page you reference indexes a few thousand over several years. Seems likely an undercount as the page claims but not by that much by probably a couple orders of magnitude.
Your first link shows 2400 documented cases since 2019 which is more than I’d have expected. But clicking through those examples… many honestly don’t seem that sympathetic. Stuff like “shootout between X and Y, but Y shot second so it was self defense”. Or “X fatally shot Y with no witnesses to contradict his self defense claim”.
Ohhhhh you must mean that military defeated by the Taliban using AK-47s, RPGs and tacticals, right? The same one defeated by the Viet Cong? Your argument is trash.
How's Saudi Arabia doing against those shoeless Houthis (i.e. 8 years later)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
> Democide is the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.
Your examples are NOT US Military trying to kill citizens. And Viet Cong? Really? You are grasping, how about you throw in Civil war references too.
The point is technology has changed the battlefield. Personal firearms mean little - not nothing, but little - on a battlefield with tanks, drones, air superiority that the US has sooo much of compared to any other modern military, including Saudi Arabia.
How is Saudi Arabia doing? I don't know. How about you visit the region, do the tourist thing in complete safety while you might see in the media that the Houthis even exist. I think they're doing fine. Not that I agree with their approach...
But back to the Democide point: If the US Military went insane and wanted to eradicate every other US citizen then they could do so easily.
But the US Military wouldn't. Because a military is made up of humans, with a heart and a conscience and killing their own families and children is not even a thought to contemplate. While "pry my guns from my dead hands" types are happy to continue the status quo...
> Personal firearms mean little - not nothing, but little - on a battlefield with tanks, drones, air superiority that the US has sooo much of compared to any other modern military, including Saudi Arabia.
Nope, this is nonsense abd exactly the point that the examples refute. A poorly equipped army can defeat the US military.
> If we are optimizing against the #1 all time cause of non natural death in the world - Democide - an armed populace does wonders.
This sounds intuitively correct, but I wonder if we have seen any evidence of this. If I think of the Holocaust would have happened if the Jews in Germany had been armed I'm not convinced either way. I can see arguments that it might have prevented it but also that it might have accelerated it, especially if everyone in 1930s Germany had been heavily armed
Do you really think that the US has oppressed its population less than comparably well established European democracies? Given its history of slavery, Jim Crow and mass incarceration? Given the militarisation if its police, the war in drugs and it's all-watching surveillance state? Given
McCarthyism and the Patriot Act? And you're citing COVID?
I am frankly astonished by your claim. It's so obviously wrong.
Edit: I cant reply to your thread. If you compare the rates of two like-minded Australian cities. (To be fair melbourne people pretend to be more cultured)
Queensland was known for its "immediate knee jerk reactions", if you want i can find sources for this.
Melbourne was known for its "reactive stance" if you want i can find sources for this.
Melbournes infection rate and inability to 'follow lock down procedures' was the root cause for their infection rate going through the roof. This further compounded because not following lockdowns created more infections which furthered more lockdowns.
Anyways, you'll take what you want from it.. Most of the links with values that I had have been removed. If I can dig up more I'll relink them here.
It's entirely likely that Australia's Covid rates had nothing to do with any particular action they took. Every Covid success story had exactly one thing in common: they're all in the same area of the globe, on the other side of the planet from Europe (where all the major outbreaks after Wuhan seem to have come from). It's about the only thing they had in common; there were vast differences in culture, political system, measures taken, and so on. Also, the main thing which seemed to determine whether a country or region was known for their "immediate knee jerk reactions" or their "inability to follow lock down procedures" was whether Covid remained under control or not, rather than the actual specific actions they took...
"(To be fair melbourne people pretend to be more cultured)"
As a currently residing Melbournian - I totally agree...
During the statewide lockdowns it was also interesting to see how the infections spread. At one stage Melbourne had near nothing. Then a removalist from NSW comes travelling and you could see the trail of COVID in the following media reports.
Maybe lack of guns meant less resistance to the authoritarian lockdown. But for ALL the people I know, education meant there was noone even wanting to resist.
Everyone knew that one person could wander around and wreck the lives of many completely unintentionally. And lockdown was the only decent tool society had until vaccines happened.
It sucked. For some more than others as you'd expect. Maybe it was because I was less affected, but in the same scenario I'd do it again no question. I'd be grumpy about the situation, but not the response.
Thank you for reading my post at face value, This was not about the 'Melbourne people suck' angle (as clearly Melbourne people do not suck), but the topic of government handling.
It's not a catch all against government, but a tool that equalizes each man for each man. In fact, each individual, shown by these attacks on schools, show how one person can have an outsized effect.
But more to your point -- I'll steal this quote:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If we didn’t love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
Decoders are notoriously harder to support than encoders due to the various internal formats and encoding/decoding options. Until it supports all the different formats (a lot of effort), it will only be able to play back a few videos.
By focusing on an encoder (at least initially) you can just support a subset of features that work well for you. Then focus on making a decoder that can at least play back videos from your encoder.
More people will find it useful to have an encoder that works all the time, rather than a decoder that only works on a subset of videos.
> I get that the most direct way of learning is to make mistakes and learn from those. But there's an easier way too. Read books, talk to people, get the benefit of others experience without needing to make those same mistakes again.
> We don't go about individually discovering why modular design is a good thing, or why at certain scales microservices are a better option. We do the research, talk to others, and figure out that the general consensus is a reasonable one that we can use.
> I think we need to do a better job at explaining why something is a bad idea to junior developers. Learn to see things from their perspective, and communicate in a way that relates to their experience rather than ours.
Not everyone learns the same. Some people may learn significantly faster and/or more effectively if they are allowed to make mistakes - to see/experience the difference. I think this a good approach for simple problems. However, if the problem is highly complex and time consuming, its not as practical as the time cost to redo, as the work is too high. Thats where you do the research and reading. It requires a balance.
When the Liberals privatised the government owned monopoly telco (now called Tesltra), they didn't properly structurally seperate it in the first place. The government, like NZ, could have gotten the wholesale part of Telstra to start upgrading network infrastructure. If they had done it properly the first time, we wouldn't be in this mess.
> The government, like NZ, could have gotten the wholesale part of Telstra to start upgrading network infrastructure.
They couldn't, though, without a lot more difficulty.
You're missing the context that at the time of Rudd's election and the NBN design/build plan, Telstra was actively hostile towards the government. Solomon Trujillo was the CEO at the time, and actively fought against any suggestion that Telstra might be structurally separated (a-la Telecom NZ's split into Chorus and Spark), or be required to build a nationwide wholesale fibre network.
Telstra under Trujillo was the company that famously gave a last minute 13-page (non-compliant) response[1] to a call for bids to build the NBN, that was effectively a giant middle finger to the government.
Forcing a structural separation when the government own a minority stake in the company[2] would've required either re-purchasing it at market rates, or some kind of legislative change, and thus opening the government up to a shareholder lawsuit. At the time, the CAN and Fibre back-haul networks were considered some of Telstra's greatest assets, those would've been some major purchases.
There were a bunch of bad options, but having been backed into this corner by previous government decisions - there wasn't a whole lot they could've done.
You misunderstand, I'm saying that if Telstra were properly separated right from the start (when the Howard government privatised it), the Rudd government could have easily gotten Telstra wholesale to do what Chorus in NZ is doing now. Most of Australia would probably have FTTP by now, or at least FTTN/HFC.
