hacker culture =/= martyr culture. I fundamentally disagree with the central premise of your entire perspective.
Society is not entitled to value. If you have the skills to create value for others, then you will inevitably have to use capital to actually scale it. In the process, through voluntary transactions, that enterprise might profit and grow - creating more value for others in the process. The question is really: who profits? I think your perspective is exceedingly misplaced in that, by necessity, it intrinsically hands control of each new innovation to said MBA-types. If a society drafts policies that make it extremely difficult to take control of your own innovation and scale it according to your own wishes, then you are implicitly leaving that work to others who (more often than not) will not share your philosophies. If a society wants to enact policies that make it difficult for a person to take ownership over their own innovations, then they should not be shocked when it becomes extremely difficult to appeal to innovators in the first place. Instead of realizing that the commentor wants to take command of the destiny of their innovations, you go down this peculiar moralizing argument that's orthogonal to their entire point. How do you know they haven't created more value for society than you have, and why are you so comfortable demanding the nature of that value creation happen on your terms?
Also, this forum is managed by a VC firm. They explicitly support people taking charge of their own creations and scaling that to society. People are allowed to ask if a society has created legitimate bottlenecks to accomplishing that.
With respect, I find your perspective hard to believe because I don't buy that you would not yourself call that very same number if something truly drastic happened to you. I have a difficult time believing any detractors of 911, for that matter, would truly actually abide by that standard.
Implying first responders are thugs irks me too, I'm unsure if you've considered the true proportion of cases they respond to that are time sensitive (during which, information parity is low). You could, of course, assert that this means they ought to not respond in the first place - but I think you would find there are a wide range of scenarios that strictly require a rapid and forceful response due to the potential for many victims to be involved (bolstered by gun ownership) with little time to actually validate the circumstances without incurring casualties.
Accidents are unacceptable but our world is complicated and sometimes requires we meet lack of information with immediate action. That is not to say accidents are permissible, but the men putting their lives in harms way to respond to these incidents don't actually know what's occurring either.
You seem to be fairly opinionated about what the system should or should not do, what have you personally done to help improve the conversion ratio between false calls and accidents? I understand this is theoretically ad hominem but I'm personally using it as a heuristic as to the likelihood that your perspective is a luxury belief. We agree that close calls should not be that close, but it's not very different from shaking your fist at the sky unless you actually happen to work in this space (in which case I'm actually very interested in hearing your thoughts). I don't mean to be rude, I'm just being blunt because I believe you're washing over some extremely difficult problems and have little to bring to the table - which is by definition unproductive.
Local swat teams should not be a thing. They're the human resources equivilent of extraneous MRAPs.
The idea that we dispatch a bunch of thugs larping as infantry (because let's be real that's what swat teams are) based on a single piece of un-corroborated intelligence from a source of unknown quality (i.e. no preexisting reason to believe they're legit) would not pass muster in any situation with "real stakes" therefore it's not ok for local police departments to act that way. There needs to be some check.
Swat teams weren't even a common thing until the 80s. Society isn't gonna collapse without them. And their response times aren't that great anyway. Send a normal officer. Any situation demanding a real swat team probably needs to be triaged anyway.
> With respect, I find your perspective hard to believe because I don't buy that you would not yourself call that very same number if something truly drastic happened to you. I have a difficult time believing any detractors of 911, for that matter, would truly actually abide by that standard.
I don't know if I would dare call the police, for any reason. Inviting poorly-trained, on-edge, armed brutes into your home who have legal immunity from anything they do, who do not have to justify escalation to violence, are not held accountable for inappropriate escalation... I don't know if I like the odds. I might just roll the dice with the home invader and hope he just wants my TV.
As someone deeply involved in local politics and in close touch with a large number of neighbors across one of the bluest, police-skeptical municipalities in the United States: this is a message board trope. Everybody expects to be able to call the police. You might, if someone is being their best self, get some hesitation before a call about someone playing at the park who doesn't look like they belong there. Someone trying car doors? 911. You'd be excoriated for seeing something like that and not calling.
This is just not a real thing, this idea that normal people will never call the police under any circumstances. It's even less the case as you go into majority-black neighborhoods, where one of their big complaints is that the police don't come when they call, only when they're walking down the street. They're being actively victimized police, and they're still upset that it's not easier to summon them.
People claiming on HN they won't call the cops might be all talk, I can't possibly know, but if you don't know anyone who won't call the police, you don't know people low on the socioeconomic ladder. And that's fine, there's no shame in that. But people who are frequent harassed by police - yeah, they don't call the police.
Ask a homeless person how they're treated by police and whether they would call 911.
Yes, I do. Not only that, but those people organize and write position statements, and those statements are: "we can't get the police to come fast enough when we call".
If I have to go all the way to "unhoused person" on the SES spectrum to see the evidence for your argument, I'll consider my point made.
Consider that the people who feel most disenfranchised might not be coming to the meetings and such you're drawing from.
I don't really understand your second statement, it would only make sense to me if you didn't consider the homeless to exist as people. But I take the impression that you don't feel that way. So I don't really see why you feel you can discard them and conclude not calling the police is a "message board phenomenon" rather than a "very low on the ladder" phenomenon.
I've met people offline who tell me they don't call the police in a way I find credible, I don't know what else to tell you. I suppose the reason I responded to your comment was because it felt like a "message board phenomenon" to me, it didn't match my experience interacting with people offline.
Speaking of message board tropes: <screeches in samplin bias>
You're not hearing about all the cases where people didn't call the police. You're doubly so not hearing about all the cases where somebody pulled a gun on a package thief (or whatever) because the kind of people who are not calling the police know very well that there's nothing the police hate more than peasants DIYing what they think is their job.
>Everybody expects to be able to call the police. You might, if someone is being their best self, get some hesitation before a call about someone playing at the park who doesn't look like they belong there. Someone trying car doors? 911. You'd be excoriated for seeing something like that and not calling.
Thank god I do not live in your municipality. Sounds like the most unholy fermented cesspit of Karens.
Nobody calls the cops on such trivial "I have no problems so I'll create some out of thin air" problems as "a man in the park who doesn't look right". People have better crap to be doing. I don't even live somewhere particularly poor either.
Last time I saw a guy trying car doors I said "Hey, leave my car alone. Get the fuck out of here!" and he immediately left the area. This seems identical to the best result the police could of provided and probably was much quicker.
Probably, but this is what he does after the police talk to him as well.
And really, we want it this way, because the alternative is that the police rough him up or arrest him on basically random hearsay.
The only other thing the police could do is connect multiple calls to one area and increase the presence of random cruisers there for a while in which case the perp will just move to an entirely different area.
This same result can be achieved if each of those concerned citizen callers simply approached the guy and said "Hey, get the fuck out of here!"
Some level of policing is probably necessary for crimes more serious than car-prowling but at a certain point we need to accept what we can and can't change about the world and try to implement policies that reduce the overall societal harm.
I think we could probably save a lot of police resources by adopting a societal focus on civil interpersonal conflict resolution and working to build a society where fewer and fewer individuals consider car-prowling to be a reasonable pursuit.
At this point this is just a "no true Scotsman." Any counterexample you're offered, you decide doesn't count. I don't know why you're entrenched in this position, but I don't think you're willing to engage with it in a manner compatible with curious conversation. I think you're personally invested in this community and it's guidelines, so I think that's something worth pointing out to you.
That's pretty weak tea. A retort, not a rebuttal. Since you aren't interested in engaging with the substance of my comment, I'll not engage any further with yours.
I mostly agree with this, and also think the "magic telephone number" is a very message-boardy kind of argument, sort of like when software developers are aghast at the idea that the criminal justice system adjudicates "intent" ("you can't read people's minds!"). I think outside of message boards, people generally do want a phone number they can call during an armed robbery.
I really appreciate your explanation regarding the crud factor. It adds a lot of intuition.
Out of curiosity, what is your perspective on gnotobiotic systems? I distinctly recall an example of a gnotobiotic mouse that, upon being provided a microbial sample from an obese mouse, started to have substantial increases in body fat despite a simultaneous reduction in feed. Would that type of experimental approach still run into the statistical difficulties you mentioned?
On a completely unrelated note, how often are you invited to parties?