This is great, and I wish it existed for Reddit too (or maybe it does already?). There’s so much good content that’s a bit hard to find now, plus it would be very interesting to see what people were talking about at a specific point in time.
That last one is impressive, most humans probably wouldn’t pull it off. And just imagine when all the cars on the road are self-driving, probably none of these accidents would’ve happened.
I've been in a self-driving Tesla vehicle. After hours on the interstate, the person ahead of me slammed on their brakes suddenly. I was caught off guard, not expecting it, and may have crashed by not reacting in time. The Tesla braked. So I have anecdotal experience that the person you're asking for an answer isn't well informed on how Tesla's respond to this type of accident.
Of course, anecdotal evidence isn't a very high standard. Thankfully, statistics on this sort of thing are tracked. Statistically, the Tesla self-driving features reduce accidents per mile. They have for years now and as the tech has progressed the reduction has grown as the technology has matured. So statistical evidence also indicates that the person you are asking the question to is also uninformed.
What is probably happening is that it makes for good clickbait to involve Elon and Tesla into discussions. Moreover, successful content online often provokes emotion. The resulting preponderance of negativity, especially about each driving accident Teslas were involved in or caused, probably tricked them into misunderstanding the reality of the Tesla safety record.
> Statistically, the Tesla self-driving features reduce accidents per mile
While that is the claim, I've never seen an independent analysis of the data. There are reasons to believe that Tesla drivers are not average. I don't know if what claims are true, which is why I want independent analysis of the data so that factors I didn't think of can be controlled for.
My Subaru from 2018 can do this. It's not rocket system and most cars nowadays have a collision detection system. This is not a slef-driving capability by any means.
Teslas keep ramming into parked vehicles on the side of the road, including emergency vehicles. So when a waymo car stops because it doesn't know how to safely proceed, the Teslas might just plow into it.
It can have to do with allergies. However, it might be something else if it has recently worsened or become more noticeable. Has it always been the same?
Does the board not have final control? Why have they agreed (in principle) to step down? I wish more of the reporting around this was specific about who has the power to do what.
My understanding is that, fundamentally, the only power the board _has_ is to fire the CEO. The CEO, not wanting to be fired, is therefore incentivized to manage the board's expectations, which looks a lot like being willing to take direction from the board if you squint a bit.
The problem comes when the situations starts to resemble the line about how, if you owe a bank a billion dollars, you own the bank: if the direction the CEO has taken the company differs enough from the vision of the board, and they've had enough time to develop the company in that direction, they can kinda hold the organization hostage. Yes, the company isn't what the board really wanted it to be, but it's still worth a bajillion dollars: completely unwinding it and starting over is unthinkable, but all the options that include firing the CEO (the only real lever the board has, the foundation of all the decision-making weight that they have, remember) end up looking like that.
If you really believe in the ideology and believe that the continuation of openai is dangerous--shutting down the company completely should be an option you consider
Oh, absolutely, although you'd have to consider what happens to the tech and the people who developed it: it may be better to have the out-of-control genie at least nominally under your control than not.
My guess is it’s hard to say exactly who has the power and where the power comes from. I bet Sam and his side don’t have any direct power, but their power in the negotiation comes from other sources, like the ability of more Sam loyalists to resign, and Microsoft legal threats which don’t have to be legitimate to be effective since they have such powerful lawyers. So on paper the board has all the power, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to the real world.
Power is a fuzzy thing. You can think about power as being distributed across lots of different entities (the board, CEO, senior execs, investors, rank and file employees, etc) with some having more concentrated power (eg the board) than others (eg individual employees). However, if you create a situation (eg lots of employees decide to walk out in support of the ousted CEO) that can aggregate enough power to overcome any other single entity. That seems to be what is happening here.
It does not matter that the board has the legal power to do whatever they want eg fire the CEO. If the investors and key employees that keep the company going walk away, they end up with nothing so they might as well resign and preserve the organization rather than burn the whole thing down.
Honest question, is there any evidence that Republican politicians are more effective at fighting crime? Or are you just saying that’s the public’s perception?
Democrat politicians sometimes bend over backwards to make themselves seem ineffective at fighting crime or sympathetic to criminals, while Republicans rarely if ever do. Prosecutors are sometimes an elected position, so it is plausibly relevant.
We need to do better than prison for drug addiction and delusional mental illness. Need to make a statewide facility to provide tented area for drug addicts to be removed from cities and suburbs. They can leave the facility after they have recovered from drug addiction or severe delusional mental illness.
> We need to do better than prison for drug addiction and delusional mental illness. Need to make a statewide facility to provide tented area for drug addicts to be removed from cities and suburbs.
That’s exactly like a prison, but probably with unconstitutionally poor conditions by design, not better than a prison, and probably unconstitutional mechanisms for sending people into them as well.
Better than prison (demonstrated, repeatedly) for dealing with addiction and related crime is funding community treatment for substance use disorders, with studies consistently showing both crime reductions and criminal justice cost savings of several multiples of the marginal funding devoted to drug treatment.
But “tough on crime” via greater criminalization makes an easier political soundbite, even if its manifestly worse at actually dealing with crime.
typically they're asking to actually lock people up with high cash bails and non lenient sentences. keeping the criminals off the streets does work even if the bycatch injustice can be intolerable.
> keeping the criminals off the streets does work [citation needed]
One of the primary features of incarceration is that the crime has already been committed. A person is described as a criminal because they've already committed a crime, not because they are likely to do so again in the future.
Yes, jailing folks for doing crimes is likely to keep them from committing crimes out on the streets, and also to intimidate would-be criminals from committing crimes lest they are imprisoned for them. But if you keep imprisoning every kind of criminal, you're just creating job openings for more criminals out there, and plenty of folks willing to fill those voids. You've also got all the problems with prisons bursting at the seams. I don't believe that mass incarceration is really beneficial, overall, for the morale of a populace. You wind up with ugly stuff like organized crime and drug cartels operating with impunity from behind bars, too: great recruiting grounds.
Note Kamala Harris was a prosecutor. Joe Biden started his 2020 campaign at a firehouse in Pennsylvania so he's definitely a champion of first responders who has said he would "refund the police."
If the crime is something like wage-theft (were businesses don't pay workers for hours worked) or attempting to overthrow the government, then no, but if the crime is feeding the homeless or seeking an abortion after being raped, then yes.
IMHO not only that, there is even historical precedent of what is unfolding before our eyes.
The mechanics:
1) while states (or countries) may differ in what they call a crime and in how they decide upon codifying it, how to police crime is almost always decided on the local level.
2) An overwhelming number of cities is run by democrats (or left-of-center parties in western countries)
3) often on such a long timescale that the GOP (or right-of-center parties) has significantly scaled down operations or even stopped nominating candidates altogether. NYC and CA come to mind.
4) While the right certainly has its weak-spots with its clerics (say, smearing some government responsibilities as „socialist“ while a sane mind could call them conservative as well or … just sane) the left certainly has issues with their clerics. Specifically in this case: smearing enforcing the law as racist (while a sane mind would call public safety a social welfare which disproportionately benefits the poorest).
The historical precedent:
It was the American city which, ruled by democrats for decades, became synonymous with crime in culture, evidenced by countless songs, TV-series and movies (or anti-american propaganda by the soviets) of the 1970s and 1980s).
Crime became so unbearable, American city dwellers started voting another party for the first time in decades (NYC and LA come to mind), spawning a political shift into other western countries as well (London, Milan, Marseille, Hamburg, Frankfurt etc).
The “racist” smearing happened back then (in the US it was search and frisk ridiculed as racist despite most performing officers being of the same ethnicity; in Europe its people like Scholz with “racist” skeletons in their closet from their days in local government).
But unlike racism what actually did happen was that people felt safe enough that they moved back into cities effectively ending decades of urban sprawl and starting the great renaissance of urban centers.
And I want to point out that voting GOP (or conservative in other countries) nationally wont fix crime locally. Rather treating our civic duties to actually engage in local elections.
Urban voters, while often overarching on (inter-) national democracy issues are making a mockery of their own governance standards locally when the mayorship effectively gets decided by whom the democrats (SF, PS, SPD, SPÖ, Labour, …) nominate.
I've lived here for years and years; a year long dent isn't something that would change a lot of things, even if it is a pleasant and agreeable trend.
For a greater picture check out unemployment, unfilled municipal employment, homelessness. For extra credit check out the ever increasing number of citations for squatting and trespassing.
Yes, Uber drivers are constantly canceling rides or just sitting in one spot until I’m forced to cancel myself and then dispute the charge. Thankfully Lyft still exists, I’ve switched to them and haven’t looked back. I can get to where I need to go much faster and more reliably, at roughly the same price or often less.
I don’t have access to the full paper, but I would expect that they at least tried to control for sun exposure.
In general, if you can think of an obvious confounding factor in about five seconds, then it’s a safe assumption that professional researchers thought of it too.
Or, at least, a safer assumption: it's worth checking to see what they said about it before publicly speculating.
And indeed, it seems they did survey for sun exposure and include it in their analysis, and they caveat a lot of their references to other work in their introduction noting where other studies didn't.
Ok but they tried to control for sun exposure just by asking how much sun exposure have you gotten in your life? A little or a lot (paraphrasing)?
The issue with this is that the amount of vitamin D someone might take is correlated with how much sun exposure is available. And the amount of available sun exposure can impact what is considered a little / a lot to each person.
> The issue with this is that the amount of vitamin D someone might take is correlated with how much sun exposure is available. And the amount of available sun exposure can impact what is considered a little / a lot to each person.
That could be case but not necessarily in this study.
I'm pretty sure XKCD created a name for this, if no-one is replying, give a horribly wrong solution to nerd snipe someone to put the time in to giving a correct solution.
> In general, if you can think of an obvious confounding factor in about five seconds, then it’s a safe assumption that professional researchers thought of it too.
I work in academic medicine. I read a lot of papers. This is not at all a given in my experience, except maybe in the tippy top journals (Nature, NEJM). When in doubt, read the paper, see if they mention the confounder you thought of.
It turns out that there was also a similar non-disclosed drop in non-Covid-related mortality. Either we discovered a magic elixir, or the entire effect is probably just confounding.
The original authors even say in their response that
> However, boosters were generally not administered to hospitalized patients who were at high risk for death from any cause.
They never even attempted to control for it.
Edit: at least NEJM accepts letters to the editor about the crap it publishes.
They probably have, but that doesn’t mean they have the necessary data to actually address the confounds. Often there is a trade off between what is most provable and what is most novel. Publishing incentives being what they are, novel invariably wins.
The study is based on a couple hundred people in a city in Finland, they could at least have tried to collect data on people closer to the tropics to hedge a bit. I doubt this has any validity ignoring such a basic confounding factor like living in a place that does have a lot of sun exposure.
Keep in mind that people from Finland are more likely to have skin that makes them particularly vulnerable to Melanoma.
A loved one is fighting this right now - if something simple like supplements, dietary practices or drug development could reduce the risk, it could potentially prevent alot of suffering. Even if it doesn’t work, perhaps it’s a line of inquiry with some value.
They could at least try to include white people in places where there is more sunlight, both my mom and my wife are white (my mom would likely be at home at a Nordic country, her family is full of redheads) and they both developed melanoma in northeastern Brazil, albeit they were found out quickly and did not cause much trouble.
Not even trying to consider the confounding variables is really sad.
Honestly I’m don’t feel qualified to evaluate the study.
It attracted my attention because the risk factors for melanoma are different than other skin cancers. A smaller number of severe sunburn incidents is correlated with melanoma while
ongoing exposure to more moderate sunlight drives other cancers. We already know that the palest skin types (ie your redhead relatives, etc) are at higher risk than even slighter less pale people.
I hope there’s more research and we learn more about ways to help bend the risk curve.
Accounting for confounders is hard. Otherwise randomised controlled studies wouldn't be needed, and we'd not have taken this long to walk back the consensus that red meat causes cancer.
