The issue is there's an asymmetry between buyer/seller for books, because a buyer doesn't know the contents until you buy the book. Reviews can help, but not if the reviews are fake/AI generated. In this case, these books are profitable if only a few people buy them as the marginal cost of creating such a book is close to zero.
This is starting to get pretty circular. The AI was trained on copyrighted data, so we can make a hypothesis that it would not exist - or would exist in a diminished state - without the copyright infringement. Now, the AI is being used to flood AI bookstores with cheaply produced books, many of which are bad, but are still competing against human authors.
The benefits are not clear: why should an "author" who doesn't want to bother writing a book of their own get to steal the words of people who aren't lazy slackers?
It's as much stealing as piracy is stealing, ie none at all. If you disagree, you and I (along with probably many others in this thread) have a fundamental axiomatic incompatibility that no amount of discussion can resolve.
Stealing is not the right word perhaps, but it is bad, and this should be obvious. Because if you take the limit of these arguments as they approach infinity, it all falls apart.
For piracy, take switch games. Okay, pirating Mario isn't stealing. Suppose everyone pirates Mario. Then there's no reason to buy Mario. Then Nintendo files bankruptcy. Then some people go hungry, maybe a few die. Then you don't have a switch anymore. Then there's no more Mario games left to pirate.
If something is OK if only very, very few people do it, then it's probably not good at all. Everyone recycling? Good! Everyone reducing their beef consumption? Good! ... everyone pirating...? Society collapses and we all die, and I'm only being a tad hyperbolic.
In a vacuum making an AI book is whatever. In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences. I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough.
> Because if you take the limit of these arguments as they approach infinity, it all falls apart.
Not everyone is a Kantian, who has the moral philsophy you are talking about, the categorical imperative. See this [0] for a list of criticisms to said philosophy.
> In a vacuum making an AI book is whatever. In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences. I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough.
Not really a valid argument, again it's circular in reasoning with a lot of empty claims with no actual reasoning, why exactly is it bad? Just saying "you haven't thought long enough and creatively enough" does not cut it in any serious discussion, the burden of substantiating your own claim is on you, not the reader, because (to take your own Kantian argument) anyone you've debating could simply terminate the conversation by accusing you of not thinking about the problem deep enough, meaning that no one actually learns anything at all when everyone is shifting the burden of proof to everyone else.
> Stealing is not the right word perhaps, but it is bad, and this should be obvious.
Many people say things that they don't like "should be obvious"ly bad. If you can't say why, that's almost always because it actually isn't.
Have a look at almost any human rights push for examples.
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> For piracy, take switch games.
It's a bad metaphor.
With piracy, someone is taking a thing that was on the market for money, and using it without paying for it. They are selling something that belongs to other people. The creator loses potential income.
Here, nobody is actually doing that. The correct metaphor is a library. A creator is going and using content to learn to do other creation, then creating and selling novel things. The original creators aren't out money at all.
Every time this has gone to court, the courts have calmly explained that for this to be theft, first something has to get stolen.
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> If something is OK if only very, very few people do it
This is okay no matter how many people do it.
The reason that people feel the need to set up these complex explanatory metaphors based on "well under these circumstances" is that they can't give a straight answer what's bad here. Just talk about who actually gets harmed, in clear unambiguous detail.
Watch how easy it is with real crimes.
Murder is bad because someone dies without wanting to.
Burglary is bad because objects someone owns are taken, because someone loses home safety, and because there's a risk of violence
Fraud is bad because someone gets cheated after being lied to.
Then you try that here. AI is bad because some rich people I don't like got a bunch of content together and trained a piece of software to make new content and even though nobody is having anything taken away from them it's theft, and even though nobody's IP is being abused it's copyright infringement, and even though nobody's losing any money or opportunities this is bad somehow and that should be obvious, and ignore the 60 million people who can now be artists because I saw this guy on twitter who yelled a lot
Like. Be serious
This has been through international courts almost 200 times at this point. This has been through American courts more than 70 times, but we're also bound by all the rest thanks to the Berne conventions.
Every. Single. Court. Case. Has. Said. This. Is. Fine. In. Every. Single. Country.
Zero exceptions. On the entire planet for five years and counting, every single court has said "well no, this is explicitly fine."
Matthew Butterick, the lawyer that got a bunch of Hollywood people led by Sarah Silverman to try to sue over this? The judge didn't just throw out his lawsuit. He threatened to end Butterick's career for lying to the celebrities.
That's the position you're taking right now.
We've had these laws in place since the 1700s, thanks to collage. They've been hard ratified in the United States for 150 years thanks to libraries.
This is just silly. "Recycling is good and eating other things is good, but let's try piracy, and by the way, I'm just sort of asserting this, there's nothing to support any of this."
For the record, the courts have been clear: there is no piracy occurring here. Piracy would be if Meta gave you the book collection.
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> In the context of humanity and pushing this to it's limits, we can't even begin to comprehend the consequences.
That's nice. This same non-statement is used to push back against medicine, gender theory, nuclear power, yadda yadda.
The human race is not going to stop doing things because you choose to declare it incomprehensible.
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> I'm talking crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams.
Yeah, we're actually discussing Midjourney, here.
You can't put a description to any of these crimes against humanity. This is just melodrama.
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> If you don't know what I'm talking about,
I don't, and neither do you.
"I'm talking really big stuff! If you don't know what it is, you didn't think hard enough."
Yeah, sure. Can you give even one credible example of Midjourney committing, and I quote, "crimes against humanity beyond your wildest dreams?"
Like. You're seriously trying to say that a picture making robot is about to get dragged in front of the Hague?
Sometimes I wonder if anti-AI people even realize how silly they sound to others
Modules sound cool for compile time, but do they prevent duplicative template instantiations? Because that's the real performance killer in my experience.
(It's a great post in general. N.B. that it's also quite old and export templates have been removed from the standard for quite some time after compiler writers refused to implement them.)
TL;DR: Declare your templates in a header, implement them in a source file, and explicitly instantiate them inside that same source file for every type that you want to be able to use them with. You lose expressiveness but gain compilation speed because the template is guaranteed to be compiled exactly once for each instantiation.
Which is to say, "extern template" is a thing that exists, that works, and can be used to do what you want to do in many cases.
The "export template" feature was removed from the language because only one implementer (EDG) managed to implement them, and in the process discovered that a) this one feature was responsible for all of their schedule misses, b) the feature was far too annoying to actually implement, and c) when actually implemented, it didn't actually solve any of the problems. In short, when they were asked for advice on implementing export, all the engineers unanimously replied: "don't". (See https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2003/n14... for more details).
1. You gain the ability to use the compilation unit's anonymous namespace instead of a detail namespace, so there is better encapsulation of implementation details. The post author stresses this as the actual benefit of export templates, rather than compile times.
2. You lose the ability to instantiate the template for arbitrary types, so this is probably a no-go for libraries.
3. Your template is guaranteed to be compiled exactly once for each explicit instantiation. (Which was never actually guaranteed for real export templates).
> He was consistent and clear when he talked about his identity in California courtrooms as he tried to fight the charges on the grounds that he really was the man whose name he was accused of stealing. But Mr. Woods made other remarks that seemed to amplify the doubts. In court appearances, transcripts show, he would sometimes interrupt the judge, talk about historical figures or assert that he had tried to warn the F.B.I. in advance of the Sept. 11 attacks.
I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
I was once dragged to a hospital by police because they were looking for a drug smuggler that was not me. They told hospital staff I was a druggie criminal with drugs up my ass, as I sat there in cuffs.
It is incredibly hard to overcome such accusation by someone in authority. Nurses cursed me, touched me without consent, and several doctors examined me. They ultimately found nothing, and noted no intoxication, but noted in my medical record that they think i am a smuggler anyway, with no explanation as to why.
I am now in medical debt for a non-existent 'overdose' bill that notes no intoxication...
I imagine as soon as some official person insists the identity isn't yours, just as multiple doctors wouldn't believe despite all evidence to contrary, they won't believe you.
Something similar happened to one of our sons. Unfortunately he has a history of drug use that landed him in legal trouble. The local police recognize him. He had a minor fender bender. The police tested him for alcohol there, clean. But then given history they detained him and took him to the nearest ER for a battery of drug tests -- for which the hospital billed our son, and for which our son is on the hook. It's bonkers.
> After being chased by police for stealing clothing from a Walmart, Seacat barricaded himself in a house at 4219 South Alton Street in Greenwood Village, Colorado. By the time Seacat was finally extracted from the premises, the house had been destroyed by law enforcement in their efforts to flush him out. The homeowner—Leo Lech—filed a lawsuit against the municipality for compensation, but was ruled against by the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit; he appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, but the court declined to hear the case.
The same wiki article also describes the absurdness of the whole thing:
> At 10:38 pm, SWAT entered the house and used a stun grenade to conceal their movements [...] During the next 10.2 hours, a Lenco BearCat was driven through the front door, tear gas[1] and 40 mm grenades were repeatedly launched inside, shots were fired upon the house, and explosives were detonated to destroy several exterior walls.
Just amazing multiple people (the authorities) were present and none of them stopped to think "gee, that house is somebody's home".
That's a different situation, because at least there it could be argued the damage was ultimately Seacat's fault for engaging in a shoot out with law enforcement on someone else's private property; the police were just doing their job apprehending an armed suspect. With a drug test that comes back negative, the person being tested clearly isn't at fault.
That said, I think it does probably make sense for there to be some sort of financial incentive for police to not create more collateral damage than necessary. Like maybe the damages should come out of the department budget initially and then they could get a judge to decide how much of that was the suspect's fault and recover that amount from them, assuming they can pay? Policing is a social service and I don't think externalizing the costs of social services onto innocent bystanders is a good idea; it makes the agency less accountable for the monetary costs they incur if those costs aren't tracked as part of their budget, and it's bad PR.
> At 10:38 pm, SWAT entered the house and used a stun grenade to conceal their movements, but were driven back outside by gunshots (though criminalists would later establish that they were not fired upon). During the next 10.2 hours, a Lenco BearCat was driven through the front door, tear gas and 40 mm grenades were repeatedly launched inside, shots were fired upon the house, and explosives were detonated to destroy several exterior walls.
Whether or not police have any imperative to consider the impact of their actions, this situation was clear incompetence and reckless destruction. They're just as much doing their job by forcing drug tests on random people. The person may not have been on drugs, but all police would have to do is say they saw "erratic behavior".
> Like maybe the damages should come out of the department budget initially and then they could get a judge to decide how much of that was the suspect's fault and recover that amount from them, assuming they can pay?
This is just a different bad incentive; it incentivizes police to completely ignore situations or to find someone to hold accountable. Just extend the logic to the other expenses of an investigation- hourly pay, overtime, materials, forensics. Making a criminal pay for their own arrest is a terrible idea.
Police should pay for all the drug tests they demand, and for all the damages incurred in the process of investigating or arresting a suspect. Those things are not related to the crime itself, like a fine is. They are part of the cost of investigation and operation.
> This is just a different bad incentive; it incentivizes police to completely ignore situations
If the societal cost of enforcement exceeds the societal cost of non-enforcement, then perhaps they should ignore the situation.
> or to find someone to hold accountable
This is why it would have to be decided by a judge as part of sentencing. If they're actually accountable then why shouldn't they be held to that?
> Just extend the logic to the other expenses of an investigation- hourly pay, overtime, materials, forensics. Making a criminal pay for their own arrest is a terrible idea.
I don't necessarily disagree, but just to play devil's advocate: why? It's their fault the public had to spend money on this, so why shouldn't they pay for it? (One argument I can think of is that for small crimes the cost of enforcement may greatly exceed the bounds of reasonable punishment for the offense, but what about when that's not the case?)
> Those things are not related to the crime itself
I'd argue exchanging gunfire with police is definitely a big part of the crime committed in this case. The shoplifting that started the encounter is practically irrelevant compared to that.
Broadly agree with you and would like to add that if in this particular case the department had expected to foot the bill for their destruction I imagine they would have readily found a slower but cheaper approach. They went with the fast, expedient, and above all exciting (for them) approach precisely because they knew they wouldn't be the ones paying for the aftermath.
> It's their fault the public had to spend money on this, so why shouldn't they pay for it?
How about transparency and uniform enforcement of the law? Fines should be formally codified, not implicit and variable depending on incidentals internal to that particular investigation. The legislature is always free to direct those proceeds wherever they would like.
> > or to find someone to hold accountable
> This is why it would have to be decided by a judge as part of sentencing. If they're actually accountable then why shouldn't they be held to that?
I am more insinuating that it will lead to much more falsified evidence- something that is already a problem even while completely shielding them from consequences.
> why? It's their fault the public had to spend money on this, so why shouldn't they pay for it?
Because that isn't really accountability, practically speaking. The department funding is very distantly coupled to personal impact. When a division of a company does badly, they don't cut its funding as a form of incentive or punishment. Individual performance is done through the system of management and personal incentive. You don't want to fund the police based on how many crimes they solve- you do it based on how much crime exists. Likewise you shouldn't cut funding for bad policing- it's something that can also just be actively managed instead of simplified to a budgetary concern.
Are you actually legally on the hook to pay? Or are they just going after you because they think they have a better chance of getting you to pay than the government?
I'm assuming you and the son of the other commenter are US citizens? Quite frankly the way the US operated on most things absolutely baffles me. In the UK were the same thing to happen to you the police would be paying the bill, but obviously we have the NHS so it actually pays. The NHS might be broken but I am thankful every time I hear an American health story!
Well, the NHS might be better than what the US has, but that doesn't mean it's good.
So Britain as a whole spends roughly half (in terms of percentage of GDP) on healthcare as the US. That includes both public and private expenditure. At similar health outcomes.
Now Singapore spends roughly half of what Britain spends (in terms of percentage of GDP), and our population is no worse off for it.
You need to look at PPP-adjusted per-capita stats, and also accept that there are limitations in a simple measure of "health outcomes" (e.g. average life expectancy)
What you can see though, is a cluster that vaguely fits "spend more, better life expectancy", with two outliers:
1. The USA, massively outspending every other country, but having same life expectancy as China spending a tenth of what it does
2. South Africa, spending roughly as much as Mexico or Columbia, but 10 years less life expectancy. I suspect it needs more targeted spending with its HIV crisis, rather than measuring average spend vs average life expectancy
Another thing to consider about South Africa is that wealth inequality is insanely high; it seems very plausible to me that most money is spent on like the rich 30% of population, and the majority of the country is basically on Namibian levels of care.
Public healthcare expenditure is also likely to be wasteful; governmental corruption and languishing infrastructure is a comparatively big problem there (compare power infrastructure, rail network, postal service), so the pure dollar value spent on healthcare is systematically off.
Thanks for the link btw-- I would not have expected such a clear trend in this, especially given how noisy metrics like life expectancy are; very interesting.
You can also get cheap dental and haircuts in Mexico: what's Singapore's purchasing power parity compared to the UK? Maybe not an extreme difference since Singapore has has such a high GDP or even worse, but if it is more that can explain a lot even for advanced services.
Purchasing power parity depends a lot on what basket you compare.
Eg owning a car or cigarettes are very expensive here. But eating out starts much cheaper than in the UK. (There's no upper limit in either place, of course.)
The GDP per capita in Singapore is roughly double that of the UK, so health spending per capita is similar. I cant find latest figures, but it seems it is somewhere around 20% higher spend in UK.
On the other hand, there are EU countries such as lithuania and estonia, that spend less than half per capita of Singapore, and are ranked with a higher healthcare index.
Depends on how you measure. Lots of health spending is labour costs, and our labour costs are higher. So percentage of GDP relatively closely tracks percentage of total working time.
Also perhaps our more enlightened policies are helping us achieve that higher per capita GDP?
> Also perhaps our more enlightened policies are helping us achieve that higher per capita GDP?
Singapore’s GDP per-capita is likely fairly inflated as it doesn’t correct for the effect of multinational tax planning by large corporations on the GDP statistics , unlike say Ireland.
Well, im not measuring anything. Im just saying that the spend per capita is mostly equivalent for Singapore and UK.
No idea why you are equating enlightenment to per-capita GDP. I don’t quite understand that equation. Singapore may have a high per capita GDP, but that isn't resulting in a higher median individual incomes. Given the extremely high cost of living, the purchasing power of an average Singaporean is actually comparable to that of someone in the less affluent EU countries that have 1/4 of the GDP per capita and equivalent (or better!) healthcare. So while the GDP figure looks impressive, it doesn’t fully reflect the financial reality for most residents. Is that your "enlightened policies" at work?
Hmm...there are other countries on that list...who spend more relative to their GDP. So not exactly "the world's ATM".
And of course the rest of the world finances the US economy and US debt by virtue of the US dollar being both the currency of international trade and reserve currency. And it is reserve currency by virtue of being the currency of international trade.
That is a far, far greater monetary value than the aid given out.
Which you can also tell by what happens to you if you start to use another currency for trade. "Would you like some regime change to go with that?" Or how the US fights the Euro tooth and nail, including sabotage.
There must be a whole bootleg health system by now in the shadows , that is single payer and non-hostile/helping. Wait till the debtdoctor passes then go to the real one in some back alley .
This is why we need constitutional amendments to make the police better. I mean there’s shit like this, and then asset forfeiture (legalized theft). Shit like this should be non-partisan.
>I'm surprised the police doesn't have to pay for them. It's not that the tests were medically necessary.
If only it were so simple. Medicine can be quite nasty politically at times, internally and externally, and these mandatory examinations are the currency of really screwing someone if that's what you want. Psych especially, part of the theme of the original catch-22 book.
A lot of the laws are at first pass related to psych - "harm to self or others". That earns you a free non-voluntary trip to the hospital. The part where it gets nasty is when words get twisted, when ulterior motives exist, when the accuser possesses some authority - such that an "unsafe to self or others" argument is put forth. Situations where the person needs help, but perhaps won't seek it out on their own, thus the state must intervene. In this narrative, our police officers said, "harm to self, drugs in digestive tract, may rupture and cause death, not willing to seek medical care for fear of losing drug transport and/or prosecution, please treat so they don't rupture"
The victim of such a crime now has a choice - pay a bunch of money to the hospital to clear the bill, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to get the police to pony up responsibility. It's happened to me too along the lines of "the government made big mistake and caused problems for you, you can take ownership of the false accusations, or pay a bunch of money to a lawyer to have them wiped". Often in our society there's the suffering of being a victim, then the victim tax on top of that
I read the piece on your blog viewing your life story from various perspectives. This story about your son seems a good example of those facets for him; in this case, the hospital situation piling on top of existing challenges. What a scam. Best of luck to both of you.
One day I got a call at work from my (now previous) partner. "What's up?" "You need to come home, we need to talk."
I duly do.
"So I went to the doctor earlier today. Had an issue. They swabbed me and told me I have an STD. So they did a full STD and blood test, we'll see how that goes. In the meantime, who did you cheat on me with?"
"Uh, nobody."
Back and forth, arguing, etc. Me insisting I'll go get tested.
The doctor rings back the next day. "We reviewed and looked again under the scope, and you do not have an STD, just a yeast infection."
Relationship relief.
A month later, get a call from the clinic: "So about this bill for $290 for a full workup and testing, can you pay that today?"
No. Not a chance. You not only misread a test, but you also gave my girlfriend factually inaccurate information that you knew was going to be controversial. On the strength of that, you told her, "If it wasn't you, you really need to get fully tested if you don't know where he's been."
And then you want to send me the bill for the battery of tests you ordered because you misread a culture? No.
Doesn't matter. It's not like they can make you pay.
I refused to pay for medical "services" I never asked for. They sent the debt to collections. Collections had no argument other than that they would really like it if I paid. My credit score was unaffected.
This is what confuses me about so many of these "horror stories" about cancelling things like gym memberships or NYT subscriptions. You can't just say to someone "you owe me X because my policy says you do". You only owe someone something if you are legally or morally obliged to do so, and there are certainly lots of cases where (it seems to me) you are neither.
That's despicable. What a clearly grotesque thing for a cop to be able to do, forcing people to involuntarily spend their own money to accomplish police business. If they want the tests, the least they should do is pay for them!
It's pretty bizarre. Surely if spending money is free speech as per Citizens United, then the right to remain silent also includes the right not to spend money on an investigation against yourself.
Apart from all the other common sense reasons why this is absurd
Ah, but you not only have the right to remain silent- since a 2013 supreme Court ruling, you also have to know that you have the right to remain silent, and you have to say that you know and that you wish to remain silent.
>In a 5-4 decision the Supreme Court ruled today that a potential defendant's silence can be used against him if he is being interviewed by police but is not arrested (and read his Miranda rights) and has not verbally invoked the protection of the Fifth Amendment.
Yes see Ashley Cervantes v US, nearly identical case to my circumstances and same people but even worse abuse. She lost as doctors were considered acting as non medical pseudo police for the purposes of challenging the care and considered purely medical actors when challenging the police search.
Catch 22 you lose. She was sent bill by same hospital. I contacted her lawyers for my own purposes, they said they'd given up these cases.
The result wasn't what you're describing. The plaintiff was suing in federal court, with a constitutional cause of action. The defendants argued, and the court decided that the plaintiff has a medical malpractice cause of action in state court, which is appropriate for her to pursue (at least before a federal court will rule in her favor).
What are the actual legal theories by which they're trying (/succeeding) at enforcing these bills? Anybody can send anybody a bill for anything, that does not mean it is valid or legally enforceable.
In general I find discussions of this topic very frustrating because everybody stops short of visiting the if and how of the fraudulent bills actually having an effect. I can certainly believe there are corrupt or dubious ways they get collected on, but those mechanisms need to be focused on and then eliminated as an obvious first step of healthcare reform.
Usually the hospital has you sign something during intake that says "I acknowledge that if the insurance fails to pay this bill then I am the final guarantor." And so without that signed documentation the detainee shouldn't be on the hook for the bill. So asking the hospital to present your signature on that document or escalating until someone can provide that or indicate that they don't have it should be enough. This is a situation where personal legal insurance might be beneficial because for about $30 a month you get a law office you can call and ask questions, for example about the legality of the local hospital's billing practices for detainees.
Yes I refused to sign anything so they just send it to a carousel of debt collectors who give up with resistance but then resell it to someone else whom hasn't received a cease and desist yet, then I must start over fighting it. This happens roughly annually for several years now.
The thing they have you sign is a single-party "consent" and not a two-party "contract", implying it's merely informing you about what they are able to do to you, rather than asking you to assent to a purportedly mutual agreement.
I cross out all that unilateral nonsense about being financially responsible (as well as other types of nonsense), and have never been balked at. Worst case is these days when they ask me to sign a contextless touchpad, and then they roll their eyes like it's some big imposition when I ask for a hard copy instead so I can "review".
So I don't think that paperwork is directly involved with how the medical industry has come to run on billing fraud shakedowns. Hence asking for actual mechanics / outcomes of what happens when people are "sent a bill" and don't do the implied thing of just paying it.
Also, have you ever talked to an attorney - especially asking them preemptive or against-the-status-quo questions? In my experience they generally tell you to just go with the flow. If they advise you to do anything else and it blows up, then they themselves could be on the hook.
> doctors were considered acting as non medical pseudo police for the purposes of challenging the care
What does that mean? They are either providing the services on behalf of the police, so their pseudo employer needs to pay them, or they are medical professionals providing a care you did not consent to or requested, in which case they should charge the party that requested the services, again, the police.
In both cases, you were not the contractual beneficiary of the services, so you own nothing. The fact that your blood and orifices are involved is purely incidental, any evidence resulting from this unnecessary medical act can only be used against you, so you would have no reason to want it.
It lives in one of those grey areas of "nobody has been murdered over it brutally enough to make national news so it persists" just like all the other abuse the police do. At least they don't suffocate people as much anymore...
In medicine, for minor procedures such as blood tests or ECG, there is the notion of implied consent. Just holding out your arm for the blood test is implied consent. To refuse, you might say, I am of sound mind and I do not consent to this procedure. Or, you are performing this procedure without my consent and against my wishes. I'm not a lawyer,and not in the US, but this is how it generally operates for practical reasons. Written informed consent is required for more invasive or significant procedures.
For people from most places outside the US, I bet such stories from US's medical system sound totally crazy. It is crazy for a medical system to function like this charging somebody for being involuntarily treated, and even more for no medical cause.
What would have happened, to the hospital's part, if they had declared that you were not intoxicated and you should not have been brought to the hospital, and sent you on your way? Would the police have had to justify dragging you to the hospital, and pay for your examination? I suspect that going along with the police may have been the decision with the simplest and most profitable outcome for everybody (apart from you) and that the hospital side was incetivised to go along with police's story rather than against, but I am not sure how things there typically work in such cases.
There was a highly publicized case a few years back where the police entered a hospital and ordered a nurse to draw a blood sample for an unconscious patient who had been in a car accident. They had no warrant and she refused per hospital policy (and law). The cops roughed her up pretty bad and arrested her.
Also good to point out that the reason they -rushed- to the hospital to do this was that the person who had hit them was an off-duty cop who was drunk and had run a red light, and they were looking for something, anything, to pin on this guy instead as being responsible, rather than the cop.
Said unconscious patient later died, if I recall correctly, too.
so now the people wielding all the power are risking death? sounds like an even more powerful incentive to cover stuff up extra hard and shoot all witnesses, etc.
What they ended up doing was getting a warrant AFTER the fact, then the smartest of the doctors waited to sign his chart until after that. Right after I was served the warrant I was released, that was the culpability they needed to save their asses.
The nursing board then used the warrants signed AFTER the nurses charts to shield nurses from my malpractice complaints. The board argued essentially nurses are performing a police search if told to execute a search, thus it's nonmedical search. However if you challenge the police, they argue it is medical care not a police search thus you can't challenge that angle either.
You should probably still try to sue each medical practitioner individually. Even in the 1980s, a doctor wouldn't interfere with something like preventing a mule from private lavatory use. If a new generation is dumb, there's only one recourse offered for fixing them.
Lawyers involved told me they'd given up and wouldn't take my case. The trouble is it is medical when you challenge the police search, and nonmedical when you challenge the medical care. The judges and police created a catch 22.
I live in a country in the EU where conversion therapy is illegal. One of my trans friends was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital, got emotionally and physically abused (no food, tied to bed), was forced into the male wing of the institute despite being legally a female and had "conversion therapy" performed on her against her will.
It's no secret that lgbt people and prisoners are being mistreated by medical professionals globally.
Being skeptical about authority figures is always a good thing, it always surprise me to see populations so deferent to them like americans are to law enforcement.
Yes, because they assume that the license to kill with paid leave will be used against someone they don't like. It's a real "fix your hearts" situation. Watch this play out in the current fiasco with USAID.
And I think in the vast majority of cases, it's only used against actual criminals. You only hear about these sensationalized cases because it's out of the ordinary and not at all common.
Sure, but there's a huge systematic bias in how a lot of surveys and research are carried out. If everyone is sampling from e.g. people who answer a phone call, their results will be consistent but hugely biased.
You haven't been to a sports even in the US right?
The general population in the US is very much in favor of law enforcement and the more "end of the world" news they consume the more they think there should be MORE law enforcement and they should have even more power.
> You haven't been to a sports even in the US right?
I have, as it happens. But many people never do; the people who go to sports games might be a similar group to the people who answer phone calls, but they're not a representative sample of the whole population by any means.
Law enforcement literally everywhere has a license to kill. They dress it up with a bunch of process to keep it from getting used on a whim but that is literally the point of law enforcement, to kill you if you don't comply with the will of the state as enforced through them.
Authority bias is very real, very problematic, and very well documented. As a consequence, those in authority must always be held to a high standard. Always doubt an assertion by authority unless accompanied with sufficient evidence.
Because there's probably a lot more to the story, and all the details that have not been provided probably make OP look worse and the police/hospital staff look better.
I have a cousin who is paranoid schizophrenic. He makes all kinds of wild claims about all sorts of things: family abuse, screwed over by employers/landlords, beaten up by the police for no reason, the people living in the crawl space are poisoning him, etc, etc... Many of them are provably false e.g. those family members didn't live there at the time of the allegation, the body cam clearly shows him charging the police and then trying to grab their guns while they try to wrestle him into handcuffs, nobody in the crawl space, etc. The problem is that it'd take a full time detective to track down all his various claims. It's very sad that as a vulnerable person he probably is sometimes taken advantage of by people, but at the same time he's never been compliant with medicine and therapy for more than a couple months at a time, despite extensive support. It's kind of a no win situation.
It is a weird twist on the fairy tale. What if you had a medical condition that compelled you to cry “Wolf” all the time? Obviously the townsfolk can’t spend all their time responding to false wolf sightings, but there is no lessoned to be learned when The Boy actually believes he sees a wolf every day.
I have been close to multiple people who made similar paranoid allegations while psychotic. It is sometimes hard for people to understand the allegations are false or part of an illness. This can include judges and mental health professionals.
Someone I know who has a psychotic illness was telling people “my dad is having an affair”. And people didn’t believe her because they just assumed it was another one of her delusions
Then guess what we find out a few months later? Yep, her father really is having an affair, and her mother has just discovered it and is now filing for divorce over it
He was for a while. It was partially successful at controlling his issues, but after a while he stopped coming to the door when social services came around each month to give him his injection. Social Services doesn't have the ability to bust down your door and inject you against your will.
>I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
(Un)fortunately, there is a quite famous experiment
>The Rosenhan experiment or Thud experiment was an experiment regarding the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions and feigned hallucinations in order to be accepted, but acted normally from then onward. Each was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder and given antipsychotic medication.
> For the experiment, participants submitted themselves for evaluation at various psychiatric institutions
How did anyone volunteer for this? Isn't there a risk of actually getting stuck at the asylum, or failing to clarify it was an experiment to have it removed from your records?
This is how divorce goes now based on my experience. The legal system is not setup to handle these sorts of problems well and leaves the innocent to deal with the fall out of bad actors and lawyers who empower them.
This won’t be corrected until there are penalties for political, legal, and administrative professionals who don’t do their due diligence.
Yes! This is divorce in America right now, if one party is willing to make up a series of lies, no matter how unbelievable the court will just default to the one making the accusations because its too much work to even try to sort out truth from lie, thats why the lawyers call it, "Liars Court" because the biggest liar wins.
The standard for the judicial is not "the truth", its about what you can "prove".
Judicial cannot claim one party is lying or not, in fact it is impossible, given the fact its nearly always a "he said she said" deal (in this particular scenario). Quite literally, the judge was't there, lawyers weren't there either and they get a twisted version of truth no matter if they are prosecuting or defense.
It sucks, fully agreed, but there is no way around it. As long as the judgement is not too punitive is about the best you can hope for.
This is in most small civil law areas and even summary criminal cases. They simply aren't important enough for the people in power to do their due diligence or give a shit. Nobody can force them to do their jobs either.
Imagine if some member of the bin Laden family was high on something and had rumors of their cousin's shenanigans and were spilling them out on some IRC channel or BBS or whatever, and that guy happened upon them and tried to alert the police, only to be dismissed as a lunatic and end up in prison for unrelated reasons while the disaster happened. That would be a true Kafkian nightmare.
No, i don't think so. I have an older friend that is persuaded to have seen something most people don't believe in back in the 90s. He just won't claim it publicly, and don't talk about it all the time, it's not a core part of his personality. Even if some people make fun of him for it (i don't think it happen nowadays, but it might), they can, and probably will believe him on other subjects (he is a very precise and knowledgeable in electronics, and have really interesting philosophical point of views).
I was crazy once. Actually, maybe multiple times. Weirdly, whenever I'm not crazy I think I want to be crazy, and whenever I am crazy I just want it to stop. "I didn't ask for that crazy, I wanted a different crazy!!!"
Can you explain. Like maybe you have a condition that causes some psychological challenges and then you get better and it goes away for a while? That would be horrible.
I don't know if I have any actual condition. I probably have maybe 5 mental disorders but I don't think any of them cause actual crazy just on their own. Usually my crazy is induced by staying awake for unhealthy lengths of time. I think last time this happened I joked about being schizophrenic because I kept hearing things in silence and being incredibly agitated/panicked about it. I probably said the exact quote "I didn't want that schizophrenia I wanted a different schizophrenia!!!!" since sometimes I wonder what it would be like to actually be schizophrenic. (I wonder this about so many things, though generally people tell me that wondering this is not normal)
This is just the system getting rid of (in their eyes) an undesirable. The truth doesn't really matter in these cases unless you have tens of thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer to plead your case.
Having grown up in the Deep South, I feel like every single person in the justice system from police to judge make decisions about you based on how you look and subconsciously decide to not believe facts or allow weak facts to have more weight. Nothing about this question seems outrageous to me whatsoever. And I think that’s the shocking part here.
> I wonder how many people are telling the truth about something, and aren't taken seriously because they're problematic about something else.
Likely a metric fuck ton. The perceived quality of one's character plays an outsized role in getting people to believe you. Serial killers figured that out a long time ago.
In contemporary parlance, “problematic” connotes to me that said individual expresses ideas, in their words, speech, or way of life, that are anathema to the dominant paradigm of thought/manners/civility, but does not necessarily imply anything about the mental health of the related individual.
Disordered thinking of the quality you’ve described is indicative of a serious psychological unwellness that, as the other commenter suggested, suggests paranoid schizophrenia or a related form of psychosis. But I don’t intend to seriously engage in back-of-envelope psychologizing.
Prattling on about irrelevant history and insinuating 9/11 conspiracy theories in a courtroom not at all concerned with either of those items does harm credibility, and I think rightfully.
For reasons of both family and personal history I am genuinely sensitive to the phenomenon of the “deemed crazy” person being consigned to permanent non-consideration of their words and expressions, their concerns, but I also recognize that such legitimate unwellness poses genuine issues for the believability of anything they claim.
Putting my extended aside aside, I would phrase it as “how many people are telling the truth about something, but aren't taken seriously because they're severely psychologically disregulated generally.”
It’s not necessarily outrageous for me to assert that I warned the FBI about 9/11 in June 2000. It seriously harms my credibility if I decide to bring up this grievance when I’m speaking to a judge about my undeserved traffic ticket in October 2024.
I wonder the same but I also firmly believe it's a useless and unproductive thing to worry about.
I mean, I wonder how many gold coins are laying in the forest? Surely there are many, and you can find ample news stories of people locating them out there, but I can confidently tell you that if you assembled a team an combed the forest for a year, maybe you would find one object worthy of a news story. And definitely you would wasted thousands of man hours that could have produced far far far more than what the object is worth.
In practical terms, it happens to virtually no one.
Hundreds of people win $10,000+ in the lottery every month. That is a lot of people. You can post a thread and will likely get comments from those who have won before.
But as a percentage of the population, virtually no one wins big in the lottery.
If you are foolish and think social media accurately portrays reality, you might quit your job to play the lottery full time - because hey, look at all the winners in the comments.
I'm not sure that being "problematic" was the issue here; it sounds more like they might have thought he wasn't fully sane. I could imagine thinking that someone fully believed what they said about their identity in the same way they believed that they could have stopped 9/11 if people had listened to them beforehand. The issue isn't thinking they have bad takes or unsavory opinions, but that they have trouble distinguishing reality from delusions.
This is how these institutions work. If someone behaves erratically, holds unconventional beliefs or just doesn't present themselves in the "right" way, they can be dismissed entirely
Unfortunately even if we could get everyone to be tested, not everyone can take the meds. I had to take a profilact dose after an accidental needle stick when I was a student nurse. The starps box was next to the light switch, and whomever collected the patients blood did not make sure the needle was actually inside the box. That medication made me feel like I was dying, and that was only for a couple of weeks. Newer better meds have come out, but there are always those people that can't take those meds.
> Instantaneous access to everything obviously comes at a cost. The cost being that we all behave like demented Roman emperors, at once bored and deranged, summoning whatever we want at any time.
> All over the world, an entire generation of young men, often referred to as “NEETs,” are robbing themselves of agency, drive, and romantic relationships through their addiction to video games and pornography. Video games allow a young man to experience a sort of pseudo-achievement, while pornography masquerades as love. Some of these men have seen more naked women than any king who has ever lived.
> Many will mock their pain and their addiction, but it’s heartbreaking to think that they’ll never experience true risk, true reward, or true romance.
This post acknowledges that NEETs are living better than ancient Roman emperors, but laments they're missing out on "risk, reward, and romance" that these ancient Romans had. What exactly is so great about risking death on the battlefield or risking food poisoning at a bad restaurant? Why would an average man in his early 20s want to take a risk by approaching women at one's job or in public? Especially when you go on Tinder/Hinge and realize just how worthless you actually are.
The article argues that:
> Thoroughly exhausting ourselves intellectually and physically through productive work brings fulfillment, and with fulfillment comes peace.
But you can, as the article acknowledges, thoroughly exhaust yourself through video games and online vices. Achievement no longer requires risk. And the article is unable to quantify what value that risk brings beyond being inherently exciting. If this was true, why aren't more people taking risks? It should be more fun than sitting at home all day.
"NEET" is an economic term that stands for "not in education, employment, or training", because unemployment doesn't include people that have left the labour force entirely. Self-description as a NEET is a proud admission that one does not contribute to the economy or work force; it's a valuation of the individual over the community.
This article accepts that premise and argues in futility that NEETs don't really want the lifestyle they chose. I disagree, and I'd rather we make it an explicit value of our society to reject individual freedoms that cause broader social harms.
If smartphone addiction is legitimately destroying society by acting as a sinkhole for human potential, we should apply legal restrictions or taxes on screen time. That would be more effective than telling someone who's doomscrolling how they're actually hurting themselves.
You have to provide your email to sign up for HN, however, it is not publicly visible. If YCombinator had to pay $10,000 for leaking a user email, this site isn't going to exist since it's not their core business and represents a huge liability.
It's also disproportionate. If my email is leaked in the context of receiving treatment for a stigmatized disease, that's a lot worse than an MMORPG leaking my real name.
Maybe some penalty is necessary but $10k or above per user is disproportionate for the vast majority of people. A $50/person penalty with gradations for sensitivity of the information is going to work better in practice. If leaking an SSN is more expensive than an email or site-specific ID, corporations might stop using SSNs to identify people to reduce their exposure
Have the C-suite hand back their compensation above minimum wage for the last 3 years. Fine the company, all profits, or a percentage of global revenue (and pay that back to customers).
If the outcome of ignoring data security is to not make any money then companies will actually do something about it.
Penalities should push the company to the point of failing.
This isn't true. int[] decays into an int* but is a different type.
An array member of a struct will have its data allocated contiguously with other struct members (subject to compiler padding). An int* would point outside the struct. This is possible even with variable length arrays. Specifically, you can declare the final member of a struct as an int[] which makes it a "flexible array member". Then you have to malloc the struct to be the sizeof the struct + whatever size you want the array to be.
This is rather pedantic but the memory model for arrays is important here. If you're iterating over multiple struct members that are arrays, the fact the arrays are stored contiguously in memory is going to matter to SIMD.
>Then you have to malloc the struct to be the sizeof the struct + whatever size you want the array to be.
Ultra pedantic, but you actually do not need to alloc struct+size; you want something like:
// A flexible array member may have lower alignment requirements than the struct
// overall - in that case, it can overlap with the trailing padding of the rest
// of the struct, and a naive sizeof(base) + sizeof(flex) * count calculation
// will not take into account that overlap, and allocate more than is required.
#define SIZEOF_FLEX(type, member, count) MAX(sizeof(type), offsetof(type, member[count]))
I'm sure there's a more elegant way to calculate this, but I am no macro master.
if using an int* over an int[] changes the memory layout of a struct, that necessarily implies a difference in the ABI.
As an example, C++'s std::array can be implemented as a struct containing a fixed-size C-style array. This can be passed-by-value. This means that returning a std::array can be more performant than returning a std::vector (which might be implemented as an int* that is reallocated when you add too many elements), because a std::array is returned on the stack while a std::vector is returned on the heap.
I was bit by this once when returning a std::unordered_map because I was doing a heap-allocation in a performance-critical section.
From this article by a German lawyer, "the question will always be whether one employee can replace the other in the event of illness or absence on leave.":
> Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG provides four criteria that have to be taken into account in the selection decision: Length of service, age, statutory maintenance obligations and the employee's severe disability.
> The employer must first determine which employees work at the same level in the company and can therefore be replaced. The group of employees determined in this way is what is known as a horizontal comparability. Social selection is then carried out in this group on the basis of the legally prescribed criteria. The members of the respective group are then ranked according to their need for social protection.
> Older employees are more in need of protection than younger ones. A longer period of employment also increases the need for protection, as does the existence of statutory maintenance obligations and the presence of a severe disability.
> Section 1 (3) sentence 1 KSchG does not indicate how the social aspects mentioned are to be put in relation to each other, which is why each of the four criteria is to be given equal importance.
> When reducing staff, employers often make use of point schemes through which points are assigned to the individual social criteria. It also gives information through which the need for social protection of the employees in the comparison group can be assessed.
> All employees who are interchangeable must be included in the social selection. Criteria that can be used in this examination are the vocational training as well as the practical experience and knowledge that the respective employees have. If there is comparability, these workers are horizontally interchangeable. In practice, the question will always be whether one employee can replace the other in the event of illness or absence on leave.
It seems pretty obvious to me that this makes it much harder for people with severe disabilities to get hired in the first place, especially for progressive degenerative diseases.
If I'm a company that is expanding at the edge of my capability, I'm not going to hire anyone with any "need for protection" that I'm able to suss out during the application or interview process because if I need to reduce staff I'm stuck with them whether they're the best or not.
Yes, online bookstores are full of them:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/travel/amazon-guidebooks-...
The issue is there's an asymmetry between buyer/seller for books, because a buyer doesn't know the contents until you buy the book. Reviews can help, but not if the reviews are fake/AI generated. In this case, these books are profitable if only a few people buy them as the marginal cost of creating such a book is close to zero.
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