I was curious how the video creators were able to generate so many videos in such a short timeframe. It looks like it might be automated with this tech: https://rivervalley.io/products/research-integrity
Very cool. I wish these guys would have a podcast discussing high profile papers, how influential they are, what sorts of projects have been built on top of them and then be like "uh oh, it looks like our system detecting something strange about the results".
I wish wish wish there was something similar also for computer science. If I got paid for how many papers that looked interested but could not be replicated, I would be rich.
The connection machine had several modes for the front lights. The one most familiar is "random and pleasing" and the code can be found here: https://trmm.net/CM-2/
You can make the impossible picture (the others too) easier by slightly moving your head back and forth while superimposing the images. The difference will move more than the rest of the image.
Well, for one thing, monetary policy is the primary determinant of money supply, not fiscal policy.
Second, I think it is fair to say that the causes of inflation are uncertain, even among mainstream PhD economists. The quantity theory hasn't been matching empirical data, and newer theories like the fiscal theory of the price level are gaining attention.
I gave sc-im a try years ago but quickly hit a showstopper for my needs. The built-in functions are very limited (for example no MEDIAN), but you can write your own external functions. However, external functions can only accept a single cell, and not a range of cells, as input. For me, operating on a range of cells is kind of the point of a spreadsheet. It seems that this hasn't been addressed yet.
If you enjoyed Williams's Augustus, do give Stoner and Butcher's Crossing a read. I "enjoyed" them even more than Augustus. Enjoyed is in quotes because they are both emotionally devastating -- Stoner more so than Butcher's Crossing. I didn't feel like myself for a week after reading Stoner and a decade later I still often think about it.
I read Stoner a month ago, and just finished Augustus. Both are among the best books I have read this year, so far at least. I’ll be picking up Butcher’s Crossing soon but needed some lighter reads in-between :)
That is a huge inventory. How do stolen tools get fenced? Sent abroad? Craigslist and FB marketplace? I've bought some used tools from online classifieds, but it always seems to be a homeowner or business owner selling one or two things.
Every flea market I have ever been to in my life always has some guy with a huge amount of lightly used and heavily assorted high-dollar power tools.
Before Home Depot started putting tools in cages, I used to see a lot of craigslist/marketplace/etc postings for brand new and unopened tools, posted at amazing prices.
Yeah, and then people act like the flea market is some precious cornerstone of the local culture. In my city there is a flea market that has dozens of freshly stolen bikes every week. There's a fund where people buy back the bikes and reunite them with their owners. Unfortunately, there's no fund supporting violence against these bike thieves.
Depends highly on the region. Most US prisons look like daycare compared to Japanese prisons, wrt prisoner treatment. (The prisons in the southeast US are an exception to this)
I don't really mean it in the quality of life sense as prison is pretty awful in most of the world, especially in developing countries.
The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind. It's basically a few small rungs down from sacrificing prisoners to Quetzalcoatl and the rain gods, which is graphic but no more dehumanizing. States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
The photo shows them walking in a line next to a guard that doesn't have to walk? I don't get it.
A lot of prisoners get treated badly, but the inherent idea of being forced to do labor doesn't strike me as ridiculous. Just about everybody has to work. Comparing it to sacrifice is stupid.
Yes, but it's not nearly as big of a gap as the above comment suggests.
Being in prison sucks. If there's forced labor that approaches the same magnitude of unpleasantness, or even worse exceeds it, then that's a huge problem. But if it makes prison mildly worse than zero labor, that's not a tremendous issue.
> I think the sacrifice comparison wasn't to labor, but to the fact that capital punishment is still practiced in the US.
I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way, unless they rewrote part of it and totally messed up the phrasing.
Whether or not the work sucks is orthogonal to the many reasons slavery is bad. While inmates certainly don't have freedom, they are still not property of the state, and profiting from their labor is both immoral and presents a huge moral hazard to the broader criminal justice system.
> I can't figure out any way to read the comment that way
? The comment literally says:
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
They're talking about the state putting people to death. Human sacrifice is when it was done to placate the gods. Modern day capital punishment is when the state puts people to death to placate the retributive demands of the people.
> States with prolific death penalties just skip the religious angle.
But read the two sentences before that. They're making a complete comparison without mentioning death penalties at all, and without any placeholders that could be filled in by a later sentence. The third sentence mentioning death penalties does not retroactively change what the first two sentences were talking about.
The comment very clearly says that slavery in the prison system is next to sacrifice, not just the death penalty.
If it wasn't supposed to say that, then the original commenter needs to come here and clarify.
> Whether or not the work sucks is orthogonal to the many reasons slavery is bad. While inmates certainly don't have freedom, they are still not property of the state, and profiting from their labor is both immoral and presents a huge moral hazard to the broader criminal justice system.
So there's a much bigger and connected moral hazard, that the people that are paid to run prisons want there to be more inmates, whether or not they do any labor. That's especially bad when it's third party for-profit companies running things. And they'll use prison labor to make extra money on top of what they're already paid.
We should fight against that situation very strongly.
But if we have all the money controlled by the state, and the labor merely reduces the cost of keeping prisoners, then there's not a huge moral hazard to the criminal justice system.
If prisoners actually start making enough money to offset the entire cost of the prison system, then we should intervene. But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
Read it in context again, it is commentary on the US prison system as a whole.
> But limiting hours and/or giving more of the money to the actual prisoners doing the labor should be enough to fix that moral hazard.
Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
The critical sentence is "The 13th amendment codifies slavery into our prison system and few things are as barbaric in my mind."
I can see your argument that the thing being called barbaric is the prison system in general, but I'm still pretty sure the thing being called barbaric by that wording is specifically the slavery part.
> Maybe but it doesn't address the immorality of the situation to begin with. There's a simple solution, here: eliminate the prison loophole for slavery. There can still be labor in prisons, it should just follow prevailing labor law.
That might be best but I'm not sure if it's obviously the best option.
The labor could actually make prison mildly less worse, as it breaks up the monotony of doing nothing. There is also often some comp, although way below minimum wage, and you can opt out (most don’t).
> It's basically a few small rungs down from sacrificing prisoners to Quetzalcoatl and the rain gods, which is graphic but no more dehumanizing.
The sacrifice would then be laid on a stone slab, a chacmool, by four priests, and their abdomen would be sliced open by a fifth priest with a ceremonial knife made of flint. The most common form of human sacrifice was heart-extraction. . . . The cut was made in the abdomen and went through the diaphragm. The priest would rip out the heart and it would then be placed in a bowl held by a statue of the honored god, and the body would then be thrown down the temple's stairs. . . .
The body parts would then be disposed of, the viscera fed to the animals in the zoo, and the bleeding head was placed on display in the tzompantli or the skull rack. When the consumption of individuals was involved, the warrior who captured the enemy was given the meaty limbs while the most important flesh, the stomach and chest, were offerings to the gods.
Prison aka confinement is a form of violence. A lot of people consider "when the good guy hits the bad guy it's not violence" no no, it's still violence.
Restraining someone against their will is a violent act, it's just an acceptable form of violence (that of course I agree with) used by the "Good" to deal with the "bad" (relative terms ofc)
There has to be some kind of personality distribution thing here with how people view this kind of thing. My general take is "I'm attacked, _especially_ if I'm with family; just shoot them. There isn't even a quibble in my head.
Why do you immediately think of it as that violent ? ,
Not tolerating the crime, involves arresting the person, and penalizing them with fines and other consequences for a while, and then if possible work on improving their living standards and help them get a job to get out of a life of crime.
Not tolerating crime does not mean shooting people up or inflicting wounds on them, why should it be that extreme ? , either inflict wounds on people or let them go free with misdemeanor charges ?
It just kills the conversation and scope to actually fix this rise in crime mess, that is spreading everywhere.
> Why do you immediately think of it as that violent ? , Not tolerating the crime, involves arresting the person, and penalizing them with fines and other consequences
Different branch of these threads:
> So they steal from you, and then you get the privilege of your tax dollars paying for their room and board. I dunno, I can see why some people might not be chuffed to bits by that solution.
If we’re going to make sure we get appropriate vengeance, and we’re not going to pay to incarcerate them… what do we have left? Physical punishment? Slavery? Unless bankruptcy of a person (without any assets to begin with) alone is a sufficient punishment for these crimes, I’m all out of ideas on where this could go.
You may not be who he was referring to, but the people he was referring to certainly seem to be present.
Your two sibling comments are currently "Why is the comfort of the aggressor more important than the comfort of the innocent victim?" And "Yes." The assumption that some people in this thread are in favor of violence seems to be borne out.
Wishing physical violence into any IRL situation is some real keyboard warrior crap. I understand the appeal, I sadly do, but we need to move beyond it.
Will you be the one to deliver the violence, or would you rather someone else did that on your behalf?
Anyone who has implemented violence IRL is also scarred, for life.
I don't think they were suggesting that violence is the preferred option. But I don't think there's any country where law enforcement cares about bike theft, so prison isn't really an option.
> Ministry of Justice records show that in the five-year period between June 2017 and June 2022, just 159 people (out of roughly 350,000 bike theft cases) were found guilty of bike thefts and only two of these were given immediate custodial sentences.
The police could do way more, but it's easier to victim blame ("register your bike, use two locks, etc.")
So they steal from you, and then you get the privilege of your tax dollars paying for their room and board. I dunno, I can see why some people might not be chuffed to bits by that solution.
Describing prison as "free room and board" is absurd. People are not going there by choice. They are there because we as a society say they should be there, and we pay for that as a society. Every attempt to not do that (e.g. by charging people for the cost they impose on the judicial system) has turned out to be an exploitative nightmare. Are you also upset that people steal and therefore your tax dollars need to go towards policing?
I didn't say "free room and board" – you did. You also said that going to prison isn't a choice, but also that I can choose to go to prison whenever I want, so which is it?
Someone in a sister thread suggested sharia law and chopping off hands, so clearly there are other alternatives besides "society pays for prison" and "the criminal pays for prison".
And yes, I am upset that people steal and that this causes more of my tax dollars to go to heightened policing. Why wouldn't I be? Presumably the only people that are not upset about that are criminals and potentially the police.
> That is a huge inventory. How do stolen tools get fenced?
Sold in bulk to someone overseas is my theory, way too much effort and risk selling this stuff piecemeal online or locally. You can see something similar happening with stolen cars in the US. [1]
If I had a bunch of power tools stolen the first place I'm checking is Facebook Marketplace. I refuse to believe I would be the only person checking the usual sites for such goods.
From the article they note that some of the things they found were VERY old, sounds strange but maybe they hadn't gotten to that part / were not able to move that much stuff:
>Some were stolen as long ago as 2014
Weird situation near me, some local folks where stealing construction stuff were found not far from me and ... they found everything stolen over the course of a few years. If a generator and some tools were taken, there they were, all of them together. It appeared they straight up had no plan / active effort to sell everything.
A former coworker came to the USA from Chile with a degree in Molecular Biology but couldn't find work in that field because of his language barrier. Instead he got a shitty job and build a small export company that sold used appliances and other goods from the USA to Chile. A big chunk were things like air conditioners, refrigerators, and washing machines. Even though Chile is a 50Hz 220V country 60Hz stuff will run off a transformer though sub-optimally which for most people is better than nothing. BUT he also found a more lucrative path by selling gun parts (mostly ammo parts like shell casings) hidden within said appliances. So there is an international market for this kind of stuff.
When I was car shopping back 20 years ago, there was a 18-year-old car with low milage and a salvage title offered for sale that the seller claimed had been stolen and sat in a warehouse for over a decade. I think a lot of theft in general ends up being “poor business.”
I'm going to assume that whoever's doing the stealing is being paid; as opposed to merely amassing a warehouse of tools collecting dust.
So, how is the money coming in to pay the thieves? How is the money coming in to continue to pay for the storage units to store the tools? It doesn't make sense.
That seems like the mostly likely way, at least for the new items stolen from retail. Trying to sell on craiglist/FB marketplace doesn't seem like it would scale. An unscrupulous hardware store owner could mix the stolen goods in with their stock to pad their margins. The tools could also be used as stock for 3rd party seller on Amazon.
Amazon comingled inventory would be the perfect vehicle for the perfect crime. They can’t even tell who shipped what, it’s basically like a cryptocurrency tumbler but for real world goods!
The Amazon marketplace seller is what I thought would be the most used route. Selling overseas would require hardware changes with the plugs I would think which would probably not be something they're willing to do. Unless it's common to use adapters or have people make that mode themselves as part of the "but it was cheap"???
Amazon marketplace is one of the best fences of all time.
China exports lots of stuff to the USA and those containers go back empty. They can easily be filled up with stolen iPhones and catalytic converters for recycling, so that they aren’t all empty.
That’s way too much trouble, and Chinese customs is really serious about their 100% tariff for DIY car imports. Stolen iPhones and cats are much easier to smuggle in, and have little value outside of Chinese recyclers.
For whatever reasons, my mind equates overseas with Europe and even Eastern Europe more specifically when it comes to trading in illicit wares. In my mind, any where in the Americas just isn't overseas.
But you are absolutely right in that a lot of stolen items do end up in that part of the world.
I just read (by audiobook) two great fiction works by Colson Whitehead that include some of these ideas, Crook Manifesto then is prequel Harlem Shuffle.
It was selling stolen clothing. Odd that it wasn't stolen cameras.
I think I actually visited that store once or twice (before the bust) and it seemed like a nice little shop, though I didn't see how it could stay in business. I guess now I know.
Here in Texas you can just look on Facebook marketplace. Included is photos of garages and living rooms filled to the brim with new in the box name brand tools
Yes, that is super annoying. I was trying to read the examples and they kept changing out from under me. To the developer: don't slow down the animation of the gallery. Make the examples static.
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