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The "third degree" of interrogation is actual torture. The less well known first degree was being shown the implements of torture, and the second degree was being made to watch somebody else get tortured.


The problem with many of these museums and even the medieval sources they're based on is that there's a strong incentive to make things as gruesome as possible, including just making shit up. For example, everybody's heard of the Iron Maiden, but all existing devices appear to be "replicas" and there's no properly documented case of such a device actually being used for execution.


"Execution by Iron Maiden" seems like a good name for an album.


Whiplash is also popular for insurance/disability fraud. There was an interesting story on HN a while back about how the prevalence of whiplash after accidents in the US is far higher than in Europe, for no other easily explainable reason, but I can't find the link now.


My mom rear ended a teenager at low spveeds. The teenager was fine with no neck issues, but after talking with their parents suddenly had whiplash.

She told the insurance company that the claim was probably fraudulent, and their response was "most whiplash claims are probably fraudulent, but it's cheaper to settle"


My wife was rear ended mildly by a truck years ago, and was initially ok other than the shock. Headaches and dizziness started after the next day and, including recovery with physiotherapy, lasted around 3 months.

That stuff is not a joke.

(more lighthearted note: after 3 months, her symptoms were mostly gone except for a new and intermittent nausea. The therapist was confounded for a few days, until he suggested the cause of that might be more related to me than the truck driver)


trusting that the "intermittent nausea" could also be phrased "morning sickness", and congrats that this is due to you than a truck driver :)


Interesting -- to my naive mind headaches and dizziness sound more like a brain problem (concussion) than a neck problem (whiplash). So, if you don't mind sharing, I'm curious what the actual underlying problem was and how the physiotherapy solved it.

I had a quick google but the only paper I found that proposed some mechanism ("vertebrobasilar artery insufficiency (VBI) leads to brainstem and cerebellar ischemia and infarction following cervical manipulation", i.e. bashing the neck might mess up blood flow to the brain somehow, causing bits of it to die off) looks complete bullshit.


Congratulations


I remember watching Jacques Villeneuve crash pretty hard in the 2000 Australian Gran Prix (tragically a loose wheel stuck and killed a marshal). I read an interview with him later, he said he ran back to the pits after the crash, but he couldn't even walk the next day. Adrenalin does funny things.

I dropped a motorcycle at the track a little over a year ago, and bounced off the tire wall in the process. Had a few bumps and bruises, but felt fine, until my back freaked out a month later. I got it sorted without too much trouble, but whiplash injuries do funny things.


Having been in a couple significant (totaled vehicles) rear end accidents, neck pain does tend to show up a little bit after the accident.

I’ve never had it seriously enough that I’ve needed treatment, but I have had a minor kink in my neck that shows up later in the day. The kind of pain where it’s sore when you turn you head one very specific direction.


Do you really think a teenager who was involved in possibly their first accident is really going to make an honest assessment of themselves? Although they make not be in shock, the sudden hit of adrenaline you get at that time can really does not make you capable of a self assessment.

Also in my last accident, it tooks months for the symptoms to become evident. When an EMT or doctor checks you out after an accident they are checking for life threatening injuries. Not saying "OK, despite the accident you are 100% the same! Go about life as normal!"


I was once rear-ended the pain in neck started the day after, not immediately..


I don't believe that it's just fraud: the claims aspect adds drama and the drama makes it objectively worse.

I'm going through wiplash myself right now (mostly gone) and I think that too much drama played a major role. In my case not because of any claims situation, but because having recently gone through an intracranial hemorrhage and because of having spent a year of my early career typing out neurosurgery reports from dictaphone. The result was that I wasn't sufficiently confident that it might be "just whiplash". Went on for months, with hardly any improvement, until a physiotherapist gave me a demonstration of just how capable those muscles are of creating the nastiest headaches. I'm quite convinced that this change to my mind was more important than the changed my neck muscles. I'd expect the drama created by the claims situation too have a similar effect as that alleviated hypochondrism I had, creating a link from claims to severity that isn't related to fraud at all. Fraud certainly exists, but its role might be much smaller that suggested by that link.

I remember that story from HN as well by the way, might actually have been a contributing factor in my disbelief/hypochondrism: "this pain is real, certainly not that thing that hardly exists outside of the American claims ecosystem". Beware of unexpected side-effects I guess.

(another factor in the difference USA vs rest of the world, entirely unrelated to claims, is likely the "unique" relationship with painkillers. Tho put it in perspective: I lost two trips to France to that injury that I had been looking forward to for months, but didn't take a single pill in the entire ordeal)


Is whiplash something that shows up in some sort of scan that shows definitively yes/no that the patient has whiplash?

If not, then that makes sense why it would be so prevelant of a thing for the ambulance chasers to use


Sometimes the muscles are compensating for a new instability in the spine from the trauma, which can be seen, but only with a motion x-ray.

I had a motion x-ray done of my neck that finally demonstrated that my skull slips slightly side-to-side relative to my atlas (C1 vertebra). So what seemed like my muscles overreacting or just me complaining about psychogenic neck pain (or trying to scam the insurance company) was actually my muscular system making sure I don't suffer an internal decapitation.

If anyone's having trouble with the insurance company insisting nothing is wrong because the static x-rays look fine, I cannot recommend highly enough that you look into a motion x-ray. It's very possible that your spine is only fine when it isn't moving, and that's no way to live your life.


I believe it is mostly just pulled muscles in the neck, so pretty hard to diagnose with imaging or that sort of thing.


I find that hard to believe, a friend of mine in Ireland touched a taxi at no more than 5mph, leaving no obvious damage on the taxi itself, but with the taxi driver rolling on the road and getting an ambulance to hospital. There's big time insurance fraud going on there apparently.


Maybe this anecdote just show how bad it is in the US then.


I wonder if it’s because of intersection designs.

Traffic lights often result in rear-ends (they commonly increase after red light cam installation, though are still safer than the t-bones red light cameras reduce.) Roundabouts, which are more common in Europe, cause these much less, and since you have to slow down to enter one any sort of crashes in one tend to be at slower speeds.


In much of Europe roundabouts are quite uncommon. There's one thing that is ubiquitous in America but not in Europe though: 4-way stop intersections.


Let's say western europe then.


Magstripe is long dead throughout Asia as well. The US (as always) has been behind the curve on this, but contactless became pretty ubiquitous during COVID.


The vast majority of Australia has been inhospitable desert since before the Aboriginals showed up. Trees can only grown on a comparatively narrow stretch of temperate or tropical, mostly coastal land.


Australia's desert would be helping to keep the % a bit lower, globally.


As a reference point for just how expensive, the Caltrain electrification project in SF is currently estimated at $2.44 billion dollars for 82 km of track, and still climbing. And this is for what's almost a best-case infrastructurally: flat land, few bridges or overpasses, etc. (But, admittedly, what just might the world's worst regulatory environment.)


American overinflated public infrastructure estimates aren't very useful for comparisons with Germany however.

With the numbers US planners are spewing out, we'd never have fast train network in Switzerland or high-speed rail across Italy, France or Spain.


$30 million per km (even if double-tracked) is exorbitant and can only be explained through entities who don't care spending Other People's Money.

The UK government estimates £600k/track-km, so even in the US with high wages it should be doable at $2 million/km per track if budgeted carefully...


Wait till you learn about the subways in NYC which they dig for comfortably over a billion dollars per mile...


Midland Main Line in England "cost given as £1.3 billion pounds and also included three station modifications at Leicester, Derby and Sheffield. 422 single track miles of wiring was supposed to occur and a total of 120 bridges modified."

So roughly 340km of double-track for $1.5bn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_Main_Line_railway_upgr...


It would be interesting to know what drives cost gaps versus other jurisdictions.


Machine translation has put a lot of human translators out of work. The per-word rates for text translation are pathetic these days, even for language pairs that Google Translate struggles with.

Of course, there are still some jobs for high-quality/high-importance translation like legal work, simultaneous translation etc, but these are quite niche.


Citation needed for "most". Sure, there are wood stoves in summer cottage saunas and old rural houses, but this is not even close to possible for the average apartment dweller, and many of these apartments rely on district heating (kaukolämpö) to boot.


There's nothing about an average apartment that, given a portable stove (which I said was needed) and some wood (which is literally everywhere), prevents it from being heated in an emergency. What exactly is there to cite?


Wind power is nice, but the key is nuclear power, which covers 35% of Finland's needs already and that number is going to go up once they fully ramp up Olkiluoto 3.

Unfortunately it also took around 17 years to build the thing, so this playbook is not going to be particularly useful to anybody else who needs to wean themselves off Russian energy now.


> ...so this playbook is not going to be particularly useful to anybody else who needs to wean themselves off Russian energy now.

At some point, stubborn commitment to terrible policy can't be recovered from.

But it is nevertheless always a good time to admit wrong and start working to correct mistakes. It would be very wise to admit that the Western powers haven't been seriously focusing on energy security for decades now and that really needs to change. If we want to be in a good spot 17 years from now we need to start ASAP.

And people could probably also get some nuclear plants built in less than 17 years if they demanded that they be an order of magnitude safer than coal plants/gas rather than the absurdist standards that are presently applied.


>> stubborn commitment to terrible policy

Would it be fair to summarise that policy as “bilateral trade will stop countries killing each other”?

>> Western powers haven't been seriously focusing on energy security

By security you mean self sufficiency? The opposite of stopping further world wars by opening global trade?

The idea a world historically proven to relish excuses for killing each other, would have been better served by following the ideals of self sufficiency rather than trade, it just doesn’t really hold up to any inspection. Are there any exceptions to the rule globally that conflict deaths decrease as trade intensity increases?

Almost all dead civilisations share a common marker before their death: greater self sufficiency (and consequently a loss of skills - which was counter intuitive to me but easily researched since it doesn’t appear to be a disputed finding as far as i can see).


> Would it be fair to summarise that policy as “bilateral trade will stop countries killing each other”?

Trade between like-minded nations is awesome; the EU itself largely has its origins in a wish to avoid yet another disastrous world war between Germany and neighbors. And by all accounts it has succeeded in that.

However, becoming critically dependent on a hostile neighbor with imperial ambitions is dumb beyond belief. As we can see in Europe today.

> Almost all dead civilisations share a common marker before their death: greater self sufficiency

If you read e.g. Tainters Collapse (which AFAIK is nowadays the largely accepted explanation of why ancient civilizations collapsed), it's a bit more subtle than that.

(Obviously post-collapse the survivors will go back to a much more self-sufficient way of life.)


>> becoming critically dependent on a hostile neighbor with imperial ambitions is dumb beyond belief

I’m struggling to reconcile that take on events with a desire for thawing hostilities and mutual prosperity. How could you seek to develop and grow mutual prosperity while deliberately holding back local industry so as not to become interdependent?

There’s 2 ways to avoid cognitive dissonance here that i can see:

    1. “Nice doggy but i won’t put down my stick” - you think they’re morons. You say publicaly that Bi-lateral trade will bring us all closer together but privately you tell your industries to reject growth beyond the point where it incurs dependence on Russia and you expect Russia to accept this asymmetry unquestioningly [EDIT: clarity]
    2. Mutual prosperity was never an option, better we had arrived at conflict sooner and never entertained welcoming Russia in to the global economy
If it’s option 2 then we’re back to how do you stop people killing each other then if not through trade?

>> it's a bit more subtle than that

Subtle seems like the wrong choice of word. Complex perhaps? It’s certainly more complex but nothing i said contradicts Tainter’s view.


> I’m struggling to reconcile that take on events with a desire for thawing hostilities and mutual prosperity.

My point is that I think the argument that trade by itself brings about mutual understanding and prosperity is fatally flawed. The West collectively made that mistake with Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We looked through the fingers at all the warning bells that were ringing, well, pretty much since Putin became the leader. Hopefully our leaders have learned the lesson. There must be much more focus on democracy, human rights, and respect for the sovereignty of other countries. Once those basic pieces are in order, we can talk trade. Until that happens I'm perfectly happy with Russia isolated like North Korea.

Peace in Europe can happen when Russia GTFO of Ukraine, not by appeasement and restarting trade as if nothing happened. Currently dropping sanctions would only help Putin rebuild his war machine, leading to more death and suffering of innocents rather than bring about some kind of trade-induced Kumbaya.

> It’s certainly more complex but nothing i said contradicts Tainter’s view.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you but from what you wrote the implication was that civilizations chose to focus on self sufficiency leading to collapse, which really mixes cause and effect and not what Tainter is arguing.


The policy was called "Wandel durch Handel" ie Change trough Trade.


I agree with your broad assessment that the glory days of Hollywood are over, but am not quite as optimistic on the future of Asian cinema.

Chinese media is crippled for the foreseeable future by heavy state censorship, including micromanagement of plotlines: can't do anything that lets the bad guys win or shows the state in a bad light.

I also note you don't include Japan, which is rich and has a population of 100M+, but with the arguable exception of anime has not produced any global blockbusters in decades.


China's movies have peaked in the 90s. Take a director like Zhang Yimou, he hasn't made any decent movies in the las 15 years because of state censorship. None of his best movies could be directed today: To live, Ju Dou, The Story of Qiu Ju or Raise the Red Lantern. The same with Chen Kaige or any of the great directors in Mainland China. Even a relatively recent movie like Beijing bicycle would not be possible today.

Even if a lot of those movies were banned in China on release, there were much less consequences for a director of a banned movie than nowadays.


I miss the Zhang Yimou that directed Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Those were some of my favorite films of that time.


Yes, these were his sellouts, the real bad ones.


Lol yes, I'd say the release of Heroes is precisely when I date Zhang Yimou's fall. The photography and use of colours is great for sure but it's his first movie with a mostly empty story that tries not to ruffle anyone.


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