That PR article doesn't answer the questions, and raises more:
- Why didn't SPD commission an independent study?
- What kinds of crimes were studied? Is this catching jaywalkers or homicides?
- Only mentions arrests. What about convictions? How are victims receiving justice?
- Where's the data and the reproducible methodology?
- How many people were tracked who didn't commit any crime at all?
There's so much wrong with that article that it's hard to come to any verifiable conclusions about the efficacy of the program. And again, doesn't answer any of the original questions.
> that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains.
It might come as a shock, but there's nothing guaranteeing private movement in public in the US. It is totally legal for people to whip out their phone and start filming you in public. People can set up cameras on their property and film the road outside their house.
In fact, many of the municipalities that have "ditched" still have loads of flock cameras that they cant remove because they're on private property owned by the property owners.
> The Court decided that a person has a “legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements.”
and
> "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere."
In my view, the individual right to document anything one may observe in public is significantly different from tax dollars being spent to record everything that's visible in public, analyze it with AI, and then cross-reference it across an extended period to track the movements of law abiding Americans.
It's unreasonable to think you won't appear in someone's camera lens at any given moment while out in public. It's not at all unreasonable to assume your patterns of life won't be tagged and cataloged for weeks on end, for whatever reason, by a private or public entity.
You're right there's not enough precedent here yet, but we shouldn't let the current precedent of there being almost no regulation on this stuff remain.
Doubt that anyone is concerned with a random person catching a portion of your face while they're taking a picture in public. Instead, it's opposition to being tracked over time by a centralized entity like a private company or government agencies.
The idea is that incurring a few hundred civilians deaths to liberate Iranians from a regime that slaughtered them by the thousands or tens of thousands is a net positive for human life. Of course this only works as a justification if the Iranians actually are liberated front their regime, which I don't think they will.
But the justification, if the liberation actually transpires, is sound. An order of magnitude more French and Dutch died at the hands of Allied bombing and shelling in 1944. I think most agree the the upside of being liberated from Germany makes the Allied landings a net positive, though.
But to reiterate, I really doubt the revolutionary guard is going to lose control of Iran.
The French and Dutch were members of the Allies, with Charles de Gaulle as leader of the Free-French forces and Queen Wilhelmina the head of the Dutch government-in-exile, both in London. Both wanted the allies to get the Germans out of their countries.
There is no government-in-exile calling for the bombing of Iran as a method for liberation.
Just as Laos did not call for the US to drop some 2 million tons on that country - more than were dropped on Japan, Germany and Britain during World War II - resulting in the deaths of over 200,000 people, as part of the US's ineffective attempt to "liberate" North Vietnam.
If killing those kids was instrumental in a greater good, only then is it worth being philosophical about. From what I've seen, they were too eager with the bang bang boom boom to actually double check that it was a valid target.
The ends do alter the acceptability of the means. E.g. if I offered you the means of “pay money to flip coin to make money as many times as possible” and the numbers involved were $50k if heads, lose $1k if tails and $50 buy in that’s way different if the numbers involved were $1k if heads, lose $50k if tails and $500k buy in.
If you can’t alter your reasoning to include outcomes then you will make poorer decisions.
No one wants to liberate Iran. Israel just wants to continue committing genocide and apartheid without any opposition. Iran arms Hezbollah and Hamas, the main forms of Palestinian resistance. The whole point of this operation is to decimate those groups so ethnic cleansing can continue without any resistance. Israel could care less about the Irani people.
You are very naive if you think the IRGC truly killed 10's of thousands of it's own people. Israel openly talks about Mossad organizing and supporting the coup, and good old Donny has admitted they have given weapons to organized resistance.
I estimate that many of the death numbers come from armed resistance being killed by the IRGC, not ordinary peaceful protestors. I also think armed resistance killed many Irani citizens. There is obviously fog of war here. The thousands of deaths were likely inflated and obfuscated.
Look at the coups we have backed in the middle east (including formerly in Iran which is what originally led to the Islamic revolution) -- and you will see a pattern. Both US and Israel provide material support to groups like ISIS or actors like Bin Laden. An Al-Qaeda fighter is literally the head of Syria now thanks to Israel.
I don't love Hamas, IRGC or Hezbollah, I don't like their ideology. But it is myopic to think they exist in a vaccum.
I wouldn't personally do so, but arguably those tens of thousands rest at our feet considering the current government was political blowback from the US and UK regime changing Iran back in the '50s.
It's even less likely to work because Trump has already claimed, publicly, to arming the protestors. That already makes any regime change illegitimate. They're all foreign backed agitators.
This is the view outside of Fairchild AFB, which runs the training course in question.
Wikipedia reports that Spokane has a Mediterranean climate, as does Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad province where this F-15 is reported to have been shot down.
WA has a crazy collection of microclimates. Ho oh rainforest, alpine at the various mountains, Yakima desert, mild and wet near Seattle, dry plains in the east of Cascades, etc.
If this behavior actually is a prevalent issue, then there will be many fines that add up. If Google doesn't rack up many fines, then this problem is evidently rare.
A lot of renewables have intermittent generation. If daytime electricity demand is already saturated, adding more solar panels increases capacity but doesn't increase generation (or to be more specific, it doesn't increase generation that actually fulfills demand).
This doesn’t paint the entire picture. Suicide rates peaked in 1990 and then declined to its lowest point in 2007 from there the rates started rising again.
Like all metrics, they fluctuate over time. But they've remained pretty for decades stable at around 10 per 100k per year. The recent rise doesn't really coincide with social media adoption. By 2008, >80% of teens were using social media. If social media adoption was driving the increase in suicides, we would have started to see a rise in suicides around the early 2000s, reaching it's peak around 2008. But that adoption of social media by teens was coupled with a decrease in suicides. The more recent rise in teen suicides occurred during a period of largely flat teen social media adoption (because nearly 100% of them were already on social media by the end of the 2000s).
This idea of teen suicide painting a clear picture about the impact of social media just isn't borne out by the data. And lastly, people ought to remember that teens have the lowest rate of suicide among any age cohort.
> If social media adoption was driving the increase in suicides, we would have started to see a rise in suicides around the early 2000s, reaching it's peak around 2008.
I think there is a logical fallacy here. Social media has not remained stable since 2008. For one thing, 2008 social media used the chronological timeline. For another, it didn't show "recommended" (or sponsored) content in your feed. There was no TikTok. Facebook was relatively new and MySpace was not even really feed-based as I recall.
Right - but these were also not "hard cut" dates. They are a couple simple examples of the evolution of social media that continued (and continues) to occur.
The platforms continue to optimize for engagement (i.e. addiction.)
Sure, but tutoring involves learning and improving the skills at hand. Meritocracy doesn't mean equal opportunity, it means candidates are evaluated equally without regard to superficial characteristics like appearance. A meritocratic test will award higher scores to test takers that can read and analyze passages faster and solve math problems more reliability. Whether those test takers possess that ability innately, or built up that ability through loads of studying doesn't alter the fact that it's a meritocratic test.
Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training.
Seattle apparently tripled likelihood of perpetrators being identified.
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