Most of time it's billed as law enforcement fighting tool. If people can't have anonymous cell phones, once you capture one criminal phone number, you can quickly look at who they call and since they can't be burners, you figure out the criminal network.
Also, if you have restrictions of speech in the country, it's great way to de anonymize any speech government says is illegal.
There a significant difference between "the user can be identified fairly well if you can get access to sensitive stuff" and "the owner is always explicitly recorded in a searchable database".
The free anonymous internet was only ever a ruse to get people to use it so the CIA could spy on them. DARPA, folks, created a “free as in beer” global surveillance network and we all bought it.
Not that we didn’t get anything in return but the idea that the worlds foremost military industrial complex just gave this to the world because they loved us is laughable.
>As in natural selection decided at one point to introduce death. It really is the case that older lifeforms don't die. All mammals do though.
Not weird at all. You sort of need this if evolution is to do its work... otherwise offspring must out-compete its parents and grandparents, who long ago colonized all of the good niches and left nothing for anything else. They'll die eventually, of course, but they'll almost certainly take the entire species with it because they were unadapted for changing conditions. Death is flexibility on an evolutionary timescale, and immortality is rigidity.
>Saying "I have absolute control" is not a justification for making bad decisions that hurt the US.
How is it a bad decision that will hurt the US? Can you make that argument on its merits? No one doubts that there isn't that one genius here or there
Last year, right here on HN I saw a headline where the "powers that be" wanted to increase Canada's population to 100 million (they currently sit at 30ish million). Is that a good decision for Canada? Where the fertility rate is so low population is shrinking? Like, do they need another 65 million people? Are there 65 million jobs going undone in Canada right now? Jobs that desperately need doing? The plan's the same for the United States, even if no one was careless enough to blare a similar headline from trumpets.
It is not racist, but it is true. The Education major is one of the bottom majors, Americans with the lowest grades and lowest SAT scores go on to become public school teachers. and it is well known information among Americans themselves.
The average SAT for Education majors: 1023
It’s ranked 24th, behind Communications (19th), Library Science (13th), and English (11th). The top major: Math.
while foreigners on H1B are top percentile in academic performance and scoring and generally H1B attract top 1% talent from the global talent pool, especially given there are only like 60k visas issued per year.
People who look at the stats objectively should be the first ones to advocate for more H1B teachers, if that meant children would get dramatically better education
It shows revealed preference: all smart people decide to work anywhere but education and public schools are scraping the barrel for talent.
Results you can see with your own eyes. USA had to significantly dumb down SAT, switch to dumbed down “Common Core” curriculum, ditch gifted&talented programs across the board, ditch SAT requirements for college and introduce remedial math at Harvard!!! The creme de la creme of US Education system.
If American teachers were any good, private schools would not be able to charge more than Ivy League tuition for very simple secondary education
This is all consequence of what kind of people decide to become Teachers, and what kind of people decide to become Wall St Traders
In the end this shows up in massive dependence on Foreign talent via H1B visas. US is importing engineers precisely because Americans did not have good STEM teachers who could teach them math and logic in middle school.
In addition to what mbauman said, hair follicles and the hair itself are not single-cell. I can't immediately find the composition and average cell size, but even a long and thick strand of hair is less than 2 orders of magnitude larger than the largest neurons. I doubt any individual hair cell is very large.
>Not really because nearly every adult has a phone with unlimited calling, and will allow you to make a call from their phone. I don't want my kids to be someplace where there are not some responsible adults around (drunk adults are not responsible)
I remember about 10 or 12 years ago, I'd answer every incoming call. Many were wrong numbers (guy who had the phone number before we was, I kid you not, some sort of wine salesman... people were wanting to order crates of wine). But I'd answer. Now, not so much. I get 15 calls a day some days, all are robots. I screen through voicemail transcription most of the time, unless I recognize the number. Blocking does not good. Numbers in my area code mean nothing... a surprising number of robot calls match my own exchange number (why? what's the point?). For 3 weeks a few months ago, one even matched my own phone number but for the last two digits being transposed, but it wouldn't leave a voicemail.
I no longer have the reasonable ability to answer strange phone numbers. If it were just mean, I'd chalk it up to some idiosyncratic neurosis and be quiet, but my own impression is that everyone else is doing the same thing. We not only tore down the old POTS network, we got rid of all the norms around it.
The alternative networks have solved this problem for me. I don’t get spam calls on Signal or WhatsApp though WhatsApp and Telegram do both have a spam text problem.
I also have a phone number from a different area and I blocked that area code and everything near it.
10 years ago I was wondering if things would reach that point. However these days I almost never get junk calls and so I answer the phone again. I guess our experience is different.
I have phone numbers in an area code that just seems to get flooded with spam calls. Even our unpublished numbers get them so it doesn't seem like directed attacks, just broadcast spam.
> a surprising number of robot calls match my own exchange number (why? what's the point?).
The robocallers have found that if the fake caller id given matches the area code and exchange of the number being called, that more of the recipients are willing to answer.
And from a robocaller's perspective, getting folks to answer is critical to being able to transfer them to someone in the scam boiler room for reaping.
The government policy might have caused it, but a reversal of the policy might never fix it. The real world is like that, unfortunately.
Besides, it's not the policy you're thinking of anyway, that causes this specific problem. This specific problem (theft for scrapyard sales) is primarily caused by piss tests. If people supposedly would suck cock for a hit of crack, then they'll also scrub toilets at minimum wage for crack too. But piss tests short circuit that. Here's the problem: the government doesn't mandate pre-employment piss tests. So they can't fix it easily. It would be far harder to convince legislators to prohibit them than it would to convince them to legalize drugs. There is a corporate culture that has gone on nearly 50 years now that has normalized piss tests, and they are true believers in it. They would lobby against prohibiting the tests.
But, even if all that could be done (very doubtful), we've also taught crackheads and tweakers to steal copper wire and whatever else not nailed down. We've taught them to do this for 50 years. Multiple generations of junkies and dope fiends have done this, passing down the knowledge (or what passes for that) of how to steal to feed a drug habit. They aren't going back to scrubbing toilets, even if they would have done that way back if only they hadn't been forced to stop.
>And do you really think there wouldn't be enough food and shelter to go around, if the government decided to get serious about poverty relief?
I think that even without the government getting serious about poverty relief, housing prices are insane and there's not enough to go around. And my grocery bill's not exactly nothing, either. And all for what, even if it did work the way you think it would, I'd get to pay for that welfare so this guy's radio station wasn't held hostage by Rudy's desperate need for bathtub meth? No thanks.
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