American citizens should be shot in the same circumstances any other citizens should be shot, like when all other reasonable countermeasures fail and they are posing a credible treat to other people's lives.
There are two different questions here, which are only tangentially related.
First, are there circumstances in which a citizen could apply lethal force to protect life and limb? Obviously yes; shooting someone trying to light your house on fire is certainly something that is both plausible and plausibly legal.
Second, is it appropriate for the political leader of a nation to imply that people committing a crime will be shot for it on the street? Not "we will deploy the national guard to provide safety and security to the citizens" but "looters will be shot". I think the answer here is obviously no, that is not appropriate.
I'm not going to defend that part of the statement, it was obviously wrong to anyone with more than 2 brain cells if interpreted literally. However the situation has rapidly declined to a state where I personally think the use of non-lethal force is justified, and lethal in the case of an imminent threat (ie. armed and threatening or literally firebomb in hand). A number of dwellings and business have been set on fire, in addition to the police precinct. These are individuals (and some large corporations) that are unrelated, and those taking advantage of the chaos and creating more should be punished appropriately. Obviously appropriate measures do not involve shooting people.
I will also add that this is also a case of tensions boiling over. While that doesn’t justify the arson, meaningful reform to defuse long standing tensions would be a wise move.
I'd also argue the recent pandemic and subsequent crash of the economy has an underplayed role in the riots. When many haven't left their homes (much) in months and have been laid off, it's no surprise they'd be looking for an excuse to get out and focus their energy. People are desperate and stressed and it makes for some abnormal dynamics.
There are better options than killing people. Even shooting legs is better than shooting to kill.
I will never advocate violence on your own citizens because that creates a never ending cycle of violence and vendettas. It’s as stupid and fruitless as populist politics
> Even shooting legs is better than shooting to kill.
No it isn't. Legs are hard to hit compared to center-mass, and the only reason you should be shooting at somebody is if you need to because they are an imminent threat; therefore you should be aiming for a part of the body that you have a higher probability of hitting and that, having been hit, has a higher probability of effectively stopping the threat.
Both the police and the reporters were calm and polite. The police told them they had to clear the street and instead of obeying the order they asked to let them know when they were going to actually walk down the street. Since they refused to obey the order they were detained and escorted out of the way.
Being a reporter does not give you a free pass to disobey orders, specially during situations like that. Being a police offer also does not give you the right to mistreat people of course, but in this video everyone actually behaved very well.
On some level the people involved here were civil, but it seems like a pretty dire problem when the police want to get rid of journalists.
It would be great if the police could figure out how to serve the public in a way where they could be proud of their work and want the journalists to help the world see the good work they're doing.
Of course I agree, but it reminds me of a situation many years back where I live.
There was a big protest and people started throwing rocks at the police, and the media were in the middle of the police at that moment. It actually made the police's response much slower and dangerous because they first protected the media and escorted them out from the protesters range, before charging and arresting people.
I'm sure they have trained some protocol to how to control mobs, and throwing innocent civilians in the mix wrecks the whole thing.
So you're saying if a police officer walks up to you and tells you do to something and you ask 'Why', that's grounds for them arresting you?
Police officers don't have carte blanche to issue orders and force people to comply. We're a nation of laws (supposedly). They were asked to move and they understandably wanted to know where they should move. Then they were arrested.
The grounds to arrest me are me not obeying a direct order, not asking "why".
Police officers have the authority to make quick judgement calls in many situations. Obviously we are all human and I could ask why and try to plead my case, but I should also expect that after some time of non-compliancy I may be detained. The felony is called something like "failure to obey a police officer".
I have never used reddit, and just know that "karma" is a type of points system like here on HN. Could you explain why you personally are interested in accumulating karma by "karmawhoring"?
I ignore the points system in HN too, but I think it's main function is to ban bad actors. So I don't understand on the other hand why someone would accumulate points unless they mean to later spend them on "bad actions".
Karma is a social proof for being able to astroturf and control the narrative. And depending on what group you're a mod in, can provide a great deal of influence and control.
I'm not saying that everyone who seeks high karma scores is like this, but astroturfing PR/advertising firms will pay real hard cash for accounts with an established history of trust from the community. I've read many stories from people who have gotten private messages from such places with an offer to buy their account. Or perhaps, like gallowboob, you want to parlay it into an actual social media gig (UNILAD for him).
I do believe for most people though it's just a sort of fame-seeking thing, for whatever reddit 'fame' is worth.
Uber and it's competitors are "dumping" their services, trying to kill their opponents before they run out of money. When only one survives, they'll raise prices to try to break even.
Platforms win out because of user familiarity, not because they're necessarily the cheapest option.
Uber had and still has a large lead on Lyft. They get free advertising all of the time through the media. How difficult is it to accept that you're not going to be number one in every market (but you'll likely remain number one in most markets), spend money wisely to shore up your position when necessary, and do everything you can to stay profitable?
Let me offer a bit of anecdotal evidence in response. Where I live, there are about 4 major competitors "Uber" services, and everyone that I know that regularly uses them, just uses whatever is cheapest at any given point. Usually it is to do with what campaign or promo code has been given most recently.
My observation is that, yes for the general public there may be only "Uber" or traditional taxis, but those are the people that never use it in the first place.
> Platforms win out because of user familiarity, not because they're necessarily the cheapest option.
Uber is not a platform for the user. It is a service for basic transportation that costs money, and all car hailing apps offer similar enough experiences with different price tags depending on how fast the company is throwing money away.
Their unit economics are fine. They have a gross margin of 6-7% after taking out attributable operating costs (so, IT + customer support + insurance + w/e).
Unless if I'm looking at the wrong numbers, they're literally killing themselves on sales, marketing, and driver incentives.
It's "stupid" that's killing them, not the dynamics of the ride share market.
And when they do raise prices another competitor with loads of VC money will appear, trying to "disrupt" them.
The barrier to entry in ride sharing business is so low it's almost non-existent, which makes the whole strategy pointless, unless they can lobby in Congress for some regulatory framework that would make starting a new ride-sharing business harder.
>unless they can lobby in Congress for some regulatory framework that would make starting a new ride-sharing business harder.
Which would presumably mean they've spent billions to go round and end up exactly where we started? Which is presumably what will happen with a lot of the 'disruptive' companies once public opinion and regulation catches up with them.
You can say that, but then where is another Amazon? People like to say these things are basically zero-friction and completely liquid, but it's not true. If you can kill all the taxis and discourage private vehicle ownership because you control 'Ubering', there will be a profound cultural habit to use YOU, 'Uber', rather than some slightly cheaper replacement.
I don't know if it's worth as many billions as it's cost so far, but it's not nothing. This is being done because a monopoly of this type is NOT so easily busted by some bright spark 'disruptor'. If nothing else, you can spend a few more billions buying whispering campaigns suggesting that the new 'disruptor' is unsafe or tainted, or simply attack them more directly, terrorize their drivers, whatever.
Even without such black tactics the notion of frictionless liquidity in market dynamics is foolish. It doesn't work that way.
That's like saying Facebook shouldn't be profitable because anyone can come up with a social media platform.
There are user costs to switching platforms, even if the platform is a ride sharing app. I get that the friction is less than something like Facebook, but an amount much, much smaller than 23 billion would have been enough to 1.) have the best app on the market and 2.) advertise/discount where necessary to maintain some market share.
If your customers have an unsustainable business model and you have favorable unit economics and a market leading position, you can quite literally sit on your cash flow (good unit economics and low overhead lets you survive market share losses) and wait until everyone else goes out of business.
Facebook has network effects: you use it because all of your friends are using it, making a cost of switching high. In the ride sharing business however, there is zero consumer loyalty - installing a new app in your phone takes one minute. Riders can have multiple apps and order ride in the one that offers best prices, and all the drivers will probably be using multiple apps already.
Also: you don't need to have "the best app in the market", just a reasonably good one. Advertising cost is more of the issue, but you can do that by starting in one local market, get some market share and use it to attract more VC capital.
Isn't the most common way to block "illegal websites" just to block it on the DNS owned by the ISP? (which is the one you will automatically use unless you configure something else). And just making their domain point to some website saying the site is blocked. Afaik this will still work. And the normal workaround of just changing to a different DNS should work aswell.
I don't know about other countries, but this never worked in Kazakhstan. They block whole IP ranges and your traffic silently gets dropped. I'm sure that having a single monopolistic ISP helps with implementing this.
I think that this change would mean that, by default, the DNS server used will be specified by Google/Chrome team. If the DNS server were still my router then there's no point to this really.
> the DNS server used will be specified by Google/Chrome team
I don't think that any oppressive regime is going to have any qualms about routing 8.8.8.8 to its own server, or just blocking it. So you use the national DNS or get nothing.
They have (had?) a requirement to block certain sites (e.g., CP), and their CEOs could be sent to jail if they didn't. So from their perspective, Mozilla was not doing a good thing as it was causing them grief in being able to follow the law:
> for their proposed approach to introduce DNS-over-HTTPS in such a way as to bypass UK filtering obligations and parental controls, undermining internet safety standards in the UK
Blackhole routing. You setup a /dev/null router with BGP and advertise the IPs you want unreachable, and things get dropped at the network edge.
IMHO, DoH will simply have network operators go from having a light touch on the network with DNS filtering, to a much heavier hand with routing and inspection. Because the regimes and laws that are currently in place won't just magically go away. (Thanks Mozilla.)
The intent is that collateral damage from such actions is so enormous that they become unthinkable. "We'll just block all of Cloudflare's IPs" is like "We'll just ban all Chinese products". OK, so now your economy is in ruins, what next?
China's great firewall for example degrades access to some popular web sites, but it doesn't do a lot of IP blackholing because that hurts China more than they'd like.
They don't have to block all of Cloudflare's IPs. First they block 1.1.1.1 so that DoH doesn't work, then they look at" 'nown bad' domains and see to what they resolve to and start with those.
If there's collateral damage to some other sites, then depending on the 'importance' of that they want to block--oh well.
I doubt they would do blackhole routing, they risk blocking IPs from cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP.
Perhaps it's a little naive of me to think that ISP and government would consider that they might block and IP that's only going to do something "illegal" for a short while and the be recycled for something else.
In Turkey, It's DNS + IP blocking. There are rumours for slowing down certain connections, especially social media stuff when something sensational happens.
Correct. However, I believe it's not because the government mandated it. The same website could be blocked differently on different ISPs. For example, when Wikipedia was blocked it was not possible to access it without a VPN from Kablonet but a simple DNS provider change was enough on TurkNET.
The sophisticated one is distributed and also more resilient against workarounds, the powerful one is centralised yet has the ability to process most requests per unit time without visible degradation on connection speed and latency.
Let me just point out that satellites don't necessarily orbit around the world. They can be geostationary, and in fact they usually are I think. That is why you will find most US GPS satellites over the US, most Russian satellites over Russia, etc.
Also, signal disruption is already very common as a necessary precaution at sensitive times and places. I think many military bases and other sensitive places, like the Kremlin, have signal interference so they are very imprecise to target with GPS-guided weapons.
GNSS satellites (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, Beidou, etc) are not in geostationary orbits. Being in a geostationary orbit would put them in fixed "locations" in the sky, making them easily blocked by terrain and entirely unusable at high latitudes.
GPS satellites are in MEO, at ~20 km MSL. Other GNSS satellites use similar orbits.
Why can't you accept that? People change and people can still be afraid that if everyone knew what they did as a teenager they'd be attacked relentlessly. Lying is exactly the correct thing to do when living in an unreasonable world.
Lying because you're afraid of an unreasonable world... That's your argument? Lying because of fear doesn't make it right. I think we fundamentally disagree on values and maturity levels that adults should aspire to.
> Lying is exactly the correct thing to do when living in an unreasonable world.
I suppose this mindset could be an ingredient for a CEO that wins. But there's a difference between forgiveness and credibility of character, and credibility is part of a CEO's job.
What Damien did was drive white supremacists to a synagogue shoot-up, and in the Navy he continued to befriend white supremacists. All these matters affect credibility, and credibility is part of the CEO's job, and hence why Banjo is being distracted right now.
