While I don't think they're right that Iran is ignored because Iranian protesters and the Iranian government are both perceived as white by Americans (or both non-white, depending on the person), it's undeniable that they use the perceived non-whiteness of Palestinians and perceived whiteness of Israelis as rhetorical ammunition.
This rhetorical device is a rather effective as Americans have a tendency to view everything through their own lens of "race"/color so casting the conflict as white people oppressing non-white people because they are non-white is a powerful argument that is easily understood by Americans.
That said, personally, I think Iran is ignored more because Palestine is sucking all the air out of the room than anything else, especially with all the graphic videos/photos. Sudan on the other hand... there's really no excuse for ignoring that.
>Personally, I think Iran is ignored more because Palestine is sucking all the air out of the room than anything else, especially with all the graphic videos/photos.
>Sudan on the other hand... there's really no excuse for ignoring that.
Palestine has the focus because America tax dollars most directly fuel the conflict and it is the most one-sided.
Iran is an internal conflict and Sudan is a civil war - neither of which are as directly funded by the US. Also neither has a perceived clear solution. In the case of Israel, the US should have significant leverage that it does not have in those other conflicts.
Definitions of race are very culturally dependent. A few decades ago South Asians were regarded as caucasian (I have an American encyclopedia published in the 1950s that says so), a century earlier so were some East Africans (Somalis IIRC). The current western definition of white does not include them.
Similarly the current American definition of black includes people most of the rest of the world would not consider black - we sometimes have to be told that some people identify as "black" (what Americans call passing as white).
Yeah of course none of this makes sense. And yet it all has real world consequences. It's all incredibly partisan. If one just manages to take a step back and watch this dynamic from outside it all seems so weird: the islamist Iran backs Hamas, Hamas are Palestinians, Palestinians are victimized by Jews, Jews have money, capitalists have money, america is capitalist, america is imperialist, ergo .... Islamist Iran is against capitalist imperialism. The protests are against islamist Iran ergo they are against the fight against capitalist imperialism and thus they don't deserve solidarity, or something like this.
I would really love to hear from somebody who is not supporting the Iran protests to honestly tell me if I misrepresented their position and in which way
The solution is to anonymize all data at the source, i.e. use a unique randomized ID as the key instead of someone's name/SSN. Then the medical provider would store the UID->name mapping in a separate, easily secured (and ideally air-gapped) system, for the few times it was necessary to use.
What a silly idea. That would completely prevent federally mandated interoperability APIs from working. While privacy breaches are obviously a problem, most consumers don't want care quality and coordination harmed just for the sake of a minor security improvement.
33 bits is all that are required to individually identify any person on Earth.
If you'd like to extend that to the 420 billion or so who've lived since 1800, that extends to 39 bits, still a trivially small amount.
Every bit[1] of leaked data bisects that set in half, and simply anonymising IDs does virtually nothing of itself to obscure identity. Such critical medical and billing data as date of birth and postal code are themselves sufficient to narrow things down remarkably, let alone a specific set of diagnoses, procedures, providers, and medications. Much as browser fingerprints are often unique or nearly so without any universal identifier so are medical histories.
I'm personally aware of diagnostic and procedure codes being used to identify "anonymised" patients across multiple datasets dating to the early 1990s, and of research into de-anonymisation in Australia as of the mid-to-late 1990s. Australia publishes anonymisation and privacy guidelines, e.g.:
"Data De‑identification in Australia: Essential Compliance Guide"
It's not merely sufficient to substitute an alternative primary key, but also to fuzz data, including birthdates, addresses, diagnostic and procedure codes, treatment dates, etc., etc., all of which both reduces clinical value of the data and is difficult to do sufficiently.
________________________________
Notes:
1. In the "binary digit" sense, not in the colloquial "small increment" sense.
>the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.
You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).
Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
> Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
Because vaccines aren't all that profitable compared to other pharmaceuticals but produce disproportionate public good.
The paper couldn't make it through peer review because of methodology errors.
Specifically, the sample groups had vastly different demographics and sizes which make meaningful comparisons between them impossible due to confounding factors.
This wasn't some secret CDC plot to bury research. The CDC wasn't even involved. This was just poor research.
It's not just a currency issue; inflation is by definition a reduction in the purchasing power of a fixed wage, and the issue we're facing is that the purchasing power of people's wages is less. If their wages were denominated in a unit of account that wasn't continuously losing value, they wouldn't be continuously losing purchasing power.
The reason you may not know it's an issue is because inflation in our current system isn't just a loss of purchasing power, it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money: the banking/financial system. So of course the system invested a lot of money, time and effort in convincing you that it's a good thing to continuously donate a fraction of your purchasing power to the finance industry every year.
The first paragraph is doing a tricky little sleight of hand. Yeah inflation reduces the power of a fixed wage. Nobody has that kind of fixed wage. The issues with wages and prices we face are not caused by inflation, which is really easy to compensate for.
The second part is just confusing. Inflation benefits the first to "receive/spend" new money? Receiving and spending are opposites, and inflation benefits anyone that's spending whether they got that money first or fiftieth.
>I don't see any positive outcome for the west in general. Europe in particular is screwed but besides short-term gains I don't think the US is going to be able to sustain anything but very fragile and transactional alliances, if any.
Europe became the forefront of human civilization, the home of the renaissance and the industrial revolution, because of internal competition between states (as opposed to the large centralized autocracies of Asia and the Middle East). In the long term more competition will ultimately be a good thing for Europe, forcing it to stop resting on its laurels, to start innovating and growing again.
>Markets also cannot account for externalities. If those externalities are something you care about (e.g. the environment you live in) - you need regulation.
Markets account for externalities via ownership and torts. This was gutted in the 1800s in the US where a judge ruled people couldn't sue for the impact of environmental pollution, in the name of the "greater good" of industrialization.
I'd disagree with the framing of this: The ownership and torts _were_ the regulation. I'm using a narrow definition of "market" that really only concerns supply and demand (because this is what "free market" ideals all revolve around).
>The events of the past 12 months, culminating in Venezuela and now Greenland, has made me reevaluate a lot of my beliefs about unimpeded competition between free agents (i.e. a free market) leading to the best and most peaceful outcomes.
What have markets got to do with it? For as long as humans have been recording history, states have been annexing weaker states, regardless of economic system. It's absurd to blame free markets for this.
They led to the rise of powerful oligarchs who now very obviously steer the country (and the world) in a violent direction that I don't believe benefits many, except themselves of course.
>and because immigration is what has delayed our demographic inversion that Europe and other developed nations are going through
The birthrate among the most conservative Americans is still over 2.0. From the perspective of the conservative movement in power, it makes sense to halt immigration so the population becomes more and more conservative over time (as immigrants are left-leaning on average, especially Indians).
Only a special group of conservatives largely in Utah have the ambition and brains to do much tech work. The rest aren’t very promising, and with the current birth rate, future tech jobs will mostly not get done and the work will move abroad.
Indians and even Chinese, not to mention most of the non-European immigrants, are relatively conservative (socially reserved, self reliant, lots of self responsibility) and are only seen as left leaning in the toxic form of nationalistic conservatism that dominates the USA.
I agree, but none of this is incompatible with what you replied to.
I have no idea if their claim that the "birthrate among the most conservative Americans is still over 2.0" is correct, but a demographic power struggle totally fits the rhetoric I observe from abroad.
They should learn to code, but as long as they believe math is some sort of conspiracy, they can’t. And it’s worse as they push their kids into the trades and into mining jobs that should go away, there simply won’t be an improvement quality if life.
Why do you think Utah is the richest red state? Mormon religion doesn’t see math/ science to conflict with faith for some reason, you will see a lot of Mormon programmers especially out here in the west. But the same isn’t true for the rest of red state America. Better yet, compare with China: China is a conservative country, but they believe in education. We simply don’t have that advantage in general.
Nobody says math is a conspiracy, except maybe the far left educators who think math is some kind of racist white supremacy. That's a ridiculous straw man.
> China is a conservative country but they believe in education
China is a communist country that banned private tutoring because some children were getting ahead, creating inequality (the "double reduction" policy).
China is less communist than America these days. And even if they were bonafide communists, that has no real relation to conservative values.
When you give American conservatives actual numbers on the economy, weather, healthcare, they assert that they would much rather go with what they think is true vs what actually is true. They simply don’t believe in data and math, you aren’t going to advance much in tech that way.
The Chinese economy is far more heavily planned than America's is, and they are far more totalitarian. There is no meaningful way you can claim America is more communist than China. China is less communist than under Mao, for sure, but it must still be kept in perspective.
You are conflating "government data" with "math" as if they're the same thing. That's a massive error and suggests you should fix your own understandings before attacking other people's. Someone saying they don't trust the government to report honest/accurate numbers doesn't mean they think math is a conspiracy, and it's a ridiculous distortion to present it like that. In fact, it's exactly that kind of behavior that causes conservatives to not trust leftists (and by extension the government departments most full of them).
ChatGPT usage is becoming common, so naturally more of the ~1500 annual US murder-suicides that occur will be committed by ChatGPT users who discussed their plans with it. There's no statistically significant evidence of ChatGPT increasing the number of suicides or murder-suicides beyond what it was previously.
Smoking doesn't cause cancer either. It's just a coincidence the people w/ lung cancer tend to also be smokers. You can not prove causation one way or the other. While I am on the topic, I should also mention that capitalism is the best system ever devised to create wealth & prosperity for everyone. Just look at all the tobacco flavors you can buy as evidence.
Are you really trying to parlay the common refrain around correlation and causation not being the same into a statement that no correlation is the same as correlation?
GP asserted that there is no correlation between ChatGPT usage and suicides (true or not, I do not know). This is not a statement about causation. It’s specifically a statement that the correlation itself does not exist. This is absolutely not the case for smoking and cancer, where even if we wanted to pretend that the relationship wasn’t causal, the two are definitely correlated.
How many more cases will be sufficient for OP to conclude that gaslighting users & encouraging their paranoid delusions is detrimental for their mental health? Let us put the issue of murders & suicides caused by these chat bots to the side for a second & simply consider the fact that a significant segment of their user base is convinced these things are conscious & capable of sentience.
> the fact that a significant segment of their user base is convinced these things are conscious & capable of sentience.
Is this a fact? There’s a lot of hype about “AI psychosis” and similar but I haven’t seen any meaningful evidence of this yet. It’s a few anecdotes and honestly seems more like a moral panic than a legitimate conversation about real dangers so far.
I grew up in peak D.A.R.E. where I was told repeatedly by authority figures that people who take drugs almost inevitably turn to violence and frequently succumb to psychotic episodes. Turns out that some addicts do turn to violence and extremely heavy usage of some drugs can indeed trigger psychosis, but this is very fringe relative to the actual huge amount of people who use illicit drugs.
I can absolutely believe that chatbots are bad for the mental health of people already experiencing significant psychotic or paranoid symptoms. I have no idea how common this is or how outcomes are affected by chatbot usage. Nor do I have any clue what to do about it if it is an issue that needs addressing.
> Nor do I have any clue what to do about it if it is an issue that needs addressing.
What happened with cigarettes? Same must happen with chat bots. There must be a prominent & visible warning about the fact that chat bots are nothing more than Markov chains, they are not sentient, they are not conscious, & are not capable of providing psychological guidance & advice to anyone, let alone those who might be susceptible to paranoid delusions & suggestions. Once that's done the companies can be held liable for promising what they can't deliver & their representatives can be fined for doing the same thing across various media platforms & in their marketing.
We established a comprehensive set of data that established correlation with a huge number of illnesses including lung cancer, to the point that nearly all qualified medical professionals agreed the relationship was causal.
> There must be a prominent & visible warning
I have no problem with that. I’m a little surprised that ChatGPT et al don’t put some notice at the start of every new chat, purely as a CYA.
I’m not sure exactly what that warning should say, and I don’t think I’d put what you proposed, but I would be on board with warnings.
That's just the thing though. OpenAI and the LLM industry generally are pushing so hard against any kind of regulation that the likelihood of this happening is definitely lower than the percentage of ChatGPT users in psychosis.
Ah yes, let's run a statistical study: give some mentally unstable people ChatGPT and others not, and see if more murder-suicides occur in the treatment group.
Oh you mean a correlation study? Well now we can just argue nonstop about reproducibility and confounding variables and sample sizes. After all, we can't get a high power statistical test without enough people committing murder-suicides!
Or maybe we can decide what kind of society we want to live in without forcing everything into the narrow band of questions that statistics is good at answering.
I would rather live in a society where slow, deliberative decisions are made based on hard data rather than one where hasty, reactive decisions are made based on moral panics driven by people trying to push their own preferred narratives.
LLMs are going to be a goldmine for lawyers. There's always a constant background rate of people doing crazy things, but now with the popularity of ChatGPT a decent fraction of those people will be users, so the lawyers will have someone to blame and sue.
But the Iranians are white. The name Iran is literally derived from "Aryan".
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