I think these laws are bizarre morality rituals. Evidence doesn't conclude it has anything to do with public health when you see how vicious alcohol is.
This isn't the smoking gun you think it is though.
Of course Alcohol and Tobacco are high up on the list because they are legal. The percentage of people drinking vs percentage of people doing heroin is not even comparable.
Apparently <0.2% of people in the UK are heroin users. [0].
Apparently above 50% of people in the UK drink once a week or more [1]
What should be surprising is that 0.2% of the population results in the second highest negative impacts on society. Not that something the vast majority partake in causes the most issues, of course it does given the sheer scale of it.
Put simply, imagine if 50% of the UK did Heroin at least once a week, it would be much worse than alcohol usage.
Although much less harmful than smoke, nicotine is still not harmless to the cardiovascular system. If the goal is public health, it makes sense to move the needle a little further and try to keep people off nicotine entirely.
Alcohol is another story, we're not ready to remove that yet.
After alcohol, are we going to stop people from having multiple sexual partners in their lifetime? Because if public health is the goal, that would solve a lot of problems.
It is fine to attempt to improve public health, but not at the cost of giving people a life worth living.
We should ban scrolling social media for people born after a certain date and legally mandate an hour of exercise per day and eating 5 servings of vegetables. If you don't listen, one month in jail. The state has decided that since it pays for your healthcare, it will now tell you how to live your life.
You're making my point by making sweeping deeply personal policy for people without first citing how much less dangerous vaping nicotine is vs using tobacco.
My question is why aren't you or the people making these policies interested? It's consequential stuff done ignorantly and recklessly.
Determine scientifically how dangerous vaping nicotine or THC is before banning it. That's call rational. Not reckless
I wonder what the cost/benefit analysis is for different addressable health outcomes. For example, under this justification could a government mandate a restricted calorie diet or enforce daily resistance training?
There are all kinds of activities/behaviors whose costs are socialized: obesity, driving, sitting around all day/not exercising, living in suburbs, gambling, engaging in sports (broken bones cost society!). That's kind of the point of a society though - to pay for socialized costs. If the goal is to make every individual pay for the consequences of their own decisions what's the point of public healthcare or insurance in general?
Then charge smokers much more for healthcare rather than collectively punishing and discriminatorily reducing the rights of a group of people arbitrarily. Individual freedom and consequences rather than prior restraint.
"It’s not Mildred sitting at a switchboard saying ‘Joe, you go to the corner of 42nd and Broadway,’ no it’s the AI. It’s not that hard given the state of current computing to imagine a system where the targeting grid is quote commanding and control itself.”
“The Population Information System provided four male and four female controls, matched for birth year and municipality of birth for each gender-referred individual. The index date of the gender-referred person was assigned to all controls.”
Obviously the control population can’t also be GR so they’re going to have different experiences, but that’s presumably offset by matching eight to one. After all at the population level you’ll have people with plenty of trauma and illness over 25 years, even if the causes will differ from GR individuals.
And regardless of your feelings on his political positions, in his extremely lengthy time in the House and Senate, he has only gotten three bills he sponsored passed - two renaming post offices, and a VA benefit increase.
Despite having a position of power for a very long time, he has been completely ineffective at wielding that power to achieve any of his goals.
If he was not able to change policy in any way as a Senator, how would he be able to do so as a President?
He can veto a bill then get it overridden. He has already proven 100% he lets the more conservative parts of Congress walk all over him - he can have the best ideas in the world but that won't change a thing.
If you want someone to make people discuss ideas - great, you can be at a think tank. The point of electing someone to political office is to get bills passed, so that things actually change.
Your claim is his acting as a voice for America abroad has not benefited the US?
"Walk all over..." when he is clearly out numbered not just in Congress but by voters. You want him to show up with a flamethrower and show what he's really made of?
You're not at all engaged in a sincere discussion. Coming off like an intentional astroturfer just out to propagate Bernie hate
Don't get me wrong I am not a Bernie Bro. Just aware there is a world outside him working against him this whole time too.
He can do that without being an elected congressman.
If you are elected to congress, your job is to get bills passed.
If you like his politics, there are other people like Elizabeth Warren that have remarkably similar political positions, yet are some of the most highly effective politicians in the sense of enacting policy.
Oh, but she is a woman. So better support Bernie instead.
The conspiracy of people who hate the left are the ones who prop of Bernie, because he is a joke. The more the left supports Bernie, the more people like Warren struggle to get elected, and the authoritarian likes that because Warren is actually a formidable foe, so they want to prop up ineffective people like Bernie instead.
> If you are elected to congress, your job is to get bills passed.
This is a vast oversimplification. Your job is to represent your consistuents. In many cases, this means your job is to stop bills from getting passed, especially in the current political situation.
> The more the left supports Bernie, the more people like Warren struggle to get elected
This is a very strange take. Sanders and Warren are mostly close allies and rarely compete. Both are successfully elected Senators, from separate states. Warren declined to run for President in 2016 and appeared to be supporting Sanders. In 2020 they both ran for President, but guess what, neither one of them won the Democratic nomination. In any case, it's important to recognize that elections are popularity contests and not competency tests, as should be obvious from our current President.
The issue is not even "the left." Sanders is more popular than Warren, indeed more popular than almost any politician of any party (including male politicians, if you insist on making this about gender), among political independents. Because of his popularity among independents, he's the most popular politician in the US and would have a better chance of winning the Presidency than any Democrat (of any gender), but the Democrats nonetheless refuse to nominate him. If Warren were equally popular among independents, then Democrats should nominate her, but she's not. Of course this lack of popularity among independents is not specific to Warren: most non-Democrats dislike Democrats.
In 2016, Sanders put up an unexpectedly stiff challenge to Clinton, who was considered an overwhelming frontrunner at the beginning of the race. The natural next step for the left would be to build on that momentum and push Sanders over the top in 2020. In my opinion, it's quite delusional to expect that the left would for some bizarre reason abandon Sanders in 2020 and throw their support behind Warren instead. That would make little sense. Why start over from scratch? In any case, I doubt that Warren would have fared better. The establishment doesn't want a leftist, no matter who, and they quickly conspired to consolidate around Biden, who didn't even pick Warren as his running mate.
True. Maybe Ro Khanna/Massie. Honestly those good tickets have minimal support. People don't pay attention enough. Will get more establishment figures. Probably Rubio vs Newsom. No reason to vote then.
If you think the democrats and the republicans are equivalent you are purposefully ignorant.
We are getting what would be admin ending scandals every other day for over a year and actual Americans are being killed because of their poor governance.
Goddamned Americans had it too easy for too long an forgot how much infrastructure and planning goes into running a superpower.
It is not possible to eye roll hard enough at this.
In the US (and to a lesser extent, the UK), you vote for whichever you believe to be the least bad candidate, or tactically for whoever will keep whoever you believe to be the most bad candidate out of office.
It is exceptionally uncommon that you get to vote for someone rather than against.
IMO voting tactically makes about as much sense as choosing lottery numbers tactically. Perhaps it makes less sense, because people do actually win the lottery. Unless you are a Supreme Court Justice, the odds that your vote will change the election outcome are practically nil.
It's a bit odd to believe that you can't change who the candidates are, but you can nonetheless change which candidate wins. In fact, you can't do either. Collectively, we determine both, but each voter is only a grain of sand in the collective heap.
Tactical voting is far more important in the UK, where there are typically more than two candidates to vote for in any given seat, the government is not directly elected and most candidates are not selected in primaries.
It's _incredibly_ common there to vote to unseat the current government, or avoid splitting the vote on one side of the spectrum or the other. For example, I personally voted for a candidate I had almost no agreement with because they were most likely to unseat someone who supported Brexit. And it worked.
> I personally voted for a candidate I had almost no agreement with because they were most likely to unseat someone who supported Brexit. And it worked.
Are you attributing the electoral result to your individual action?
Yes - and to action the other thousand or so who made the difference between a win and a lose.
Of course, I understand what your are clumsily and nihilistically trying to suggest, so here’s at least one example of an election won and lost by a single vote [1]. This is not the only one, naturally.
> and to action the other thousand or so who made the difference between a win and a lose.
That's my point. You have no control over those other thousand people. Even if you hadn't voted, or had voted the opposite, it wouldn't have changed the outcome.
I would love to be able to make a difference, or perhaps just to believe that I could make a difference. Unfortunately, I've learned the hard way that I can't.
It's crucial to note, moreover, that determining the winner of an election is not the same as determining the winner's behavior in office. There's no evidence that the voters want FISA extended. But the military-industrial complex does, and it has the money to buy whoever happens to win. Somehow the damn thing keeps getting extended no matter who is in power.
> here’s at least one example of an election won and lost by a single vote
I don't deny that occasionally a small, local election is determined by a single vote. However, the topic of this submission is the US Congress. I found no Congressional elections decided by one vote over the past 100 years. That circumstance was more common (though still unlikely) in the distant past when the population was much smaller.
In 1974, the US Senate election in New Hampshire (one of the smallest states by poulation) had a margin of 2 votes after the second recount, though the initial count was 355 and the first recount 10. This election was disputed and was eventually decided by a subsequent special election, with a margin of 27,000.
In 1984, the US House election in Indiana's 8th District also had multiple recounts, the latest—controversial, partisan, dubious—having a margin of only 4 votes.
In 2020, the US House election in Iowa's 2nd District again had multiple recounts, the latest having a margin of only 6 votes. This result was contested on claims of counting errors, but the contest was denied.
As with the 2000 US Presidential election, whenever the count is very close, the results are usually decided politically (e.g., Bush v. Gore) rather than by the voters. Perhaps they can count votes more accurately in the UK.
> However, the topic of this submission is the US Congress.
The topic of the comment was about not voting because you think it makes no difference. If everyone develops that mentality, no-one will vote and elections will be decided only by the most extreme people. For those who do not believe tactical voting is not a thing in the US or is "stupid", look no further than the recent Texas Democratic primary, where selecting the best _candidate_ (rather than the person who might be closer to the ideals of many voters when in office) was achieved via exactly that means.
> Perhaps they can count votes more accurately in the UK.
There are no voting machines, everything is done by hand, under the strict observance of the campaign teams for each candidate. Every non-obvious vote is presented to all candidates teams with a proposed disposition. There are, to a first approximation, never allegations of process issues, because they would be so absurd on their face.
> The topic of the comment was about not voting because you think it makes no difference.
Not exactly. The "No reason to vote then" commenter was referring to a hypothetical Rubio vs. Newsom contest, whereas they expressed some enthusiasm for Ro Khanna and/or Thomas Massie. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47809316
In other words, the commenter wants to vote for someone they perceive as good, not for someone they perceive as only the lesser of two evils.
And I believe this attitude is not at all tactical. They aren't saying, "I'll only vote for Khanna to prevent him from losing by one vote." The margin doesn't even matter if there's someone good to vote for.
> If everyone develops that mentality, no-one will vote and elections will be decided only by the most extreme people.
If everyone develops the mentality of not voting for the lesser evil, then evil candidates will receive no votes, which would be a good outcome.
> For those who do not believe tactical voting is not a thing in the US or is "stupid"
What do you mean by "not a thing"? Of course people vote tactically. People say they vote tactically, and I believe them. What I dispute is the effectiveness of it.
I wouldn't say that tactical voting is "stupid" per se. What I think is that tactical voting is not somehow mandatory or uniquely rational. I wouldn't chastise people for voting their conscience and refusing to give in to "lesser evil" calculations.
Let me put it this way: if, as some argue, the only rational choice is to vote for a duopolist candidate, no matter how bad, as long as one dupolist is less bad than the other, then we are doomed to the same duopoly until humanity becomes extinct (which I would say is sooner with the duopoly in place), and the duopolists are destined to get worse, more evil over time, because there is no incentive for politicians not to be evil in a lesser evil voting situation.
I'm sorry to be slightly off topic but since it's ChatGPT, anyone else find it annoying to read what the bot is thinking while it thinks? For some reason I don't want to see how the sausage is being made.
The macOS app version of Codex I have doesn't show reasoning summaries, just simply 'Thinking'.
Reasoning deltas add additional traffic, especially if running many subagents etc. So on large scale, those deltas maybe are just dropped somewhere.
Saying that, sometimes the GPT reasoning summary is funny to read, in particular when it's working through a large task.
Also, the summaries can reveal real issues with logic in prompts and tool descriptions+configuration, so it allowing debugging.
i.e. "User asked me to do X, system instructions say do Y, tool says Z which is different to what everyone else wants. I am rather confused here! Lets just assume..."
It has previously allowed me to adjust prompts, etc.
These small annoyances just keep adding up. The result, a less happy population which most likely correlates with a lower life expectancy. It's also just less and less human agency. My cars software is going to monitor and manage my behavior? Seems maddening.
There has always been a subset of highly technical people in the software world who are anti-organic. They dislike the "meatspace" and humans and relate more with machines and software.
Yeah, that was what I was refering to, no the specific part of the article. I've seen it much more here recently. Kind of disgusting and sad, but on the other hand it's good if people show their real face that way.
I sort of agree with the premise of the article. I ask myself, did more non-technical people pick up AI chat bots when they were invented than picked up personal computers in the late 70s/early 80's? I think probably. From my conversations with others.
The very first personal computers came out in 1972. In 1978, we got several. The PC came out in 1981. The computer boom didn't begin until 1992.
My wife is absolutely not technical, and she began using ChatGPT before me.
This is to say, I believe you to be correct here. The LLM adoption rate is many times the computer adoption rate. Non-technical people are immediately seeing the benefit of LLMs where they did not with computers in the 1970s.
Part of this is because we aren’t paying the actual cost of these chatbots. If ChatGPT wasn’t essentially free for casual users then we’d definitely see a much smaller/slower adoption rate. I wonder if a single person using them, even paying for tokens, isn’t substantially subsidized. Probably not but I’m speculating.
If 3D printers could’ve given usage away for years directly in our homes then I bet we would’ve seen wider adoption there too.
I get this may seem nitpicky but that is by definition not free, and good luck running even the lightest LLM’s on 8gb ram consumer hardware. 16gb is barely sufficient and you probably need a new MacBook to really stretch that.
People aren’t going to wait minutes per response for clearly inferior results compared to what they get for free on ChatGPT in browser in seconds, whether it’s logical or not. Not to mention they can’t ask more than a few questions tops before the whole thing crumbles. Expectations and reality are too far apart here.
Let’s also address another real issue: what are they going to use? LM studio? Is that really a user experience most will tolerate?
But certainly indirectly with cash. All the advertised products are more expensive than they could be, due to the costs of advertising. This comes out of everyone's pocket.
1. Alcohol 2. Heroin 3. Crack Cocaine 4. Cocaine 5. Tobacco
I think these laws are bizarre morality rituals. Evidence doesn't conclude it has anything to do with public health when you see how vicious alcohol is.
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