Sounds like we need a community-owned website (like Wikipedia) that tracks crime stats and allows people to enter their own incident reports, to see if certain municipalities are under-reporting their crimes.
Newark is majority black; I was just there for something and I stuck out like a sore thumb downtown. I wouldn't feel comfortable there at night. But the part that kinda disproves you is the rape stats: Newark is near the top for murders, but it's near the bottom for rapes. The top 6 cities for rapes (per capita of course) are Minneapolis, Anchorage, Cleveland, CO Springs, Tulsa, and Lincoln NE. I'm pretty sure 5 of those 6 have very few black people: Lincoln is 86% white and only 3.8% black. Tulsa has more blacks at 15.6%, but still nowhere near a majority. Cleveland is majority black at 53.3% (and 37.3% white), but it's the exception here. Anchorage is 5.6% black (actually higher than I expected), Minneapolis 18.6%, and CO Springs 6.3% (78.8% white). So it appears from this list that cities with lots of white people are the ones where you're more likely to get raped, though perhaps you're less likely to be murdered.
BTW, Newark is 52.4% black, and only 11.6% non-Hispanic white (and 33.8% Hispanic of any race). What'd be really interesting is to see who actually commits the most of each type of crime, in every metro area, since it isn't necessarily the majority group that commits the majority of any particular crime. But still, it does appear that there is no correlation between black concentration in a city and its standing in the rape rankings, which I find quite interesting. (And before you think of it, it doesn't correlate to how many Hispanics there are either; the cities with tons of Hispanics like Miami, San Diego, LA, and El Paso are pretty low in the rape rankings.)
Interesting. But isn't CO Springs also a tech hub? (Not saying that tech hubs are rape-fests; San Jose, Seattle, Portland, Austin, and SanFran are much farther down in the rape rankings.) And what about Lincoln NE?
Also interesting is that Newark NJ (which I happen to live not far from) is near the top of the murder stats, but it's near the bottom of the rape stats, right next to Plano and Seattle. Same goes for New Orleans; it's #2 in murders, but it's only in the middle for rapes (and if you look at the numbers, only a little over 1/3 as many rapes per capita as the rape capitals Minneapolis and Anchorage). I guess poor black people just aren't that interested in rape compared to poor white people.
Being tall has advantages and disadvantages, you might not fit well in a cheaper small car and have to pay more for a bigger car with more legroom.
Wrong. This used to be true back in the 80s, when many cars really were pretty small, but these days even economy cars are generally well-designed for legroom and can fit taller passengers/drivers. There might be a few crappily-designed cars still out there, but you don't need to go to a bigger car for more legroom, just a better car. I'm over 6' with long legs, and I've tried out various lower-end cars in recent years with no issues at all. Back in the 80s and 90s, however, I had a lot of problems with various cars, including a giant Caprice Classic I had to ride in once in the front passenger seat, as well as the C4 Corvette where I couldn't fit in the driver's seat comfortably. My experience (back then) was generally that American cars were terrible for legroom. But all the rental cars (American & Japanese) I've driven in the last 5 years have been just fine.
No, it's not decreasing. Ask anyone in Detroit or St. Louis.
Yes, nationwide, on average, it is decreasing. Not everywhere. Cities with strong economies do enjoy reducing crime rates, such as NYC. Detroit is not like NYC.
The real problem is poverty and a ruined economy, coupled with high density. Rural areas with poverty don't have the crime levels that Detroit does.
Violent crime is down on average, yes, but that doesn't mean that it's down everywhere. Detroit and St. Louis are still extremely dangerous cities to visit, and probably even more dangerous than they were 30-50 years ago. Yes, other places are a lot safer (like Manhattan; it was a pit in the 80s, but now is extremely safe), but there's still plenty of extremely dangerous cities, especially in the Rust Belt.
Depends on the city. Some cities are very safe, others are not. Manhattan is very safe generally, other parts of NYC (like the Bronx) are less so. St. Louis, Oakland, and Detroit are the most dangerous cities, while Plano, Virginia Beach, and Henderson have very low violent crime rates.
There's a lot of interesting info in that link. For instance, WTF is going on in Colorado Springs? It's one of the safest cities for murder, however it's one of the most dangerous cities for rape. Same goes for Anchorage, though maybe that has something to do with Alaska's highly skewed male/female ratio. Lincoln NE is also the same.
Anyway, aside from some oddities like that, if you look through the rankings for various crime categories, you'll generally see the same cities topping the charts for crime: St. Louis, Oakland, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, Toledo, Newark NJ, Atlanta, etc. The common factor in all these is poverty: these cities have terrible economies, their industries left decades ago, they're just burned-out shells really and all the people who could afford to leave have left. Some of them do have some industry still left (Atlanta is home to CNN, Newark has some financial industry that spilled over from Manhattan and Jersey City in search of cheaper real estate), but not nearly enough to keep the economy in good shape. The cities that are the safest are either bedroom communities (like Henderson NV) for nearby larger cities (Las Vegas in that case) (Jersey City is like this too, a lot of Manhattanites have moved there in search of cheaper rent), tourist destinations (VA Beach), or have strong economies due to strong industries (San Jose, Portland, Seattle, with tech industry). However, many of the safest cities are smaller cities with less than 500k people, like Plano, Lexington KY, Fort Wayne IN, Lincoln NE, and Mobile AL, which would lend support to the idea that higher density creates more crime.
Unless you fly a lot, how exactly are you supposed to know whether you'll fit comfortably into a seat or not? It's not like they have some seats set up in the airport that you can try sitting in to see if your knees will fit or not; you just have to wait until you get on and are stuck there before you find out you don't physically fit when the asshole in front of you decides to recline.
Stallman's a bit of an extremist, and wants all software to be open-source. Remember, it all goes back to when he was trying to get a printer working, and couldn't because the driver was closed-source. That's why he invented the GPL, which just requires you to make source available to anyone whom you distribute software to.
But you're right: some parts are far more important than others. The platform being open-source is much, much more important than any high-level application being open-source. When the platform is closed and proprietary, you have all kinds of problems: you're locked in by the vendor, it's harder to write and debug applications, the platform vendor can have secret APIs to give them an advantage over third-party application vendors (we saw this with MS many times), you're stuck with drivers that vendors provide you and can't upgrade your platform software if the driver providers don't want you to (we've seen this with Windows upgrades, where older but perfectly functional hardware can't be used because the HW vendors didn't feel like updating their drivers for the new OS, since they want you to buy new HW), etc. Whereas if some random application is closed-source and proprietary, that doesn't affect anything at all except that one application.
>If the purpose is to give people a useful / fun / powerful / cheap piece of software, it is a strength.
It's a strength, but it doesn't do that much good if no one except a few statistical outliers actually bother to use it, and 99.9% of people prefer to genuflect and empty their bank accounts.
Say what you will, but the middle class needs work. We need something for the vast majority of people who aren't scientists, engineers or politicians to do.
Oh please. We can just put everyone to work in retail sales and real estate. We'll all get rich selling houses to each other!
Factories need industrial engineers, not just assembly-line workers. No, you don't need a ton of IEs to run a factory, but still, there's some there. You also need engineers to do the design, testing, etc. (though some of that may be at their main location in California).
110V is annoying to work with because it has so many restrictions. It's no safer than 230V and coupled with more lax wiring regulations you have a much higher rate of electrocutions in the USA than in the EU.
Correlation =/= causation. The higher electrocution rate is probably just because Americans are stupider than Europeans....
More seriously, I imagine electrocutions have fallen greatly with the mandating of GFCI outlets in bathrooms and kitchens, with the problem being that only new construction has these unless someone has gone to the trouble of retrofitting them in older homes. Perhaps in the EU they were more aggressive about getting these upgraded. In the US, it's basically impossible to force people to upgrade anything; you can probably still legally use knob-and-tube wiring if that's what your house came with.
It's also substantially more labour cost to install, test and maintain.
I don't know about your house, but I've never, ever, ever had to do "maintenance" on house wiring. It usually stays in there for decades without being touched.
FWIW, the wiring in your "high power" circuits is much heavier than is used in most european circuits
Yes, but not only that, it's usually aluminum wire.
>f special tools mean making your own OBDII cable, and loading one of the dozen or more software packages onto a PC or laptop to interface with the onboard computer..
You can probably buy the appropriate OBDII cable, but what software packages are you talking about? This probably varies enormously by automaker. Doing anything advanced on my Volvo requires buying a "VIDA" unit; you can get Chinese-made clones for $150-200 on Ebay, but there's still a bunch of procedures and updates that seem to require an online account with Volvo which costs a fortune.
>No I think it's a strength. When MS forced Me, vista, Win8 on it, we recoiled and puked, but some people were forced to use it because they lacked options.
And did that cause Microsoft to lose their desktop monopoly? Nope. People kept using it anyway, despite the puking. The only thing that's put a dent in MS's desktop market is MacOS, which is basically the same thing (single-source, proprietary) only worse, and the iPad (also single-source and proprietary).
>For people getting work done, we need choices, we're willing to suffer a little to avoid suffering a lot.
Apparently, most people are perfectly happy funneling their money to MS and Apple, because those two have been highly successful with the consumer markets, while Linux has not. Regular consumers do NOT want choices; they want to be told what to do and buy.
You're wrong about that. There's lots of Gnome3 users. I see them in message forums all over, like/r/linux, and of course/r/gnome. Of course, I can't explain why anyone would want to use it, but there really are a lot of people who do. Similarly, there's a lot of people who use and like Windows8/Metro, despite the fact that it's total crap.
>Ignoring the very real problem that putting so damn much in PID 1 is dangerous for system stability and security,
From what I've read, this isn't true, but I don't have an authoritative source for it. But, here's the really dumb part of your response:
>Last, the dependency system absolutely screams for a GUI interface to be able to follow and configure it, but when one finally is created (if it hasn't been already), it'll be useless on servers, because nobody with brains installs a GUI on the server.
Maybe you haven't heard of the X Window System, introduced over 25 years ago. It allows you to run graphical applications remotely, so the system with the application does not need a GUI at all.
Teslas, from what I've read, are pretty open compared to other carmakers. You can connect an Ethernet cable to them and access the main computer's Linux prompt pretty easily. Most other makes require special tools to do anything at all involving the computer.
It's worked fine for me for 16 years (mine was the very first model, not the later touchscreen models), except for the big mold issue (which after a couple years they did a factory recall and sent a technician to my place to install a bunch of new, redesigned parts in the door and front area), and the water pump failed a couple years ago which I replaced myself. There haven't been any electronic issues. I have read of some people having problems with the wax motor (the thing that controls the door locking) control circuit.
It can be very hard to get a new programming job if you haven't been doing it for a while. It doesn't matter how competent you are or if the language hasn't changed in 20 years. Many companies outright refuse to interview someone if they've been unemployed for more than 6 months.
So how do the Europeans do it? Just look at how cheap and high-quality cellphone and ISP service are in western European countries. Government regulation seems to work pretty decently over there.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like we need a community-owned website (like Wikipedia) that tracks crime stats and allows people to enter their own incident reports, to see if certain municipalities are under-reporting their crimes.
Newark is majority black; I was just there for something and I stuck out like a sore thumb downtown. I wouldn't feel comfortable there at night. But the part that kinda disproves you is the rape stats: Newark is near the top for murders, but it's near the bottom for rapes. The top 6 cities for rapes (per capita of course) are Minneapolis, Anchorage, Cleveland, CO Springs, Tulsa, and Lincoln NE. I'm pretty sure 5 of those 6 have very few black people: Lincoln is 86% white and only 3.8% black. Tulsa has more blacks at 15.6%, but still nowhere near a majority. Cleveland is majority black at 53.3% (and 37.3% white), but it's the exception here. Anchorage is 5.6% black (actually higher than I expected), Minneapolis 18.6%, and CO Springs 6.3% (78.8% white). So it appears from this list that cities with lots of white people are the ones where you're more likely to get raped, though perhaps you're less likely to be murdered.
BTW, Newark is 52.4% black, and only 11.6% non-Hispanic white (and 33.8% Hispanic of any race). What'd be really interesting is to see who actually commits the most of each type of crime, in every metro area, since it isn't necessarily the majority group that commits the majority of any particular crime. But still, it does appear that there is no correlation between black concentration in a city and its standing in the rape rankings, which I find quite interesting. (And before you think of it, it doesn't correlate to how many Hispanics there are either; the cities with tons of Hispanics like Miami, San Diego, LA, and El Paso are pretty low in the rape rankings.)
Interesting. But isn't CO Springs also a tech hub? (Not saying that tech hubs are rape-fests; San Jose, Seattle, Portland, Austin, and SanFran are much farther down in the rape rankings.) And what about Lincoln NE?
Also interesting is that Newark NJ (which I happen to live not far from) is near the top of the murder stats, but it's near the bottom of the rape stats, right next to Plano and Seattle. Same goes for New Orleans; it's #2 in murders, but it's only in the middle for rapes (and if you look at the numbers, only a little over 1/3 as many rapes per capita as the rape capitals Minneapolis and Anchorage). I guess poor black people just aren't that interested in rape compared to poor white people.
Being tall has advantages and disadvantages, you might not fit well in a cheaper small car and have to pay more for a bigger car with more legroom.
Wrong. This used to be true back in the 80s, when many cars really were pretty small, but these days even economy cars are generally well-designed for legroom and can fit taller passengers/drivers. There might be a few crappily-designed cars still out there, but you don't need to go to a bigger car for more legroom, just a better car. I'm over 6' with long legs, and I've tried out various lower-end cars in recent years with no issues at all. Back in the 80s and 90s, however, I had a lot of problems with various cars, including a giant Caprice Classic I had to ride in once in the front passenger seat, as well as the C4 Corvette where I couldn't fit in the driver's seat comfortably. My experience (back then) was generally that American cars were terrible for legroom. But all the rental cars (American & Japanese) I've driven in the last 5 years have been just fine.
No, it's not decreasing. Ask anyone in Detroit or St. Louis.
Yes, nationwide, on average, it is decreasing. Not everywhere. Cities with strong economies do enjoy reducing crime rates, such as NYC. Detroit is not like NYC.
The real problem is poverty and a ruined economy, coupled with high density. Rural areas with poverty don't have the crime levels that Detroit does.
Violent crime is down on average, yes, but that doesn't mean that it's down everywhere. Detroit and St. Louis are still extremely dangerous cities to visit, and probably even more dangerous than they were 30-50 years ago. Yes, other places are a lot safer (like Manhattan; it was a pit in the 80s, but now is extremely safe), but there's still plenty of extremely dangerous cities, especially in the Rust Belt.
Depends on the city. Some cities are very safe, others are not. Manhattan is very safe generally, other parts of NYC (like the Bronx) are less so. St. Louis, Oakland, and Detroit are the most dangerous cities, while Plano, Virginia Beach, and Henderson have very low violent crime rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There's a lot of interesting info in that link. For instance, WTF is going on in Colorado Springs? It's one of the safest cities for murder, however it's one of the most dangerous cities for rape. Same goes for Anchorage, though maybe that has something to do with Alaska's highly skewed male/female ratio. Lincoln NE is also the same.
Anyway, aside from some oddities like that, if you look through the rankings for various crime categories, you'll generally see the same cities topping the charts for crime: St. Louis, Oakland, Detroit, Memphis, Cleveland, Toledo, Newark NJ, Atlanta, etc. The common factor in all these is poverty: these cities have terrible economies, their industries left decades ago, they're just burned-out shells really and all the people who could afford to leave have left. Some of them do have some industry still left (Atlanta is home to CNN, Newark has some financial industry that spilled over from Manhattan and Jersey City in search of cheaper real estate), but not nearly enough to keep the economy in good shape. The cities that are the safest are either bedroom communities (like Henderson NV) for nearby larger cities (Las Vegas in that case) (Jersey City is like this too, a lot of Manhattanites have moved there in search of cheaper rent), tourist destinations (VA Beach), or have strong economies due to strong industries (San Jose, Portland, Seattle, with tech industry). However, many of the safest cities are smaller cities with less than 500k people, like Plano, Lexington KY, Fort Wayne IN, Lincoln NE, and Mobile AL, which would lend support to the idea that higher density creates more crime.
Unless you fly a lot, how exactly are you supposed to know whether you'll fit comfortably into a seat or not? It's not like they have some seats set up in the airport that you can try sitting in to see if your knees will fit or not; you just have to wait until you get on and are stuck there before you find out you don't physically fit when the asshole in front of you decides to recline.
Stallman's a bit of an extremist, and wants all software to be open-source. Remember, it all goes back to when he was trying to get a printer working, and couldn't because the driver was closed-source. That's why he invented the GPL, which just requires you to make source available to anyone whom you distribute software to.
But you're right: some parts are far more important than others. The platform being open-source is much, much more important than any high-level application being open-source. When the platform is closed and proprietary, you have all kinds of problems: you're locked in by the vendor, it's harder to write and debug applications, the platform vendor can have secret APIs to give them an advantage over third-party application vendors (we saw this with MS many times), you're stuck with drivers that vendors provide you and can't upgrade your platform software if the driver providers don't want you to (we've seen this with Windows upgrades, where older but perfectly functional hardware can't be used because the HW vendors didn't feel like updating their drivers for the new OS, since they want you to buy new HW), etc. Whereas if some random application is closed-source and proprietary, that doesn't affect anything at all except that one application.
>If the purpose is to give people a useful / fun / powerful / cheap piece of software, it is a strength.
It's a strength, but it doesn't do that much good if no one except a few statistical outliers actually bother to use it, and 99.9% of people prefer to genuflect and empty their bank accounts.
Say what you will, but the middle class needs work. We need something for the vast majority of people who aren't scientists, engineers or politicians to do.
Oh please. We can just put everyone to work in retail sales and real estate. We'll all get rich selling houses to each other!
Well then, somebody needs to tell the media, because they sure do like treating it as a common noun.
Today's media can't even spell words properly or use proper grammar; it shouldn't be too surprising that they'd screw up Tesla's factory name.
Factories need industrial engineers, not just assembly-line workers. No, you don't need a ton of IEs to run a factory, but still, there's some there. You also need engineers to do the design, testing, etc. (though some of that may be at their main location in California).
110V is annoying to work with because it has so many restrictions. It's no safer than 230V and coupled with more lax wiring regulations you have a much higher rate of electrocutions in the USA than in the EU.
Correlation =/= causation. The higher electrocution rate is probably just because Americans are stupider than Europeans....
More seriously, I imagine electrocutions have fallen greatly with the mandating of GFCI outlets in bathrooms and kitchens, with the problem being that only new construction has these unless someone has gone to the trouble of retrofitting them in older homes. Perhaps in the EU they were more aggressive about getting these upgraded. In the US, it's basically impossible to force people to upgrade anything; you can probably still legally use knob-and-tube wiring if that's what your house came with.
It's also substantially more labour cost to install, test and maintain.
I don't know about your house, but I've never, ever, ever had to do "maintenance" on house wiring. It usually stays in there for decades without being touched.
FWIW, the wiring in your "high power" circuits is much heavier than is used in most european circuits
Yes, but not only that, it's usually aluminum wire.
>f special tools mean making your own OBDII cable, and loading one of the dozen or more software packages onto a PC or laptop to interface with the onboard computer..
You can probably buy the appropriate OBDII cable, but what software packages are you talking about? This probably varies enormously by automaker. Doing anything advanced on my Volvo requires buying a "VIDA" unit; you can get Chinese-made clones for $150-200 on Ebay, but there's still a bunch of procedures and updates that seem to require an online account with Volvo which costs a fortune.
>No I think it's a strength. When MS forced Me, vista, Win8 on it, we recoiled and puked, but some people were forced to use it because they lacked options.
And did that cause Microsoft to lose their desktop monopoly? Nope. People kept using it anyway, despite the puking. The only thing that's put a dent in MS's desktop market is MacOS, which is basically the same thing (single-source, proprietary) only worse, and the iPad (also single-source and proprietary).
>For people getting work done, we need choices, we're willing to suffer a little to avoid suffering a lot.
Apparently, most people are perfectly happy funneling their money to MS and Apple, because those two have been highly successful with the consumer markets, while Linux has not. Regular consumers do NOT want choices; they want to be told what to do and buy.
You're wrong about that. There's lots of Gnome3 users. I see them in message forums all over, like /r/linux, and of course /r/gnome. Of course, I can't explain why anyone would want to use it, but there really are a lot of people who do. Similarly, there's a lot of people who use and like Windows8/Metro, despite the fact that it's total crap.
>Ignoring the very real problem that putting so damn much in PID 1 is dangerous for system stability and security,
From what I've read, this isn't true, but I don't have an authoritative source for it. But, here's the really dumb part of your response:
>Last, the dependency system absolutely screams for a GUI interface to be able to follow and configure it, but when one finally is created (if it hasn't been already), it'll be useless on servers, because nobody with brains installs a GUI on the server.
Maybe you haven't heard of the X Window System, introduced over 25 years ago. It allows you to run graphical applications remotely, so the system with the application does not need a GUI at all.
Teslas, from what I've read, are pretty open compared to other carmakers. You can connect an Ethernet cable to them and access the main computer's Linux prompt pretty easily. Most other makes require special tools to do anything at all involving the computer.
No, of course not. However, in America, HR runs the company, so there's no way around this idiocy.
It's worked fine for me for 16 years (mine was the very first model, not the later touchscreen models), except for the big mold issue (which after a couple years they did a factory recall and sent a technician to my place to install a bunch of new, redesigned parts in the door and front area), and the water pump failed a couple years ago which I replaced myself. There haven't been any electronic issues. I have read of some people having problems with the wax motor (the thing that controls the door locking) control circuit.
It can be very hard to get a new programming job if you haven't been doing it for a while. It doesn't matter how competent you are or if the language hasn't changed in 20 years. Many companies outright refuse to interview someone if they've been unemployed for more than 6 months.
You want a surgeon working on you who isn't passionate about medicine, and just wants to put in his 8 hours and go home?
So how do the Europeans do it? Just look at how cheap and high-quality cellphone and ISP service are in western European countries. Government regulation seems to work pretty decently over there.
You don't think microwaves can boil water?