Windchaser

> Surely every police organization in the United States is just racist.

Well, there's personal racism, meaning personal prejudice against a race. But then there's also institutional racism, like policies that turn out to be racist. Racist policies can be blatantly racist, like redlining, or they may indirectly turn out to be racist.

But yes, I think institutional racism is fairly common and very well-documented in the US.

> You're literally just describing a chicken-and-egg problem.

If you want to understand this more deeply, I highly recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' book "Between the World and Me".

Yes, it's a chicken and egg problem, but our police and judicial institutions are actively sustaining/aggravating the problem.

Damn! My info was out of date.

But it doesn't look great that we're up there with El Salvador (a failed state), Cuba, Rwanda (another failed state), and Turkmenistan

> But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.

Is that true, though? I don't expect that the individual biases of officers or judges, or the institutional biases of the police or immigration departments, can switch at a moment's notice.

> it seems pretty close to police state levels of power, corruption and control.

And: which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world?

Ancedotes are personal stories, like "oh, my dad was down at the post office the other day, and he saw..."

This is not a personal story, not an anecdote. I'm reporting on a study that looked at incarceration rates for drug use vs the drug use itself.

Why is that important? Because the study itself is solid, and it shows that there is some sort of bias between police/policing and african-american communities.

Sure, maybe that bias doesn't show up in other areas like firearm-related crimes. Or: maybe it does, and we haven't yet figured out how. Or, maybe it plays an indirect role, further eroding the relationship between the AA communities and the police, gradually building up a mutual dynamic that subjects black people to an unhealthy chronic level of stress and despair and harassment while also "justifying" the prejudicial activities of the cops.

There are whole books written about this. But at a minimum, I can't imagine just brushing over a 4x higher arrest rate for the same level of crime. That's pretty damn big.

I would expect that the NSA-like orgs have access to the data about where we travel, your spending habits, your comments on Reddit or HN, etc., etc. Basically, a profile on each of us. It might not be a collated readable profile as such, just a vector in a big NN describing our risk potential, but, all the same.

Yeah, I remember reading that a study found that white and black youth used marijuana at roughly equal rates, but black youth were about 4x as likely to be arrested for it. Due to differences in the # of stops, then differences in searches, then differences in actual arrests, with white youth getting more lenient treatment at each step.

And then this just reinforces the idea: "well, look at the crime statistics, black kids are more crime-prone, right"

There are times where you want to check for existence before fetching a key-value pair, and there are times where you want to automatically throw an error if the value doesn't exist.

Both have valid use cases. It's weird to be sarcastic about it.

... have we?

Can AI handle driving yet?

This is probably the boldest claim in the entire comments section, considering we're only in 2026.

Compare 1926 to 1999, and how technology advanced in that time. Radio wasn't widespread in 1926, nuclear fission hadn't been demonstrated, the idea of the semiconductor energy band gap, underlying the entirety of the modern computing industry, wasn't put forth until 1928. And yet, 20 years later we were purifying silicon, and 10 years after that (1954) the first silicon transistor was created and kicked off the semiconductor boom. 50 years later, we were in the Internet bubble.

We've got decades upon decades upon decades to come up with new ideas and implement them, even before the end of the century.

> Humans name their vehicles, so they're definitely going to name their $10k-$20k house bot

huh. I can only think of one friend I've ever known who named their car.

Anyways, not saying I necessarily disagree with the rest of what you say, but it's out there, for sure. We're a good distance away from an AI that can meaningfully act like a friend.

(Though who knows what AI will look like in even 10 years? I'm not ruling this out)

> at parties, and even at the dinner table all looking at their phones

This is very different from what I see.

At coffee shops and on trains, sure, people are working or on their phones. But at dinner and parties, at bars and climbing gym and dances, we're there to be there with each other.

Maybe a cultural difference between where you are and where I am?

Isn't the modern economy already a runaway improvement? First writing and agriculture, the stone age became copper became bronze became iron became steel, and one Revolution after another - agricultural 1 and 2, industrial, information.

Looks like AI will be another revolution, and eventually, probably the largest.

Have you heard of the idea of "steelmanning"?

> And nobody in western capitalist societies has to live with real hunger or starve.

??

I have friends raised in the US who experienced serious food scarcity as children (~20-25 years ago), and they have plainly disordered eating as a result. The stories I hear, many variants on things like "oh, yeah, as a kid I learned you can get rid of hunger by just drinking more water".