alehul

I am a happy end user of Apple, and I vastly prefer the walled garden.

When I was younger, I preferred a Windows to a Mac as I liked to customize everything and make it look fun and cool and unique, and to be able to use many niche programs that only existed for Windows. I preferred Android to iOS for the same reason.

Now that I'm working most of the time, however, I just want something that works. I don't care about customizing all that much; I'll leave it to the (mostly) great designers Apple pays. I really value being less concerned about the legitimacy of things I download or view, knowing that Apple's choices to make a walled garden have protected me further.

Beyond myself, though, I'm immensely happy that my older, less tech-savvy parents have iPhones, and I bought my mother a MacBook which she has loved compared to her old desktop. All she wants to do are common tasks on it, and to accomplish them simply and quickly and without worrying about viruses.

I empathize with the jailbreaking community and honestly love how responsive you all are, and how you really make an effort to build things that bring people joy. I think there's millions of people in the world that prefer to have jailbroken phones and more customization and freedom, but there's also millions who prioritize as I do. There's a pro and con to every choice.

> A third option would be to increase demand response at the industrial and customer level. Meaning, power isn't generally expected to be 100% available in that scenario. If there isn't enough generation capacity, those that aren't willing to pay the high prices are shut off (or something along those lines). That is generally how supply/demand is supposed to work anyway

I don’t think any of these solutions are viable to prove we can be reliant on renewables, and this one especially would not resonate with a populace.

Just at a consumer level, think of everything you use power for on a daily basis. It’s a cornerstone of modern life, and you can’t expect society to backtrack.

Seeing a high crime rate doesn't automatically call for radical reform — and in a way abolition — of the status quo of law enforcement.

Why is the crime rate high? Is it really because of police, or do they help? How will some radical restructuring reduce it?

There are many questions here.

Preventative policing, while effective in social democratic countries with low inequality like the Nordics, isn't on the table when we see violent crime that mirrors African and South American countries. Disincentivizing homicide in a country rife with inequality and materialism is a harder task than we imagine.

There are ~900,000 police officers in the United States, and 240 million 911 calls, and 50 million police-public interactions. That's an average of over 50 interactions per day for a police officer.

They may not have the obligation to enforce a restraining order, but I imagine >99% of the time they do, and they have for me.

Wasn't an open warrant for violating a restraining order what led to the Jacob Blake alteraction?

Total U.S. police spending is around $100 billion, which is around $285/person/year.

Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year, at a surface level this feels extremely efficient — certainly more so than other parts of our bureaucracy.

Crime occurs for social, cultural, and/or financial reasons — focusing on the financial, we have a giant bureaucratic and inefficient government, an incredibly large population, and a lot of waste. I don't think one could argue the $24/person/month we pay for police would make a substantial difference / stop a ton of crime.

> omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement

U.S. civilians own nearly 400 million firearms, which is larger than the country's population. The intentional homicide rate is comparable to Kenya, Pakistan, Ecuador, or Argentina (5x higher than Western Europe). Are you sure that police will be able to operate effectively without being armed in a somewhat militaristic manner?

> redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities

What will happen if I call 911 and report someone stole from me at gunpoint? What if I report that someone violated my restraining order against them? What if I report that someone is yelling threateningly at waitstaff at a restaurant?

> not violate the public trust

While we absolutely need more oversight, there are over ~55,000,000 documented police-public encounters in a given year, and ~1,000 cases of lethal force used by police (vast majority were people attempting to harm the officers).

The rate of lethal force as a percent of interactions: 0.0000206473%.

The rate of lethal force against the total U.S. population: 0.00000343477%.

I have, maybe naively, always believed that the U.S. operates at a level of secrecy and complexity where dozens of terrorist attacks are thwarted every year, and that this surveillance plays a hand in it (but to admit that would hinder its effectiveness).

Is it really possible we only have <5 terror plots against our country in a given year, considering the population of our country, the amount of ideological extremism domestically and internationally, and the States' interventionism?

Maybe it is possible, in which case the U.S. has been very successful at convincing my generation it's a larger issue than it really is (I was a toddler when 9/11 happened, so it's all I know).

After reading, I’m convinced that this must be a draft mistakenly published. Wow.

> Did you know that other countries have grocery stores too?

In the countries destroying the rich in revolution, grocery stores are empty.

> how are welfare and immigration related?

Welfare and immigration are related because increasing both are fundamentally incompatible.

If you substantially increase welfare, you must avoid mass immigration that collapses the system.

If you substantially increase immigration, you must avoid welfare that collapses the system.

The United States is rare, as a wealthy country, in generally choosing substantial immigration over substantial welfare.

> There is no way they'll be able to stop the upcoming revolution.

As someone who grew up poor in America, these talks about “revolution” have always perplexed me.

We have one of the highest median incomes in the world, and we live in a country that pushes much of the world forward in terms of technological progress.

People have always flocked to America for opportunity, and if we cut welfare so we can expand immigration again, I guarantee there will be another giant influx.

This country allows people of virtually all income levels access to an abundance of food and pleasures through our capitalist system. Grocery stores with packed shelves aren’t something you should take for granted.

Revolution isn’t the path to become like Sweden. It’s the path to become like the USSR.