What a disingenuous comparison. The wiki article you've linked ("List of killings by law enforcement officers in Germany") sums to 552 people over the last 100 years. In contrast, the corresponding wiki article on the US ("Lists of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States" [1]) estimates more than 900 deaths per year. Indeed, the number of slayings is so great that the article does not tabulate the sum in a single table (as the German article does) but instead links to separate wiki articles with tabulated results by month.
Over the last 100 years, almost certainly not. For the most recent decade? Yes, of course I would expect these statistics to be fairly accurate.
Between 2021 and 2025 (inclusive), Wikipedia lists 68 dead in Germany versus 5882 dead in the US, despite the US only being ~4 times larger. More people have been killed by police in the US this year than in Germany in the past ten years, and it's not even April yet.
> Imagine the outrage EU would have had if US seized immigrants jewelry
The US literally deports people to concentration camps in countries with no civil liberties. Many have disappeared there. A whole other group have been raped and become pregnant and are being moved around to force births.
And you are concerned about fucking jewelry. Genuinely, are you taking a piss here?
We now know he entered under the Visa Waiver Program, which explicitly prohibits adjusting status for any reason. So yeah, it's immigration fraud, and a massive overstay of 20 years.
We also now know a judge refused his Habeas corpus petition, and he has a final order of removal -- signed by a judge, not an administrator.
> People underestimate how effective direct personal accountability is when it comes with harsh consequences like jail time. That's how you fix all issues in society and enforce law abiding behavior. You make the cost of the crime greater than the gains from it, then crucify some people in public to set an example for everyone else
And yet criminals still commit crimes. Obviously jail is not the ultimate deterrent you think it is. Nobody commits crimes with the expectation that they'll get caught, and if you only "crucify some people", then most criminals are going to (rightfully) assume that they'll be one of the lucky ones.
Essentially all of your concerns concerns can be mitigated by building somewhere else.
Worried about natural disasters? Build some place less prone to natural disasters.
Worried about the strain on local communities? Build some place more remote.
Worried about energy availability? Build near a nuclear power plant or hydroelectric power station.
Worried about hostile governments? Don't build data centers within the territories of hostile governments. (If you consider every country a hostile government, that is a you-problem.)
For the cost of building a data center in space, you could instead build a second (or third, or fourth, ...) data center somewhere else.
Omg. I dident say my reasons where good. I said that the claim that price vs ground based data center alone made space based compute a no God, was a bad argument. I obviously suck at framing my point
> A friend of mine has a terrible Instagram addiction, yet has developed for himself a certain degree of cinephilia lately -- we've watched long movies together in theaters and not once has he been on his phone during the screenings. When one has faith that sustained attention might hold more value than that gained by interruption, they tend to prioritize the former.
I'm not convinced that you've fingered the reason. Pulling out your phone at the theater is considered anti-social behavior, comparable to conversing with your seatmate, and that sort of normative pressure can overcome a compulsion. It's like claiming that someone couldn't possibly be an alcoholic because they don't drink on the job.
A better test would be: What does your friend do when you watch a movie at one of your homes, where there's a lesser expectation to tuck away one's phone? Does he still watch the movie attentively, or does he check his phone every so often?
It's satire. It's supposed to be absurd. Why else do students still read A Modest Proposal nearly three hundred years after its publication?
Regardless, LLMs are already being abused to mass produce spam, and some of that spam has almost certainly been employed to separate the elderly from their savings, so there's nothing particularly implausible about the satirical product, either.
No, the cause is structural. Even if one could identify the sources of rot (money in politics, an outdated electoral college, the collapse of our information environment, whatever), Congress would deadlock, the Courts would block any meaningful reform, and the President would be left trimming the blight while the rot festered underneath.
The only ones that could cause change needed to reform their representation in the political system is the people. The incumbents have no incentive to do it.
I agree the cause is at least partially structural but I'd argue that congress deadlocking is generally an intentional feature not a bug. Meanwhile the courts on the whole seem quite reasonable to me. Disliking what the rules say should never turn into lambasting the ref for making calls consistent with those rules.
That said, it doesn't seem to me that reform has been meaningfully attempted yet. It isn't reasonable to blame the establishment for blocking a reform that never got organized to begin with.
Presumably if there were concrete proposals with broad popular support intended to fix lobbying, gerrymandering, first past the post, and the information environment in general then we should see them implemented at the state level here and there. But we don't.
The idea that Congress deadlocking is somehow a feature is a relic of the Republican party's destructionist agenda of the past four decades. In reality, this dynamic is what caused so much power to accrue to federal agencies, which they then proceeded to bemoan and go to work tearing down as well. Their goals were kind of understandable when they represented US business interests, but it seems as of late they're under new foreign ownership.
> a relic of the Republican party's destructionist agenda of the past four decades.
I believe it goes all the way back to the founding of the country. Gridlock was viewed as preferable to tyranny. Failure to arrive at a compromise is supposed to mean that no one gets to proceed.
Of course times change and cracks show up in the system.
Maybe. As a libertarian I'm sympathetic to the concept. I would say that one of the huge founding assumptions which clearly no longer holds is that the federal government was meant to be a less-powerful mediator between states, with the individual states being more powerful. For example I'd imagine that the founders' solution to our current predicament would be individual states calling up their own sizeable militias to put down the lawless gangs (regardless of whether they were purportedly "authorized" by the federal government), only calling for federal government help if they desired it. Restoring order within a state shouldn't hinge upon Congress agreeing to do so, right? Of course the obvious inapplicability of that solution to the events of the Civil War demonstrates how we got to the point we're at. It looks like slavery is still on track to being the great stain that ultimately dooms us.
> Whatever power you put into the hands of the government is guaranteed to fall into your enemy's hands some day.
Only if there's a functioning system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, there is not. This Court is willing to use motivated reasoning to achieve its preferred outcomes; to slow-walking favorable rulings for Democrats while expediting favorable rulings for Republicans (often without explanation via the "shadow docket"); and to throw out decades of precedent in the process by ignoring stare decisis, a bedrock legal principle which ensures stability of the judicial process.
Just to give an example, consider the ban on universal (national) injunctions. One might be surprised to learn that it was the Biden administration that initially petitioned the Court for the ban. However, the Court found such a ban unnecessary then (i.e., when lower Courts were blocking the Biden administration's agenda), but conveniently found it necessary during the second Trump administration (when lower courts started blocking the Trump administration's agenda). And just as another kick in the balls, they used the birthright citizen case as a vehicle to bring the matter to Court, strengthening the President without even deigning to address the Trump administration's obviously illegal executive order.
The result of this mess is that, if the Trump administration is eventually voted out, it is highly unlikely that an incoming Democratic administration would be able to capitalize on the expansion of executive powers that this Court has given to this President. We see a similar situation in Poland. After ~a decade in power the Law & Justice party was voted out, but the new coalition government has not inherited the same ability to government, with its agenda constantly curtailed by Law & Justice appointees embedded throughout the government (including the highest court).
Even this is too charitable. A short timeline of January 2025 would be something like this:
- Jan 16: The Supreme Court issues its opinion, upholding the legality of the TikTok ban. The Biden administration declines to enforce it, preferring to let the incoming Trump administration handle the matter.
- Jan 18: TikTok voluntarily turns off its services. Google and Apple remove the app from their respective app stores. Trump declares on social media that he will sign an executive order "to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect".
- Jan 19: TikTok restores it service after being assured by the incoming Trump administration that TikTok would not face penalties.
- Jan 20: The Trump administration signs the aforementioned executive order.
However, Trump's executive order was untimely (the law already should have gone into effect), and at any rate it's dubious that the executive order would've been legal regardless. The TikTok ban (PAFACA) had a specific provision for when an extension could be granted. From Wikipedia:
> The president may grant a one-time extension of the divestiture deadline by as long as 90 days if a path to a qualified divestiture has been identified, "significant" progress has been made to executing the divestiture, and legally binding agreements for facilitating the divestiture are in place.
Notably, none of these requirements had been met. There were no identified buyers; there were no binding agreements. The Trump administration's refusal to enforce the TikTok ban might have been the first lawless act of the second administration, and it happened only within hours of Trump being sworn in.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...
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