This is kind of an interesting thought experiment around laws in general. If you made guns illegal tomorrow you would certainly increase guns crimes because anyone who doesn’t give up their guns is now committing a crime. Similarly all sales of guns would now be illegal and the demand for illegal guns would go way up resulting in more black market trade.

But the framing of the question leads to that conclusion. If what you are actually after is something more akin to “if legalizing drugs decreases violent crime then shouldn’t legalizing guns also decrease violent crime?” This is more interesting in my opinion.

Now let’s assume for a second that legalizing drugs does decrease violent crime (I do believe there I’d research that supports this). What crime is reduced? It is likely that crime around the drug trade itself is what is mostly reduced: you do not have as much cartel, gang, mob, and other organized crime entities around who are committing much of the violent crime. Drug users themselves are probably committing less of the crime than the actual distribution as using drugs is often times not an inherently violent act.

For guns the gun itself is a tool of violence. You cannot use a gun without committing a violent act. Now not all violent acts are violent crime, as target practice is not exactly illegal, but it is still violent. If you make manufacturing of guns illegal less will be manufactured which means less will be in existence therefore there is inherently less access to tools of violence. I’m sure the drug smuggling trade would introduce more violence as it would increase drastically. However the increase there may be smaller than the decrease of just having less guns in the world.

I guess the key difference is that guns are a tool of violence much more frequently than the use of an illicit substance is most likely.

Most of the things you listed are not moral things.

• staying positive
• making friends
• looking for a better job
• saving money
• selling online
• therapy
• religion
• sleep

All of these have nothing to do with moral good or evil. An evil person can stay positive that their plan to steal credit from coworker will result in their promotion. An evil person can make friends and take more than they give from the relationship. An evil person can take a better job that exploits vulnerable populations. An evil person can hoard wealth… And on and on.

It seems like you are saying things aren’t working out for you financially, socially, etc. And for a lot of that cognitive behavioral therapy can certainly help you reframe bad thinking and patterns to make things better. That doesn’t mean all your problems are solved, but it can make things better.

Many of the things you listed are wise things to do rather than morally good. And even if they don’t result in your idea of “success” they almost always result in something better than having not done them. For example saving money. Let’s say you save 10,000 and inflation makes it only have the purchasing power of 8,000. You find yourself in a spot where you are unemployed and that 8,000 is going to be a saving grace. It will help your life way more than if you had blown it on 10,000 worth of vacations or consumer goods.

Let’s take your example of a Hyundai Santa Fe. 5 year total cost of ownership according to Kelley blue book is ~$64,00 while the plug in hybrid Hyundai tuscon is ~$54,000 and the Hyundai kona is ~$49,000. (Note I adjusted the numbers for all up to account for $6.00 gas)

If the question is about small vs big the big tuscon is about the same as the small kona since it is a hybrid. So you can have big and save at the pump. Now why would someone spend $10,000 more for a Santa fe over a tuscon? I dunno, car buying is complicated and emotions come into play quite a bit.

I suspect you wouldn’t balk at someone getting a small car at an upper trim level, but that could be them spending $20k more for fancy gizmos and leather seats.

The more surprising thing is people are spending $50,000k for 5 years of transportation regardless of energy source. If you want to save money on transportation, paying cash, buying used, or keeping what you already have are much bigger savings options than how big the vehicle is.

I’ve seen someone trade in a big v8 SUV with horrible gas mileage for a small sporty sedan and told themselves they were saving money. But the 15% 5 year loan they picked up was telling a different story.

the data behind these statistics are so riddled with bias that I am extremely dubious about them, to the extent that I think it’d be epistemologically safer to largely disregard the stats

This right here is what I’m arguing against. I’d go so far as to say applying this at a macro level is dangerous and destructive (and let me be clear I am not accusing you of doing anything dangerous or destructive, this has been a lovely conversation and I hope I carry no offense. A politician saying this would scare me, but talking about this in a small setting is interesting and productive).

What I have seen from your argument is the possibility for bias at a few different levels of hypothetical data. Now again I’ll caveat that this is not my area of expertise and I’m probably not doing a great job representing the body of literature, but let’s examine a few studies to hopefully demonstrate what I mean. In this study accessing women’s arrest rate for violent crime there are some interesting charts that help illustrate my point (which is largely unrelated to the focus of the paper). They came up with this set of graphs:

I’ll grant that these partially illustrate your point (the part I said I agreed with), the arrest rate for a crime is not necessarily tied to the act of doing the crime itself, and it does so by comparing victim reports of crime with arrest records as a victim report has nothing to do with if an arrest is made or not. Now you could also say that maybe it is less likely that a victim of a woman committing assault is less likely to report they were victimized along with them less likely being arrested. Sure I could even get behind that, but does that account for the 10-20 fold difference in both of them? That would be wild.

For an ever clearer example of this let’s look at another citation (shared author as before) looking at gender differences in drunk driving. In this analysis it was found that 30% of self-reported drunk drivers are women, 25% of DUI arrests are women, and 18% of legally intoxicated drivers in fatal crashes are women. Here we would need to come up with an explanation that up to triples the “real” counts of DUI driving for all three of these stats. We’d have to say well women are 2x less likely to self report than men (why?), they are 2x less likely to be pulled over for DUI (maybe because cops don’t target them as much?) , and that they are 3x less likely to cause accidents that result in death (I guess they are just better drunk drivers by a massive margin).

Even if there are potential for bias in the data you can then account for it with other studies, for the last point the cleanest way would be to ask “are women better at driving under the influence than men?” and a study that tried to tackle exactly that found that “women displayed greater impairment than men on all behavioral tests and also reported higher levels of subjective intoxication compared with men.”

Sure we could poke and prod at hypothetical biases in this data but just because you can generate a plausible explanation for bias doesn’t mean you should “largely disregard the stats”. The reason I claim this is dangerous at the macro level is because this is how you get climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, smoking and lung cancer deniers, and on and on. There are times where it is appropriate to raise eyebrows at statistical findings, but with something as clear cut as violent crime with men vs women it is not it.

Your reply here I pretty much agree with completely but you have moved the goal posts quite a bit from your initial comment.

What I’m gathering from your comment here is that crime statistics need to be carefully considered because of a large risk of bias in police responses to things let alone the justice system itself. Totlally agree with that.

But your original point that we just don’t know if women actually commit less crime than men is not supported here as I don’t believe it was in your original comment. Virtually all the data I have seen (and I admit I’m nowhere near a subject expert on this) suggests men commit more crime then women. This goes beyond police searches, convictions, etc. Its everything. It is extremely unlikely that there is enough types of bias across the entire dataset of crime stats across the world to make it so women commit roughly the same amount of crime as men (or even more crazy MORE crime).

Now one of the big issues with this is that “crime” is a squishy definition, if we count speeding of 1mph over the limit than just the number of miles driven per gender would be enough to sway the stats. Cause everyone speeds all the time pretty much which is a “crime”

Basically all our data suggests that men commit more crime than women across the boars like the original poster said. I don’t necessarily disagree with your comments about bias in data, but your final conclusion I don’t think is accurate:

I strongly believe that we don’t know if men commit more crime than women. I think it’s plausible that it could be true…

Sure I don’t think we know this with 100% certainty but it is much more than plausible, it is with a high degree of confidence true. If all of the data points to one conclusion I don’t think it is very fair to throw your arms up and say there could be bias everywhere, show that there is bias across the board and then let’s try to account for the bias. I don’t even think you have shown there to be bias.

You also state

women are effectively undercounted if we’re talking about who commits more crime

This conclusion I don’t see proven in your analysis, racial bias does not equal gender bias and it’s quite a jump to use that as evidence. Also we have more data than just who is caught or who is sentenced, there are surveys asking if you have ever shoplifted (sure these need to be take with a grain of salt), there’s data about the suspected gender of a perpetrator of crime when it is initially reported. Etc. Etc.

It is a very important thing to keep in mind statistical data is not infallible and in some cases only slightly useful (self reported surveys). But if you take all that into account and look across the board we can be rather confident men commit more crime than women. Not 100% but probably 90%+

You introduce the possibility of bias but don’t really prove there actually is that bias in any data sets. This argument feels dangerous in the opposite direction of what Donna Haraway is warning about, you have taken weaknesses in the entire category of statistical data to throw their conclusions out entirely without having specific reasons to.

This is quite a take. Ownership equates to subsidies? So elon musk is the largest subsidized of space x and has absolutely 0 to gain from owning the stock? What is it that openai is gaining by giving away free stock? The only thing they are “gaining” is less control over their company and less ability to raise investment.

The gymnastic backflips I see happening in this thread are intense. A sovereign wealth fund DOES flip stocks back onto the market, that’s the whole point. Look at Norway’s ~$2 trillion sovereign wealth fund sells about 3% per year. (Similar for the Alaska permanent fund)

Assuming you mean HELOC how in the world is this anything like a HELOC? If a HELOC was the bank giving me free stocks I get to own forever and do whatever I want with I would he getting them every chance I get.

Agreed 100% we are both speculating at motives. So if we set that aside the question then becomes would it be better for institutional shareholders to have this 5% or for a wealth fund like the Alaska permanent fund to have it.

Even in a case of this being about bribing the trump admin it would result in all future administrations having access to this as well. This would require a bill in Congress to implement so I say support it and look at the bill to see if there is a way that trump or someone else can abuse it, then we can get out the pitchforks

No it doesn’t seem likely that the government would do that. The government collected more than $5 trillion last year in taxes. If the government wants to get more money they are incentivized to make the whole us economy more efficient, not prop up failing investments that would lead to the detriment of the rest of its revenue sources.

They propped up gm and chrystler because the auto industry collapsing would have sent shockwaves through the whole economy. I’m not saying I agree with what they did, but it wasn’t for a return on stocks.

The key thing here is this is funneling PRIVATE Monet into PUBLIC hands, we need more of this!

I don’t like the military industrial complex, and sure this money will help fund that technically because money is fungible. But I want to expand government programs like social security and Medicare, and I’d love for an administration that also wants to do that to have openai’s returns to fuel it.

I agree this level of scrutiny should be applied to the situation, but there is a growing sentiment of the government stepping in to take returns from AI, Bernie Sanders asked for it (where I got the 50% from) and many other countries have this exact model. Hell Alaska has this model for oil already.

It could be what openai is hoping to get out of this is only needing to give up 5% instead of a much larger number and be able to look like a good guy giving back.

I’m open to hearing what a theory is that openai is trying to bribe the government with but I’d say my explanation is more plausible than an unknown backdoor deal.

I think this is a much better argument than the bailout ones I see in this thread, but I still disagree.

If the tech bros are going to have easier jobs then the tech giants who employ them will become richer. I want the american people to see some of that enrichment that they themselves produced by generating a portion of the training data.

If ai is going to burn down the planet then the person I want on the board to help with decision making is the government. They will be a force to say no we will only use renewables, or that we have to source water sustainably, etc.

The government does not have a profit motive, if they did taxes would be maximized, and while the government’s motive isn’t exactly pure at least it is somewhat influenced by the people through democracy.

If the only alternative is ai companies doing whatever they want then this is way better. If your alternative is shut down ai companies I don’t think that’s possible, the cat is out of the bag, this genie can’t be put back in the bottle.

Stocks cannot be negative. I get the hate surrounding AI companies, but the resistance to this idea makes no sense to me.

In my opinion the number should be closer to 50% instead of 5% - but in both cases if AI companies are the biggest bubble in the world and go bankrupt then the government is left with a $0 value stock they didn’t give any money for…

If ai companies don’t go bankrupt then any returns they do generate go to the government which can be used to provide public services and offset the average Americans tax bill, thus passing any potential gains from ai to the people who generated the training data for them in the first place.

It is quite hilarious that you are so smug and judgemental about someone you claim is “just wholesale making shit up”

When you claim:

The issue is this “fundraiser” existed prior to the shooting and is not for legal defenses.

The op’s article clearly states that only funds received AFTER the shooting are not to be used according to the judge. Funds for bail do not need to be acquired specifically for legal defense, in fact him receiving funds from his fans after the shooting most likely for his legal defense is expressly WHY the judge is saying they can’t be used.

I guess I shouldn’t have given you all this valuable information unless you “asked nicely” first. Silly me.

I just want to start by saying I think you are coming at this in good faith.

I disagree that it is as cut and dry as “private citizens cannot [own land]” from the link you posted a private citizen cab get a land grant for 70 years to do with the property what they will. Now sure it might be said that this isn’t technically owning the land but it is nearly indistinguishable from a normal American with a house.

And if we want to get real pedantic the fact that the USA can eminent domain your land kind of shows that you are just leasing it as well. This is a bit of an exaggeration since most land has not and likely will not be taken, but the point is it CAN.

I’m not super familiar with how inheritance works in China but if you can will your property to a relative and then they get a fresh 70 year grant then this is basically indefinite. Now maybe that’s where the difference is if you can’t do that, but that’s not what I think of when I’m thinking of “ownership”