The irony is that a key plank of the SDNY's allegations against Roman Storm for his development of Tornado Cash is that he provided a UI (since the backend smart contract is already established as a matter of law to be immutable and outside of Roman Storm's control), and the UI that Roman Storm provided was an (open source) static HTML file that users ran entirely client-side in their own browser.
1. Claims of structural harm are far more speculative, and thus harder to establish, than direct violence like a stabbing or shooting.
2. The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
3. Structural harm, where it exists, is most often done without intent. Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.
What is most disturbing in your comment is that it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable". That logic erodes the distinction between disagreement, accusation, and a right to kill.
Once people treat their own ideological conclusions as sufficient moral license for violence, they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process — beyond just the letter of law, as in the Jeffrey Doucet case, but also in its spirit, for we have democracy and due process precisely to tease out the ambiguities that social questions of causation and responsibility are so replete with.
Democracy that produces outcomes advesarisl to the voters intentions, for example massmigration even though voters voted against that - has ceased to be a democracy. Making the government and its cronies as illegitimate as any bannana republic dictatorship.
> Intent is a key element in criminal culpability.
There are plenty of illegalities based on neglect.
> it shifts from "the system produces unjust outcomes" to "violent personal retaliation is understandable or even laudable"
There's something unsettling to me about how quickly Americans are to explain white collar wrongdoings by talking about "the system" but how slow they are to take that same attitude towards crimes like burglary, murder, etc despite the abundance of scholarship we have arguing for social forces driving those actions.
I'm not against applying the sociological imagination in both instances. I think it's almost always more useful than a narrow personal perspective. I'm just pointing out the obvious inconsistency.
> they are abandoning all respect for democratic and due process
This "democracy" has clearly produced a result where poor people crimes are heavily policed and rich people crimes are heavily underpoliced. All robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft amounts to about $12 billion a year while the total amount lost due to wage theft each year is over $50 billion. Yet one version of this crime is much more heavily policed than the other.
I never called for a "right to kill", I'm calling for fair application of justice. I don't think we individual citizens should have the responsibility of carrying out this justice. Instead I think a properly running representative system would be carrying out the justice. But it's simply not.
Nothing in my original comment was prescriptivist. I'm just describing the state of matters as I see it. And I predict we will continue to see a rise in this sort of vigilante acts of justice until we have a valid alternative to it
The reference to white collar crime is an extremely provocative assertion, because it smuggles in a tenuous allegation that Thompson committed white collar crime.
More generally, I said there is a major difference between structural harm, white-collar crime, and deliberately killing someone. Your answer was to fixate only on general claims about inequality, underpolicing, social causes, etc, which insinuates that maybe Brian Thompson deserved to be murdered while maintaining plausible deniability.
Yes, the system is unfair, but in what ways it's unfair is up to debate, unlike whether the child predator in the Jeffrey Doucet case abused a child. You are trying to connect the fact there is injustice in the world to how justifiable it is to deliberately kill someone, by using this analogy.
You can deny that you are endorsing it, but your comment still does the same thing: it takes a personal act of violence and places it inside a moral story that makes it sound less straightforwardly wrong. That is exactly the problem.
Also in no moral universe, do you shoot someone in the head in cold blood because they were negligent, let alone negligent in some abstract way related to structural social forces. That is a blanket justification for all sorts of political violence.
On democracy, you are using disappointment with democratic outcomes to erode respect for democratic process. By your standard, every single political faction would argue against respecting the democratic process.
The value of a mission like this isn't only in the narrow technical data it returns. Its value is also institutional. Once you have an actual crewed mission orbiting the Moon, the program becomes concrete rather than aspirational. That creates momentum inside NASA and among contractors, strengthens the credibility of follow-on lunar missions, and accelerates work on the many parallel systems a sustained lunar program actually requires.
I agree entirely that it's much easier to imagine a successful moon program built around repeatable missions at high cadence, so I'm not disagreeing on that point. I would just push back on the idea that this has little or no value.
This is exactly what I mean though; the technical decisions for the SLS, and every bit of "institution" that follow are so flawed that I dont believe you can draw a path from this to future work.
It doesnt matter if you are actually running missions, if the scale is so small and wasteful that its not meaningfully comparable to the aspirational future missions.
The point of these videos is that no platform that values freedom of expression and diverse points of view would have auto-ban systems for the kinds of things that he said. X is massively more liberal in what it allows and what it tolerates before it will ban someone than Blue Sky. So the EFF's claims are totally disingenuous and I don't think people should stand for it no matter where they stand politically.
Regarding the Spanish (or Kansas) flu, there is some evidence suggesting that the second wave was much deadlier than the first because of an unusual practice connected to World War I:
Soldiers infected with more virulent strains were more likely to be shipped to military hospitals, while those infected with less virulent strains were more likely to remain in the trenches.
The military hospitals were much more active vectors of transmission than the bays of the trenches, so the normal pattern of transmission was inverted, with the more virulent strains spreading faster than the less virulent ones.
Under normal conditions, the very sick would stay home while the less sick would go to work, which would tend to push highly virulent viruses toward becoming less virulent over time.
This reminds me of the fact that hospital-acquired pneumonia is the leading cause of death in ICUs in the US.
Among people who are already going to die, the thing that kills them the most is an opportunistic bacterial pneumonia that barely even exists outside of hospitals, or other compromised patients.
The US lead over the EU in per capita productivity has massively grown over the last 20 years. There's no indication of waning American power.
America has produced 70 times more stock market wealth if you look only at companies created within the last 50 years than the EU. And this is not all paper wealth. If you look at technological sophistication, whether that's frontier AI models, leading-edge pharmaceutical drugs, total amount of compute, or the space industry, the U.S. has grown its lead over the EU over the last 50 years.
It's because the EU has largely fixated itself on reducing wealth inequality by punishing those who succeed. It's safety-maximalist approach to private industrial action has also hamstringed industry — see Germany closing all 17 of its nuclear power plants. The US doesn't really need to do much except not sabotage itself to maintain its lead. Like in all nations, laissez-faire (French for "leave it alone") allows the private sector to do the rest.
As just an average US citizen living in a not so prosperous area, this rings pretty hollow to my mind and most of Europe sure looks like it is winning over 95% of the people that live around me. We already know the stock market is divorced from reality, IP rights are a short-term benefit, and I fail to see how having more compute or starlink satellites are suppose to carry the US into future economic prosperity.
Now im not saying everything is bad, but it sure feels like a lot of the US economy is a Lamborgini shell stuck on the body of a Ford Focus and we think we are winning because most people haven't noticed yet and the profit margins are higher than ever. Europe sure ain't perfect, they got plenty of problems, but their problems are more like worrying about percentage points in the future, while in the US the worry is whether our economy is going to provide for people at all not in the top 25% long-term. And an angry and unsatisfied mass of lower class people is a recipe for upheaval with everyone on top relying on that not happening.
I'm not so sure people in Europe are better off. There are a lot of very poor regions in Europe compared to how people tend to imagine Europe. In fact, most European countries, if they were U.S. states, would rank among the poorer U.S. states.
Now, looking only at the statistics, there are certainly some things European countries are doing better than the U.S. But based on my research so far, which admittedly isn't enough for a full understanding, my tentative conclusion is that almost all of those things don't seem related to economic policy. They seem more related to things like urban planning, for example more pedestrian- and bike-friendly cities.
In terms of work and wages, U.S. wages are substantially higher than wages in most European countries. And I'm not just talking about longer hours. I mean the compensation per hour is significantly higher.
Averages tell us the general availability of wealth. To give you some perspective, most European countries are poorer than the poorest U.S. state, which is Mississippi. There just aren't as many high-paying jobs. And these figures encompass everything, including what the government spends on health care and welfare programs and education. So Europeans as a whole get much less per capita from both government and private sector. When it comes to purchasing power parity, which takes into account cost-of-living differences, the gap isn't as big as above, but it's still pretty significant.
> It's because the EU has largely fixated itself on reducing wealth inequality by punishing those who succeed.
It's actually because America pivoted[1] from manufacturing to higher-margin services (financial, tech[2]), and generations of American Diplomats had negotiated trade deals that ensure American services are never shut-out or hobbled in most countries. American companies won't look so special,or be nearly as profitable, once they lose their default status that allow them to siphon money from all over the globe -including Europe
2. Silicon valley caught lightning in a bottle. Other American locales repeatedly tried and failed to replicate it - so it rules out American legislative attitudes as the vital ingredient.
If you're familiar with American capital markets and global venture capital, you'd know that it had almost nothing to do with these trade deals. They had a marginal impact. The amount of capital available to startups and established companies at all stages of their development was the main difference. And the difference between the US and EU in that regard came mostly from the US simply not sabotaging itself the way the EU did with extremely high taxes on the top income earners, as part of an agenda to reduce wealth inequality.
The fact that the tech industry concentrated in Silicon Valley is simply due to network effects. Regardless of which locale became the Schelling point for U.S.-based technology companies, that locale would have succeeded, because of the national economic policy it operated inside of.
> ...that locale would have succeeded, because of the national economic policy it operated inside of.
The US policy is about to become a lot more robust and a lot less laissez-faire. Over the decades, the public image of tech CEOs has switched from benign, awkward but genius dorks, to out-of-control bond villains.
There's a tech backlash happening in the US, if you've been paying attention, and legislators follow the voter zeitgeist.
Correct. There seems to be a pretty broad tendency across societies to fixate on reducing wealth inequality. I don't think the U.S. is going to escape it. Taxing the rich is the most popular thing in the world. There's nothing the common man prefers more.
Even if US companies only had the US market, they'd be massive — Google gets ~50% of its revenue from the US alone, Amazon over 60% from North America, and most other Big Tech is in that same range. The US market by itself is plenty huge. And the EU provides 20-30% of US Big Tech revenue. Even losing all of that (very unlikely even under protectionist policies), US tech companies would be doing well, with 70-80% of their current revenue.
Sure, full-blown protectionism everywhere would make the world including the US poorer (less specialization, less division of labor), but it would also harm EU exports, as the US is the EU's biggest importer, and moreover it wouldn't change the factors behind the growing US-EU gap. US-EU trade policies with each other are basically the same. The difference is internal, and mostly comes down to the US just not sabotaging the private sector as much.
The EU did retaliate to Trump's tariffs with its own.
Anyway, I wasn't making a point about recent developments. I was talking about more long-term trends showing that why the US has outpaced EU in economic growth.
A pretty strong, evidenced-based argument can be made against current nuclear regulation standards and for less onerous ones.
Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.
Of course regulation is necessary. The point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis.
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