There certainly is a lot of discussion on how criminals should be caught.

Perhaps in the distant future we will be better at understanding how a person becomes a criminal.

The sorrowful case of Christa Pike has been in the news in recent days. To summarise, she was on death row in Tennessee, and on the day of execution, she was given the prescribed lethal injection, twice, and survived. She is currently in hospital.

She was sentenced to death when she was 18, having tortured and murdered a young woman (together with her then boyfriend accomplace). Her childhood had not been pleasant. She had been neglected and abused by her alcoholic parents. By that point in her life she had been raped twice, the first time at age 11, then at age 17.

Our system puts all responsibility onto the individual, so she - having committed a murder - is sentenced to death. But one can't help but wonder how much of this murder was due to Pike's volition, and how much was due to her environment and upbringing. To keep things simple though, we have a murder, and we have a murderer. We sentence the murderer to death. An eye for an eye.

Then if we fail in our attempt to execute them, we send them to hospital to be patched up. Perhaps we can try again later.

I suspect that this will all be see as utterly barbaric, once it becomes history.

Start with all parental advice you might ever give your child, take the inverse, and distill it.

Why is it that the discussion on almost any issue in the US makes it sound like a bad decision is some sort of existential threat?

I love analogies - They're fun to stretch.

I'd argue that there are a multitude of knives, designed for different purposes. Some of them need to be sharp, and are restricted to expert users. But many of them don't need to be quite so sharp for the intended use, so having them slightly more blunt is quite appropriate.

Use of the word "the" implies an underestimation of the extent of the network of computers involved.

We can hold two ideas in our head at the same time.
1. We can understand the reason for Reddit dropping support for RSS, and see that the decision was, all things considered, a reasonable one.
2. We can feel a sort of sad nostalgia for the days when we used RSS, and the nature of the internet in those days.

We don't need to be 100% for or 100% against. In fact we could go one step further, and be a bit suspicious of anyone with that kind of ultra-strident stance... on just about any topic.

Did you see the scene in one of the 28 Days After film series, where, after the virus has wrecked society, a group of people are looking for food and go into a supermarket.

They collect all sorts of tinned food, but see that all the fruit and vegetables are rotten - except the irradiated apples, which they gleefully collect, and which we continue to see in subsequent scenes, implying they last for ages.

Installing a conventional OS on it would be a good use of old hardware, but it would move away from two of the big advantages of a Chromebook, which are low maintenance and speed. Hear me out...

I don't mean to simply that any conventional OS is not fast. I just mean that having an OS which doesn't store and manage things locally makes for very swift boot and wake times. If you use the Chromebook much as a tablet (gmail, browsing, media viewing, video conferencing, etc.) then after installing a conventional OS you'd miss being able to open the lid and, pretty much instantly, start using it.

And not having to concern yourself about OS upgrades is also a benefit of a Chromebook.

The UK has a cultural sensitivity about having a right to privacy. But I think we make a mistake by considering the rules in this area some sort of a fixed "red line", rather than a spectrum.

The law, by nature tends to set "red lines", so that we can rule that this case was illegal, while that case was legal". But with an issue like privacy, the reality is that there is not a clear red line as such. As privacy is gradually encroached upon, we feel increasingly worse about it.

Having an army of cameras automatically detecting people who look like those on watchlists, and being used in a "proportionate" manner, might be legal, but it certainly sails close to the wind.

In economics "price stickiness" is the idea that prices can't always be changed easily, or at least there is a disadvantage in changing prices. The example often given is the cost of having to reprint a restaurant menu if you changed the prices. These days, with digital menus, that text book example is not so relevant, but there is also a bit of a risk with customer loyalty. If a customer feels that the price of something they purchase is stable, then they are more likely to feel at ease with their regular purchase. If on the other hand they know they they need to keep checking the latest "dynamic" price before each purchase, they might start looking for an alternative vendor.

There are studies that show they have become safer over the last 5 years.
e.g. 2021–2024 IIHS (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) Study: 68% fewer crashes overall for driverless vehicles across all analyzed cities.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Feletric-vehicles.com%2Fw...

I'm not a researcher in this area, so I'd certainly be willing to be persuaded if you have other sources which tell a different story.

That's an fascinating prophecy.

Self-driving cars already appear to be safer than human driven cars. There are all sorts of stats on this, but even if you quibble with that assertion, you might still concede that the safety of self-driving cars is improving faster than that of human driven cars - and that there may be no way to change this. Human driven car safety can be improved a little by driving courses, stricter rules on drunk driving, etc. But the improvements in self-driving can be made at a much faster pace, and to a greater degree.

Now imagine a future where the roads are filled with self-driving cars, driving very close to each other (because they can), linking up electronically on highways, like carriages on a train. How would a human driver even be able to join that sort of ultra-fast reaction traffic? I could see a potential future where society might start to consider it too dangerous for humans to drive manually. The laws might even be changed to forbid it. The benefits would be safety and efficiency, but the disadvantage would be to the rights of those who want to take hands-on control of their car.

I can already sense the American Slashdotters starting to bristle, and I suspect that any such legal change might be more likely to happen first in a country like China, where the culture might be more accepting. But is it a trend that could be resisted in the longer term?

It's depressing that we now talk in a misty-eyed manner about the age of principles.

Fascinating. I second that imploration.