How exactly do you weigh the “suffering” — I would call it inconvenience or annoyance — of traffic fines against bodily harm caused by dangerous drivers? A fine versus a hospital stay or worse?
I'm honestly not sure what the balance is, but there is a point where one bad accident is worth less then many speeding tickets. It's obvious when you think about it- otherwise the speed limit would be 20 mph everywhere.
I'm really not sure where and how you draw the line but i do think we should err on the side of less surveillance. That's the predominant view on hn.
On the other hand, as an American citizen living in Asia after spending most of my life in the USA, I like not getting mugged, assaulted, or run over by a speeding car.
I think you refer to China, or maybe Japan or Singapore. Not every country in Asia has advanced surveillance. The UK, Canada, and America have advanced the same technology but use it in other ways, which is why American police can’t make the subways or roads safe like the Japanese have, but monitor your social media posts and emails for signs of terrorism and political dissent.
Finland along with most of the rest of western Europe will roll out biometric identification ( fingerprints and photos) as part of the delayed ETIAS program, scheduled for this year.
You gave some exaggerations and misinterpretations.
Every country has separate immigration lines for citizens and foreigners. Immigration officials have access to national databases but not those of other countries. Like the USA and most other countries Japan has biometric data associated with passports, but only has direct access to match that for Japanese passports. Perhaps you have never experienced the “dystopian” foreigner entry process in the USA or your own country.
Don Quijote has no such signs and does not demand your passport to enter or shop. If you want to get the VAT refunded — a privilege many countries extend to foreign tourists — you can do that by showing you have a tourist visa. Essentially duty-free shopping extended out of the airport. The USA does not have a national VAT so no American store needs a passport to refund taxes.
Japanese businesses do sometimes exclude foreigners, mainly because they don’t have multilingual staff, but also because they want to reserve some places for Japanese and not have tourists overrun every locals restaurant and bar.
Customs and immigration officials everywhere ask probing questions to catch smugglers and criminals. Annoying perhaps but hardly a Japanese thing. Part of the job description. You have no right to enter a foreign country, the immigration officers get to determine that.
Lol. That’s 6.7 times the median US salary. Fewer than 1% of Americans earn a $500k+ salary. If anyone could tell you an easy way to get to that, or what “niche of the future” you should focus on, everyone and their dog would do it.
Look at people who make that much now — the people already at the front of the line ahead of you. That might give you some ideas.
If you don’t have family money and connections and don’t want to break the law or defraud people you will probably need years at a name-brand university, quite a few more years climbing the ladder, good connections, and lots of luck.
Don’t trust important business processes or customer relationships to half-baked tech.
This kind of thing tells your customer very clearly how little your company cares about them. Calling a chatbot an “agent” doesn’t make the experience better for the customer.
FWIW I’m tentatively bullish on AI (for specific use cases) but I have never once… ever… ever… had a useful interaction with a customer service chatbot.
I hope AI replaces Bill Gates. Even a bad LLM could write less insipid and vacuous statements, and publish a witless list of books to read every year.
An AI can’t fall backwards into tremendous wealth and then imagine it earned it from smarts and hard work, then pretend to know more than everyone else.
Every day we get new affirmation of the incompetence and malice of the Trump administration. The people in charge of the futures and lives of millions, such as RFK, don’t have public welfare or health in the front of their minds. Nor can they admit their own ignorance or acknowledge mistakes.
Asking one side to have an honest intent to understand and consider positions that have no basis in fact or reality or scientific method amounts to asking scientists to have an open mind about astrology, Ouija boards, and repeatedly discredited junk science. Of the two possibilities — RFK et al. know something the rest of us don’t about disease and vaccines, or he knows nothing and suffers from egomania — I think the evidence speaks for itself.
Dr. Fauci and others may have made mistakes, but they can admit to their mistakes in the face of enormous pressure to act and save lives. They didn’t make mistakes out of colossal stupidity, ignorance, and drug abuse.
> What is so incomprehensible about this viewpoint?
Abysmal compared to what? In hindsight? Millions of lives saved in the face of a novel pathogen and public panic. The only people who lost confidence sit in the White house, pretending they know better than people who learned to read.
Also Tesla holds the record for most crashes, injuries, and accidents on FSD. Impressive considering the cars fail and fall apart at a rate few other auto manufacturers can match.
That's odd. Tesla's per-car warranty repair costs last year was less than
1/2 of Ford and about 1/3 of GM. I'm not sure where you get your comment
that they "fail and fall apart at a rate few other auto manufacturers can
match". The warranty fund is available in the manufacturers financial reports.
Please cite your sources for your claim since it clearly is not from the
public financial data.
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