In Portugal, if you do that the police will ask you for your ID if it's a light drug like cannabis, or take you to the police center if it's an heavier drug. If you keep being caught by the police a judge can order you to take psychiatric help.
Being decriminalized means that you won't be arrested when you ask for help, and you have access to clean syringes to avoid diseases and infections.
Help being provided, it's not the same than being legal.
While what you're saying is true, I think that's why the world is afraid to adopt Portugal's policy. If getting halfway there is worse than doing nothing at all, it's a very dangerous thing to try.
In my experience, when people say drugs they think of cannabis, but cannabis was never the major problem in Portugal.
Our problem was heroin. I think no country will legalize heroin, at least not in the short/medium term.
This is clearly working, one of the major entrypoints of heavy drugs in Europe (Casal Ventoso in Lisbon) is almost clean of problems, there are still heavy drug users of course, but most of the associated violence disappeared.
Even portuguese people's mindset shifted from "junkies" to "people that need help".
So even if you consider a "halfway there" because you're thinking about legalization, this is still working and it's a good middle term to help society shift their mentality.
Disclaimer: I'm talking from my experience as a Portuguese person, not hard numbers. I remember walking in my hometown parks (which is a very small city) and see syringes and drug users everywhere when I was a kid. This doesn't happen anymore.
> In 1971, as the Vietnam War was heading into its sixteenth year, congressmen Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy from Illinois made a discovery that stunned the American public. While visiting the troops, they had learned that over 15 percent of U.S. soldiers stationed there were heroin addicts. Follow up research revealed that 35 percent of service members in Vietnam had tried heroin and as many as 20 percent were addicted—the problem was even worse than they had initially thought. [...]
> Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that completely upended the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that when soldiers who had been heroin users returned home, only 5 percent of them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12 percent relapsed within three years. In other words, approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight.
True, I had heard that before, but its not really what I was asking. Your example still has 10% addicts (the same number that I mentioned). Did these people become problematic to their wider community? The 10% who become addicted have caused plenty of problems in my city.
Just for argument’s sake, my opinion is that intelligence is a kind of social construct. What we view as “intelligence” is the manifestation of traits that are important for our current society to function. i.e, we value bridges, so the traits of bridge builders are viewed as positive traits, which we call “intelligence”. In other environments these traits might not be seen as intelligent. For example, from what I’ve gleaned from reading books written a hundred or so years ago, “intelligence” could only be possessed by members of the upper classes, so even if you could build bridges, if you weren’t born into a certain class you were seen as mentally inferior. So our definition of intelligence shifts over time based on whatever society deems as important.
Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills. Your example of equating intelligence with wealth or bridge building is not even close to how intelligence is measured. It will be measured in dimensions like long term memory, working memory, pattern recognition, rotation of visual space, strategy/problem solving. And these abilities invariably dictate how people will be able to learn or perform at things like bridge building or software engineering. You will never be an exceptional software engineer if you cannot keep a suitably sized problem space in working memory.
It's so frustrating to me that we keep regressing our political conversations with assertions of this nature, that intelligence is a social construction, when in doing so we are literally turning a blind eye to what is arguably one of the greatest injustices our society faces. Intelligence is not a social construction, and it's not distributed equitably, and that isn't fair. It's the single greatest psychological signifier for material success. I'd much rather accept reality as it is, and spend resources attempting to ameliorate objective injustices, rather than making assertions that intelligence is a social construction because it gives some opening for a utopian alternative that can simply dispense with our "oppressive conceptions of competence."
Our definition of intelligence comes from a set of measures which were calibrated to correlate with measures of success. Success is by definition a measure of societal “fit” and so the whole program is by definition socially constructed.
Doesn’t mean it’s not “real”. But I also would not say it’s “abstract” in any meaningful sense. It’s certainly not derived from first principles, nor do we have any kind of theoretical model of intelligence that’s good enough to construct measures around.
I agree with you, believe it or not, what I was referring to was “our definition of intelligence” (edit: ie, the collection of traits we see as “ingelligent”), not the underlying traits.
The fact that intelligent people were seen as mentally inferior doesn't negate the existence of their intelligence. The upper classes relied on the expertise of engineers, scribes, musicians, mathematicians, and artists and supported them materially even as they debased them in other ways. Otherwise that intelligence wouldn't have been selected for and inherited by later generations.
This paper already assumes that success is a social construct, and so it is not evidence of the kind you’d need to substantiate your initial enormous claims.
From the very first part of the abstract: “[...] the literature has not fully explored distinctions between the ways leaders of these organizations socially construct success, [...]”
Claiming success is a social construct seems to me to be trivially true, not a staggering claim. Intelligence is less obvious since there is a vast literature around it, but, again, it is clearly a social construct; we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.
I'm also not sure what "scientific evidence" would look like here. You seem to have had some sort of allergic reaction to the assertion of social construction and retreated instinctively to familiar but hollow epistemic grounds.
>we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.
This makes everything a social construct, which negates any usefulness of the distinction. Having to agree to definitions cannot be a realistic definition of social construct, because it's a basic part of using language.
Yes? And? This is one of the most profound and basic observations of twentieth century philosophy. That is what social construction is, it underlies our basic notions of perception and reality.
What you've said is not profound. When you go around saying "the sky is blue" people aren't wrong to assume you meant something relevant, rather than just tossing out vague and trivial statements.
I'm not sure what to do with this remark. You said my definition of social construction was untenable because the implications were too broad and you seemed to find that frightening. I responded by saying that social construction IS a theory with broad implications and gave you a reference to read, since you seem to be unfamiliar with these concepts. Your response seems a non sequitur.
Sadly, this story is wrong and stems from a misunderstanding of how this feature works. The OS bootstraps these suggested apps from a configuration hosted by Microsoft servers, not anything present in your ISO. (e.g. https://twitter.com/thurrott/status/1122847063312613377)
I installed Windows as early as last month (in a VM) and still got Candy Crush. This is probably because my ISO image was not fully up to date.
I was not aware of this change but it is greatly appreciated. I can no longer modify the parent comment but if dang or anyone else with permission wants to please feel free.
No need for a new litmus test, though solving the problem of Edge opening MSN ads after updating would probably buy some goodwill.
It's making it worse until something bad happens to someone you value.
If Obama's daughters (or Trump's if you are on the other side) were killed in some horrific racist incident, wouldn't you approve the usage of such software if it was the only hope of getting the perpetrator? Or would you say "as much as I am saddened, I cannot approve such massive invasion of privacy".
What safeguards do you have in place to make sure that personally identifiable information of customers that companies using your tech have is not aggregated and pulled together for nefarious use? For example very targeted lead sourcing or targeted advertisement?
Oh, none, you actually advertise that you are mining all the databases for:
> Prospect and identify leads
But I understand that it can be hard to see certain things when your income depends on you not seeing them.
At the end of the day, the only aspect of what we do that is really anything like Palantir is that we build a search index, using Lucene. That's it, an inverted text index. There really is no meaningful way to know that the data being put in is PII, or to regulate how the orgs that use it, do so. And even if we did put in any such safeguard, all our stuff is Open Source, meaning anybody could rebuild it without the safeguard, and we'd be none the wiser.
The differences between us and Palantir then:
1. We don't pitch our software to intelligence agencies, law enforcement, etc., or encourage it's use for these kinds of ends. But we can't specifically block those uses, or we'd be in violation of the OSD.
3. Everything we do is Open Source, meaning that at least the public can take a look inside and see what's going on... modulo any changes a given end user organization makes and keeps private.
4. Our technology is positioned primarily for internal knowledge management / collaboration use inside organizations. But, again, we have no means, legal or technical, to stop somebody from using it for other purposes. And even if we did, they could just download Lucene, ManifoldCF, blah, blah, etc., and build up their own Nefarious Indexing System.
But I understand that it can be hard to see certain things when your income depends on you not seeing them.
There is nothing in this regard that we "don't see". Taking your argument to it's logical conclusion, even a worker mining sand somewhere, to use to fabricate silicon chips, which can be used to power computers, which can be used to run privacy violating software, is "guilty". I don't think I need to point out the absurdity of that position. Furthermore, if we really just cared about "get all the money at any cost" we would have immediately jumped at a chance to talk to In-Q-Tel and the possibility of juicy, rich contracts supplying the CIA and their brethren with technology.
> There really is no meaningful way to know that the data being put in is PII, or to regulate how the orgs that use it, do so. And even if we did put in any such safeguard
Since you advertise that your tech is suitable for lead sourcing, you obviously don't see anything wrong with mining and linking databases of PII information, as long as it's done by "the good guys".
Since you advertise that your tech is suitable for lead sourcing
We don't. The line you quoted above is from my LinkedIn profile where it's describing my responsibilities as founder of the company. So, of course, part of what I do is prospecting and identifying leads. All companies do that, I don't think anything we do falls into the "nefarious" range. We aren't using retargeting or buying user information from data mining companies, etc. Our prospecting basically starts and stops with Twitter and LinkedIn... Not exactly spook stuff.
And while I can respect that some people take things to such extremes that they can even find mundane things like advertising unethical; I'm pretty comfortable with my own sense of ethics and our attempt to do the right things. In either case, attempting to draw any parallel between us and Palantir is an exercise in absurdity. Notice that there's no HN top-page stories titled "Fogbeam Lab's Secret User Manual For Cops", etc. :-)
No worries. I understand where you're coming from. And believe me, I've spent a not inconsiderable amount of time thinking about these issues. I tend to look at raw technology as being "ethically neutral" but it does bother me that there doesn't seem to be any way to truly ensure that tech is only used for noble / beneficial ends. But I don't feel like I can let that stop me from working on tech in general... the only other alternative seems to be to turn Amish or something. And somehow I'm not quite comfortable with that.
>If Obama's daughters (or Trump's if you are on the other side) were killed in some horrific racist incident, wouldn't you approve the usage of such software if it was the only hope of getting the perpetrator? Or would you say "as much as I am saddened, I cannot approve such massive invasion of privacy".
The latter, every time. The nature of principles is that they do not change with changing circumstances. I find your example extremely unpersuasive.
I think the reference here is to the problem of fatal shooting of minorities by police in the US. The OP is attempting to draw attention to the problem by an exaggerated situation in which the former first daughters are involved in such an incodent.
Isn't this just kind of like wedding photography before Instagram? Photos everyone else has already done in fake "spur of the moment" situations, you're selling illusion just like P.T. Barnum.
C14 dating loses precision dramatically past a certain age (~50k years, IIRC), because of the nature of half-lives. Since this is in the 200k range, C14 wouldn't be the go-to.
But to answer your question, yes, it turned a profit:
> The maker of cloud-based file-sharing software reported profit, excluding some costs, of 10 cents a share, above the 6 cent average estimate of analysts polled by Bloomberg.
It is funny - but to add a little nuance here, it sounds like they're reinvesting tons of cash back into R&D. If they were not reinvesting as heavily, they would be cash positive.
> Dropbox has demonstrated impressive growth since 2015, roughly doubling the number of paying users and revenue. Dropbox became cash-flow positive in 2016, but recorded a loss of $111 million that year after pouring money back into its product development efforts.
