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As a professional advertiser: yes. Gambling ads should be illegal. Big issue is supreme court said states cant ban gambling ads due to first amendment.

Certain porn is illegal despite the first amendment existing - the court merely invented a "nuh uh" exception, called "obscenity".

Current precedent is that states can ban almost anything they want, but if something is legal, you cant ban ads for it.

Is it legal to advertise cigarettes in the US?

Point is the supreme court can just "nuh uh" anything they want to

Cigarette ads have a ton of restrictions despite that first amendment existing

Funnily enough cigarette ads were banned in 1970 before the Supreme Court regime that says you can't ban ads for a given legal product. If someone were to take the case to the Supreme Court, they could probably get cigarette ads un-banned.

With a sufficient endowment to the Trump family, one can get anything they want from this supreme court

Companies underestimate how much this murders productivity. All friction compounds.

Every drive

Intra-species dominance is very different from group raiding. Chimps team up to slaughter other chimps all the time. Raid style warfare was the norm for humans

It was not the norm, but rather a failure mode. This isn't to say it wasn't common, but not the norm.

A History of Warfare by John Keegan is a good introduction to military anthrolopogy, with an extensive bibliography.


It is the norm for pre-industrial societies.

No it isn't, and I invite you to read the book to find out why. Murderous raids are the exception when the more widespread norm of ritual combat or tit-for-tat kidnappings with limited casualties had broken down.

Sure, you can go in to kill everyone, and sometimes they did, but only when they were OK with almost as many of their own group dying as the enemy. There's no big technological or tactical advantage to be had in the stone age. Maybe, if you're really lucky, only one of you die for every two of theirs?

(Attacking them in their beds, pah, don't you think maybe the neighboring tribe thought about that and had someone on watch?)


Attack in beds was very common. Sneak in canoes, kill as many as you can before the enemy regroups, canoe away as the sun comes up.

"The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800" by Wayne Lee is a good read that describes a similar kind of warfare. It doesn't necessarily prove (nor does it set out to prove) that all non-industrial warfare followed this model but it does provide decent evidence for population-limited societies generally preferring deadly ambush to pitched battle.

When running away is a big part of the tactic, it's not a "kill everyone" tactic. You don't have the advantage for long. And even if you did succeed, the next tribe over could just as easily do the same to you (and they probably would, seeing what you're like), so there's a strong reason to develop norms, rules of engagement limiting this sort of thing.

There are no "kill everyone" tactics. That's never a goal because it's extremely difficult to achieve. It may happen, but it's always a bonus.

The versions I've heard always included bringing back any cattle and/or women you could. That gives the raids a more demonstrable benefit.

If you're talking cattle, you're talking a different time of history entirely. That allowed collecting and concentrating enough wealth that some could engage in that sort of thing without worrying about immediately falling victim to it themselves. In the paleolithic, that wasn't possible.

Before humans had domesticated cattle, it was of course not possible to steal it. Not sure if that's what you're saying.

I have read stories about this happening in the current day Amazon.


I think this makes the common mistake that all "primitive" cultures have the exact same behavior -- I suppose you're not speaking from PNG right? (although likewise I have no such specific knowledge) As the article cites, in this specific place (and in many other similar cultures), I don't think there's motive to wage large scale wars or take large amounts of territory, that would justify something like raiding and wiping out other groups. I suppose that could happen in the huge number of other cultures, ones that had more centralized leadership or competing more unified cultures. The conflicts in the case of PNG might have been localized dispute over borders and such.

In nonhuman animals, even in fierce disputes over territory and mating, killing is rare, because it's quite costly: you eliminate completely a healthy individual, and usually would run the risk of serious injury yourself, making both dying likely. Usually they e.g. resolve mating with displays of beauty/fitness, and territory with displays of force (chimpanzees for example have lots of display of force rituals, specially around selecting leadership, I believe) and sometimes non-lethal conflict (some species evolve apparatus just for this kind of conflict, e.g. antlers, so they can engage in conflict with low chance of injury).

Since we're referring to human cultures, something distinct we have is memory and communication -- information can get out on reputation, behavior, etc. of a group. I think if a group just goes out and murders another in their sleep (which TBF is not so easy), then I imagine for example word would also go out of their actions and may get into trouble with other groups, I'm sure spiritual traditions would also have a say about it, in favor of some sort of "spiritual revenge". But I suppose it's difficult to generalize.

I do think it's interesting to consider some forms of morality, or just metaphysical and logical understanding around ethics, as a kind of technology that enables people to live longer and enable more secure conditions, including preventing large scale conflict that can bring destruction on an industrial scale to entire societies (although misguided moral arguments ironically are also misused sometimes to enact destruction). Although I guess morality alone is not enough (because not everyone seems to internalize it well), and other mechanisms are also helpful to achieve more social stability.

(Also of note is that there can be such thing as too much stability -- for example, for some new more interesting and maybe more worthwhile forms of culture to emerge, old ones have to be replaced, so stability should be balanced with cautious openness to new ideas, technologies, methods, peoples (ethnicity), cultures, ..., and worldviews -- of course, as long as change is in the direction of improving our lives collectively. For example in some cases religious fundamentalism advocates for an absolutist cultural stagnation; we just shouldn't need one group to murder another to spread about new things)


Different cultures of course have different norms. There were even hunter-gatherer societies that practiced extreme forms of pacifism - Moriori would be one example (and their eventual fate shows why this isn't more common).

In general, though, pre-agricultural societies tend to have very high mortality rates from armed conflict with outgroups. In PNG in particular, as I recall, it gets to the point where >20% of all males die from enemy action. Similarly, pre-agricultural societies rarely take prisoners, and often target what we would consider non-combatants (i.e. there's no separation between "enemy warrior" and "enemy civilian", even in principle).

And this makes a lot of sense when you consider what motivates this warfare. Pre-agricultural societies are bounded by the output of the wildland that they forage on, and a single human requires a lot of land to live off in this manner. This is why those bands tend to be small - very few biomes can sustain a foraging band of even few hundred. But conversely it means that any other band of humans foraging off the same land is literally starving you out. It doesn't matter if they are otherwise hostile or not, and there's no potential compromise to be achieved even in theory if you have a plot of land that can sustain, say, 100 people, but now it has 150 feeding off it. The only way for one group to survive is to either kill or drive off the entirety of the remaining group, so it doesn't matter if it's women or children that you're killing. The point is to convince the other group that they are more likely to survive by going elsewhere by making it so precarious for them to remain, or if that is not possible, then to wipe them all entirely. Raids do exactly that.

This is also why prisoners are rarely taken and often ritually killed right away - every prisoner you take is an extra mouth to feed. In an agricultural society, an extra mouth can feed itself because it requires comparatively little land to do so, but for pre-agriculturalists an extra pair of working hands is worthless if the land is already at capacity wrt what can be extracted from it (which is usually the case since populations grow until they reach that point).

Stuff like ethics of warfare, spiritual tradition, reputation etc is derived from all this. Cultures that practice this kind of raid warfare generally glorify it. A war leader who leads a successful raid to massacre an unprotected enemy village is a hero, not just to his own people, but more broadly as a model for other aspiring warriors in the larger culture. So things that we might consider as "disreputable" are not necessarily seen as such there.


Competition drives innovation

...no. flock doesnt have robot cars weaving through traffic. Its not the same thing literally or figuratively.

So their tracking is OK because it's immobile. That's an interesting and novel defense of a surveillance state which I hadn't heard before.

Do you have any idea what it would mean for society if people routinely resolved political disagreements by destroying each other's property? I think celebrating that kind of behavior is deeply wrong.

Yeah, it would mean that the British Crown would no longer hold dominion over the Colonies. I'd insult you, but then dang would get mad at me.

Fundamentally this is silly because Flock only tracks cars and not individual people. It doesn't do facial recognition surveillance. Society decided a long time ago that driving is a privilege that can be regulated in a variety of ways.

There is a societal consensus that driving is a privilege which can be restricted or revoked, not that you give up your rights by driving. In fact the opposite is true, the courts have found that drivers have fourth amendment rights for instance.

Drivers have a right not to have their car searched without probable cause. But being photographed in public is not a search.

Those photographs go into a searchable database.

And?

... and you need a warrant to surveil individuals? And they have to be suspected of crimes?

You don't need a warrant to record people in public. You keep throwing around the term "surveil" as though this is a singular activity. Do the police need a warrant to search your house or car? Yes. Do they need a warrant to get Google to hand over your Gmail contents? Yes?

Do they need a warrant to photograph the exterior of your house? No. Do they need a warrant to photograph you in public? No


You keep missing that these aren't singular photographs. This isn't the 70s: these are persistent systems that aggregate video and photographs of everyone, tracking their movements over time. That is enough to make this constitutionally distinct from a cop taking a single picture of your house.

And? These are still videos of people in public. This information is in plain view. You keep insisting that if you aggregate public information it somehow becomes private information, but that's not true unless the Supreme Court makes some new precedence-setting decision.

That precedence-setting decision would be Carpenter v US [1], which established that being in public does not automatically eliminate all fourth amendment protection, and the comprehensive nature of government surveillance can matter constitutionally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States


Carpenter v. United States was about the government accessing telecommunications data. This is not public information, location data also tracks people's movements on private property. Just like the other case you cited, Chatrie v. United States, this is a situation wholly removed from public facing video cameras.

Carpenter was not about who owned the data or the technology being used but rather the government reconstructing a person's movements over time, including movements occurring in public.

The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.


> Carpenter was not about who owned the data or the technology being used but rather the government reconstructing a person's movements over time, including movements occurring in public.

...and including movements occurring in private.

> The fact that the data is owned by a private company or that some of it is considered private by the individual doesn't matter: it's about tracking individuals over time.

More importantly, tracking their private movements over time, not just their public movements. You're hand waving away an important part of the case. And the decision does not extend to ALPR readers, from what I can tell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States

> The Supreme Court's ruling in Carpenter was narrow and did not otherwise change the third-party doctrine related to other business records that might incidentally reveal location information, nor did it overrule prior decisions concerning conventional surveillance techniques and tools such as security cameras.

Trying to interpret Carter v. US as prohibiting public security cameras is a very big leap


As I quoted before:

> A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere. To the contrary, “what [one] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”

This would still be an issue even if they weren't recorded in private spaces. At issue here is the reconstruction of data, regardless of if it happened in public or private spaces.


Picking out one quote doesn't change the fact that the ruling in Carpenter was narrow, limited to cell phone location information. You're just wrong about the scope of Carpenter, and unwilling to accept that fact.

You're focused on the narrowness of the final ruling and not the vast legal reasoning that led to it.

Carpenter's reasoning concerning comprehensive records of an individual's movements (regardless of private or public) are relevant when LE uses aggregated Flock data to reconstruct a person's movements over an extended period.


Except the narrowness of the final ruling is exactly what makes it not impact the legality of Flock. It doesn't matter whether you think the courts decision should be extended to cameras - your opinion doesn't decide the law, the court's opinion does.

Except what I'm discussing is why the court went with that decision and how that reasoning applies to modern technology like Flock cameras. Your original argument was that cameras are in public and location data is private and includes private data, and the distinction is that you have no expectation of privacy in public. The court doesn't agree, and they've explicitly pointed out that 4A still applies when someone is being monitored and tracked in public.

> The court doesn't agree, and they've explicitly pointed out that 4A still applies when someone is being monitored and tracked in public.

Only when that tracking is done via cell phone location information. The Carpenter decision did not apply this to all forms of public monitoring. You keep ignoring the fact that the decision was narrowly scoped to cell phone location data, and continue to erroneously claim that it applied to public tracking in general.


I agree that Flock and other license plate readers should be regulated. Law enforcement should be logged and have rules for how and when they can access these records. What I would strongly disagree with is the idea that flock and license plate readers are unconstitutional and should be banned.

It can track devices via their Bluetooth radiation. A lot of devices use randomized MAC addresses though, but probably not all.

Tracking vehicles lets you strongly infer who's driving them. Individual people have already gotten into trouble over their vehicles being spotted by Flock. If it could not be used to track people, the technology would be almost useless. Just because driving is a privilege (it's more of a requirement in the US, but the US at large doesn't really understand coercion) doesn't let you do anything you can come up with to people possessing that privilege.

"Flock only tracks cars and not individual people."

prove it.


They do track people and their systems are capable of searching by identifiers including skin color and clothing. You are either disingenuous or not informed enough to discuss this issue.

It's even actively advertised as a feature: https://www.flocksafety.com/products/flock-freeform

https://www.404media.co/how-cops-use-flock-to-track-people-n...


Just do it in China or Japan.

Cities with the social order required for robotic street cleaning rarely require robotic street cleaning. One might as well suggest a novel heart surgery that works only on healthy patients.

China has very little street crime but they pay street cleaners very regularly. You can actually find videos on YouTube. I just watched one with a 65-year-old man who manages 600m of street and has managed the same street for 28 years. Just using big brushes, dust pans, and putting it all in garbage bins. the city pays him between $600 and $800 a month in USD.

Japan has much, much less litter to pick up. Turns out when your windows aren't broken, that you take pride in the rest of your community too.

It's true that if you lower your expectations enormously that it's easier to hit them.

It's also true that if you raise you expectations enough then you will never be able to hit them.

Keep in mind that it's not always a case of "shoot for the stars but hit the moon if you miss", sometimes it's "shoot for the stars and suffer crippling burnout for 20 years, after which it's too late to recover to anything meaningful".

Being realistic, for all it's boringness, does have advantages.


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