Honest question: is that not just being complicit in their cover up? If they say nothing happened and nobody is allowed in to verify anything, then you say nothing has been verified yet so you’ll assume nothing has happened, it’s that not just doing exactly what they want? How are you supposed to prevent atrocities if all they have to do is deny and refuse outside observation for you to remain inactive?

Yeah, you’re right, you can open up a black box in a way you can’t really for a typical phone app/OS stackup. Maybe I argue it’s no longer a black box then, but no matter. I had originally started in on another section about better permissions and data handling and such, so I probably had a more optimistic view of permissions in general when writing, but one of the points was about being able to sniff your own (app’s) packets to be able to monitor what’s collected and sent at any given moment. That’s the sort of thing that I think makes the most sense, to directly interrogate the issue of what data they are sending back about you, rather than making logical connections from other observations.

Counterpoint: It might be normal for that device to have a WiFi radio or something to communicate wirelessly, but if the software is actually using the antenna to detect and track your heart rate, it might require an extremely (or even impossibly) talented hardware engineer to notice anything fishy from the device’s hardware itself. The WiFi and heart-rate thing specifically might not be a viable vector, dunno, but it can be a lot harder to check for stuff than just seeing if there’s an “ACME Spy Microphone” module plugged into the board somewhere. Though I agree they would probably get a worse reaction from illicitly including a hardware feature vs an app scraping the same data from your phone, even if they’d send back the same info; also that you could at least know a separate device was only tracking your car’s location, and only when you brought it with, not relying on it’s own software to decide when and where to collect data.

Ultimately, the solution might have to involve not using an OS developed by a company that also wants to slop up as much data as it can, but only so much one can do. At the very least, it’d be nice to get more separation between a “personal space” that you live your life in, e.g. socialize and consume content, and a “functional space” for other stuff that will run on your phone or you access occasionally but isn’t part of you being you, like apps for random companies or services, phone lights/sensors, a driver-insurance-safety app that should just get data pipes in from a specific list of sources and isn’t supposed to be sending data home 24/7, etc.

In some ways I agree, but on the other hand, a “box with GPS, accelerometer, mobile data, and everything else it needs to function … built right in” is just a phone, minus a touchscreen and some extra computing power. And unless you know the hardware inside the black box, just blindly passing its data through could be even worse than an app pulling stuff off your phone.

Similar, but my real question is why you have an explainer for the North American Fiber-Seeking Backhoe but with a picture of a Northern Pipe-Cracking Excavator?

I always felt like it was a good idea to prefer imports from developed nations with functional, representative governments. As an American, it is pretty embarrassing for my neighbor to see my roommate’s leopard eating my face though.

I think that mental model only works if you imagine the parabolas as reaching to infinity in a finite space so that both ends are parallel, ie having identical vertical slopes of +/- infinity. At that point, easier just to call it “half an ellipse”. To me, it’s much easier to imagine a parabola as the end of an infinitely long ellipse.

Your intuition and the KSP example are correct though. If you imagine the plane and cone for a parabola, you wouldn’t notice any significant change to the shape (at a finite distance) if you tipped the plane ever so slightly into forming an ellipse (or a hyperbola, for that matter) since it’s all smooth changes.

Anyway, the size of the elliptical (I think hyperbolic would have a different sort of energy state) arc that’d be formed by a thrown object would be so large relative to human scale as to basically be infinite, equivalent to a parabola. I imagine the difference might become significant once you are launching something a decent way around the Earth, but with that much energy in play I don’t think it makes much difference where exactly the projectile “lands”.

I’m really not seeing the flow from claiming that basically “selective breeding [some sense of eugenics] could result in biological changes in humans as it does in other animals” to being a proponent for eugenics in either a moral or policy sense. There was an naked counterclaim that it wouldn’t work, but honestly that’s immaterial to my first sentence, and I don’t know that I believe it either. Could you create an overall biologically “better” human? Dubious, if you could define such a thing in the first place. Could you create a human with superior moral or intrinsic value? Definitely not.

It’s certainly a completely bonkers statement to drop out of nowhere. There’s no context given in that article nor in a few others I found, but I don’t think it’s unfair to assume there was some sort of context or trigger.

There was a apparently another statement about abortion and Down’s that IMO just reads like an amateurish attempt at using absolute utilitarianism to make a profound, off-the-cuff observation based on a pretty ignorant set of assumptions. Yes, it’s a stupid statement that makes a pretty generic argument for eugenics with other assumptions, but the core claim of “an action that causes net negative happiness in the world is immoral” is, strictly speaking, not morally indefensible. There is a correcting of facts required, but essentially the same logic is used for the fairly non-controversial (as any abortion, at least) termination of a pregnancy that would only result in suffering and a dead baby. Correcting facts is, I think, much less substantial than correcting thinking.

Is there anything else substantial I didn’t see? To use just this as a basis for a declaration of “open eugenicist”, to me, just dilutes very powerful terminology that I’m sure many people definitely fit.

Also, as a side note, some of the takes in some counter-articles were absolutely wild. If your position is that (even if you don’t recognize it yourself) “Gee honey, I don’t think we’re in a financial position to try for another baby” is eugenics, it’s hard to believe there is actual meaning behind any string of words you manage to get out.