Nobody claimed Europe was worse than China, only that if you wouldn't visit China for this reason then you shouldn't visit Europe (or the US) for the same reason.
Speaking of being disingenuous, when you say "Police can search phones to counteract human traffickers", did you think critically about that at all before writing it? Given one of the stated justifications is "preventing terrorism", and the UK has been illegally arresting Palestine Action supporters as terrorists for over a year, this seems a little naive at least.
> Nobody claimed Europe was worse than China, only that if you wouldn't visit China for this reason then you shouldn't visit Europe (or the US) for the same reason.
That would be nonsensical. If you have anti-Xi propaganda on your phone (which could be the reasons you mention), you have nothing to fear in Europe or in the US and a lot to fear in China.
The US is actually worse than both China and Europe because it's 18th century amendments protect human traffickers. Although they do what they can to not have to adhere to those, especially in border control.
> What about Palestine Action...
I'll limit myself to the LARP about "oppressive Europe invigilating your phone".
Nobody cares about your phone in China, if you are tourist, you are less likely have your phone searched than when visiting US. Nobody is going to ask you for your social media profiles when visiting China, unlike when visiting US. So who is here the free country?
I've spent this summer 3 weeks in China, used 2 VPNs, both of them worked fine (1 cost less than dollar, the other 4-5 dollars), so did my wife, mother and her husband, guess how many times someone cared about checking our phone.
The biggest issue was when we travelled into Beijing province where there are mo strict border checks and police found out we didn't register our accommodation (at wife's family), the scary horrible policemen then locked us for weeks and deport us from country... No, seriously, that would more likely happen in US than in China, in China they just told us to register after the weekend at local police station and let us continue into province to check Great wall, policemen in police station could not care less and be more laid back about it.
Maybe visit some other countries to have actual experiences instead spreading everywhere your feelings about other countries based on some propaganda.
It's not the tourists, it's the local dissidents that have something to fear. Or maybe try going there as a tourist, and putting up anti-party posters.
Indeed anti-Xi posts are unsafe in China, and safe in UK. Equally, anti-UK posts are safe in China and not so in the UK... (eg https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118565/documents/...). The naïveté in the claim that these are significantly different reminded me of an old joke from the USSR:
American: In America, we have freedom of speech.
USSRian: What's that?
American: I can stand in front of the White House and yell "Reagan is a moron!" and nothing will happen to me.
USSRian: Well, we have that in USSR too.
American: Really?
USSRian: Yes, of course! I go stand in the center of the Red Square and yell "Reagan is a moron" and nothing will happen to me.
You're saying anti-uk posts, you're linking some heavily editorialized article from a highly ideological media outlet about an arrest "allegedly over criticising anti-trans activists". So not anti-UK posts.
The arrest doesn't seem to have lead to any conviction. So not years of jail and reeducation camps like you get in China for dissent.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You put this things together and you claim they're the same. They're not even close. This makes you seem funny, unserious.
You're trying to convince a flat-earther with logic or physics. Western democracies are evil. Worse than China and worse than North Korea. The answer is Marxism.
EDIT: This reminds me of a Russian person I used to work with. He truly believed that elections in all western democracies were fake and rigged. That is you go and vote but the vote is predetermined. This was a long time ago but I think it was some story told in Russia about the west (basically how the west is not really free) that stuck as an unshakeable belief when he left Russia and moved to the west. This was about 40 years ago give or take. People can hold weird beliefs and conspiracy theories (like people that believe the earth is flat) and those beliefs can not be assailed with logic or facts.
The reality is(?) that western democracies with all their flaws are better than authoritarian regimes but a person can not grasp the entirety of reality. One can always find examples where people are treated unjustly or unfairly in western democracies and ofcourse one can find examples of people being "ok" in authoritarian regimes. The key is to apply the scientific method to the question vs. relying on anecdotes but the human mind is not really wired for that.
Increasingly, people in the US get convinced that Europe is pretty much like China (they usually focus on the policing of online spaces in the UK as proof of that).
There was apparently a recent push in their media to introduce and reinforce this narrative. Can’t see what good would that do, except the current leadership wanting to worsen relations with everyone.
I did that. There are no arrests for criticizing on the first page of Google.
Judging by your previous reactions, you're going to say that your Google is different, and link some news story about an arrest that isn't for criticizing and instead for supporting terrorism.
Hate to break to you that not every arrest is the same. Some include beating, and lead to jail time. Some include questioning and they lead to the arrested walking free within the day.
So you're hyperfocusing on the UK's online posting, which has nothing to do with the original subject of phone passwords, and doesn't even happen in other European countries, because UK has more proactive monitoring of online spaces by police.
And this is your proof that Europe is a tyrranical dictatorship.
I do agree with your conclusion, but the catalog in most online shops is certainly not impartial. Amazon sells the entire first page of search placement, for example.
Within a few years people will be accustomed to the idea of AI chatbots selling them stuff and it will be obvious then too. The first time paid placements appeared in a catalog, it was probably also not obvious then.
catalog ads are labeled. "what's the best something I can buy?" is begging for unlabeled ads that go against your interest. if you literally cannot tell between ad and not ad, you can't skip to actual results, it's useless.
> I am excruciatingly aware of the difference between a copyleft license and the public domain.
Then why did you say "no harm was caused"? Clearly the harm of "using our copylefted work to create proprietary software" was caused. Do you just mean economic harm? If so, I think that's where the parent comments confusion originates.
The quoted text describes separate comments from different police officers. It's also reported by a third party, is a paraphrase rather than a quote, and isn't bragging.
Are you sure about that? Police brutality has been reported as a huge issue in the US since at least the 60s. If anything, from the outside it looks like it's got better since Iraq.
> Personally I’ve had encounters with LE and have not had a gun drawn yet, so it’s obviously not the default.
What does the default have to do with it? We are already not in the default situation. Interacting with police at all is not the default! If you mean to say something like "it's not likely" or "they're not doing it in unreasonable cases" then your anecdote is not relevant.
> And why would someone threatening people with a knife deserve benefit of the doubt?
Several reasons, which would be obvious if you tried to think of them. Most knife-wielding maniacs are, well, maniacs, and aren't fully in control of their actions. Innocent bystanders are regularly killed by police discharging guns accidentally or inappropriately (in fact, even police are frequently killed this way). People are routinely misidentified by police as carrying weapons when they aren't. Police often give misleading or unclear instructions while trying to de-escalate, and with a gun drawn, failure to comply can and does result in the suspect being shot.
Bear in mind that what you are excusing is essentially a (substantially increased likelihood of) extrajudicial execution. It should be a last resort. It's not enough to say "well he's clearly a bad guy, why give him the benefit of the doubt?".
Why is it not zero? This strikes me as the exact sort of calculus they used way back when they stopped chasing fleeing suspects in vehicles: the danger to the public is too high to justify the use of force. If you can't hit your suspect without hitting other civilians, then don't fucking fire! And no I don't particularly care if the LEO's life might be in danger either, that's literally the job they signed up for: to put themselves in danger to enforce the law. It's ridiculous that cops just get complete power of life and death every time they feel a spot of stress, and have to be handled with kid gloves by the general public less they be murdered in the streets.
I will never be zero because perfection is impossible. It's like saying there should be zero car fatalities. We should work to get them down (enforcement against drunk driving, maybe checkpoints, stronger driving tests), but asking for zero accidents just isn't reality.
"Helsinki hasn’t registered a single traffic-related fatality in the past year, municipal officials revealed this week."
"The limits were enforced with 70 new speed cameras and a policing strategy based on the national “Vision Zero” policy, with the goal of achieving zero traffic injuries or deaths. Data collected by Liikenneturva, Finland’s traffic safety entity, shows Helsinki’s traffic fatalities have been declining ever since."
That's not analogous at all. Everyone drives, and so everyone is a possible source of a car crash. Police are not (in theory) just whoever wanders into the goddamn precinct. They're (in theory) trained professionals, educated in what they do, and therefore entrusted with both the force of law, and the deadly force they wear on their belts.
And no we probably can't make it ZERO, but we could surely get it under 1,300!?
1300 is not the rate of innocent bystanders being killed. It's the rate of people killed by police period. Maybe if we didn't have police being killed by criminals in the USA then they wouldn't need to go in armed and scared for their lives.
By definition, every person the police interact with is innocent, because at such time as they are talking to a cop, even being detained by one, they have not been convicted of a crime.
No, it's the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" and even if you'd like to craft a scenario next where we're going to talk about Officer Friendly stopping a rape-in-progress, yes, that person is almost certainly guilty, AND the punishment for that crime is usually not death, AND the cornerstone of our justice system says that the officer in question, no matter how pure of heart he might be, cannot exact a death sentence on a clearly guilty person because that is not how justice works.
A cop killing ANYONE, be they a bystander, or a suspect, or an assailant, should be RARE. It should be notable.
Let's aim for a max of once every year, then, over the entire USA. And once that's achieved, let's aim for once every few years. Once a decade should be good enough, you probably won't get better than that.
The EU has a much bigger population than the USA, in a smaller space, and I'd bet they're already around this number.
Well... the sicilian mafia comes to mind... the french can be quite violent too... Western Europe is not so bad either, with guns.
I guess you mean "normal" non-criminal people in the EU are not allowed to have AR-15 assault rifles in their homes, that they can use if they have mental health issues.
I personally believe that is one of the reasons the USA has so much gun violence. Get rid of the guns in people's homes and things will change for the better.
There's a slightly new topic called Agentic Commerce, where you say for example: "purchase for me the most energy efficient dishwasher with a budget of $600", and the agent will connect via specialized via special MCP Servers and APIs to available stores, and will do the full purchase process for you.
This MPP helps bridge the gap between the agent putting the product "in the basket", to actually completing the full purchase process.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way advocating for this use case, but it's part of my job to understand how it works. Part of what I do is try to help Agents understand, for example, what is "an efficient dishwasher" using actual data, and not hallucinated info.
I'm probably overlooking something, but what makes the problem of being able to get from item in basket to item is shipping different from choosing which item(s) to put in the basket?
In other words, if Agents are able to navigate marketplaces, shouldn't that imply they can also navigate a subset of the marketplace, the payment section? Especially given that that section is "easier: theres no need for qualitative (or quantitative) judgement like there is for the shopping portion.
It's not actually doing browser actions like Playwright or other browser automation tools, rather than direct API and MCP calls/actions. This is a whole new subset of API and connections that are all contained within the Agent context, no browser mocking. That's why they are creating these new protocols, so the full governance can work within the context of the Agent and its available tools.
As I said, it doesn't have to make sense, but this is being pushed on us anyway...
It seems like this workflow suffers the same problem as Alexa and Amazon dash buttons: consumers don't typically want the computer to just go buy things for them with no oversight. At least I don't.
Adding a checkout step would make this more plausible to me. "Agent, go find the most efficient dishwasher under $600" where it adds its recommendation to a cart, or even "Find me the best dishwashers under $600" where it creates a catalog page with its recommendations and an easy checkout process with whatever store is actually providing.
So, what is an efficient dishwasher, in agentic-speak? Furthermore, what is actual data? How is any data you pull remotely a source of trust to answer my question? Surely not just what is on the manufacturer's website?
Not trying to be snarky here, your problem space must be awfully complex.
As much as I detest having to look at ads or being "influenced" in any way, shape or form, I think the opportunities for exploitation with what you just described is potentially orders of magnitude more harmful. Sure, let me just hand my wallet to a stochastic black box with god-knows-what RL'd biases and then hook it up to adversarial data sources all vying to extract the most money from me - what could possibly go wrong?
Aside from physical real-world purchases, just opening up the space that agents get access to would be another feature. E.g. if you ask Claude to summarise a Twitter thread, it will say "I can't access, please paste the contents in here". That's fine with a human in the loop, but prevents it using Twitter as a source during deep research, say.
Similarly with paywalled sites like the New Yorker or research journals - If the LLM came back to you and said "I've found these 5 articles. Do you want me to add them as sources to summarise (access cost: $0.05)?" or you give it a budget upfront "Access whatever you think is most useful, but don't spend more than $0.10"
At the moment, sites either allow bots full access or block them, but this could provide a middle ground.
And would it not be useful to have some kind of human in the middle? For example what is to stop charge backs if no human has actually authorized the transaction?
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