This is completely untrue, there are unlimited examples of speech that exists out there that you have absolutely no inherent right to hear, and in fact many existing laws explicitly support restrictions on your ability to hear the speech. Just a few examples off the top of my head; do I have the right to hear:
* A comedian at a paid event when I haven't paid
* Private conversations between you and your significant other
* DMs between other people on social media
* Podcasts published exclusively on Spotify when I don't have a membership
* Speech in walled gardens (FB, Insta, X, etc) where I don't have an account
By your reasoning, I have a right to hear the speech on instagram and X, correct?
Well tough cookies for me, meta and X are bith restricting my freedom of assembly. Will you go to bat for me?
They’ve imposed arbitrary restrictions on my access to speech simply because I refuse to sign up. And The government is okay with them restricting me from these public squares, outrageous!
Will you be angry on my behalf, like you are with the restriction on tik tok?
If these are truly public squares, it’s outrageous that I need to essentially show ID and give away a ton of rights to X and meta just to access the public square. Why are we not mad about that as well?
Again, this feels completely unrelated to the tiktok ban. It's fine for a venue of free speech to have rules, it's different for the government to ban a platform 1/3 of americans use because of intangible threats that are frankly an incredibly thin excuse for censorship.
The government isn't banning you from most of these, the only ones they are banning you from is private ones, but TikTok has speech that is non-private, so it's completely different.
I wonder how much real difference you get in the statistical sampling margin of error when going from 58% to 70%. How much accuracy does that buy in the election outcome for the extra time that additional 12% of the population spent?
> You can debate why turnout is so low in this country for something so high stakes.
Maybe because statistically speaking your individual vote does not in fact matter? And that's a principle that applies equally to the left/right. For every marginal non-voter in your preferred party you get to vote, there's a marginal non-voter in the opposite party that somebody else is trying to get out to vote.
Put another way, we could intentionally reduce the sample size and mandate that only 33% of adults vote in any given election, and we'd reduce the statistical confidence in the election result very little.
Any given individual's singular vote (which is likely nullified by the marginal person in the opposite party) just has so little impact compared to Atwood's $8m political contribution that it's a rounding error.
> We are a democracy, but 144 million Americans – 42% of the adults who live here – do not vote and have no say in what happens.
Why do we worry so much about voter turnout? A 58% voter turnout is a statistically significant sampling of the population; aren't we getting a pretty accurate measurement of the actual vote with that high of voter turnout?
Now if voter turnout is skewed, then that's a problem worth talking about. But with how much time and effort it takes to vote, it seems like such a waste of time with how we do it today.
We could get the same results with much less effort if we made it work like jury duty; at each election we select 10% of the population at random and it's their job to actually do the research and go to the work of voting (research candidates, wait 3 hours at the ballot box, etc), and the remaining 90% of us get to go watch a movie or something that day.
> A 58% voter turnout is a statistically significant sampling of the population
Voters are not randomly sampled so this is impossible to state due to selection bias. If a plurality of potential voters are saying "none of the above" when asked to vote, that itself is a noteworthy signal.
Have you heard of sortition? Its taking your last idea even further, and having that random selection just actually become the legislative body. Would hopefully lead to less polarisation as parties would have less opportunities to fundraise and divide. Most people don’t fall neatly into the two party buckets anyway
Insurance for human drivers stays the same. If anything, it goes down, because the more Waymo-level autonomous vehicles on the road, the safer it is overall.
Insurance isn't a zero sum game, where "less insurance spent on autonomous vehicles" means the insurance companies have to make up for it somewhere else.
In a way, "car driving getting safer overall" isn't great for car insurers, because they make money financing auto risk, and if there is 50% less auto risk then they have less addressable market.
Insurance is, however, a for profit corporation, out to maximize profits, so they'll charge both groups a premium, and then add a service fee on top of that.
Nothing about that changes with the introduction of autonomous vehicles though, and it's a very open and highly competitive market. It is extremely easy to switch your auto insurance provider, and anyone who can pay some actuaries can start up a new business. (Though few do, because there isn't a huge margin to take away from the industry as it is.)
And when they post the obscene margins as a result of doing this, other insures can come in and undercut them. That's a key ingredient to making insurance work well. Its also why "insurance" doesn't work for healthcare.
One one hand, indeed, we're approximately at "one quarterth" of the century.
On the other a high-tech well-funded professional combined-arms military with total air supremacy in complete control of the perimeter is ought to be capable of being more careful. And maybe it is, just wasn't feelin' it.
Well that. But also geurilla warfare against non-uniformed combatants that use public infrastructure for military purposes has inherently higher civilian casualties. It's not going to be all one thing or another.
Wait, is the air outdoors generally cleaner than the air indoors? Certainly not true in the Salt Lake valley for the 4 months of the year we get persistent inversion.
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