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For me, it’s How to Lie With Statitics. It opened my eyes to how much lies are in numbers. Also, another good one is 1984. It really made me think about my online life depending so much on Google.


Jim Crow laws, blackballing, and redlining. You ant allowed to work in certain jobs, if you speak out (see Kapernick), no job for you! And you can’t even live within reasonable distance of work!


Truth. I like how the young dems are doing in terms of anti-war and pro-privacy stance.


Facebook. That’s why. People protest online instead of offline.


That'll teach them!


And the comments. How to not worry in one paragraph. If you can’t control, don’t worry. If you can, do something! Also, imagine if you are blind and walk around for 5 minutes with your eyes closed. Imagine if you are permanently blind. How will it be like to live as that forever! Open your eyes. You have the power of sight! More than you will ever need to survive! Edit: Why the downvotes?


True, I never show my real name in any public platform unless it's my "official" one, which is whitewashed. I go through pseudonymous accounts every 2 years for my privacy. We already do have social credit, it's called your credit score. Self-deception is a powerful force. Everybody rise up to the polls! Oh wait, it's both sides that are abetting this crap. Just vote with the closest to freedom (including a social safety net) and don't worry, cause you can't control it.


Unless I’m mistaken, your credit score is your financial credit rating, not your social. It isn’t affected if you get a ticket jaywalking, or acting like a jerk.

There are interconnections between the two, but there are pretty clear distinctions.


A matter of time, I guess. Your "insurance score", as seen by insurance companies, provides information on how likely you're to be able to pay back a long-term loan, or even to be alive long enough to pay it back. And "insurance score" is based on increasingly deep insight into your lifestyle. It's only a matter of time before someone will have the bright idea to use "insurance score" as an input to credit score - and then, suddenly, you have social credit (sans the politics part).


Then spying, tracking, censorship of "offensive" or "unpatriotic" words depending on your political side for little gain of the little people. Of course, the state won't do anything to actually reduce mass shooting, they profit of fear and hate. History doesn't repeat, it is remixed.


Mass shootings are vanishingly rare. Your odds of being in one are microscopic.


Risk assessment fundamentally about probability and impact.

We took measures to get serious about drunk driving because it increased the probability of car accidents, especially at night,and was killing people.

On the flip side, we mandate tamper evident seals in medicine because the rare event of tampering hurt a small number of people, but undermined the citizens faith in the institutions they depend on.

The mass shooting issue is like the pill bottle problem. It’s a serious matter with an obvious solution. At the end of the day, it’s a problem unleashed by marketing — as hunting and shooting sport participation evaporated, gunmakers were left with a problem. Now we have batshit crazy people with political power, which is a genie that will be difficult to put back in the bottle.


> It’s a serious matter with an obvious solution.

This is a bold statement. Why do you think the solutions are obvious? Do you believe this is a subject without nuance?


No gun, no bullet, no shooting.

Look at the gun death rates in the northeast compared to the south.


However, it’s a shame that it happenes with frighting regularly in 2019! I probably won’t involve me but it’s a outrage.


Lots of things are vanishingly rare, the odds of being in a mass shooting are a lot less vanishingly rare then I am comfortable with. If the odds were up near where tornado deaths are I'd prefer it. The numbers I saw gave a 1/11125 chance per year of being killed in a mass shooting in the US.


That number looks wrong. It can't be the case that thirty thousand people die in mass shootings every year in the US.


Yeah that number is outright false for "mass shootings". This figure originates from the approximate 33k people that are killed by firearms per year. Of that number, somewhere around 23k are individual suicides with firearms. Of the remaining approximate 10k deaths, 80% are gang related incidents. Source is the FBI UCR.


There are roughly 30000 gun-related deaths per year in the U.S., but far fewer from mass shootings as you say https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths-mass-shootin....

You can also see the gun deaths broken down here. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/


I think they're probably quoting the chance over a lifetime, assuming rates stay the same. According to Wikipedia, 382 people died in mass shootings in 2018.


Gang violence is often included in mass shooting statistics, and rightfully so, but depending on the depiction or commercial are not shown as such. On the other side of the coin, often times, gang crime is taken out of mass shooting statistical data, making it look far less likely, but more realistic to rich, white, suburban targeted audiences that politicians tend to advertise to. Neither is a lie, but both data sets are "massaged" to suit political narratives popular with particular bases.


Only if you use the perversely tight definition of 4 or more people killed (not including the shooter), not in a robbery, not as part of gang violence, not as part of domestic violence, and not including sponsored terrorist events, on the same day in close geographical proximity.

As soon as you drop some of those requirements the numbers increase dramatically.


In fact they do not


Social Security, dark web crackers, and crappy online forgotten passwords websites want to know your location. I jest. But seriously, DOB is extremely valuable, which is why I never use my real one online except for government stuff like that.


Thank god youtube got rid of that. One day you would browse a dark page, and boom! Searing white at 3AM! But it’s nostalgic.


But they are hella racists and discriminating.

https://www-m.cnn.com/2016/02/29/us/bh-photo-lawsuit/index.h...


Can anyone explain why this comment is being downvoted? Is it a matter of "yeah but Amazon does it too/is worse"?


Perhaps because it includes multiple breaches of this line in the HN guidelines:

> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

There may be a case for introducing information like this when a company is recommended, but the comment would need to be worded with more civility than that one was.


Oh sorry, I just wanted to inform people. I will try better next time!


The story is very likely untruthful.


I see you are a disciple of the guilty-before-proven-innocent principle.


From the bit of googling I did, the suits appear to be settled. People seem to take considerably settlement checks as an implicit indicator of some truth. Granted there's probably more to the story.


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