It is true the Constitution was amended after the Civil war to include banning of slavery in most circumstances. However, slavery is explicitly still allowed as a "punishment for a crime". Instead of "Black = Slave", it's "Black = criminal , criminal = slave". After all, it only takes only 6-12 angry white men to find you guilty.
I would think one of the major points BLM should be making, is removal of slavery as a punishment. It has too many very degenerate ways it can fail - and in some ways I think were very intended. But I doubt in this political climate of this happening.
EDIT: Boy, I said it was an unpopular view. Wasn't expecting this much hatred and contention, along with this much -1's. I mean, it's not like the 13th amendment explicitly says.
Would you please stop breaking the site guidelines by posting generic commentary about the voting on your posts, how unpopular your opinions are, and whatnot? It's pontificatory, tedious, and off topic.
Also, if you're going to post on an ideologically inflammatory topic like slavery or race, make sure your comment is substantive enough not to be flamebait. An example of how to do this is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543652. Your comment fell on the flamebait side. We don't need yet another flamewar! We need thoughtful discussion.
Worse, when you start posting comments that go Atwater, Erlichman, and Flint (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15543975), you're just going full generic, which is what makes flamewars burn hottest and be most tedious. Please don't.
I was really surprised to see you start with this being an "unpopular view about slavery" but the voting has shown that I was naive. It's pretty uncontroversial to the majority of historians and sociologists that post-reconstruction institutions like sharecropping, Jim Crow, chain gangs, "farms" such as Angola and Parchman, and of course the widespread lynching, were all structural continuations in fact of the previous de jure social system.
I guess this topic is like climate change.
I have noticed a gross difference in how US history is taught today (to my son and my gf's sons) vs how it was when I attended a US high school. Much less depth, much more boosterism, no discussions of "how would you act if this old institution were still in place today".
I don't think it's really that controversial to suggest that Jim Crow, sharecropping, etc, were massive injustices that intentionally limited progress for decades. In the South in public schools (in some places), they do teach us about this. We got to read The Invisible Man in high school, which was incredibly subversive when it was written.
I only say this because your post implies that the only reason someone would disagree with them is ignorance or racism, but some of us just have an appreciation for honest views about history, as I'm sure you do.
Thank you for acknowledging that. I tend to dig in to certain topics that I feel strongly in. I've had similar response before, on reddit and in real life. Both cases have been, what I could call, nasty responses to matter of factly stating what the 13'th amendment actually says.
Or one can look at plenty of longform articles about this very topic. Or countless books in this realm. Or if one doesn't believe the evidence, look no further than that 1 dot per person map, and finding prisons. They stick out.
But yeah, "climate change" rage inducing indeed. I mean, we have people denying simple (easily verifiable) claims with feelings and "simplistic" retorts.
Not sure why you're being downvoted (+1 from me) but this is essentially the basis of the Netflix documentary 13th [1]. The thesis is that slavery was replaced by excessive incarceration of African Americans, which were then used as cheap or free labour... much like slaves were.
And before that it was the thesis of the book The New Jim Crow. Arguing that the modern incarceration system came into being as a system of control to replace the Jim Crow laws that arose as a system of control to replace slavery.
The most 'aha' connection there was that a shocking percentage of black men have felony convictions of some sort or another, and we deny felons the right to vote in most states. Jim Crow indeed.
I'm curious what "automatic restoration" means. I recall from The New Jim Crow that the process is onerous in many states, involving paperwork and bureaucracy that many don't end up taking the time to do. But maybe that's just in the nine non-automatic states.
Ah, and in the paragraph underneath that table:
Even in states where ex-offenders automatically regain the right to vote upon completion of their sentence, the process of re-registering to vote often is difficult. One reason is the complexity of the laws and processes surrounding disenfranchisement. In some cases, it is difficult to determine whose rights can be restored. This can vary in some states according to the date of the crime, the conviction, or the release from prison, or the nature of the crime. The complex restoration process also can be daunting. It often involves lengthy paperwork, burdensome documentation, and the involvement and coordination of several state agencies
This, again, is why Jim Crow is an apt comparison. It's a web of rules that all together add up to a system of control.
Depends on the state. I'm on one of the states in the "Restoration by Governor's Action or Court Action" category, and I can tell you thought it is possible, voting rates are rarely, if ever reinstated in my state.
Oh, I'm familiar with that. It's just that most don't take away the right to vote permanently. They take it away until you're done serving your sentence and then it is automatically restored. (See the link.)
A couple of States even allow inmates to vote while incarcerated. In my now-home State, inmates are encouraged to vote and sometimes politicians will even go campaign inside the prison. That's pretty rare, but has happened.
So, it's a temporary loss in most cases. Notably, Maine allows inmates to vote and Maine is overwhelmingly white. Vermont is the same way. In my quest for more information, I found some commentary about that aspect.
> Notably, Maine allows inmates to vote and Maine is overwhelmingly white. Vermont is the same way.
Being overwhelmingly white is probably part of the reason; if you don't have a visible black underclass to subjugate, you don't take steps to subjugate them. In discussing the thesis of felon disenfranchisement as part of “the New Jim Crow”, pointing out that states without a notable visible black population don't engage in disenfranchisement is in line with that thesis.
There's some truth to it but the original post is way too simplistic.
They are suggesting that prison, even today, is equivalent to slavery. There is injustice within the modern prison system, but prison is not slavery, at least in the right context it is a place for punishment and rehabilitation.
Sure prisons make a profit off their prisoners, but those profits are nothing like those obtained by slavery, it's an extreme exaggeration and the problem with the justice system isn't just race, if someone wants to suggest that.
removal of slavery as a punishment
What is actually being proposed here?
To say we "never quit doing slavery" is to ignore the massive improvements and lives dedicated to get rid of actual, you know, slavery.
So the post is missing nuance in favor of a "big picture" opinion. I still view it as a thoughtful take on the situation. Then again, I generally only downvote trolls and distractions, not thoughtful posts with which I disagree.
Prisons are hugely profitable (see the video elsewhere of the Louisiana sheriff) and the prison industrial complex throws off so much cash that its lobbying effort is one of the largest in California (and is why we still have, for example, the three strikes law)
I said "yep" because I figured you were asking a general question; in the specific case Walmart's position is that they don't use prison labor (but plenty of web sites will tell you it's not true. Here's Huffpo: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/al-norman/walmart-prison-labo...).
At WalMart, yes. Also JC Penny, Victoria's Secret, K-Mart, and Starbucks have all used prison labor. There's also prison call centers, such as those used by American Airlines and Avis.
It's being downvoted because it's pushing a false narrative that it's only black people that are being incarcerated, and they're being incarcerated explicitly for cheap labor. There are major issues with regards to race in America, but real life is more nuanced than "it's happening because racism."
> It's being downvoted because it's pushing a false narrative that it's only black people that are being incarcerated,
Nobody is saying "only" black people are being incarcerated. They're saying that incarceration is used as a tool to perpetuate many of the same outcomes as slavery. Which is trivially verifiable, if you look at the respective incarceration rates by race.
> they're being incarcerated explicitly for cheap labor
Virtually all prisoners are required to work for what amounts to as little as $.10/hour. $1/hour is considered an incredibly good wage for a prison job. Prisoners are, by design, excluded from minimum wage laws. This is not limited to private prisons; it includes inmates at state-run and federal prisons too.
In California, about a third of the people fighting the recent and ongoing wildfires are prisoners, generally making about $1/hour or less. The maximum they can make is $2.56. Again, this burden largely falls on black and other non-white people, because they're incarcerated at much higher rates and for much longer sentences for the same crimes.
> Which is trivially verifiable, if you look at the respective incarceration rates by race.
This assumes that incarceration rates should be equal for all races, which probably shouldn't be the case. There's a correlation between low socioeconomic status and incarceration. Black Americans tend to have a lower socioeconomic status. Murder rates are also much higher among blacks than other races in America.
> Prisoners are, by design, excluded from minimum wage laws.
Right. Prisoners are being exploited, but that's not why they're being imprisoned. They're being imprisoned because of drugs, violence, and thievery/burglary for the most part.
Waitsec. So, because I didn't write a dissertation on this topic, nor did I write a longform article, it's invalid? Hardly.
It's not hard to look up that google maps census dot map. And then go find prisons in Google Maps and find it on the census map. Might be pretty surprising what you see... then again, might not.
Hint: https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/ Turn overlays. Go to Indianapolis, then look to the West side towards Avon and Danville. There's a dense green block (green dots = Black people) due south of Avon. Now, go look in Google Maps as to what's there.
Wash, rinse and repeat all across the US. You want evidence? There's pretty telling evidence right there.
Hell, I would go over the comment limit on even an abstract on this topic. We're talking 300+ years of history just in the US and colonies.
No, the real reason here why I'm being downvoted is because of a popularity contest. It certainly doesn't have to do with content, at least here. But some people are considered "unpopular". So we see rapid point swings and -1's. To me, its just some of the backward-ness how this community works. Every community has something like this. Grain/block of salt, and all.
Insulting the community won't help against the downvotes. The healthy path is to just ignore the votes and freely discuss your opinions, whether they resonate with other people or not.
By that I don't mean "ignore other people", only their effect on your comment score/karma. You should listen to their arguments nonetheless.
> Insulting the community won't help against the downvotes. The healthy path is to just ignore the votes and freely discuss your opinions, whether they resonate with other people or not.
That's the problem with "Downvotes" in the way they're done here. Legitimate discourse, albeit unpopular will attract downvotes. And so will unrelated offtopic garbage (Spam, 1 word replies, crazy rantings ala TempleOS).
The end result to both "unpopular" material and "spam" is the same - hidden. Simply put, -1s = losing right to talk and be seen. So yeah, I am pretty disappointed in the community, and I have a justifiable right to be.
I think there's space on HN for what one might consider unpopular views when they're presented in a more diplomatic way. Starting off with a chip on one's shoulder ("I've always taken an unpopular view about slavery") isn't a great way to start out. If you're looking for productive discussion, I can think of better ways to go about it. If you think something you want to share might be unpopular, why not take some effort to couch it in terms you think might have a better chance of being listened to?
The HN community is what it is. It has certain norms and behaviors. By participating, you're part of it. If it doesn't operate in a way you prefer and you'd like to continue to contribute, be the change you want. Behave in the ways you want. I encourage you to do so! That said, if you want to be confrontational and argumentative rather than looking for points of agreement and teasing out more nuanced differences, I think you're likely to continue to see pushback on HN. In some sense, such behavior can be as corrosive as spam.
I agree; there definitely should be a discussion about the whole system. Personally I would favour a system with a report option for comments that violate community guidelines or even laws, and a comment score that doesn't affect the visibility of your comment (at least not in an absolute hidden/visible way)
Video of a Louisiana sheriff complaining that releasing prisoners means he loses free labor. It's from this month, and Louisiana has some of the highest incarceration rates in the country
Slavery has had significant long term effects on the black community. That can't be denied. Disproportionate poverty in the black community is directly tied to slavery.
However I disagree that slavery - as the term is usually meant to mean - still exists in the form of incarceration.
We as a society have decided that certain things are illegal. The black community, because of poverty (so because of slavery), disproportionately breaks those laws and so there is disproportionate incarceration.
Slavery is the root cause of this disproportionate incarceration, but we should not blame the fact that we have a system which punishes criminals, or equate the enforcement of laws with slavery.
Instead we should be trying to eliminate outdated laws - the illegality of marijuana for instance - and also reducing crime in the black community.
Yes, making a criminal - who has committed a crime, been convicted and sentenced to jail time - do work is not equivalent - morally or otherwise - to racialized slavery.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
What if the policies can be shown that a distinct criminalization was made to expressly target a specific demographic? Or what if we can show that health and infant mortality trends mirrors that of the 18060's map of slave county census? We have more than a smoking gun - we have the blood spatter and the bullet, and the gun in the person's hands still smoking. 150 years later, and it's still going strong.
BTW, how's that water upgrade going on in Flint, MI? I'll give you a hint: they're a bunch of black people who live there. It's already out of the news.
>--Lee Atwater, 54th Chairman of the Republican National Committee
I highly recommend you listen to that entire interview to understand why it's important. He said it while he was a campaign strategist for Reagan and was talking about historical campaign strategies of the 50s and 60s.
I agree with the sentiment behind your comment, however I would also consider how the legal system seems to work. If you can’t afford a lawyer then the likelihood of “breaking the law” seems to be higher than otherwise.
Also, slavery had plenty of detractors and apologists had arguments in favor of slavery. Some of those arguments were pretty rational sounding (pretty wrong to)
Sure, but that's why it's important to ensure competent public defenders are available to all people accused of a crime. I'd be very interested to hear suggestions on how we can improve the public defender system.
Your second point may be true, but that's the case for almost everything. Doesn't mean that everything is right or wrong. We need to judge things on a case by case basis.
> because of poverty (so because of slavery), disproportionately breaks those laws.
Not correct. Blacks don't disproportionally break laws. The problem is that non-violent crimes in America are disproportionally enforced. Several Thousand, probably close to a million cases of illegal white collar crime go unenforced every year. Stuff like insider trading, corruption, fraud, laundering, etc. Crimes that white people are more likely to break simply are not regularly enforced. Non-violent crimes like drug possession in Black urban areas are highly enforced, while whites in suburb areas use drugs at the same rate, are not enforced. There is a bias in the enforcement laws
Don't the statistics show that violent crime is much higher among blacks than other racial groups?
I'd be interested to see statistics on white collar crime, but I know that there are significant resources put towards catching and sentencing white collar criminals.
>The black community, because of poverty (so because of slavery), disproportionately breaks those laws
This is so simplistic that it borders on a racist falsehood. Increased police presence, inadequate legal representation, racially motivated jury-selection and expansions of prosecutorial power are huge factors.
I'm not sure why you would call that statement racist.
Poverty tends to beget crime, this is very hard to deny. Because the black community - as a result of the slavery of its ancestors in this country - suffers disproportionately high rates of poverty, it also suffers from disproportionately high rates of crime.
The topic at hand is highly contentious. Regardless of how wrong you think the other party may be, it behooves us to strive to be even more civil in our discourse in such circumstances.
Except data shows this isn't the case. A closer match is male = criminal, criminal = slave. The legal system is far harsher on a white male than a black female. And even closer is poor = criminal, criminal = slave.
The legal system discriminates first on SES, then on gender, and finally on race. So what reasoning is behind there being a disproportionate focus on race over SES and gender?
so we end the war on drugs and outlaw private prisons. Do you really believe this will satisfy BLM? Do you really believe this will solve the problems in the inner cities? Chicago? Baltimore? St. Louis? There are a LOT of fingers pointing for political reasons, yet some topics and ideas are deemed "off-limits".
How about anything regarding "black-on-black" crime? YOu hear about "serial killer" in Tampa after 3 shootings, but nothing about Chicago or Baltimore or Cleveland, etc... WHERE IS BLM THERE? Granted, some cops are assholes. there is no doubt about that. some shouldn't be cops. But as a black man, you're 11 times more likely to be killed by another black man than you are by a cop [1]. Inconvenient facts
Or that police officers are almost 20 TIMES more likely to be killed by a black man [2]. Now - Think about the population ratios and what that entails.
How about the ENTIRE "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" movement was based on a known LIE. That didn't stop BLM, though, did it?
How about being "unarmed" does not mean "docile" or "not dangerous"?
How about statistics that that BLM and the regressive left don't like to hear? like how the Welfare system is a GENERATIONAL crutch that drags society and their individual communities down [3-7], but what do people vote for? MORE WELFARE, and anyone who votes against less welfare (or anything that doesn't "redistribute" or otherwise steal money) is obviously racist. Its things like THIS that gave you Trump. Identity politics is what gave you Trump. Yet very few in this country want to take responsibility for their actions or their current situation. It's always someone else's fault, and someone else's job to fix it. Stop wallowing in the past. Today and every tomorrow is a blank sheet. It isn't "my" fault that some people can't see or don't take advantage of their opportunities. But what do I know? You've probably already labeled me a "racist", not knowing my race, not knowing my background or circumstances.
Indeed not. The prosecution is on the Cops' side. The prosecution decides how vigorously they go after people in Grand Jury and open court. The Judicial system is on the Cops' side, even if during a jury trial they give words that "cops are just like everyone else" - they aren't.
It isn't a thin blue line. It's a big fat highlighter blue bar. The people, vs the Judicial System. And they're the ones that make and enforce the rules.
We legislated and regulated the old Taxi Cab industry when there was no insurance, bad employees, criminal activities, badly maintained vehicles. And someone can move in and laugh at the laws, and offer it for cheaper (Uber). Its only time until they die, or are regulated themselves.
Evidently for their trials, they have bots that scan the VMs and kill machines running cryptocurrency software. Just read a bit of threads on google, reddit about this.
Possibly, you can run it on paid machines - but why would you? They charge you more for a machine/hour than you can make cryptocurrency/hr.
If the free tier isn't funded by conversions, then it's only really valuable as a marketing tool.
This is why hosts are often judicious with the free hosting tier - even with address verification and capchas, 60% of the free tier is phishing hosts using a stolen identity and credit card. About 20% are Ebay snipers running shoe-bots, or crypto-miners, begging for bare metal for the response times or hardware, respectively. Another 18% are technology generalists who might cobble together a 2004-era blog hosting service, to engorge their inner nerd - mostly harmless, might not patch something, but will never convert.
For the first 2 groups - once the credit is up (or gets flagged for spam/phishing), the account gets flipped. The scammer uses new email and maybe a new credit card, and migrates their activities. Darknet forums (and probably some subreddits) have lists of providers and how to work the free tier. I expect software to auto-balance between multiple free-tier accounts on multiple cloud providers exists; I've debated scripting the API calls in Powershell in a few weekends.
Some shoes have limited editions where only a specific number of pairs are manufactured. e.g. Yeezy Boosts by Adidas. They are Kanye West's design and very exclusive. So when they go on sale they run out within seconds. Most of the people who buy them then put the up for auction on other sites like eBay where they can fetch up to 20 times the price.
So people who want them have to get them quick so they need automated scripts that can add to cart, fill in credit info and check out the moment they are released. (The manufacturer usually announces in advance exactly the date and time they will be released).
People pay a lot for these bots. I once wrote a bot for somebody off Craigslist for a certain clothing brand that was selling exclusive jackets and shirts like this. ( I do a lot of automation and scraping for my day to day work so it was not difficult). The guy paid me $600, didn't even try to negotiate downwards. The bot bought 10 items (max allowed in the cart) at like 250 each. I looked the items up on eBay sometime later and they were going for slightly above 1k. So I actually felt I could have asked for much more.
Anyway, long story short, people put a big value on exclusivity and brand so they are willing to go to lengths to secure these limited items.
It's an eBay bidding bot - bid on a popular product faster than humans. For some reason, shoes were extremely popular, and I have only ever seen this type of user target shoes, and not other products such as handbags or hats.
Actually it's mostly on niche stores that sell limited edition items like Yeezy Boosts, Supreme, BAPE. They even do it for clothes now. They have a release date and time and sell out within seconds
How is Etherium's latency? Would it be at all worthwhile to pursue building a shoe-bot (or other HFT/bidding bot) on an Etherium platform? Is there a future where users could pay more Gas to get a low-latency response?
Well, where "Machine Learning" (aka: black box you can only get weights for a given question), one can train a machine to be racist, sexist, ageist, or whatever.
The problem is that the end weight distribution is different than the GB's or TB's of training data. How do we know the training was fair and impartial? How did the trainers even know if it was? What biases crept in on this stage?
Worse yet, what if the bias of the black box does denigrate black people... Say, we take in all pictures of convicted criminals- it's disproportionaly black. I would argue part of that is because of inherent policing biases, but that's embedded in "guilty" verdict. Who's at fault for this "bias"? Is there a fault? How do we detect, other than exhaustively?
I'm eagerly awaiting for methods to "open up" ML black boxes and see what makes them tick. See their decision trees, their neural weights. I want to poke and prod to see what's behind those series of numbers like [.888271829 1.10999292992 37.999999921 1000.32 .73] . Right now, it's shove data in exhaustively and hope for the best. I don't particularly care for that way of analysis.
I would concur with that paragraph. When I was driving through South Indiana and Kentucky, I saw dollar store after dollar store after Dollar Store. I would see a little town with one to three dollar stores.
These little towns all had something in common. They had no noticeable industry, very limited business opportunities, and dilapidated and or dying community.
My and assessment, just driving through, is that these towns were all dead ends. I really hate saying that about people because it shouldn't be true. But for all intents and purposes they looked like they were in the last stage of existence.
But would people still shop at dollar stores if they had more money? I sort of think so--New York is incredibly prosperous, and there are dollar stores everywhere, visited by rich and poor.
I can't speak for New York. I've never been there. My experiences are that of portions of the Midwest in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Missouri. Larger places will have Walmarts and will have grocers and more industry.
What I see time and again our little towns that are too small to support even a Walmart or a grocery have one or two Dollar Generals. I'm not an economist and not sure what to make of that other than that a Dollar General seem to be pretty cheap to set up pretty cheap to stock and I guess and implicit acknowledgement that these markets are failures for anything other than dinky stores.
Uh... What? Not true. Living in NYC for the past 4 years, before that I lived in rural Ohio and Texas. There are no dollar general or dollar tree stores here, just kinda expensive mishmash-of-crap stores, Duane Reades and Rite-Aids.
Yes. At the other end of Indiana there are small towns continuing to do well due to the RV industry (which only seems to grow). At least in the town I'm from the DG is always busy.
OTOH in Indianapolis we also have dollar stores but not everyone uses them.
I'm curious how those towns even got started. It's not like there was ever much going on in small towns in Indiana. How did it manage to get even worse?
1. It used to be possible to make a bit of a living by doing your own farming. Now if you aren't industrial scale you probably won't even make a profit, let alone a living.
2. Globalization - Look around - there are almost always old warehouses either for food, lumber, or a small manufacturing plant that are run down - usually a few blocks away from downtown. These places one by one couldn't compete manufacturing cheaper goods from china or elsewhere
3. Walmartization - big box stores come in from out of town, suck up all the economic activity, pay people nothing, and ship all of the profits to HQ. Then the walmart closes, and there is nothing left.
I'm from small town Indiana - the biggest "city" I lived in had maybe 50,000 people. The average town I lived in had about 3000 or something.
There has never truly been anything in most of these towns. A good number had rail, canal, or other trasnportation connections, which made them viable (yet still small) at one time. Now most are really dependent on the next biggest "city" outside of the farming communities that bring them together. I Think the reason they get worse is because the hub cities - places like Kokomo, Marion, Muncie, and to a lesser degree Lafayette - have suffered. Manufacturing jobs that held these together no longer do that. Even outside of the "good-paying" factory jobs, it used to be OK to drive to the nearest city for a basic job. That's no longer the case (even though fuel prices have improved). And you wind up feeling like you are stuck.
Farming used to take a lot of manpower. So, the industry was largely what's going on between these small towns.
Cars reshaped the landscape as stores / restaurants / movie theaters etc could draw from a large enough population to support themselves. However, farm automation drastically reduced the number of jobs causing young people to move out. Eventually you can't really support much, but the travel distance allows for some shops in these nano towns.
Remember, 80 acres used to be a viable small farm. Now 800 acres are generally just a hobby unless your raising livestock and buying a lot of feed.
I think you underestimate the scale and magnitude of the industrial, steel, and auto industry dominance in some of these areas, and then the precipitous decline since.
“Before World War II, the cities in the Rust Belt region were among the largest in the United States. However, by the twentieth century's end their population had fallen the most in the country.”
Knowing nothing else about the particulars of why this was the case, it’s easy to see that this change would have drastic consequences for these areas.
From the article, talking about Decatur but generally describing "many rural towns":
> Like many rural towns, Decatur once fed itself and shared its bounty with the rest of America. At the turn of the 20th century, it had a tomato cannery and exported peaches, apples, strawberries, and beans by the boxcar from a downtown train depot. A population of 245 in 1915 supported two grocery stores and four general stores. But in the 1930s, blight outbreaks and insect invasions largely wiped out local orchards. The depot is now a museum where antique bushel baskets and poplar harvest crates hang from the ceiling.
Given the scale of technology at the time, it was a hotbed of agriculture, timber, mining and transport.
To New York and London of the 1800s, the Midwest (especially) looked a lot like China did to us 20 years ago -- a massive pool of resources that could be exploited using the new technology.
I live in a dying, rural small town. Well, dying is too strong a word. The population isn't growing, but it's not shrinking either. Stable for the past 20 years. Has around 800 people.
Anyways, this town was founded as a railroad hub in the 1880's. Both a freight hub taking farmers' harvests and delivering goods to the farmers, and a passenger hub transporting people from the surrounding counties into the nearest big cities. The town also provided necessary services at a time when traveling more than 15-20 miles was a hardship. There was a grocery store, general store, cinema, funeral home, pharmacy, bars, couple of hotels, hardware store, and so on. Was a central gathering place for the farmers, and the people who provided services for the farmers.
Many of those businesses are long gone now. The town is still vital for farming because of its mill & grain elevator, and the hardware store still does great business. But the rest is gone. Even the railroad moved away. There are no tracks left in town and the main route is 20-30 miles away. The town survives because of inertia. And because some people are willing to commute an hour to their work in exchange for having a house in the country, and a school with small class sizes for their kids.
Michigan is peppered with old railroad stops and logging towns.
My parents grew up on either side of a small village that now has a dollar store as one of 4 or 5 shops. It started when the railroad came in to log and became a "potato town" where farmers brought their potatoes to the railroad.
I would love for someone to explain how keeping the pricing information away from me, for weeks or months equates "Informed Consent"?
Because if I would have known the price, I would have chosen not to "consume" the services. I would love to see a lawsuit based on this very area, with complete lack of informed consent with regards to cost and health benefit.
Because the way it's currently handled is like if I went into a Walmart, loaded up with lots of stuff, and walked out the door. Then 3 months later, I get letters saying I owe X*$1,000 on threat of all sorts of things (garnishment, lawsuit, etc).
BTW, this is also the basis of a story by Greg Egan. Diaspora. (Aside: I highly recommend Greg Egan's work, especially Diaspora)
The claim he makes in the fiction novel, is that a neutron star-neutron star collision event would be enough energy to sterilize 100 light year radius around the event. The one in the novel happens closer than 100ly.
So, in other words, the law is wrong. And the is kept as such for purposes of revenue enhancement (illegal taxation)?
I can see a few interesting govt things coming out of "Autos":
1. Revenue from bad laws drops to 0. These vehicles follow the letter of the law. And they have the logs to prove any sort of claim against the former.
2. A false claim is filed (BLM makes about a point about this..) and says driver did X. Is this the person's responsibility, or the company who wrote the AI?
"We never quit doing slavery."
It is true the Constitution was amended after the Civil war to include banning of slavery in most circumstances. However, slavery is explicitly still allowed as a "punishment for a crime". Instead of "Black = Slave", it's "Black = criminal , criminal = slave". After all, it only takes only 6-12 angry white men to find you guilty.
I would think one of the major points BLM should be making, is removal of slavery as a punishment. It has too many very degenerate ways it can fail - and in some ways I think were very intended. But I doubt in this political climate of this happening.
EDIT: Boy, I said it was an unpopular view. Wasn't expecting this much hatred and contention, along with this much -1's. I mean, it's not like the 13th amendment explicitly says.