But people desire them as a conspicuous symbol because some people decades ago were really into fast cars and picked those brands as the best of the best. It was the true enthusiasts that promoted them and then other people copied them because they wanted to be in the same "gang" and over time that evolved into a status symbol, far removed from the original one. But it did start with a small group of true fans.
Exactly this. If someone from "high tier" countries like Canada and Germany can get locked up in ICE jails for several weeks imagine someone like me from a peripheral European country. Even worse, my youngest brother that has a more "tanned" appearance. tattoos, and a beard.
I won't be visiting the US for the foreseeable future (used to go several times per year for work), just not worth the risk.
> Exactly this. If someone from "high tier" countries like Canada and Germany can get locked up in ICE jails for several weeks imagine someone like me from a peripheral European country. Even worse, my youngest brother that has a more "tanned" appearance. tattoos, and a beard.
Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
I constantly travel to EU for work. I see all kinds of people from any part of the world, and they pass through fine.
When I traveled last time, I have witnessed an European denied entry for a reason I don't know, and a white male without any beard has been escorted into the immigration office.
Said office had a giant window. The officers were just chatting with him while checking his documents, and also drinking some coffee and eating some cake. I didn't look that long to see whether they have offered the same to him (because it's rude).
Also, I don't have an EU/UK/US passport, and I just pass fine.
It all depends what part of the EU and how you look.
For some EU perspective: last summer we traveled with a group of social dancers from Berlin to Pula in Croatia, going to an event at the coast.
Croatia joined Schengen in January 2023.
We had one couple in the group that where not "white". She is German but her parents are Vietnamese and he is from Syria. They're married, they have German citizenship.
They were the only ones from our group of ~20 people who got singled out and had their papers and luggage (!) checked. She looks Asian, he looks Middle-Eastern (oh, and he has a beard!).
That said, they just took 10mins longer to make it through the arrivals hall. They didn't get incarcerated.
However, the year before they were traveling to a dance event in Belgrade. That was was before they got married so he didn't have a German passport yet. He only had a Syrian passport and a residence permit for Germany/Schengen.
Serbia is not part of the EU. Usually such a mistake means they just send you back on the next flight. Happened to two friends of mine, both "white US citizens, who didn't also know this and were traveling to Belgrade from Switzerland two years before.
My Syrian friend however spent three days in a jail in cell with a dozen criminals before they let him fly back to Germany. Mind you, the event they went to was four days and he had a return ticket that could have been easily changed to the arrival day.
Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU. And some EU countries are more "famous" for it, the Balkans e.g.
It is entirely outside of the EU until it's a member country. Serbia doesn't have any special status like Switzerland or Norway that are closer to the EU even if they are not members, and anyway the leadership of Serbia is currently closer to Russia than to the EU.
Though my point was that as someone who's moved into a EU country, it might not be entirely clear that it's not inside EU, given it's proximity and that they might have read about it in an EU context given its status.
Heck I'm in Norway and had to check to make sure I was right.
> Racial profiling is everywhere. Also in the EU. And some EU countries are more "famous" for it, the Balkans e.g.
Some countries are more "famous" for it, but that's really just a matter of perception and how it fits into an existing narrative, not based on actual evidence.
It's not like there's data showing that racial profiling is lower in France, Germany, and Sweden than it is in Eastern Europe.
I'd say racial profiling is probably around the same everywhere, but rule of law is not, and while you have a lot of corruption at the top level in France, bureaucratic processes makes it hard for low-level public servant to ignore said rule of law, which isn't the case in some Eastern European countries (i've heard that Romania made _huge_ improvement though, so maybe my only first-hand experience wouldn't happen these days anymore)
Are you implying there are similar arrests and indefinite detentions going on in Europe? Any data to share? Certainly worth being upset over if that’s a true accusation.
> Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
Depends on which part of Europe. In the more diverse parts, nobody would bat an eyelid (even if border police might profile you).
EU Eastern Europe, you might get funny looks but it's still not an extraordinary situation to have various shades of skin colour (e.g. Syrians, various Central Asians are migrant workers in a few of the countries in question; a lot of e.g. the Balkans are on a palette of skin colours).
Non-EU Eastern Europe (referring more to Belarus than Montenegro here), might get casual racism.
Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
> Depends on which part of Europe. In the more diverse parts, nobody would bat an eyelid (even if border police might profile you).
As a person who matches the description above, and has traveled to Europe extensively and frequently, I can tell you that as much as Europeans like to believe this is this case, it is absolutely not true.
> Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like. Other than of course the usual suspects of Belarus, Russia, Azerbaijan and etc. who could for any reason.
Unless you're making some extremely critical assumptions about how much wear the word "indefinite" can bear, this is unfortunately not true either.
A couple years ago my girlfriend and I spent about 2 months travelling through europe. We visited about 10 countries on our trip. A lot of our travel between countries was by bus. After a few bus trips we started noticing something strange - the busses often pulled over for rest stops just after we'd changed countries. Everyone would all get out of the bus to stretch our legs, and some police would miraculously appear and decide they wanted to talk to some of the people who were on our bus.
Now, officially the shengen zone means there's no need to show your documents between countries. But countries still don't want certain people coming in. And they don't want drugs smuggled in either.
It was really interesting who they decided to pull aside for a chat. It was almost always men who were travelling alone. Almost always men who were in the 25-45 age range. And I wouldn't be surprised if there was some racial profiling going on as well. The police never questioned me - probably because I was with my girlfriend the whole time. If she wasn't there, I bet I would have been pulled aside every time too.
Anyway, I believe your experience in Europe. But if you were a man travelling alone, its possible it was partially or fully due to that. For about a decade, every time I went through security at an airport I was always "randomly selected" to have my bag swabbed for chemicals. It never happens any more, and I'm as white as they come. I assume it was a gender + age + travelling alone thing - but its still a mystery to me.
I'm white, male. I travel to some lower-income countries for work. I can dress like a neat, well-paid software developer with the €2000 laptop and €1000 camera in my bag. I'll sail through security in Europe and at the destination, then have a horde of people hassling me for a taxi, sometimes pretty aggressively, and I feel I stand out as an easy target for robbery.
Instead, I wear some old, faded clothes for the journey. Then I get the "random" drug swab check in Europe, border control at the destination might ask to see my hotel booking, but the taxi drivers and street kids will ignore me as another cheakskate backpacker.
> Nobody will throw you in jail in indefinite detention in another country with no human rights because of your skin colour, beard, tattoos or anything of the like.
Most EU country police don’t need probable cause to detain you. It does happen to be detained for no reason outside of profiling. For example, in France, you can be sent to jail for up to 24h with no probable cause.
A friend's family flew into a EU country with a letter, they thought this letter was their visa but it turned out to be a rejection from the EU country's consulate (maybe it was a request for more information for their visa application). They were denied entry, but there was no indefinite detention, they were just told to get on the next plane out of the country and had to wait in the "international area" of the airport until said flight.
Also, a 24 hour detainment in reasonable conditions is very different from an indefinite detention with a possibility of torture (solitary confinement) or being sent off to an El Savadorian prison with no hope of being returned.
In the US you need probable cause to get pull over or temporary detain you.
In France, you don't need probably cause for temporary detaining you, but if they suspect you of something they can also send you to jail. You can't be sent to jail in the US just on them just suspecting something.
That's not the case in the US either. Like, how would that work if a non-citizen isn't bound to law anyway? "Oh you're not American, so you're not bound by our murder laws. Free to go".
But this admin highly disagrees with that notion. Really hope the courts start throwing heads sooner rather than later.
> Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
I can answer that! It is pretty uneventful. My experience with the border checks in airports was always very pleasant (despite the lines, depending on the airport they can be pretty long)
Normal stuff, millions folks like that come every year. Millions folks like that live here and also have citizenship, I have friends and colleagues working in banking fitting that description (including passports).
Now I am not saying we are uniform half a billion, not at all, wear burka in eastern EU in some small backwardish village and you will raise eyebrows and maybe more. Try that in US and its the same, to put it mildly.
> Out of curiosity, what do you think it's like to travel to Europe as someone who is dark-skinned, has a beard, and does not have a European passport?
With a Canadian or American passport (until recently)? No problem.
> With a Canadian or American passport (until recently)? No problem.
First of all, the folks profiling and detaining you don't ask you where your passport is from first - they'll generally make the decision and then ask for your documentation.
But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
> First of all, the folks profiling and detaining you don't ask you where your passport is from first - they'll generally make the decision and then ask for your documentation.
It depends. Most countries do have certain kinds of extra policies for passports of certain countries. For example, Visa fraud, especially for education visas, is extremely common from India. So extra checks for those that the acceptance letter isn't from some diploma mill and that they're not coming to work illegally tends to to occur more often.
But the same is true for local citizens that make odd, quick trips to certain countries that tend to be sources for drug smuggling - you're going to probably get pulled aside.
Being a border guard is 40% art, 40% science, 10% luck, and 10% other.
> But even then, I have a US passport, and I've had far more issues being detained in European airports than I have in the US - which is really saying something.
You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.
As a Canadian, I found that Canadian border agents tend to harass their own citizens, especially at land crossings, because the default assumption seems to be we're trying to dodge paying duties.
I've found American border guards mostly tend to act terse and rude (possibly as a strategy to try and trip you up?), though some of the nicest I've ever met were also American. I've found most EU guards with my Canadian passport to be bored and slow, though that may be because most Canadians going to Europe are just vacationing?
> It depends. Most countries do have certain kinds of extra policies for passports of certain countries
That's not relevant when, as I said, they detain you without knowing what passport you even hold.
> You're a citizen, though. Unless they think you're importing something you shouldn't, you're far less likely to be hassled as you have more rights than others.
Being a citizen does not, in fact, exempt you from being profiles and detained at border crossings, either in the US or in Europe.
I'm able to do a few more reps and recover a bit faster between sets and from one session to the next. That will definitely have a positive impact on muscle mass in the medium/long term.
Yes, yesterday I accidentally used the 4o instead of 4.5 model and noticed it was behaving differently. Showed me a table with pros and cons, suggested me to generate a document that I could print for better convenience etc. Seems it's better than before but haven't used it that much to be sure.
I maintain a 2-week supply of boxers, but do laundry every week. Over 10 years theres roughly 520 laundry cycles. I change my boxers at least once a day. Assume each boxer has equal probability of being selected, so it creates a 50% chance of being in that wash cycle. So its feasible that they've been through ~260 wash cycles.
I'd wish people stop using "open sourcing" when speaking about models.
Open sourcing is about being able to change and replicate builds, they make the models "freely available" but the recipe on how they are made is kept secret.
It's akin to being able to download Windows shareware executables and calling that "open source" when nothing related to how the executables are build is available.
Even if they did release the code, that would not help you much unless you have the $ for traning and the talented individuals for pipelining and distributed training.
The issue, in my non-educated view, is that it's the same issue twice in a row. I'm all for innovation and have admired SpaceX since the Grasshopper prototype but they can't just keep having debris flying down the Bahamas every month. Maybe it does need a pause in the launches and re-think the whole upper stage.
My parents' neighbours have a huge number of goats in their property. It really is in the middle of nowhere Northern Portugal and for decades everyone always said "oh the wolves are gone, they used to be such a menace to our animals but not anymore. Barely any need for guard dogs".
However, there is a small (200~300) population of wolves and since Covid it seems they got less scared of people, or more brave and desperate because the intense forest fires have ravaged their turf. Last year they attacked the goats and killed dozens of them. It was, according to my dad, one of the goriest things he ever saw.
Guess what, the guard dogs are back, nobody says it's all a thing in the past. On one hand it's great news that wolves are making a comeback but there's always the other side.
I think it's good they're prospering! Was just telling an anecdote. Guard dogs and better fences seem to be working, they never had another attack since then.
All solutions are compromises. For example here in France:
Wolves ? You have to get guardian dogs (a requirement to get compensated for attacks), accept that a part of your herd will be killed each year (disrupting the dynamic of the herd I've been told) and getting a small compensation. Guardian dogs cause problems with hikers. Someone I know had her dog killed, and I hate having 3 or 4 of them barking around me until I get far from a herd. They aren't that many incidents but it's always a stressful situation.
No wolves? You rely on hunters to regulate the population of some species (chamois, alpine ibex, etc.)
People against the reintroduction of wolves seem to see proponents as city dwellers with no experience of the real world, and proponents seem to see people against it as retrograde.
I live in the SF Bay Area (Los Altos Hills). My neighbor used to raise miniature goats. A few years ago a mountain lion got into the goat pasture and killed all the goats. It was pretty gory. On the other hand, it seems like the mountain lions (and coyotes) are doing a pretty good job bringing down the local deer population. I wish they would also start eating the non-native wild turkeys that have migrated into my area over the past 5 years or so.
As someone with young kids... I want to be a free-range parent to the extent possible, but I'm not going to let my kids wander around in the forest if there are wolf packs loose in the area.
This worked well in 1950s Britain because they had exterminated all large predators! Let's be real about that. For most of human history, nature was deadly.
We have wolves and the occasional bear on our property. They cause problems with chickens and trash cans, not people. They don't want to mess with us any more than we want to be messed with, and they typically keep their distance to the point that we see their tracks, not them.
I wouldn't tell a toddler to go play in the woods, you are correct about that, but the rest of us freely wander nature without fretting too much over it. I also just checked and there have been zero wolf attacks on humans in my state. Ever. We just aren't their preferred targets.
I agree that we shouldn't be worrying about reintroduced wolves causing much risk to humans, but historical perspective is a good idea: We shouldn't worry about them in the context of today, since wolves have learned to be very careful about bothering humans. In earlier history, it was a different story.
From what i've read, lethal wolf attacks in premodern Europe, even up to the late 18th century, were extremely common and claimed hundreds of human lives per year. Predators are predators. They stop attacking easy prey only if they're forcefully habituated into not doing so, not because they've become more warm, fuzzy and calm.
I lived the first 40 years of my life in bear and mountain lion territory and spent lots of time out in the wild, especially as a kid (usually a group of three or four of us). This is the first time I've lived where there is no wild animals to worry about aside from one variety of snake. It was a very odd sensation to realize I didn't have to be vigilantly aware of my surroundings to prevent a wild animal encounter. People have lived with predators for all of our existence
There have been a small number of cases where wolves attack humans, but the majority of attacks that do occur generally prey on cattle or sheep. With fencing and guard dogs, an equilibrium can be reached. Maybe have you kids wander with a protective dog. I don't want to see us continually destroy and suppress biodiversity because it's inconvenient for us.
2. Humans adapt their behavior to minimize the risk of attack by wild predators.
This is like saying "relatively few people get mugged wandering around alone in the tenderloin at 3am". It's because everyone knows it's a terrible idea and avoids doing so. That doesn't make the area safe.
To be honest, that area is very hilly and rough. Even without wolf packs loitering around I wouldn't recommend young kids wandering by themselves outside of the fenced areas.
I have livestock in an area with mountain lions, bears, and coyotes. There’s no fence that I could build that will reliably keep out a mountain lion, because they can jump very high and climb trees. Electrified fences with a high enough hot line will keep out coyotes and bears, but no one I know fences entire pastures that way. It would be very expensive and require a lot of maintenance. Livestock Guardian Dogs bred to protect livestock will do a much better job of scaring off and fighting predators. They’re specific breeds like Anatolians and Maremmas, not regular farm dogs.
My parent's neighbours, they're not my parents' goats (they only have a few to keep their property clean).
The neighbours have a big piece of land and electrifying the fences would be quite expensive, the guard dogs seem to be doing their jobs quite well, no attacks since then.
