However, CAHOOTS is selectively dispatched by 911 and is only sent to a small percentage of situations which would otherwise overlap with police. (Most of their calls are more general assistance to the houseless folks/public where no police response would occur.) This is largely due to very strict “low-risk” criteria to not send police. This may be appropriate to protect all parties since CAHOOTS is not as equipped or qualified as other first responders — CAHOOTS only receives partial city funding, notably through the police department, and they are not equipped as EMTs/paramedics.

But this also means if you witness someone in crisis and call 911, you cannot be certain that CAHOOTS will show up and not the police, because as the article points out, 911 is set up to send police as the default and will likely do so whenever in doubt. This can clearly have life-or-death consequences for the person in crisis, and we won’t understand the full potential of these intervention teams until they are decoupled from the police and treated as peers with a discrete scope of responsibility.

https://www.sj.se/en/about/about-sj/our-trains/sj-night-trai...

The solution to fixing a broken system isn't to prohibit an alternative and force everyone to use it; those with resources will find a way to circumvent any specific ban, as that's significantly easier than solving a systemic failure. Also, why is it their problem? I'm by no means a libertarian, or particularly anti-government at all, but why should individuals with higher socioeconomic status be burdened with repairing a malfunctioning piece of government above and beyond voting and paying taxes?

What the US public educational system needs is to incentivize the most qualified individuals—potentially those who graduated from private secondary schools, even—to join and help fix the system as it currently stands. The vast majority of teachers in US public schools aren't there because the pay and benefits are any good, and I've known several former educators who've since moved on to other careers due to the need for a living wage. If we want to restore the system correctly, it needs to be done by providing impetus for its repair, at which point perhaps those individuals will actually admire it enough to send their own future children there.

The real issue isn't private schools, the wage gap, or any of that, it's the dismal lack of motivation for anyone capable of overhauling the system to do so.

No it isn't. Perhaps by far the best and most practical way, but not the only way ever to type math notation.

I'm a goddamn middle-class American, I believe I have a reasonable knowledge of what Google will get out of this deal (as they do every day from my heavy usage of their services), and I would accept the free computer. Even at that, poor kids without regular access to the internet aren't your average highly tech-literate, open-source-aware HN user, and I really doubt they care about Google's relatively responsible* use of collected information in exchange for a rather nice free netbook, even if they were fully aware of its implications.

*Sure, I understand this is an arguable definition, but in the larger scheme of things, it seems fair to say that Google doesn't have a malicious use of the data in mind.

For anyone wondering, here's what it looks like: http://imgur.com/XbZJpC6.png

You know it's serious journalism when they take something that was already overblown by the actual media and rehash it. Also, when he says, "if I can speculate further," and proceeds to talk about "steal[ing] the content that greases their ad machines," as well as "their quasi-religious effort to more quickly bring about technological singularity," ending in an unclever and sarcastic comment.

This is an inflammatory piece of junk with an alarming lack of facts (and abundance of pathos appeals and weasel words) to back up any of the claims. Political criticism is fine, but this is just blasphemy pretending to be news.

See: most things on Change.org.