Mandatory reference: the kids-for-cash scheme [0] where private prisons paid a judge to send them children, often for the tiniest offense.
The two judges receiving bribes were sentenced to 17.5 & 28 years in prison respectively.
The bribing company is still in operation today. One of the co-owners was sentenced to 18 months in prison for "failing to report a felony". The other co-owner at the time is now the sole owner and was not charged. His brother was and still is the District Attorney.
(No idea who first said that. Someone on the internet, probably.)
Directly involved:
* the District Attorney
* 2 judges
* the director of ... of the Juvenile Probation Office
* the brother of the District Attorney, who ran the prison (he was convicted, NOT because he paid off corrupt judges, but because he lied about that)
* a supreme court lawyer
Indirectly involved:
* a supreme court justice personally
* the whole Pennsylvania supreme court
* the governor of Pennsylvania
* Pennsylvania's Judicial Conduct Board
* the FBI
Clearly the problem is "corporate america". Which means, Facebook and ExxonMobil, I guess? Seriously?
All were at the very least presented with evidence this was happening (most participated in it), all refused to help obviously wrongfully convicted children.
And when this was finally dealt with? What was the problem that needed fixing? What got the ball rolling you ask? Hundreds of complaints about improper sentencing? No. The district attorney realising obvious wrongdoing happening for years, quite literally right in front of them? No.
A childish squabble over who has to do what job, by court employees, resulting in judges accusing each other. One accuses the other of "conspiring" to remove her, and infighting over shared ownership of a Florida condo ... which lead to press coverage of what one judge was accusing others off ...
Needless to say, the justice system, judges, public prosecutor, the county and the state of Pennsylvania, needed to put the blame somewhere. Somehow, not a SINGLE dollar of damages has to come from them. One might add that had this in fact been private sector wrongdoing that there would be no question that the justice department, as the employer, would have been responsible for damages caused by their employees, the judges.
So: yes, clearly everything that's wrong with America is corporations and the private sector ... not at all corrupt government, who then even refuses to take responsibility for the actions of their employees, and then used parts of the damages to fund their own operations ...
Lots of other problems, such as the crime of treating the children so badly in the juvenile facility EVEN IF they would have been correctly convicted are still, shall we say "open problems". No convictions, no attempts at fixing anything. Everything from access to medical care to the temperature of the facilities is still illegal. To save the government a buck.
Clearly capitalism is what's to blame here ... that the public sector might do enormous damage due to corruption is apparently not possible, yet it's absurdly clear this is exactly what happened here on a very large scale (thousands of children). That they're still just openly violating the law in the very same place this happened, they're still mistreating juveniles (and adult convicts for that matter).
Frankly I'd argue power needs to be taken away from these people JUST based on the pathetic childish accusations between the judges that brought this to light.
If you are still having trouble getting it, imagine corporations were called by some other name, say Mafia, and see if you'd want your law to prosecute then.
And here 1 private organisation (relatively small, minuscule compared to the public organisations, and with literally zero control on what happens to kids)
The private organisation was THE ONLY organisation that was held responsible to any extent at all. For the long list of public organisations that were 10x as responsible as the private company, only employees were sued.
The problem is not law, the problem is not corporations or "failing to hold corporations accountable". The problem is that law enforcement organisations don't see any need for themselves to respect the law, even when it's being blatantly violated right in front of them. And when they do get caught, they find a scapegoat employee, a few employees, that then get destroyed, guaranteeing that nothing is done for the victims of these organisations and absolutely NO effect on the organisations themselves.
The problem is failing to hold GOVERNMENT accountable when it blatantly violates the law on a large scale. And yes, they used a company as a tool in violating the law. Sorry but that's a detail.
The damage done here was estimated at $150 million. How about that amount gets paid AGAIN, this time to the victims, 50/50 out of the budget of the justice department (GREATLY impacting the district attorney's office and the court, for obvious reasons) and out of youth services' budget. That will greatly "hold the corporation accountable", no worries. This will in fact mean the victims actually get something, and the people that are guilty, that actively worked to damage those kids, get punished.
Canada is not a country, it's a corporation, and should be held accountable as both. It has 0 claim to the land and they know it.
They launder money too
Fk off racist pigs
But of course he recused himself from the case for the obvious conflict of interest right? Right???
One kid was locked up by these evil people for a minor drug paraphernalia charge. He spiraled after that and ended up committing suicide. The video is the mom confronting the corrupt judge and the river of BS from his lawyer.
How would a "important things in the world" algorithm work ?
One that is not "maximise engagement" but "maximise understanding of important shit"
Thank you for posting
The problem was people as a whole didn’t care. I think it’s only very recently that more than a small minority of Americans became aware of the reality that the police and justice system aren’t always people out there doing good—they’re normal people, for better or worse. Up until we got daily police videos of cops killing innocent people, it was assumed that arrested=guilty, throw them away. Even in the face of video evidence lots of people won’t budge from the idea that the justice system had a good reason for doing heinous things.
But for some reason they think that corruption in the justice system is impossible. Usually they think the same about assosiated organisations like FBI
That's during a conflict with Russia, a country where all power was seized by internal security services
IMHO, this is a kind of pathological extension of "internal locus of control"[2]. Internal locus of control is good for mental health and achievement, but once you start to project it onto other people without sufficient consideration of their circumstances things quickly get problematic.
People dont care about the economics of free messaging apps or "tech monopolies", but plaster it enough across enough articles across many years of publication and suddenly it becomes an issue.
I'd argue that the NY Times and other media are the ones who dont care. They get to decide what people care about.
The gp isn't asking for automated journalism, just algorithmic promotion. You would still need real people to investigate and write; the proposed algorithm would simply sort.
I actually think this type of thing is very conceivable, but the problem is that it's not a technical challenge - it's an incentivisation one. Current algorithm creation is profit-incentive, and trivial, consumer-oriented & generally useless/inaction-driving "news" are all significantly more profitable than what the gp describes as "important".
In fact, currently many journalistic platforms & publications actively promote themselves on the basis that they already offer what the gp has asked for (which by-and-large they don't of course).
How do we define "real journalist" in a way other than "curates news in a way that I personally approve of"?
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...
Ironically, this is not a real no true Scotsman.
So that eliminates cable news entirely and most of the work done by NYT, WAPO etc. who basically act as a mouthpiece for government and repeat the same stories ad infinitum.
[0] https://www.projectcensored.org/ [1] https://www.projectcensored.org/category/the-top-25-most-cen...
My hunch is because of some combo of
a) The attention economy. We're all overwhelmed. Filtering signal from noise is exhausting.
b) Manufacturing Consent's five filters of mass media. The economics of daily "news" determines what is covered. Yet another attention economy; and it's not clear to me that any other arrangement would be better.
c) Professional courtesy. Billionaire media moguls generally aren't going to narc on their billionaire hedge fund buddies.
--
Don't feel too bad about missing this outrage, or any other particular story. There's no shortage of outrageous stories. It's unending.
As a news junkie, from long before doom scrolling, I binge on this stuff. It's unhealthy.
Talking about it makes you sound like a lunatic to most people. Even worse, this stuff distracts you from living your best life and doing your own awesome thing.
The more effective policy people I know manage to somehow compartmentalize. Fighting the good fight is their day job, left at work. Off the clock, they do normal people stuff. The activists I know that don't do the work / life balance burn out. (Like I did.)
--
FWIW, outlets like Democracy Now!, Thom Hartmann, and Project Censored try to day light these memory hole stories.
Justice for Sale – Part 3: Greed Breeds Corruption [2015] https://www.projectcensored.org/justice-for-sale-part-3-gree...
Project Censored's Yearly Top 25 Most Censored Stories is a treasure. Allows me to binge less and periodically catch up on stuff I've missed.
https://www.projectcensored.org/top-25-censored-stories-of-a...
I've tried to figure that out myself. The best I've come up with is Wikipedia's current events page. It's not ideal, but as a bone dry, non-sensationalized summary of things going on worldwide, it's pretty impressive. Sometimes it would be nice to have more context, but the linked articles usually help with that. It's biggest problem for me is it's a bit overwhelming realizing how often ferries sink and buses crash.
PBS NewsHour is the other source I've used because it tends to be less rage-baiting, but this fact-based presentation is great.
Maybe historians would be better stewards of meaningful “news”.
anyway look at it this way - if the algorithms were working at giving you this important stuff in a way you were aware of it, you might have chosen a different username.
on edit: sometimes we are unaware of things just by happenstance and no algorithm tweaking will fix it, consider it a version of the XKCD 10000, I was aware of this as it passed in my feed at some point, but really if I was unaware of it I would assume it as a likely consequence of for profit prisons anyway - if asked to consider the possibility that is.
You’re wanting to optimize for something intangible, philosophical and something most people would just prefer to ignore.
Technology can still help though… look, you learned about it from HN!
However, you cannot automate this process entirely because caring, compassion and looking into the dark corners of our socioeconomic system require human judgement at every step. This human decision making, consensus forming and problem solving process is also known as ‘politics’
You'll get familiar with a lot of broken aspects of society, much of which could take a lot of time and adjustment to understand why its not as productive as seemed. And some might seem like farfetched things to change, but you'll be familiar, especially after its old news and has been changed.
Another signal source might be based on the assumption that the important bits would be subject of suppression efforts, like topics that disappeared from school curriculum, internet censorship filter rules (for example [2]), takedown notices, banned books, topics journalists wrote about that were fired/defenestrated, wikipedia articles that were removed/renamed or heavily edited, unusual court cases with abnormal patterns might be recoverable from public records (like the Steven Donziger case [3]), websites on the internet archive that were taken down by infrastructure companies, there might be topics that are ignored by modern historians etc.
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_clickstre... [2] https://lumendatabase.org/faceted_search?sender_name=Europea... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger
How about, you know, philosophers and other learned people who's life job is to study it?
I have mistakenly written "argument" instead of "algorithm" in my original post (edited now), which may have lead to a misunderstanding. Otherwise, could you please elaborate?