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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

It's a "pre-crime"!

Who knew the movie Minority Report would come true.

The best predictor of crime is a previous crime yet there’s a revolving door on jails and DAs won’t prosecute anything. It’s looking quite a bit like the Soviet Union where political dissenters were punished worse than murderers.

There’s quite a few behaviors that are illegal because they are associated with stuff people are concerned about even if they aren’t inherently harmful.

Public intoxication for example was criminalized long before Minority Report was a thing.

We didn’t make photographing critical infrastructure illegal, but people were pushing that narrative and it could have easily happened.

I would partially push back on public intoxication not being harmful. It does intimidate other people trying to use the same public space.

Is the presence of alcohol or is it the way some people behave while drunk? Because that behavior could be illegal without being drunk also being illegal.

Put another way, people get arrested sitting quietly because they are drunk without any obvious outward signs of being drunk so it’s is hardly intimidating.

That’s because a drunk persons’s decision making is inherently impaired. They might be sitting quietly now. The vast majority of criminal violence (domestic or otherwise) occurs in conjunction with impaired faculties and alcohol is often the cause.

A classic pre-crime argument.

You can measure that beyond any biases, however.

This, on the hand, is up to the guy in charge. Anyone can be affected by this if they happen to be on the bad side of the people in charge.

It may not be illegal but I dare you to go take photos of a port.

With minority report, at least the ones calling in the pre-crime were psychics and for imminent danger, afaik.

So, much less bad than what canada is up to.

"It's been determined with more than 86% accuracy that you are likely to commit a crime within the next 6 months. You will be detained until the probability goes down."

"It's not sweeping, it's only going to be used for the worst potential crimes"

SURELY they wouldn't use generalization to put the worst potential crimes and thoughts they dislike in the same bucket.

All you dissenters are under arrest. The only reason you'd be against this is if you're planning to commit a crime; therefore, you must be planning to commit a crime!

The limit case of prosecutorial discretion is pragmatically indistinguishable from tyranny. The more selective law enforcement is when everything is illegal, the less meaningful the laws themselves actually are and the more important the personalities of the enforcers.

Unfortunately the notion that law is best used to restrict government is a uniquely English cultural development. It’s unsurprising that Canada is losing that as she accelerates away from her English heritage. In principle of course there’s no reason a multicultural society couldn’t adopt the principle, but I’m unaware of that actually happening except for lip service.

But only the bad parts.

Also the obnoxious RSI-inducing touch interface?

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