Hacker News Reader

Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

While I don't entirely disagree with you. You have to understand why the courts exist at all. To govern working class citizens. Laws are written by the powerful and wealthy - always has been - to control the working class (everyone else).

You're freedom is an illusion. A social contract agreed upon by you following certain rules. Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy. In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years. Technology isn't going to solve this without becoming that AI overlord everyone is scared of. Court systems are designed to prevent working class from becoming wealthy and to protect the wealthy and their assets from the working class. (violent crimes aside)

View on HN

> In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years.

When did we start being a just society would you say? WWI? The Civil Rights Act? Unless you really stretch things, saying that justice declined in the last 50 years - even if true - means that justice "peaked" for a short period of maybe a generation. I suspect if you actually lived in that era[1] you wouldn't think that though so this whole framing is based on false nostalgia for a time you never experienced.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism

Just going off my own experience. While violent crime has diminished, other crimes are going on in plain sight with prudence from the courts. Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there. I remember when "debtor's prison" was illegal. Now it's not. So you can brush it under a rug, claim things are better, claim we are more just than we used to be, but I never claimed that we ever were 100% just. Only that we used to be more just than we are today.

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/states-unfairly-burdening-incar...

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...

https://news.gallup.com/poll/653897/americans-pass-judgment-...

https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/the-withering-of-public...

https://www.idea.int/blog/how-independent-us-supreme-court-u...

Debtors prison is illegal in the US. You can’t be imprisoned for your debts. Are you suggesting sentences are being extended based on unpaid fees?

They are. Debtors prison is illegal with one exception - if you already went to prison due to a crime and then completed your sentence, many states will charge you for the full cost of your prison stay (often upwards of thousands of dollars). And since a lot of sentences involve some amount of parole after the prison sentence, you’ll be sent back to prison under a parole violation if you fail to pay back the fees by the due date.

Wow, that’s fucked up.

It's the only way to create career criminals now... The private prisons need career criminals to justify their existence. Career criminals become career criminals because they can't earn their way to an honest living (outside of mental health issues) because of the debts they owe. It's a vicious cycle. They want repeat offender by the time they turn 24. Statistically, that means they'll be in and out of the system for life.

(source: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/stee...)

This is a better link that directly talks about "pay-to-stay" fees (prison reimbursement). Your link mostly talks about courte fees.

https://endpaytostay.org/pdf/pay-to-stay-report-20250622.pdf

Ah yes, good point

> Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there.

"I hereby inform you under powers entrusted to me under Section 47, Paragraph 7 of Council Order Number 438476, that Mr. Buttle, Archibald, residing at 412 North Tower, Shangri La Towers, has been invited to assist the Ministry of Information with certain enquiries, the nature of which may be ascertained on completion of application form BZ/ST/486/C fourteen days within this date, and that he is liable to certain obligations as specified in Council Order 173497, including financial restitutions which may or may not be incurred if Information Retrieval procedures beyond those incorporated in Article 7 subsections 8, 10 & 32 are required to elicit information leading to permanent arrest notification of which will he served with the time period of 5 working days as stipulated by law. In that instance the detainee will be debited without further notice through central banking procedures without prejudice until and unless at such a time when re-imbursement procedures may be instituted by you or third parties on completion of a re-imbursement form RB/CZ/907/X..."

Ugh... That's not exactly the "Shangri La" the world knows.

Terry Gilliam knew what he was doing when he wrote "Brazil".

Arguably justice in general started declining with the invention of the typewriter, and injustice accelerated with the invention of the word processor and will get far worse with LLMs. The cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law. Personally I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.

My counterargument would be that before the typewriter literacy rates were much worse than they are now. So while it's true that laws were simpler, interpreting those laws was still out of reach for many at the bottom of the economic ladder. It would be interesting to try to compare legal complexity with the percentage of society that has a sufficient reading comprehension to meaningfully interact with those laws across various eras.

> I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.

I could really get behind this sort of rate-limiting. It would also make the thinktank-written legislation a little less appealing for the lawmakers, as they'd still need to write everything out.

> Arguably

I'd like to see you support that argument.

Implicitly, the argument is that, when "cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law," justice for litigants declined when sheer access to the necessary legal funds and time began to outweigh other costs and benefits as a factor in determining pursuit of justice. Maybe it's not self-evident, but I don't think direct quantifiable evidence of justice is necessarily available, so what qualitative evidence would be capable of confirming support?

That limits the rate of change of the law, not its total size.

In medieval Iceland, the lawspeaker -- the leader of the parliament -- had to recite the law from memory every three years (one third in each year).

Probably 50s-70s? The golden age of capitalism oddly enough. Among other things taxation maintained a more even wealth distribution during this time in many western countries. Combined with a record large generation that had few children and parents that dies in wars (almost everyone working), this lead to a surplus. When there is a surplus the overlords are generous. Now that generation is old and dependent on the handful of children they had. There is no longer a surplus. There is hope that the technologies we are creating could bring enough productivity gains to return to surplus conditions, but the population decline that will have to overcome is extreme. IP laws aren't encouraging these productivity gains like we need them to, so we should ignore them. The west deciding to ignore chinese IP won't be the thing that starts the war, and it isn't like china ever respected the IP of the west. We should be buying up all the tooling we need to painfully bootstrap automated manufacturing ourselves and reverse engineer it.

"Justice" is not a scalar. It is a matrix, at best.

In some parts of America, and in some aspects, "justice" was still clearly increasing up until the second Trump presidency. This is especially true for the treatment of various marginalized groups (especially queer people, where it's quite obvious that "justice" for them increased markedly with the Obergefell v Hodges decision in 2015, and continued to improve in many ways after that).

In other areas and ways, it peaked before 9/11 and has dropped a great deal since.

In still others, it's been on a long slow decline since some time in the latter part of the 20th century.

And this is part of why some people are so angry these days: they see "justice" decreasing for them, while it increases for other people—including some of the people they've always considered to be beneath them—and they wrongly conclude that it's a zero-sum game, and they need to reduce justice for those other people in order to bring it back for them.

Disenfranchisement. A powerful cause to be angry about.

> When did we start being a just society would you say?

I think most historians would agree that it started with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

It was a very small start, it only protected nobles from the king, but it's generally considered to be the start.

If that's the standard, it's ridiculous to say we stopped being a just society in the last 50 years.

Magna Carta didn't make us a just society, it was the start of making us a just society.

Being a just society is not a boolean. We never got 100% there. Nor is it along a single dimension -- you could argue we were more just 50 years ago, as long as you were white.

> you could argue we were more just 50 years ago, as long as you were white.

"Just" can't mean "in my favor" unless your also say that monarchy was very just, for the king.

Justice includes equality before the law. Without equality there can't be justice.

> could argue we were more just 50 years ago, as long as you were white

Well that is certainly one take. I really don't see how you can argue that position in good faith but I won't spend energy to refute it since you didn't actually argue it at all beyond making the supposition.

> I think most historians would agree that it started with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

Ahahaha, this is the most anglocentric thing I've heard in a while. That's not remotely the case, and it's certainly not something an historian would say.

That’s an exaggeration. As a famous example, Musk believed that laws didn’t apply to him and he ended up having to buy Twitter anyway after he tried to back out.

Corporate law is a thing. There are huge, consequential lawsuits between giant corporations.

> As a famous example, Musk believed that laws didn’t apply to him and he ended up having to buy Twitter anyway after he tried to back out.

Yeah and nevermind everything else. Thanks for the laugh.

Strawman

"Democracy" boils down to choosing one point ("candidate") in a highly dimensional space to express your entire preference (actually a high dimensional vector). This is _obviously_ stupid.

You can see the effects in how people love simplifying things into the left/right spectrum, sometimes adding a second axis for conservative/liberal. Because if you do PCA, those are probably the most important factors for many people.

But they fail to generalize this realization to openly discuss the other "less critical" dimensions.

It's a failure of the education system and it perpetuates learned helplessness.

> we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years

How could I guess you are not black?

That's a whole other can of worms... For them, it's been more like 500 years. The user danaris said it best I think, it depends on who you are. While some groups have had their justice increased, others have seen theirs decrease.

> Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy

How do you think the wealthy resolve dusputes among themselves? You obviously have never lived in a truly lawless society

> You have to understand why the courts exist at all. To govern working class citizens. Laws are written by the powerful and wealthy - always has been - to control the working class (everyone else).

It's amazing that after so many failures people are still preaching communism.

You'd have a leg to stand on if you could produce a single communist society which worked for the working class instead of the communist elites.

Can you produce a single capitalist society which worked for the working class instead of the capitalist elites?

In the US, laws protect the franchise. The franchise may have wealth but at least at this point in history we have as a nation, extended it to everyone.

If the laws protect the wealthy then perhaps your cynical view misses the fact that there is more wealth held by the average US citizen than that of any other nation on earth. Are we trending the correct direction? No. But that’s not the result of injustice, it’s the result of an economic system that prioritizes wealth extraction.

Wealth and power aren’t entirely the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com