Comment by hashmap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hashmap | Hacker News Reader

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> Police should use it to capture and stop the 1% of the population that's making life much more difficult for the rest of us. And they should lock them up for a considerable amount of time, not as rehabilitation or punishment, just to make the lives of ~99% of us better off. Maybe not 3 strikes, but can we settle on 10? 20? Anything would help.

criminals are not out there making life difficult for you. you are far more likely to die in a car crash than a repeat offender that you don't know. this complaint is a subjective truth blithered from behind a keyboard.

> So these theoretical arguments about a surveillance state where some hypothetical political dissident is getting doxed and raided just strikes me as fantasy.

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/04/nx-s1-5717031/ice-dhs-immigra...

we know this is what they do, and we know this is what palantir does in other countries to help governments oppress civilians. that is the product. that is why it is worrying to see it used here.

Sure I'm unlikely to be murdered by some rando. But I have gotten my packages and bike stolen. I've been accosted on public transportation. Been threatened by homeless junkies. I've had to cross the street to keep my kids from seeing some unspeakable sight.

And then there's the minor inconveniences, too many to worth mentioning. These are the things that affect my life.

I could care less about someone whose daily routine involved "patrolling for ICE". I don't see myself trying to purposely obstruct law enforcement so maybe I can't empathize. I just don't see "professional agitateur" in my future so I focus on things that affect me.

This is more to the point, I think. You have a number of different minor inconveniences that you think are worth locking humans up for life for, and also you don't care about people who are not you even if they are not doing anything wrong. That doesn't make for a set of long-term legislative principles that would make a society work because they would be structurally sociopathic.

Correct, I don't think we should allow people to steal and terrorize the public. It's not a minor inconvenience and every sensible society in history would remove these people from the population.

I imagine you live in a nice gated community where you don't have to deal with these people. Must be nice.

Wishing to remove people from the population for stealing packages is the sociopathy I'm talking about. Valuing personal property over human life is how you get so many people in positions where they end up stealing to begin with, so it is short sighted as well. The people who end up stealing, for the most part, are not well-off.

I live in an apartment building where packages regularly get stolen or torn apart, am regularly accosted in the street and frequently see people who are homeless, not that it matters. Those things absolutely are a minor inconvenience and beyond those few minutes I don't think much about it. It doesn't really impede me from going about my day, and I certainly don't fantasize about imprisoning and "removing these people from the population".

The kind of thinking that produces those words, though. That does frighten me.

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