America Has a Black-Market Problem, Not a Drug Problem

Secondly, I very very rarely here of juries being "too hard" on police. The current culture is that most police can't be touch even if everyone knows they did it AND has evidence. In a lot of cases, they are untouchable unless their peers want to throw them under the bus or a separate, usually federal service looks into the matter.

There are people that, while wearing a camera in a dangerous situation, can remain calm, cool, and collected. If anything, that should be one of the first requirements of becoming a cop, not an argument against cameras.

In those cases the safest thing for the police to do is to withdraw to a safe location and wait for backup, which is what they're supposed to do. Engaging in the sort of aggressive behavior that could be "mischaracterized" as police brutality in response to a potentially dangerous situation only serves to escalate the situation and make it even more dangerous.

The accused have a moral right to have a jury decide what was appropriate for the officer to do in a given situation. Keeping the data private by its nature detracts from the goal of having a fair judicial system.

NB: to your read, the laws may need to be adjusted to allow officers to legally be more brutal to people who have not been convicted of crimes. That does not change the fact that police work should be able to be done in the light. Nobody benefits when police to feel like they don't have to become criminals to do their jobs.

While something like that may exist in some engineering-heavy workplaces (I've heard stories but never seen it), it's nowhere near as common or institutionalized.

Bad programmers don't have weapons and authority to kidnap people legally.

Many of the people who deal with police on a frequent basis are skilled liars. They know how to stymie investigations by tying the officers up in paperwork. Having video evidence would prevent spurious complaints.

I don't think it's as easy as blaming the voters. The political system seems caught in a negative feedback loop, greased by lobbyist money and with no clear offramp.

[1] http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-g...

Grow up.

So can widespread monogamy in certain circumstances. In fact, that's pretty much why polygamy usually manifests as polygyny -- in societies with norms favoring men fighting, or engaging in other high-risk activities and protecting women (and children, usually, but while that's important to the motivation, its irrelevant to the effect), after certain types of events, such as large scale (for the community affected) conflict, an exclusive monogamy rule means most women have no mates and prevents a society from rebounding (and makes it more likely that there culture will die out).

This is also probably why in history polygamy loses acceptance as a general norm as the scale of society gets larger and these kind of events affecting a whole society become less common.

It's less than desirable for ugly poor men, but doesn't mean victim. There is no victim involved in not being chosen as a mate by a women. If 5 women choose to marry the rich man, that's a choice between consenting adults and it harms no other party.

No one is victimized by some other people getting married, whether it's because they're gay or because they're polygamists.

Forget the state for a moment and try to scale it down. In a village where everybody knows and depends on each other, what would you do if an outsider came along and tricked one of your fellow villagers out of all their means?

When winter came, would you let that person die? No, you would use your own means to keep them alive.

Now, the next time this trickster came to town, would you just let them prey on the less perceptive of your fellow villagers again?

1. Not ever? Surely you don't think that the age of majority/consent is 0-years-old?

2. Taxation for Military defense falls under that same umbrella! Normally, people would never pay any taxes to support it until they feel threatened... And then it's too late, and they suffer from their own short-sighted penny-pinching. Are you saying the government should not collectively protect them from their own decisions?

>drugs hurt no one else

what about the family of the abuser? should a child grow up in the home of a heroin addict? doesn't society have the responsibility to protect children?

>gambling

humans are just dumb monkeys. we have psychological weaknesses to stuff like gambling. how many fathers will gamble away their grocery money?

>5 wives

is it really consent if a girl is too poor and uneducated to get a job and is forced into a polygamist marriage for subsistence?

It is very possible to use alcohol recreationally without becoming physically dependent on it.

You can't say the same for drugs like heroin or meth.

That we as a society allow groups of men to make billions selling a tremendously addictive product that has unequivocally been shown to kill its users is, for me, absolutely heinous.

I'm not meaning to play emotions; however, I don't think you can just write it off: if all drugs were legalized, you would see use among youth increase (just as you would likely see an increase in any other subset of the population).

> If you choose to put something in your body, that's a choice, you were not victimized by anyone.

For me, very physiologically addictive substances are a different category: in that case, you have somebody with full knowledge of the danger and addictiveness of the drug knowingly enticing others to start using it with the end goal of causing them to become addicted and making a lot of money off of them. I see that as a very low form of extortion.

I will not try meth because, despite whatever curiosity I have about the drug's effects, I know I am probably not capable of willing my way out of a very real physical addiction. Somebody less educated and rational is much more likely to say, "Sure, I'll try it once", and go downhill from there. For me, that person is being victimized. Sure, they made the decision, but it was an uninformed one.

Now, I have no idea how to solve that problem. I think that the US's ridiculous drug policy probably ruins more lives than the drugs would if they were legal. But whenever I think about blanket legalization, I can't escape feeling uneasy about the above.

What Bernie should have to do is work for x amount of years at a lowly job, or some job that he'd never take in life to earn back as much as he can during his sentence outside of the prison (not talking about a debtors prison but fraud). Financial fraud would re-think if they needed to work at McDonalds for years after during their sentence rather than their comfy suite. It is not like they wouldn't also be marked just like a normal locked up criminal is.

You are confusing who is stealing from whom.

Then there is the key point that jail costs time which is proportional to the individual fined rather than the victim. In a proportional payment system there would be an even larger perverse incentive to get hit by moneyed people if the fine was in anyway punitive.

"But it costs society to incarcerate and is a net negative from the point after the accident on", Yes but we decided that prisoners shouldn't incur debt for being imprisoned for some very good reasons.

What of the victims? What benefits the victims more than giving them money after the fact is reducing the risk of it happening in the first place. A payment system has either a more harsh proportional punishment than the current system to decrease this happening further, or reckless driving will increase because it is more tenable for the drivers (or people are irrational when assessing jail time and money as punishment and the deterrent affect is not proportional).

So my main point is while I agree that it may be utilitarian to lower the cost to society after the fact there can be even more utility to play the ultimatum game before the event.