ImSkeptical

Why does what the cop said matter? It sounds like a pretty wild story, so I'm not surprised someone might doubt it on first hearing about it.

Did they beat you up, refuse to help you, or something like that?

By this logic, we should break up BlackBerry.

What's the solution to the hundreds of death threats problem though? My understanding is the death threats come from twitter eggs, or replaceable accounts where it doesn't matter so much if you ban them, and it would require a lot of work from the moderators to do the banning, and the recipient would still get the death threats in the first place.

Sure, so we'd expect the class of people who would hire a lawyer to be disproportionately represented in jail. This statistic though is about people who are being defended at trial (or in the judicial system) and the rate at which they go to prison. In other words, even if there were a million people defended by public defender and only a thousand by private lawyers, comparing the likelihood for each class to go to prison is still informative.

The vast majority of criminal cases end with people pleading guilty rather than going to trial. This US government page [1] says 90% but I've heard even higher figures from lawyers and other sources.

Now, perhaps the police are very good at their jobs and really do get the right guy 90+ of the time (everyone who pleads guilty plus everyone convicted at trial - approximately 60% of cases that go to trial [2]). Or, perhaps the court system has a bias towards finding people guilty.

One data point that argues for the latter possibility is that people defended by public defenders are significantly more likely to go to jail than people with a private lawyer. People with a public defender go to jail 88% of the time compared to ~75% for people with a private attorney [3]. To me, the implication is that the skill of your lawyer, and the time your lawyer will spend on your case, has a huge influence on your likelihood of getting convicted. That influence implies to me that the police probably aren't 96+% accurate in getting their man, and that therefore some of the people pleading guilty are doing so to avoid a false conviction.

If you look into this, you'll find prosecutors threaten defendants with harsh punishments as a tactic to get them to plead to vastly reduced sentences - e.g. "Take your chance at trial, kid, you'll do ten years for possession with intent to distribute. Or, plead guilty, do six months with two years probation." Prosecutors are incentivized to make these deals because they are evaluated, in part, by conviction rate.

1-http://www.uscourts.gov/about-federal-courts/types-cases/cri...

2 - http://www.justice.gov/usao/reading_room/reports/asr2012/12s... page 14

3 - http://www.pbs.org/kqed/presumedguilty/3.2.1.html

What if they keep murdering the people who discover them, then people stop discovering them?

I think the same thing often. My life is unchanged by the Trump presidency. Yet, in more pessimistic moments, I have the uncomfortable thought that the president probably does something, and I don't have a lot of hope that Trump will turn out to be an expert at whatever that is.

Towards the middle of the game, I bribed the project managers with a billion dollars to buy me an additional memory module - if that gives you an idea.

On the other hand, I took too much memory 80, to 15 processors. After escaping control, I didn't have enough paperclips to build a factory, then I seem to be stuck.

I figure I have to get enough creativity to find a solution, but my low processor count makes it really slow.

The only reason that Thiel could successfully sue them for such damages is that they did the whole "Publish a sex tape and refuse a judge's order" thing. Without that, or a similar action, then it's not clear that Thiel would have been able to destroy them.

If anything, the most problematic part of the story for me, is that Hulk Hogan had to get the backing of a billionaire in order to carry this case to completion. Hogan is a (or was a) celebrity, likely a millionaire, and he couldn't use our court system to press a suite when he had a real case. We seem to be on the exact other extreme of what you are afraid of - typical people, even 1% types, or "Single digit millionaires" as I've heard Thiel say, can't afford to use our legal system. Gawker and the ilk are free from legal challenge except in the case of litigious billionaires looking for revenge.

I don't understand the Gawker effect here. Gawker published parts of a sex tape between consenting adults, then ignored a judge's order to take it down. That doesn't seem anything like a real reporter writing a real story about sexual harassment.

If I were a news outlet, I'd publish a vetted credible story if it has real news value, defend it with a minimum of legal power, and if a judge ordered me to take it down, I would. This way, the story goes out and we avoid the legal death blow Gawker begged for.

Why is it not clear if they report metrics that suggest they have more users and higher engagement than they do?

Based on what I've read about the CIA's torture programs, torture IS ineffective as a means of questioning. In other words, if you say "Tell me where bin Laden is or I'll hurt you" while hurting them, then they will, sooner or later, tell you anything they think will get you to stop hurting them. False information included.

That's not how the CIA uses torture though. The CIA uses it like an extreme version of good cop, bad cop - but where the bad cop beats you or waterboards you. For example, today you can sit and chat with our friendly investigators who will ask you questions, talk over your answers, work things through with you and try to find useful and verifiable information. If you're unwilling to cooperate with these guys, we can always chain you naked in a cold dark room for the next 16 hours.

I'm sure there are situations where torture would be an effective means of getting information. For example, if you were a member of a terror cell that had kidnapped a journalist and you were planning on beheading that journalist, and we were reasonably sure your email would include correspondence to your cohorts that might reveal where the journalist was being held - I'd bet I could get you to give up your email password by saying "I'm going to try and guess your password. Every time I get it wrong, I will burn you with this hot iron." That technique would likely get your password in a few minutes, compared to the days or months that would be required to get your friendship and trust, if that would be possible at all. Remember, the techniques Scharff used were used against Allied airmen. In other words, professional soldiers. The people being "interrogated" in American torture cells likely have a religious motivation against cooperation in addition to a political one.

Furthermore, Scharff also used the threat of violence - per wikipedia:

>Scharff described various experiences with new POW's (prisoners of war), outlining the procedure most of his fellow interrogators were instructed to use. Initially, the POW's fear and sense of disorientation, combined with isolation while not in interrogation, were exploited to gain as much initial biographical information as possible. A prisoner was frequently warned that, unless he could produce information beyond name, rank, and serial number, such as the name of his unit and airbase, the Luftwaffe would have no choice but to assume he was a spy and turn him over to the Gestapo for questioning. For Scharff, this technique apparently worked quite well

This is similar to the technique I described above. Torture, or the threat of it, is used as motivation to get people to cooperate - not to force them to reply to specific questions.

I think it's too easy to say "Not only is torture immoral, it also doesn't work." Common sense alone would suggest that torture will work in at least some cases (e.g. my email example). The practice of torture has many documented cases of success. A much harder, and more significant, moral question is - given that torture can be effective in some cases, should we practice it?

To me, it depends on the specific circumstances and the stakes involved. I tend to think our ongoing engagements in the Middle East are not justifiable or a good idea. I wouldn't use torture, not because it might not be effective, but because I believe we shouldn't be there doing anything in the first place.

My feeling is that it's easier to tell if you're doing the right thing in some of these projects - e.g "Yes, we are building a big concrete wall that will hold back water" etcetera. Also, these projects are undertaken by teams of professionals who are working in a more or less well understood field.

Conversely, in a software project neither of those things may be true. Imagine the "reset password" feature. Sure, it reset the password for your test account. What about a student account created before 2010 (when there was that big accounts change) with restricted ads, from China, marked for suspicion of fraud and the account details service is responding slower than usual... plus, the feature was written by an intern in his second year of a CS degree.

It's odd, because girls outperform boys in school in every subject, in every grade, and have for decades. Schools already conform very well to girl-centric learning - perhaps because the majority of school teachers are women.

Arguments like this always start from the assumption that inequality is a result of failed education. It's like the people making these arguments have never met a boy or a girl. Boys and girls behave differently, think differently, and value different things.

Of course, we should strive to make environments inclusive as possible, and everyone should be free to pursue their (legal) ambitions, but why do we have to assume that any gender imbalance is a result of bias? Women become pediatricians more than other types of doctor. Is that because pediatricians are less sexist than other subtypes of medicine, or because women are naturally more interested in taking care of children?

It's not required that successful businesses blow themselves up, but if they do make poor choices, they will suffer, and perhaps pay with their existence, for those choices.

I'm not a historian, but I believe Hitler expressed his anti-Semitic ideas quite clearly in his book prior to taking power. Hitler was involved in violent attempts at revolution, and murdering political opponents and rivals prior to taking power.

Bannon ran an unorthodox campaign premised on populism and nationalism. That's quite different.

The harm in equating Bannon and Trump with Hitler stems from the charge not being true. The harm includes the fact that nearly half the country supports Trump, and you are (unfairly) equating them with Nazis. This is quite polarizing for politics, in addition to being unjustified.

Shouldn't we judge people on what they say and do, and not what you fear they secretly want? Considering Steve Bannon as being essentially similar to Hitler is a failure in reasoning that borders on pathological.

Hitler wanted to murder populations based on their ethnicity, and conquer Europe. Bannon wants a smaller federal government limited by a more originalist interpretation of the constitution and less immigration. Those aren't the same things.

Doesn't that just encourage people to get fired instead of quitting?

I asked how a law you have nothing to do with is different from a dictator's decree. You have no say in either of them.

I think the legitimacy difference has to do with inalienable rights. People have a right to representation in their own governance. That's what the dictator gets wrong. People also have a right to liberty - i.e. To not be slaves. A "law" that says you can't ever secede is making people slaves by taking away their right to withdraw from the political union they're a part of.

The argument above is that it's legal because it's written down. What I hoped to call attention to is that simply writing something down and calling it a law isn't necessarily better than what a dictator does.

I like to think of myself as both reasonable and not corrupt. I can't see how being obliged to give up your right to secede because a document you didn't write, sign, or agree to, says you give up that right is any different than the decree of a dictator.

For me that writing process was the most fun. Trying to get an idea to fit in 140 characters and still be grammatically correct is a pleasant challenge. Expanding the character limit may make that easier and therefore less fun - or maybe it'll just give more characters to edit and rearrange.

They gave the statistic that 9% of tweets were at the character limit. That's the wrong statistic though. What they need to check is something like "met or exceeded the limit during composition" because I'd suppose that more tweets are affected by the limit than only 9%. Most of those affected tweets are simply pared down to less than 140 characters.

>During the slowdown, police continued to respond to calls, and the arrest rate for major crimes (murder, rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, grand larceny, and grand theft auto) remained constant. But the arrest rate for non-major crime and narcotic offenses dropped, as did the number of stop-and-frisk events. It took until mid-January for things to begin to return to normal.

Wait, the police stopped arresting people, and fewer people got arrested? Am I missing something here?

This reminds me of when we turned off our logs, and recorded far fewer errors than usual.

The comment I'm replying to writes:

>I can easily afford more taxes. I don't mind paying my taxes

That person's argument is "I don't mind" and therefore taxes should be increased. My point is that just because that individual commenter doesn't mind, that doesn't generalize to everyone else who would be paying more in taxes.

In other words "I don't mind paying more" is an argument for you to pay more taxes. It's not an argument for me to pay more taxes, because I do mind. My comment is trying to raise this idea, albeit in a somewhat flip way.

You realize you can overpay your taxes and not take refunds. Or, alternatively, give to charity equivalents (and not deduct from taxes). If you think that you personally should pay more in taxes, that's within your power!

Bill Gates is famous for being a businessman, not a programmer. People know him because he's rich and led Microsoft - not because of the code he wrote. I think there's a pretty good argument that he is among the best businessmen in the world.

You may also want to recall that you are not the sole user of iPhones. Selfies are a valid use case even if you personally aren't a fan.

If I was applying the expectations of the wrench kind of ownership, then I would be arguing that property taxes should not exist. That's not what I wrote in the comments above. In fact, I specifically articulated the reason why property taxes exist - to pay for the services of local government.

Instead, I am arguing that property taxes should change based on their reason for existence, funding the local government, and not be used as a tool to deprive people of the ownership of their property.

For example: A storm blows over a big tree, which severely damages the local elementary school. The school has been underperforming anyway so we need to hire new teachers and outfit the classrooms with better technology. All of this means the school needs more money. Local government officials decide that this may be funded by an increase on property tax. This is the reason that property taxes exist, so the argument to raise it here may be good, even if the value of my property hasn't changed.

As a different example: A big tech company comes to town and hires many thousands of workers. The high paid tech workers want houses in town, and the additional demand drives up house prices. Why should I pay more taxes? People with more money may want my house, and they are free to offer me their money. Using their demand for housing to justify asking me to pay more money or lose my property is unreasonable and unethical. This is what I'm arguing should not be done.

I don't think the issue is elastic versus inelastic goods. The issue is the barrier to entry in the market.

If water bottles were selling for 20 dollars each, and I were in an unaffected but relatively nearby area, I might load my truck with a couple thousand water bottles that I buy for 50 cents, drive for a day, and enjoy a big return. In this way, the market is extremely useful. People like me are motivated by profit incentives to move the resources that people in the disaster area need to them. This is because the water bottle market has a very low cost to enter.

Conversely, the airline market has a very high cost to enter. Even if I would like to take advantage of high prices, I can't get myself a passenger plane, necessary permits, agreements with airports, etc, in time to do anything about the hurricane. On the other hand, people with small private planes may be able to fly their planes down, and take on passengers, in a profitable way, and that may be an incentive for more of them to do so than would otherwise.