436 karma · joined July 1, 2024
> thousands of people a day
and this virtually never happens. Sure, on one side, it's bound to happen eventually, but from the other, "aggrieved loved one" is in good cover if you need that guy dead.
The frunk problems, definitely design problems. This article is about a guy slamming someone's hand in his car door by accident.
Link to the actual content of the reddit thread.
1) it is not hard to get a silencer. You can make one in under an hour with cheap parts from a hardware store and a drill.
2) the CEO was at a conference. It's not surprising that this person "knew he would be there", it's interesting that this interviewee stresses this point like it is some big one to be made. The CEO of a big company in an industry will of course be at a big industry conference. You can say "how did he know he would be exiting that door" or something, but it's not like he was sneaking out the back exit. Hes probably coming out the door where the limo is parked or whatever.
I agree this was probably not a professional hit, but this was very clearly well planned out with limited knowledge. I don't think it's as simple as a disgruntled family member of a medical patient or something. It's likely this was something much more serious, but not billionaire behind the scenes business politics or something. Those kind of guys, while we like to pretend would be the last guys to know where to find professional killers, they all know where to find professional killers. I'd guess this guy was into something he shouldn't have been into with some unsavory people.
On the plus side, India gets access to many scientific papers. "Many" is a huge understatement. India's future relies on science, domestically performed as well as global shared learning. Without access to this information, India will stagnate.
On the other hand, why is India producing papers for journals they had no access to? Why give the publishing cartel control of their scientific progress? I thought, big as India is and as important as these scientific papers are to their nation, we would see progress on the freedom of information front with them at the forefront, skirting foreign laws as they please. So in that sense, this is a failure.
Looks like they took the route of getting along with the other states in the world and benefitting their own scientific progress along with it. I hope it works out for them.
Yes, they are actually. These are glock full auto switches, which if you've ever seen a glock and you know how it works, you know how easy it is. Glock designed the handgun specifically to allow this, and they even manufacture switches themselves.
I don't know why they're going out of their way to not inform people of what exactly is happening. People are buying or building a very easy to make gun, buying or building a very easy to make part and adding it to the gun. It's not something anyone can easily stop anywhere, but the last paragraph really gives you a clue. Canadian law enforcement understands that the phenomenon of growing violence in street crime is a cultural problem and pretty new in Canada at least in it's current form and in recent decades.
This article reads like it was haphazardly written.
> Regarding the pro-caning argument that prisons create hardened criminals, this is mitigated by longer sentences, such as harsh recidivism laws as seen in the U.S.
It is absolutely not, if it were, you wouldn't see the incarceration rates you see in the US. Have you met some of these criminals? I have. The 40 year olds who've been in the system since adolescence wear it as a badge of honor. It's all they know.
> El Salvador, despite obviously being a much poorer country than the U.S., has an incarceration rate of 3x that of the U.S. after embarking on a mass incarceration program, ending its otherwise intractable gang problem seemingly overnight when other measures failed.
That's because all the organized criminals are currently in prison. They haven't been rehrehabilitated, and if they ever get out that country is back to square 1.
Prison being effective because it's inhumane is not much of an argument here. The discussion is "cruel and unusual." You can't say corporal punishment is any more so than prison, both were commonplace at the time that clause was written in the constitution.
So which is less humane, or, say, has a higher humane-to-effectiveness ratio? I'd say corporal punishment.
Yes I'd rather be caned than go to prison. Prison is terribly cruel. But I'd also say, the prospect of experiencing severe pain would definitely be enough deterrent to me. I think so for most people. And for those it wouldn't, they're gonna be career criminals regardless, at least you're not turning one offs into that also by sticking them in an environment dominated by gangs and forcing them to associate with gangs to keep from being stabbed. Being beaten is such a deterrent that a person would rather become a career criminal. Criminals would rather go to prison again than get beaten in prison. Which is more effective, corporal punishment or prison?
I have a model in my mind for an optimal justice system, which would be minimally cruel and maximally effective.
First, as a prerequisite, there can be no such thing as a victimless crime. Nothing can be against the law which involves no unwilling participant. Also, no punishments involving maiming. No cutting off hands and gouging eyes and things like that. Finally, for the ultimate penalty, pain cannot be deliberately inflicted in the process, no breaking at the wheel or anything like that.
For petty and financial crimes, theft, fraud and the like, fines suffice. The fine is to be 2 * average theft value * (total occurrences/total successful prosecutions). No money is to be given to the victim unless the stolen item is not recovered. This ensures that, on average, a thief paysore over their thieving career than they gain, and that there's no perverse incentive to get people charged with theft. Repeat offenders can be caned a little if it can be shown to have an impact on rate of recidivism.
For low level violent crimes, simple assault, breaking and entering, vandalism and the like, corporal punishment. Lashing, caning, anything that doesn't do more than superficial permanent injury. The sentence should be at the discretion of the judge, but the type of corporal punishment for each type of crime should be in statute.
And for serious violent crimes, such as robbery, attempted murder or deliberate injury, rape, murder, etc the punishment should be first offense severe corporal punishment, could be caning or lashing or anything, second offense death. The first offense more lenient punishment serves two purposes: rehabilitate a first time offenders, and reduce occurrence of accidental execution of an innocent party. The only people that get killed here are repeat offenders, or career criminals as one might call them.
Crimes of negligence, like manslaughter, accidental injury and the like, corporal punishment and civil restitution. Non violent crimes of negligence like accidental property destruction can be handled civilly, with the same formula as the financial crimes one outlined above.
Same as above for corruption of an office of public trust.
There should be no registry of any kind once punishment has been served. It serves no purpose; either the person is no longer a threat to those around them, or they're dead, or will soon be dead. One should not wear a black mark if they're truly rehabilitated, and if they aren't able to be, should be removed from society.
Exile, I think there may be a place for it, I don't know. But I don't think exile is good in leu of execution, it is far less humane to put a bunch of repeat violent offenders in with each other to abuse one another than to just execute them.
As far as imprisonment and forced bondage, this should only be an option if one is unable to pay their debt for theft and negligence, and ideally in the form of wage garnishment or seizure of assets and not direct enslavement, although as a last resort if this must be undertaken, but the subject must be compensated fairly for their work before having it taken to pay down those debts.
That would be in my mind the closest thing to a perfect criminal justice system as you can get. If the idea is deterrent, rehabilitation, reduction of organized crime and removal of those who cannot help but hurt others, it is the most effective paradigm I can come up with to achieve those goals, while significantly reducing the amount of suffering members of our society have to endure.
This is people leaving twitter and then after the fact justifying it with some virtuous ideal espousing. Not only, if those ideals mattered to people they wouldn't have been on twitter in the first place, I bet 80% of the bluesky converts will be back on twitter within 3 months. This isn't a shift, it's the end of nothing.
Then they bring up AI. Gotta bring up AI. And that's gonna be... "the algorithm." No thanks.
Just use nostr already and quit pretending some revolution is brewing.
That's not how free association works. Both the individual and the group, each according to their own criteria, determine if they want to associate with one another.
The same point applies to many of your other arguments.
I don't really think it would increase the number of people who are left behind. There are many left behind people all over the world who on paper have states they belong to, but which the rules of those states leave them cut out of any real participation. If they could participate in whatever groups they currently belong to, with full sovereignty rather than under a state attempting to destroy these groups and subsume them, I think those people would be better off. And, for those few that are unwanted by anyone, much fewer than there are now in a state dominated environment, they can always choose to associate with one another.
There will be rules based on location no matter what you do. You don't need a state for that. People live in places, and they have customs and etiquette and rules of decorum. You probably won't be able to walk around naked in Kabul no matter whether there's a state or not.
The reality I want for humanity is one where we aren't born partially enslaved, which almost all human beings are currently. A world of power structures, but where people can choose their tribe, where we aren't subject to the dictates of others as a consequence of the coordinates where we are born, would be a much more free world.
Closer to the mark examples are all over the place with different levels of success. The most prominent are the governance structures of multiculutral and multi religious states of south and southeast Asia, Singapore is a prominent oneone, but India and Bangladesh have also adopted similar models to differing degrees. Basically, where multiple ethicities or religions coexist together, their civil and sometimes even criminal law are the laws of their religions or ethnicities, and only when a dispute is between people of disparate groups does some supreme, secular society wide set of laws apply. There are also examples of this throughout Africa, and truly, this is the way most of the world operated for thousands of years before states had defined borders.
Of course, these aren't truly what we are talking about, they're close, but in my examples there is still an overarching state that is arbiter of last resort, and there is nothing voluntary about the associations, they're usually hereditary and imposed by the state with at most an opt out of tribal/religious law. The concept as noted in the diamond age differs in that associations are voluntary (both on the part of the individual as well as the organization) and prominently, you're subject to the law of those you violate, or, if two members of two different groups are in dispute, the dispute and a resolution are handled diplomatically.
If you've read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (and more prominently, later, The Diamond Age) you get the concept of "phyles", voluntary association groups who govern themselves, arbitrarily decide their membership criteria, expect adherence to cultural practices, and have different types of safety nets for their members, basically, states defined by their people and not by their territory, enabled by networking and freedom of movement which is in turn enabled by advanced technology.
The ideas of the critiqued person in this piece draw heavily from these ideas, and their writings are less so "one commandment states" and more so an exploration of the types of nation-like organizations that can emerge from some of the new technologies enabled by global networking and Turing complete computation. The critiqued individual predicts the collapse of the state as we know it today, where people are "owned" from birth and resources are owned and managed primarily for the continuation of state power. He sees this as a good thing, a thing that will finally empower human beings to choose their tribe, to form tribes as they see fit, to explore the merits of any and all ideas without taboo, to live their lives autonomously and ultimately live up to each of their own full potential. I generally agree with the premise and related concepts.
It is fractal in nature. So it would follow that any correct set of ideas derive from some principles, and if the principles have a lot of corner cases that require caveats then you're missing something and you don't have the principles hammered down after all.
Profitable, sure. More popular? Only if you ignore your own eyes and defer to their quarterly reporting.
It's about getting rid of the nepotism and corruption by downsizing the bureaucratic state. That's obvious to anyone paying attention, this argument is a non sequitur.