jimz

Or lobbying

(well, that and if it's legally binding, it's a matter of performance or damages)

I do the same in Las Vegas, "sin city" moniker and all. I lived in Boston, NYC, LA, Montreal, and Spokane. I had two bikes stolen while I was working at the county public defender's and my girlfriend called the police, filed out a report, and nothing ever came down the line on the other side. The officer tried to talk her out of filing the report. Since I've worked in other jurisdictions and have heard broadly about how few fucks are given about property crimes generally, we don't even know how high or low this figure is in comparison to other cities with different policies. It could very well be true that people are experiencing recency bias, triggered by a question that touches upon something that wasn't taken seriously to begin with.

Also, I live in Las Vegas now and I also don't know anyone who had their car broken into or packages stolen. I left my Steam Deck outside for 48 hours since it was delivered early and hidden poorly, but I wasn't looking and didn't even notice it. But since none of the polls - the Chronicle or the Standard's - mention vehicle prowling, we have even less data on that. Why even bring it up? Nobody was expecting Rumble in the Bronx (great movie in spite of the whole movie being made up of stereotypes).

This is likely still lower than a lot lot lot lot lot of jurisdictions where prosecutors and cops don't even make any sort of effort at theft cases until the facts of the case allows for a more serious charge to stick and the theft is irrelevant. I had two bikes stolen from me, while I was personally at the Public Defender's Office, working in Spokane. Nobody called the police for that kind of stuff, and if you did, the police wouldn't do anything. It's compounded by the fact that the elements of Burglary - which is trespass + felony, no actual stealing needed, in WA - covers the really serious thefts that are seldom solved anyway, but counting burglaries would be overbroad, but reporting a theft can be yelling into the wind even with a police force that's funded by the government AND reality TV show money. Since the same poll wasn't conducted in multiple cities, there's no frame of reference. This could be very bad, or could just be a lack of points of reference when it comes to actual acts of criminal conduct that happens but never gets reported. So, without more data, the road paved with good intentions leads to a place to be named later.

Considering that two years ago the Supreme Court ended up having to hold that the use of the indefinite article "a" in the phrase "a notice to appear" means a singular document that fits the definition of said notice instead of multiple notices sent piecemeal, even clear legal language can somehow wind up being challenged all the way to the top. The opinion, which actually makes for some delightful grammar shade from Gorsuch to Kavanaugh that's both utterly thorough and gratuitous at the same time, is quite the read, although the Supreme Court having to definitively state that "a means a" is almost a parody of itself. I wish you the best of luck with a word that's 5 times longer and features a slightly more complex definition than the meaning of "a".

The opinion, btw: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-438_j4el.pdf

And the stack is still used today by plenty of people around the world, what's the problem?

Haha my goodness. Yes, if you're the state, all that is theoretically true, but the catch is of course the problem of legibility. The state is well aware of that, as you noted, but so many transactions themselves are untrackable, some because of explicit state policies (undocumented immigrants line up to purchase money orders to pay taxes a notable example of a collective and voluntary effort to overcome state obstacles that are put in place, but also the many many unbanked individuals in the country, especially those not on the payroll for various reasons). That argument absolutely works if you simply realize that a) the state is never going to be able to actually capture 100% of cash transactions and b) the state's primary goal is not recordkeeping per se but to collect its perceived share, so the greater punishment it dishes out and the more complex laws get in regards to consumer finance, the more likely that those on the cusp simply opt out of the formal system if they're in a position to do so and disappear from all that heavy enforcement measures, much of which the average consumer do not understand fully anyway.

This viewpoint issue is not limited to financial legibility of course. We do know that the underground economy, because data is only reported by authorities, is inflated or deflated for political purposes, further muddling any potential estimations. Oh, and plenty of what the IRS wish to do is just that - wishful, and only when it's convenient for the other party. You can try to regulate cash transactions domestically in a more heavy handed manner, but you're mostly going to affect those least able to afford it to begin with, and the costs involved may not be worth the effort. Oh, and US currency is commonly used abroad, including in place of native currencies in some countries. When it comes to cash, there are only estimates as to how much the government can reasonably regulate the transacting of, and the government's policies have undermined efforts to do so even when they could. Not everyone is in the cohort that posts on HN.

My decision to at least exclude family law, beyond the divorce of my parents when I was a teenager being fairly ugly (although now with a larger sample size I've observed, relatively tame), was cemented by sitting through a whole session where the only property that needed to be split were a pair of season tickets to my school's men's college basketball team. While the school's team is quite good, we've never won a championship, at the time of the proceedings we've only been AP #1 for a week and then was almost knocked out of the tourney by a 16 seed, and in open court both parties acknowledged that they don't go to all of the home games and are seeing other season ticket holders, meaning that neither party needed to have both sets of tickets just to go watch the games live. The only advantage is that the seats would be together, but I've been to a lot of games of just about every North American professional sport (yes, including Arena Football) and seat swapping is ubiquitous whether the place is sold out or a quarter full. I've litigated my own case in small claims court and can honestly say that there were cases far more consequential there than the acrimonious splitting of a pair of basketball season tickets. It's not exactly kafkaesque - the criminal justice system fits the bill better - but it's at least... Dadaist in an un-self-aware way? I've appeared in undergraduate musicals written by my classmates that were less cringeworthy than that.

And I've practiced administrative law which, since they are not established under Article III of the Constitution, can be pretty cowboy and roughshod. I've also appeared in tribal court which seem to frequently take cues from TV courts. But they are not frivolous, not at all. Administrative hearings can and do determine the liberty of people every day. Same for tribal courts. There's something farcical about all 3 types of proceedings but family court just hits the perfect note of "legitimate", "important", and "farcical" to me, even though they are undoubtedly important. I can assure you that no immigration or NLRB hearings, the administrative courts in this country with teeth, sink into farce at a similar rate.

At one point there were some half-joking talks about finding an agreeable local tribe to partner with us to open a startup that allow same-day in-app divorces. Sadly even with introductions and approaching tribes in several states they all ended up saying no. There's a free idea for y'all, business-wise, if you can pull it off.

State-run lotteries are ALWAYS about the transfer of wealth and property from the poor and marginalized to the wealthy and connected. This was true during colonial times, this was the manner by which the state of Georgia divvied up land stolen via Indian removal, culminating in 8 substantial (and all rigged) lotterying of land that can only be characterized as stolen under the threat of muskets and bayonets. It's not a coincidence that lotteries became increasingly unpopular. This was then deliberately conflated with private lotteries ran by blacks, immigrants, and the poor where the house odds were good but not anywhere close - to the tune of 1 in 900 compared to 1 in 14 million or so for your typical 6 out of 49 game, made a moral issue, then a tax issue (giving more reason to raid minority neighborhoods), until the 1970s when essentially states began seeing the system as a two-birds-one-stone scenario both in raising revenue and also booting out what was otherwise an illegible parallel society that it had little direct way to profit from or exercise control over.

The really interesting counter-example - or really, the most incompetent series of lotteries ever ran by a state - was the excise farming schemes the British colonial administrators ran in SE Asia, in particular Penang and Singapore and further afield in Malaya, between the 1840s and officially 1903. Excise farming is basically the lotterying of monopolies on the vice trade for fixed periods of time, which existed since the 1500s and periodically gets brought out (prominently under Cromwell, and a bit during the restoration), except because the decline of the East India Company and the lack of civil servants and administrators who had a working knowledge of Chinese, which had become the biggest financial players and essentially realized that the authorities were unable to make sense of the place-of-ancestral-origin system that had little to do with what the British were familiar with (like blood quantum) and inadvertently enabled the same native-place association or Landsmannschaft (we need an English word for this, btw) to simply dominate certain vice trades by the simplest subterfuge - by leveraging the comparatively fluid role personal names represented. Yes, it took more or less an actual case of "all Asians look alike" for a state lottery to fail. Carl Trocki's works are the authoritative research on this subject and time period for those interested in what probably represents one of the most mind-boggling peacetime self-owns by two successive governments that in mainstream academic discourse (outside Subaltern, Asian, and Diaspora/Migration studies, which are arguably niche and very much interdisciplinary), represents the archetype for hegemonic power relationships in practice. I suppose one can also chalk it up as a lottery win there, a rare one, but someone does usually actually win the lottery eventually.

Also, reddit, due to the way it encourages specific niche subreddits to proliferate, inadvertently also showcases, albeit from the tag side instead of the tagged-content side, one use-case where community tagging is both necessary and canonical tags are inconsistent or nonexistent, which is the vast arena of porn, which involves attempts to categorize massive amounts of content that are frequently lacking in tags or tagged minimalistically or even erroneously by studios, and also, can involve specific preferences that aren't necessarily even considered as something that needs to be tagged until someone starts a subreddit on some really obscure aspect of a clip and then, suddenly it turns out there's a community and demand for such a tag.

Some automated tagging solutions do work on some aspects of the tag deficiencies - performers using different stage names, for example. However, just as obscenity is defined on a "I'll know it when I see it" basis, individual and perhaps previously unnamed categorizations pop up frequently enough that there's no realistic way to anticipate every future community tag that may come about. There's also inconsistencies as to how currently-used tags are defined, and even in the generally more centralized and almost over-specific niches of the industry in Japan, with consistent and unique product codes for reference, you still don't get a single consistent studio tag system, even for their domestic mainstream market. And language certainly factors into all this, as well as culture. It's already evident that some tags translate and some simply don't, either because there is no word for it in the other language, or the categorization loses some aspect of cultural significance in the translation process that makes it end result valid but also nonsensical. Some degree of community curation to augment even a relatively consistent, centralized, and comprehensive canonical source.

There are a few projects on Github that are hashing out compatible systems for at least the English language (and it appears that projects in Korean and Chinese exist too, also on Github). This is definitely an arena that is organic, disorganized, and even if in the future can mostly be automated, will always have room for community curation, and is actually actively being worked out and evolving in real time. Tags, or community curation at large, will likely persist as content, the market, culture, CV/classification tech, and mores change as time goes on. Definitely not dying.

Italy as a polity, regardless of how real the polity actually existed as a coherent and cohesive governing state, pretty much existed continuously from Rome until entirely left out by the Congress of Vienna in 1805 though. By the time 1848 rolled around most people alive were perfectly aware of the concept of Italy in living memory, and even those who didn't actually live in what was considered Italy - in particular those living in the south from Naples down to Calabria and Sicily, if they were educated and literate, were still aware of the notion of Italy as a distinct political entity. There might not have been much of a centralized government based in Italian territories that represented the polity for long periods of history, but ruling regimes/dynasties come and go but political entities tend to last longer.

It's not 100% undisputed but most historians would agree that until conquered by the Persians in 525 BC, Egyptian history consists of 26 dynastic changes and 8 major distinct periods. Each dynasty of course usually had more than one ruler. Since we're talking about Socrates, then the slightly extended timeline of 33 dynastic changes (including 2 Persian, and 2 Greek), across 9 major and distinct periods, would represent pretty much the mainstream view that is supported by the available evidence, ending in its incorporation into the Roman Republic in 30 BC.

If anything, Egypt is one hell of a counter example of institutional stability. I would also make the pedantic quibble that the HRE never called itself "Germany" until the term was incorporated into part of its much longer official title in the late 1400s. English usage started in the 1500s. It's not to say that the concept of "Germany" or "Deutschland" didn't exist, but pre-Westphalia it's difficult to make truly apt comparisons to conceptualizations of states today, and the term equivalent to Germany was used, intermittently at that, from Charlemagne's death for the next 700 years somewhat like the status of Scotland or Wales within the UK today, as in, it coexisted with the HRE as an part but not considered to have referred to the whole until the HRE lost its non-German territories an that was pretty much all that was left.

Oh god I hope law enforcement doesn't decide to jump in on this as a cost-cutting measure (that they don't need) that would result in evidentiary and potentially constitutional issues. Most LE departments have arrangements that give them access to far more accurate results from, say, GC/MS testing, and performed by those who does testing and analysis for a living. The police in America at least has a pretty poor record on using pseudoscientific methods to build a case while leaving the easy and proven part of scientific testing - sending rape kits and such DNA collected to labs - on the backburner. And of course none of this is going to actually help the police since reporting rates and clearance rates for rape and sexual assault remain very low and by the time a report comes in, the evidence may no longer exist.

The focus on GHB/GBL seems... lacking in coverage, considering that there's a whole range of water/alcohol soluble substances that is easier to carry (in powder or pill form, instead of liquid) and doesn't have the taste problem GHB/GBL has when mixed drinks tend to drown out the chemical taste of Midazolam or, if push comes to shove, research chemicals based off existing formulations such as Nifoxipam represent just the tip of the iceberg in the analogues of just one category of potential "date rape drugs", quotes because without question the likes of Midazolam have contributed much more to the health and well-being of patients than as the moral panic du jour once again that overshadows its utility.

And I would posit that alcohol is not viewed as an epidemic in part because those who drink tend to know what they're drinking, while there's virtually no street demand for fentanyl and its analogues and the supply-side demand is generated entirely by the failed war on drugs that targets the supply side aggressively enough so that the golden rule of prohibition kicked in and the most potent and easiest to carry form of the prohibited substance becomes what the supply side focuses on. Regular, non-opiate-naive users were overdosing and dying, which is very much an aberration when it comes to overdoses generally. And we've utterly failed at implementing anything more than the bare minimum in terms of harm reduction while politicians go out of their way to blame everyone but themselves. It's effectively a government sanctioned epidemic. If you want to kick off your week on a shitty note, read Inspector Generals' reports on DOJ and the DEA specifically. However impractical, this is at least an attempt at putting a harm reduction product on the market, and should be applauded as such. It's more than what congress have managed to do for god knows how long.

While almost everyone in China who can get out of the country is essentially "laundering" money by attempting to evade the ridiculous currency controls? The Russians arguably have more faith in the Yuan than the wealthy Chinese at this point, which is, well, I don't know what the adjective to use here but a mixture of funny and sad and wtf and irony and inevitable all rolled into one.

I find the comparison really odd as someone in the opposite position - I had formal classical piano training from 8 years old until I gave it up during college, and later learned how to code entirely through copying other people's code and Stackoverflow in my mid 20s. Piano to me feels much more like a sport, in that there's a very visceral, physical aspect to playing, and in turn a ton of effort goes into optimizing everything from where your fingers should be placed to how hard or soft one is striking a key. Practicing is effectively comparable to training for some sort of non-team sport much more than anything else. I don't have perfect pitch, but learning how to read music is a very small part of the whole experience, and I would think that as an adult someone learning piano will find the physical aspect, particularly the finer motor elements, to be the primary hinderance to being really great. Writing code is entirely different in that it feels much more like learning a subject matter, and there's neither something akin to the apotheosis of the particular thing you're working on that you aim to emulate, nor hard boundaries as to determine your proficiency through performance. It's cool if your code doesn't work when you test it, you can fix that. It just feels like apples and oranges in the experience.

If you're picking up basketball at age 30, I hope you know that you're never going to be anywhere nearly as good as Curry, or Lebron. But you can definitely pick up a subject matter and become an expert later in life. Heinrich Schliemann essentially began his archeological career at age 36 and yes, basically excavated Troy in the worst way possible, but managed to actually excavate Troy. That's the difference between an adult piano learner and an adult code learner, I think.

I'm sure in some social circles or professions it is, but after college I've lived in Seattle, Boston, Brooklyn, and Las Vegas, and outside of the context where the existence of my degree is a necessity by virtue of state law in order to undertake the profession I was in, it really doesn't come up, ever. In part, it's probably because facebook had us all list our education particularly my cohort who needed a .edu email address to sign up, but even after I got off facebook and changed careers entirely, it's just not something that comes up. I don't know if there's simply a presumption that I'm "one of them" or because I have a social circle that isn't entirely homogeneous educationally, but I can't even really think of how the subject matter would come up, or why anyone should care.

Eliot himself explains in no uncertain terms in his seminal essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that what he intended to accomplish, and views as essential to the poetic form, resides in the referential nature of poetry to the past or "tradition", and the poet is a mere conduit or at best a curator of material that already exist. Although it's arguable that even he himself did not follow this dogmatic way of constructing poetry, his thesis effectively defined modernist literary criticism for decades. In that vein, it's not unreasonable, but also not top-of-mind, to connect his works and purported ethos to crosswords, as crosswords are necessarily referential but it had the flaw that it was not necessarily consisted of expressions of emotion and art via channeling tradition in a newly curated manner but rather, the expression of another, more "pop" form of culture that existed at the time. The connection between him and crosswords may very well be a product of the immense popularity of the crossword during his early adulthood when it was viewed as an almost transgressive element in society that, among other things, served as the convenient conduit du jour for mixed-gender interaction in social settings set up by clubs dedicated to these puzzles.

But I really consider Eliot the first poet who openly advocated for what we'd consider "sampling" or "mashups". Although actual tech that could be used to sample music wouldn't exist until 30 years after Eliot first expressed his sentiments, and musical quotation certainly have existed before that, musical quotations are seldom directly acknowledged and never formed as the basis of a work in its entirety. Eliot did not necessarily quote verbatim every reference he made, but he made extensive footnotes directing to the source in many cases and in other cases used references to works popular enough that notation would not be needed. I very much think that what was being expressed by his works, starting with Prufrock but really peaking before the Four Quartets, is an attempt at legitimizing a way of creating art that served as a precursor for hip-hop and electronic music today.

Are you sure? PH's official line has always been "share with people you know but no bots/asking for upvotes/manipulation" or something akin to that. It's still in their community guidelines, albeit with language that gives them a bit of wiggle room.

https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/2690626-how-do-i-sh...

https://help.producthunt.com/en/articles/484935-can-i-ask-my...

I think the problem is that they don't seem to have a good enforcement mechanism, and so for what must've been years I haven't really seen staff proactively go after those who do game the system. The only times when I've seen action taken is when the community comes out and basically calls out a product/maker. Most people don't care enough to do that kind of stuff, I'd imagine. I've done it a few times (either outright illegal stuff like peddling American legal services from overseas without qualifications, or obviously scam crypto projects) but these should have been obvious. The staff is also unresponsive on email, although better on the forums.

I should note that the government does a lot of stuff. If you have a cause you feel strongly about, whichever side, it's worth taking some time to understand which ones you can actually (at least theoretically) have a direct impact over, and that's generally in the regulatory arena, or administrative law arena. Agencies don't make laws, they pass rules and regulations, and those that adds legal obligations to pre-existing ones in a substantive way are subject ot note and commentary under the Administrative Procedures Act. This means you, even if you're not an American citizen but have some sort of interest at stake, can and should voice your concerns. It's in fact one of the only ways the average person can at least reach the decision makers that were not elected and don't owe their jobs to anyone but the president.

In those cases, the specific site to follow would be https://www.regulations.gov/ and the api docs are at https://open.gsa.gov/api/regulationsgov/ and at least most administrations (last one excepted, although they didn't seem to have anyone on staff in the executive branch who was familiar with the APA to begin with) are pretty good about at least reading, if not agreeing - sometimes cruelly and sometimes nonsensically - to your comments.

It's good to see what the government is doing, but in a sense if you want change, that's already too late. Focus on the regulatory aspects of things, and you can make a real difference, possibly. The CFR feed on the RSS page shows how regulations are routinely promulgated, and it's not an ideological thing necessarily: DHS/ICE is an agency just like the FDA or EPA. Rules are, after all, rules.

I understand why lawmakers would want to enact such measures, and I'm quite familiar with the result of impaired driving of any kind, having represented those accused of such charges in court. However, it should be noted that the drunk driving laws and the campaign for more punitive punishment are not actually targeting those who have caused harm or have taken a substantial step at causing harm, and the statistics behind the portrayals of the problem are frankly misleadingly reported and takes on the characteristics of a moral panic and a boon to law enforcement in circumventing the 4th Amendment. I have no doubt that any additional measures will continue down the same dead-end path.

Firstly, the NHTSA freely defines fatal crashes as "alcohol-related" or "alcohol-involved" if any person, driver or pedestrian or victim in another vehicle had 0.01 BAC or above. It does not mean that the cause of the crash is related to alcohol, only that it is present in a party involved. For non-fatal crashes, the label attaches if the police report indicates a presence of alcohol on the scene, even when no person involved had been tested or was suspected of intoxication. A glossary of definitions can be found here: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Secondly, the actual numbers of alcohol-related crashes and fatalities are largely estimates imputed by filling in the gaps in the data with values derived from alcohol-involved data that was collected and extrapolated under the assumption that the two populations would have similar distributions of BAC levels when tested, without regard as to considerations as to why BAC data wasn't collected. The imputation is validated by comparing the new imputed statistics to that which is also derived but from an older method with fewer classification categories and not actual recorded data. Methodology: https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... In any case, the extent of the problem is obfuscated by both a very broad definition and statistically imputed figures based on earlier estimates. While the researchers have pointed out the shortcomings and limitations of the method, the numbers reported to the public and used to justify punitive measures under criminal and administrative laws are taken at face value.

Thirdly, the common DUI/DWI laws punish in a manner more out of the Minority Report than how any criminal justice system that isn't a sham should - by punishing behavior based on the potential for such behavior writ large to potentially cause harm, although there's no victim, no actual harm, no intent to cause harm, and in some cases may not even be possible to cause harm. It's pre-crime in the purist sense, especially since nearly all states have vehicular homicide and vehicular assault charges, or charges that cover the same ground, to deal with instances where actual harm is caused. This is made possible by lawmakers simply designating an arbitrary BAC level as the line for per se intoxication, regardless of actual impairment. NHTSA's own literature states that their guidance material is focused not only determining impairment, but determining whether any individual stopped by the police has a BAC above 0.08, a figure that shifted throughout time and was first set into law around the height of the push for prohibition. Field sobriety tests and such, obviously, have tons of critics both on the false positive and false negative side, but more problematic is the fact that the punitive laws are made not to stop impaired driving but rather, to act as a crude way of divining whether a person's BAC is over or under a precise but arbitrary level, through which probable cause can be established. It's a giant game of charades.

Many laws passed with the best of intentions end up with unforeseen outcomes and ramifications. This is worse than that, as it takes a real problem of unknown scale and pushes it into moral panic territory. Maybe the moral crusaders of MADD should actually take a hint from their organization's name and figure out the extent of the problem outside of crashes where only the driver is killed (70% of alcohol-related fatalities, the NHTSA estimates) before letting loose the moral panic at the heart of their campaign. Reading the footnotes tend to help.

Articles of Confederation. It was in force for 6 years before the founders dumped it and drafted the Constitution. The main problems were the inability for congress to levy taxes, regulate trade international and interstate, and congress wound up having to beg the states for money.

If it's a civil rights case and there's merit to your claims, you might be able to find public interest lawyers to help out for much less than that. Call around, there are firms in most large cities.

They, alongside the Second Amendment Foundation, have actually had some success fighting states for discriminatory laws that deny 2nd Amendment rights to specific populations. After all, the Constitution wouldn't work if it doesn't apply to everyone, but states have spent a lot of effort putting up roadblocks to everyone from legal immigrants to medical marijuana patients and states would selectively refuse to renew CCWs and licenses without cause or bar legal gun owners from receiving Section 8 vouchers and imposing categorical bans on legal gun owners attempting to foster or adopt children. In a sense they are the exact opposite of the NRA, who haven't done much to address the lack of equal access to the Constitutional right for quite some time when the complainants don't fit a particular mold.

The system is set up under the assumption that the institutions themselves cannot have systemic issues and all problems are really the work of individual employees acting outside of what they're supposed to do, and so you're supposed to sue them in their personal capacity. Then the Supreme Court basically slammed that door effectively making remedies impossible to obtain. Deetz: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/civ...

Alternatively, call a god damn lawyer and have them deal with this. This is no time for amateur hour crowdsourced solutions.

Federal agents, while technically only possessing something akin to an even less accessible version of qualified immunity under the Bivens doctrine, in reality are basically never going to be held responsible in any sort of substantive way from those they victimized on the job, unless they literally kill a bystander or something and even that isn't a sure thing.

The problem is that both forms are treated identically by law, at least in the United States. You can be charged additionally for profiting from piracy but not profiting or not taking credit and mere distribution does not absolve you of the crime. The stakes are always higher when there's a literal loss of liberty hanging as a sword of Damocles and because the terms of protection tends to be arbitrary and punitive in nature, philosophical nuance gives way to legalistic absolutism in applying absolute consequences to potentially speculative harm. As long as the law exists and can be enforced in a way that makes no distinction between the two, anyone who may be affected by its reach must at least put that interpretation first in doing the cost/benefit analysis before more subjective aspects can even be discussed.

* From the consumers: Piracy doesn't matter. Pirates were never going to buy anyway.*

Really? Maybe times have really changed but I know a lot of people, myself included, who pirated software - starting in the mid 90s for me - because we couldn't buy software since we were too young to make money and lived in constant fear that the one time our parents do buy some game or piece of software it turns out to be total crap. At this point, even though my education have led me to a more nuanced and philosophical objection to the enforcement of intellectual property in the manner at least the United States does, and equates physical property either on par with it or even underneath it, the only times I pirate software now is if there's no trial version, and if it's something I really want to use long term I'd purchase it anyway. Effectively the only long term sort of piracy I conduct at this point is to circumvent blackout rules on sports streaming because for whatever reason a whole fifth of MLB is blacked out on mlb.tv where I am but the biggest streaming package only shows 2 of those teams. Access, ultimately, determine whether someone pirates. That includes cases when access is outlandishly expensive or simply barred, and even knowing my share of anarchists and career criminals as defined by state I really don't see people who are ideologically committed to piracy in an absolutist sense. It's like, if I can pay $25 a month for unlimited access to JSTOR it would entirely be for my intellectual curiosity but I'd do it, but that's not an option so sci-hub when the article isn't available is kind of the only reasonable option. The alternative is simply to give up and find something else to be curious about.

Some aspects of reverse-engineering/cracking in the scene was gamified to such an extent where it became a prestige sort of thing, a competition for its own sake. That tends to stop where-ever your rivals stop, and as a result it's never a sure thing that patches would be cracked, for example.

I don't know why you'd assume you're the outlier. Never mind the differences between physical and psychological dependence and problem use (which can happen without dependence, and one can be dependent but not using problematically), you personally experienced underwhelming withdrawal effects on multiple drugs that don't all affect the same parts of your brain, and some more physically addictive than others (benzos on top of that list). As for your friends, you know about their struggles because they had struggles in the first place. Just as the news doesn't report things when nothing bad happens, it's unlikely that, with the potential of stigmatization and jailtime, most people would volunteer something that caused them no issues but can only cause issues if they let it be known. If I were in your shoes I'd not assume that you and this guy happens to be the outliers, but rather, selection bias, the well-documented history of our drug laws being based on racial panics (Chinese for opiates, cocaine for African-Americans, marijuana for Mexicans, the crack sentencing disparity, et cetera) that happens to fund a lot of the economy via the prison-industrial complex, it's not much of a leap to think that a great deal of the harm linked to drug use is linked really to the various behavior undertaken to hide from detection and not necessarily from the drugs themselves, most of which - diamorphine included - are classified as having some medical use somewhere, although for whatever reason MDMA and marijuana are classified as having none. I think it's not hard to buy into the idea that problematic use is not the outlier because that's been taught to us for decades. But if your personal experience doesn't indicate that, why jump directly to thinking that you're the odd man out?

Prosecutors aren't necessarily blessed with bigger budgets in a lot of places, they simply have a separately-funded (and very well funded at that) investigative body that is the police or sheriff's office doing the really expensive part that the defense, especially a public defender's office, will only have a skeleton crew to do. The problem is that defense may not have the resources or knowledge to use inadequacies of something like this as a defense in the first place, and may not be able to effectively cross or direct an expert because of the lack of specific expertise and the reactive nature of the job.

It's not that the venn diagram of tech-literate and criminal-defense lawyers are entirely separate circles, but having been "that guy" in a public defender's office for even basic stuff like cell tower triangulation accuracy to finding proprietary surveillance video codecs to decode exculpatory evidence, you really need to start at square one while the prosecution have the whole police department's resources, expertise, and initiative at their disposal. You can afford the expert, it just won't do any good when you don't know what questions to ask that will actually be effective. And unsurprisingly those who do have experience in technical, specialized fields tend to get poached into the private sector or out of trial (really plea) practice all together, so the knowledge/bullshit gap will still exist and there's no real consistent way to bridge it.