I might not track where my cash goes, but it's easier to track how much I'm spending. If I yank out $100 on Saturday, and I'm broke on Friday, I know without calculating that I've spent $100 that week. If I charge that amount, I actually have to look at my records to see how much I've spent.
It depends on whether you ever use cash. I rarely do these days, except if it's cash-only, or a cheaper cash price, or a really cheap item at an independent shop (and I choose to save the owner the transaction fee).
Thus, I probably withdraw $100-200 in cash at one time, and that will last me a few months unless I'm forced to make a large cash purchase somewhere. I visit an ATM only a few times per year.
So tracking when my wallet gets empty tells me very little. On the other hand, I can check my net worth every few hours if I want to and instantly see the impact of my recent purchases. Plus, many of my expenses are automatically categorized, so I know precisely where in my budget I'm overspending.
Look -- your system works for you, and I'm sure you find it useful. Others may find another system more useful. I.m not arguing that anyone should do it my way, only that something like my way is becoming more common, and it's changing the way some people view cash vs. credit.
I started browsing it looking for anything juicy. The edits seem to be small, good quality, mostly political edits. They look like interns with an interest in politics, history...
Huh. Competent information provided by people who actually might know something about a topic. Who would've guessed?
This is one of the main issues with Wikipedia -- it depends on knowledgeable editors, but those who know the most about a topic are often barred (or at least discouraged) from sharing their knowledge, which might be branded "original research" or (as in this case) automatically assumed to be suspicious or potentially made only in self-interest.
The problem here is NOT contributions from experts -- I imagine those involved in government might be most qualified to know what needs to be added to articles on it. The problem is the continuing Wikipedia mentality that we don't need qualified (but disinterested) experts to authorize edits on good articles... and instead depend on whichever volunteers are best at wikilawyering.
Don't get me wrong: Wikipedia's amazing growth is largely from its early "open door" policy on edits. But new editors have stopped coming to Wikipedia now, because they are greeted with suspicion and faced with the daunting task of fighting a bureaucracy (mostly of people who are not experts on the topic) to suggest any substantial edit. It's time to move into a more "mature" phase on established articles that have been deemed to be reasonably good quality. (My personal suggestion would be a two-stage edit on established articles, with a "stable version" displayed by default and an "experimental" or whatever version that can still have suggested edits by anyone... and those edits can be added to the stable version after review... but that's just one possible system. That would be a better system to prevent abuse as well as random vandalism, rather than a system that is suspicious of any user from the wrong IP or any new user who might just be a shill.)
And no, the cash is accounted for n withdrawal, it has not "disappeared".
I think you missed my point. Suppose you take $60 out from an ATM to cover miscellaneous cash expenses for a week (or two or whatever). That number is immediately deducted from your balances, so if you look at your checking account to decide what you have to spend for future purposes, the cash is "invisible." Moreover, if you want to track individual cash transactions, you would need to enter and itemize them manually, which frankly most people can't be bothered with unless they do a lot of cash transactions or use large amounts of cash.
So, if you use financial software, cash becomes this untraceable invisible part of your financial total (like credit cards used to be), while every other transaction will automatically update and modify your net worth. I'm NOT saying you CAN'T keep track of cash... I'm saying for people who don't use it very much, it's more difficult, and people don't bother.
The cluster of odd bills in my wallet has become sort of like the "change jar" that people throw their coins into. You don't quite know how much is there, because you don't need it or use it very often,, but it's probably less than $100, and if you ever need some, you can probably dig out a couple quarters as necessary.
That younger people cannot maintain a balance in their heads is no reason to dispose of cash in society for those who can.
I know that this is what TFA is about, but I never argued in my post to get rid of cash. I don't think that would be good at all. My post was simply responding to others who said that cash was easier to track in your wallet -- for previous generations, yeah, today... not so much.
Actually, can you explain to me the benefits of a $1 coin to the user? Fine, it's more durable; I don't really care, I rarely accidentally destroy $1 bills, so that benefit accrues solely to the mint.
Umm, you do realize who pays for dollar bills to be printed, right? The US government, which is funded by your taxes. Dollar bills on average last less than a year in circulation before they are removed and destroyed (due to damage, etc.). Coins last years or even decades in circulation. There's a lot of debate over exactly how much we'd save by switching to coins, but the consensus is it's at least a few hundred million dollars per year. In the giant federal budget, this is barely a drop in the bucket, but it's something...
Wrong, they're made for circulation, they're just making sets with all the presidents, like they did with all the states and Washington DC on quarters.
No, sorry, but you are wrong here. The US mint is sitting on roughly a billion of these coins, minted in previous years, which may never see circulation because there is no demand. Thus, the mint is NOT minting any new coins for the purpose of circulation. Unlike quarters (which circulate and wear out and needed to be replaced, new designs or not), at current demand levels, the mint has enough dollar coins in storage to last for decades.
Thankfully, the mint was able to stop this idiocy of minting new coins just to shove into vaults a few years ago, so now they are only producing new coins to sell as uncirculated coins for collectors (which they can actually make some money off of). Sure, the new coins CAN be put in circulation, but their primary purpose is to be sold for premium prices to collectors.
Think that doesn't come out of your pocket in the end through higher prices?
Of course it does. But there's not much I as an individual can do about it. So, actually this is an INCENTIVE for consumers to use credit cards, since at least with my card I can get a percentage back in whatever form of rewards (whereas cash only customers will just lose all of it). The only place where I have an incentive to pay cash is when merchants charge different prices for cash vs. credit, and there I generally would pay cash. (Of course, this assumes you never carry a balance on your card... and why would you?)
Exactly true. Market research shows people spend more if they are using a CC. Part of the psychology is of course that cash you are carrying around is generally a more limited asset than your CC balance limit.
While that's true, it's beginning to change, particularly for many younger people. I've personally always found cash easier to spend, because it wouldn't be in my pocket if it weren't available. Credit cards, though? I need to think about my bank account balances and charges for the month before using those. But I agree that most people aren't that careful.
However, the big game changer for younger folks is financial tracking software -- so now you can see instant balances changing whenever you charge or debit. With financial tracking software, the CASH becomes the "funny money," because it isn't tracked automatically.
That means that whatever money is in my wallet has already disappeared from my "accounting software," so it's basically already spent, as far as I'm concerned. I've talked to many people who feel the same way now... cash is now the "free money to spend" while credit transactions see an immediate visceral impact as you look at your moving balance.
The real problem here is not Amazon or books or even Google, it's the French mindset that things should never change, that the old ways are always the best ways.
I'm NOT saying the French are right here, but sometimes greater efficiency should not be the only goal, and sometimes it doesn't really result in "progress."
Fetishing bookshops doesn't have any emotional appeal to me - they're just buildings stacked with a small and limited selection of reading materials, which inefficiently deploy land and people.
As someone who has lived for a time in Europe (various times in France, Germany, and Italy), I can firmly state that I'd take their small food markets and shops over the U.S. any day, "just buildings stacked with a small and limited selection of food options, which inefficiently deploy land and people" to often local small farms and food productions.
Despite all of the efficiency gains of big agriculture in the U.S., and the apparent variety at your local supermarket, you mostly end up dining on processed crap and corn-derived junk. You can argue that that is the choice of Americans, but most Americans don't have an easy way to get access to the quality of food that they could have in Europe. And I'm not talking about questionable claims about "natural organic" BS -- I'm talking about simple plain ingredients and real food that just plain tastes better.
Now -- you can certainly argue that local bookshops don't provide some equivalent function, so they don't deserve regulatory preservation. But I'd say in certain senses, the French sensibility that you deplore has helped them maintain better stuff in some areas, even if it's less efficient.
Any modern quartz-controlled watch that costs more than $10 is a status symbol and nothing more.
I don't know about that. My Citizen WR-100 is a very modest watch. My wife bought it for me about 8 years ago. $250.
Agreed. I bought one of the Citizen watches that was near the bottom of the line, got it on sale for about $80 maybe 5-6 years ago. Before that, I used to buy the $10-20 watch from Target or Walmart or whatever, and it would last 1-3 years before the battery would die. So then I could either go through the annoyance of taking the watch apart and finding the correct random battery (usually at least a few dollars unless you'd buy them in bulk) or I could spend $10-20 on a new watch. I'd do the latter.
After 3 or 4 disposable watches, I decided to buy the Citizen... it has a simple style that I like (though slightly nicer than most of the cheap watches) and no more buying a new crappy watch every year or two.
In a few years, the watch will have paid for itself... it already has in convenience (since twice before I had a watch battery die suddenly and had to go to a store at an inconvenient time and get whatever was available).
Some features are worth a few bucks; it's not just status.
I lived in NYC on and off for most of a decade and I can assure you that as a pedestrian the act of stepping into the street was a game of roulette and that yellow cabs were the greatest cause of un-safe living.
This is a common sentiment, but it has been proven to be a myth. People just think cabs are disproportionately responsible for pedestrian injuries because it's easy to lump them into a group, but you're actually roughly 6 times more likely to be seriously injured or killed in New York City by private cars. (Note that NYC has well over 100 pedestrian fatalities per year.) For more details, see here:
Throughout the city, 79 percent of the serious crashes involved private passenger cars; 13 percent involved taxis or livery cabs; 4 percent involved trucks; and 3 percent involved buses.
The story notes that at certain times of day, taxis can make up almost 50% of traffic on the streets downtown, so these numbers may imply that cabs are much safer overall than passenger cars.
The newspapers and television stations of yesteryear were just as interested in selling ads as today's are.
This is the most important point. Everyone on Slashdot always chimes in and says things like "You're not really Facebook's customer -- the companies who want your information and want to run ads are," but people seem to forget that this has been true for a lot of things for a LONG time.
The "news" has rarely been about conveying unbiased facts -- it's about selling a product. And before ad revenue was so important, most newspapers were even more sensationalist, since they depended solely on news boys pitching crazy stories that would attract an audience.
The primary goal of most news sources is to make things as sensationalist as possible without alienating their sponsors or their audience... and that's always been the goal, even centuries ago. People turn their heads to watch car wrecks and freaks -- the vast majority of people don't want "unbiased coverage," and even those who say they do don't generally want to hear things that disagree with their worldview.
I think the biggest difference is the level of honesty. Sean Hannity will TELL you that he's a conservative. Peter Jennings and Dan Rather pretended to be objective.
This is true, but I wouldn't quite say that nothing has changed in terms of the tone of news. We did go through a somewhat less sensationalist era for televised news in the early decades of television, but that was an aberration in the history of journalism. But of course you're right: there still were biases, even if they were less overt.
How about instead of trying to spin it one way or the other, try publishing the facts.
As another poster already said, there are billions of "facts" generated every day. A news organization has to choose to emphasize some or others -- there's certainly enough stuff going on in the world to generate an entirely "positive" newspaper every day or an entirely "negative" one.
No real news entity should be spinning stories, but they obviously do in order to pull in a larger audience, or deliver their agenda (Fox, MSN).
That is the ENTIRE point of most news organizations. Contrary to popular belief, there never was some sort of "golden age" where news sources ever just "reported the news." Newspapers and magazines have always mostly been trying to sell newspapers and magazines -- that means publishing attention-getting headlines. They might not "spin" it in a positive or negative fashion, but they certainly will try to spin it in a way that gets you to buy their product. And, like any product, they'll eventually develop an audience (intentionally or not), and that will lead them to slant things to entertain that audience.
News organizations are businesses, first and foremost. Their main goal is to generate revenue and always has been.
I'm really tired of these crappy stories that I see on local news meant to scare folks, or pull at their heartstrings. They really misguide peoples perceptions of reality.
Ah yes, the perpetual complaint that goes back centuries. You can find Ben Franklin complaining about all the sensationalist crap published at the time... and others from even further into the past.
And before newspapers, there were town gossips who spread rumors about why the town butcher closed his shop inexplicably for one day last week, or the weird lady who lives down the street and never talks to anyone and how she must be a witch, or the evil people who live beyond the mountains and eat babies.
Ever ready fairy tales -- not the sanitized versions generated by Disney, but the original ones? It was mostly horrific blood and gore and evil deeds... if people don't have enough sensational entertainment from the stuff happening around them, they make it up.
Believe me, I wish news sources were better too, but that's not their point, and it never has been dating back to the dawn of civilization. The closest we can get to a "neutral" news source would be to turn something into a non-profit and remove a business motive. But even then, if you look at something like NPR (which is better than most), you'll find it tends to run stories and choose reporting styles that slant toward its customer base, which tends to lean liberal (for U.S. politics).
Unfortunately, most people just want the sensationalist news. The stuff you want is NEVER going to be what your local news station will run, because that just is never going to generate much revenue.
All that matters is how they arose and how they're actually practiced.
If that's true, then your argument so far has been ill-informed. Historically, what Galileo and Newton and other "scientists" in the 17th-century called their work was not "science" but rather "natural philosophy." And the reason they called it that was because it came out of a long philosophical tradition, which was in the process of evolving under the work of a number of scientist-philosophers like Mersenne, Descartes, etc. who was seen at the time as leading the real intellectual "revolution." (The "scientific revolution" was something basically made up in the 1800s and projected back on the 1600s -- at the time, what Galileo, Newton, et al. were seen as doing was participating in a larger intellectual revolution in "philosophy.")
As for how things are practiced, well there are in fact scholars who work on philosophy of science, and some of their ideas have been influential in changing the way scientists conceive of their methodologies, even in the past century. People around here tend to like Popper, but there were people before him, and generations after him (Kuhn, Lakatos, etc.). The way we teach the "scientific method" in grade school is essentially the distillation of a particular philosophical conception of science developed in the 1800s, perhaps modified by some of the stuff like Popper that was formulated in the first half of the 20th century.
I'm not trying to overstate the influence of philosophy here, but modern science actually did develop out of a branch of philosophy. And it's only in the past 50 years or so that practicing scientists stopped having a detailed acquaintance with ongoing philosophical debates about scientific methodologies.
I'm not the one arguing for any authority over the other. I'm pointing out the attitude of some philosophers towards science as a junior form of philosophy when it isn't and probably never was.
Science isn't a "junior form of philosophy," and I do think you are right to criticize people who have said so. But science does have particular philosophical assumptions at its core, which were historically developed often by people with more than a passing familiarity with philosophical debates. Modern philosophy is still concerned with underlying assumptions of science that are largely unnoticed by practicing scientists who don't necessarily reflect on problematic elements of their methodology. This is not a criticism of science nor an assertion that it is subservient to anything -- it's just pointing out a different perspective... not unlike the mathematicians who are obsessed with the foundations of analysis and the underlying basis of number systems, which gets into the realm of philosophy. Most of those issues have little bearing on the everyday work of applied mathematicians, but there is a possibility that some research into these assumptions could lead people down a new path.
When humans were learning how to farm, they were doing proto-scientific research and they probably couldn't care less about the "big questions" or the "nature of things".
Are you serious? Of course they cared about the big questions. That's why they created gods and goddesses and personified nature to create explanations for all the "big questions" happening around them. Religion was the first answer.
Philosophy was the first step in introducing self-reflection, rationality, and logical consistency to the investigation of those questions.
The process of observation and working out what is happening is not in itself philosophy. It's something every human does since birth.
Naive empiricism is not the same as philosophy nor science. There's a self-reflective attitude required to begin asking questions about the methodology of observation that led to both philosophical revolutions and ultimately to the scientific revolution (which, depend
Turing was wrong about his predictions. But that doesn't mean his test is invalid
Imho it is.
Suppose we manage to create a strong AI. It's fully conscious, fully aware, but for some quirk we cannot understand, it's 100% honest.
Such an AI would never pass the Turing test, because it would never try to pass off as human
That sounds like a legit point at first, but think about it for a sec. Programming a computer to lie and be evasive about its nature is easy, and many chatbots can already do that. Asking a strong AI "are you a computer?" or "what did you have for breakfast?" would not be useful for evaluating intelligence. Getting the AI to debate an intellectual topic, on the other hand, will be less likely to require deception but would be a better measure of intelligence. That's another fundamental point people miss: The point of the Turing test was to imitate human INTELLIGENCE, NOT to pretend to be a physical human.
A knowledgeable interrogator trying to evaluate intelligence would thus likely be more interested in asking intellectual questions, rather than queries just designed to test whether the computer can make up some nonsense about itself.
Exactly. That's part of my point. A lot of people are acting like the test was "passed" by an AI pretending to be a Ukranian teenager conversing in his non-native language and acting like an evasive weirdo. Turing's standard for "intelligence" was obviously much higher. It sounds like his AI would probably be pitted against an adult human from the top 5-10% of intelligence in his test.
And isn't that a potential standard for evaluating when true AI has arrived? No one would have cared about Deep Blue or Watson if the computer wasn't at least better than most of humans in specific areas. If and when true AI arrives, it will likely have been endowed with superior access to facts, so the question is whether the AI will demonstrate understanding, i.e. ability to put those facts together and express them in a nuanced natural language way. (The point wasn't specific knowledge about sonnets, it was getting the AI to express a detailed understanding of nuanced language.) Giving an AI a bunch of facts about sonnets is easy; getting it to debate creative artistic choices in the way that an intelligent human who knows about sonnets might is a LOT harder.
The Turing Test was not passed, and the only people who claim it was are ignorant reporters looking for an easy story with a catchy headline
Indeed. There's a lot of misinformation out there about what Turing originally specified. The test is NOT simply "Can a computer have a reasonable conversation with an unsuspecting human so that the human will not figure out that the computer is not human?" By that standard, ELIZA passed the Turing test many decades ago.
The test also doesn't have a some sort of magical "fool 30%" threshold -- Turing simply speculated that by the year 2000, AI would have progressed enough that it could fool 30% of "interrogators" (more on that term below). The 30% is NOT a threshold for passing the test -- it was just a statement by Turing about how often AI would pass the test by the year 2000.
So what was the test?
The test involves three entities: an "interrogator," a computer, and a normal human responder. The interrogator is assumed to be well-educated and familiar with the nature of the test. The interrogator has five minutes to question both the computer and the normal human in order to determine which is the actual human. The interrogator is assumed to bring an intelligent skepticism to the test -- the standard is not just trying to have a normal conversation, but instead the interrogator would actively probe the intelligence of the AI and the human, designing queries which would find even small flaws or inconsistencies that would suggest the lack of complex cognitive understanding.
Turing's article actually gives an example of the type of dialogue the interrogator should try -- it involves a relatively high-level debate about a Shakespearean sonnet. The interrogator questions the AI about the meaning of the sonnet and tries to identify whether the AI can evaluate the interrogator's suggestions on substituting new words or phrases into the poem. The AI is supposed to detect various types of errors requiring considerable fluency in English and creativity -- like recognizing that a suggested change in the poem wouldn't fit the meter, or ir wouldn't be idiomatic English, or the meaning would make an inappropriate metaphor in the context of the poem.
THAT'S the sort of "intelligence" Turing was envisioning. The "interrogator" would have these complex discussions with both the AI and the human, and then render a verdict.
Now, compare that to the situation in TFS where the claim is that the Turing test was "passed" by a chatbot fooling people. That's crap. The chatbot in question, as parent noted, was not even fluent in the language of the interrogator, it was deliberately evasive and nonresponsive (instead of Turing's example of AI's and humans having willing debates with the interrogator), there was no human to compare the chatbot to, the interrogators were apparently not asking probing questions to determine the nature of the "intelligence" (and it's not even clear whether the interrogators knew what their role was, the nature of the test, whether they might be chatting with AI, etc.).
Thus, Turing's test -- as originally described -- was nowhere close to "passed." Today's chatbots can't even carry on a normal small-talk discussion for 30 seconds with a probing interrogator without sounding stupid, evasive, non-responsive, mentally ill, and/or making incredibly ridiculous errors in common idiomatic English.
In contrast, Turing was predicting that interrogators would have to be debating artistic substitutions of idiomatic and metaphorical English usage in Shakespeare's sonnets to differentiate a computer from a real (presumably quite intelligent) human by the year 2000. In effect, Turing seemed to assume that he would talk to the AI in the way he might debate things with a rather intelligent peer or colleague.
Turing was wrong about his predictions. But that doesn't mean his test is invalid -- to the contrary, his standard was so ridiculously high that we are nowhere close to having AI that could pass it.
Apologies -- I read your statement more broadly than you intended it. I agree that raising your actual intelligence is actually hard, and the "IQ test" things given in interviews are often somewhat crappy. But I also think there's a problem in using the modern SAT, since there is so much coaching these days and the test has become easier to coach.
Which, though still flawed, are a vastly better way of measuring ability to reason than IQ tests and more difficult to game.
Raising your IQ is easy - just do a lot of IQ tests as practice. Raising your actual intelligence is a lot harder.
Huh? The exact opposite is true. There's a reason why we have a vast industry devoted to coaching kids on the SAT -- it's a very easy test to coach, and there are ridiculous numbers of practice tests out there.
On the other hand, there are a number of different IQ tests, with very different forms and types of activities (from "culture-free" abstract tests like Raven's progressive matrices to stuff that looks like old SAT tests with a lot of abstract verbal things like analogies and antonyms and such).
The SAT used to be more like an IQ test, and until the past few decades was designed to be a proxy for IQ. But beginning in the 1980s, the SAT has been under pressure to move toward learned skills instead of abstract reasoning... more basic definition-like exercises for memorized vocab and fewer abstract exercises like analogies and antonyms to test nuanced understanding of meaning and creative connections, more basic algebra skills and fewer abstract reasoning exercises like the old quantitative comparison questions or pattern recognition.
Real IQ tests aren't like most of the stupid things you find on the internet where everybody scores 150 and is a genius, so they can get you to buy some stupid other crap info or materials. They take a variety of forms and are pretty hard to "study" for, unlike SATs.
It doesn't matter in the case of the TSA, since the other requirements of a valid search aren't met (specific place, person, and things to be searched and/or seized).
And even so, there is no way you can read the fourth amendment and the justifications behind it that the Founders who drafted it used to explain it and then conclude that they meant to allow "probable cause" to apply to every single person and thing going on a plane... and even if we could justify it initially, empirically it quickly fails: "probable" means more than just "possible" -- it means likely. Given that something greater than 99% of airport searches fail to produce items which would result in arrest or charges, it's clear that the cause is NOT "probable."
Just because some terms can have vague boundaries doesn't mean that anything goes. The description of unreasonable searches is unusually explicit compared to the rest of the Constitution.
What is the literal, non-interpreted meaning of "unusual punishment" or "unreasonable search"?
Well, "unusual punishment" is more complicated, but an unreasonable search is explicitly defined in the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty clear to me: probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, and a specific description of the place to be searched, along with the person and things it applies to.
The Founders wanted to be very explicit in this case to exclude the generic "general warrants" that the British had used as tools of oppression, so they required cause and detailed instructions for the target of the warrant.
Now that you've read that, see how much "interpretation" it takes to distort that into allowing government agents to do an invasive search of every single person and every single thing that might go on a plane, with no evidence of wrong-doing or probable cause. Before 9/11, airport security got away with it because (1) it wasn't government agents, but airlines/airports doing the searching, (2) you consented to this search by a private airport security as a condition of doing business, and (3) the search was a minimal "procedural search" where you walked through a metal detector -- they'd need probable cause or sufficient suspicion to search you further or detain you. Nowadays we don't even pretend to adhere to the Constitutional text.
There's a very simple explanation: there just aren't that many terrorists with both the knowledge and initiative to carry out such attacks. If your idea was feasible for terrorists, so would attacks on any number of public places with loads of people -- shopping malls, major city squares, subways, buses, etc. Places with REAL terrorist problems (e.g. some places in the Middle East) see these sorts of attacks on public places.
The fact that such attacks don't happen in the U.S. is pretty strong evidence that the terrorist threat is likely nowhere as big as the TSA (and others) would have us believe.
The deceit isn't in saying how the contraband was actually discovered/acquired, but in what the impetus was for using that (perfectly legal) method in the first place. That part is the "parallel construction."
Yep, and that's precisely my point. This thread started about a police officer doing something illegal to justify a search. That could have happened in a parallel construction case, or it could have happened in some normal case where a cop needed more "evidence" for a search and manufactured it. My original response was to someone who claimed that it was "called parallel construction" when there was nothing in the anecdote to suggest that parallel construction was actually taking place.
And by the way, I think almost all parallel construction should also be illegal. I also know that fabricating evidence definitely is already illegal. But none of this means that a cop observed fabricating evidence for probable cause is NECESSARILY participating in a parallel construction case... so I'm still waiting to hear about how I'm "misinformed" and the original person I responded to was correct....
Actually, GP was correct, and you seem to be misinformed.
How so?
The notion of parallel construction originated in protecting CIs, and has been used for that purpose for decades. Extending it to cover illegal NSA wiretaps was a more recent development.
I know this, and I don't see how anything I said disagrees with this. The point is the construction of an alternative chain of evidence to avoid revealing a source, but the whole point is that the evidence chain needs to appear legitimate. In the case in question, an officer instead clearly fabricated evidence, instead of actually gathering an alternative set of legitimate evidence.
While this may in fact be part of a "parallel construction" case (an ILLEGAL one), GGGP's original story could just be an example of an officer fabricating evidence to, say, enhance an otherwise legit investigation without necessarily any hidden source. For example, maybe police received a tip about the location, but a judge wouldn't offer a warrant on only that evidence... so this guy goes out and gets "more evidence." That does NOT make it parallel construction -- it's just an example of fabricating evidence.
That's called 'parallel construction' - the practice of fakeing a source in order to conceal the real source. It's used to protect informants by allowing for plausable deniability, giving the appearance that the police stumbled upon a crime by other means or sheer luck.
No, what GP described is NOT the potentially legal version of "parallel construction." Parallel construction, done properly, is supposed to involve the construction of a legitimate alternative chain of evidence, where the original chain of evidence came from a questionably legal information source (e.g. NSA wiretap, improper search) or a source that can't be exposed for some reason.
The way this is supposed to work is that all the legally obtained evidence is given to a separate law enforcement person, who doesn't know the case or have the detailed evidence and who then investigates in a legal fashion. As long as there is no "fruit of the poisoned tree," the investigation can be legit. The recent controversy is often that in new cases, the NSA will convey an "anonymous tip" or something to law enforcement to search a particular place... but after that tip, the police are still expected to act legally.
In GP's case, the officer presumably received a tip that that particular house had drugs. The dog was brought past to provide probable cause (in addition to the tip) for a search. However, in this case the dog didn't sense anything, so the officer chose to commit an overt illegal act and fabricate evidence for the probable cause.
So, while "parallel construction" is on questionable legal ground in many cases, GP's description involves fabrication of evidence... which does not lead to parallel CONSTRUCTION, since no legitimate chain of evidence was legally constructed.
Actually, you know, ya could start by reading your own link:
Watson continued by expressing his support of eugenics -- the science that deals with the improvement of hereditary qualities of the human race -- in that it is the science of having better children.
However, he tempered his support by acknowledging the negative consequences of state efforts in support of eugenics including massive sterilizations at mental institutions in the United States and Sweden and the excesses of the German eugenics programs.
In other words, Watson believes it can be done "correctly," but most people who have tried it have done really bad (and unscientific) crap.
Slashdot Mirror
I might not track where my cash goes, but it's easier to track how much I'm spending. If I yank out $100 on Saturday, and I'm broke on Friday, I know without calculating that I've spent $100 that week. If I charge that amount, I actually have to look at my records to see how much I've spent.
It depends on whether you ever use cash. I rarely do these days, except if it's cash-only, or a cheaper cash price, or a really cheap item at an independent shop (and I choose to save the owner the transaction fee).
Thus, I probably withdraw $100-200 in cash at one time, and that will last me a few months unless I'm forced to make a large cash purchase somewhere. I visit an ATM only a few times per year.
So tracking when my wallet gets empty tells me very little. On the other hand, I can check my net worth every few hours if I want to and instantly see the impact of my recent purchases. Plus, many of my expenses are automatically categorized, so I know precisely where in my budget I'm overspending.
Look -- your system works for you, and I'm sure you find it useful. Others may find another system more useful. I.m not arguing that anyone should do it my way, only that something like my way is becoming more common, and it's changing the way some people view cash vs. credit.
I started browsing it looking for anything juicy. The edits seem to be small, good quality, mostly political edits. They look like interns with an interest in politics, history...
Huh. Competent information provided by people who actually might know something about a topic. Who would've guessed?
This is one of the main issues with Wikipedia -- it depends on knowledgeable editors, but those who know the most about a topic are often barred (or at least discouraged) from sharing their knowledge, which might be branded "original research" or (as in this case) automatically assumed to be suspicious or potentially made only in self-interest.
The problem here is NOT contributions from experts -- I imagine those involved in government might be most qualified to know what needs to be added to articles on it. The problem is the continuing Wikipedia mentality that we don't need qualified (but disinterested) experts to authorize edits on good articles... and instead depend on whichever volunteers are best at wikilawyering.
Don't get me wrong: Wikipedia's amazing growth is largely from its early "open door" policy on edits. But new editors have stopped coming to Wikipedia now, because they are greeted with suspicion and faced with the daunting task of fighting a bureaucracy (mostly of people who are not experts on the topic) to suggest any substantial edit. It's time to move into a more "mature" phase on established articles that have been deemed to be reasonably good quality. (My personal suggestion would be a two-stage edit on established articles, with a "stable version" displayed by default and an "experimental" or whatever version that can still have suggested edits by anyone... and those edits can be added to the stable version after review... but that's just one possible system. That would be a better system to prevent abuse as well as random vandalism, rather than a system that is suspicious of any user from the wrong IP or any new user who might just be a shill.)
And no, the cash is accounted for n withdrawal, it has not "disappeared".
I think you missed my point. Suppose you take $60 out from an ATM to cover miscellaneous cash expenses for a week (or two or whatever). That number is immediately deducted from your balances, so if you look at your checking account to decide what you have to spend for future purposes, the cash is "invisible." Moreover, if you want to track individual cash transactions, you would need to enter and itemize them manually, which frankly most people can't be bothered with unless they do a lot of cash transactions or use large amounts of cash.
So, if you use financial software, cash becomes this untraceable invisible part of your financial total (like credit cards used to be), while every other transaction will automatically update and modify your net worth. I'm NOT saying you CAN'T keep track of cash... I'm saying for people who don't use it very much, it's more difficult, and people don't bother.
The cluster of odd bills in my wallet has become sort of like the "change jar" that people throw their coins into. You don't quite know how much is there, because you don't need it or use it very often,, but it's probably less than $100, and if you ever need some, you can probably dig out a couple quarters as necessary.
That younger people cannot maintain a balance in their heads is no reason to dispose of cash in society for those who can.
I know that this is what TFA is about, but I never argued in my post to get rid of cash. I don't think that would be good at all. My post was simply responding to others who said that cash was easier to track in your wallet -- for previous generations, yeah, today... not so much.
Actually, can you explain to me the benefits of a $1 coin to the user? Fine, it's more durable; I don't really care, I rarely accidentally destroy $1 bills, so that benefit accrues solely to the mint.
Umm, you do realize who pays for dollar bills to be printed, right? The US government, which is funded by your taxes. Dollar bills on average last less than a year in circulation before they are removed and destroyed (due to damage, etc.). Coins last years or even decades in circulation. There's a lot of debate over exactly how much we'd save by switching to coins, but the consensus is it's at least a few hundred million dollars per year. In the giant federal budget, this is barely a drop in the bucket, but it's something...
Wrong, they're made for circulation, they're just making sets with all the presidents, like they did with all the states and Washington DC on quarters.
No, sorry, but you are wrong here. The US mint is sitting on roughly a billion of these coins, minted in previous years, which may never see circulation because there is no demand. Thus, the mint is NOT minting any new coins for the purpose of circulation. Unlike quarters (which circulate and wear out and needed to be replaced, new designs or not), at current demand levels, the mint has enough dollar coins in storage to last for decades.
Thankfully, the mint was able to stop this idiocy of minting new coins just to shove into vaults a few years ago, so now they are only producing new coins to sell as uncirculated coins for collectors (which they can actually make some money off of). Sure, the new coins CAN be put in circulation, but their primary purpose is to be sold for premium prices to collectors.
Think that doesn't come out of your pocket in the end through higher prices?
Of course it does. But there's not much I as an individual can do about it. So, actually this is an INCENTIVE for consumers to use credit cards, since at least with my card I can get a percentage back in whatever form of rewards (whereas cash only customers will just lose all of it). The only place where I have an incentive to pay cash is when merchants charge different prices for cash vs. credit, and there I generally would pay cash. (Of course, this assumes you never carry a balance on your card... and why would you?)
Exactly true. Market research shows people spend more if they are using a CC. Part of the psychology is of course that cash you are carrying around is generally a more limited asset than your CC balance limit.
While that's true, it's beginning to change, particularly for many younger people. I've personally always found cash easier to spend, because it wouldn't be in my pocket if it weren't available. Credit cards, though? I need to think about my bank account balances and charges for the month before using those. But I agree that most people aren't that careful.
However, the big game changer for younger folks is financial tracking software -- so now you can see instant balances changing whenever you charge or debit. With financial tracking software, the CASH becomes the "funny money," because it isn't tracked automatically.
That means that whatever money is in my wallet has already disappeared from my "accounting software," so it's basically already spent, as far as I'm concerned. I've talked to many people who feel the same way now... cash is now the "free money to spend" while credit transactions see an immediate visceral impact as you look at your moving balance.
The real problem here is not Amazon or books or even Google, it's the French mindset that things should never change, that the old ways are always the best ways.
I'm NOT saying the French are right here, but sometimes greater efficiency should not be the only goal, and sometimes it doesn't really result in "progress."
Fetishing bookshops doesn't have any emotional appeal to me - they're just buildings stacked with a small and limited selection of reading materials, which inefficiently deploy land and people.
As someone who has lived for a time in Europe (various times in France, Germany, and Italy), I can firmly state that I'd take their small food markets and shops over the U.S. any day, "just buildings stacked with a small and limited selection of food options, which inefficiently deploy land and people" to often local small farms and food productions.
Despite all of the efficiency gains of big agriculture in the U.S., and the apparent variety at your local supermarket, you mostly end up dining on processed crap and corn-derived junk. You can argue that that is the choice of Americans, but most Americans don't have an easy way to get access to the quality of food that they could have in Europe. And I'm not talking about questionable claims about "natural organic" BS -- I'm talking about simple plain ingredients and real food that just plain tastes better.
Now -- you can certainly argue that local bookshops don't provide some equivalent function, so they don't deserve regulatory preservation. But I'd say in certain senses, the French sensibility that you deplore has helped them maintain better stuff in some areas, even if it's less efficient.
Any modern quartz-controlled watch that costs more than $10 is a status symbol and nothing more.
I don't know about that. My Citizen WR-100 is a very modest watch. My wife bought it for me about 8 years ago. $250.
Agreed. I bought one of the Citizen watches that was near the bottom of the line, got it on sale for about $80 maybe 5-6 years ago. Before that, I used to buy the $10-20 watch from Target or Walmart or whatever, and it would last 1-3 years before the battery would die. So then I could either go through the annoyance of taking the watch apart and finding the correct random battery (usually at least a few dollars unless you'd buy them in bulk) or I could spend $10-20 on a new watch. I'd do the latter.
After 3 or 4 disposable watches, I decided to buy the Citizen... it has a simple style that I like (though slightly nicer than most of the cheap watches) and no more buying a new crappy watch every year or two.
In a few years, the watch will have paid for itself... it already has in convenience (since twice before I had a watch battery die suddenly and had to go to a store at an inconvenient time and get whatever was available).
Some features are worth a few bucks; it's not just status.
I lived in NYC on and off for most of a decade and I can assure you that as a pedestrian the act of stepping into the street was a game of roulette and that yellow cabs were the greatest cause of un-safe living.
This is a common sentiment, but it has been proven to be a myth. People just think cabs are disproportionately responsible for pedestrian injuries because it's easy to lump them into a group, but you're actually roughly 6 times more likely to be seriously injured or killed in New York City by private cars. (Note that NYC has well over 100 pedestrian fatalities per year.) For more details, see here:
Throughout the city, 79 percent of the serious crashes involved private passenger cars; 13 percent involved taxis or livery cabs; 4 percent involved trucks; and 3 percent involved buses.
The story notes that at certain times of day, taxis can make up almost 50% of traffic on the streets downtown, so these numbers may imply that cabs are much safer overall than passenger cars.
The newspapers and television stations of yesteryear were just as interested in selling ads as today's are.
This is the most important point. Everyone on Slashdot always chimes in and says things like "You're not really Facebook's customer -- the companies who want your information and want to run ads are," but people seem to forget that this has been true for a lot of things for a LONG time.
The "news" has rarely been about conveying unbiased facts -- it's about selling a product. And before ad revenue was so important, most newspapers were even more sensationalist, since they depended solely on news boys pitching crazy stories that would attract an audience.
The primary goal of most news sources is to make things as sensationalist as possible without alienating their sponsors or their audience... and that's always been the goal, even centuries ago. People turn their heads to watch car wrecks and freaks -- the vast majority of people don't want "unbiased coverage," and even those who say they do don't generally want to hear things that disagree with their worldview.
I think the biggest difference is the level of honesty. Sean Hannity will TELL you that he's a conservative. Peter Jennings and Dan Rather pretended to be objective.
This is true, but I wouldn't quite say that nothing has changed in terms of the tone of news. We did go through a somewhat less sensationalist era for televised news in the early decades of television, but that was an aberration in the history of journalism. But of course you're right: there still were biases, even if they were less overt.
How about instead of trying to spin it one way or the other, try publishing the facts.
As another poster already said, there are billions of "facts" generated every day. A news organization has to choose to emphasize some or others -- there's certainly enough stuff going on in the world to generate an entirely "positive" newspaper every day or an entirely "negative" one.
No real news entity should be spinning stories, but they obviously do in order to pull in a larger audience, or deliver their agenda (Fox, MSN).
That is the ENTIRE point of most news organizations. Contrary to popular belief, there never was some sort of "golden age" where news sources ever just "reported the news." Newspapers and magazines have always mostly been trying to sell newspapers and magazines -- that means publishing attention-getting headlines. They might not "spin" it in a positive or negative fashion, but they certainly will try to spin it in a way that gets you to buy their product. And, like any product, they'll eventually develop an audience (intentionally or not), and that will lead them to slant things to entertain that audience.
News organizations are businesses, first and foremost. Their main goal is to generate revenue and always has been.
I'm really tired of these crappy stories that I see on local news meant to scare folks, or pull at their heartstrings. They really misguide peoples perceptions of reality.
Ah yes, the perpetual complaint that goes back centuries. You can find Ben Franklin complaining about all the sensationalist crap published at the time... and others from even further into the past.
And before newspapers, there were town gossips who spread rumors about why the town butcher closed his shop inexplicably for one day last week, or the weird lady who lives down the street and never talks to anyone and how she must be a witch, or the evil people who live beyond the mountains and eat babies.
Ever ready fairy tales -- not the sanitized versions generated by Disney, but the original ones? It was mostly horrific blood and gore and evil deeds... if people don't have enough sensational entertainment from the stuff happening around them, they make it up.
Believe me, I wish news sources were better too, but that's not their point, and it never has been dating back to the dawn of civilization. The closest we can get to a "neutral" news source would be to turn something into a non-profit and remove a business motive. But even then, if you look at something like NPR (which is better than most), you'll find it tends to run stories and choose reporting styles that slant toward its customer base, which tends to lean liberal (for U.S. politics).
Unfortunately, most people just want the sensationalist news. The stuff you want is NEVER going to be what your local news station will run, because that just is never going to generate much revenue.
All that matters is how they arose and how they're actually practiced.
If that's true, then your argument so far has been ill-informed. Historically, what Galileo and Newton and other "scientists" in the 17th-century called their work was not "science" but rather "natural philosophy." And the reason they called it that was because it came out of a long philosophical tradition, which was in the process of evolving under the work of a number of scientist-philosophers like Mersenne, Descartes, etc. who was seen at the time as leading the real intellectual "revolution." (The "scientific revolution" was something basically made up in the 1800s and projected back on the 1600s -- at the time, what Galileo, Newton, et al. were seen as doing was participating in a larger intellectual revolution in "philosophy.")
As for how things are practiced, well there are in fact scholars who work on philosophy of science, and some of their ideas have been influential in changing the way scientists conceive of their methodologies, even in the past century. People around here tend to like Popper, but there were people before him, and generations after him (Kuhn, Lakatos, etc.). The way we teach the "scientific method" in grade school is essentially the distillation of a particular philosophical conception of science developed in the 1800s, perhaps modified by some of the stuff like Popper that was formulated in the first half of the 20th century.
I'm not trying to overstate the influence of philosophy here, but modern science actually did develop out of a branch of philosophy. And it's only in the past 50 years or so that practicing scientists stopped having a detailed acquaintance with ongoing philosophical debates about scientific methodologies.
I'm not the one arguing for any authority over the other. I'm pointing out the attitude of some philosophers towards science as a junior form of philosophy when it isn't and probably never was.
Science isn't a "junior form of philosophy," and I do think you are right to criticize people who have said so. But science does have particular philosophical assumptions at its core, which were historically developed often by people with more than a passing familiarity with philosophical debates. Modern philosophy is still concerned with underlying assumptions of science that are largely unnoticed by practicing scientists who don't necessarily reflect on problematic elements of their methodology. This is not a criticism of science nor an assertion that it is subservient to anything -- it's just pointing out a different perspective... not unlike the mathematicians who are obsessed with the foundations of analysis and the underlying basis of number systems, which gets into the realm of philosophy. Most of those issues have little bearing on the everyday work of applied mathematicians, but there is a possibility that some research into these assumptions could lead people down a new path.
When humans were learning how to farm, they were doing proto-scientific research and they probably couldn't care less about the "big questions" or the "nature of things".
Are you serious? Of course they cared about the big questions. That's why they created gods and goddesses and personified nature to create explanations for all the "big questions" happening around them. Religion was the first answer.
Philosophy was the first step in introducing self-reflection, rationality, and logical consistency to the investigation of those questions.
The process of observation and working out what is happening is not in itself philosophy. It's something every human does since birth.
Naive empiricism is not the same as philosophy nor science. There's a self-reflective attitude required to begin asking questions about the methodology of observation that led to both philosophical revolutions and ultimately to the scientific revolution (which, depend
Turing was wrong about his predictions. But that doesn't mean his test is invalid
Imho it is.
Suppose we manage to create a strong AI. It's fully conscious, fully aware, but for some quirk we cannot understand, it's 100% honest.
Such an AI would never pass the Turing test, because it would never try to pass off as human
That sounds like a legit point at first, but think about it for a sec. Programming a computer to lie and be evasive about its nature is easy, and many chatbots can already do that. Asking a strong AI "are you a computer?" or "what did you have for breakfast?" would not be useful for evaluating intelligence. Getting the AI to debate an intellectual topic, on the other hand, will be less likely to require deception but would be a better measure of intelligence. That's another fundamental point people miss: The point of the Turing test was to imitate human INTELLIGENCE, NOT to pretend to be a physical human.
A knowledgeable interrogator trying to evaluate intelligence would thus likely be more interested in asking intellectual questions, rather than queries just designed to test whether the computer can make up some nonsense about itself.
I doubt most humans could pass that test either.
Exactly. That's part of my point. A lot of people are acting like the test was "passed" by an AI pretending to be a Ukranian teenager conversing in his non-native language and acting like an evasive weirdo. Turing's standard for "intelligence" was obviously much higher. It sounds like his AI would probably be pitted against an adult human from the top 5-10% of intelligence in his test.
And isn't that a potential standard for evaluating when true AI has arrived? No one would have cared about Deep Blue or Watson if the computer wasn't at least better than most of humans in specific areas. If and when true AI arrives, it will likely have been endowed with superior access to facts, so the question is whether the AI will demonstrate understanding, i.e. ability to put those facts together and express them in a nuanced natural language way. (The point wasn't specific knowledge about sonnets, it was getting the AI to express a detailed understanding of nuanced language.) Giving an AI a bunch of facts about sonnets is easy; getting it to debate creative artistic choices in the way that an intelligent human who knows about sonnets might is a LOT harder.
It was passed as defined
The Turing Test was not passed, and the only people who claim it was are ignorant reporters looking for an easy story with a catchy headline
Indeed. There's a lot of misinformation out there about what Turing originally specified. The test is NOT simply "Can a computer have a reasonable conversation with an unsuspecting human so that the human will not figure out that the computer is not human?" By that standard, ELIZA passed the Turing test many decades ago.
The test also doesn't have a some sort of magical "fool 30%" threshold -- Turing simply speculated that by the year 2000, AI would have progressed enough that it could fool 30% of "interrogators" (more on that term below). The 30% is NOT a threshold for passing the test -- it was just a statement by Turing about how often AI would pass the test by the year 2000.
So what was the test?
The test involves three entities: an "interrogator," a computer, and a normal human responder. The interrogator is assumed to be well-educated and familiar with the nature of the test. The interrogator has five minutes to question both the computer and the normal human in order to determine which is the actual human. The interrogator is assumed to bring an intelligent skepticism to the test -- the standard is not just trying to have a normal conversation, but instead the interrogator would actively probe the intelligence of the AI and the human, designing queries which would find even small flaws or inconsistencies that would suggest the lack of complex cognitive understanding.
Turing's article actually gives an example of the type of dialogue the interrogator should try -- it involves a relatively high-level debate about a Shakespearean sonnet. The interrogator questions the AI about the meaning of the sonnet and tries to identify whether the AI can evaluate the interrogator's suggestions on substituting new words or phrases into the poem. The AI is supposed to detect various types of errors requiring considerable fluency in English and creativity -- like recognizing that a suggested change in the poem wouldn't fit the meter, or ir wouldn't be idiomatic English, or the meaning would make an inappropriate metaphor in the context of the poem.
THAT'S the sort of "intelligence" Turing was envisioning. The "interrogator" would have these complex discussions with both the AI and the human, and then render a verdict.
Now, compare that to the situation in TFS where the claim is that the Turing test was "passed" by a chatbot fooling people. That's crap. The chatbot in question, as parent noted, was not even fluent in the language of the interrogator, it was deliberately evasive and nonresponsive (instead of Turing's example of AI's and humans having willing debates with the interrogator), there was no human to compare the chatbot to, the interrogators were apparently not asking probing questions to determine the nature of the "intelligence" (and it's not even clear whether the interrogators knew what their role was, the nature of the test, whether they might be chatting with AI, etc.).
Thus, Turing's test -- as originally described -- was nowhere close to "passed." Today's chatbots can't even carry on a normal small-talk discussion for 30 seconds with a probing interrogator without sounding stupid, evasive, non-responsive, mentally ill, and/or making incredibly ridiculous errors in common idiomatic English.
In contrast, Turing was predicting that interrogators would have to be debating artistic substitutions of idiomatic and metaphorical English usage in Shakespeare's sonnets to differentiate a computer from a real (presumably quite intelligent) human by the year 2000. In effect, Turing seemed to assume that he would talk to the AI in the way he might debate things with a rather intelligent peer or colleague.
Turing was wrong about his predictions. But that doesn't mean his test is invalid -- to the contrary, his standard was so ridiculously high that we are nowhere close to having AI that could pass it.
Apologies -- I read your statement more broadly than you intended it. I agree that raising your actual intelligence is actually hard, and the "IQ test" things given in interviews are often somewhat crappy. But I also think there's a problem in using the modern SAT, since there is so much coaching these days and the test has become easier to coach.
and he has to use the proxy of SAT scores
Which, though still flawed, are a vastly better way of measuring ability to reason than IQ tests and more difficult to game.
Raising your IQ is easy - just do a lot of IQ tests as practice. Raising your actual intelligence is a lot harder.
Huh? The exact opposite is true. There's a reason why we have a vast industry devoted to coaching kids on the SAT -- it's a very easy test to coach, and there are ridiculous numbers of practice tests out there.
On the other hand, there are a number of different IQ tests, with very different forms and types of activities (from "culture-free" abstract tests like Raven's progressive matrices to stuff that looks like old SAT tests with a lot of abstract verbal things like analogies and antonyms and such).
The SAT used to be more like an IQ test, and until the past few decades was designed to be a proxy for IQ. But beginning in the 1980s, the SAT has been under pressure to move toward learned skills instead of abstract reasoning... more basic definition-like exercises for memorized vocab and fewer abstract exercises like analogies and antonyms to test nuanced understanding of meaning and creative connections, more basic algebra skills and fewer abstract reasoning exercises like the old quantitative comparison questions or pattern recognition.
Real IQ tests aren't like most of the stupid things you find on the internet where everybody scores 150 and is a genius, so they can get you to buy some stupid other crap info or materials. They take a variety of forms and are pretty hard to "study" for, unlike SATs.
It doesn't matter in the case of the TSA, since the other requirements of a valid search aren't met (specific place, person, and things to be searched and/or seized).
And even so, there is no way you can read the fourth amendment and the justifications behind it that the Founders who drafted it used to explain it and then conclude that they meant to allow "probable cause" to apply to every single person and thing going on a plane... and even if we could justify it initially, empirically it quickly fails: "probable" means more than just "possible" -- it means likely. Given that something greater than 99% of airport searches fail to produce items which would result in arrest or charges, it's clear that the cause is NOT "probable."
Just because some terms can have vague boundaries doesn't mean that anything goes. The description of unreasonable searches is unusually explicit compared to the rest of the Constitution.
What is the literal, non-interpreted meaning of "unusual punishment" or "unreasonable search"?
Well, "unusual punishment" is more complicated, but an unreasonable search is explicitly defined in the Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty clear to me: probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, and a specific description of the place to be searched, along with the person and things it applies to.
The Founders wanted to be very explicit in this case to exclude the generic "general warrants" that the British had used as tools of oppression, so they required cause and detailed instructions for the target of the warrant.
Now that you've read that, see how much "interpretation" it takes to distort that into allowing government agents to do an invasive search of every single person and every single thing that might go on a plane, with no evidence of wrong-doing or probable cause. Before 9/11, airport security got away with it because (1) it wasn't government agents, but airlines/airports doing the searching, (2) you consented to this search by a private airport security as a condition of doing business, and (3) the search was a minimal "procedural search" where you walked through a metal detector -- they'd need probable cause or sufficient suspicion to search you further or detain you. Nowadays we don't even pretend to adhere to the Constitutional text.
I've wondered why they haven't done that before.
There's a very simple explanation: there just aren't that many terrorists with both the knowledge and initiative to carry out such attacks. If your idea was feasible for terrorists, so would attacks on any number of public places with loads of people -- shopping malls, major city squares, subways, buses, etc. Places with REAL terrorist problems (e.g. some places in the Middle East) see these sorts of attacks on public places.
The fact that such attacks don't happen in the U.S. is pretty strong evidence that the terrorist threat is likely nowhere as big as the TSA (and others) would have us believe.
The deceit isn't in saying how the contraband was actually discovered/acquired, but in what the impetus was for using that (perfectly legal) method in the first place. That part is the "parallel construction."
Yep, and that's precisely my point. This thread started about a police officer doing something illegal to justify a search. That could have happened in a parallel construction case, or it could have happened in some normal case where a cop needed more "evidence" for a search and manufactured it. My original response was to someone who claimed that it was "called parallel construction" when there was nothing in the anecdote to suggest that parallel construction was actually taking place.
And by the way, I think almost all parallel construction should also be illegal. I also know that fabricating evidence definitely is already illegal. But none of this means that a cop observed fabricating evidence for probable cause is NECESSARILY participating in a parallel construction case... so I'm still waiting to hear about how I'm "misinformed" and the original person I responded to was correct....
Actually, GP was correct, and you seem to be misinformed.
How so?
The notion of parallel construction originated in protecting CIs, and has been used for that purpose for decades. Extending it to cover illegal NSA wiretaps was a more recent development.
I know this, and I don't see how anything I said disagrees with this. The point is the construction of an alternative chain of evidence to avoid revealing a source, but the whole point is that the evidence chain needs to appear legitimate. In the case in question, an officer instead clearly fabricated evidence, instead of actually gathering an alternative set of legitimate evidence.
While this may in fact be part of a "parallel construction" case (an ILLEGAL one), GGGP's original story could just be an example of an officer fabricating evidence to, say, enhance an otherwise legit investigation without necessarily any hidden source. For example, maybe police received a tip about the location, but a judge wouldn't offer a warrant on only that evidence... so this guy goes out and gets "more evidence." That does NOT make it parallel construction -- it's just an example of fabricating evidence.
That's called 'parallel construction' - the practice of fakeing a source in order to conceal the real source. It's used to protect informants by allowing for plausable deniability, giving the appearance that the police stumbled upon a crime by other means or sheer luck.
No, what GP described is NOT the potentially legal version of "parallel construction." Parallel construction, done properly, is supposed to involve the construction of a legitimate alternative chain of evidence, where the original chain of evidence came from a questionably legal information source (e.g. NSA wiretap, improper search) or a source that can't be exposed for some reason.
The way this is supposed to work is that all the legally obtained evidence is given to a separate law enforcement person, who doesn't know the case or have the detailed evidence and who then investigates in a legal fashion. As long as there is no "fruit of the poisoned tree," the investigation can be legit. The recent controversy is often that in new cases, the NSA will convey an "anonymous tip" or something to law enforcement to search a particular place... but after that tip, the police are still expected to act legally.
In GP's case, the officer presumably received a tip that that particular house had drugs. The dog was brought past to provide probable cause (in addition to the tip) for a search. However, in this case the dog didn't sense anything, so the officer chose to commit an overt illegal act and fabricate evidence for the probable cause.
So, while "parallel construction" is on questionable legal ground in many cases, GP's description involves fabrication of evidence... which does not lead to parallel CONSTRUCTION, since no legitimate chain of evidence was legally constructed.
Watson continued by expressing his support of eugenics -- the science that deals with the improvement of hereditary qualities of the human race -- in that it is the science of having better children.
However, he tempered his support by acknowledging the negative consequences of state efforts in support of eugenics including massive sterilizations at mental institutions in the United States and Sweden and the excesses of the German eugenics programs.
In other words, Watson believes it can be done "correctly," but most people who have tried it have done really bad (and unscientific) crap.