I agree with this, but I'm not sure making information harder to get is the right approach here. The government, especially the police and the criminal justice system, LOVES to make information hard to get. Even when you have the right to the information and there's even an office/process to get it, they have all kinds of gimmicks to essentially deny access.
I think a better approach might be:
1) Make it illegal to sell arrest information -- it can only be obtained from the government, and the government logs all access to the data
2) Make it a civil violation to use arrest information alone to deny employment, housing or any other public accommodation -- $25,000 per violation ought to be enough of a penalty to both scare HR and other managers away, and enough to motivate lawyers to take these cases. Access of arrest data logged to a company or employees IP addresses is prima facie evidence of a violation, which will motivate IT to just block access outright.
That being so,street-smart economists say what the rich and powerful like to hear - and get lucrative professorships, book contracts, government jobs, sponsorship, etc.
I'm not sure all of economics is untestable, but it's occasionally hard not to see some aspects of it as a variation on confirmation bias, justifying the outcomes of the economic elite through a quasi-scientific basis.
Surely the economists who create theories and rationales which justify capitalists' economic behaviors wind up with more and better employment opportunities than those who would criticize them. It also doesn't help that economists like to reflexively claim a non-ideological/non-judgemental position on a lot of issues. If something like high-frequency trading, globalism, etc, leads to greater profits it's seen as a good economic outcome even when it causes huge externalities.
Shipping jobs to China has always found legions of economists who support the practice for various reasons and who hand-wave side effects like large-scale regional unemployment as something to be cured with "job training in new industries".
I think there is a lot of economics that can be reasonably modeled and explained through mathematics, but it's not a completely scientific endeavor and seems willing to engage in willing ignorance of some/many outcomes if something like profit/wealth increases.
Reduced social welfare costs should result in less government growth and reduced or at least not increasing levels of taxation.
Lower or stable payroll taxes means reduced salary demands and higher profits?
I'm not saying this isn't a flawed argument (government reducing taxes, etc) but from an economics standpoint, reducing social welfare externalities results in less drag and deadweight losses.
There are probably other arguments, like turning impoverished people into Google customers which would be an expansionary benefit to shareholders.
Taubes uses a couple of well-studied populations of manual laborers (one group I think includes oil field workers) who have high levels of obesity in trying to disassociate physical activity from weight gain. Taubes primary thesis is that excessive carbohydrate consumption leads to obesity.
Since most physical labor is done by low-income people and carbohydrate foods are cheaper than meats and high-fat/protein sources, it seems to be pretty easy to connect the dots. Being poor leads to a diet which contributes to obesity and all its health problems and physical activity doesn't help.
If Taubes' carbohydrate/obesity thesis is right, then being poor and working hard might make health worse because it may promote a greater appetite which gets satisfied with food that makes obesity worse, not better.
Taubes' has other criticisms and examples of high levels of physical activity that doesn't involve starvation not really changing obesity, too, so he'd probably consider this a minor point or complicated by other factors -- like poor people who have to do hard work eating more carbs not out of hunger (since their labor doesn't burn that many calories) but out of boredom or frustration of a life filled with hard work and poverty.
There are probably examples of hard work/lean populations but these may be complicated by food scarcity. Starving a hard working population isn't really valuable to either the labor effort or method of weight loss that will gain many adherents.
The problem with homelessness is that there's a lot of different reasons for being homeless, some of which involve choice by the homeless person, including choices most people would consider irrational or self-destructive.
I kind of doubt most homeless people are really ordinary people on a string of bad luck who can't find housing due to prices. I'm sure that's some subset of the homeless, but not the majority.
High real estate prices encourage development of underutilized real estate. Low or even stable real estate prices allows for some level of persistent vacancy rates, forcing landlords into economic compromises of cheap rents, tolerating some level of rent non-payment (10 months rent on an empty apartment beats 0 months rent), etc. This helps the involuntary homeless and probably some degree the voluntary homeless to the extent that they will choose to live in a fixed location.
So high real estate prices contributes but it doesn't completely explain the homelessness phenomenon, especially when you get into more voluntary homelessness.
My sense is that where cities run into problems are tolerating homeless "camps" and other aggregations of homeless people in a single location. Cities should probably be more aggressive about breaking these up, even if they can't offer alternatives. Unless the majority of homeless people are beyond rationality (and some are due to mental illness or drug use), they will find ways to leave the area if homelessness in one spot becomes too difficult.
The people that have crunched the numbers insist that paper $1s and $5s are cheaper long-run than coins.
I find it hard to believe too, but supposedly a lot of the cost advantage comes in the gimmick of seignorage, where the paper currency is sold at face value to the Fed, making it quite profitable to actually print paper currency. The seignorage profit is less on coins apparently.
I think there's something about people socking away more coins than notes, which adds to the cost of coins.
What seems weird is that so many other currencies have dropped their small denomination notes for coins; you would think they would have similar kinds of costs and would have kept paper, too.
Do any of the nominally diesel vehicles get setup to run on jet fuel? I would think that might be kind of convenient and plausible considering how close jet fuel is to diesel.
True or not, overstated or not, you'd think that Assange would be of a mind to be as deferential as humanly possible to the the embassy, located in a country desperate to nab him, which was sheltering him.
Do they not plug airplanes into "shore" power when parked at the gate? I know some might have a small turbine generator for this, but I'd wager it's not practical to run that all the time at the gate.
You can go to any airport and see a tiny tug vehicle moving a giant airplane around.
To be honest, I often wonder why those tugs didn't go electric years ago, like giant golf carts or something. Traction motors can deliver torque at extremely low RPM, they don't need any range and can be plugged in easily. I'd wager the tugs they use now have diesel engines that will run off jet fuel which is abundant at an airport.
These never seem to go anywhere. There's never enough evidence to convict any significant decision maker of a crime, especially when they have enough resources for counsel that is able to obfuscate sufficiently.
At best you see some kind of vague conspiracy charge -- which really, anyone could be charged with -- or real bullshit stuff, like mid-level flunkies who get convicted of something like "lying to the FBI", which seems to make a serious felony out of either honest people's inadvertent "lies by omission" or the natural reaction people have to the intimidation of being questioned by a serious law enforcement organization.
So a handful of people might wind up scapegoats on technicality charges since prosecutors don't like failure publicity. No film at 11, you can find this story buried on the back of the sports section.
This is about the major for-profit sports industry (NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, NCAA) getting pissed because someone else is making a profit off their sports they can't get a piece of. Every sports book will be "using" their IP (team names, player names) to make money and they won't get a dime of it.
The leagues also worry about it harming the "integrity" of their sport. They need the public convinced that the outcomes are purely driven by competition and that there's no manipulation driving outcomes. I think this is *mostly* true now, but all these leagues are constantly manipulating rules and given the amount of money involved in media deals, etc, it's hard to know at what point "fine tuning" of the sport isn't driven by some kind of for-profit agenda on someone's part.
It will really threaten the NCAA, which doesn't pay its players. The pro leagues can at least pay their players enough money that the stakes are high enough to dissuade most of them from compromising outcomes. The NCAA has to be terrified that its free labor force won't give in to the temptation to throw games and make a buck on the side.
I don't care for gambling at all, but the best part of this deal is that it chips away at the special status the sports leagues that not only want to be exempted from most of the laws of capitalism, they want the public to underwrite their leagues at the same time.
Then why do car salesman at luxury dealerships treat me like such an asshole?
And I'm not even talking about Bentley-scale luxury, either. They fucking size you up in a heartbeat and give you the brush off if you just walk in.
Some of this may be that people with REAL money don't waste time walking into the dealership, if they handle it themselves they probably call the dealership and talk to sales person, and it's something like:
"Yeah, I'm Preston Biggs, I live in the Luxury Hills community. I want to buy a new Mercedes, but want to test drive the E63 and the S65. I'm home Tuesday afternoon, can you bring the cars by? I will have a check for you after I make a choice and you can leave a loaner with me until you can deliver the new one with my specs."
Walk-ins at a high-end dealership (that doesn't sell shitty starter models) are fantasy tire-kickers for the most part and I think they just want to steer them out as painlessly as possible.
And an other question: Isn't AI an indirect or even direct product of biology?
It's kind of indirect. I suspect that any emergent AI will likely be the byproduct of some kind of algorithm which provides a method of evaluating the effectiveness of various other machine learning algorithms on specific problems.
Even though those specific algorithms may have been human products originally, the "work product" becomes a byproduct of the machine evaluating the effectiveness of which machine learning algorithm provides the best answer.
People who understand the base algorithm may be able to deduce some outcomes because they understand the base abilities. But it will likely also produce novel and unpredictable outcomes based on the ability to analyze more data, faster, via a greater number of analytical methods than a non-machine intelligence, and generally free out many outcome biases.
The outcomes may appear logical and somewhat predictable based on common inputs, but that doesn't necessarily mean understanding the combination of learning outputs that produced the outcome. I may predict my friend's behavior in a novel situation similar to another one in which I have observed his behavior, but that doesn't mean I truly understand all the possible decision making that produced that behavior.
Literal cash, as in a suitcase with bundles of $100s?
One of my post-Powerball winning fantasies was to walk into a Bentley dealership in shorts and t-shirt and tell them I wanted a car and was willing to pay cash. When they blew me off or treated me like a problem, pop open my duffle of cash and start burning $10k bundles in their face, and then walk out and climb into a Rolls Royce.
I think this is the right answer. I think the naysayers all assume a self-aware AI has to be HAL9000 or some other recognizable and human-like entity.
I think it will mostly likely be as unrecognizable to us as a copy of "Pravda" would be to a stone-age hunter-gatherer. An unintelligible language comprised of symbols devoid of meaning and comprising concepts so foreign as to be unrecognizable even if some meaning could be derived from the symbols.
Modern humans are as likely to understand self-aware AI as we are to understand an alien from the other side of the galaxy.
Yeah, I left that out. Not sure why I blanked on it, it was just about as outrageous as Dimond.
Interestingly, in both Castille and Dimond shootings the officer involved was a minority. I wonder if there's something to that -- minorities who feel they have something to prove to white officers and are more apt to be more violent as a result.
Personally, if we're going to keep the death penalty, I'd like to see the judge, jury members, and DA draw straws to be on a firing squad.
The means of execution should be a 12 gauge shotgun fired at the base of the skull at point-blank range. This will vaporize the medulla oblongata and terminate heart and lung function and probably eliminate consciousness at the same time.
The judge and the DA should be REQUIRED to view this procedure. I'd leave the jury out of it, they had no choice to participate and their verdict choices are hemmed in by the judge. The DA and the judge are the most closely culpable for bad convictions -- DAs for pursuing the death penalty, faking or hiding evidence, and judges for not sufficiently suppressing bad evidence or tolerating misconduct by prosecutors (the US criminal court system has much too cozy of a relationship between judges and prosecutors, and being a prosecutor should be a bar to becoming a judge).
I'd imagine that even the most hardened judge or prosecutor wouldn't have the stomach for seeing this more than once and only for the most extreme cases.
I don't think the death penalty is always wrong, there are some extremely violent or cruel criminals who are practically beyond redemption, have committed crimes of exceptional cruelty or are so prone to continued violence that the death penalty has practical advantages for public safety. The larger problem isn't killing some subset of convicted violent felons, its the willingness of prosecutors to railroad someone innocent into a conviction and judges for tolerating the misconduct that makes it possible.
Executing felons who kill in prison might even help the prisons become more reform oriented by undermining the power of prison gangs and eliminating the hyper violent prisoners who drive gang violence. A big problem the Feds have had with gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood is that they're already serving life sentences and there's only so much room in solitary confinement and/or SuperMax prisons, so killing another inmate becomes just more years on top of a life sentence. Executing these inmates after committing homicide in prison may not deter other prisoners, but it will reduce their numbers and dilute their power by eliminating the most violent members who tend to control leadership.
There were a couple of recent FLIR videos taken by F/A-18s off the coast of San Diego that were interesting. I'm not saying they were aliens, but they had the kind of aura of respectability, or at least more than your usual MUFON chapter can muster, that might interest a congressman.
Yes, Justine Dimond shot by Officer Mohammed Noor.
While I think that "warrior" training and militarization have encouraged cops to shoot people, I often wonder if cops shooting so many people is a byproduct of the reduction of blunt force by police.
Cops used to all carry nightsticks, and many also carried saps or wore sap gloves and these were their first go-to weapons for dealing with uncooperative or physically violent people. But over time these weapons fell out of favor, and not necessarily for the wrong reasons, either. So cities, departments, etc, reduced the use of these weapons to the point where they almost couldn't be used at all or could only be used under the same circumstances that a firearm could be used.
So when you're only left with a gun, all your problems now look like targets.
But cops still face a lot of people who fight them or physically resist arrest. A lot of them end up rolling around on the ground wrestling, which is a great way to lose your gun (or gain a reason to use your gun).
I think they should bring back blunt force weapons and train the police how to use them. The down side is that since it doesn't involve death or gunshot wounds, more people will end up getting beat senseless. The up side is that the cops will have a use of force tool that doesn't involve a firearm and killing people.
I know the Taser was supposed to be the ideal combination, but it mostly seems like a lot of bad compromises. Ineffective on some people, limited number of "shots" -- maybe when it's a "ray gun" and not a dart-firing gun with wires attached it will be better.
Hardship stories already don't work. I've had two people come to my door with sob stories about a stalled car, trying to get to work, need $20 for gas, new to town, taking my kid to the hospital, etc etc.
I fell for it once 25 years ago when the dude walked into my video store looking for $2 bus fare. When he came in with the same fucking story two weeks later (he must tell it so often he forgets his audience) I knew I had been scammed and threw his ass out.
I told the last two they had 60 seconds to get out off my property and take their panhandling bullshit elsewhere.
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I agree with this, but I'm not sure making information harder to get is the right approach here. The government, especially the police and the criminal justice system, LOVES to make information hard to get. Even when you have the right to the information and there's even an office/process to get it, they have all kinds of gimmicks to essentially deny access.
I think a better approach might be:
1) Make it illegal to sell arrest information -- it can only be obtained from the government, and the government logs all access to the data
2) Make it a civil violation to use arrest information alone to deny employment, housing or any other public accommodation -- $25,000 per violation ought to be enough of a penalty to both scare HR and other managers away, and enough to motivate lawyers to take these cases. Access of arrest data logged to a company or employees IP addresses is prima facie evidence of a violation, which will motivate IT to just block access outright.
That being so,street-smart economists say what the rich and powerful like to hear - and get lucrative professorships, book contracts, government jobs, sponsorship, etc.
I'm not sure all of economics is untestable, but it's occasionally hard not to see some aspects of it as a variation on confirmation bias, justifying the outcomes of the economic elite through a quasi-scientific basis.
Surely the economists who create theories and rationales which justify capitalists' economic behaviors wind up with more and better employment opportunities than those who would criticize them. It also doesn't help that economists like to reflexively claim a non-ideological/non-judgemental position on a lot of issues. If something like high-frequency trading, globalism, etc, leads to greater profits it's seen as a good economic outcome even when it causes huge externalities.
Shipping jobs to China has always found legions of economists who support the practice for various reasons and who hand-wave side effects like large-scale regional unemployment as something to be cured with "job training in new industries".
I think there is a lot of economics that can be reasonably modeled and explained through mathematics, but it's not a completely scientific endeavor and seems willing to engage in willing ignorance of some/many outcomes if something like profit/wealth increases.
Load the plane back to front and the 1st class passengers are pissed and/or ignore it ("because I'm Delta Platinum Elite").
Load it front to back, and most people cheat anyway and the boarding gate people don't really enforce it.
They really should have added a second boarding door and load through two doors, although I guess this doesn't solve nimrods who pick the wrong doors.
Reduced social welfare costs should result in less government growth and reduced or at least not increasing levels of taxation.
Lower or stable payroll taxes means reduced salary demands and higher profits?
I'm not saying this isn't a flawed argument (government reducing taxes, etc) but from an economics standpoint, reducing social welfare externalities results in less drag and deadweight losses.
There are probably other arguments, like turning impoverished people into Google customers which would be an expansionary benefit to shareholders.
Taubes uses a couple of well-studied populations of manual laborers (one group I think includes oil field workers) who have high levels of obesity in trying to disassociate physical activity from weight gain. Taubes primary thesis is that excessive carbohydrate consumption leads to obesity.
Since most physical labor is done by low-income people and carbohydrate foods are cheaper than meats and high-fat/protein sources, it seems to be pretty easy to connect the dots. Being poor leads to a diet which contributes to obesity and all its health problems and physical activity doesn't help.
If Taubes' carbohydrate/obesity thesis is right, then being poor and working hard might make health worse because it may promote a greater appetite which gets satisfied with food that makes obesity worse, not better.
Taubes' has other criticisms and examples of high levels of physical activity that doesn't involve starvation not really changing obesity, too, so he'd probably consider this a minor point or complicated by other factors -- like poor people who have to do hard work eating more carbs not out of hunger (since their labor doesn't burn that many calories) but out of boredom or frustration of a life filled with hard work and poverty.
There are probably examples of hard work/lean populations but these may be complicated by food scarcity. Starving a hard working population isn't really valuable to either the labor effort or method of weight loss that will gain many adherents.
The problem with homelessness is that there's a lot of different reasons for being homeless, some of which involve choice by the homeless person, including choices most people would consider irrational or self-destructive.
I kind of doubt most homeless people are really ordinary people on a string of bad luck who can't find housing due to prices. I'm sure that's some subset of the homeless, but not the majority.
High real estate prices encourage development of underutilized real estate. Low or even stable real estate prices allows for some level of persistent vacancy rates, forcing landlords into economic compromises of cheap rents, tolerating some level of rent non-payment (10 months rent on an empty apartment beats 0 months rent), etc. This helps the involuntary homeless and probably some degree the voluntary homeless to the extent that they will choose to live in a fixed location.
So high real estate prices contributes but it doesn't completely explain the homelessness phenomenon, especially when you get into more voluntary homelessness.
My sense is that where cities run into problems are tolerating homeless "camps" and other aggregations of homeless people in a single location. Cities should probably be more aggressive about breaking these up, even if they can't offer alternatives. Unless the majority of homeless people are beyond rationality (and some are due to mental illness or drug use), they will find ways to leave the area if homelessness in one spot becomes too difficult.
The people that have crunched the numbers insist that paper $1s and $5s are cheaper long-run than coins.
I find it hard to believe too, but supposedly a lot of the cost advantage comes in the gimmick of seignorage, where the paper currency is sold at face value to the Fed, making it quite profitable to actually print paper currency. The seignorage profit is less on coins apparently.
I think there's something about people socking away more coins than notes, which adds to the cost of coins.
What seems weird is that so many other currencies have dropped their small denomination notes for coins; you would think they would have similar kinds of costs and would have kept paper, too.
Do any of the nominally diesel vehicles get setup to run on jet fuel? I would think that might be kind of convenient and plausible considering how close jet fuel is to diesel.
True or not, overstated or not, you'd think that Assange would be of a mind to be as deferential as humanly possible to the the embassy, located in a country desperate to nab him, which was sheltering him.
Do they not plug airplanes into "shore" power when parked at the gate? I know some might have a small turbine generator for this, but I'd wager it's not practical to run that all the time at the gate.
Because I'm fifty-fucking-one years old and I've seen this dumb movie remade 100 times. The ending never changes just because the cast does.
You can go to any airport and see a tiny tug vehicle moving a giant airplane around.
To be honest, I often wonder why those tugs didn't go electric years ago, like giant golf carts or something. Traction motors can deliver torque at extremely low RPM, they don't need any range and can be plugged in easily. I'd wager the tugs they use now have diesel engines that will run off jet fuel which is abundant at an airport.
These never seem to go anywhere. There's never enough evidence to convict any significant decision maker of a crime, especially when they have enough resources for counsel that is able to obfuscate sufficiently.
At best you see some kind of vague conspiracy charge -- which really, anyone could be charged with -- or real bullshit stuff, like mid-level flunkies who get convicted of something like "lying to the FBI", which seems to make a serious felony out of either honest people's inadvertent "lies by omission" or the natural reaction people have to the intimidation of being questioned by a serious law enforcement organization.
So a handful of people might wind up scapegoats on technicality charges since prosecutors don't like failure publicity. No film at 11, you can find this story buried on the back of the sports section.
$3? I thought we'd get a coupon good for $3 off any purchase of $20 or more worth of Facebook advertising.
This is about the major for-profit sports industry (NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, NCAA) getting pissed because someone else is making a profit off their sports they can't get a piece of. Every sports book will be "using" their IP (team names, player names) to make money and they won't get a dime of it.
The leagues also worry about it harming the "integrity" of their sport. They need the public convinced that the outcomes are purely driven by competition and that there's no manipulation driving outcomes. I think this is *mostly* true now, but all these leagues are constantly manipulating rules and given the amount of money involved in media deals, etc, it's hard to know at what point "fine tuning" of the sport isn't driven by some kind of for-profit agenda on someone's part.
It will really threaten the NCAA, which doesn't pay its players. The pro leagues can at least pay their players enough money that the stakes are high enough to dissuade most of them from compromising outcomes. The NCAA has to be terrified that its free labor force won't give in to the temptation to throw games and make a buck on the side.
I don't care for gambling at all, but the best part of this deal is that it chips away at the special status the sports leagues that not only want to be exempted from most of the laws of capitalism, they want the public to underwrite their leagues at the same time.
Then why do car salesman at luxury dealerships treat me like such an asshole?
And I'm not even talking about Bentley-scale luxury, either. They fucking size you up in a heartbeat and give you the brush off if you just walk in.
Some of this may be that people with REAL money don't waste time walking into the dealership, if they handle it themselves they probably call the dealership and talk to sales person, and it's something like:
"Yeah, I'm Preston Biggs, I live in the Luxury Hills community. I want to buy a new Mercedes, but want to test drive the E63 and the S65. I'm home Tuesday afternoon, can you bring the cars by? I will have a check for you after I make a choice and you can leave a loaner with me until you can deliver the new one with my specs."
Walk-ins at a high-end dealership (that doesn't sell shitty starter models) are fantasy tire-kickers for the most part and I think they just want to steer them out as painlessly as possible.
And an other question: Isn't AI an indirect or even direct product of biology?
It's kind of indirect. I suspect that any emergent AI will likely be the byproduct of some kind of algorithm which provides a method of evaluating the effectiveness of various other machine learning algorithms on specific problems.
Even though those specific algorithms may have been human products originally, the "work product" becomes a byproduct of the machine evaluating the effectiveness of which machine learning algorithm provides the best answer.
People who understand the base algorithm may be able to deduce some outcomes because they understand the base abilities. But it will likely also produce novel and unpredictable outcomes based on the ability to analyze more data, faster, via a greater number of analytical methods than a non-machine intelligence, and generally free out many outcome biases.
The outcomes may appear logical and somewhat predictable based on common inputs, but that doesn't necessarily mean understanding the combination of learning outputs that produced the outcome. I may predict my friend's behavior in a novel situation similar to another one in which I have observed his behavior, but that doesn't mean I truly understand all the possible decision making that produced that behavior.
Literal cash, as in a suitcase with bundles of $100s?
One of my post-Powerball winning fantasies was to walk into a Bentley dealership in shorts and t-shirt and tell them I wanted a car and was willing to pay cash. When they blew me off or treated me like a problem, pop open my duffle of cash and start burning $10k bundles in their face, and then walk out and climb into a Rolls Royce.
I think this is the right answer. I think the naysayers all assume a self-aware AI has to be HAL9000 or some other recognizable and human-like entity.
I think it will mostly likely be as unrecognizable to us as a copy of "Pravda" would be to a stone-age hunter-gatherer. An unintelligible language comprised of symbols devoid of meaning and comprising concepts so foreign as to be unrecognizable even if some meaning could be derived from the symbols.
Modern humans are as likely to understand self-aware AI as we are to understand an alien from the other side of the galaxy.
Yeah, I left that out. Not sure why I blanked on it, it was just about as outrageous as Dimond.
Interestingly, in both Castille and Dimond shootings the officer involved was a minority. I wonder if there's something to that -- minorities who feel they have something to prove to white officers and are more apt to be more violent as a result.
Personally, if we're going to keep the death penalty, I'd like to see the judge, jury members, and DA draw straws to be on a firing squad.
The means of execution should be a 12 gauge shotgun fired at the base of the skull at point-blank range. This will vaporize the medulla oblongata and terminate heart and lung function and probably eliminate consciousness at the same time.
The judge and the DA should be REQUIRED to view this procedure. I'd leave the jury out of it, they had no choice to participate and their verdict choices are hemmed in by the judge. The DA and the judge are the most closely culpable for bad convictions -- DAs for pursuing the death penalty, faking or hiding evidence, and judges for not sufficiently suppressing bad evidence or tolerating misconduct by prosecutors (the US criminal court system has much too cozy of a relationship between judges and prosecutors, and being a prosecutor should be a bar to becoming a judge).
I'd imagine that even the most hardened judge or prosecutor wouldn't have the stomach for seeing this more than once and only for the most extreme cases.
I don't think the death penalty is always wrong, there are some extremely violent or cruel criminals who are practically beyond redemption, have committed crimes of exceptional cruelty or are so prone to continued violence that the death penalty has practical advantages for public safety. The larger problem isn't killing some subset of convicted violent felons, its the willingness of prosecutors to railroad someone innocent into a conviction and judges for tolerating the misconduct that makes it possible.
Executing felons who kill in prison might even help the prisons become more reform oriented by undermining the power of prison gangs and eliminating the hyper violent prisoners who drive gang violence. A big problem the Feds have had with gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood is that they're already serving life sentences and there's only so much room in solitary confinement and/or SuperMax prisons, so killing another inmate becomes just more years on top of a life sentence. Executing these inmates after committing homicide in prison may not deter other prisoners, but it will reduce their numbers and dilute their power by eliminating the most violent members who tend to control leadership.
There were a couple of recent FLIR videos taken by F/A-18s off the coast of San Diego that were interesting. I'm not saying they were aliens, but they had the kind of aura of respectability, or at least more than your usual MUFON chapter can muster, that might interest a congressman.
I have a full head of hair and I got into super short hair about 20 years ago and eventually said fuck it and shaved my head.
I love it and would never go back. My male friends with baldness problems have actually told me they're kind of mad that I have hair and I shave it.
It is literally 5 minutes every other day to keep it shaved.
You do have to pay attention and wear some cover in the sun, I sunburned my head ONCE and that was all it took to learn that lesson.
When it's super hot out you also get hotter and sweatier. Hair absorbs sweat and provides some kind of evaporation cooling.
Yes, Justine Dimond shot by Officer Mohammed Noor.
While I think that "warrior" training and militarization have encouraged cops to shoot people, I often wonder if cops shooting so many people is a byproduct of the reduction of blunt force by police.
Cops used to all carry nightsticks, and many also carried saps or wore sap gloves and these were their first go-to weapons for dealing with uncooperative or physically violent people. But over time these weapons fell out of favor, and not necessarily for the wrong reasons, either. So cities, departments, etc, reduced the use of these weapons to the point where they almost couldn't be used at all or could only be used under the same circumstances that a firearm could be used.
So when you're only left with a gun, all your problems now look like targets.
But cops still face a lot of people who fight them or physically resist arrest. A lot of them end up rolling around on the ground wrestling, which is a great way to lose your gun (or gain a reason to use your gun).
I think they should bring back blunt force weapons and train the police how to use them. The down side is that since it doesn't involve death or gunshot wounds, more people will end up getting beat senseless. The up side is that the cops will have a use of force tool that doesn't involve a firearm and killing people.
I know the Taser was supposed to be the ideal combination, but it mostly seems like a lot of bad compromises. Ineffective on some people, limited number of "shots" -- maybe when it's a "ray gun" and not a dart-firing gun with wires attached it will be better.
Hardship stories already don't work. I've had two people come to my door with sob stories about a stalled car, trying to get to work, need $20 for gas, new to town, taking my kid to the hospital, etc etc.
I fell for it once 25 years ago when the dude walked into my video store looking for $2 bus fare. When he came in with the same fucking story two weeks later (he must tell it so often he forgets his audience) I knew I had been scammed and threw his ass out.
I told the last two they had 60 seconds to get out off my property and take their panhandling bullshit elsewhere.