They often say that a grand jury could be made to indict a ham sandwich. It means that they don't have enough evidence to even try him, which is basically like saying there's no real evidence, just a lot of hearsay, which isn't allowed as evidence in court.
What evidence could there be against a ham sandwich? I don't think you understand the meaning of that phrase. It means the prosecutor can get an indictment for just about anything. If they want someone indicted, they get them indicted. It implies that the prosecutor did not want an indictment in this case.
I have heard it said that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. As you point out, the grand jury hears what the prosecutor presents. That's part of the reason I don't take this lack of an indictment to mean that the officer acted appropriately.
The simplest solution would be to teach brown and black cultures that crime is not acceptable. Instead of celebrating, encouraging, and enabling crime, these cultures should stigmatize it. Teach children that it is a life-ruining mistake. Expose the "snitches get stitches" mentality for what it really is -- passive, silent support for crime in your community. Let children know that criminals are the bad guys.
Black and brown cultures have integrated crime to the point where it is seen as a legitimate way to support yourself or your family, while completely failing to observe that crime is hard to keep up as you get older, has severe ramifications for your employment once you stop being a criminal, and is not a stable, reliable way to generate income. It isn't even an option; engaging in crime is the point at which your strategy towards life has failed.
As long as these cultures handle crime as a rite of passage and as an acceptable alternative to legal employment, their youths will continue to be hounded by the police. And when you look at how such an overwhelmingly large amount of crime is caused by these groups, you can see why law enforcement seeks them out. When 99% of young black men are murdered by young black men, the police will stop and frisk young black men. It's that simple.
There's a reason we don't hear about Chinese people being targeted by the stop-and-frisk policy, and that's because their culture rejects crime. This issue isn't about the police, or current laws, it's about culture. Cultures that embrace and support crime will always be at odds with law enforcement.
Can we talk about the culture of crime that exists among rich white men in the financial industry? It seems that some of them have integrated crime to the point where it is seen as a legitimate way to support yourself or your family. Perhaps some of these brown and black people should call up the prosecutor working on their cases to tell him to stop the investigation. You know, like Jamie Dimon did. Maybe then they wouldn't be stopped and frisked like rich white criminals are not stopped and frisked. They just need more money, connections and better lawyers.
Like so much in America these days, it's as much about class as race. Bankers don't go to jail because of their wealth and status (and because they've successfully convinced everyone that prosecuting them would end civilization). They have done more damage to more people than some punk on the street will ever do. But we tut-tut to the brown and black people and scold them about their culture of criminality, while the biggest criminals wear three-piece suits and have lunch with the Commerce Committee chairman. Why is that?
You are not forced to breathe anything. If a smoker is near you, you are free to move away.
Ah, so it's my responsibility to react to someone else's harmful action. If I start swinging my fists for personal enjoyment while standing next to you, you aren't forced to be punched. You are free to move away. Sucks for you if you lose your place in line, have mobility issues that make it difficult to move away, etc.
If you think something someone else is doing is harmful to you, and you have the ability, I think moving away is a valid choice. Your health is your responsibility. But at the same time, we are all interconnected. Our decisions and actions affect other people all the time; sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. If a chemical company is dumping in your back yard, you should get them to stop. But if someone is smoking next to you in line, it's really not hurting you.
Wow, it's 2014, the cold war ended decades ago, the 'red scare' was half a century ago and yet some slashdotter can't take a light joke about communism without modding it as flamebait!
restricting smoking is reasonable.
your smoke can give me cancer, which means your actions potentially are affecting me negatively (very).
i really dont care if you smoke. go ahead, light em up.
just dont do it near me where im forced to breathe your carcinogens without choice or in a way that impeeds my ability to make that choice or carry on with my life.
You seem to live under the illusion that it's possible to live your life unaffected by the choices of others. You likely inhale, ingest or imbibe carcinogens every day. Yet you are concerned about standing next to a smoker and inhaling a minute amount of smoke, which will have no measurable affect on your health. You are not forced to breathe anything. If a smoker is near you, you are free to move away.
Having internal company correspondence, communication between groups and corporate offices will have valuable company information in Facebook's hands. We've had people walked out, fired, for using Evernote in meetings.
Remember what Zuckerman said.
"They trust me — dumb fucks," says Zuckerberg in one of the instant messages, first published by former Valleywag Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider, and now confirmed by Zuckerberg himself in Jose Antonio Vargas's New Yorker piece. Zuckerberg now tells Vargas, "I think I've grown and learned a lot" since those instant messages.
[John]
I thought the same thing when I read TFS. My company deals with secret stuff and wouldn't want their data flowing through Facebook's servers. We block cloud storage as it is.
I wonder how long before they no longer feel the need to give us the illusion of freedom?
They'll keep it up as long as they can. Maintaining control through propaganda is preferable to maintaining it by force. It's cheaper and more stable. Most people still buy what they hear on the news. Even though people are starting to chafe under the surveillance, most still think it's about terrorism (as opposed to maintaining the status quo). If the powers that be do have to resort to jackboots in the streets, the media will make sure to characterize it in the right way. Again, most people will buy it.
Like they say in the movie, most people are not ready to be unplugged from the matrix. It would take something supremely radical for them to start distrusting the news and make a real break from the world view that they have. Most will never do it. We all know how people will generally continue to believe what they have always believed, even in the face of contrary evidence. At this point the illusion is so pervasive people will maintain it themselves, without help, because they firmly believe the illusion is real.
The statistic I have always heard is that 60% of intrusions are internal. So 50% of breaches coming from employees sounds about right. It's a lot easier to steal stuff if you have a key. And as we have learned again over the past 6 years or so, the best way to rob a bank is to own one.
We'll "get it right" when we knock off the electronic BS and use what has been tested to work, marked paper ballots.
It.Just.Works.
This is really all that needs to be said. Electronic voting machines cannot be trusted to be free of errors and not open to mischief. The companies that make them won't reveal the code. And what has been revealed has been troubling (sloppy coding, insecure data transmission methods, lack of overall security, etc.)
Stephen Spoonamore has had some good things to say on the subject. One of the things he says is, "Paper ballots, please"
What on earth would make you say something like that? Everyone who isn't blinded by ideology knows that Ferguson is a mountain made out of a mole hill for political reasons and ratings. Shit like what happened there happens all over the place with at least three incidents i know of happening after it and no one is excited about them. Ferguson just happens to be in the right place to muster the troops so to say.
It has nothing to do with anyone's citizenship and everything to do with motivating the right people to the polls. We've already seen the flyers claiming some are will be turned into ferguson if certain people are elected.
It has to do with the systemic violence directed toward black people, young black men more specifically. Like you said, it happens all the time. It's wrong, and it's past time that the nation dealt with it. Yes, the incident in Ferguson was just one example, but it has become a flash point for the larger issue.
Nope, and they don't care. They don't care that their cheap shitty chocolate comes from slaves. They don't care than Nike uses child labor. They don't care about the abusive practices involved in processing shrimp. They don't care about overfishing. They don't care about the pink goo in their food. They don't care about air pollution.
Face it, people are fucking stupid, and NO they don't care. If they did, actually, they'd probably be in favor of it, as long as it didn't happen to them.
Americans (people, really) care about what they're told to care about. Everyone is terrified of Ebola and ISIL and know something must be done; and it's not because of their good judgement and risk analysis.
Maybe all the commenters here who have maintained that H-1B workers are paid the same as domestic workers and don't contribute to wage suppression in the IT industry.
When I enlisted in 1990 you only had to be able to complete something like 13 pushups to be assigned to a basic training unit. Those that couldn't were put into a "remedial physical training" unit...
This is kind of what I was thinking. Can't you just get some of these overweight recruits into training and whip them into shape? After all, you control their exercise and diet. Maybe they need to bring Bob Harper on as a consultant.
I think they're human beings. I think that money is power, and that political suffrage (the vote) is no longer enough. We must also have universal economic suffrage as well. Every individual needs to have an assurance that their annual income won't fall below the poverty line, because poor people aren't human beings in the USA.
If they don't want to work, but live on ten grand a year while sharing an apartment with a few other people who want to live on basic, that's their problem. Ideally it would help parents, especially single parents. It would help students. It would help artists. It would help open source hackers and other people who do useful work that isn't adequately valued by our system.
And it would give us an excuse to get rid of our existing welfare system. We can tell people who aren't working, "You got your basic income. If you need more money, get a fuckin' job."
I quite agree. As someone who gave up his artistic dreams for a steady paycheck, this vision speaks to me personally.
But practically, I don't see how we afford it. The middle class pays the taxes (and the middle and lower classes actually work the jobs that produce new wealth). Mitt and pals dodge all that shit with their offshore tax havens. We're already paying for the poor (not that welfare and medicaid are worth shit), we're supporting the old with social security and medicare. How much more are we supposed to produce to take care of everybody else?
All you really need is to understand how money works at the federal level. The US government cannot go broke. It can print all the money it needs. So there really isn't any question of how to pay for it. I know our politicians and news media talk about taxes and the federal budget like they have some kind of relationship. But the reality is that the US government does not have to tax or borrow to spend. If we need more money, we simply create it.
If anyone actually reads this post, they will probably take some umbrage with that notion. But that's the reality in a country that prints it's own currency. That only danger is printing money too fast (which is the purpose of reserve requirements in our current system) which will induce inflation. As long as the money supply doesn't outpace GDP, you will not get inflation. Heck, the Fed has tripled the money supply since 2008. Tripled! So you can see there is some elasticity present.
Saying the Federal government does not have enough money is a red herring. It can, and does, print all the money it needs. Having the funds for a project is a political decision, not a monetary one.
It's not as useful as you think. The American device's #1 function is to tell you that you're currently being hit by a radar gun. Surprise, too late. Same with laser-based guns. In some cases some models detect radio frequencies but a lot of radios now have listen-only mode and the detector goes off like crazy anyway.
The proper way to use a radar detector is to detect radar hitting a car in front of you. As long as you have traffic in front of you, you can get a warning. It works quite well, as my detector has saved me from a number of tickets.
The sane thing to do would be to institute a minimum basic income.
What, just give people money for doing nothing? Who do you think they are, bankers?
I like the idea of a basic income. It would be an interesting experiment both economically and socially. I would love to see how it would be received in a country that loves its myth of the self-made man, pulled up by his own bootstraps. People in America work for what they have, so if they have more they must have worked harder or smarter for it. How would that square up with people getting money just for existing? It might change our perception of money and wealth and how it is supposedly tied to work or ability.
I mean, maybe I'm just harking back to a past that exists only in my mind, but I seem to recall a time when the journal actually covered business in its pages, rather than regurgitating neoclassical economics talking points all-day every day, attempting to construe every single negative thing as a result of failing to religiously adhere to its principles.
Am I misremembering, and imagining the shift from kinda disagreeably right-leaning to fanatical?
It's the editorial page. The editorials have always been right-wing wacko objectivist crap. Maybe not as bad as now, but not that far off. The rest of the paper still reports on business.
Slashdot Mirror
They often say that a grand jury could be made to indict a ham sandwich. It means that they don't have enough evidence to even try him, which is basically like saying there's no real evidence, just a lot of hearsay, which isn't allowed as evidence in court.
What evidence could there be against a ham sandwich? I don't think you understand the meaning of that phrase. It means the prosecutor can get an indictment for just about anything. If they want someone indicted, they get them indicted. It implies that the prosecutor did not want an indictment in this case.
I have heard it said that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. As you point out, the grand jury hears what the prosecutor presents. That's part of the reason I don't take this lack of an indictment to mean that the officer acted appropriately.
lol. "Interesting".
Slashdot was never mighty but, God, how low it's fallen.
Yeah, wondering at what might be possible. Pssh! Who needs that? This is a serious site, after all!
The simplest solution would be to teach brown and black cultures that crime is not acceptable. Instead of celebrating, encouraging, and enabling crime, these cultures should stigmatize it. Teach children that it is a life-ruining mistake. Expose the "snitches get stitches" mentality for what it really is -- passive, silent support for crime in your community. Let children know that criminals are the bad guys.
Black and brown cultures have integrated crime to the point where it is seen as a legitimate way to support yourself or your family, while completely failing to observe that crime is hard to keep up as you get older, has severe ramifications for your employment once you stop being a criminal, and is not a stable, reliable way to generate income. It isn't even an option; engaging in crime is the point at which your strategy towards life has failed.
As long as these cultures handle crime as a rite of passage and as an acceptable alternative to legal employment, their youths will continue to be hounded by the police. And when you look at how such an overwhelmingly large amount of crime is caused by these groups, you can see why law enforcement seeks them out. When 99% of young black men are murdered by young black men, the police will stop and frisk young black men. It's that simple.
There's a reason we don't hear about Chinese people being targeted by the stop-and-frisk policy, and that's because their culture rejects crime. This issue isn't about the police, or current laws, it's about culture. Cultures that embrace and support crime will always be at odds with law enforcement.
Can we talk about the culture of crime that exists among rich white men in the financial industry? It seems that some of them have integrated crime to the point where it is seen as a legitimate way to support yourself or your family. Perhaps some of these brown and black people should call up the prosecutor working on their cases to tell him to stop the investigation. You know, like Jamie Dimon did. Maybe then they wouldn't be stopped and frisked like rich white criminals are not stopped and frisked. They just need more money, connections and better lawyers.
Like so much in America these days, it's as much about class as race. Bankers don't go to jail because of their wealth and status (and because they've successfully convinced everyone that prosecuting them would end civilization). They have done more damage to more people than some punk on the street will ever do. But we tut-tut to the brown and black people and scold them about their culture of criminality, while the biggest criminals wear three-piece suits and have lunch with the Commerce Committee chairman. Why is that?
It's unlikely that a high school student would come away with any other conclusion than the police are a fearful group to be avoided at all costs
Well, at least they're learning something valuable.
You seem to live under the illusion that it's possible to live your life unaffected by the choices of others.
I don't know about the AC, but I'm under the illusion that people don't have the right to do something that will potentially cause harm to those around them. Since the 1964 Surgeon Generalâ(TM)s Report, 2.5 million adults who were nonsmokers died because they breathed secondhand smoke.
You are not forced to breathe anything. If a smoker is near you, you are free to move away.
Ah, so it's my responsibility to react to someone else's harmful action. If I start swinging my fists for personal enjoyment while standing next to you, you aren't forced to be punched. You are free to move away. Sucks for you if you lose your place in line, have mobility issues that make it difficult to move away, etc.
If you think something someone else is doing is harmful to you, and you have the ability, I think moving away is a valid choice. Your health is your responsibility. But at the same time, we are all interconnected. Our decisions and actions affect other people all the time; sometimes for good and sometimes for ill. If a chemical company is dumping in your back yard, you should get them to stop. But if someone is smoking next to you in line, it's really not hurting you.
Wow, it's 2014, the cold war ended decades ago, the 'red scare' was half a century ago and yet some slashdotter can't take a light joke about communism without modding it as flamebait!
Witness the power of propaganda.
restricting smoking is reasonable. your smoke can give me cancer, which means your actions potentially are affecting me negatively (very).
i really dont care if you smoke. go ahead, light em up.
just dont do it near me where im forced to breathe your carcinogens without choice or in a way that impeeds my ability to make that choice or carry on with my life.
You seem to live under the illusion that it's possible to live your life unaffected by the choices of others. You likely inhale, ingest or imbibe carcinogens every day. Yet you are concerned about standing next to a smoker and inhaling a minute amount of smoke, which will have no measurable affect on your health. You are not forced to breathe anything. If a smoker is near you, you are free to move away.
You smoke cigars *and* cigarettes?
Country and Western!
Not just no, but fuck no.
Having internal company correspondence, communication between groups and corporate offices will have valuable company information in Facebook's hands. We've had people walked out, fired, for using Evernote in meetings.
Remember what Zuckerman said.
"They trust me — dumb fucks," says Zuckerberg in one of the instant messages, first published by former Valleywag Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider, and now confirmed by Zuckerberg himself in Jose Antonio Vargas's New Yorker piece. Zuckerberg now tells Vargas, "I think I've grown and learned a lot" since those instant messages.
[John]
I thought the same thing when I read TFS. My company deals with secret stuff and wouldn't want their data flowing through Facebook's servers. We block cloud storage as it is.
I wonder how long before they no longer feel the need to give us the illusion of freedom?
They'll keep it up as long as they can. Maintaining control through propaganda is preferable to maintaining it by force. It's cheaper and more stable. Most people still buy what they hear on the news. Even though people are starting to chafe under the surveillance, most still think it's about terrorism (as opposed to maintaining the status quo). If the powers that be do have to resort to jackboots in the streets, the media will make sure to characterize it in the right way. Again, most people will buy it.
Like they say in the movie, most people are not ready to be unplugged from the matrix. It would take something supremely radical for them to start distrusting the news and make a real break from the world view that they have. Most will never do it. We all know how people will generally continue to believe what they have always believed, even in the face of contrary evidence. At this point the illusion is so pervasive people will maintain it themselves, without help, because they firmly believe the illusion is real.
Yeah, well the government never let intellectual consistency get in the way of doing what they want to do.
At some point - probably soon - they'll shut down the last one of these and then there won't be any more. That's how the war on drugs was won!
If you want to truly win the war on drugs, then you need to go after the biggest drug dealers on the planet.
In case you were wondering, that would be the ones we allow to legally peddle their fucking addictions.
Don't forget the CIA and the banks that launder the money for them!
This is like trying to stop people from breathing... The illicit markets will NEVER die.
Man wants what he cannot have... This will NEVER change.
Its our Nature. Fighting our own nature... Is costing us more than we care to admit.
More like Man wants what his government has decided he should not have. But you're right, it is costing us a lot.
The statistic I have always heard is that 60% of intrusions are internal. So 50% of breaches coming from employees sounds about right. It's a lot easier to steal stuff if you have a key. And as we have learned again over the past 6 years or so, the best way to rob a bank is to own one.
We'll "get it right" when we knock off the electronic BS and use what has been tested to work, marked paper ballots. It.Just.Works.
This is really all that needs to be said. Electronic voting machines cannot be trusted to be free of errors and not open to mischief. The companies that make them won't reveal the code. And what has been revealed has been troubling (sloppy coding, insecure data transmission methods, lack of overall security, etc.)
Stephen Spoonamore has had some good things to say on the subject. One of the things he says is, "Paper ballots, please"
What on earth would make you say something like that? Everyone who isn't blinded by ideology knows that Ferguson is a mountain made out of a mole hill for political reasons and ratings. Shit like what happened there happens all over the place with at least three incidents i know of happening after it and no one is excited about them. Ferguson just happens to be in the right place to muster the troops so to say.
It has nothing to do with anyone's citizenship and everything to do with motivating the right people to the polls. We've already seen the flyers claiming some are will be turned into ferguson if certain people are elected.
It has to do with the systemic violence directed toward black people, young black men more specifically. Like you said, it happens all the time. It's wrong, and it's past time that the nation dealt with it. Yes, the incident in Ferguson was just one example, but it has become a flash point for the larger issue.
Nope, and they don't care. They don't care that their cheap shitty chocolate comes from slaves. They don't care than Nike uses child labor. They don't care about the abusive practices involved in processing shrimp. They don't care about overfishing. They don't care about the pink goo in their food. They don't care about air pollution.
Face it, people are fucking stupid, and NO they don't care. If they did, actually, they'd probably be in favor of it, as long as it didn't happen to them.
Americans (people, really) care about what they're told to care about. Everyone is terrified of Ebola and ISIL and know something must be done; and it's not because of their good judgement and risk analysis.
Is anyone even remotely surprised by this?
Maybe all the commenters here who have maintained that H-1B workers are paid the same as domestic workers and don't contribute to wage suppression in the IT industry.
When I enlisted in 1990 you only had to be able to complete something like 13 pushups to be assigned to a basic training unit. Those that couldn't were put into a "remedial physical training" unit...
This is kind of what I was thinking. Can't you just get some of these overweight recruits into training and whip them into shape? After all, you control their exercise and diet. Maybe they need to bring Bob Harper on as a consultant.
I think they're human beings. I think that money is power, and that political suffrage (the vote) is no longer enough. We must also have universal economic suffrage as well. Every individual needs to have an assurance that their annual income won't fall below the poverty line, because poor people aren't human beings in the USA.
If they don't want to work, but live on ten grand a year while sharing an apartment with a few other people who want to live on basic, that's their problem. Ideally it would help parents, especially single parents. It would help students. It would help artists. It would help open source hackers and other people who do useful work that isn't adequately valued by our system.
And it would give us an excuse to get rid of our existing welfare system. We can tell people who aren't working, "You got your basic income. If you need more money, get a fuckin' job."
I quite agree. As someone who gave up his artistic dreams for a steady paycheck, this vision speaks to me personally.
But practically, I don't see how we afford it. The middle class pays the taxes (and the middle and lower classes actually work the jobs that produce new wealth). Mitt and pals dodge all that shit with their offshore tax havens. We're already paying for the poor (not that welfare and medicaid are worth shit), we're supporting the old with social security and medicare. How much more are we supposed to produce to take care of everybody else?
All you really need is to understand how money works at the federal level. The US government cannot go broke. It can print all the money it needs. So there really isn't any question of how to pay for it. I know our politicians and news media talk about taxes and the federal budget like they have some kind of relationship. But the reality is that the US government does not have to tax or borrow to spend. If we need more money, we simply create it.
If anyone actually reads this post, they will probably take some umbrage with that notion. But that's the reality in a country that prints it's own currency. That only danger is printing money too fast (which is the purpose of reserve requirements in our current system) which will induce inflation. As long as the money supply doesn't outpace GDP, you will not get inflation. Heck, the Fed has tripled the money supply since 2008. Tripled! So you can see there is some elasticity present.
Saying the Federal government does not have enough money is a red herring. It can, and does, print all the money it needs. Having the funds for a project is a political decision, not a monetary one.
It's not as useful as you think. The American device's #1 function is to tell you that you're currently being hit by a radar gun. Surprise, too late. Same with laser-based guns. In some cases some models detect radio frequencies but a lot of radios now have listen-only mode and the detector goes off like crazy anyway.
The proper way to use a radar detector is to detect radar hitting a car in front of you. As long as you have traffic in front of you, you can get a warning. It works quite well, as my detector has saved me from a number of tickets.
The sane thing to do would be to institute a minimum basic income.
What, just give people money for doing nothing? Who do you think they are, bankers?
I like the idea of a basic income. It would be an interesting experiment both economically and socially. I would love to see how it would be received in a country that loves its myth of the self-made man, pulled up by his own bootstraps. People in America work for what they have, so if they have more they must have worked harder or smarter for it. How would that square up with people getting money just for existing? It might change our perception of money and wealth and how it is supposedly tied to work or ability.
I mean, maybe I'm just harking back to a past that exists only in my mind, but I seem to recall a time when the journal actually covered business in its pages, rather than regurgitating neoclassical economics talking points all-day every day, attempting to construe every single negative thing as a result of failing to religiously adhere to its principles.
Am I misremembering, and imagining the shift from kinda disagreeably right-leaning to fanatical?
It's the editorial page. The editorials have always been right-wing wacko objectivist crap. Maybe not as bad as now, but not that far off. The rest of the paper still reports on business.