We can't break out of the two party system, but the parties themselves can certainly change. After all, when did the Whig Party last win an election?
And the Bill of Rights is already in serious jeopardy. The 2nd has been obliterated and the push to remove the last vestiges of it has plenty of support from judges. The 4th has been very thoroughly weakened thanks to drugs, terror, and CP. "A dog trained to please me said the search was ok" is actually accepted. We're electronically surveilled without limit. The 5th? 3 words: Civil Asset Forfeiture. Now the courts are also starting to undermine the right against self-incrimination by ruling that people can be held for decades if they can't remember something the court wants them to say. The 6A right to a speedy trial? LOL. And let's not even get started on how indigent defense funding denies effective assistance of counsel for the poor. 8A says no excessive bail or fines... this is so thoroughly ignored it's not even funny, thanks to the wonderful assumption that if it's not excessive for the rich, it's not excessive for the poor either. Cruel and unusual punishment? Please. Destroying someones life with years in prison because they were using the wrong plant extract is the epitome of cruel. The 9th is being rapidly flipped on its head; lots of people think any right not in the BoR doesn't exist. The 10th might as well be void since there's no power the federal government doesn't have.
What's worse, with the exception of the 2nd, support for trashing our rights is strongly bipartisan. The 1st isn't immune either, with the right going after free press and the left trying to get a hate-speech exemption (that will undoubtedly be used against them by the right, a fact it takes an incredible level of naivete to not see).
1) It does not serve any additional deterrence over life in prison, or even several decades. There's been lots of research on this.
2) Providing closure via execution instead of a life sentence is not a valid purpose of justice, nevermind the fact that not all survivors support it and the problems with letting them choose. To understand why this is barbaric, consider that dying the same way as their loved ones would likely satisfy closure via violence even better; so why not do that? Because justice isn't about satisfying personal desires for vengeance.
Well no whether it's a life or not isn't a tricky issue. It's very clearly a living human. The tricky part concerns higher level issues like whether or when it's a 'person' and whether or when termination is permitted. It's silly to try to say it's not a) alive, and b) a member of the Homo sapien species.
Even if you were willing to pay every single guard and support staff a high six or seven figure salary to ensure that they were paid too well to be bought (and subject them to invasive monitoring to ensure they're not incurring debts even beyond that), you'd still have the problem that the other aspect of the black market is that it's controlled by violent gangs who would then just threaten someones kid. Or someone or their family gets indebted to a gang and they won't just take cash. Or a guard is actually a member of the gang. The degree to which you'd have to search to prevent it coming in is also impractical; full cavity searches every time someone comes through the secure door, ridiculously intense searches of the massive amount of commercial goods shipped in by multiple people. So when you say 'It's not that they can't', it's one of those useless things to say like 'It's not they can't eliminate traffic fatalities, it's that they can't eliminate them for the speed limits they're willing to set'. You can't spend the amount it would actually take any more than you could force all carmakers to limit their vehicles to 5mph; both technically possible and absolutely never going to happen.
We get the government we deserve. People keep falling for the same old trick, that either the (R) or (D) guy will actually change things for the better, but whether it's Hope And Change or MAGA, we get the same old shit and the people continue to get screwed. We've got one party dedicated to screwing everyone and everything to help the rich, but thanks to a couple social wedge issues and peoples baffling inability to recognize that they're being lied to about how the middle class will be helped and that trickle down doesn't actually work, they still get votes. Meanwhile, the other side seems to be running on a platform of demonizing white men while copying the worst attributes of the R's like mass surveillance and foreign warmongering. But thanks to their social wedge issues and peoples baffling inability even consider other options, they still get votes too.
Neither side comprehensively stands for protecting our civil rights and acting the best interest of all society. And sadly, if even the Trump/Clinton race couldn't do anything to boost 3rd party votes, nothing will. We're going to be stuck with bad and worse for the foreseeable future. Maybe if the L's didn't have such a batshit right-wing economic policy they'd gain more traction.
But hey at least both sides can agree that this fafalone guy should be downmodded for his heresy right!
So use a mask like euthanasia does. 'Gas mask' doesn't have much baggage. It's worth the problems in any case; as long as we insist on executing people, inert gas is far more reliable than our other methods, painless, fast, easy to administer, easy to acquire supplies for, and safe for bystanders (unlike poisonous gas). It's really the best way to do things pending a more enlightened criminal justice system.
Just to be pedantic and not taking either side, violent crime has overwhelmingly fallen in the past few thousand years. Do you really not understand just how incredibly violent humanity was up until the last few centuries? It's also way down over the most recent couple decades compared to the decades prior to that. Nothing to do with the death penalty*, but still.
*-After a certain point, severity of punishment is not a deterrent. Especially with the types of crimes we execute for.
250m in 10 days is 25 million per day; divided by 3m users is an average of 8.3 streams per user per day. That wouldn't be unrealistic if they counted a play of any single track on the album as the album being streamed. Did they specifically say otherwise? Listening to the album all the way through just once would be more than 8 streams under that scenario. Life of Pablo has 16 tracks according to Google, so half their users listening to it once is already 24m plays. So IMO if they are indeed counting a stream of a song as a 'stream of the album' then it's not at all far fetched.
Obama did absolutely nothing to wind it down. He slightly reduced some federal sentences. That's it. Anything he did on marijuana reform (a very mixed, and mostly negative record) again isn't going to help much with police. WoD isn't a liberal policy, it's a bipartisan policy.
And one Democrat supporting it? Please. There's not even one who opposes it. There's not a single Senator on Congressman who stands against the War on Drugs. Zero. Sure they'll call for more treatment, and that's great, but no one is willing to stop prohibition enforced at gunpoint for anything other than pot.
That nightmare of a 5th Amendment trashing precedent where the penalty for forgetting a password is an effective life sentence is thankfully not settled yet. Different courts have ruled different ways. That it's an overt violation of the 5th, namely using the contents of your mind to aid in your prosecution, is clear, but alas so many courts are willing to flat out ignore the Bill of Rights wherever law enforcement wants. It won't be settled until SCOTUS takes it up.
And make sure you don't use any superfluous language either, like saying 'I want my lawyer, dog'. They'll omit the comma, and then rule that you didn't actually ask for a lawyer, you asked for a lawyer dog (a canine with a legal degree), and since that doesn't exist you have not invoked your right to counsel. And the Louisiana Supreme Court actually upheld that nonsense. That's the most extreme example, but there's plenty of tricks they have to deny you your rights. Like you have the right to remain silent, but must affirmatively invoke the right; you can't just actually remain silent, you must inform them that you are exercising your right to remain silent.
Liberals love law enforcement too-- there's simply no other conclusion to draw from their support of the War on Drugs. That's responsible for the large number of police, their military-like tactics including viewing us as the enemy, what has enabled the vast expansions of their power completely trashing the 4th Amendment, and the total erosion of trust in police almost everywhere.
Legalizing marijuana isn't going to put the brakes on any of that. The biggest disappointment in liberal support for marijuana is that it in fact has not come from a realization that drug prohibition increases harm; it's really just about marijuana being harmless. You need look no further than the current opiate crisis to see that, liberals and conservatives are hand in hand calling for more policing and longer sentences. The liberal-backed prohibition policies this time have the wonderful effect of essentially being pro-torture; a direct result is severely restricted access to relief for people in debilitating pain who previously had a life but are now bedridden or even killing themselves as control is ceded to the black market resulting in the OD spike. Liberals are backing police and DEA overriding best medical practices full throttle.
Until liberals actually back off on their support for a policy that takes a dangerous substance and increases the harm it causes along with devastating side effects, inevitably resulting in law enforcement issues I described up top, it's entirely disingenuous to say liberals aren't fans of law enforcement.
Well I for one don't think mass facial recognition should be used at all, because anyone who thinks it won't be abused just hasn't been paying attention.
Is cispute like mansplain? Or just the opposite of transpute? But anyway, it's people like him that are the true oppressors. You're right about what the facts are, and people that pretend there's no disparities and scream racist at everyone pointing them out, are a massive barrier to the kinds of systemic fixes that could dramatically reduce measures like poverty and violent crime. Truth is, there's a lot more interest in blaming others and excusing than there is in elevating.
It's not just passing on a photo. People are temporarily detained and ID checked. Their response to this is 'theres been no complaints'. I guess the British have more tolerance for being stopped by the police, but I find that entirely unacceptable.
You seem to think there's no extremely poor areas populated by white people. There are. There's groups of white people every last bit as destitute as the poorest black groups. They certainly commit a lot of crime, but the difference is violence. The fact remains, at every income level, from poorest to richest, the black violent crime rate is disproportionately high compared to the rate of other groups, with Asian being the lowest, white slightly higher. Sorry, but you can't exclusively blame poverty. And nor can you exclusively blame white people for black poverty.
Wrong. We recently had an article here that informed us it's not contrast or training data, it's racist white male programmers who are to blame for facial recognition accuracy. Add it to the list.
For less popular events sure. But top acts that will sell out? That method prices out lower income fans, and even a lot of the ultra-commercialized pop formula robots don't want their concerts attended only by the most wealthy fans.
It doesn't take being addicted to not care that everything you put in a semi-public profile is available to various 3rd parties. They couldn't access private message contents, which is the only thing anyone should think wouldn't be public. I don't care that some company might have scraped my public profile info through one of my friends installing an app; even though I only add in-person friends I'd still never presume anything visible to dozens of people wasn't publicly accessible to apps on the platform.
While I have a well thought out reason why it won't keep me off Facebook, I suspect an even larger contingent has that vague 'it's not really a secret anyway' attitude combined with the even bigger lack of direct consequences: What impact has this had on them that they can see? None. And not because they think just others were effected like your drug cut, but because even if their data was collected; so what?
Which if the US Gov't doesn't get back doors, will be the next big push "Protect America! Install this great piece of spyware, er security software!"
First, sex offenders will be required to install the software. The Supreme Court ruled you can't bar them from using Facebook et al., so we've somehow got to monitor that they're not on there grooming little kids for sex slavery (even if their conviction was for peeing on wall at 4AM). And nobody will oppose that, because you don't support pedophiles and child sex trafficking do you?
Next, it will become standard terms of probation/parole for all offenses. Nobody will care; those guys broke the law and took the deal right?
Then for all convicted felons. Then for those law enforcement or a court considers a threat but haven't been convicted of anything (if we can strip someones 2nd amendment rights in this situation surely installing some software isn't a problem right?). What makes someone such a threat will then just expand.
And the program is working so well, why not use it to make sure someone isn't using their phone while driving? Driving is a privilege after all, and they'll pinky swear they're not gathering content from drivers.
If you think any level of this slippery slope is unreasonable, you just haven't been paying attention. You have to stop rights from being lost up front, when they're being taken away from someone terrible, or when it's a right you don't like so don't care what end run is used to take it away (2A). It's always a one-way ratchet. More people need to stand up and protect our rights in the face of the awful people and events that are used to take them away.
The last mile is a natural monopoly, whether or not there's actual laws preventing other companies from putting up poles and wires. There's just no way there's ever going to be a free market on that. The only way you'd get good ISP competition is if the last mile was a public utility where any company could run service over the wires. And I say public utility, because even if we forced the current owners to open their lines, they'd find a way to keep competition down financially and degraded service if they still retained ownership.
Ah the classic 'there's no evidence against Trump, therefore no investigation to search for evidence should occur' argument.
And even if you think Trump's entire inner circle during the campaign isn't enough to look into whether Trump himself knew, interfering with an investigation is a crime by itself even if the underlying criminal action never took place.
Just stop lying dude, nobody who repeats Fox News talking points and refers to it as a 'witch hunt' is actually interested in anything other than a predetermined conclusion that Trump is innocent of everything, so unless there's solid proof of a crime, no such proof can be gathered. And just how many Republicans need to be involved with and supporting the investigation before it's no longer exclusively an operation of the Democrats? You're not fooling anyone, just own your bias, you don't care what Trump did you just want him cleared.
The author is singling out a particular sex and race. You're really going to try and tell me the implication isn't that programmers of other races use different training data and therefore don't have this problem? Again, there's plenty of non-white programmers, so why single out white men when there's no evidence their algorithms are more biased than those of others?
Slashdot Mirror
We can't break out of the two party system, but the parties themselves can certainly change. After all, when did the Whig Party last win an election?
And the Bill of Rights is already in serious jeopardy. The 2nd has been obliterated and the push to remove the last vestiges of it has plenty of support from judges.
The 4th has been very thoroughly weakened thanks to drugs, terror, and CP. "A dog trained to please me said the search was ok" is actually accepted. We're electronically surveilled without limit.
The 5th? 3 words: Civil Asset Forfeiture. Now the courts are also starting to undermine the right against self-incrimination by ruling that people can be held for decades if they can't remember something the court wants them to say.
The 6A right to a speedy trial? LOL. And let's not even get started on how indigent defense funding denies effective assistance of counsel for the poor.
8A says no excessive bail or fines... this is so thoroughly ignored it's not even funny, thanks to the wonderful assumption that if it's not excessive for the rich, it's not excessive for the poor either. Cruel and unusual punishment? Please. Destroying someones life with years in prison because they were using the wrong plant extract is the epitome of cruel.
The 9th is being rapidly flipped on its head; lots of people think any right not in the BoR doesn't exist.
The 10th might as well be void since there's no power the federal government doesn't have.
What's worse, with the exception of the 2nd, support for trashing our rights is strongly bipartisan. The 1st isn't immune either, with the right going after free press and the left trying to get a hate-speech exemption (that will undoubtedly be used against them by the right, a fact it takes an incredible level of naivete to not see).
1) It does not serve any additional deterrence over life in prison, or even several decades. There's been lots of research on this.
2) Providing closure via execution instead of a life sentence is not a valid purpose of justice, nevermind the fact that not all survivors support it and the problems with letting them choose. To understand why this is barbaric, consider that dying the same way as their loved ones would likely satisfy closure via violence even better; so why not do that? Because justice isn't about satisfying personal desires for vengeance.
Well no whether it's a life or not isn't a tricky issue. It's very clearly a living human. The tricky part concerns higher level issues like whether or when it's a 'person' and whether or when termination is permitted. It's silly to try to say it's not a) alive, and b) a member of the Homo sapien species.
Well we completely ignore the first two clauses, why not the third.
Even if you were willing to pay every single guard and support staff a high six or seven figure salary to ensure that they were paid too well to be bought (and subject them to invasive monitoring to ensure they're not incurring debts even beyond that), you'd still have the problem that the other aspect of the black market is that it's controlled by violent gangs who would then just threaten someones kid. Or someone or their family gets indebted to a gang and they won't just take cash. Or a guard is actually a member of the gang. The degree to which you'd have to search to prevent it coming in is also impractical; full cavity searches every time someone comes through the secure door, ridiculously intense searches of the massive amount of commercial goods shipped in by multiple people. So when you say 'It's not that they can't', it's one of those useless things to say like 'It's not they can't eliminate traffic fatalities, it's that they can't eliminate them for the speed limits they're willing to set'. You can't spend the amount it would actually take any more than you could force all carmakers to limit their vehicles to 5mph; both technically possible and absolutely never going to happen.
We get the government we deserve. People keep falling for the same old trick, that either the (R) or (D) guy will actually change things for the better, but whether it's Hope And Change or MAGA, we get the same old shit and the people continue to get screwed. We've got one party dedicated to screwing everyone and everything to help the rich, but thanks to a couple social wedge issues and peoples baffling inability to recognize that they're being lied to about how the middle class will be helped and that trickle down doesn't actually work, they still get votes. Meanwhile, the other side seems to be running on a platform of demonizing white men while copying the worst attributes of the R's like mass surveillance and foreign warmongering. But thanks to their social wedge issues and peoples baffling inability even consider other options, they still get votes too.
Neither side comprehensively stands for protecting our civil rights and acting the best interest of all society. And sadly, if even the Trump/Clinton race couldn't do anything to boost 3rd party votes, nothing will. We're going to be stuck with bad and worse for the foreseeable future. Maybe if the L's didn't have such a batshit right-wing economic policy they'd gain more traction.
But hey at least both sides can agree that this fafalone guy should be downmodded for his heresy right!
So use a mask like euthanasia does. 'Gas mask' doesn't have much baggage. It's worth the problems in any case; as long as we insist on executing people, inert gas is far more reliable than our other methods, painless, fast, easy to administer, easy to acquire supplies for, and safe for bystanders (unlike poisonous gas). It's really the best way to do things pending a more enlightened criminal justice system.
Just to be pedantic and not taking either side, violent crime has overwhelmingly fallen in the past few thousand years. Do you really not understand just how incredibly violent humanity was up until the last few centuries? It's also way down over the most recent couple decades compared to the decades prior to that. Nothing to do with the death penalty*, but still.
*-After a certain point, severity of punishment is not a deterrent. Especially with the types of crimes we execute for.
First I learned a new word, then I laughed. +1 Informafunny.
250m in 10 days is 25 million per day; divided by 3m users is an average of 8.3 streams per user per day. That wouldn't be unrealistic if they counted a play of any single track on the album as the album being streamed. Did they specifically say otherwise? Listening to the album all the way through just once would be more than 8 streams under that scenario. Life of Pablo has 16 tracks according to Google, so half their users listening to it once is already 24m plays. So IMO if they are indeed counting a stream of a song as a 'stream of the album' then it's not at all far fetched.
Obama did absolutely nothing to wind it down. He slightly reduced some federal sentences. That's it. Anything he did on marijuana reform (a very mixed, and mostly negative record) again isn't going to help much with police. WoD isn't a liberal policy, it's a bipartisan policy.
And one Democrat supporting it? Please. There's not even one who opposes it. There's not a single Senator on Congressman who stands against the War on Drugs. Zero. Sure they'll call for more treatment, and that's great, but no one is willing to stop prohibition enforced at gunpoint for anything other than pot.
That nightmare of a 5th Amendment trashing precedent where the penalty for forgetting a password is an effective life sentence is thankfully not settled yet. Different courts have ruled different ways. That it's an overt violation of the 5th, namely using the contents of your mind to aid in your prosecution, is clear, but alas so many courts are willing to flat out ignore the Bill of Rights wherever law enforcement wants. It won't be settled until SCOTUS takes it up.
And make sure you don't use any superfluous language either, like saying 'I want my lawyer, dog'. They'll omit the comma, and then rule that you didn't actually ask for a lawyer, you asked for a lawyer dog (a canine with a legal degree), and since that doesn't exist you have not invoked your right to counsel. And the Louisiana Supreme Court actually upheld that nonsense. That's the most extreme example, but there's plenty of tricks they have to deny you your rights. Like you have the right to remain silent, but must affirmatively invoke the right; you can't just actually remain silent, you must inform them that you are exercising your right to remain silent.
Liberals love law enforcement too-- there's simply no other conclusion to draw from their support of the War on Drugs. That's responsible for the large number of police, their military-like tactics including viewing us as the enemy, what has enabled the vast expansions of their power completely trashing the 4th Amendment, and the total erosion of trust in police almost everywhere.
Legalizing marijuana isn't going to put the brakes on any of that. The biggest disappointment in liberal support for marijuana is that it in fact has not come from a realization that drug prohibition increases harm; it's really just about marijuana being harmless. You need look no further than the current opiate crisis to see that, liberals and conservatives are hand in hand calling for more policing and longer sentences. The liberal-backed prohibition policies this time have the wonderful effect of essentially being pro-torture; a direct result is severely restricted access to relief for people in debilitating pain who previously had a life but are now bedridden or even killing themselves as control is ceded to the black market resulting in the OD spike. Liberals are backing police and DEA overriding best medical practices full throttle.
Until liberals actually back off on their support for a policy that takes a dangerous substance and increases the harm it causes along with devastating side effects, inevitably resulting in law enforcement issues I described up top, it's entirely disingenuous to say liberals aren't fans of law enforcement.
Well I for one don't think mass facial recognition should be used at all, because anyone who thinks it won't be abused just hasn't been paying attention.
Is cispute like mansplain? Or just the opposite of transpute? But anyway, it's people like him that are the true oppressors. You're right about what the facts are, and people that pretend there's no disparities and scream racist at everyone pointing them out, are a massive barrier to the kinds of systemic fixes that could dramatically reduce measures like poverty and violent crime. Truth is, there's a lot more interest in blaming others and excusing than there is in elevating.
It's not just passing on a photo. People are temporarily detained and ID checked. Their response to this is 'theres been no complaints'. I guess the British have more tolerance for being stopped by the police, but I find that entirely unacceptable.
You seem to think there's no extremely poor areas populated by white people. There are. There's groups of white people every last bit as destitute as the poorest black groups. They certainly commit a lot of crime, but the difference is violence. The fact remains, at every income level, from poorest to richest, the black violent crime rate is disproportionately high compared to the rate of other groups, with Asian being the lowest, white slightly higher. Sorry, but you can't exclusively blame poverty. And nor can you exclusively blame white people for black poverty.
Wrong. We recently had an article here that informed us it's not contrast or training data, it's racist white male programmers who are to blame for facial recognition accuracy. Add it to the list.
For less popular events sure. But top acts that will sell out? That method prices out lower income fans, and even a lot of the ultra-commercialized pop formula robots don't want their concerts attended only by the most wealthy fans.
It doesn't take being addicted to not care that everything you put in a semi-public profile is available to various 3rd parties. They couldn't access private message contents, which is the only thing anyone should think wouldn't be public. I don't care that some company might have scraped my public profile info through one of my friends installing an app; even though I only add in-person friends I'd still never presume anything visible to dozens of people wasn't publicly accessible to apps on the platform.
While I have a well thought out reason why it won't keep me off Facebook, I suspect an even larger contingent has that vague 'it's not really a secret anyway' attitude combined with the even bigger lack of direct consequences: What impact has this had on them that they can see? None. And not because they think just others were effected like your drug cut, but because even if their data was collected; so what?
Which if the US Gov't doesn't get back doors, will be the next big push "Protect America! Install this great piece of spyware, er security software!"
First, sex offenders will be required to install the software. The Supreme Court ruled you can't bar them from using Facebook et al., so we've somehow got to monitor that they're not on there grooming little kids for sex slavery (even if their conviction was for peeing on wall at 4AM). And nobody will oppose that, because you don't support pedophiles and child sex trafficking do you?
Next, it will become standard terms of probation/parole for all offenses. Nobody will care; those guys broke the law and took the deal right?
Then for all convicted felons. Then for those law enforcement or a court considers a threat but haven't been convicted of anything (if we can strip someones 2nd amendment rights in this situation surely installing some software isn't a problem right?). What makes someone such a threat will then just expand.
And the program is working so well, why not use it to make sure someone isn't using their phone while driving? Driving is a privilege after all, and they'll pinky swear they're not gathering content from drivers.
If you think any level of this slippery slope is unreasonable, you just haven't been paying attention. You have to stop rights from being lost up front, when they're being taken away from someone terrible, or when it's a right you don't like so don't care what end run is used to take it away (2A). It's always a one-way ratchet. More people need to stand up and protect our rights in the face of the awful people and events that are used to take them away.
The last mile is a natural monopoly, whether or not there's actual laws preventing other companies from putting up poles and wires. There's just no way there's ever going to be a free market on that. The only way you'd get good ISP competition is if the last mile was a public utility where any company could run service over the wires. And I say public utility, because even if we forced the current owners to open their lines, they'd find a way to keep competition down financially and degraded service if they still retained ownership.
Ah the classic 'there's no evidence against Trump, therefore no investigation to search for evidence should occur' argument.
And even if you think Trump's entire inner circle during the campaign isn't enough to look into whether Trump himself knew, interfering with an investigation is a crime by itself even if the underlying criminal action never took place.
Just stop lying dude, nobody who repeats Fox News talking points and refers to it as a 'witch hunt' is actually interested in anything other than a predetermined conclusion that Trump is innocent of everything, so unless there's solid proof of a crime, no such proof can be gathered. And just how many Republicans need to be involved with and supporting the investigation before it's no longer exclusively an operation of the Democrats? You're not fooling anyone, just own your bias, you don't care what Trump did you just want him cleared.
The author is singling out a particular sex and race. You're really going to try and tell me the implication isn't that programmers of other races use different training data and therefore don't have this problem? Again, there's plenty of non-white programmers, so why single out white men when there's no evidence their algorithms are more biased than those of others?