A LEO friend of mine once said, "It's not that we're that smart. It's that the criminals are mind-numbingly stupid."
Let's do a cost benefit analysis of an armed robbery, shall we? Expected haul: $30 to $200, per drawer. Possible sentence: 8 to 25 years (New York State), without counting time tacked on for additional charges (weapons possession, etc.) Possible complications: Running into an off-duty LEO, cashier that decides to resist, witnesses that decide to intervene, etc.....
Clearly a very smart decision. Here's hoping this nimrod didn't reproduce before he got caught, those genes don't deserve to be passed on to the next generation...
Personally, I'm for paradropping such people with basic supplies somewhere deep in the Northwest Territories far from anywhere, but I'm told that's inhumane.
1. Read/. story about any topic, doesn't have to be relevant to the NSA.
2. Make joke about the NSA.
3. +5 upmod, with an average of +3 funny, +1 insightful, and +1 underrated
Additionally, an eyewitness, Edwin Negron, testified regarding Davis’s conduct at Universal Beauty Salon and the adjacent Tae Kwon Do studio. He testified that Davis pointed a gun at his head, pushed a 77 year old woman and Negron’s wife to the ground, and took several items from Negron and others.
Another eyewitness, Antonio Brooks, testified that he confronted Davis and his accomplices outside the Wendy’s restaurant after that robbery and tried to write down the license plate of their getaway car. Brooks testified that Davis fired his gun at him, and that he returned fire towards the car.
I guess we can add attempted murder to his list of accomplishments.
There's no way to say whether or not he's a sociopath. You keep using that word.
Sociopath, noun: Someone who behaves in a dangerous or violent way towards other people and does not feel guilty about such behavior
There are many factors that could contribute to this, including abuse, poverty, drugs, etc.
Don't care. Seven different violent crimes. One or two, that don't end in death or serious injury? Fine, here's your shot at cleaning your act up. Seven? Lock him up and throw away the key.
I'd rather take the chance
Then go visit him in prison and be his friend. Don't volunteer to put me and mine in harms way because you feel guilty that society values innocent life more than it values the rights of a demonstrated sociopath.
Have the last word, I'm done tilting at this particular windmill.
But that's irrelevant, because we shouldn't be Tough On Crime to begin with
"Tough on crime" is a political slogan. I don't really care if we're "tough on crime", but I do think it's pretty absurd to give a demonstrated violent sociopath the benefit of the doubt, which is essentially what you're purposing. It's sheer dumb luck that he didn't kill anybody, but you think he should get more bites at the apple? After seven different violent crimes? No, I don't abide that line of reasoning. He doesn't get yet another chance to take someone's life away from them and their loved ones.
I don't think that someone should stay in prison forever just because they were idiots at some point in their life.
Sticking a firearm in someone's face on seven different occasions is a bit more serious than being an idiot at "some point" in your life. Do you have any comprehension of the fact that we're talking about someone who threatened to kill people if he didn't get what he wanted? And that he did it on at least seven different occasions? This isn't some stupid kid that took the neighbors car for a joyride. This is a violent sociopath who needs to be removed from society and put into a cage where he can't do any further damage.
Seven different armed robberies justifies the length of the sentence. That's seven separate violent acts, seven chances for some innocent working stiff to get shot over a lousy $100, if not less than that.
Just how many times do you think a person should get to stick a firearm in someone's face before they go away forever?
Davis was convicted of participating in a string of armed robberies in the Miami area in 2010. His accomplices testified against him, saying he carried a gun during their crimes and discharged it at a dog that chased them after one of their burglaries.
On Feb. 9 of this year he was convicted of committing seven armed robberies at fast-food restaurants, a Walgreens pharmacy and other commercial establishments in the Miami area from August to October of 2010.
So essentially, he decided to carry a deadly weapon, and stick said weapon in the face of some teenage cashier at Wendy's, so he could make off with the <$100 that was in the drawer at the time. And we're supposed to feel sorry for him? Here's two hints:
Don't commit felonies.
If you must break Rule #1, don't carry a damned firearm while doing so.
but if they use the tracking data to find it where you are, and then sent out some agents to see what you were up to, and found other incriminating evidence, they could present that evidence in court.
No they can't. Google fruit of the poisonous tree.
Sen John Tester (MT), Rep Heath Shuler (NC), Rep Dan Boren, Rep Mike Thompson.
Read Daily Kos sometime and try to advocate either position there. See how receptive the audience is. Oh, don't like the blogosphere? Fair enough. Explain to me why one of my United States Senators did a complete role reversal on gun rights after she got the seat, going from an A+ NRA rating to an F, voting against legislation as harmless as allowing firearms in checked baggage on trains. That would be Senator Gillibrand if you can't figure it out.
have advocated modest regulations.
Banning an entire class of firearms is not "modest regulation".
The purpose of NATO is "To keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out." Those were the words used by NATO's first Secretary General, so there you go. The rest of your post is an anti-American rant that only got a +5 because of the Iraq reference and use of the words "military-industrial complex". It was the EU that dragged the United States into Libya, and it was pressure from the EU that nearly dragged us into Syria. Our feckless President wanted nothing to do with either of those adventures. For once he was actually able to read the American electorate and knew exactly what they wanted. I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
It would have been very tough for him to pull off, especially after he let Team Obama spend months defining him as an out of touch rich asshole. I think it would have been a better way to lose though, at least he would have laid some useful groundwork for the GOP in 2016.
I don't know enough about the current crop of Tier 1 and Tier 2 candidates to say if there are any that meet the bill. I will concur with something Will said in an interview: No more United States Senators. We need someone who has actually run something next time.
Sure it is. It's just not one they can take credit for. This guy says it better than I did. FWIW I'm somewhat sympathetic to the Tea Party, except for a few minor gripes:
1) They keep blowing perfectly winnable elections, thus ensuring that we have a Democrat who votes with us 0% the time rather than a RINO who votes with us "only" 80% of the time.
2) They rally around idiots like Cliven Bundy, and seemingly have no problem with Americans aiming guns at other Americans over something as stupid as cattle grazing rights. Really, everything that's wrong with our country, and this is the issue they rally around? 200+ years of history as a Republic and there's only been one issue (slavery) that we couldn't resolve without reaching for the guns.... now they think we should reach for them over fucking cattle grazing?!?
3) They haven't produced a single Statesman, someone who is willing to compromise in order to tackle the big problems of the day. If the Tea Party had been at the Constitutional Convention we'd still be arguing over who was going to take the minutes of the first meeting. You think these clowns could have solved issues as divisive as how to fairly allocate representation, how to elect the POTUS, or (god help us) slavery?
Does the Libertarian party get to use the electorate?
They do in New York State, all they need to do is qualify for permanent ballot access, which is as simple as getting 50,000 votes for your candidate for Governor. There were 4.6 million votes cast in the last gubernatorial election, so this doesn't seem like an unreasonable hurdle to climb if you wish to have the taxpayers foot the bill for you going forward.
Of course, the Libertarians have never managed to do this in NYS. Other third parties do, easily in fact, but the Libertarians can never seem to meet the threshold. In 2010 they barely managed to beat this clown when the votes were tallied.
Romney hinted at this in one of the Presidential debates, with a line about too big to fail that was predictably ignored by the mainstream media. George Will picked up on it in one of his op-eds. Will has written extensively on the subject of crony capitalism, with a focus on the unholy alliance of business and regulators. Will speaks for the intellectual wing of the GOP, such as it is, so it's not as though they aren't aware of this problem.
Romney was probably the wrong person to try and make this argument, though it would have been refreshing to see him try. I can't recall him saying anything on the matter other than the throw away line about too big to fail, which is a pity, because it's an issue he could have made headway on.
and the anti-illegal-immigration feeling on the right is far stronger than the GOP seems to realize.
If you look at polling that sentiment is shared in the center and center-left. Opposition to immigration is one of the few truly bipartisan things in the American electorate. The political establishment doesn't acknowledge it because big business wants cheap labor and Democrats think Hispanics are always going to vote for them. You can see similar trends in any developed country, fly over to one of the better developed EU countries and ask John Q. Public how he really feels about immigration. It's not popular even when it comes from other EU members (migration from Eastern Europe into Western Europe or the Nordic States), and $deity help you if you're one of the poor bastards coming there from Africa or the Middle East.
Another issue with a broad consensus in the electorate that's soundly ignored by the political establishment is non-interventionism. People are sick of interventionism, be they left, right, or center. The establishment ignores the electorate on this issue because of a combination of perceived economic interest, bureaucratic inertia in the national security apparatus, and entangling alliances set up after WW2 specifically to prevent an American retrenchment.
Republican voting base has gone full bat shit, the party won't last much longer now.
The Tea Party may be trying to spin this into a "win" (since they've been soundly defeated elsewhere this primary season) but at the end of the day this really comes down to Politics 101. Mr. Cantor was more interested in running the House than he was in providing consistent services. Drill past the national media's obsession with the Tea Party and/or immigration for a moment and look at the local media in his district. Read some of the complaints about him that have nothing whatsoever to do with ideology. Then ask yourself how frequently incumbent Legislators manage to lose primary elections, particularly ones in a leadership role that give them all manner of opportunity to funnel pork (err, I mean "investment") to the folks back home.
All politics are local. The Tea Party didn't win this. Mr. Cantor lost it. The funny/sad (depends on your perspective I guess) thing is he probably didn't see it coming until the first returns started coming in. This is what happens when you've held elective office long enough to treat elections like mere formalities.
The crux of net neutrality is bits from different providers being given the same priority. Nobody is arguing that we can afford to drop some Bittorrent packets in exchange for VOIP / video streaming. What the cable companies want to do, however, is prioritise their video streaming, for example, over someone elses. That is the net neutrality issue.
There's plenty of people on "our" side of the issue that have co-opted NN to argue against anything and everything they don't like. NN has been twisted to include economic debates (like settlement free peering, see the ongoing Netflix spat) that really have nothing to do with Small Startup getting a fair shake from Big Fortune 100 ISP. There are also plenty of people with unrealistic expectations, like those that say QoS of any form is irrelevant, because networks should never be congested. They want 1:1 contention at residential pricing, and NN is the buzzword they're using to try and advance their cause.
In short, NN has been hijacked by people who don't know what they're talking about, or worse, people that do and should know better. Some have them have gone overboard to the point that I'm disinclined to support it, and I was one of the original advocates back in the day. The co-opt'ing of the cause by large and currently entrenched players (I'm looking at you Reed Hastings) doesn't help matters either.
if the choice is between a union that moves government money into the pockets of at least some citizens vs. a lobby group that moves government money into the pockets of the 0.01% then I'd rather have the former.
Counterpoint: Your hypothetical 0.01% don't have arrest powers.....
In America you have this issues with two main groups poisoning the culture - the gangs and the "don't tread on me" types.
Who are the "don't tread on me" types killing? Oh, that's right, nobody.
The problem is the criminal culture, which we could significantly hinder if we ended the absurdity known as the "War on Drugs". The War on Drugs provides all the profit incentive criminals need to heavily arm themselves, while simultaneously destroying our communities (thus increasing violence) and alienating the most vulnerable among us from the police (thus making it harder to catch and convict the people doing the killing).
It's disappointing that I've scrolled this far down into a conversation about the para-militarization of our police and not one person has mentioned the WoD. I love 2nd Amendment discussions, but this really has nothing to do with RKBA. It has everything to do with our misguided policy of prohibition. What happened the last time we tried it? Violent criminals with a profit motive and an arms race with the authorities. Hmm, didn't see that coming....
Verizon isn't the one asking Netflix to dispose of a massive amount of traffic. The longstanding model has been sender-pays. You have traffic that you need me to deliver, either to one of my customers or to another network that you can't directly reach? You pay me, or you take a similar amount of traffic off my hands and we call it a wash. That has been the model for peering agreements since the internet first went private. It's a network of networks, you can't reach everybody without relying one or more third parties, none of whom are obligated to work for free.
Reed Hastings wants to blow up the business model that built the internet and he's suckered people like you into becoming his advocates.
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A LEO friend of mine once said, "It's not that we're that smart. It's that the criminals are mind-numbingly stupid."
Let's do a cost benefit analysis of an armed robbery, shall we? Expected haul: $30 to $200, per drawer. Possible sentence: 8 to 25 years (New York State), without counting time tacked on for additional charges (weapons possession, etc.) Possible complications: Running into an off-duty LEO, cashier that decides to resist, witnesses that decide to intervene, etc.....
Clearly a very smart decision. Here's hoping this nimrod didn't reproduce before he got caught, those genes don't deserve to be passed on to the next generation...
If your a "criminal mastermind" you would think that turning off your phones mobile access might be step #1.
Criminal masterminds don't use handguns to hold up a Wendy's.
Personally, I'm for paradropping such people with basic supplies somewhere deep in the Northwest Territories far from anywhere, but I'm told that's inhumane.
It's called Australia. ;)
New Slashdot comment SOP:
1. Read /. story about any topic, doesn't have to be relevant to the NSA.
2. Make joke about the NSA.
3. +5 upmod, with an average of +3 funny, +1 insightful, and +1 underrated
P.S., Here's some light reading for you.
Additionally, an eyewitness, Edwin Negron, testified regarding Davis’s conduct at Universal Beauty Salon and the adjacent Tae Kwon Do studio. He testified that Davis pointed a gun at his head, pushed a 77 year old woman and Negron’s wife to the ground, and took several items from Negron and others.
Another eyewitness, Antonio Brooks, testified that he confronted Davis and his accomplices outside the Wendy’s restaurant after that robbery and tried to write down the license plate of their getaway car. Brooks testified that Davis fired his gun at him, and that he returned fire towards the car.
I guess we can add attempted murder to his list of accomplishments.
There's no way to say whether or not he's a sociopath. You keep using that word.
Sociopath, noun: Someone who behaves in a dangerous or violent way towards other people and does not feel guilty about such behavior
There are many factors that could contribute to this, including abuse, poverty, drugs, etc.
Don't care. Seven different violent crimes. One or two, that don't end in death or serious injury? Fine, here's your shot at cleaning your act up. Seven? Lock him up and throw away the key.
I'd rather take the chance
Then go visit him in prison and be his friend. Don't volunteer to put me and mine in harms way because you feel guilty that society values innocent life more than it values the rights of a demonstrated sociopath.
Have the last word, I'm done tilting at this particular windmill.
But that's irrelevant, because we shouldn't be Tough On Crime to begin with
"Tough on crime" is a political slogan. I don't really care if we're "tough on crime", but I do think it's pretty absurd to give a demonstrated violent sociopath the benefit of the doubt, which is essentially what you're purposing. It's sheer dumb luck that he didn't kill anybody, but you think he should get more bites at the apple? After seven different violent crimes? No, I don't abide that line of reasoning. He doesn't get yet another chance to take someone's life away from them and their loved ones.
I don't think that someone should stay in prison forever just because they were idiots at some point in their life.
Sticking a firearm in someone's face on seven different occasions is a bit more serious than being an idiot at "some point" in your life. Do you have any comprehension of the fact that we're talking about someone who threatened to kill people if he didn't get what he wanted? And that he did it on at least seven different occasions? This isn't some stupid kid that took the neighbors car for a joyride. This is a violent sociopath who needs to be removed from society and put into a cage where he can't do any further damage.
Seven different armed robberies justifies the length of the sentence. That's seven separate violent acts, seven chances for some innocent working stiff to get shot over a lousy $100, if not less than that.
Just how many times do you think a person should get to stick a firearm in someone's face before they go away forever?
Poor baby. I feel so sorry for him. Not.
Davis was convicted of participating in a string of armed robberies in the Miami area in 2010. His accomplices testified against him, saying he carried a gun during their crimes and discharged it at a dog that chased them after one of their burglaries.
On Feb. 9 of this year he was convicted of committing seven armed robberies at fast-food restaurants, a Walgreens pharmacy and other commercial establishments in the Miami area from August to October of 2010.
So essentially, he decided to carry a deadly weapon, and stick said weapon in the face of some teenage cashier at Wendy's, so he could make off with the <$100 that was in the drawer at the time. And we're supposed to feel sorry for him? Here's two hints:
but if they use the tracking data to find it where you are, and then sent out some agents to see what you were up to, and found other incriminating evidence, they could present that evidence in court.
No they can't. Google fruit of the poisonous tree.
Sen John Tester (MT), Rep Heath Shuler (NC), Rep Dan Boren, Rep Mike Thompson.
Read Daily Kos sometime and try to advocate either position there. See how receptive the audience is. Oh, don't like the blogosphere? Fair enough. Explain to me why one of my United States Senators did a complete role reversal on gun rights after she got the seat, going from an A+ NRA rating to an F, voting against legislation as harmless as allowing firearms in checked baggage on trains. That would be Senator Gillibrand if you can't figure it out.
have advocated modest regulations.
Banning an entire class of firearms is not "modest regulation".
There's nothing of that sort.
The purpose of NATO is "To keep the Americans in, the Germans down, and the Russians out." Those were the words used by NATO's first Secretary General, so there you go. The rest of your post is an anti-American rant that only got a +5 because of the Iraq reference and use of the words "military-industrial complex". It was the EU that dragged the United States into Libya, and it was pressure from the EU that nearly dragged us into Syria. Our feckless President wanted nothing to do with either of those adventures. For once he was actually able to read the American electorate and knew exactly what they wanted. I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The dems have decades of dealing with big tent
Too bad they're busy pouring gasoline on the big tent and lighting it on fire. Try being a pro-gun or pro-life Democrat these days....
It would have been very tough for him to pull off, especially after he let Team Obama spend months defining him as an out of touch rich asshole. I think it would have been a better way to lose though, at least he would have laid some useful groundwork for the GOP in 2016.
I don't know enough about the current crop of Tier 1 and Tier 2 candidates to say if there are any that meet the bill. I will concur with something Will said in an interview: No more United States Senators. We need someone who has actually run something next time.
Sure it is. It's just not one they can take credit for. This guy says it better than I did. FWIW I'm somewhat sympathetic to the Tea Party, except for a few minor gripes:
1) They keep blowing perfectly winnable elections, thus ensuring that we have a Democrat who votes with us 0% the time rather than a RINO who votes with us "only" 80% of the time.
2) They rally around idiots like Cliven Bundy, and seemingly have no problem with Americans aiming guns at other Americans over something as stupid as cattle grazing rights. Really, everything that's wrong with our country, and this is the issue they rally around? 200+ years of history as a Republic and there's only been one issue (slavery) that we couldn't resolve without reaching for the guns.... now they think we should reach for them over fucking cattle grazing?!?
3) They haven't produced a single Statesman, someone who is willing to compromise in order to tackle the big problems of the day. If the Tea Party had been at the Constitutional Convention we'd still be arguing over who was going to take the minutes of the first meeting. You think these clowns could have solved issues as divisive as how to fairly allocate representation, how to elect the POTUS, or (god help us) slavery?
Does the Libertarian party get to use the electorate?
They do in New York State, all they need to do is qualify for permanent ballot access, which is as simple as getting 50,000 votes for your candidate for Governor. There were 4.6 million votes cast in the last gubernatorial election, so this doesn't seem like an unreasonable hurdle to climb if you wish to have the taxpayers foot the bill for you going forward.
Of course, the Libertarians have never managed to do this in NYS. Other third parties do, easily in fact, but the Libertarians can never seem to meet the threshold. In 2010 they barely managed to beat this clown when the votes were tallied.
Romney hinted at this in one of the Presidential debates, with a line about too big to fail that was predictably ignored by the mainstream media. George Will picked up on it in one of his op-eds. Will has written extensively on the subject of crony capitalism, with a focus on the unholy alliance of business and regulators. Will speaks for the intellectual wing of the GOP, such as it is, so it's not as though they aren't aware of this problem.
Romney was probably the wrong person to try and make this argument, though it would have been refreshing to see him try. I can't recall him saying anything on the matter other than the throw away line about too big to fail, which is a pity, because it's an issue he could have made headway on.
and the anti-illegal-immigration feeling on the right is far stronger than the GOP seems to realize.
If you look at polling that sentiment is shared in the center and center-left. Opposition to immigration is one of the few truly bipartisan things in the American electorate. The political establishment doesn't acknowledge it because big business wants cheap labor and Democrats think Hispanics are always going to vote for them. You can see similar trends in any developed country, fly over to one of the better developed EU countries and ask John Q. Public how he really feels about immigration. It's not popular even when it comes from other EU members (migration from Eastern Europe into Western Europe or the Nordic States), and $deity help you if you're one of the poor bastards coming there from Africa or the Middle East.
Another issue with a broad consensus in the electorate that's soundly ignored by the political establishment is non-interventionism. People are sick of interventionism, be they left, right, or center. The establishment ignores the electorate on this issue because of a combination of perceived economic interest, bureaucratic inertia in the national security apparatus, and entangling alliances set up after WW2 specifically to prevent an American retrenchment.
Republican voting base has gone full bat shit, the party won't last much longer now.
The Tea Party may be trying to spin this into a "win" (since they've been soundly defeated elsewhere this primary season) but at the end of the day this really comes down to Politics 101. Mr. Cantor was more interested in running the House than he was in providing consistent services. Drill past the national media's obsession with the Tea Party and/or immigration for a moment and look at the local media in his district. Read some of the complaints about him that have nothing whatsoever to do with ideology. Then ask yourself how frequently incumbent Legislators manage to lose primary elections, particularly ones in a leadership role that give them all manner of opportunity to funnel pork (err, I mean "investment") to the folks back home.
All politics are local. The Tea Party didn't win this. Mr. Cantor lost it. The funny/sad (depends on your perspective I guess) thing is he probably didn't see it coming until the first returns started coming in. This is what happens when you've held elective office long enough to treat elections like mere formalities.
The crux of net neutrality is bits from different providers being given the same priority. Nobody is arguing that we can afford to drop some Bittorrent packets in exchange for VOIP / video streaming. What the cable companies want to do, however, is prioritise their video streaming, for example, over someone elses. That is the net neutrality issue.
There's plenty of people on "our" side of the issue that have co-opted NN to argue against anything and everything they don't like. NN has been twisted to include economic debates (like settlement free peering, see the ongoing Netflix spat) that really have nothing to do with Small Startup getting a fair shake from Big Fortune 100 ISP. There are also plenty of people with unrealistic expectations, like those that say QoS of any form is irrelevant, because networks should never be congested. They want 1:1 contention at residential pricing, and NN is the buzzword they're using to try and advance their cause.
In short, NN has been hijacked by people who don't know what they're talking about, or worse, people that do and should know better. Some have them have gone overboard to the point that I'm disinclined to support it, and I was one of the original advocates back in the day. The co-opt'ing of the cause by large and currently entrenched players (I'm looking at you Reed Hastings) doesn't help matters either.
if the choice is between a union that moves government money into the pockets of at least some citizens vs. a lobby group that moves government money into the pockets of the 0.01% then I'd rather have the former.
Counterpoint: Your hypothetical 0.01% don't have arrest powers.....
but handguns in particular have no use or purpose in a civilized country.
Self-defense.
In America you have this issues with two main groups poisoning the culture - the gangs and the "don't tread on me" types.
Who are the "don't tread on me" types killing? Oh, that's right, nobody.
The problem is the criminal culture, which we could significantly hinder if we ended the absurdity known as the "War on Drugs". The War on Drugs provides all the profit incentive criminals need to heavily arm themselves, while simultaneously destroying our communities (thus increasing violence) and alienating the most vulnerable among us from the police (thus making it harder to catch and convict the people doing the killing).
It's disappointing that I've scrolled this far down into a conversation about the para-militarization of our police and not one person has mentioned the WoD. I love 2nd Amendment discussions, but this really has nothing to do with RKBA. It has everything to do with our misguided policy of prohibition. What happened the last time we tried it? Violent criminals with a profit motive and an arms race with the authorities. Hmm, didn't see that coming....
Verizon does not offer balanced traffic ratios.
Verizon isn't the one asking Netflix to dispose of a massive amount of traffic. The longstanding model has been sender-pays. You have traffic that you need me to deliver, either to one of my customers or to another network that you can't directly reach? You pay me, or you take a similar amount of traffic off my hands and we call it a wash. That has been the model for peering agreements since the internet first went private. It's a network of networks, you can't reach everybody without relying one or more third parties, none of whom are obligated to work for free.
Reed Hastings wants to blow up the business model that built the internet and he's suckered people like you into becoming his advocates.