Maybe we should be looking into fixing our legal system so that junk science isn't counted as evidence. Legal proceedings are handled in a workman-like manner. Ever had a roof built and signed a contract stating that all work shall be done in a workman-like manner? That clause means that if everyone in the industry does it WRONG, that's the way it's done.
In Texas, a man was executed for burning his house down with his wife and kids in it. They said he was satanic because he had an Iron Maiden poster in his bedroom. They used some forensic evidence about how burn patterns show accelerants were used and the fire was started in the children's room. Well, an expert in pyrophisics whatever fireology crap, dude who studied fires all his life and how they burn, he looked at the case several years later and shit a brick--because EVERY CLAIM THEY MADE WAS FUNDAMENTALLY INCORRECT. And this is standard arson forensics. It directly contradicts science. We think we may have executed an innocent man--he may have been guilty as sin, but we now aren't so sure we actually know that--because the evidence we used to determine that he was a murderer and an arsonist was a bunch of factually incorrect pseudo-scientific bullshit.
And we still use those same techniques to study arson cases and convict people.
Our legal system is broken. Fix it. Don't tell me locking a bunch of motherfuckers up doesn't hurt them because we're not executing them. Stop locking innocent motherfuckers up.
Has it ever occurred to you that I don't keep a mountain of references for every little study I've seen in a book, in a library, on the odd web site, etc.? Maybe I should start running to Wikipedia and adding citations for facts not readily available from there so I can use them in debate.
The stock answer for "I didn't know that" is "you're making that up." Like how "Natural flavor" is the secretion from a raccoon's anal glands. People are like, "You're making that up, that's not true." This was even lamp shaded in an early episode of Red vs Blue, where Grif explains to Sarge that there's a big cat called a puma. "... You're makin' that up." "I'M TELLING YOU, IT'S A REAL ANIMAL!"
There are multiple studies showing that murder rates in states without capital punishment are lower than murder rates in states with capital punishment. These studies attempt to argue that capital punishment increases murder rates, i.e. arguing a causal relationship flowing from state executions to violent crime, rather than flowing from violent crime to state execution. But these studies don't adequately compare similar socio-economic environments; to do that, you must show a state that has abolished the death penalty, and the immediate effects in the next 2-4 years. Even that may not be enough, as social and economic factors change rather quickly in many places.
Then you have graphs like this, but with the long time scale and confounding factors the data is vulnerable to Simpson's Paradox and so this graph is somewhat misleading (false evidence does not support my argument because it can be dispelled).
Then there's scientific studies, showing that i.e. Rhode Island has abolished the death penalty twice, and always reinstated it because the murder rate immediately increased. The murder rate, of course, immediately decreased after reinstatement. Which was my original argument--citation granted. This one's actually legitimate and carries weight.
So again: if the socio-economic environment is such that the death penalty is the primary deterrent, then the death penalty is a deterrent. If the socio-economic environment is such that the death penalty is not the primary deterrent--that is, if capital crimes carry an inherent risk of fatality so high as to make state executions a significantly minor proportion of actual deaths experienced by criminals as consequence for their crimes--then it is insignificant and does not act as a deterrent. Apparently at the time Rhode Island attempted to abolish the death penalty people were more likely to die by state execution than by bullet-to-the-face while committing crimes that would get them executed.
Death penalty works as a deterrent. It doesn't work as a deterrent if other deterrents are stronger: if robbing a house or dealing drugs is likely to end in fatalities 99% caused by the commission of the crime (i.e. homeowner with a shotgun, bad drug deal ending in savage beating to death, etc) and 1% caused by state execution, state execution has little deterrent force. If the state manages to execute you, it means you survived.
There have been many cases where stripping the death penalty has caused no change in criminal activity. There have also been many cases where stripping the death penalty has caused double or quadruple increases in homicide, and reinstating it has caused the homicide rate to return to normal over a few years' time.
That we have trouble with mental illness and situational behavior is a wholly different matter.
Mental illness is a judgment call. That a society considers itself civilized for not weeding out the bad ones because they're bad due to a classified behavioral disease rather than an unclassified one defies examination. Is there not something mentally wrong with any man who commits murder or rape? Why should we jail a person who has sex with an 11 year old, when clearly there is something psychologically wrong with them and they should be given treatment? On the other hand: why don't we execute crazy people who go on murder sprees anyway, considering that THEY ARE MURDERERS and they are not innocent just because they hear voices or cannot understand that killing people who annoy them is somehow wrong or even that it carries consequences? What places them above their crimes, and what advantage does society gain from keeping them alive?
Desperation and passion are the same thing at different timescales. Desperation is what happens when a situation continues to get worse, causing a slow slide in mental stability. Passion is when an emotional reaction immediately causes and perhaps sustains the same state. Crimes of desperation occur because society cannot support everyone, and so some people wind up in situations they cannot handle; this exceeds welfare, as someone may become desperate over a romantic interest they can't attract, and of course humans have this foolish idea that the only reason a person isn't attracted to them is because they're attracted to someone else (i.e. if her boyfriend was out of the picture, she'd fall into your arms, right?).
Deterrents do work for both of these. Looming negative consequences stretch peoples' tolerances, especially in desperate situations. This is why people shoplift food when they can't afford rent, rather than robbing a bank so they can pay their landlord and not wind up living in a trash can. Crimes of passion, likewise, need to override the same facts encoded in the basal ganglia: the brain has to overcome the conditioned belief that taking an action will have worse consequences than living with the situation that the action is intended to resolve.
For example: you are annoying, and murdering you would be great because then I wouldn't have to deal with you anymore; but it would also cause great emotional pain due to remorse, and besides would bring the police to my door and much unpleasantness would follow. These things are worse than listening to you yammer; and at the precise point where the internals of my brain decide that listening to you yammer is worse than remorse and prison and possible execution, I'll probably kill you.
Four monkeys go in a cage. A banana is placed. Whenever a monkey tries to get the banana, they are all hosed. Eventually they start beating any monkey trying to get the banana.
One monkey is replaced. Whenever it tries to get the banana, the other three beat it.
This is repeated until no monkeys in the cage have experienced the hose. At this point, any monkey attempting to reach the banana is beaten savagely be the others.
These monkeys have been repeatedly punished for attempting to obtain a banana. The punishment has been cold-water and beatings. This has successfully fixed a behavior in society, such that society itself perpetuates the new behavior without external influence.
Many experiments have been performed on humans and animals. It has fallen out of favor to experiment on humans in this way; there will be no more Little Alberts to deal with. But yes, the large body of scientific evidence shows that punishment is highly effective as a deterrent, both to the individual and to the group as a whole who quickly note that they shouldn't do that shit if they don't want to get beat like Mikey over there.
Killing a person whose life has been run through already, who has obtained all the wealth and power and emotional comfort and who has provided all of their economic output, is a minor operation. An old, retired man who is going to be dead in 4 years loses 4 years of being an old, retired man if you kill him.
Take someone at a critical age--18, 22, 25 maybe--and put them in prison for 4 years. The rest of their life is a mess. Through hard work and dedication, they can get back on track--and always be behind. Far behind. First off, these people are established when you start: they either live on their parents' money, some kind of loan, or an existing salary. When you take them away from that, you disconnect them from their ability to thrive; they're dumped back onto the street with a huge gap to fill. Instead of showing an employer that they've been working, learning, growing for the past 4 years, they need to show an employer that it would somehow be better to hire an ex-con with no resources, possibly one who is living on the street or in a shelter, who is four years behind the field at least and who is out of practice and does not have appropriate experience.
The dating pool is smaller here. You could get some ghetto relationships with druggies, homeless people, or whatnot; a small proportion of these are worthwhile, but the ones whose attention you can attract when you're well-established lower-middle-class carry proportionally more quality mating and child rearing prospects. It's likely that your judgment of what is 'worthwhile' depends on where you want to put yourself: if you're content to scrape by and be a ghetto rat, ghetto rats will appeal to you; if you want to get back to the middle class and have a traditional family where you carry a lot of personal responsibility for the welfare of your spouse, children, and neighbors, then you'll only be interested in people who find these things important as well. Those people... will probably look down on you until you can establish yourself in society again, since most people at your class level are not worthwhile and it's a waste of resources to try to sort out the gems from the silt.
So from one end: it takes much more time and economic investment to get to the same career position after exiting prison. From the other end: it takes much more time and economic investment to get to the same personal life position after exiting prison. Prison is a life-destroying event.
But jail time is harmful to society. A person who can function as a productive member of society improves the economy by providing labor, whereas jailing them removes that economic benefit and incurs a cost. It is costly for society to put me in jail.
Science has proven that negative re-enforcement does indeed work. A huge amount of behavioral study utilizes negative re-enforcement in the form of burns or electrical shocks to train behavior. Some behavioral studies--the infamous monkey experiment--have revolved around the application of cold water and severe mob beatings, and have shown that both are sufficient to train a small society to forgo food.
it might be best for society as a whole to keep them isolated from society for the rest of their life.
There are two ways to execute a man.
First, you may lock him away from society. Feed him, bathe him, provide him exercise. Nothing else. His life has ended, and the body dies slowly over a period of decades. In this form, the body can be retrieved; however the life is destroyed, and re-integration provides a dysfunctional automaton which can only accomplish most life functions by major deviance.
The generally regarded theoretical justification for criminalization is:
1. Segregation of harmful individuals from the balance of society (aka specific deterrence); and
2. A warning to others to not commit crimes (aka general deterrence).
In other words, the point of the criminal system is on the prevention of future crimes. The only purpose of these drugs consistent with our theory of the criminal system would be if there were some repair happening in the brains of those taking the drugs, but it is apparent from the article that thought has not entered into the minds of the authors.
I dunno. Warning others that they'll be locked in a cage for a thousand years seems to fit with (2).
The problem with civilized society is they tend to sacrifice innocent life faster than sacrificing their ideals.
In some areas, execution does not deter murder: it has almost zero impact in either Texas (every law-abiding citizen has guns and no trouble shooting you if you threaten them physically) or Baltimore (criminals have guns and engage in criminal acts likely to get them killed). In some of the more liberal northern states, they've found up to a quadrupling of homicide just two years after banning the death penalty; those states have tended to roll back those decisions. This is because the primary deterrent in those states is execution; the primary deterrent in other states is that you will probably get shot in the face for what you're doing well before the state has a chance to execute you.
Peoples' high ideals claim that civilized society does not execute its criminals. In the most civilized societies, these criminals are largely deterred by execution as punishment for certain high crimes such as murder. Given the statistic that 1 in 100 of the executed are innocent, but that excising the death penalty will create more murder in equivalent to 15 innocents lost per 100 executions stayed, many who consider themselves enlightened will chose to save the 1 innocent and condemn the 15 other innocents to protect their conscience: leaving a man behind to die is not the same as murdering him by your own hand.
The rational often reject civilized society and look for stricture and rules to support optimal function. The rational also function with limited information, and make their own mistakes: some decide that absolute control is better, because they have no concept of how probability, chaos theory, and black swans work, nor have they realized the importance of a society supporting a certain level of petty crime.
I question the ethics of actual jail time. Putting someone in prison is worse than killing an old person: the earlier parts of your life are critical. What happens when a 25 year old goes to prison for 4 years? They may lose their major opportunities to develop a career, settle into a good relationship, raise a family, etc. Their career skills are out of date, they have criminal records, their dating pools in age range shrink and they need to aim at old cougars or flighty college girls who are just looking for older men to hook up with.
We currently take petty criminals in poor neighborhoods, put them in jail for 60 days, they get out, 2 months behind on rent, fired from their job for not coming to work for 8 weeks, incapable of feeding their kids, and they wind up homeless. Now what? Best course of action is to become a drug dealer.
You stole a candy bar. Caning, 10 lashes. Then you go home.
Justice IS vengeance. Let's say I rape and murder your wife, and the cops catch me 6 months later, and I'm like... really sorry I did it. The lifestyle of brutalizing people in that way is just not for me, it's left terrible emotional scars, I've since found Buddha.
That's a communications issue. Communications face noise from everything imaginable: poor understanding of specific vocabulary, implied meanings based on local (down to sub-city) culture, misalignment of context (person A is thinking in one POV and person B is thinking in another, so the words being said have a completely different meaning), and so on. Communicating effectively is a lot more complex than "use good grammar and speak clearly".
Project managers have banked on technical skills for a long time: the production of work breakdown structures, requirements documentation, and requirements traceability matrixes for scope management; risk breakdown structures, schedules, communications plans; charters to ensure authority; and so on. It's recently become apparent that what we need are people skills: negotiation, diplomacy, stakeholder management, and actual communications skills instead of communications management plans. All of these issues you mention stem from poor people skills.
The reason this happened is simple: soft skills are intangible. Pick up a book on soft skills. Your first reaction will probably be to ridicule it for being a book about obvious things that everyone knows, or just full of pointless fluff with no meaning. Even if it's a really good book full of useful information, most people react this way. Why? Because soft skills are a really open field, and can't be nailed down like hard skills.
Hard skills are immediately rational: if I show you how to create classes in Python, you can apply that with predictable results. Soft skills are not rational: if I explain to you concepts like communications channels (verbal, vocal, non-vocal), business acumen, situational awareness, and diplomacy, you'll recognize most of it but see no actual useful processes in there. People gravitate toward rational hard skills, and away from soft skills that can't be readily forced into a repeatable cause-effect framework. People unlike Kevin Mitnick.
And so here we are: crap situations where nobody communicates well and nobody can actually get a project running. Without stakeholder management, demanding people demand attention: they're noisy, so they get resources, and their unimportant shit gets done instead of important project shit. Without diplomacy and vague concepts like awareness, you can neither control these people nor predict when they'll show up and what they'll want--or worse, how some idiot filing clerk can somehow impact your huge IT project even though he has no organizational power. But all the technical plans say the project was managed correctly--how did it fail?
This targets specific insects, and has no feeding requirements. Birds which are fed enough millet won't bother insects; birds which are underfed will consume the population wholesale and then starve off, limiting effectiveness. Getting birds to control the insect population is difficult.
Bug zappers may kill 2000 insects, with a dozen being biting insects and the rest being beneficial insects like ladybugs and dragonflies. The same goes for birds. This technology attempts to blacklist mosquitoes, leaving other insects alive.
Right, that's comparative advantage, and is a way to generate wealth: you take the things you aren't good at (expensive for you to do) and you let someone else who can do them more efficiently do them (less expensive for them). Less total resources (what a grammar construct...) are spent in this way to produce the same output, so more total wealth exists.
I always use the example of taking an action which creates output greater than its input. People confuse this with profiteering: if you spend $8 on wood and $6 on metal and $4 in labor and make a birdhouse, that birdhouse has a value of $18. If you sell that for $20, you profiteer $2 by transferring wealth to yourself from another person. That's not wealth generation, it's only wealth transfer; however, it does utilize comparative advantage, and so the establishment of businesses which can provide high-quality birdhouses cheaper than individuals can produce them themselves (including the cost of the individual's labor--often overlooked) does itself generate wealth.
In the same way, basic public health care generates wealth: the establishment of an effective policy to provide free clinical care has an associated and rather high cost, but it has an exceedingly high economic return due to the large gains in public health that come from free STD testing, vaccination, minor wound treatment (infections, sprains, etc.), and so on. Mishandling these plans diminishes or inverts that: public health care can be an economic drain, causing more total death and suffering than even America's broken private system. Further, as public health policies become more comprehensive--as they cover more health conditions--it becomes more difficult to implement economically positive plans.
Most fully-comprehensive public health policies have glaring flaws at the upper end: long waiting lists for "not fatal now, could become fatal later" diseases, i.e. the cancer won't kill you for 6 months, so we'll schedule surgery in 4 months... oh, the cancer has progressed faster than expected. Private health care policies often do this as well, but less often: more capital availability makes more health resources (doctors) available. Canada handles this simply: they use a single-payer system, but also everyone gets private insurance from their employer just like in America. Canadians use said private insurance when the public system becomes inadequate, bypassing its flaws without exposing themselves to the whole surface of flaws that a private system could develop.
This is the same standard of wealth generation as, for example, iTunes. Before iTunes, there was a murky world of mp3.com, portable MP3 players, and CDs. iTunes was really the first widely accepted method of purchasing music online. This meant that people could purchase individual songs for a dollar or two rather than spending $15 on CD; and that distribution became much less resource intensive; and that people didn't need to wait for shipping or go to the store to actually get music. This freed up a lot of capital and labor: less fuel, shipping resources (trucks, fuel, highway capacity, air traffic capacity), physical capital (CDs, machinery), and labor (time spent operating and maintaining machines to press all these CDs). In exchange, consumers got more fine-grained purchasing power and even a steep discount on whole albums (50%-ish, $8 albums instead of $15), as well as shipping times measured in seconds.
A zero-sum game doesn't mean everyone is better off not playing; it means what goes in comes back out. Poker is zero-sum: the five of you put $10 in the pot, and someone comes out $40 richer while four of you come out $10 poorer. The stock market is another one: securities are arbitraged, and the fact that there are 100 million shares of AAPL at $400 doesn't mean you can actually sell all 100 million shares of AAPL for $400 each--large liquidations always push the spot price down.
It takes a rather long explanation to illustrate why this is; the short of it is the
Okay, you are ignorant of any understanding of economics. Simple as that.
You can have no money and have vastly more wealth than someone with $50,000 in the bank. The man with cash in the bank may have more stress due to more labor required to keep up with the demands of life--that $50,000 is a buffer, a hedge against disruption for his fragile system of debts he must continue to pay from commissions on sales which are dodgy. Meanwhile your debts are paid, so you have all of these assets and plenty of free human labor time.
Society--large economic systems--operates primarily on scarcity. This isn't a strategy so much as a status: there is more demand than supply in general, particularly in energy and thus in things that require energy to produce. Exchanging things around creates no wealth; rather it moves wealth around, and potentially destroys wealth in the process of transfer. Creating a way to acquire more of a thing without expending so much resource--so much energy, so much raw material, so much human labor--creates wealth in society and reduces scarcity.
Running a farm does not create wealth. Society has 10,000 people and has the capacity to produce food for 10,000 people. You work on a farm, produce food, and get paid for your work. That's not wealth generation. You work on a farm, create a farming method so that you can produce the same amount of food for less human time and raw material investment, and now have capacity to feed 20,000 people, you have now generated wealth. You may sell more and invest less and gain personal wealth, but society also comes out with more than it started: more food, more capacity to produce food, more capacity to support humans, more human labor available (especially after creating more humans, who can now be fed, IF you can support all their other needs).
Selling something that costs $250 to produce for $500 does not generate wealth; it instead transfers a thing worth $250 to someone who is willing to part with twice its value in order to obtain it. This may be because they can use it to derive more wealth than that from some other source: they may be able to make the next person three times as poor by using your $250 gizmo, and so paying you $500 still lets them extract $750 and come out $250 ahead. Nothing of value is created, but money is siphoned and concentrated, and with it economic freedom and the ability to acquire assets--wealth.
You assume that by someone generating an income, they are creating wealth. The problem with this assumption is income is complex: it comes exclusively from other people losing exactly as much money, and so is zero-sum. It's all the other assets and all the other effects that you must examine.
Of course it'll get a Nobel Prize. You get a Nobel Prize for anything these days. Vladimir Putin has a Nobel Prize for having contributed so much shirtless Russian pictures to Google.
That's silly. Everyone knows the universe was danced into existence by Shiva, the Lord of the Dance. You cannot deny the power of dance. Lose yourself to dance.
Also, Warren Buffet hoarding his money is destroying wealth. He's concentrating $1000 from society into $900 in his pocket and $100 destroyed. Paris Hilton's lavish spending is more healthy for the economy and is not consuming wealth, but rather redistributing it. This does consume resources, because she consumes things; but it also increases the economic flexibility of society.
By contrast, the poor overspending decreases the opportunities for new business ventures to produce new goods and services which may be of interest to the poor: the poor have less money, thus they are not really a target market. When this effect spreads across the middle class, you no longer have business opportunities: nobody can buy into new consumer goods, thus new ventures are doomed to failure. The economy stagnates.
The rich spending within their means can spend quite a lot. The middle class can spend less, and the poor can spend even less. A certain amount of spending is healthy for the individual and the economy; excess of that is unhealthy.
Your economic theory is completely backwards. Please stand on your head.
Okay so if I get taxed 10% of my $50,000 salary, I pay $5000 in taxes.
If there's a 10% sales tax on consumption, then when I buy a bunch of shit, I pay $5000 in taxes.
Income is not wealth because money is not wealth. Wealth is the ability of labor to produce goods. If you have a $500 widget and I give you $500 for the widget, no wealth is created. If, instead, you create a $500 widget that allows you to create other $500 widgets but only invest $250, society is now more wealthy: 100 employed people creating widgets become 50 employed people creating widgets and 50 unemployed people who can now be employed to create samoflanges. These people are specifically inconvenienced by a round of layoffs, but in the end we all can spend half our money on widgets instead of all of our money on widgets, and we can spend the other half buying samoflanges.
That's wealth. Society is wealthy because the scarcity of widgets is now half, and the effort--the cost--to create widgets is now half, and the surplus available can now support the creation of samoflanges.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe we should be looking into fixing our legal system so that junk science isn't counted as evidence. Legal proceedings are handled in a workman-like manner. Ever had a roof built and signed a contract stating that all work shall be done in a workman-like manner? That clause means that if everyone in the industry does it WRONG, that's the way it's done.
In Texas, a man was executed for burning his house down with his wife and kids in it. They said he was satanic because he had an Iron Maiden poster in his bedroom. They used some forensic evidence about how burn patterns show accelerants were used and the fire was started in the children's room. Well, an expert in pyrophisics whatever fireology crap, dude who studied fires all his life and how they burn, he looked at the case several years later and shit a brick--because EVERY CLAIM THEY MADE WAS FUNDAMENTALLY INCORRECT. And this is standard arson forensics. It directly contradicts science. We think we may have executed an innocent man--he may have been guilty as sin, but we now aren't so sure we actually know that--because the evidence we used to determine that he was a murderer and an arsonist was a bunch of factually incorrect pseudo-scientific bullshit.
And we still use those same techniques to study arson cases and convict people.
Our legal system is broken. Fix it. Don't tell me locking a bunch of motherfuckers up doesn't hurt them because we're not executing them. Stop locking innocent motherfuckers up.
Has it ever occurred to you that I don't keep a mountain of references for every little study I've seen in a book, in a library, on the odd web site, etc.? Maybe I should start running to Wikipedia and adding citations for facts not readily available from there so I can use them in debate.
The stock answer for "I didn't know that" is "you're making that up." Like how "Natural flavor" is the secretion from a raccoon's anal glands. People are like, "You're making that up, that's not true." This was even lamp shaded in an early episode of Red vs Blue, where Grif explains to Sarge that there's a big cat called a puma. "... You're makin' that up." "I'M TELLING YOU, IT'S A REAL ANIMAL!"
There are multiple studies showing that murder rates in states without capital punishment are lower than murder rates in states with capital punishment. These studies attempt to argue that capital punishment increases murder rates, i.e. arguing a causal relationship flowing from state executions to violent crime, rather than flowing from violent crime to state execution. But these studies don't adequately compare similar socio-economic environments; to do that, you must show a state that has abolished the death penalty, and the immediate effects in the next 2-4 years. Even that may not be enough, as social and economic factors change rather quickly in many places.
Then you have graphs like this, but with the long time scale and confounding factors the data is vulnerable to Simpson's Paradox and so this graph is somewhat misleading (false evidence does not support my argument because it can be dispelled).
Then there's scientific studies, showing that i.e. Rhode Island has abolished the death penalty twice, and always reinstated it because the murder rate immediately increased. The murder rate, of course, immediately decreased after reinstatement. Which was my original argument--citation granted. This one's actually legitimate and carries weight.
So again: if the socio-economic environment is such that the death penalty is the primary deterrent, then the death penalty is a deterrent. If the socio-economic environment is such that the death penalty is not the primary deterrent--that is, if capital crimes carry an inherent risk of fatality so high as to make state executions a significantly minor proportion of actual deaths experienced by criminals as consequence for their crimes--then it is insignificant and does not act as a deterrent. Apparently at the time Rhode Island attempted to abolish the death penalty people were more likely to die by state execution than by bullet-to-the-face while committing crimes that would get them executed.
Death penalty works as a deterrent. It doesn't work as a deterrent if other deterrents are stronger: if robbing a house or dealing drugs is likely to end in fatalities 99% caused by the commission of the crime (i.e. homeowner with a shotgun, bad drug deal ending in savage beating to death, etc) and 1% caused by state execution, state execution has little deterrent force. If the state manages to execute you, it means you survived.
There have been many cases where stripping the death penalty has caused no change in criminal activity. There have also been many cases where stripping the death penalty has caused double or quadruple increases in homicide, and reinstating it has caused the homicide rate to return to normal over a few years' time.
That we have trouble with mental illness and situational behavior is a wholly different matter.
Mental illness is a judgment call. That a society considers itself civilized for not weeding out the bad ones because they're bad due to a classified behavioral disease rather than an unclassified one defies examination. Is there not something mentally wrong with any man who commits murder or rape? Why should we jail a person who has sex with an 11 year old, when clearly there is something psychologically wrong with them and they should be given treatment? On the other hand: why don't we execute crazy people who go on murder sprees anyway, considering that THEY ARE MURDERERS and they are not innocent just because they hear voices or cannot understand that killing people who annoy them is somehow wrong or even that it carries consequences? What places them above their crimes, and what advantage does society gain from keeping them alive?
Desperation and passion are the same thing at different timescales. Desperation is what happens when a situation continues to get worse, causing a slow slide in mental stability. Passion is when an emotional reaction immediately causes and perhaps sustains the same state. Crimes of desperation occur because society cannot support everyone, and so some people wind up in situations they cannot handle; this exceeds welfare, as someone may become desperate over a romantic interest they can't attract, and of course humans have this foolish idea that the only reason a person isn't attracted to them is because they're attracted to someone else (i.e. if her boyfriend was out of the picture, she'd fall into your arms, right?).
Deterrents do work for both of these. Looming negative consequences stretch peoples' tolerances, especially in desperate situations. This is why people shoplift food when they can't afford rent, rather than robbing a bank so they can pay their landlord and not wind up living in a trash can. Crimes of passion, likewise, need to override the same facts encoded in the basal ganglia: the brain has to overcome the conditioned belief that taking an action will have worse consequences than living with the situation that the action is intended to resolve.
For example: you are annoying, and murdering you would be great because then I wouldn't have to deal with you anymore; but it would also cause great emotional pain due to remorse, and besides would bring the police to my door and much unpleasantness would follow. These things are worse than listening to you yammer; and at the precise point where the internals of my brain decide that listening to you yammer is worse than remorse and prison and possible execution, I'll probably kill you.
A little neurology for you.
Four monkeys go in a cage. A banana is placed. Whenever a monkey tries to get the banana, they are all hosed. Eventually they start beating any monkey trying to get the banana.
One monkey is replaced. Whenever it tries to get the banana, the other three beat it.
This is repeated until no monkeys in the cage have experienced the hose. At this point, any monkey attempting to reach the banana is beaten savagely be the others.
These monkeys have been repeatedly punished for attempting to obtain a banana. The punishment has been cold-water and beatings. This has successfully fixed a behavior in society, such that society itself perpetuates the new behavior without external influence.
Many experiments have been performed on humans and animals. It has fallen out of favor to experiment on humans in this way; there will be no more Little Alberts to deal with. But yes, the large body of scientific evidence shows that punishment is highly effective as a deterrent, both to the individual and to the group as a whole who quickly note that they shouldn't do that shit if they don't want to get beat like Mikey over there.
Killing a person whose life has been run through already, who has obtained all the wealth and power and emotional comfort and who has provided all of their economic output, is a minor operation. An old, retired man who is going to be dead in 4 years loses 4 years of being an old, retired man if you kill him.
Take someone at a critical age--18, 22, 25 maybe--and put them in prison for 4 years. The rest of their life is a mess. Through hard work and dedication, they can get back on track--and always be behind. Far behind. First off, these people are established when you start: they either live on their parents' money, some kind of loan, or an existing salary. When you take them away from that, you disconnect them from their ability to thrive; they're dumped back onto the street with a huge gap to fill. Instead of showing an employer that they've been working, learning, growing for the past 4 years, they need to show an employer that it would somehow be better to hire an ex-con with no resources, possibly one who is living on the street or in a shelter, who is four years behind the field at least and who is out of practice and does not have appropriate experience.
The dating pool is smaller here. You could get some ghetto relationships with druggies, homeless people, or whatnot; a small proportion of these are worthwhile, but the ones whose attention you can attract when you're well-established lower-middle-class carry proportionally more quality mating and child rearing prospects. It's likely that your judgment of what is 'worthwhile' depends on where you want to put yourself: if you're content to scrape by and be a ghetto rat, ghetto rats will appeal to you; if you want to get back to the middle class and have a traditional family where you carry a lot of personal responsibility for the welfare of your spouse, children, and neighbors, then you'll only be interested in people who find these things important as well. Those people... will probably look down on you until you can establish yourself in society again, since most people at your class level are not worthwhile and it's a waste of resources to try to sort out the gems from the silt.
So from one end: it takes much more time and economic investment to get to the same career position after exiting prison. From the other end: it takes much more time and economic investment to get to the same personal life position after exiting prison. Prison is a life-destroying event.
Stoning is execution. You throw rocks until someone dies. Beatings are inflicted pain.
But jail time is harmful to society. A person who can function as a productive member of society improves the economy by providing labor, whereas jailing them removes that economic benefit and incurs a cost. It is costly for society to put me in jail.
Science has proven that negative re-enforcement does indeed work. A huge amount of behavioral study utilizes negative re-enforcement in the form of burns or electrical shocks to train behavior. Some behavioral studies--the infamous monkey experiment--have revolved around the application of cold water and severe mob beatings, and have shown that both are sufficient to train a small society to forgo food.
it might be best for society as a whole to keep them isolated from society for the rest of their life.
There are two ways to execute a man.
First, you may lock him away from society. Feed him, bathe him, provide him exercise. Nothing else. His life has ended, and the body dies slowly over a period of decades. In this form, the body can be retrieved; however the life is destroyed, and re-integration provides a dysfunctional automaton which can only accomplish most life functions by major deviance.
Second, you may sever the head from the body.
The generally regarded theoretical justification for criminalization is:
1. Segregation of harmful individuals from the balance of society (aka specific deterrence); and
2. A warning to others to not commit crimes (aka general deterrence).
In other words, the point of the criminal system is on the prevention of future crimes. The only purpose of these drugs consistent with our theory of the criminal system would be if there were some repair happening in the brains of those taking the drugs, but it is apparent from the article that thought has not entered into the minds of the authors.
I dunno. Warning others that they'll be locked in a cage for a thousand years seems to fit with (2).
The problem with civilized society is they tend to sacrifice innocent life faster than sacrificing their ideals.
In some areas, execution does not deter murder: it has almost zero impact in either Texas (every law-abiding citizen has guns and no trouble shooting you if you threaten them physically) or Baltimore (criminals have guns and engage in criminal acts likely to get them killed). In some of the more liberal northern states, they've found up to a quadrupling of homicide just two years after banning the death penalty; those states have tended to roll back those decisions. This is because the primary deterrent in those states is execution; the primary deterrent in other states is that you will probably get shot in the face for what you're doing well before the state has a chance to execute you.
Peoples' high ideals claim that civilized society does not execute its criminals. In the most civilized societies, these criminals are largely deterred by execution as punishment for certain high crimes such as murder. Given the statistic that 1 in 100 of the executed are innocent, but that excising the death penalty will create more murder in equivalent to 15 innocents lost per 100 executions stayed, many who consider themselves enlightened will chose to save the 1 innocent and condemn the 15 other innocents to protect their conscience: leaving a man behind to die is not the same as murdering him by your own hand.
The rational often reject civilized society and look for stricture and rules to support optimal function. The rational also function with limited information, and make their own mistakes: some decide that absolute control is better, because they have no concept of how probability, chaos theory, and black swans work, nor have they realized the importance of a society supporting a certain level of petty crime.
I question the ethics of actual jail time. Putting someone in prison is worse than killing an old person: the earlier parts of your life are critical. What happens when a 25 year old goes to prison for 4 years? They may lose their major opportunities to develop a career, settle into a good relationship, raise a family, etc. Their career skills are out of date, they have criminal records, their dating pools in age range shrink and they need to aim at old cougars or flighty college girls who are just looking for older men to hook up with.
I say we bring back beatings.
We currently take petty criminals in poor neighborhoods, put them in jail for 60 days, they get out, 2 months behind on rent, fired from their job for not coming to work for 8 weeks, incapable of feeding their kids, and they wind up homeless. Now what? Best course of action is to become a drug dealer.
You stole a candy bar. Caning, 10 lashes. Then you go home.
It eliminates the con-man way out: I did it but I'm really sorry, believe it!
No, the basic idea is that other people won't want to do that shit.
The police will come get you, and you know how police are in America.
Justice IS vengeance. Let's say I rape and murder your wife, and the cops catch me 6 months later, and I'm like... really sorry I did it. The lifestyle of brutalizing people in that way is just not for me, it's left terrible emotional scars, I've since found Buddha.
Well, why should I go to prison?
That's a communications issue. Communications face noise from everything imaginable: poor understanding of specific vocabulary, implied meanings based on local (down to sub-city) culture, misalignment of context (person A is thinking in one POV and person B is thinking in another, so the words being said have a completely different meaning), and so on. Communicating effectively is a lot more complex than "use good grammar and speak clearly".
Project managers have banked on technical skills for a long time: the production of work breakdown structures, requirements documentation, and requirements traceability matrixes for scope management; risk breakdown structures, schedules, communications plans; charters to ensure authority; and so on. It's recently become apparent that what we need are people skills: negotiation, diplomacy, stakeholder management, and actual communications skills instead of communications management plans. All of these issues you mention stem from poor people skills.
The reason this happened is simple: soft skills are intangible. Pick up a book on soft skills. Your first reaction will probably be to ridicule it for being a book about obvious things that everyone knows, or just full of pointless fluff with no meaning. Even if it's a really good book full of useful information, most people react this way. Why? Because soft skills are a really open field, and can't be nailed down like hard skills.
Hard skills are immediately rational: if I show you how to create classes in Python, you can apply that with predictable results. Soft skills are not rational: if I explain to you concepts like communications channels (verbal, vocal, non-vocal), business acumen, situational awareness, and diplomacy, you'll recognize most of it but see no actual useful processes in there. People gravitate toward rational hard skills, and away from soft skills that can't be readily forced into a repeatable cause-effect framework. People unlike Kevin Mitnick.
And so here we are: crap situations where nobody communicates well and nobody can actually get a project running. Without stakeholder management, demanding people demand attention: they're noisy, so they get resources, and their unimportant shit gets done instead of important project shit. Without diplomacy and vague concepts like awareness, you can neither control these people nor predict when they'll show up and what they'll want--or worse, how some idiot filing clerk can somehow impact your huge IT project even though he has no organizational power. But all the technical plans say the project was managed correctly--how did it fail?
This targets specific insects, and has no feeding requirements. Birds which are fed enough millet won't bother insects; birds which are underfed will consume the population wholesale and then starve off, limiting effectiveness. Getting birds to control the insect population is difficult.
Bug zappers may kill 2000 insects, with a dozen being biting insects and the rest being beneficial insects like ladybugs and dragonflies. The same goes for birds. This technology attempts to blacklist mosquitoes, leaving other insects alive.
I thought I was the only competent project management person here. Do you have a PMI membership?
Right, that's comparative advantage, and is a way to generate wealth: you take the things you aren't good at (expensive for you to do) and you let someone else who can do them more efficiently do them (less expensive for them). Less total resources (what a grammar construct...) are spent in this way to produce the same output, so more total wealth exists.
I always use the example of taking an action which creates output greater than its input. People confuse this with profiteering: if you spend $8 on wood and $6 on metal and $4 in labor and make a birdhouse, that birdhouse has a value of $18. If you sell that for $20, you profiteer $2 by transferring wealth to yourself from another person. That's not wealth generation, it's only wealth transfer; however, it does utilize comparative advantage, and so the establishment of businesses which can provide high-quality birdhouses cheaper than individuals can produce them themselves (including the cost of the individual's labor--often overlooked) does itself generate wealth.
In the same way, basic public health care generates wealth: the establishment of an effective policy to provide free clinical care has an associated and rather high cost, but it has an exceedingly high economic return due to the large gains in public health that come from free STD testing, vaccination, minor wound treatment (infections, sprains, etc.), and so on. Mishandling these plans diminishes or inverts that: public health care can be an economic drain, causing more total death and suffering than even America's broken private system. Further, as public health policies become more comprehensive--as they cover more health conditions--it becomes more difficult to implement economically positive plans.
Most fully-comprehensive public health policies have glaring flaws at the upper end: long waiting lists for "not fatal now, could become fatal later" diseases, i.e. the cancer won't kill you for 6 months, so we'll schedule surgery in 4 months... oh, the cancer has progressed faster than expected. Private health care policies often do this as well, but less often: more capital availability makes more health resources (doctors) available. Canada handles this simply: they use a single-payer system, but also everyone gets private insurance from their employer just like in America. Canadians use said private insurance when the public system becomes inadequate, bypassing its flaws without exposing themselves to the whole surface of flaws that a private system could develop.
This is the same standard of wealth generation as, for example, iTunes. Before iTunes, there was a murky world of mp3.com, portable MP3 players, and CDs. iTunes was really the first widely accepted method of purchasing music online. This meant that people could purchase individual songs for a dollar or two rather than spending $15 on CD; and that distribution became much less resource intensive; and that people didn't need to wait for shipping or go to the store to actually get music. This freed up a lot of capital and labor: less fuel, shipping resources (trucks, fuel, highway capacity, air traffic capacity), physical capital (CDs, machinery), and labor (time spent operating and maintaining machines to press all these CDs). In exchange, consumers got more fine-grained purchasing power and even a steep discount on whole albums (50%-ish, $8 albums instead of $15), as well as shipping times measured in seconds.
A zero-sum game doesn't mean everyone is better off not playing; it means what goes in comes back out. Poker is zero-sum: the five of you put $10 in the pot, and someone comes out $40 richer while four of you come out $10 poorer. The stock market is another one: securities are arbitraged, and the fact that there are 100 million shares of AAPL at $400 doesn't mean you can actually sell all 100 million shares of AAPL for $400 each--large liquidations always push the spot price down.
It takes a rather long explanation to illustrate why this is; the short of it is the
Okay, you are ignorant of any understanding of economics. Simple as that.
You can have no money and have vastly more wealth than someone with $50,000 in the bank. The man with cash in the bank may have more stress due to more labor required to keep up with the demands of life--that $50,000 is a buffer, a hedge against disruption for his fragile system of debts he must continue to pay from commissions on sales which are dodgy. Meanwhile your debts are paid, so you have all of these assets and plenty of free human labor time.
Society--large economic systems--operates primarily on scarcity. This isn't a strategy so much as a status: there is more demand than supply in general, particularly in energy and thus in things that require energy to produce. Exchanging things around creates no wealth; rather it moves wealth around, and potentially destroys wealth in the process of transfer. Creating a way to acquire more of a thing without expending so much resource--so much energy, so much raw material, so much human labor--creates wealth in society and reduces scarcity.
Running a farm does not create wealth. Society has 10,000 people and has the capacity to produce food for 10,000 people. You work on a farm, produce food, and get paid for your work. That's not wealth generation. You work on a farm, create a farming method so that you can produce the same amount of food for less human time and raw material investment, and now have capacity to feed 20,000 people, you have now generated wealth. You may sell more and invest less and gain personal wealth, but society also comes out with more than it started: more food, more capacity to produce food, more capacity to support humans, more human labor available (especially after creating more humans, who can now be fed, IF you can support all their other needs).
Selling something that costs $250 to produce for $500 does not generate wealth; it instead transfers a thing worth $250 to someone who is willing to part with twice its value in order to obtain it. This may be because they can use it to derive more wealth than that from some other source: they may be able to make the next person three times as poor by using your $250 gizmo, and so paying you $500 still lets them extract $750 and come out $250 ahead. Nothing of value is created, but money is siphoned and concentrated, and with it economic freedom and the ability to acquire assets--wealth.
You assume that by someone generating an income, they are creating wealth. The problem with this assumption is income is complex: it comes exclusively from other people losing exactly as much money, and so is zero-sum. It's all the other assets and all the other effects that you must examine.
Of course it'll get a Nobel Prize. You get a Nobel Prize for anything these days. Vladimir Putin has a Nobel Prize for having contributed so much shirtless Russian pictures to Google.
That's silly. Everyone knows the universe was danced into existence by Shiva, the Lord of the Dance. You cannot deny the power of dance. Lose yourself to dance.
Also, Warren Buffet hoarding his money is destroying wealth. He's concentrating $1000 from society into $900 in his pocket and $100 destroyed. Paris Hilton's lavish spending is more healthy for the economy and is not consuming wealth, but rather redistributing it. This does consume resources, because she consumes things; but it also increases the economic flexibility of society.
By contrast, the poor overspending decreases the opportunities for new business ventures to produce new goods and services which may be of interest to the poor: the poor have less money, thus they are not really a target market. When this effect spreads across the middle class, you no longer have business opportunities: nobody can buy into new consumer goods, thus new ventures are doomed to failure. The economy stagnates.
The rich spending within their means can spend quite a lot. The middle class can spend less, and the poor can spend even less. A certain amount of spending is healthy for the individual and the economy; excess of that is unhealthy.
Your economic theory is completely backwards. Please stand on your head.
Okay so if I get taxed 10% of my $50,000 salary, I pay $5000 in taxes.
If there's a 10% sales tax on consumption, then when I buy a bunch of shit, I pay $5000 in taxes.
Income is not wealth because money is not wealth. Wealth is the ability of labor to produce goods. If you have a $500 widget and I give you $500 for the widget, no wealth is created. If, instead, you create a $500 widget that allows you to create other $500 widgets but only invest $250, society is now more wealthy: 100 employed people creating widgets become 50 employed people creating widgets and 50 unemployed people who can now be employed to create samoflanges. These people are specifically inconvenienced by a round of layoffs, but in the end we all can spend half our money on widgets instead of all of our money on widgets, and we can spend the other half buying samoflanges.
That's wealth. Society is wealthy because the scarcity of widgets is now half, and the effort--the cost--to create widgets is now half, and the surplus available can now support the creation of samoflanges.