>People are cruel to prisoners because they enjoy being cruel to prisoners
I don't enjoy being cruel to convicted criminals. I would much prefer they not commit crime, and that there be no need for the punishment.
>especially given that free will is inconceivable;
I too, have no free will in the matter. I am just a clockwork mechanism, operating as the random universe has not only ordained, but I cannot operate otherwise. Coincidentally, the nature of my mechanism makes me immune to your arguments, and no change in behavior is forthcoming. Fun, huh?
>mass incarceration and poor prison conditions seem to increase crime
Statistics say otherwise. Crime is down across the board the last few decades.
>If we are to have prisons, let's be honest about why they exist: people like them.
I agree. I like criminals being locked away from the rest of us.
>I too, have no free will in the matter. I am just a clockwork mechanism, operating as the random universe has not only ordained, but I cannot operate otherwise. Coincidentally, the nature of my mechanism makes me immune to your arguments, and no change in behavior is forthcoming. Fun, huh?
I don't understand what point you think you're proving. Yes, your actions were determined by the laws of physics based on factors outside your control. This implies that it is incoherent to condemn you as a person for an immoral action because you could not have behaved differently. It does not imply that your actions are good or that you should behave the way you do.
I disagree with you and think you are being obstinate. You should change those things. But I don't think you should be caused to suffer, even though you are guilty of causing others to suffer.
>Statistics say otherwise. Crime is down across the board the last few decades.
Look at Figure 1 in this paper and tell me you see a correlation:
Perhaps I overstated the case somewhat. The evidence is that mass incarceration in certain jurisdictions increases crime. But overall, the notion that mass incarceration is one of our best tools against crime is wrong. It is not very effective, very expensive, has deleterious effects on communities, and is cruel. And the notion that mass incarceration is an important tool is so thoroughly debunked by now that I think it's fair to call it an excuse.
I'd like for conditions that lead to people not feeling the need to become criminals in the first place.
Which means, housing first, end the war on drugs, provide access to mental and physical healthcare, provide a reasonable living minimum wage and some sort of UBI for those that fall through the cracks.
He's telling you that so you'll quiet down about the economic destruction even half-assed AI promises to wreak. But that same AI will end up powering the anti-personnel drones when you realize the UBI isn't coming.
Oh, you didn't read the AI savior sarcasm. Or realize he's already back tracked on that.
Anyone that's actually worked a day in their life knows it's all bullshit. Yet Texans keep being the gullible voters they are, giving Sam, Dario, Elon, Mark, and Trump's kids everything they want while their own communities suffer more and more.
>I don't understand why Texas voters support such inhumane conditions.
I'm in Texas. I'm a little confused as to why you think I should care. For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison... and for those correctly convicted, I'm not especially worried about making them more comfortable.
The entire point of punishment is the cruelty. It doesn't really work without it... it's unclear if you're quibbling over the amount of cruelty, or if you think that there exists some sort of cruelty-free punishment that the rest of us just haven't heard of.
And here I was thinking that prisons should be about keeping people who can't operate in society without damaging society away from society. I mean, even better would be to find a way to help them operate in society, but apparently we're not even all at the baseline.
1. Even correct convictions can later be found to be wrong. Death is irreversible and financially restituting someone's death can never benefit one wrongfully killed.
2. Unless death is the sentence, a sentence should not result in death. If you don't closely control and monitor when the state can do something, it increases the risk of misuse of that power by the state.
3. If cruelty and punishment really worked, crime would decrease over time, not increase.
4. The AC can be set to 75. That's not luxury but won't kill anyone with heatstroke.
> For those wrongly convicted, I don't want them to get air-conditioning in prison
What a remarkable thing to write. Even knowing that some innocent people are there, you want them to suffer the risk of death and severe harm from heat.
>What a remarkable thing to write. Even knowing that some innocent people are there,
I don't want them in prison at all. You, you're apparently satisfied (somehow?) that they get air conditioning. And you think I'm the psychopath. Something's seriously wrong with you. Leftism, not even once.
I think there's a basic floor for how we should treat other people, regardless of the circumstances. Things like access to food and water, shelter, etc.
I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it, but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.
>I'm going to disagree that the point of prison (as punishment) is cruelty. It absolutely can work without it,
This is an absurd claim. How does punishment work without cruelty? Remember, that I allow for people to disagree on the quantity of cruelty (supposing that can be quantified)... so you're proposing cruelty-free punishment. This misses the entire point of what punishment is. Perhaps your reading comprehension is faulty, and you confuse the word with "rehabilitation". I see that alot.
>but I'll recognize this is nuanced and there are likely those that can't be rehabilitated effectively.
Hah! I hadn't even read that sentence yet when I wrote the above! Damn I'm good. Rehabilitation is science fiction. No one has even ever proposed a theory on how or why it's supposed to happen, let alone engineered a method to induce it to occur. On reddit, these conversations are often hilarious, but maybe here on Hackernews it will be glorious. Why do you think you need to do to cause a violent criminal to rehabilitate? If the method is performed diligently, what percentage of violent criminals rehabilitate, and what sort of timeline are we talking? Why do the failures (and let's be honest, there are failures in every manufacturing process) fail? Can these be sorted out beforehand?
But at the end of the day, there is still a big problem. Justice is what society promises to the victims so that they will refrain from revenge; the state must carry out the revenge for them. It does so for several reasons: to discourage eternal feuds, to ensure that the correct culprit is targeted, and to avoid normally nonviolent people from growing accustomed to violence. To satisfy their monkey need for vengeance in the most civilized manner possible. If you fail to satisfy it, then these people are obligated to do it themselves. Rehabilitation alone can't substitute, even if it were possible. For the lesser criminals, incarceration suffices. For those more depraved, we don't want them rehabilitated. It serves no need at all.
My mother spanked me when I misbehaved. She caused real pain as punishment.
It was never cruel.
Punishment and cruelty are not equivalent.
Please note, I am not in favor of spanking children, and never spanked mine.
Now as to your final point, that justice is the state taking revenge on behalf of the victims. I replied to you above that I see the validity of this, and for the same reasons you give (discourage eternal feuds). And for those same reasons Justice is restraint. At most equivalent harm, no more than an eye for an eye.
I think it was your anger that made you say these ethics we both share are bullshit rules designed to hurt your family.
Now in the current case, for that point to stand, we need to ensure that the prisoners have in fact harmed identifiable others. Google tells me "Roughly 40% of inmates in Texas prisons are incarcerated for non-violent offenses". Thus 40% of the time, there is no cause for vengeance.
And where prison is vengeance, if it is just, it needs to be restrained. Not cruel. Not unusual. Just as punishment is not cruelty, justice is not cruelty.
For other readers, as I mentioned above, while I see a valid ethical stance behind NoMoreNicksLeft's anger and hurt, I do not share it. I seek mercy, and as for Justice, "Justice is mine sayeth the Lord"-- in other words, I leave it to God. I find it sick that the US, the "land of the free" has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Look, I've had bad interactions with bonafide unredeemable unrehabilitable psychopaths, and I'd like to see such people locked up for life. But I do not wish them cruelty beyond the innate cruelty of life behind bars.
Then that's what they should have written. Leaving it ambiguous gives us the opportunity to take someone who says cruelty is the point at their word, though. They want people to suffer, they are a sadist.
That's a pretty messed up morality. I don't even know where to start on this one.
How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
Its also messed up ethics.
The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta. And from the first time this ever came up it came up as the government saying justice should be balanced. "eye for an eye" == "Punishment fits the crime"
>How do you align this with "to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God."
I'm an atheist. There is no god nor gods. But if I had to have a god, I don't think I'd choose one of the abrahamic ones. There are many to choose from who aren't big on mercy.
>Its also messed up ethics.
I don't accept your ethical framework. It's a system of bullshit rules made up by people who care for me not even a little to put me and my family at a disadvantage against a civilization that doesn't even want to go on living.
>The purpose of having the government administer punishment for crime is to prevent vendetta.
Then you're doing it wrong. It can only prevent vendetta if the victims feel as if they receive justice... if those who do wrong are punished. If you remove the punishment/cruelty from the equation, they will simply do that part themselves. Unless you're hoping to emasculate and disarm them so thoroughly that they have no hope of doing so... but I guess that was the ethics stuff you were talking about above.
Ok, so as an athiest, could you do what is right, love mercy, and walk humbly with your beliefs?
Your comment on which god you might choose suggest you are not a fan of mercy. Have you ever made a mistake and wished for mercy for yourself? Have you ever received forgiveness that maybe you didn't think was deserved, if even only from you family?
I can agree with you that justice calls for punishment in response to a harm, and thus harming the person who caused the first harm. And if one considers any intentional harm to another as cruelty, then yes, "the purpose of punishment is cruelty". However, justice also limits the cruelty. The earliest example is "an eye for an eye"-- because the prior system was "a death for an eye" or "I burn your village for an eye", and Hammurabi saw that this lead to endless blood feuds. Vendetta, i.e. you hurt me so now I cause you and your family as much pain as I possibly can, that is not justice.
In fact, I was taking your side in this argument. Many others talk about prison as rehabilitation and keeping society safe, totally dropping the psychological need of the victim for some sense of vengeance. And while I agree with those others, and prefer to leave the vengeance to God rather than to the prison system, I took your side and legitimized the victims need for vengeance.
I am sorry that you have such anger that you saw this as bullshit rules from someone who doesn't care for you and wants to disadvantage you.
>Ok, so as an athiest, could you do what is right, love mercy, and walk humbly with your beliefs?
What has caused you to conclude that any of those things are right? Mercy, benefit of doubt, leniency... these are for the remorseful. We live in a society that doesn't even seem to know that word.
>However, justice also limits the cruelty.
Within reason. Haven't seen much evidence that we currently need to limit it. This isn't 1700s England where anyone is getting the noose for stealing loaves of bread.
Show me some excessive punishment, I might agree with you. "They have to live with the summer heat like everyone had to do so, convicts and the innocent alive, until 70 years ago" just isn't excessive.
Rehabilitation has never really been the point of the US prison or even correctional system at all.
The fact you can serve your time, earnestly work on rehabilitating yourself, jump through all the hoops, etc. but still be under the economic death sentence more or less summarizes how people feel about it.
It’s basically NIMBY applied to the justice system. Everyone loves to pretend they want rehabilitation but also wants someone else to do it. This shows up in hiring, apartment leasing, social benefits, etc.
>Everyone loves to pretend they want rehabilitation but also wants someone else to do it.
People on the left love to pretend this, perhaps. Those of us on the right make no such pretense. It's about punishment, sequestration, and deterrence in that order. Rehabilitation doesn't even enter our minds.
Why do you pretend? It wouldn't surprise anyone if you were to just be honest and that you don't care about rehabilitation either, it's rather that you don't want a justice system at all. We all know that already. There's no reason to hide it.
Why do you continue to pay taxes for private for-profit prisons?
If you don't see value in the U.S. Constitution and providing human beings a chance at reformation, you should advocate for killing falsely convicted criminals before they enter prision and die of inhumane conditions. Wouldn't that be more efficient for your worldview?
I'd love to see a "murder any criminal" bill named for you. I think you would too, so go for it!
>Why do you continue to pay taxes for private for-profit prisons?
Taxes weren't optional last I checked.
>If you don't see value in the U.S. Constitution
Which part of the Constitution is it that guarantees air conditioning? Did I miss an amendment?
>and providing human beings a chance at reformation
Everyone has not only the choice at reformation, if they choose poorly there's always another opportunity to do so later that day. To do so the next morning. If they have to be bribed for that with air conditioning or anything else, they're as far from it as any human can possibly be.
You have a right to advocate for how your taxes are used. Advocate for killing white-collar criminals before they reach prision, and then closing unused prisions, if saving taxpayer money is the only thing that matters to you. Maybe you'll find enough supporters for your cause to make capital punishment a mandatory alternative to prision for all convicted white-collar felons, like future offenders along the lines of Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald J. Trump.
For those in prision today, they can't be rehabilitated if they're dead due to heat stroke caused by cruel and unreasonable 115 degree heat.
As someone in Texas, who also donates large sums of money every year to the Innocence Project, I kind of understand their position even though I think they have written it poorly. I want anyone wrongfully convicted freed and compensated, and I want our justice system to be better at ascertaining guilt rather than using plea deals improperly to imprison people wrongly. I also want our prisons to be places where we take every reasonable action to preserve the lives of the prisoners, including for sure having air-conditioning.
But I also fully understand the point of prison is /punishment/, which is why it's such a severe injustice when someone is punished when they have not committed the crime. Prison is not supposed to be pleasant and comfortable, and we should take every action to preserver prisoner's lives specifically in order to ensure that they can serve their complete sentences, upon the assumption of fair adjudication. Without clear, just, punishment within society, we will revert to vigilantism and chaos.
The core ethical/moral complexity here to me is not about treatment of prisoners, its about how people become prisoners in the first place in the state of Texas. In Texas we have a long history of racist practices in policing, in the courts, and the use of coercive plea deal structures that have resulted in many people being wrongfully convicted. As long as that situation stands, it would be clearer to argue that nobody should be imprisoned at all, but that's also not a reasonable argument. As long people are being imprisoned, we should ensure they are rightfully convicted and understand that prison is a punishment, and that we should preserve prisoner's lives and health so that they can experience whatever just punishment has been meted out by society for the harm they have caused through their choices and actions.
At the same time prison shouldn't be deadly. 85F versus 110F is the difference between uncomfortable and death.
>Without clear, just, punishment within society, we will revert to vigilantism and chaos.
The problem is this doesn't really seem to have any relation to the punishment. In the US we love to think that beating someone to a pulp has a strong effect on their future actions that lead to the beating but redactivism rates do not show any strong correlations here at all. Things like education, living conditions, and wealth are far more correlated.
> At the same time prison shouldn't be deadly. 85F versus 110F is the difference between uncomfortable and death.
Fully agreed. There absolutely should be air conditioning in prisons in Texas. We need to preserve prisoners lives and health using all reasonable means so that they can receive their just punishment via their sentence.
Of note, however, there are /schools/ in Texas that lack working air conditioning due to mismanagement and underfunding, which I find a far more egregious and wrong circumstance.
> The problem is this doesn't really seem to have any relation to the punishment. In the US we love to think that beating someone to a pulp has a strong effect on their future actions that lead to the beating but redactivism rates do not show any strong correlations here at all. Things like education, living conditions, and wealth are far more correlated.
Agreed, punishment does not help with recidivism rates. You're making a rehabilitation argument. That argument might even be reasonable. That is not why prison in the US exists or how they are operated. They are a form of punishment, that is their purpose in our society.
> But I also fully understand the point of prison is /punishment/... Prison is not supposed to be pleasant and comfortable...
I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you present your view, and also see it's validity-- that one purpose of prison is for the government to take a measured and limited 'revenge' for the victims of harm. Where the alternative is blood feuds.
Thus prison should not be comfortable, for those rightfully convicted of crimes involving harm TO OTHERS.
But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.
> But by this same line, that the government's actions should be measured and limited. Prison should not be cruel, nor should the punishments be unusual.
Fully agreed, which is why I make the point that air conditioning isn't a question, of course a prison in Texas should have air conditioning. The 8th Amendment makes this pretty clear, that cruel and unusual punishments are disallowed, as they should be. The punishment is and should be the prison sentence itself.
>Can you really prevent people from getting cheaper products forever?
Do you even want cheap products? We're all trapped in low-quality-product hell together, and some of us have realized we'd be less frustrated and less poor with something at least not-quite-so-low-quality.
If people could have realized that sooner, and if there had been some vision or political will at the top, stopping this would've been a matter of very boring policy decisions. It wasn't inevitable. Containerization might have made it easier, but it didn't make it irresistible.
I've suffered the iCloud ads for almost 2 years at this point. You can't dismiss it, or if I can... the badge only disappears for a day and then it's back. I wish I could turn off iCloud completely, I have no use for it and do not want it. It sometimes hijacks files that I wanted to keep local-only.
He said so himself. I take him at his word. Meanwhile, the actual USA stopped doing the one extant program in his leaks that was ruled a violation of the 4th Amendment.
> To move it to another program, classified and unreported, under which it could hide again. Don't be naive.
Why? They first made a more limited program to comply with the law and then shut that down because the data wasn't useful. If they made another program exactly like the original, the SSCI would shut it down, or a whistleblower would point out a program that they know to be clearly illegal, whereas the original program was arguably legal, with the government's justification in the leaks. After the ruling, the government would not be able to provide justification for obtaining that data from the telcos with their old legal argument because it is invalidated by precedent.
>The outcome of the study is mixed, because on one hand, natives eventually ended up earning more overall, as they moved into white collar professions. On the other hand, I'm not sure they were happy to be forced to leave their chosen professions. The study doesn't evaluate life outcomes, happiness, satisfaction, or any other similar metrics.
What happens when immigrants force people out of the highest-skilled job tiers, and there is no higher tier to upskill into? Here in the US, with the H1-B program, we're being told that these immigrants are only for the very highest levels of skill, which the American workforce lacks.
In theory, there are no Americans available in those highest levels of skill to be forced out. I’d be interested to see studies that tried to actually assess that.
Anecdotally, lower margin industries (think manufacturing sector) employ almost exclusively immigrant tech workers because the salaries are too low to retain any but the least skilled US coders.
The naive interpretation is that these companies would pay higher wages without access to H1B workers.
Studies like TFA suggest that is not actually true. Companies in all sectors are constrained by the availability of skilled labor and to some extent are paying what they can afford.
Reducing the number of H1B visas would likely hurt employers to the extent that their workers would suffer. It is not sensible to pretend that all of those jobs would still exist if you cut the H1B program.
We don't have a lot of contemporary examples of this, so the research is sparse. If we were to extrapolate the existing research and what we know about how economic and markets work, it would lead to lower wages and higher unemployment in white collar jobs - at least in the short and medium term. Economies tend to grow in the longer term to accommodate immigrants, and new jobs are created. There is, however, no guarantee that those new jobs are going to be higher paying or better quality. AI confounds the equation further right now.
One major issue I did not touch on above is that it is unequivocally true that immigration grows GDP. What is not unequivocal is that immigration grows GDP per capita, and I think this matter a lot more than the top line figure. American immigrants usually grow GDP per capita, but it depends on the migrant group and reason for migration. Refugees are usually a net loss, for example. To point: most of the gains in GDP growth have been accrued to the top 1-10% over the last few decades. Meaning that high immigration is great for business and asset owners. As someone who is displaced by immigration, unless you own a lot of assets, you will bear the cost of immigration without experiencing any of the gains.
This is the premise of a fascinating paper by [Eric Weinstein from 2001.](https://www.ilo.org/publications/migration-benefit-all-towar...) He proposed an "immigrant dividend." Since the costs are usually borne by the poor, and the gains usually accrued to the rich, there should be some mechanism to rebalance this. His proposal is a fee which companies need to pay to the government for hiring an immigrant. For the sake of discussion, let's say this is $1M. This money is then used to compensate the people most affected. It could be money split evenly between everyone, or targeted for those most impacted.
This aligns multiple negative incentives with public good. For starters, there is a widespread belief that companies like Microsoft regularly fire (or fail to hire) good local employees because they can hire much cheaper (and desperate) foreign workers, who will not complain if they are asked to work 70 hour weeks. Secondly, it compensates people affected by these practises, so they can be made whole. Third, it forces companies to only hire immigrants when there is a genuine skills shortage. Fourth, it encourages companies to upskill employees (this is a major issue right now) - or at least partake in improving education across the nation.
If companies were forced to pay an immigrant dividend, I think we would immediately discover that very few of those "genuine" skill shortages were real, and instead it was really a shortage of people willing to work for low pay and poor conditions.
Anecdotally, it is definitely the case that an employee whose residence in the USA is contingent on an H1B or STEM OPT visa will accept worse pay and conditions. A US citizen in the same job will do 2 years and quit for better money elsewhere.
The question is whether jobs in low-margin industries would exist at all if the immigrant workers weren't there to do it. It's not cut and dried, but the research tends to suggest that cutting immigration would hurt both employers and the workforce.
My last employer (manufacturing sector) flat out refused to consider paying $100,000 for a non-resident H1B. Employers that did fork out were likely hiring top level or very scarce talent. An "immigrant dividend" paid by employers would simply restrict immigration to highly paid work.
As it is, H1B visas already go primarily to highly paid (mostly tech) workers. The problem is that most immigrants arrive in the US by different avenues. Who pays for spouses and dependents? Asylum seekers?
As for Microsoft: it is not a low-margin business. If Microsoft is suppressing labor costs to juice profits, that is the sign of a company that does not know how to use the talent it has at its disposal.
What facts do you think can change my preferences? I'm sitting here telling you I want apple pie, and you're harping on about how "kale salads have all the vitamins you need!". We're talking at each other, because you failed to understand. This isn't about what you think the facts are, but about what I want to happen. I can accept those as facts and it wouldn't change anything.
In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins. Then when told apple pie is not the answer and its actually kale you want them you immediately pivot to a different for ending up at apple pie.
Its the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
>In your example you would be saying you want apple pie because it gives you all these vitamins.
No. I just want it. That's the part you don't seem to get. It's a preference. There's no reason or rationale that you can attempt to short-circuit with any fact.
>ts the floating table. You knock all the legs of their argument down and
They're not arguing with you. They're attempting to tell you that this is their preference. That they won't change their mind. Sometimes they're bad at it, can't articulate it. Other times they say this perfectly clearly... doesn't much matter, because you're not listening. You hear what you want to hear (like above, with "you think the apple pie has vitamins!").
>and their belief only gets stronger. They are not switched on.
It's not belief. That's actually frustration. And a little bit of spite.
My password manager's browser integration breaks on every update of Firefox, which seems like it is a weekly affair. I got rid of the extension, and copy/paste everything.
Password managers were never meant to solve the problem of phishing, and aren't really capable of that. They solved the problem of password reuse. They do that just fine.
The age of internet search is over. The age of Cloudflare has begun. It wouldn't be possible to build a search engine now if they wanted to... and there wouldn't be anything to search for anyway. The non-corporate internet withered into dust and blew away in the wind.
If you could find what you want, how would they ever sell you what they want you to buy? And I'm not just talking merchandise, though that too. Your political narratives, your values, opinions, everything. And everyone likes it so much they just sit there scrolling and swiping and tapping.
I'm hoping for a future where we create static HTML pages again styled with a bit of handmade CSS, because we're so tired of bot attacks and long loading times. Then suddenly a Cloudflare network becomes absolet.
people have been putting their fuckass blogs with 0.5 visitors a day behind Cloudflare long before the increase in bot traffic. and that increase makes fuck all any difference for them anyway.
It's probably cheaper to switch your ISP to one that your target site does not block, than to pay someone else to buy that connection and proxy all your traffic through them.
I think curated directories from prehistory might make a comeback eventually, maybe combined with a search engine that indexes only the whitelisted websites. ironically, we can use LLMs to filter out AI slop by measuring the signal-to-noise ratio, which is atrocious for AI slop and ESL slop that preceded it.
You can stream your own stuff, from home, to all of your devices and your friends' devices, for free. And since the movies are on your own hardware, you have them forever. Movies, tv, music, books, comic books, video game roms, basically any sort of media you can even name. And it's been possible for you to do so for the last 15 years, maybe more.
I don't enjoy being cruel to convicted criminals. I would much prefer they not commit crime, and that there be no need for the punishment.
>especially given that free will is inconceivable;
I too, have no free will in the matter. I am just a clockwork mechanism, operating as the random universe has not only ordained, but I cannot operate otherwise. Coincidentally, the nature of my mechanism makes me immune to your arguments, and no change in behavior is forthcoming. Fun, huh?
>mass incarceration and poor prison conditions seem to increase crime
Statistics say otherwise. Crime is down across the board the last few decades.
>If we are to have prisons, let's be honest about why they exist: people like them.
I agree. I like criminals being locked away from the rest of us.
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