Flock cameras are assisted suicide for dying neighborhoods. They don't prevent crime, they record crime. Cleaning up vacant lots, planting trees, street lighting, trash removal, and traffic calming like adding planters and crosswalks reduce crime.
You are hitting on the fundamental difference in political views.
Half of this country believes problems are systemic and can be fixed. The other half believes they are a natural consequence of culture, race, and invisible flying creatures that tempt you to do bad things.
100% agree. Interestingly, the only politicians who talk about removing Citizens United or even just strengthening consumer protections are considered "far-left" in this country.
Every single one of my ancestors who were in the war--except one--fought for the Confederacy in the War Between the States. (Or the War of Lincoln's Aggression, according to some. Yankees call it the "Civil War.")
Going further back, my Cherokee forefathers (the Chickamauga) were equally unimpressed by what they saw and experienced of this entity (they viewed it as a malignant tumor) that calls itself the "United" States of America.
I believe my ancestors are envious that I get to see the day when the truth of the Empire of Lies is finally exposed in front of all the world.
What was it about? By the time the Democrats were crowing that he was a felon, no one eve remembered. Did Trump see or sign this paperwork? Didn't much matter to anyone. If he saw it or signed it, would he have known what it was? Did he read it first? Probably not.
With a tiny little wall of text, you might even manage to tell me why you think the paperwork was so horrible that he should be in prison for it, I suppose. But no one would read your wall of text, because if it takes you a wall of text to explain it, they figure it's all bullshit anyway. And this is why he won in 2024, and why his successor will win in 2028, and likely in 2032. It's why this November is going to shock you even though there's virtually no room left for surprises. Just remember, it's like 96% certain Hillary's going to beat him if you need to fantasize about a better time...
To answer the question you avoided. The "paperwork" was classified materials that make the Hillary's emails outrage of magats look like nothing at all in comparison.
No. The so-called 34 felonies were about "falsifying business records". So you don't even know, that figures. You should've left room for being able to claim I'm wrong with a snarky non-answer.
You lie thru your teeth. Trump is far more guilty of mishandling classified material than let's say Hillary Clinton .... And in his own words. She belongs in prison. What does trump deserve then?
In June 2023, a federal grand jury indicted Trump on 37 counts, including violating the Espionage Act, false statements, and obstruction, regarding documents kept at Mar-a-Lago.
The vast majority of crimes are committed by a small percentage of people. The real issue is prosecutors who refuse to incarcerate repeat offenders. But having video evidence is a powerful tool for a motivated prosecutor to actually take criminals off the streets
We spend $80 billion a year on incarceration in the US, and have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Your plan increases both. Do you honestly think that if we spend $160 billion or $240 billion a year and double or triple our incarcerated population that we'd solve crime?
Look at places and countries with low crime. They don't have the most Flock cameras, the most prisoners, or the most powerful surveillance evidence because while those may solve a crime, they don't solve crime as a whole.
Iceland is one of the most peaceful countries in the world (murder rate 0.54), 36 incarcerations per 100k, police don't carry guns, and it's not known for its widespread mass surveillance system.
Portugal is one of the most peaceful in the world (murder rate 0.7), 118 incarcerations per 100k, and doesn't have license plate readers or mass surveillance.
USA murder rate is 6.3, 541 incarcerations per 100k, extremely high recidivism, and an amazing array of surveillance systems.
Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001. Guess they should have bought Flock cameras instead?
Ghana has a murder rate of 1.84 and incarceration rate of 133 per 100k. It didn't get this stable by buying Flock cameras. They have nowhere near the surveillance of the U.S. And they have far fewer murders, far less violent crime, and far fewer incarcerations. If only the prosecutors had more evidence then it could be more like the U.S.!?
Woodmore, Maryland is 82% black. Chance of being a victim of a violent crime is 1 in 904. That's three times safer than the national average. It's an extremely safe community with an overwhelming majority of residents being black.
I would think hard on Ghana. It has no shortage of black people living in poverty. Yet it's extremely safe compared to the US as a whole. You're far less likely to be the victim of a violent crime walking down a street in Ghana surrounded by impoverished black people than you are in many streets in the U.S. Not all of Africa is like that. Many countries are more dangerous than the U.S. But Ghana shows pretty clearly that it's not a racial or even strictly a poverty issue. And that increasing our incarceration rate is quite possibly the opposite of what needs to be done. We need to consider other solutions.
It feels good and easy to say lock the bad people up. But the numbers don't show that as a solution if the real issue you're trying to solve is decrease violent crime.
Also Sierra Leone in Africa with a homicide rate a third that of the USofA.
Both Ghana and Sierra Leone are gated communities, just as the USofA, the UK, and Australia are.
I'd suggest that Woodmore fails to meet you particular bias, hence you rule it out.
Woodmore likely meets your four intended criteria depending upon the level of internal surveillance .. I suspect it's not surveillance that prevents Woodmore occupants from killing each other.
Gated communities don't count because residents have to be wealthy enough to buy their way in, so they're populated by a non-violent-criminally-biased sample of the general population. Some countries might count as gated communities if they're heavily populated by 1st generation immigrants who had to be wealthy to get in, otherwise no, they're just full of whatever random people were born there or moved there without any selection pressure against crime.
From the outside, it looks like the US's society and culture fosters an unusually large criminal class compared to other western countries? If people had access to education, healthcare, jobs that aren't shipped overseas, minimum wage that wasn't laughable, etc, there wouldn't be so much problems? Arguing over severity of punishment while ignoring systemic issues is silly.
Non-developed countries do not have functional law enforcement and they are highly corrupt, so any statistics outside of developed countries should be ignored.
For developed countries, none but America have such high levels of immigration nor the racial diversity America has. It is much easier to convince society to promote high-trust empathetic solutions when society is racially homogenous and shares cultural background. It’s impossible to compare America to any European country, although soon it may be possible if immigration continues
How are you measuring that? There are plenty of developed countries with a higher immigrant share like Switzerland and Australia. If you're taking about visible minorities then Canada has a higher proportion of the population.
I don't think you can make a facile pronouncement that European countries and ethnically and culturally homogenous any longer. We can't have a High-trust society in the USA when politicians scapegoat immigrants, in spite of their being more law-abiding on the whole. We can't avoid having a demoralized populace when corporate funded politicians of both parties drag their feet instead of giving citizens of the most productive and wealthy country in the history of the world parity with less wealthy countries, in terms of healthcare, education, housing, retirement and lack of life precariousness, like going into bankruptcy over medical debt...
Who do you think those people are that are incarcerated in the USA?
I come across this rather frequently among people from sheltered backgrounds like those who graduated from mom and dad taking care of them, all the way through to Mega Corp/university taking care of them, and absolutely cannot fathom why everyone doesn’t just eat cake.
I have a working theory that this effect, whatever one wants to call it, of people being too abstracted from reality, is ultimately the source of collapse of all kinds of organizations of humans… including civilizations.
It is, for example also why America can have so many vile warmongering people, because not only do they not have to lead troops into battle, have their children drafted into the front lines, or pay for the invariable disaster and murder they perpetrated and orchestrated; but in the most grotesque way, they profit from it and immensely; usually also combining it with other types of fraud like “money printing”, i.e., counterfeiting, which they use to plunder the wealth they accumulated through murder, mayhem, and fraud.
This isn't a new complaint. People have been identifying this group as the source of a lot of bad stuff at least as far back as Marx. The petty or petite bourgeoisie, the professional managerial class, Karens, the name changes with the times. But the constant derision for these groups is rooted in people observing that these groups are disposed to the sort of "driving society off a cliff" behavior you are listing examples of.
Now you're getting it. You have exactly identified the problem.
Instead of identifying and addressing the real problems--mass unemployment, homelessness, hopelessness--your dystopic "solution" is simply more and bigger jails, more and better armed cops with surveillance cameras attached, more laws, more weapons, more bondage and discipline, more "you will do what I say or else."
Doesn't work. Never works.
Read the essay "Fate of Empires" by Sir John Glubb to see how things this time are not in fact any different than what came before.
If there is no real penalty for being a career criminal, people will continue to be career criminals.
If someone knows they can rob people and get away with it, why would they do honest work for a living?
What is your solution to prevent crime without incarceration as a possible outcome for people breaking the law… especially those who do it repeatedly? It’s easy to talk down to solutions being used today, but without offering up a realistic alternative, this provides no value.
I asked for a realistic alternative solution and you offered none, just more criticisms for the status quo.
There are already incentives for honest work… a paycheck, benefits, etc. Not to mention being a net positive to society. There is also the option to start a business, which has unlimited upside.
Some people put a lot of effort into breaking the law and making life worse for other people. If that effort was directed in a positive direction, they could be successful, without being a criminal.
This also goes for the white collar criminals that get a pass while running large companies or governments. If those efforts were directed in a better direction, life would also get better for everyone.
I wish there was as much sympathy for the victims as the criminals.
The average drug dealer makes less than minimum wage. People commit crimes because they enjoy doing it, not because they need to. We know this because we have survey data on convicted criminals.
> The average drug dealer makes less than minimum wage.
The average drug dealer struggles to keep a minimum wage job.
> We know this because we have survey data on convicted criminals.
We know otherwise because the US isn't the only country in the world, and places that focus on rehabilitation and job training have dramatically lower recidivism rates.
This may be hard to accept - but there are some people who can’t help themselves. They are career criminals and even when presented with honest work they still choose to commit crimes. There exist sociopaths who don’t feel empathy or remorse, and are driven by their own desires and needs regardless of the cost to other people and society. They cannot be rehabilitated. They need to be locked in a cage forever. Society has known about these people since civilization began
Yeah there are people who can't help themselves, but they are a fraction of a fraction of the population. When presented with an honest and decent alternative the vast majority will choose it.
You continue to dodge my question about the alternative to incarceration, when we continue to have significant numbers of repeat offenders. You know what I’m asking, yet continue to try and distract from it by nitpicking semantics. I don’t think you have an answer.
Hoss, if you cared you'd know about all the many, many efforts at things like "Restorative Justice". Hell, you'd know what the statistics are around recidivism in the US versus other countries and be able to tell us why other places in the world have such different outcomes.
There are plenty of reasons. Mass incarcertaion is a strategy, and it's unique to the US.
If you're really curious, a good entry point is the film "13th".
As a third person observing this conversation, you seem neither curious nor interested in learning why someone might think of US mass incarceration in such strong terms.
The answers are out there, if you actually cared to find them.
Looking for opinions on the open internet doesn’t tell me what the person I asked actually thinks about the topic. The strong term they used is precisely the reason I asked.
Most offenders in the U.S. prison system that U.S. citizens tax dollars are paying for are not violent offenders, at least not until they've been in and out of the prison system at least once, then their chances of committing additional crimes sky rocket.
So to answer your sneakily worded question (throwing in the word violent like some kind of gotcha for the first time): I personally don't want more people in prison because I think it is wasteful both in terms of capital and in terms of human experience, there are proven better alternatives like rehabilitation that work for most people and have significantly better outcomes, and finally because the united states prison system is effectively captured by corporate interests which is antithetical to a society that should be against cruel punishments.
Why is your focus so narrow on ensuring people get punished for crimes rather than ensuring there is no crime? We have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Increasing that isn't going to turn us into Iceland.
Depends a lot on the city/state.
Check super blue cities like Seattle or San Francisco, and the people there complain that the justice system doesn't work as repeat offenders are let go, for one reason or another.
The big incarceration states are most likely deep red states.
The incarceration rate of every single US state is higher than that of every country in the European continent except Belarus, Russia and Turkey. Each state's incarceration rate is also higher than that of every country in the OECD (a club of mostly rich countries) except Chile, Costa Rica and Turkey.
Of the exceptions I have listed, Turkey has the highest incarceration rate of 366 per 100k. Even so, it is still lower than that of 41 states, falling between Hawaii (367) and Connecticut (326).
I live in Canada, to me the US is a whole. I am pretty sure one can find close to crimeless areas there along with something totally opposite. does not matter from the outside.
The real problem with prosecutors is that they don't want to prosecute. When I was on the grand jury in my city a couple of years ago, there was a slow morning and the assistant DA said that there were about 4000 cases per year and that they brought 30 of those to trial. He didn't think anything of it, for him it was a story about how they loved trials because "they were so much fun". But if they were so much fun, why are less than 1% of cases going to trial?
Plea deals.
Plea deals subvert justice for both those innocent who are bullied into pleading out, and for those who are wickedly guilty and get a big discount on the penalty exacted. Plea deals give the system extra capacity for prosecution, encouraging the justice system to fill the excess capacity, while simultaneously giving an underfunded system that doesn't have enough capacity the appearance of being able to handle the load. Bad all around.
there exists evidence proving that a fraction of individuals commit the majority of violent crime. thus, incarcerating those particular individuals would inherently reduce the majority of violent crime. is something missing from this equation?
I read that as questioning whether better evidence would actually help. Which I assume is a reference to some prosecutors ignoring certain crimes as a matter of policy, for example there was news a bit ago about CA choosing to ignore shoplifting under some amount.
If you’d like to have an informed opinion, at least engage with the academic material. Otherwise you come off sounding naïve, insisting that complex problems have simple solutions.
Edit: maybe my ears are a bit sensitive, but I can’t help but hear a faint whistle in the wind, maybe only at a frequency a dog could hear. But no, surely not here in gentlemanly company.
That’s not what I’m disputing, of course. I’m disputing that the grandparent’s assertion that if we (by your stats) simply lock up 1% of the population that violent crime would drop by 60%.
I mean, trivially, using our brains for a nanosecond, what if that 1% of the population is almost always 16-18 year olds when they commit those violent crimes. The 16-18 demographic is roughly 4% of the US population (Google). That would mean locking up 1 in 4 high school students for 6-20 of their most formative years, and thrusting them back into society with a “Mission Accomplished” banner hanging behind you.
Play with the numbers a bit (maybe it’s 1 in 20), but the point stands. Using imprisonment to try to quarantine a demographic that is perceived as irreparably violent is a barbaric, sophomoric idea that has very little evidence of success in the modern era.
There are two ideas here - locking up actual criminals and locking up people who happen to fit the pattern of a criminal even without committing any crime. You're arguing against the latter, but I don't think anybody was proposing that.
Don't jail criminals because maybe they're young, that's your argument? Sounds like a something that's already part of the sentencing policy, leniency of first time offenders.
I was tipsy when I typed that out, tbh. But yeah, there’s a strong case to be made that jailing youth while simultaneously divesting in their communities causes a pretty significant hollowing out and sense of hopelessness.
The reason I brought up youth is because, unsurprisingly, most violent crime is performed by people who don’t have a fully-formed prefrontal cortex. Feelings of invincibility and a sense of not having much to lose.
oh so you did have a point , why didn't you just say so ! do you have any hard evidence to back you assertion that the majority of recidivism occurs in minors ? coz that would definitely make for a better discussion than calling each other names
you are accusing me of virtue signalling without discussing the evidence. this in itself is a virtue signal. I'm not trying to insult you by saying this ... you are behaving hypocritically. lots of people don't treat that gently, I genuinely suggest you be careful towards whom you act that way. if you have an actual point I'm happy to chat about it, however my tolerance of snippy snappy rhetoric is running low
Nah man I’m going to continue to proudly call out people who skirt the line of racism by advocating for the same policies that racists have championed since the fall of the Confederacy. Say it with your chest next time, there’s a reason that it’s not tolerated in polite company. I guess maybe some of YCombinator would enjoy it though, judging by their investments and the rhetoric of those they are associated with.
it sounds to me like you would prefer moral grandstanding about north american politics instead of sharing discussion. not interested, thanks for the opportunity to practice my patience
I agree. There needs to be a non racist president that just sweeps in and does a El Salvador type cleanup of the streets. I bet the 80%+ of normal black people in crime ridden cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Memphis, Detroit, New Orleans would be in full support. Let’s be honest, young black gangsters are the main criminal element in these places. Trump can’t do this because he is a piece of shit with no integrity.
El Salvador doesn't have the type of Constitutional rights that America has. That type of sweep would not be legal.
And that doesn't even get into jurisdictional issues. The federal government doesn't have jurisdiction over local crimes that do not cross interstate boundaries.
In theory that sounds good, but in practice our private system has created the best universities in the world and educates an immense number of students to highly employable levels.
never thought about it before but after playing with it a while i notice i tend to approach from the right, which means moving out if i'm inside on the right side. i think this is because my positioning accuracy seems to be higher moving leftwards than rightwards...
I had that for a few months and cancelled. They have minutely rate limits as well so you get 3-4 hyperspeed responses and then a 45 second pause waiting for the throttling to let your next request through.
And then, depending on what you're working on, the 24M daily allotment is gone in under an hour. I regularly burned it in about 25 minutes of agent use.
I imagine if I had infinite budget to pay regular API rates on a high usage tier, it would be really quite good though.
> They have minutely rate limits as well so you get 3-4 hyperspeed responses and then a 45 second pause waiting for the throttling to let your next request through.
I haven’t really gotten that, though have noticed on some occasions:
A) high server load notifications, most commonly, can delay an answer by about 3-10 seconds
B) hangs, this happens quite rarely, not sure if a network issue or something on their side, but sometimes the submitted message just freezes (e.g. nothing happening in OpenCode), doesn’t seem deliberate because resubmitting immediately works, more often than not
> And then, depending on what you're working on, the 24M daily allotment is gone in under an hour. I regularly burned it in about 25 minutes of agent use.
That’s a lot of tokens, almost a million a minute! Since the context is about 128k, you’d be doing about 8 full context requests every minute for 25 minutes straight.
I can see something like that, but at that point it feels like the only thing that’d actually be helpful would be caching support on their end.
You must be on some pretty high tier subscriptions with the other providers to get the same performance!
I think solutions like Plasmic, Refine, and React-Admin probably have a strong place in this AI future. They combine being able to work LLM-first while still offering agility by providing a solid foundation to build on. Otherwise you're stuck to the whims of untested AI slop for everything from security to component design. There's a reason people writing AI code still use libraries and it's the same reason we used libraries pre-AI. They're tested, they're stable, they have clear documentation. Just because the cost of code is zero doesn't mean the cost of software systems is zero.
Medicaid-receiving immigrants could have their immigration status change, legal violations, emergency medicaid use, sometimes there's state funded coverage that immigrants are offered, etc. There's lots of reasons where Medicaid will have information on immigrants.
That doesnt mean they are illegal right off the bat - there is no reasonable way to filter out the "illegal" members of the roles and essentially making it so the DOJ has a list of people who they can cross reference with expiring status and the moment the clock strikes midnight and their status changes they can get picked up. They should not have all those records for fishing expedititions.
I migrated to Purelymail around the same time! It's working great for me. Unlimited domains, unlimited users, easy to setup. I'm slowly moving all my accounts over to my own domain.
