Fiona

The crazy thing about minority report is that nobody, least of all the people who made it, seem to have understood the problem that the movie depicted:

Having the ability to predict attempted killings and interfere with them would be a genuinely good thing! The problem was the notion that everybody who is predicted to commit such a crime gets an extreme punishment without even a trial, consideration of the circumstances, or any of the other things we would normally attempt to do if we learned about someone attempting to commit a crime. Equating premediated murder out of greed with an over-reacting in a highly surprising situation, with self-defense, with pretty much just accidents and punishing them all in the most cruel way you can imagine is what was so idiotic about the movie that it was hard to take seriously. Trials are there for a reason, and that reason isn’t just to figure out what happened physically!

If you don’t want people to point out that you are spreading Nazi-ideology, than maybe don’t spread Nazi-Ideology…

Locking you (and everyone making similar comments here) up would also help all the people that you won’t have the opportunity to hurt or kill. Because how can I know that you won’t ever commit a crime like that?

The idea that you can get security by simply locking everyone up who commits a crime is delusional and for the outcomes you only need to check the US.

Higher education is truly a scam.

It really depends. From what I hear about the US a lot of it is there. But in some ways that is also the exception.

Compare Germany: By most rankings KIT is one of, if not the top university for computer science in the country. The requirements to get a spot there are literally just that you are qualified to study (aka: have the right high school diploma) and haven’t lost your right to study computer science at a public university by conclusively failing to do so at a different German university. When I was there until 2019 we payed a bit over 100€ per semester in administrative fees and got a limited train ticket in exchange.

The only selection criteria were “did you pass your exams?” that during the bachelors were almost all written exams that were the same for everyone. What you learned was to an extend up to you, it was a university, not an apprenticeship, so there certainly was a significant focus on theory, but especially during the masters a lot just fully depended on what you wanted.

The main cost at the time was just general housing and living costs, which in my case was payed for by my mom, but for those for whom this is not an option, provided that they were either German citizens or legal residents for reasons other than the education, there was BAföG, which comes down to an interest-free loan from which you only have to pay back 50%.

And yes, I definitely learned a lot of useful stuff there.

you definitely don’t have the authority to say he’s definitely beyond ANY help. That’s the part I find ridiculous, not the part where you think there’s something wrong with him

It’s an approach known as perpetrator type theory (or “Tätertypenlehre” in German) that was notably deployed by the Nazis to be able to punish people they didn’t like much harder than others, by allowing them to say for example that someone was inherently and unchangeably a murderer and should thus be executed. The crime was essentially just proof of that, what you got punished for, was what some judge deemed to be the innate criminal personality you had. In particular this allowed to hand out lighter sentences to “Arians” and to decide that Jews for example were inherently bad and could thus be punished much harsher for the same crime.

It’s very obvious from your posts that you neither know what the purpose of a punishment in a legal state is, nor what the effects of them are.

The idea that a multi year sentence is “getting of easy” is insane. And from what you are writing I get very strong vibes that you are one of those people who still subscribe to debunked ideas of perpetrator types, which are unironically Nazi-ideology.

The world that you want to create is not a safer one, quite the opposite in fact. Rehabilitation is the by far most important aspect of a punishment and the idea that crimes like the one in question are committed by people who carefully weigh how many years they are willing to spend in prison and could thus be deterred is beyond ridiculous.

Trace the execs

Importantly you need to trace the execs who copied it, not the ones who decided to try it the first time. Giving things a try and not immediately throwing it away when it isn’t perfect is a good thing and behavior that needs to be encouraged. The problem is when others start copying it blindly because it is new before it could demonstrate benefits. It’s the people jumping on hype that are the problem, not the people giving new things a try, even if they may fail.

It should not be legal to hand out life sentences to minors, period.

In Germany the maximum sentence for minors is 10 years and depending on your developmental state you can count as a minor until you are 21 (You are always treated as one if you are under 18). And that is how it should be. Locking people up for life helps nobody.

This is a completely artificial US problem that has been completely solved in Germany and many other countries by requiring a 1€ deposit to unlock the cart and returning it when you relock it. So, complain to the store for failing to use basic countermeasures.

I’m not saying it’s an easy line to draw because you obviously don’t want to create incentives for bad journalism, but don’t want to make it too high of a bar to get into in the first place. I think you’d need to take things like the number of readers, the factuality of headings and content, the originality and the investigative value into account and be able to at least temporarily cut of bad outlets that spread fake/hate/… while at the same time ensuring that inconvenient truths make it out.

It’s not an easy task, but I feel there is more room to get somewhere useful than with the current model of billionaire-owned media that outdo each other with rage-bait and inaccurate/misleading/falsly balanced/biased reporting…

The honest answer are general fees like they are used for public broadcasters. It’s not a perfect system either and it requires significant effort to keep things neutral, but overall it seems to have the best results if you compare the quality of the outcome.

There has to be a meaningful number of companies where each individually is spending more on adobe licenses than it would cost them to pay a bunch of developers to get gimp to the point where it is a fully sufficient alternative. But hey, the only thing more important to capitalists than making profit seems to be, to not go for cheaper FLOSS options, rather than spending pointlessly large amounts of money on proprietary software…

just imagine the bank would give your payment info to insurance companies for example

That would be a very severe violation of the GDPR and whatever bank-privacy laws are in place. On top of that, which insurance would even be affected by it? I don’t own a car, health insurance comes at non-discriminatory rates here and why would my liability insurance be affected by what I buy? Like: It’s genuinely a non-issue here.

And even if, cash is still a much better option for everything.

Not telling someone something isn’t gaslighting. That’s a very different thing.

And you are making the mistake of assuming that other people think like you, have the same preferences as you, also have memories on an at least subconscious level, …

There are just so many factors, that depend on the person and this is one of those cases where extrapolating from your own lived experience is not the right way to do things. Like: I’m trans and you can trust me, that I have my own places, where I know that I can’t apply my standards to other people (“what do you mean, people don’t like the effects of cross-sex hormones?”).

I’m positively surprised that the article acknowledges the nuance of question of whether unknowing victims should be informed, instead of just jumping on the “tell them all, no matter if it hurts them more than the crime did”.

Anyone who claims that there is a simple answer that is always best is acting out of ideology, rather than an interest in improving people’s lives…

The one thing that might help somewhat, at huge logistic cost, would be to ask everyone what their preference in a situation like that is, ideally with the possibility to have different answers for different crimes. Like, combine it with a question on being an organ-donor and a couple of similar things. Since it goes to everyone, people who don’t know and don’t want to know can stay in blissful ignorance, because the question doesn’t arise suspicions, as it would be if only they got asked. You could still get bad results, but in that case they would at least be the results the people in question choose. Though even this approach can’t easily deal with the cases of minors being involved…

All that said, there is another component to the case, that might be the biggest problem with it: The perpetrator getting of easy because it was assumed that the victims didn’t know and the implication of a much harder punishment had they been known to have known: Whether the victims knew, didn’t change the crime that was committed, only the outcome. And punishing the outcome rather than the action is an extremely bad way to enact justice. (Yes, attempted murder should be punished like murder!)

Yeah, buying medication is literally the only good use-case for cryptocurrencies, but it still is a valid and important use-case that saves lives!

I’m willing to agree partially: AFAIK the usual classification of the economic system of the SU is “state capitalism” which is indeed distinct from capitalism and socialism and I’m even willing to grant it that, if well executed (in the SU it mostly wasn’t) it has the potential to be better than capitalism in a few aspects.

That said, I agree about the notion that fascism is a form of capitalism: The two are often associated with each other, but at the end of the day quite distinct and orthogoanl systems. Fascism is about having a powerful leader who oppresses the population and the SU very much had that in an almost textbook-manner with Stalin, though I will also acknowledge that there were of course detals in hwo it differed from say Naziism in Germany at the same time.

No it’s more likely that they are an actual leftist. China and Ruzzia are (and the SU was!) fascist hellholes that have nothing to do with socialism and/or communism besides screaming it of the windows all the time.

And people who delude themselves to believe something else are really annoying…

I saw “driverless waymo” in the title.

Also: Prejudice against people wearing fedoras is still prejudice and thus not really a great thing to have. One of my best friends also likes to wear a hat at times (not sure if it counts as a fedora, I know very little about heads) and is one of the sweetest people I know.

Okay, this really seems more like a case of sexual harassment, rather than harassment of Waymo customers, which was my first suspicion. Had it been the latter as part of a politically motivated action against the company I might have had a lot more sympathy, but this is disgusting…