Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

It strikes me that people who are bothered by theft in the modern age just haven't got the whole digital revolution on quite a profound level. She lists the things that bothered her as "the BlackBerry with contact information for dear old friends, the wedding anniversary wallet that her husband bought her when she finished chemo, stuffed with about two years' worth of love letters from her toddlers, hopeful doctors' notes, and other scraps of paper she couldn't bear to part with".

The wallet itself I kind of get, but the rest is just data. With a ScanSnap and an iDrive account, the stuff that matters becomes so many electrons in the grid. Send the bits of dead tree off to Iron Mountain, insure your gadgets and stop worrying.

I think it's a sort of zen exercise, separating sentiment from utility. If suffering really is caused by attachment to transient things, then it seems to me that we have a truly unique opportunity to break attachments wholesale, at little or no cost. Keep your bits in the cloud and treat your atoms as if they're borrowed (which ultimately they are).

If we really want to reduce crime, locking people up isn't going to help - we have decades of recidivism as proof. There's no such thing as deterrent, not for people with chaotic childhoods who never developed self control or long-term thinking. If I'm robbed from, it's my fault, because I haven't done enough for the people in society with lives so crappy that petty theft seems like an attractive career.

Here in the UK, the average prison inmate is functionally illiterate, mentally ill and addicted to drink or drugs. One in ten is psychotic and one in five has attempted suicide. I imagine the numbers are much the same in the US. I see a lot of comments in this thread about preventing crime, about punishment and deterrent. If it worked, why is recidivism so high? Is the best we can do just locking people up?

I disagree with the parent, but I'm disappointed to see so many people voting their agreement with a comment, not with whether the comment is valuable or not. You guys can take that attitude back to reddit, please (yes, I've been hear more than a year...).

Regarding the comment, the problem is that the "data" is more than the actual pixels on the scraps of paper. The data includes the knowledge that the scraps were actually held by the giver. The data includes a part of the relationship that is embodied by the the scraps of paper. A digital version would never replace that.

If you are robbed, it is not your fault. While I agree that our current efforts aren't working and really need to be re-evaluated (unfortunately, that always falls on idiotic, extremist "hang them all" or "give them a kiss and tell them it's all right" politics), when you are robbed, it is always somebody else's fault, even if you left the garage open and the car unlocked.

Excusing others' illegal actions will never make the problem go away, and there will always be sociopaths who believe they deserve what they take. They will never have permission to take from me.

You need to read the next rest of the sentence and the next:

that person would probably prefer you just dump it all in the trash. Because finding fragments of your private life on people's yards and scattered on the street, in the shrubs and gutters, is a unique kind of psychological torment. Suddenly a routine violation starts to feel really personal.

She wasn't upset about the stuff being stolen, she was upset about the stuff lying all over the neighborhood for the world to see. She felt violated and exposed.

The proper digital analogy is having your "bits in the cloud" hacked and posted on a public website for all the world to see.

The proper digital analogy is having your "bits in the cloud" posted on a public website for all the world to see.

So, you mean Facebook.

Have you ever been robbed? Also, it sounds like the "transient things" were the things that helped her get through chemo. Have you every gone through that?

I agree... being robbed induces sharp feelings of rage and helplessness that don't fade for a long time. That said, I voted the grandparent up (from -1) because there are a couple good points in there.

> The wallet itself I kind of get, but the rest is just data

how insensitive. No wonder some people find we hacker/geek types so unlikeable.

I definitely read the opinion as more buddhist than geek.

I know what you're getting at (non-attachment and all), but also remember that the Buddhist position is one of compassion, even for those not practicing non-attachment.

The best we can do is lock people up for longer periods of time -- at least for crimes with victims (robbery, murder, assault, rape, etc...).

It isn't actually clear that that reduces crime, though, if you're advocating it from a utilitarian perspective (as opposed to advocating longer prison sentences as morally justified punishment, which is a different argument). For example, doing the opposite, releasing people early under various kinds of early-release and parole programs, generally doesn't appear to increase either crime rates or recidivism rates, at least in any studies I can find. And increasing sentence length also rarely has a statistically significant effect on either crime rates or recidivism rates. One alternative that does seem to often have an effect is increasing policing, i.e. increase the probability of being caught rather than the severity of the punishment if caught. (Doubling the sentence length and doubling the being-caught probability each has the same effect on an "expected years of prison for committing this crime" computation, but they seem to have different deterrent effects.)

I just meant that if we keep people who have demonstrated they are violent in jail longer, that should keep them off of the streets. My assumption was that in jail they'd commit less crimes -- at least on people who weren't in jail.

If every person who commited a violent crime went to jail for life, would that reduce violent crime? I feel like it would, although I have no evidence of it.

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