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Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

It'd be great if the government more regularly caught, prosecuted, and convicted people at this level of criminality. Otherwise the entire society collapses under the weight of abject corruption, because prosecution is a selective enforcement tool used at the whim of corrupt politicians, rather than an automatic mechanism that operates independently.

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He was prosecuted because his ego meant he alienated the fuck out of everybody, including what should have been his allies.

If he'd been just a bit less outspoken theyd probably have left him alone.

Yep, corruption sucks.

Same reason Lance Armstrong eventually went down.

Interesting i didnt realize that.

Not everyone, he managed to romance a reported in the turmoil.

I have a strange opinion that it should be a lot easier to send people to jail and that more people should spend time in jail for real crimes. Ex. First time DWI - straight to jail. None of this "I'm rich and important" or "it's only my first time".

But also that jail time should be short and absolutely not destroy lives. This whole "lottery" thing that jail has become is completely absurd. One person who does zero jail time for a crime while another person has their life destroyed for the same crime.

If we start apply punishment equally without any question then maybe we can get some laws changed.

How about sending fewer people to jail instead, like every other country in the world?

There is no automatic mechanism that operates independently. The prosecution, defense and judiciary are not GPT-3 robots that can mine through centuries of case law in 2 seconds to achieve a perfectly balanced decision.

If you want regular prosecution of white-collar crimes, you may want to support better funding for these agencies, so they can actually put resources behind investigating and trying cases where criminality occurs.

>"you may want to support better funding for these agencies, so they can actually put resources behind investigating and trying cases where criminality occurs. "

I don't think people realize just how much of law and regulatory enforcement is dependent on "who knows who" in the white collar world. A lot of investigations are discretionary and it is surprisingly easy for prosecutors to simply not address something. Would more funding help? I'm sure it would have some impact. But if Martin Shkreli was a big time political donor I suspect things would have turned out differently.

> automatic mechanism that operates independently

Yes, but I think this is more metaphorical than literal. Of course there aren't literal automatic robots doing the work of rooting out corruption; it's a goal.

I would argue that a high-functioning justice system should appear as close to automatic as possible, in order to most effectively create a sense of "if I do wrong, I know that I will be punished" rather than "if I do wrong, I need to figure out how to get around the law."

Should or would aside, it's not an automatic system. Even if it were, the trials themselves would be adjudicated by federal district court judges, who are political appointees. If you've ever watched a Senate judiciary hearing, the questions posed to the candidate are often ideological in nature rather than legal.

I probably seem pedantic, but I think it's important to reiterate the scale of human involvement and imperfection underpinning the entire system in which we exist. The solution to that is not "take the humans out of it", but to iterate that system with incremental improvements and fund it to the level commensurate with its importance to our society.

> If you've ever watched a Senate judiciary hearing, the questions posed to the candidate are often ideological in nature rather than legal.

It hasn't always been this way [1]. There have been controversial candidates at times throughout history, but most candidates got supermajority votes. In modern times, things are incredibly, abnormally polarized.

[1] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/nominations/SupremeCourtN...

The issue isn't funding, it's structurally dysfunctional organizations. But that's a much harder problem to solve than blaming lack of funding. I was involved with a certain tax collection agency's project that was a never-ending trainwreck that spent decades complaining about being underfunded. When they finally got the 10s of millions of dollars they said they needed, they used it to hire and train college grads RPG (a programming language, if you haven't heard of it) along with how to operate mainframes and other systems that haven't been touched since the 80s. Fast forward a couple years, and every single one of the dozen hires had either quit or moved onto something more glamorous. But meanwhile the maintenance burden had just doubled because of all the new systems written in RPG on a mainframes which they can't retain people on.

I think most of the government agencies problems has nothing to do with their budget, but how they run themselves.

I wonder which countries do a better job with managing technical debt, both in digital and bureaucratic systems.

How much research and experimentation is being done in those areas?

The point is that it should behave like an automatic mechanism. This is a metaphor for reducing bias as much as possible.

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