1,650 karma · joined May 2, 2014
The "soft spots" they found aren't cavities. They're lying.
Public schools have to take children that do not want to be there and make it everyone's problem, and their classmates suffer for it. Maybe this public school policy is the issue that should concern you.
Tell them that, not me. We live in a descriptivist universe.
That leaves our successor species, the machine minds, with replicators and free energy, I think you mean.
Of course they'll change with time. They'll go down further. Not what you mean, you somehow believe they'll go back up... but without bothering to come up with an explanation for why they'd do that. Maybe because it's emotionally comfortable to imagine it so, or convenient to your argument.
In reality, low fertility rates cause economic stagnation that most believe to be the cause of even lower fertility rates. It will spiral.
China's 1.0ish fertility rate means that they will be gone in 14 generations or so. India's not that far behind them. It's strange hearing people talk about the "erasure of races"... a meme that goes back 70 or more years at this point, when the only race that will be erased is the human race.
When fertility rates are 1.0, every subsequent human generation is half the size of the previous. Rapid population will become impossible to ignore in just a few decades. Human extinction looms.
Sure. Do I have to reboot the machine and put in special commands in the UEFI? Will the next OS update then revert that on me anyway? Will they silo all the data on a per-app database, then make the machine unjailbreakable?
I have little confidence that I am still free to do this much longer.
Turns out that her husband had been penetrating her urethra throughout their marriage. When the old woman was questioned about these medical issues by the doctors, she told him that though it had hurt the first time, she expected it to and never thought much of it. Nor had she connected the onset of incontinence and infections with the act.
So no, I don't think that this is necessarily true, either.
I first learned of it here on HN, someone submitted it last year.
>The economy can handle it over that time frame.
What economy? Are you planning on finding jobs for tens of millions more people? One might say that you don't have enough jobs to go around as it is.
The miracle was supposedly $1.2 million per season. On a back catalog item where they apparently never made their money back (maybe we shouldn't believe them on that, dunno).
But in other cases, it's not about the money at all, but about everyone cockblocking it at every step of the way long enough that the assets themselves wither and die. Babylon 5 comes to mind.
Cloudflare murdered crawlers. Then, OpenAI and Anthropic nailed a few hundred nails into the coffin just to be sure... whatever large websites were still semi-open weren't going to let their precious data be ingested for free. Good prostitutes don't give it away.
I'm not sure when all this happened. It snuck up on me too. I think maybe 10 years ago search still worked. Not long after that though. It was dead 6 years ago, and I want to say it was dead even 8 years ago. Someone else could do a better job narrowing it down I'm sure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.