This might be an interesting subject worthy of a proper treatment. I was somewhat put off by the fact that there were giant tangentially-related pictures between every paragraph, though.
The answer is: "Depends". Though if your business model is immoral when applied to poor folks, it's still immoral when applied to rich folks.
> Though if your business model is immoral when applied to poor folks, it's still immoral when applied to rich folks.
The markup on drug store cotton balls is shockingly high, like 1000%. Nobody who buys cotton balls cares though, because the $2 per bag they end up costing is a very small fraction of their income.
But take that to a developing country, and that $2 is completely unaffordable. You would be forcing people in need of sterile cotton swabs to pay a day's or a week's earnings, when their manufacture costs a few pennies.
I don't think the former example is unethical (indeed, the cost of a bag of cotton balls (in America) is probably far below what the market could truly bear). That stupendously high markup is fine because it still keeps the final price easily affordable.
In the latter example, that same markup makes cotton balls all but impossible to buy, when even a "normal" retail mark up of 25% would have kept the price in the cents and therefore at least approachable. I'd call that unethical.
> In the latter example, that same markup makes cotton balls all but impossible to buy, when even a "normal" retail mark up of 25% would have kept the price in the cents and therefore at least approachable. I'd call that unethical.
If setting prices too high is unethical, then is refusing to sell at all also unethical?
And if it is unethical, should it be mandatory to sell any good at a reasonable prices? Or only a class of goods deemed "essential"?
In my personal opinion? If you are they person/company able to provide a necessary good (a patented, life-saving medicine say), then you have a moral obligation to sell it.
Similarly, I believe it immoral to sell a necessary good at exorbitant prices, but fine to sell luxury goods at whatever price you like. Of course, the question follows: What counts as "necessary"? I don't have an easy answer for that one :)
That's an interesting example. But if an opportunity exists in the market for somebody to come in undercutting me and selling cotton balls for a mere 500% markup, then I think it's still okay.
I don't know. Apparently a lot of the people here are master criminals, because they seem to be awfully paranoid about the idea that police detectives can, if sufficiently motivated, deduce some information about their activities. (These sorts of folks must really hate Sherlock Holmes stories.)
Personally, as a law-abiding citizen, I'm really not too concerned about being the target of a police investigation, and if I ever am the target of a police investigation I'll be happy to hand over as much evidence as possible since it will assist the police in ascertaining the truth that I am not, in fact, the guilty party.
You assume that the police care if you are guilty or not. They don't. The quality metric that police work towards is not finding the actual perpetrator, it is finding someone who can be convicted, or, even better, strongarmed into confessing and/or accepting a plea bargain. As a (mostly) law-abiding citizen myself I wish it were otherwise. But it isn't.
You assume that the over three quarters of a million US law enforcement officers act uniformly. What's the statistical significance of a youtube video?
(Edit: The question's phrasing is for effect; I'm well aware there are egregious abuses documented in number greater than one. But I'm still not convinced that with the non-uniformity of the LEO population between different jurisdictions, etc, as well as the non-random selection bias, that all the accounts we have of LEO malevolence provide statistical certainty that police, overall, are bad.)
> You assume that the over three quarters of a million US law enforcement officers act uniformly.
No, I don't. It only takes one less-than-perfectly-honest cop or prosecutor to totally destroy your life. Just ask Troy Davis. (Oh, wait, you can't. He's dead. He was recently executed for a crime he (almost certainly) did not commit.)
Being convicted of a crime you didn't commit may be a risk you're willing to take, but your snide remarks are not justified merely by the fact that others choose not to share your risk posture.
Snideness is about HOW you say something, not WHAT you say. "What is the statistical significance of a YouTube video?" is a snide comment completely independent of the question of whether or not a YouTube video actually has statistical significance (whatever that could possibly mean).
BTW, your claimed math literacy is not much in evidence here. Of course opinions have no "statistical weight" (whatever that could possibly mean). Only data has statistical significance. So let's examine the data. So far in this discussion I've offered up three data points:
1. A video (hosted on YouTube, though I fail to see how that could possibly be relevant) of two individuals, one of whom claims to be a lawyer and another who claims to be a former police officer, both of whom say that it is unwise to talk to the police under any circumstances, and explain why in considerable detail.
2. The well-documented fact that the Innocence Project has to date exonerated 280 people.
3. The fact that Troy Davis was recently executed for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.
Are these data points statistically significant? I have no idea. I haven't done the math. But 1) neither have you and 2) the burden of proof is not on me. I am only arguing that it is not unreasonable to be wary of law enforcement. If someone wants to dispute that, the burden is on them to show that law enforcement is trustworthy. So far no one participating in this discussion has offered up EVEN A SINGLE DATA POINT in support of that position. So my three data points may or may not be statistically significant, but (and here comes a fine example of a snide comment) I dare say they have better prospects than your zero data points.
I shall largely ignore your feigned obtuseness (despite claiming not to know what things could possibly mean, you do seem to get the gist quite well) and get to the relevant section. As an aside, I note that I'll do my best to eradicate any trace of vagueness which the rhetorically inclined like yourself enjoy seizing upon—but that's most usually an unattainable goal.
> Are these data points statistically significant? I have no idea. I haven't done the math. But 1) neither have you and 2) the burden of proof is not on me.
Forgive me for not showing my work. Contrary to your claims that I offered zero data points, I did mention that there are over three quarters of a million law enforcement officers in the US. That would require a randomly selected sample in the several hundreds to determine with any degree of accuracy the character of the population.
You will likely counter that you're not arguing about the character of the population, in fact, you just wrote:
> I am only arguing that it is not unreasonable to be wary of law enforcement.
I must assume you're retracting your earlier statements, then. The ones that started with, "You assume that the police care if you are guilty or not. They don't." and continue on for several more sentences that speak to the character of the population as a whole, notably including an alleged desire to convict anyone regardless of guilt and strongarm confessions.
My point with the above is that if that were an informed opinion based upon data the holder would need to see a sampling of several hundred randomly selected officer/citizen interactions and see the majority of them end in a disregard for the rule of law, courtesy, etc. To my knowledge, that doesn't exist. Partially for difficulties I mentioned originally: nonuniformity of the population, selection bias in accounts, etc.
I shall perform an additional back of the envelope calculation. The Uniform Crime Report for 2010 shows over 13 million arrests that year. Even considering the total number of arrests appears to be declining year over year lately, I can assume relatively safely that in recent years (8-15 roughly) there have been over 100 million arrests. That is a large number of interactions between police and the citizenry.
While I don't have a number for convictions, I will assume it is also rather large. Wikipedia lists over 7 million people under correctional supervision, so that's at least a floor. Do I claim that the false conviction rate is 280/7 million? No, but still (and especially considering that 7 million is likely to be an exceptionally low estimate) my intuition tells me that a random sampling of convictions would find the vast majority to be not wrongfully convicted through law enforcement malevolence.
Your fear and anger toward the general population of law enforcement are not supported by the data. Note that that does not discredit the emotions themselves—they're worthwhile and valid. I even feel them in cases of police abuse, such as Troy Davis and, for instance, the unwarranted pepper spraying of the UC Davis students. I would only caution you against letting those emotions override your reason and thereby jumping to conclusions that the data does not support.
> If someone wants to dispute that, the burden is on them to show that law enforcement is trustworthy.
There's nothing wrong with the opinion that the burden of proof should fall on someone other than one's self. However, I might add that in practice the burden falls on the contrarian. And when one's opinion is against one of the established pillars of society—for better or worse, with no judgment implied—that person is nearly by definition the contrarian.
A description of it (http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/ronhuff.htm) describes the arrived at number of wrongful convictions to be around 0.5%. More that half of those were caused by eyewitness misidentifications, leaving less than half to be caused by police malfeasance. The authors indicate that this is probably low, but: even doubled or tripled or quintupled, it seems that the data indicates the vast majority of law enforcement are not conspiring to convict everyone and anyone for a crime.
> I must assume you're retracting your earlier statements, then
No. The reason it is reasonable to be wary of law enforcement is because the police don't care if you're guilty. Let me be more precise about what I mean by that. It may well be that most individual police officers really do care if you're innocent. But on a systemic level they do not care. They are trained not to care. Their job (they are told) is not to determine guilt or innocence. That (they are told) is the prosecutor's job. (And the prosecutors usually pass the buck to the jury.) The police are not rewarded for letting innocent people go, they are rewarded for making arrests on probable cause. (And prosecutors are not rewarded for letting innocent people go either, they are rewarded for securing convictions.)
I did not mean to cast aspersions on individual law enforcement officers. I'm sure most of them are fine upstanding people. They work hard. They put their lives on the line. They deal with the scumbags of the world so the rest of us don't have to. I respect them and I'm grateful that they are there.
But the police (and prosecutors) work within a system that actively discourages them from thinking about whether you are actually innocent (except insofar as your actual innocence might prevent them from convicting you) and encourages them to think instead only in terms of whether they can collect enough evidence to prove your guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in the mind of a jury, or to present to you a sufficiently credible threat of being able to convince a jury so that you'll accept a plea bargain. Your actual guilt is (and by their training ought to be) irrelevant to them.
BTW, there's a defensible argument that the system ought to be this way, which is that determining actual guilt or innocence is really, really hard, and individuals are easily swayed by emotions and other irrational factors (in both directions BTW) and this system is designed so that no one individual's irrationality can affect the outcome too much. Flawed as it is, it is arguable that it's the best we can do given human nature.
Postscript (since I just saw your edit): a 0.5% false conviction rate is very high. There are about 8 million convicts in the U.S. At 0.5%, that would be 40,000 wrongly convicted. That's about 500 years worth of lightning strike casualties.
> the vast majority of law enforcement are not conspiring to convict everyone and anyone for a crime
Clearly. But a conspiracy is not the only way to produce bad outcomes.
First, it is widely considered prudent to take precautions against both lightning and bees precisely because they are not negligible risks. Some people even consider it prudent to avoid, say, sharks despite the fact that the number of people killed by sharks is smaller than either lightning or bees. Personally, I have gone scuba diving with sharks, but I can certainly understand that this is not for everyone. I've also gone bungee jumping and flown small single-engine airplanes in bad weather. Some people smoke. I don't. Everyone's risk posture is different.
Second, it is far from clear that your chances of wrongful conviction in the U.S. are smaller than being struck by lightning. The Innocence Project has exonerated 280 people. That's 5-10 years worth of lightning deaths in the U.S., and those are just the ones that they have been able to prove were innocent using DNA testing and limited resources. The actual number of wrongly convicted people behind bars is surely much higher, but reliable numbers are understandably hard to come by.
And third, the U.S. has a lamentable track record of using criminal prosecution to silence various forms of dissent. c.f. Bradley Manning, Aaron Swartz, and all the people being arrested and pepper sprayed at the OWS protests.
All of these things can factor into one's personal decisions on how to interact with law enforcement. A certain level of skepticism about the integrity of the legal system is (alas) a defensible position.
Because conspiracy theories are never true? Or just this "kind" of conspiracy theory? You object to the idea that a democracy can't turn into a place where the government is dangerous to its citizens? Have you heard about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution?
With all the myriad of documented ways that rich people have worked with other rich people to fuck us all over, I'm amazed that anyone can write that there is no conspiracy. The revolving door between government and industry, between regulators and the regulated, the money channeled to the police. You need to do some more research.
I visited that link just to see and found that it was posted as an HN article a while back. Your characterization is completely wrong. In that video, a lawyer explains how a person's words can be used against them by the police even if that person is innocent. In fact, innocent people have the most to lose if they come under police suspicion.
Please note that I do not hate cops by any means. In fact, all of the ones I have known have been great. But I've never taken a ride in the wrong side of a police car, either. Perhaps you should read this: http://www.innocenceproject.org/fix/Priority-Issues.php
I am totally cool with the FBI lying, coercing and otherwise trying to convince criminals to give up the evidence against themselves, as long as they don't actually break out the wrench.
The idea that you can't be compelled to testify against yourself, present in many western legal systems, is a good one, and is designed to prevent both torture and false imprisonment due to torture-induced false confessions. But that doesn't mean it's not a good thing in those circumstances when a guilty person does incriminate themselves.
Boucher ended up having to unlock the hard drive, because he had previously unlocked the drive for border agents. Had he refused, the court likely would have held that he could not be compelled to produce the password or the hard drive contents
So it sounds like the actual legal question here, of whether the government can compel you to hand over your password in the general case, has never actually been tested?
IANAL, so I'm unqualified to say, but the way I read the ruling was that they decided that you can't be compelled to hand over your password, but because Boucher had already unlocked the drive for law enforcement once, doing so again would not further incriminate him. So, they forced him to unlock the hard drive without disclosing the password.
As I understand it, if he had initially refused to unlock the drive, then he couldn't have been compelled to unlock it again, under grounds that it could be self-incrimination.
Full marks for lateral thinking, but I don't think that works.
It's the use-mention distinction. Uttering a set of words is not the same thing as asserting that they're true. If you say "My password is 'I killed and ate a young girl in Tucson'" then that does not count as a confession, and could not be taken as one by any court (thankfully, because I just typed out that sentence myself...). Therefore, uttering that sentence does not count as testifying against yourself.
I'm presuming that they are true, and that they are a revelation of an actual crime that you committed. Thus, by revealing the passphrase, you are revealing evidence about yourself, and effectively testifying against yourself.
I believe you'd have to be under oath as well.
Further, I believe that this strategy would be employed as an argument to not ever giving up the passphrase. You would tell the judge, or whomever, that the phrase is a literal confession of a crime, and thus, by doing so, invoke 5th amendment protection.
(You may be right, and my idea may not work. I just want to make sure you're not assuming that the confession is for a false crime, when I meant it to be for a real one (though my examples of course, are false.) Which is why I didn't use a murder as an example...)
The court is not interested in your passphrase, they want the information that it is protecting. The court will simply compel you to provide the information in another manner if you claim that revealing your passphrase would be a 5th amendment violation (although I doubt they would even buy that one to begin with.)
1) tell you to provide the pass phrase to your lawyer (which makes it protected via attorney-client privilege) and then tell your lawyer to unlock the system and provide it to the court
2) out-geek you and notify you that since your encryption system does not actually use your passphrase but instead passes it first through a strong hash function you are to provide the court with the hashed passphrase so that they can use a decrypt method which skips the hashing step.
The short version is that claims that a passphrase alone is protected via the 5th is unlikely to succeed.
1) I read about at least one case where that's about what happened. The police asked the defendant to unlock the computer; they didn't ask for the password itself.
Further, I believe that this strategy would be employed as an argument to not ever giving up the passphrase. You would tell the judge, or whomever, that the phrase is a literal confession of a crime, and thus, by doing so, invoke 5th amendment protection.
I'm not assuming the confession is for a false crime, but nonetheless uttering the phrase "my password is $string' where $string is a true confession is still not a confession.
In your strategy, there are two parts to your confession:
1. The information that your password is the string "$s", and
2. Your volunteering of the information to the judge that the strong $s is in fact a confession of a real crime which you did in fact commit.
Part 1 is not testifying against yourself, unless in conjunction with part 2. Since you voluntarily threw Part 2 into the discussion, you're voluntarily testifying against yourself, and there's no rule against that.
A physical equivalent to your strategy would be to write out a letter of confession, leave it in your basement, and tell the police that the existence of this letter means they're not allowed to search your basement. It's not gonna work.
Parental income and child intelligence are correlated, but the direct causal relationship is (I suspect) extremely weak except at the low-end extreme. The real relationship between these two variables is dominated by parental intelligence: smarter parents have smarter children (with a very strong correlation), and smarter parents earn more money (with a reasonably strong correlation).
Once the parents are picked, earning a little more money won't do much to make the children smarter. If anything it might make them dumber, since those extra hours spent at work are much better spent with your children.
The trouble with these articles is that they actually affect some folks' lives. No doubt, for years to come, there will be couples sitting there and planning out how they want to space their families based on a half-remembered article that they read in the New York Times one day about how they'll ruin their kids' lives if they're spaced less than three years apart. Some of these couples will no doubt go on to delay their second child until they wind up infertile. Others will probably delay their second child until they're so old that the second child winds up with Down's syndrome (that being vastly more common for older than younger mothers). And basically, it's just another one of those random factors that really don't matter much for middle-class parents to agonize over (while lower-class parents keep pumping out a dozen crack babies to get more welfare).
Aw geez folks, are we getting so offended nowadays over a flippant piece of exaggeration?
No, not all poor people are pumping out a dozen crack babies. But they do seem to find it possible to have children in rather inauspicious circumstances while those of us further up the social food chain bite our nails and prevaricate about breeding under any circumstances other than perfect. And that's not a good thing on either end.
are we getting so offended nowadays over a flippant piece of exaggeration?
When the flippant piece of exaggeration comes across as demeaning/classist/racist, then yes, that's going to get us offended.
There is a meaningful phenomenon of lower-income familes tending to be larger than upper-income families. There's even a non-insulting way to talk about it.
The reason his remarks were classist is that poor people are lower class by definition. But the only way they can be constructed as racist is if you assume that poor = black.
I think you redeemed yourself here haha. Honestly, I didn't think you were really being serious but that was kind of a borderline comment. Borderline in the sense that if we assumed correctly that you were kidding around, do we tolerate that kind of thing around here and let it go or do we assume you're being ignorant and ferociously downvote you to hell? I get where you're coming from, hugh3, and I can have a sense of humor about it but other people's racism/prejudice radar just go off the charts when you say that kind of stuff.
But hey, I really like how you put your thoughts with that last sentence. "it's not that good on either end" - very true. It is ridiculous to take this article into any kind of consideration when thinking of having a child. While the study shows data to support the premise, it's far from enough to consider the findings accurate or relevant to having kids. Correlation does not equal causation and all that. It really is just an entertainment piece when you really dig in.
Since crack babies don't exist, but black people have been have been the majority of people incarcerated for crack related offenses (though they are not the majority of crack users), I'm assuming that you're just awkwardly trying to specify black people?
Dude, you had me until you started on that third sentence then you lost me.
I agree with Hugh that there will be people who take these findings a little too seriously. There are so many more factors that can possibly play a role. The possibilities are too many to even go into. This sort of thing makes for good reading but it's far from something to be taken as definitive.
Actually if I'm reading his post correctly, his $2 million net worth is imaginary, and is based on an estimate of how much money it would take in order to passively generate the $60K per annum-ish which he currently works for. Kindof an odd way of putting things.
The answer is: "Depends". Though if your business model is immoral when applied to poor folks, it's still immoral when applied to rich folks.