Why do we punish based on consequences caused by the crime, then?
A drunk driver is punished much more severely if they hit and kill a person, than if they hit and hurt a person, than if they hit a tree, than if they don’t crash at all.
As long as we’re punishing people based on the actual impact of their crimes, then emotional impact should count.
why evidence rules exist in court.
Sure, but not for victim impact statements. Hearsay, speculation, etc. have always been fair game for victim impact statements, and victim statements aren’t even under oath. Plus the other side isn’t allowed to cross examine them. It’s not evidence, and it’s not “testimony” in a formal sense (because it’s not under oath or under penalty of perjury).
I’d argue that emotions are a legitimate factor to consider in sentencing.
It’s a bit more obvious with living victims of non-homicide crimes, but the emotional impact of crime is itself a cost borne by society. A victim of a romance scam having trouble trusting again, a victim of a shooting having PTSD with episodes triggered by loud noises, a victim of sexual assault dealing with anxiety or depression after, etc.
It’s a legitimate position to say that punishment shouldn’t be a goal of criminal sentencing (focusing instead of deterrence and rehabilitation), or that punishment should be some sort of goal based entirely on the criminal’s state of mind and not the factors out of their own control, but I’d disagree. The emotional aftermath of a crime is part of the crime, and although there’s some unpredictable variance involved, we already tolerate that in other contexts, like punishing a successful murder more than an attempted murder.
Everyone has their own reasons. If you disagree with their management, then you should celebrate other people choosing to leave, even if for different reasons than your own.
I don’t brush anything under the rug. I actively shared the Tweet that started this hole BS.
I get that. But my point is that you can’t claim that Proton’s CEO is acting independently of the Proton corporation itself when Proton’s official corporate accounts chimed in on his side on this.
Both of the American parties are a shitshow
Not on antitrust. The Biden administration was one of the strongest advocates for consumers on antitrust issues we’ve seen since Robert Bork convinced Reagan to tear it all down.
Anyone who says otherwise is trying to lie to the American public about it, and should be called out for actively advocating for false MAGA propaganda. Andy Yen did it, and Proton agreed with it.
Proton didn’t decide anything, Andy Yen posted ONE tweet and then doubled down on it with the Proton Reddit account which was deleted.
How are you going to say that Proton didn’t say anything and then acknowledge that the official Proton social media accounts were making statements like this:
Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses
That’s the context you keep brushing under the rug. The official Proton position is not just that Trump made a good choice, on this one thing, it’s that you should vote for Republicans over Democrats.
Yes, it was official corporate Proton position to delete that comment. But it was the official Proton position to make that comment in the first place.
OpenAI’s commercial entity
They should never be allowed to call this a “non-profit”
They never did. The nonprofit parent owned shares in a for-profit subsidiary, which was structured in a way that investors in the for-profit subsidiary could never control the company (the nonprofit would own a controlling share) and had their gains capped at 100x.
Andy Yen went out of his way to criticize Democrats on antitrust, which is how you can tell it’s actually a pro-Trump position unsupported by the actual facts.
I like Gail Slater. She’s possibly the best choice among people who Trump likes, to head DOJ’s Antitrust Division. She has bipartisan bona fides.
But to say that Democrats, after 4 years of Lina Khan leading the FTC, and a bunch of the reforms that the Biden FTC and DOJ made to merger standards and their willingness to sue/seek big penalties for antitrust violations, aren’t more serious than Republicans about reining in big tech consolidation and about stronger enforcement of antitrust principles, completely flips around the history and is a bad faith argument.
Andy Yen could’ve praised Gail Slater, and that would be that. Instead, he took a post by Trump that didn’t even mention Democrats, and made it about how the Democrats are bad on taking on big tech. That’s the problem everyone had with it.
That’s not an outrageous medical bill. It’s an outrageous bill for clawing back government benefits for those whose full time care for family members prevents them from working.
No, even if tuition and books are free, financial aid still needs to help full time students have food to eat and have a place to live and ordinary day to day expenses. In many places, the aid on room and board is much more money than aid on tuition and fees.
And community colleges tend not to have their own dorms or anything like that, so it comes in the form of a monthly payment that helps the student pay their rent. That’s an incentive for fraud.
Yeah, investing in a company is investing in the whole company and all of its projects. Lies about your company are only fraud when the lies rise to the level of making a material difference to how a typical investor would value that company. If the lies are about a very minor percentage of revenue or profit, then it’s not gonna rise to the level of securities fraud.
The actual data compromise happened sometime before July 2022, months before Elon’s purchase of Twitter happened. Telling people they shouldn’t have registered their real phone numbers to Twitter in 2015 or whatever isn’t really a helpful argument to make today.
Copyright is for written, filmed, or musical work, as well at its derivatives.
It’s a little bit more than that. There are 8 categories:
Sculpture is a type of visual work that can be copyrighted. So are architectural works. Not that a bar of soap would likely qualify as a sculpture, but there are 3 dimensional shapes that can be copyrighted.
Shapes can be trademarked, but an oval is not trademarkable because it is a very generic shape.
If it’s not already in common use when trademarked, even simple shapes can be trademarked. Simple colors can be trademarked as well: UPS trademarked its shade of brown, Tiffany has trademarked its shade of blue. Specific design elements can be trademarked as well, like the recognizable Burberry check pattern, the iconic glass bottle shape of Coca Cola, etc.
And the Dove soap bar shape isn’t just a generic oval. It’s a precise 3 dimensional shape, with a raised center and a gradual taper to the vertical edges all around.
I couldn’t find a registered trademark, but the shape is distinctive enough that they probably would be able to trademark it if they wanted to (or even enforce an unregistered trademark in that shape, at least in the U.S.).
You use Signal to avoid government surveillance.
I use Signal to avoid government accountability.
We are not the same.
Nearly half of U.S. adults
Half of LLM users (49%)
No, about a quarter of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than they are. Only about half of adults are LLM users, and only about half of those users think that.
I love that the question doesn’t specify what “better” means, and we’re all interpreting it in our own ways. Healthier? More enjoyable?
No.
Autocracy moves faster at marshaling the resources it has, but is significantly worse at accumulating resources than what economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson describes as inclusive political and economic institutions, which broadly allow members of the public to engage in political and economic activity. (Note that their work on these things won them the Economics Nobel last year.)
Distributed, decentralized power is important for maximizing the potential of a population.
Autocratic political systems are brittle. They’re also poor. They tend not to survive more than a decade or two before the strongman is deposed, one way or another, whether from internal coup or revolution, or simply external invasion of a weakened state. And a successor strongman might be weaker. All the while, the inclusive states continue to grow in their own power and influence.
So any short term gain in consolidating power into smaller groups is going to be up against time, and the fragility of the whole arrangement as the autocratic country falls behind its competition.
Actually for federal sentencing, property destruction is punished under the same table as theft. It’s mostly measured from the amount of loss to the victims, whether the person actually profited from it or not.
“Up to 10 years” is the maximum possible for that type of crime. Actual sentencing guidelines for a $500k loss for a first time offender will probably come out to about 2, maybe 3 years.
In order for the recommended sentence to hit 10 years, we’d have to be talking about damage of over $550 million, or something like a long criminal history.
Substantial disruption of critical infrastructure would get someone to around 5 years, as a reference.
It’s complicated, and people can have different philosophical approaches to the goals and purposes of criminal punishment. But my argument is that people should be internally consistent in their views. If people believe that the consequences of a crime should be considered when sentencing for that crime, then emotional consequences should count, too, because emotional harm is real harm.