Whenever these people ask for more power in order to "stop/prevent crime", there should be a bot that replies a list of times when the police didn't act to stop crime, despite having full knowledge of the crime occuring and potential to stop it from happening.
EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report she was being kidnapped, every single time, the operators and the police officers spoke to her in an ironic and condescending tone. It took 19 hours to locate her, by which time, she was already dead. [1]
Two years ago a woman in Greece phoned the police, begging for a patrol car because her ex was about to “kill her.” The officer mockingly replied, “Police cars aren’t taxis”. Seconds later she screamed, “He’s here! He’s going to kill me” (screams). She was murdered outside the police department moments later.
Being bad at your job isn't the same as being an accessory.
But then again, doctors can be arrested for being bad at their job. As well as lawyers losing their license to practice. Maybe that's a standard we should hold to our supposed "public servants".
>Being bad at your job isn't the same as being an accessory.
Deliberately refusing to intervene when you have a duty to do so kind of is though, at least in a moral sense.
Although, reading the transcript in that article through a translator, it does not seem all that bad. The taxi comment is very early in the conversation, and the operator does immediately offer to send a patrol car to her home.
The operator also stays on the line, keeps collecting more information and does really not seem to do anything obviously wrong.
Even if they'd immediately acquiesced to her request to send a patrol car to drive her home, the car probably wouldn't have been there on time anyway.
Even better, in the US, the police have zero obligation to actually protect anybody from crime (unless that person is in government custody). The courts have upheld this time and again.
>An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim's Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation.
>To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so.
Unfortunately the courts have repeated ruled that "aware of the Constitutional violation" means knowing that the exact action being observed had previously been ruled a violation of Constitutional rights. It's essentially impossible to prove, which is one of the reasons we don't see that offense prosecuted.
In the Chauvin case all three of the bystanders were sent to prison by federal courts specifically for civil rights violations stemming from their failure to intervene as Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in front of them.
QI applies to civil cases. IIRC, Chauvin didn’t face a civil case and was not made to pay damages for violations of anybody’s rights. Nor did the other officers.
If a cop violates your rights, you just have to pray the DA will prosecute criminal charges. But you still won’t get an monetary
damages from the cop. You might talk the state into settling.
Generally speaking, the way it's supposed to work is the local prosecutors will start the process. That, unfortunately, isn't something they like to do because they have to work with police departments. If they fail to do their job, theoretically the next step is that the FBI gets involved. But, doesn't seem like today's FBI is doing much beyond prosecuting Trump's political enemies.
This is the reason why I've long believed we need a check both federal and local to police that is completely divorced from regular prosecution. We need lawyers/investigators whose sole purpose is investigating and prosecuting police at pretty much all levels of the government. The federal government theoretically has that with the office of inspectors general.
The government prosecutes the government and is judged by the government and a jury screened under voir dire by two government lawyers?
Kind of like when a robber comes to your house, you have him arrested, and when you go to court you look up and he is the one swinging the gavel.
Of course, interesting the cop has to know there is a constitution violation. Somehow ignorance of the law is always an excuse for the cops but the citizenry must know all 190,000 pages of federal regulations and 300,000+ laws and by god if they forgot one they are fucked.
> the police have zero obligation to actually protect anybody from crime
This gets misrepresented on the Internet all the time. What this really means is that you can't sue the city for incompetent policemen, which is the case in basically every country. That only punishes the taxpayers after all. What is different about other countries is that they are much better at firing incompetent police.
In some (EU) countries, as a public officer/agent you can actually get prosecuted (civil or criminal proceedings per case), in cases of blatant or willful incompetence. (Think of the levels of gross wanton disregard/negligence.)
(There is also the legal vehicle of insubordination.)
The bar is high, of course, and yet people have historically managed to get prosecuted, lose their jobs, and go to prison.
I think the problem in the U.S. is, ironically, the power of police unions in a fragmented police force (city, territory, county, etc.) ecosystem, coupled with the lack of unified, express state and federal statutes to enforce a standard of care and competence.
Add to that that peace officer-specific state statutes (e.g., describing manslaughter while on duty) are written in such a way that, as a matter of law, it becomes a herculean task to tick all the boxes to successfully preserve a conviction on appeal. It is truly troubling. (I am hopeful, as this can be solved by the U.S. legislature, which I think we have a lot of reasons to demand to be done.)
The case in NY was police setup a sting on the subway to catch a serial stabber. Instead of stopping him they stood by and watched him attack several innocent bystanders.
They were sued for incompetence. For the failed sting.
The two police officers who stood and watched him get attacked were ruled to be immune because they had no duty to protect him.
Point being, if police see you getting attacked, they have no duty to /stop/ that from happening. Their only duty is to take a report once they feel safe enough to approach.
If you see two police on the corner and think "this is a safe area" you'd completely be operating on faith in their character.
And then chain that with the ridiculous "clearly established" bar for qualified immunity and it's nigh on impossible to hold police in the US accountable for what most citizens would recognize as clear malfeasance.
Not to speak highly of the NYPD - but it is the character of most violent criminals to refrain from attacking you when police officers are standing close at hand.
well the thing about robbing stores nowadays is that crime has been decriminalized. therefore people performing these non-criminal acts no longer have to suffer the stigma of being labeled "criminal" and become good citizens, or so the thinking goes
Depends on the violent crime. I've been nearly run over in crosswalks dozens of times in view of police, sometimes when they're in traffic as well and could easily pull over the perpetrator. It's never happened.
I am sick to the back teeth of this narrative that all grievances can be resolved into currency and that paying this hurts taxpayers. We can jail negligent or reckless public officials, the financial costs of investigating and compensating people are an economic incentive to promulgate better standards in the first place.
> I am sick to the back teeth of this narrative that all grievances can be resolved into currency and that paying this hurts taxpayers.
I don't understand. This seems contradictory. If the problem is that we're trying to resolve too many grievances with currency, then doing so does nothing but hurt the taxpayer. Americans are already significantly more litigious against police, yet you get significantly more misconduct. The same goes for doctors, drivers, etc.
Which wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact they do have an obligation to stop anyone from protecting other people from crime (see Uvalde, where orders from above were to block parents from saving their children).
That's tangential... they can be held liable if they fail to protect somebody that is in custody. They generally cannot be held liable for failure to protect a member of the public.
Generally speaking, yes. I have worked with the corrections side of law enforcement in the US and don't internationally for quite a few years at this point. The correction side is a different beast than the police side in many ways, so I definitely want to meet clear that my personal experience is limited in scope to that. However, generally speaking I have seen that the majority of corrections staff take protection very seriously. There are individual officers that can be scum, and ideally they should be bounced out of there. But realistically, it's a human problem. I've known plenty of software engineers that were cavalier with people's personal information in ways I think can be just as damaging. On the whole though, the majority of software engineers I know take protecting that information quite seriously.
Or a bot that lists out all the times police have been given these powers only for them to be abused.
Flock is a great example. Story after story in the local news (only there for some reason) about police officers being disciplined or fired because they stalked people using the flock system.
Meanwhile not a single story where a major case was cracked by, and could only have been cracked by, the flock camera system.
In some parts of the world it's well known if you actually want the police to show up, just claim there are lots of drugs or cash at the location. That will actually get the police excited since they stand to gain from it. It's not clear why the police would care someone is being raped/murdered since they cannot profit from that. Although at 15 I would not expect someone to be wise enough to the world to figure that out.
From my memory this case can actually be used to support spyware, I remember all the media complaining "how is it possible that the police or the secret service can't instantly locate a phone very precisely" , same when that airplane crashed and the people were calling for help but the authorities could not get the coordinates and searched for hours , the media was demanding that the police or other services have the technical ability to locate any person in distress.
It is rather jarring to be stuck in the woods with Google Maps offering turn-by-turn navigation back home while the emergency room only gets a vague triangulated position (which might be wrong entirely if the signal gets reflected off of something).
Of course these days such a system has been added. Bonus feature of the (at least American) feature: the system can be activated remotely, even if you're not actually calling in an emergency. The European ETSI spec is pretty funny, it basically comes down to sending an SMS to a Secret Number with a Secret Format containing your coordinates to prevent abuse (both can be found very easily); at least that supposedly only activates when you dial the emergency services.
> To not "demonize" a particular community where a sizeable percentage (in at least one city the number of 30% of all pakistani muslim men involved in the rapes has been mentioned) of its members happens to think that raping infidels ain't rape.
These accusations keep happening, but the whole "why didn't this get investigated" thing was investigated, and the answer is no, investigations weren't throttled because of woke, in fact the machinery of justice operated just about the same as it always does for sexual assault cases: poorly. Also there's been quite a few investigation and convictions.
Tbf, if my government would be out to kill me for protesting, I'd use something that at least was security audited. Not to shit on bitchat, I haven't audited the code personally.
Do we have evidence of this? The only concrete claim made in that post is that Briar 'hit 252 points on Hacker News," which is orthogonal to if it's actually being used.
Seeing Jack committing to this repo is kinda wild to me. I also wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
> wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
In Taiwan you can be on NHI within 6 months of arrival on certain visas. Once you get permanent residency, you're always eligible so long as you keep making monthly payments, which cap out at around 45$usd/month. NHI makes an MRI cost less than 100$ usd. If you don't have NHI you can pay iirc 300$ for an MRI, 100$ for an emergency room visit with blood draw and IV, maybe ~30$/month for buproprion over the counter.
For Portugal the "free" healthcare is extremely generous to anyone staying there, regardless if citizens or not. It does lose money, but then again Germany always pays the bill.
Salaries are low and equipment/infrastructure is top notch so the overall deficit per year is about a billion EUR, which is the extra they deduct from our taxes and Germoney. Quality and efficiency of "bang per buck" is decent albeit citizens always complain.
Portuguese did run half the world for a couple of centuries, the most spoken language by natives on the southern part of this planet but quite tiresome to deal with all that, now is more like Italy and prefers quality of life.
My health insurance (self employed, high CoL area USA, healthy/not old) is 6k$/yr. Kind of blows up that $18k/yr idea. I don't think it gets that much better if you live in a low CoL area.
> One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive
For the U.S., yes, I'm assuming Medicare/Medicaid. For overseas: Vietnam and Portugal have affordable systems you can pay into, with private insurance options above that at $1,200 and $5,000 a year.
I thought fuck-you money also included the ability to explore whatever you want in a way that included e.g. hiring a team to explore projects for you as startups?
Also everyone I know with fuck you money already lives in Asia for cost of living reasons, but spends half the year jet setting to various raves and rich people shenanigans in random places like Croatia.
American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.
> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings
Wealth versus liquidity. I'm saying you sell everything you own, pay off your debts, and then take what's left to retire on. Someone with $10mm in home equity may still be strapped for cash on account of the mortgage.
I recall going to a Subway in TX some years ago and making some slightly risque remarks - we are Brits (ooh er missus). We were mildly scolded that "minors are present". The minor in question was 20 years old, we were told.
So today but at least kids get spared? Jokes aside, we do need moderation of digital platforms but it feels like in the US political landscape at least, that would do more harm that good.
They won't, I genuinely believe the vast majority of Americans will call for war, invasion, etc if the price of their "treats" (TVs, cars, gas, ...) gets too out of reach.
Consumer prices are the only category that hasn't gone up in price in the last couple of decades. It's basically the only little "treat" you can look forward to while toiling away for peanuts
In Romania, far right figures have gone as far as calling for 2026 to be named "The Year of America" in Romania.
It's hilarious because the same types are yelling about Making Romania Great Again, "truly sovereign" (whatever that means) and not subordinate to other states.
"Firearms may not be discharged solely to disable moving vehicles. Specifically, firearms may not be discharged at a moving vehicle unless: (1) a person in the vehicle is threatening the officer or another person with deadly force by means other than the vehicle; or (2) the vehicle is operated in a manner that threatens to cause death or serious physical injury to the officer or others, and no other objectively reasonable means of defense appear to exist, which includes moving out of the path of the vehicle." [1]
What I see is an ICE agent a half-step away from moving out of the path of the vehicle
Yes, let's argue a truly hypothetical situation that has no contact with reality.
What you're arguing is that the woman (alive) pointed her car at him with intent to kill, but after the shooting, the woman's corpse was able to steer out of the way of the officer
Even if the 1st shot through the front of the vehicle is ruled (if it even gets to that point) to be legit, the 2nd and 3rd through the side window almost certainly wouldn't. There's virtually no way this guy walks free if it goes to a fair trial.
If I was on a jury for that case, I'd need some very, very convincing evidence to suggest the officer was in serious fear for his life (or anyone else's) given the publicly available evidence now.
I mean, at 03:05 she does drive into him, and I have a feeling she would have ended up dead anyway were it police officers instead of ICE. I have watched LOTS of bodycam footages and it is crazy to me that people get shot in scenarios that does not require lethal force, but people seem to side with the cops. I think neither cops nor ICE should be doing this shit.
The ICE agent decided to use his gun 10 seconds before the shooting, when the car was stationary and he was in a safe location, to the right of it, and well behind the front. We know this because his own cellphone video shows him switching his cellphone into his left hand from his right. After a brief verbal interaction with the departing partner of Renee Good, and seeing her about to get into the vehicle, he chose to walk in front of it (a violation of procedure), with his hand on his service weapon.
She doesn't 'drive into him.' He engineered the situation by deciding to ready his service weapon and then leaving a place of safety to step in front of a vehicle whose occupants were visibly preparing to depart. Perhaps he learned this tactic in Border Patrol, where he used to work:
Again, the first shot could be ruled to be justified, but the second and third were indisputably after the officer was out of harms way.
There's also unanswered questions about jurisdiction and whether the officers were acting within the scope of their duties, which would also be a major factor in the justification for use of force.
I somewhat agree with this poster. However, I think the unfortunate reality of programming for money is that a mediocre programmer that pumps out millions of lines of slop that seems to drive the business forward and manages to hide disastrous bugs until after the contract / promotion cycle is over will get further ahead than the more competent programmer that delivers better, less buggy, less spaghetti code.
I mean, isn't driving the business forward really what matters (outside of academia, open source, and other such endeavors). We live in a hyper competitive market. All else being equal, if company A can produce "millions of lines of slop", constantly living on the knife-edge of disaster but not falling over it, they will beat company B that artificially slows themselves down. Up until the point company A implodes, but that's not necessarily a given if pre-LLM companies are any indication.
Huh? Where did I say that's what I like? I'm just trying to discuss for discussion's sake. Personally, I want a world that rewards the people who put their thought, care, and craftsmanship into something more than those that don't. In order to live in that world, I think we need to discuss the parts (maybe the whole) that don't and why that might be.
Most of us are paid to solve problems and deliver features, not craft the most perfect code known to man.
If the slop-o-matic next to you is delivering 5 features a week without tripping up QA and you do one every two weeks - which one will the company pick when layoffs hit again?
Most developer jobs are like working at Ikea, but most developers on HN pretend they are fine furniture craftsman and that's really what everyone needs or the whole world will fall apart. It turns out, the vast majority of the population is quite happy with a LACK side table and their carefully crafted dovetail joinery adds nothing but expense to the average use case.
Exactly. With the current over-funded startup market people can spend tons of time and money building over-engineered juicers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ - and their software equivalent.
So many companies would be just fine with a single VPS, Python and PostgreSQL - but that's boring and doesn't look good in your resume =)
In China, the social contract at least is "you give up some individual freedoms and some privacy, never dissent against the government, and in exchange the government promises you prosperity"
I wonder what the Brits get in exchange for their giving up of personal freedoms?
Some brits, most brits are worse off than the average Chinese in all but paper money. Restriced to Han chinese regions; PPP is on par. Overall china has much better social services and growth. Of the two I know which country I'd want to be born into in 2026
Almost all the wealth is in the South East of England. Outside of that the country is much poorer.
I drive from Manchester to Dorset once a month to visit my parents. There is a clear line where I notice all the street signs, the service stations, roads etc are better kept. Cars and houses are in better condition/news.
It is going to exist pretty much anywhere. Wealth is going to be concentrated in some areas and not others. So comparing the Median income of the entire country is not representative of the whole.
e.g. Jobs in London (even remote ones) will pay twice as much as jobs in the North West of England.
I do agree that boiling it down to a single comparison is always gonna be reductive, but the median is IMO still the best you can do here, because it ignores outliers completely (on both sides).
From what I can tell the prosperity gap is also large enough that small errors don't really matter; I already looked at urban china vs average UK (systematically favoring China) and the numbers are still not close (something like $30k vs >$40k even after PP adjustment).
> but the median is IMO still the best you can do here, because it ignores outliers completely (on both sides).
Using the Median as far as I am concerned is meaningless as the South/South-East skews everything. It is quite obvious as you drive across the country. You can see it with your own eyes.
I don't really care that much about the comparison with China.
The difference is that the purpose of government in China is to govern effectively. They dedicate resources to producing leaders who have proven they can govern at lower levels to some degree (you always find that the corruption in China comes from leaders who came up through SOEs or similar). In terms of civil service and province-level leadership, it is just incredibly effective.
In the UK, you have leaders who are incredibly unpopular, they have no real skills, and they spend most of their time pandering to very small groups of people for various reasons. There is no real incentive to do anything relevant to voters, in fact you have seen over the last five years that political engagement has dropped significantly in a way that has generally benefitted incumbents.
To say this another way: the point of the UK system is so that people who are manifestly unfit to govern end up governing, and a small rotating group of special interests are continually pandered to (there is complete blindness to this in the UK, people often assume this is wealthy people when wealthy people are largely ignored...a politics grad working in research for a think tank will have more power in actual government than someone who gives £10m to the governing party).
It is important to note that this is a deal struck for just some ethnic groups of the citizenry. It does not apply fairly across the board to all people under Chinese governments' control so it's not even as good as it sounds for the average Chinese citizen.
It isn't even obvious to me which country GP refers to when they write "i already live in one". No reasonable individual would criticize "liberal politicians" and "electronic dictatorship" without making it absolutely clear where they are coming from. This obfuscation seems like a deliberate choice and makes any standing point balancing on crutches.
EU member and supporter of Chat Control, Romania, had a massive scandal where a kidnapped 15 year old girl called emergency services multiple times to report she was being kidnapped, every single time, the operators and the police officers spoke to her in an ironic and condescending tone. It took 19 hours to locate her, by which time, she was already dead. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_Alexandra_M%C4%8...
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