Google Engineer bails out student in jail • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#161

Post by d0mine » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 2:27 AM UTC

yummyfajitas wrote: post #116

barrkel wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criminals are created by (a) laws, (b) their transgression, and (c) their enforcement. You seem to think that the whole issue is in (b) - that there's something about the US that causes more people to act unlawfully, to transgress. Have you considered other possibilities, such as unjust laws, or unequal application of laws? Besides that, there's social issues, whereby subgroups are disadvantaged and have fewer opport…

It's certainly the case that (b) is a major role. Forget about convictions - lets just look at crimes. The US murder rate is 5/100,000 people, Britain, Denmark and similar countries have about 1/100,000 people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona... The reason why we are different from much of Europe isn't a secret, it's just taboo to discuss. Most of our crime is confined to a small subset o…

What subset are you talking?

The link you provided to fbi.gov doesn't indicate it.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#162

Post by baltcode » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 3:22 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #45

mixmax wrote: post #24

25% of the world population in jail is American. 737 out of 100.000 Americans are in jail, that's almost one out of a hundred. As a comparison Denmark has 59 out of 100.000 people in jail. And the number of Americans in jail has been rising steadily for the last 20 years. This is a pretty serious problem.

And yet, somehow, over the last 20 years the crime rate in the US has dropped tremendously. Every single one of those prisoners was convicted of some crime or another by a comparatively just court system. The underlying problem--criminality in some American cultures--is difficult and rather unique to the United States. Other rich countries are more culturally homogenous and hence suffer less criminality, though that'…

Or, there is a problem with the "justice system" and how it deals with minorities, non-white people, immigrants or members of some other less powerful group. One glaring example: http://www.theworld.org/2010/12/06/missouri-court-guatemalan...

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#163

Post by stonerinsoma » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 5:02 AM UTC

Anti-Flag says it best. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEtEG2Q7zCk

The police are not there to protect us, they are a bunch of gestapo thugs who have been hired to keep us enslaved.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#164

Post by rhizome » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 6:24 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #153

kawera wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the efficiency of police work doesn't always depend on location. I also live in Brazil (São Paulo) and had my car stolen last year; they found it the next morning. While living in Paris years ago, I had my car stolen and it was never found.

I was told it was safe to assume, considering model/year of my stolen cars, that they were dismantled the very same day. It's possible your recovered car had a lower demand for aftermarket parts. As for your car in Paris, the obvious conclusion is that the total prison population in France is a bit lower than it should be. ;-)

If the people who told you that were the police, they have a conflict of interest if they don't feel like hunting down stolen cars, which I imagine is policework equivalent of being the guy who gets to tell people to reboot in the IT world. Yeah, it fixed the problem, but it's just going to happen again, in the exact same way, possibly to the same people.

However, and given the more-or-less subject of this thread, it might be a good punishment for bad cops to have to work these cases (no gun or handcuffs) for $2/day.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#165

Post by pinchyfingers » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 6:30 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #45

mixmax wrote: post #24

25% of the world population in jail is American. 737 out of 100.000 Americans are in jail, that's almost one out of a hundred. As a comparison Denmark has 59 out of 100.000 people in jail. And the number of Americans in jail has been rising steadily for the last 20 years. This is a pretty serious problem.

And yet, somehow, over the last 20 years the crime rate in the US has dropped tremendously. Every single one of those prisoners was convicted of some crime or another by a comparatively just court system. The underlying problem--criminality in some American cultures--is difficult and rather unique to the United States. Other rich countries are more culturally homogenous and hence suffer less criminality, though that'…

"Comparatively just court system" !? Dude pull your head out of your ass, you're drinking some really dangerous Kool Aid. How was this 17 year old kid treated with any justice? The cops destroyed his private property and ruined his family's life to protect their own power-tripping asses.

The core of being American should be to question and challenge authority at every opportunity. It's why we have the First and Second Amendments. It makes me sick that so many Americans are spineless slaves to this dying corrupt government.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#166

Post by neilk » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 6:41 AM UTC

foldr wrote: post #122

matwood wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, anecdotally speaking, as a Canadian I find the racism in America to be pretty breathtaking. White Americans, whether liberal or conservative, take it as a given that there's always some part of the city dominated by blacks where gunfire is heard at night and the cops are afraid to go. If you probe even a little bit you find that most white Americans, even nominally liberal ones, think blacks have lower capacit…

>When it comes to bad areas in large cities nearly every city has at least one such area. [...] This is not something made up or in the minds of white people. I think neilk is aware of that. I took his point to be that it is surprising that Americans accept this as a normal fact of life.

Yeah, exactly. And living in the Bay Area really makes that plain.

I lived with a friend in San Francisco's Potrero Hill / Dogpatch neighborhood. The north side of the hill is one of the most desirable areas of the city and is one of those deliberately quaint neighborhoods that is pretty much 100% white. The south side has low-cost housing and is almost as uniformly black. [1]

My friend lived very near the top of the hill, where the character abruptly changed. Police sirens were common, but since it was all over on the other side of the hill, everything was okay and nobody even felt unsafe. Apparently whoever it is that makes trouble on that side knows never to come over to the other side, presumably since the police will bring down the hammer much harder.

Taking the bus into the city was embarrassing. The bus started on the "black side" and then came over to the "white side" on its way downtown. And half a century after Rosa Parks, the bus was voluntarily segregated with blacks at the rear. I got on the first "white" stop and was stunned to see how, every day, the entire bus was filled at the back with nobody at the front. One day I went to a different bus stop (just three blocks over!) and got a lot of stares, because this was obviously a "black" stop and I'd crossed the line.

I'm not saying Canada does it much better -- ethnic ghettos exist, and are often encouraged by realtors or even government policies. But I always felt like, in Canada, we all sort of knew that was a bad situation that had to be rectified eventually. If you asked a typical Obama-loving resident of Potrero Hill if they lived in some kind of cultural standoff that amounted to a separate regime for their black neighbors, they'd be shocked and offended.

[1] Race map of the Bay Area: http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4981425631/

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#167

Post by webuiarchitect » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 6:53 AM UTC

I liked the statement he made, "Bad things can only happen if good people do nothing".

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#168

Post by neilk » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 7:04 AM UTC

icegreentea wrote: post #134

neilk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link seems suspect to me. India is rife with crime. Daily life , even for rich people, involves lots of activities that would be crimes in a Western country, particularly official corruption. Anyway, you spoke in terms of "criminality in some American cultures", which sounds like a euphemism, since you neglected to name them. Although you followed it up with your hetereogenity thesis I (like many readers) was al…

As a counterpoint (Canadian.. living in Toronto). There is a good chunk of people growing up (my age... university age) that just assumes every city with a significant non-white population will have some region where the poor of the non-white people end up shooting at each other. Toronto has/had these areas (Jane and Finch ring a bell?). Vancouver has these areas. Montreal does too. It's no where as bad as the crime…

You're right, the situation in Canada is changing. And I am older than you so perhaps my attitudes are outdated. When I hear about such areas developing in Vancouver I think of it as some sort of un-Canadian cancer, perhaps caused by recent adoption of US-style policies.

That said, I know what I'm talking about. I'm an insufferable do-gooder who has volunteered to teach in East Vancouver, and I've had friends and significant others who are artists using warehouse space in economically depressed areas, like Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (which, to be fair, is for many a race-blind vortex of despair). And in the Bay Area I've had similar experience making frequent trips to West Oakland, Emeryville, and San Leandro. I never lived there, but I am the sort of person who tries to walk whenever possible (even when people tell me it's ill-advised) so I've seen a lot more that one does from an automobile.

Trust me: the ethnic divide in Canada is nothing compared to the USA. In Canada you have neighborhoods where people are struggling. In the USA you have neighborhoods that look like the apocalypse happened, thirty or forty years ago.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#169

Post by neilk » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 7:51 AM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #139

neilk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That link seems suspect to me. India is rife with crime. Daily life , even for rich people, involves lots of activities that would be crimes in a Western country, particularly official corruption. Anyway, you spoke in terms of "criminality in some American cultures", which sounds like a euphemism, since you neglected to name them. Although you followed it up with your hetereogenity thesis I (like many readers) was al…

America's slave-descended population have been in the country for over 500 years. By any normal expectations, their original culture should have been completely blended with the mainstream culture hundreds of years ago. And a large extent this is true of those blacks that enter the middle class and beyond. But for those that are trapped in a ghetto lifestyle -- with ghetto attitudes -- I don't think you can attribute…

Yeah, perhaps we do agree, but you do phrase things in a way that pushes people's buttons more. ;)

I'm not as pessimistic about Latin American integration as you are. Their values are pretty much identical to mainstream America. I don't expect they will ever vote in blocs; they don't even do that today. The worst thing about that situation is the hypocrisy about so-called "illegals", especially in California.

BTW, the French in Quebec were never excluded from government, higher education, or the professions, although they were excluded from the business and managerial classes for centuries. So it wasn't quite oppression, like say Cuba, but the French did feel like second-class citizens in their own country. It's not comparable to any other situation I know of.

Re: Google Engineer bails out student in jail

#170

Post by nitrogen » Sat, Dec 25, 2010, 8:34 AM UTC

jdminhbg wrote: post #137

jchrisa wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd suggest that our living arrangement (get isolated from community, earn and spend money to purchase a simulacrum of what community used to provide) has a lot to do with the bleakness of American life, and bleakness is probably a bigger predictor of criminality than anything else. If you want to fix the US, go back 60 years and fight highway and auto subsidies.

Given that crime rates are vastly higher in walkable urban settings than sprawling suburbs, I'd suggest that highway subsidies are a poor indicator of crime rates.

Possible explanation: the highway subsidies led to the middle and upper-middle classes leaving the cities, leaving only those too poor to afford a move (because they can't afford the added transportation costs, etc.).