After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered • Hacker News Board

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#131

Post by selecsosi » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #20

nix23 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well its normal that they denied human right's, maybe the most important of it, it's called 'freedom'. But i know what you mean. Having private prisons is also a big NoNo i think, its like every single one state service is corporation driven ;)

Private prisons are a red herring. The vast majority of prisoners are not in private prisons, and states have been moving to get rid of them. In many big states, like New York and Illinois, private prisons weren’t legal to begin with. Rikers, the NYC jail famous for its abuses, was public. People make private prisons to face of prison abuse for tactical reasons. In reality, the story of the American prison system is…

This 100%. Private prisons are used to create a contrast statement for corporate suppliers of prisons and lobbyists to "show" how cheaply operations can be done. They are a conference booth to lure states in regarding shredding prisoner QOL for a 6% revenue increase can work without increasing the inmate death rate too much.

The Industrial private prison complex owner group don't want to operate, they want to sell support, training, equipment and materials to public prisons not operate (like a defense contractor), because a prison is very complicated management problem and has little public reward over budget efficiency sadly (things are changing but slowly).

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#132

Post by peruvian » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

masukomi wrote: post #120

throwablePie wrote: post #87

> "Caging me for a decade is not rehabilitating. I may be making excuses for myself, though there is a lesson that could have been learned with the same amount of value for justice if the sentence was 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, even 6 years." From the article at: https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus-severi... I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessiv…

> I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. you miss the point. prisons are a massive industry with serious lobbying clout. Putting lots of people in prison for a long time isn't a punishment to the prisoner, it's a gift to the prison system. The "punishment" is just a side effect, and the longer it lasts, the richer the people in power…

Don't forget that a lot of companies, even "liberal" ones, make use of prison labor.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#133

Post by fencepost » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:40 PM UTC

non-entity wrote: post #117

desstap wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are in Asia right? Let’s see China - disappeared for comparing xi jing ping the dictator to Winnie the Pooh, or mention Hong Kong or Taiwan in a postiive light on wechat Singapore - 2 years in jail for selling gum, death penalty for Having drugs Vietnam - 34 years for drug trafficking

> 2 years in jail for selling gum What do they have against gum?

Ever wondered what those black spots on city sidewalks are? That's gum. All of it is gum that's been spat out then walked on until it acquires a top embedded coating of city grime.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#134

Post by dylkil » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #129

masukomi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. you miss the point. prisons are a massive industry with serious lobbying clout. Putting lots of people in prison for a long time isn't a punishment to the prisoner, it's a gift to the prison system. The "punishment" is just a side effect, and the longer it lasts, the richer the people in power…

10 years of prison time for a single non-violent crime is extremely rare in America. What can happen in certain states, is that repeat offenders are hit with escalating prison terms each time they are convicted (the classic example are the three-strikes-your-out laws), whereby someone can be sentenced to a life term. In those cases, sentences don't translate to actual prison terms since non-violent offenders are rout…

>10 years of prison time for a single non-violent crime is extremely rare in America.

Ross Ulbricht got double life imprisonment + 40 years for a non violent crime.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#135

Post by koheripbal » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

non-entity wrote: post #117

desstap wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are in Asia right? Let’s see China - disappeared for comparing xi jing ping the dictator to Winnie the Pooh, or mention Hong Kong or Taiwan in a postiive light on wechat Singapore - 2 years in jail for selling gum, death penalty for Having drugs Vietnam - 34 years for drug trafficking

> 2 years in jail for selling gum What do they have against gum?

It's extremely hard to remove from sidewalks and gets on people's shoes, and was a big problem in the 80's when they adopted the law.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#136

Post by tarsinge » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

V-2 wrote: post #81

CalRobert wrote: post #26

This bit at the end was the most interesting to me. "For me, I stepped out into an uncertain future. I don’t really see meaningful human interaction anymore. I see a society that is impossibly distracted by likes and selfies, smartphones, and similar technologies, and I often find it frustrating to find my place in the midst of this new interconnected world simply because I was not there to naturally evolve with it."

Has it really changed that much in 10 years, or is part of it just the sense of alienation everyone experiences getting out of jail after a long time? I mean, 10 years ago people lamented over the exact same thing; and before that, and before the before. I can't prove it of course, but I'd bet you might feel that "human interaction" is not quite what you remember it to be if you had only just spent 10 years behind th…

I agree with that. Yes some persons and young people now live completely connected in a kind of parallel world of social networks, but depending where you live it's a small minority. The physical world and human interactions in it haven't changed, and lot of interesting things still happen offline.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#137

Post by karlkatzke » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:43 PM UTC

annoyingnoob wrote: post #56

I recently had someone in a restroom ask me how to flush the toilet. The toilets had IR sensors and flushed automatically. This person had been in prison for many years and had never seen that before. I think part of the social reform that people are protesting for recently needs to extend to people in prison. Our system does nothing to rehabilitate people or to prepare them to re-enter society. We need to treat pris…

One of my coworkers met a guy on the bus the other morning who had been imprisoned in the mid 90s and was just released. (Assault charge plus drugs.) He hadn’t seen a smart phone in person yet and was astounded that you could look up bus schedules on it.

Besides the tech astonishment and the sheer length of the 25 year prison sentence (that’s tangential), it was a bit inhumane how they treated released prisoners. This guy had been released in downtown Austin at 3 in the morning after being bussed from Huntsville, Texas and processed at the courthouse. He had been given a Greyhound ticket to a El Paso Texas, and in order to not violate his probation he had to check in to a halfway house within 48 hours.

What he wasn’t given was any money for taxi, any information about where the greyhound stations were, any money for a cab ride, or any way of actually staying within the bounds of his probation, which involved avoiding being cited for minor misdemeanors like laying on a park bench to catch a nap after being thrown out into a city at 3am.

The guy was lucky he ran into some folks willing to buy him a transit ticket and tell him how to get to the greyhound station half a city away. Imagine how few people are that lucky.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#138

Post by miracle2k » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #129

masukomi wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessive for most non-violent crimes. you miss the point. prisons are a massive industry with serious lobbying clout. Putting lots of people in prison for a long time isn't a punishment to the prisoner, it's a gift to the prison system. The "punishment" is just a side effect, and the longer it lasts, the richer the people in power…

10 years of prison time for a single non-violent crime is extremely rare in America. What can happen in certain states, is that repeat offenders are hit with escalating prison terms each time they are convicted (the classic example are the three-strikes-your-out laws), whereby someone can be sentenced to a life term. In those cases, sentences don't translate to actual prison terms since non-violent offenders are rout…

I think it is fair to say that whether for violent crimes or non-violent crimes, sentencing in the US is considerably harsher than in many other countries.

I've rarely seen a prison term issued by a US court which I have not found to be excessive relative to my experience with sentences in Germany.

The statistic of the total number of prisoners in the US per capita is well-known and gives us a strong indication that sentencing must be a factor. Still, I'd love to see some official data on this.

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#139

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:46 PM UTC

throwablePie wrote: post #87

> "Caging me for a decade is not rehabilitating. I may be making excuses for myself, though there is a lesson that could have been learned with the same amount of value for justice if the sentence was 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, even 6 years." From the article at: https://forklog.media/ex-convicted-hacker-ghostexodus-severi... I don't consider myself a bleeding heart lib but I think that a decade in prison is excessiv…

He hacked central control systems used by utility companies. This could have caused all sorts of disruptions including to traffic lights and hospitals. This was definitely not a "victimless crime".

Re: After 10 years in tech isolation, I’m now outsider to things I once had mastered

#140

Post by dylan604 » Wed, Jun 10, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #100

lliilliillii wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more involved you are with anything to do with data, the less likely you are to use it. I don't like social media very much because it's created a culture of bullying people into conformity. It's not so much my opinion that data trends predict individuals, as some may argue, but that people are pressured to conform to trends, rewarded when they do, and punished when they do not. This philosophy is deeply entrench…

Social media didn't create the culture. It just gave more people a chance to be part of it. Before, marginalized voices were almost universally bullied and abused into conformity. Some of those marginalized people handle having a voice now poorly, but it doesn't mean the culture they participate in is new.

Before social media, the bullying was typically confined to school yards. Now, it follows the bullied everywhere they go. Social Media didn't create the culture, but it poured fuel on the fire and cranked the volume knob up to 11.