What was the actual bug in the software that caused the accounting errors?
At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
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Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#42Suicide is a verb and result by itself. Would the author also say “he died by murder”?
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Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#43The four-part mini-series Mr Bates vs The Post Office is worth checking out: > A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions…
What is particularly striking about the scandal is the impact of the mini-series. From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case. Without it, those involved would still be in a bureaucratic and legal nightmare, in which all institutions rejected their innocence claims, and hardly anyone would have been held accountable. See also the "Impact" section on the linked wiki page.
It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#44To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…
"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.
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Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#45To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…
"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.
I say this as someone whose father killed himself when I was in 5th grade:
The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand.
The person is dead either way. There's literally no way to sugarcoat this fact. We'd rather you just speak in plain, honest language than trying to make it sound less bad somehow.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#46Suicide is a verb and result by itself. Would the author also say “he died by murder”?
This trend for commenting on news articles with nothing to say but a complaint about the wording of the headline is tedious. The right to free speech does not impose a responsibility to say something about everything you see.
I think you're missing the point by a mile. The point isn't some tedious debate over grammar; it's about the choice of language that perpetuates the idea that suicide is a tragedy that happens passively 'to people' in some kind of tragic, medicalised, incomprehensible way which is severed from any socio-political context.
In this case, these people were driven to suicide. I would argue that those responsible for the Horizon scandal are guilty of at minimum manslaughter of these poor people.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
>if software developers screw up Well, yes, they did screw up, but the fallout was amplified 100x by bad management.
"The Horizon IT system contained "hundreds" of bugs[0]." If your accounting software has hundreds of bugs then you are really in the deep shit. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#:~...
Well not really, no one should be committing suicide due to a buggy system. If you know the details of the case it was widespread but the post office decided to gaslight everyone and put people in debt and prison. That’s what caused this, the bugs were just a catalyst for shitty humans to do shitty things
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#48[flagged]
It's the euphemism treadmill in action. It's like how "undocumented residents", which replaced "illegal aliens" in the media, now has a negative connotation anyway, so mainstream media are now trying to find a new word that doesn't sound "offensive"... but the very concept is loaded by definition, so no amount of euphemism is going to change that.
My take: as long as the thing being described connotes some lower status, change the term all you want and it will still be "uncomfortable"
Negro, black, African American, person of color... it's not the term, it's the implication. Solve the fact that the treatment is that of second-class citizens and there won't be a need to create new terms.
("But that's hard and as an individual I feel powerless so instead I will use a different term I guess." Probably the same phenomenon causing people to direct energy against vaccines more than pollutants and chemicals)
"Disabled", "handicapped", "differently-abled" -- we've never needed to rename "tall", have we?
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#49I'd love to see a technical analysis of what went wrong with the software and what to do about it. Similar to when airplanes crash etc... This is another case like Therac-25 that should be tought in every IT master class.
Re: At Least 13 People Died by Suicide Amid U.K. Post Office Scandal, Report Says
#50To the NY Times: please don't say they died by suicide. The passive voice makes it sound like some act of God, something regrettable but unavoidable that just somehow happened. It's important not to sugarcoat what happened: the postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system. Don't blur the details o…
"died by suicide" is just a modern replacement for "committed suicide", because that phrase dates back to when it was a crime, so it's regarded as making the victim look bad.
For context: Suicide was a crime in the United Kingdom until 1961.