Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
I am not sure that I agree, in all cases.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
I guess this is an angle I also didn't think about that is relevant. If you are attempting to stop someone fleeing with an officer's body there is almost always an alternative. Like, the first truck they arrived in could have just parked in front of the victim's vehicle? A different vehicle goes around it moments before!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
I guess to my mind the underlying crime is obviously relevant to what means are justified in arresting or stopping the suspecting. You've got a murderer with a hostage? By all means, high speed chase. Use deadly force. You think someone has an illegal quantity of drugs? Probably no high speed chase or deadly force. This latter is outside the context of self-defense of course. If guy with drugs pulls a gun on you, feel free to escalate appropriately. The point is that there needs to be a proportional relationship between the means and the crime.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
The point is that not all escalations to enforce all laws are justified. I think it bad when police officers manufacture justifications to escalate.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
That does not justify any escalation to enforce any law. Policy officer's can't shoot a jaywalker to stop them from jaywalking.
I had to have a bit of a think about this. Cops standing in front of vehicles as a means to prevent escape then escalating to deadly force has also felt a little off to me but I was not totally clear on why. I think what icks me about it is that, as a tactic, it manufactures a justification to escalate to deadly force to prevent an escape where one would not otherwise be present.
Consider a few cases.
Imagine if the individual in the video was not in a car but rather on foot or on a bicycle. As agents approach to effect an arrest they flee. Would the police have had a legal justification to shoot them to prevent them from fleeing? My impression is no, they would not.
Imagine the individual is in a car, but they effect their escape while police are still several feet away, to the sides or rear of the vehicle. Would the police have had a legal justification to shoot them to prevent them from fleeing? My impression again is no, they would not.
But once you place an office in the direction of the vehicle's escape that escape becomes assault with a deadly weapon, which does permit escalation to lethal force.
It's obvious why officers like it as a tactic. Most people are probably not willing to make contact with a person with their vehicle to flee a crime, so it effectively prevents the obvious way someone might escape. If they are wrong about that individual's willingness it lets them escalate to shooting.
I continue to have mixed feelings about it. I don't like it as a means of manufacturing an excuse to use deadly force where you wouldn't normally be able to but it is not clear to me what reform of it as a tactic would look like.
As to this particular case I think it is unlikely the office gets convicted of a crime. I don't recall particular cases but I'm reasonably confident I've seen cases where officers used deadly force when under less threat and get acquitted. The high profile nature of the case may alter that, though.
ETA:
Someone in the comments on one of the videos posted this slowed down version and now I am less sure. It looks to me like the agent in front of the vehicle (who did the shooting) might be clear of the front of the vehicle before they open fire. High potential to be another McGlockton where what happened in a second or two of time is determinative.
ETA 2:
Slowing down Angle 3 to 1/4 speed and watching from seconds 2-4 it seems clearer to me the agent was out of danger before they opened fire.
ETA 3:
I guess I'm closer to 100% probability that this guy doesn't get convicted. Not because I think it's a good shoot but because someone pointed out that, as a federal officer, state likely can't prosecute and very unlikely the federal government prosecutes. Pending a change in administration I think it's very unlikely there are legal consequences for this guy.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
I am also under the impression a lot of large corporate gambling companies will just ban you or restrict how much you can gamble if you are too good. They want to bet against people who will lose, and nothing prevents them from ceasing gambling with people who consistently win!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
The arguments for permitting insider trading are pretty straightforward from an economics perspective. We want prices to incorporate all available information. Limitations on trading by insiders prevent information from being incorporated into a price as quickly as it could be. So restrictions on insider trading make prices less efficient, less useful, than they could otherwise be.
I think the best counterargument I've heard comes from some of Matt Levine's writings on US equity insider trading. The basic skeleton is that the restrictions on insider trading reflect a duty of confidentiality you have to some entity with respect to that information. If I am an employee of a company and come into possession of some material nonpublic information I have a duty to my employer to keep that information confidential and insider trading restrictions are a reflection of that duty. Trading on that information (or sharing it to others for them to trade on) violates that duty by revealing that information.
What that second argument looks like in the context of prediction markets is less clear. I think in the specific Maduro case whoever did the insider trading probably had a duty of confidentiality with respect to that information. Likely to the United States government. I am not sure how well it generalizes.
Does this sound insane to anyone else? Why isn't everyone doing this, if they aren't already? Just create a market about things you know in advance, using proxies and crypto mixers to hide your identity and money trail if needed. An Nvidia employee could make a prediction market about an upcoming chip, or an Apple employee about an upcoming iPhone. More specifically, shill accounts would create markets pretending to be an outsider, and the employee and his accomplices would place the correct bets leading up to the deadline. Wash trades by accomplices could be placed to create hype and volume to lure unsuspecting traders.
One thing preventing just anyone from doing this is market liquidity. In order to make a substantial amount of money you need a lot of people to be willing to take the other side of the bet. Also, it seems like people are doing this. At least some of them.
There's also some weirdness in US law, specifically, about prediction markets technically being event contracts which are commodities and subject to different (more lax) insider trading rules than equities.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1d ago
What I was trying to get at is that your comment says this context is connected to the phenomena in my comment but it's not clear to me how.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I actually don't think this one is specifically gendered. Both my wife and I have at times struggled with expecting the other to know our preferences and desires without having to explicate them.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I guess it's not clear to me what I'm supposed to do this this purported context. Are the factors identified here supposed to serve as justification? It's ok for men to generate and distribute nonconsensual nude images of women and girls because X and Y? Or an explanatory purpose? Men are doing this because of these factors, no comment on the permissibility? Either way I don't see how this is supposed to work. "Feminists complain about scantily clad women in video games so obviously middle school boys are going to generate nonconsensual pornography of their classmates" Huh?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
So much this.
The number one complaint I hear from women about porn is that it gives men a very confused, one-sided view of sex. You could imagine how irritating it is to hear that men spend 30 minutes a day jerking off to porn for decades and then one of them finally gets to fuck you and has no idea how to bring you to orgasm and you leave the experience totally unsatisfied. Consistently!
I guess apologies if this is TMI but this was literally me with my wife when we were in high school. The first time I fingered her my only experience was from porn and so naturally that was what I tried to replicate. It was a painful uncomfortable experience for her and she left quite unsatisfied. Fortunately for me my response was to go online and look up some actual useful information about what women like. Talk with her about her preferences. Developing the skills to bring her to orgasm was not that hard! Unfortunately I get the impression a lot of men have the opposite takeaway. "If she doesn't like what the women in porn like, it must be something wrong with her!"
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
I guess one limitation is it does have to be your "buddy" (at least, non-relative). The page describing the program has an exception so that you cannot receive subsidized childcare payments for your children during hours when you yourself are providing childcare to a child you are related to that is paid for with subsidies but it is worded kind of confusingly:
Note: In-home providers who are relatives and are paid child care subsidies to care for children receiving WCCC benefits, may not receive those benefits for their children during the hours in which they provide subsidized child care.
On the same page they are specific that a child's "parent" cannot be a subsidized provider but it seems like other family members could be:
Someone other than the child's biological parent, step-parent, adoptive parent, legal guardian, in-loco parentis, or spouse of any of these individuals
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
You can see the base payment rates for Licensed Centers from Washington's Working Connections Child Care here. Depending on exactly where you are (region map) that 40k is very possible. If you took care of 12 infants (<1 year old) for a full day, for 30 days, in King County, the state would pay you ~$41k for that month. The rates are fairly similar for licensed family homes. You can also get an increase above those base rates if your childcare entity is part of the Early Achievers program. Family Home and Center EA rates.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2d ago
Someone also quote tweeted that with a quote from Naomi Wolf's book Misconceptions:
When Nico was about 9 months old, I was in the floor with him playing the way you do with a nine-month baby- sorting cubes. We were doing this for what seemed to me to be a really long period of time. Ed came in, saw this scene and said, "Oh you're just entranced." And I said, "Are you out of your mind? I am bored silly." And he was stunned- he had no idea.
I am not myself a parent but I have a lot of experience being around smaller kids at various ages due to having siblings with kids in a wide age range. Playing with younger kids is definitely something I often found boring or tedious, both as a teenager and adult.
I don't think there's anything wrong with him (or any parent) feeling this, nor does it make him a bad parent. I suspect most parents feel this way some of the time. The things that are entertaining for kids are just not that entertaining for adults!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
I guess I don't see how eliminating no fault divorce and making it harder to divorce in general helps this. Bad enough that a woman is in an abusive situation. Now she has to create a paper trail. Hire a lawyer. Convince a judge. And if she can't do that she's compelled to remain. Why is that better? Why would shifting to this arrangement make women more inclined to marry? Less likely to be concerned about their ability to support themselves?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
I don't think I disagree with any of this. For many women who end up in that kind financially trapped situation, could they have made better choices earlier? Likely so. The cases where there are no red flags in advance are quite rare I think. Heck, the reason my parents never married is because my father's gambling problems were a deal breaker for my mother! But I think the question about what to do when one ends up in that situation is still important. Whatever process we have for mate selection is not going to be perfect at avoiding these kinds of problems.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
I do not have a good understanding of Hungary's economy so it's hard for me to assess the scale of their interventions relative to the opportunity cost. The exemption from 15% personal income tax seems like it comes the closest to defraying the drop in wages but it only kicks in after 4 children while my impression of the research is that the wage drop kicks in after the first child.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
Your last paragraph is, I think, part of why the discussion on the left is often framed as wages rather than tax cuts. The two proposals are only really equivalent with some assumptions about what you mean by "tax cut" and the underlying facts. If its implementation is as a reduction in one's tax rate or taxable income then they are only really equivalent if you are earning sufficient wages and paying sufficient tax to benefit. I have in mind something more in the vein of Unemployment Insurance or perhaps the refundable EITC. In the most straightforward case, the woman having the child expects to face some lifetime earning reduction of X. If society thinks her having that child is worth more than that lifetime earnings reduction it ought to pay her some amount Y > X. Or, women themselves presumably capture some of the benefit of having kids so perhaps society should only pay something like 0.5*X. The general point is that we need to set the payment amount such that it is actually competitive with the opportunity cost, or we are not going to get anywhere.
I think a combination of feminism-consumerism-hyperindividualism has convinced both men and women, but, especially women, that not having the means to support yourself (even within the context of a family) makes your morally reprehensible.
I suppose my perception is not that it's perceived as a moral failing per-se. Rather, lots of women have heard horror stories from other women about feeling or being trapped in a bad situation due to a lack of access to money. I'm optimistic that this is not the typical case but I think it's understandable women want some downside protection. I, personally, would be uncomfortable in the woman's position in some stories I've read.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
I suppose it's all a matter of framing. I don't think women are obliged to give society children such that their failure to do so is a "harm" to society in a sensible way. Would it be sensible to say you are doing "harm" to every person you could give money to, but don't?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
The impression I get from the rest of the article is not just the boy avoided school discipline immediately but even after having been charged with a crime for his actions. Maybe that's wrong, the boy goes unidentified and the school claims it also can't provide any information. Surely if there's enough evidence for the police to charge a crime there's enough evidence for a school to act.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
I suppose I imagine it's of a piece with something like false light which operates along similar lines to defamation. The harmed party would obviously be the individual whose photo was edited. Especially if their was an intention to pass off the photo as genuine. I don't think you could reach any edited picture with this doctrine but I think you could likely get non-consensual NSFW edits. In the underage case my understanding is that digital edits of minors can already be considered CSAM so I don't know why this would be different.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5d ago
How about a different kind of AI culture war? I speak of course of non-consensual pornography generation. The most outrageous article I read about this recently was probably this AP article: Boys at her school shared AI-generated, nude images of her. After a fight, she was the one expelled. The girl in question is 13 and she started a fight on a school bus with one of the boys later charged with a crime for sharing the images.
The girls begged for help, first from a school guidance counselor and then from a sheriff’s deputy assigned to their school. But the images were shared on Snapchat, an app that deletes messages seconds after they’re viewed, and the adults couldn’t find them. The principal had doubts they even existed.
Among the kids, the pictures were still spreading. When the 13-year-old girl stepped onto the Lafourche Parish school bus at the end of the day, a classmate was showing one of them to a friend.
“That’s when I got angry,” the eighth grader recalled at her discipline hearing.
Fed up, she attacked a boy on the bus, inviting others to join her. She was kicked out of Sixth Ward Middle School for more than 10 weeks and sent to an alternative school. She said the boy whom she and her friends suspected of creating the images wasn’t sent to that alternative school with her. The 13-year-old girl’s attorneys allege he avoided school discipline altogether.
When the sheriff’s department looked into the case, they took the opposite actions. They charged two of the boys who’d been accused of sharing explicit images — and not the girl.
It turns out that finding apps that advertise this kind of functionality is not hard. In fact, part of the reason I bring this up is it seems this capability is integrated into one of the largest AIs: Grok. There's been some controversy on X over the last couple days after Grok allegedly generated pornographic images of a couple minor girls. Additionally the bot's "media" tab was disabled, allegedly due to the discovery lots of people were using the bot to make pornographic edits of other people's pictures. Though the media tab is gone I did not find it very hard to get Grok to link me its own posts with these kinds of edits.
There is, I think understandably, a lot of controversy going around about this. It's not that it was previously impossible to make this kind of content but the fidelity and availability was much more limited and certainly required more technical skill. Being something you can do without even leaving your favorite social media app seems like something of a game changer.
Frankly I am unsure where to go with this as a policy matter. Should someone be liable for this? Criminal or civil? Who? Just the generating user? The tool that does the generating? As a general matter I have some intuitions about AI conduct being tortious but difficulty locating who should be liable.
There is a simple and straightforward way, common in our society, to induce people to commit their time to doing X instead of Y: pay them more. If you think the marginal women having another kid is more beneficial to society than whatever else she would be doing with her time then society should be willing to put its money where its mouth is. This circles back to your point about economics, though in a rather different way. Women's work outside the home is, by market standards, much more valuable today than it was 30 years ago. The opportunity cost to women of having children is correspondingly higher. As Vox pointed out back in 2018, women suffer a large and persistent decrease in earnings (that men don't) after having children. Women delay having children due to a desire to secure financial stability for doing so. This leads to them overall having fewer children, due to age-related difficulties with pregnancy. If you want more women to have children, pay them for the imputed loss in lifetime earnings.
I should probably just link Parenting as a public good.
I think there is a wide gap between "lethal force" and "trivially easy."
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