Inb4 Donald Trump calls for all of them to be sent to Gulagtanimo Bay.

There’s also the possibility of appeals to get the sentence reduced. And the defendant’s family can apply for pardons. Pardons and commutations are usually associated with political grift in the US (and this is a well-deserved reputation), but they can also be applied for and governors occasionally grant them to prisoners who demonstrate they’re reformed even when they’re not otherwise eligible for parole.

Grovelling before the judge and acting like you accept you are guilty for sixty minutes costs nothing on the part of the defendant anyway.

Even though by the time the hearing commences, the judge has already usually decided on the sentence, every competent criminal defence lawyer will advise their client to grovel and beg for mercy at the sentencing for two reasons:

1. Acting recalcitrant could upset the judge and result in a heavier sentence than the judge originally planned because they feel a need to make an example of the defendant.
2. Not being apologetic damages your future chances of parole when the parole board looks at the tape or record of the sentencing.

I am not accusing anyone of anything. I’m saying we don’t know what the “marijuana-related charge” is based just on this article.

Removed by mod

I feel like every few years, the same thing happens:

1. A new study comes out that essentially says “left-leaning people are smarter than right-leaning people”.
2. All the left-leaning people smugly say that it was obvious
3. Right-leaning people accuse the study of being fake or politically motivated
4. Everyone forgets a week later

That was a typographical error. I fixed it

Lot of derision but not much explanation as to how this strange system came to be.

Many state constitutions in the US were written in the 18th and 19th centuries. The key differences relevant here to this discussion were that during these times, suffrage was far more restricted, and communities were far more sparsely populated and isolated.

Prior to the 20th century, suffrage was not universal and generally was restricted to wealthy white men of status, who, as a consequence of their socioeconomic standing, also tended to be more educated and thus better suited to rationally judge the qualifications of office-seekers. A consequence of universal suffrage is that the education level of the average voter goes down.

Most Europeans severely underestimate how few people lived in these states and across how much land they occupied. The US typically granted statehood to its territories when they reached the mid to high five digits in population. The majority of Western states are the same size as the largest European countries. Let me use California as an illustrative example. Its statehood was granted in 1850 and it had a population of 92,597. So just imagine essentially a group of people fewer in number than a single small European city trying to run a piece of territory the size of Germany (California is actually bigger than Germany by 69,000 km²).

What happens in such a scenario is that communities become very isolated and insular. They get used to running their own affairs since basically any model of centralised government is going to fail when your population density is 0.2 people per km².

Understand that aside from tightly-knit indigenous communities (who were branded as “savages” and categorically excluded from participation in so-called “civilised” society) this was literally unsettled land. Empty plains, dry desert, and wild forest for hundreds of kilometres around where there was no law but those of physics.

In these isolated communities, you still need to fill the required leadership roles, but you run into the issue where nobody is particularly qualified to these offices and further still, the townsfolk don’t really want to just elect a single person to fill all the other offices by appointments. Rather the best way to fill these offices is by election where the community can get together and decide collectively who is best qualified for office. So how it would go is that everyone entitled to suffrage would, every other year, ride their horses into the county seat, which could take hours, and then listen to the candidates’ campaign pitches, vote for whomever they thought was the most qualified for sheriff and county judge, and then go home and never hear from those people again for months on end.

As a result, when these territories were granted statehood, most delegates to the conventions that wrote the state constitutions saw no reason to deviate from these established methods for picking local office-holders.

Edit: I realise this also doesn’t explain why these constitutions haven’t been amended to allow for appointed judges in the modern US. The reason is because politics in the US is extremely cutthroat and anyone who proposes such an amendment is taking a rather unnecessary risk with their political career because their political opponents can then attack them for taking away power from the voters in favour of “unelected bureaucrats”.

I feel like they would have fared better if they went all in on the “corporations are gouging consumers” line and not try to convince people with GDP figures or the unemployment rate.

Did he do anything besides the Stanford Prison Experiment that I just don’t know of? Because if that’s all, I’d be more inclined to say that he’s just stubbornly wrong rather than evil. But maybe you know something I don’t

I remember some popular YouTuber ran an experiment trying to re-create the conclusions that Zimbardo had come to. The results contradicted his conclusions and they confronted him. He continued to defend his experiment. He seemed like a rather stubborn man.

The only realistic way I see the situation being better here is if the United States imposes it. Nobody else has the power to do so and keep the peace. The United Nations is losing its credibility every passing day but maybe there is still enough time where Palestine being placed under UN trusteeship with the USA, Israel, and one Arab nation as joint trustees would be acceptable to the key stakeholders here. Eventually, once the situation stabilises, the goal would be to grant the Palestinian state independence from the Trusteeship Council.

The socialists of Lemmy will decry this solution. They’ll call it colonialism and an example of Israeli and American imperialism. And it is. But it’s better than whatever shit-show is happening now. Israelis today will not accept a sovereign Palestinian state and will devote all their resources to destroy it. Organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah will not accept an Israeli state and will similarly continue to expend their resources to destroy. These are resources that could otherwise be used to rebuild Gaza and the West Bank and to make reparations for those whose lives were destroyed in this decades-long conflict.

Israelis see the situation in reverse—if they don’t beat the Palestinians to a pulp every single time without mercy, organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah will overrun Israel and do the same thing to them. It’s kind of like the reason why Japanese troops in World War II wouldn’t surrender to the Americans; they thought the Americans would treat Japanese POWs like how the Japanese treated American POWs.

FiveThirtyEight gives Harris a 16% chance to win Texas. That’s over 1 in 7. So it’s definitely doable.

He is “accused” of piling debris behind his podium but there’s literally video evidence of exactly that happening.

I mean… the fact that the Government cannot really control cryptocurrency is viewed as a downside by quite a large portion of the population.

Inb4 DeSantis claims the Government is ignoring Florida when it comes to hurricanes

There are a few types of “anonymity”.

The highest level of anonymity is perfect anonymity, where it is literally impossible to prove a transaction occurred or know anything about that transaction without being a party to that transaction. Some private cryptocurrencies are truly perfectly anonymous because it’s cryptographically infeasible to determine who paid whom and how much was paid without being a party to that transaction. Metal coins are generally perfectly anonymous. Paper money is nearly perfectly anonymous. They still have serial numbers that can be traced. It is easy to make arguments that perfect anonymity is undesirable because the drawbacks of allowing criminals, terrorist organisations, or sanctioned states to transact freely and in complete secrecy outweigh the privacy benefits to normal people compared to what they enjoy with lower levels of anonymity. I am not here to make an argument about this.

The next-highest level is what I will call “legal anonymity”, where knowledge of transaction details is tightly restricted by law. If you think of Swiss bank secrecy laws, this is close to what I mean. A CBDC can operate at this level of anonymity. The central bank would still theoretically know all details of all transactions, but the use of this information would be legally restricted and cannot be used for mass surveillance. However, the information is still retrievable by means of some defined legal process, such as a court subpoena or specific search warrant.

The level below that is what I will call “discretionary anonymity”. This is where a third party knows all the transaction details, and the restrictions on what they can do with this information are either weak or non-existent. Hence, your privacy is at the discretion of whoever holds this information. This form of privacy is weak compared to the other forms but a large portion of the population still finds this level of anonymity to be acceptable for everyday transactions. Bank transactions in the USA are discretionarily private. The bank can use and exploit the transaction data it knows with relatively few legal restrictions.

The final level is pseudo-anonymity, where transaction data is publicly accessible, but some information (such as the exact names of the payor and payee) is not provided. Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies are pseudo-anonymous.

I have a very strong feeling that @paf0@lemmy.world is being downvoted here, not because they make a bad point, but because they phrased it in terms of cryptocurrency which immediately triggers negative reactions from everyone.

What OP has proposed is neither novel, nor a terrible idea. In fact, economists call it a central bank digital currency. And yes, some countries have adopted it. It’s usually not run with a blockchain, but that’s because if you have a trusted central entity to run the system, that being the central bank, a blockchain is inferior in practically every aspect to a normal relational database. That’s why all current CBDCs still use fairly traditional accounting systems.

Your use, however, of the terms “real money” and “fake money” has, I believe, the effect of shutting down intelligent conversation, rather than encouraging it. “Money” is a social construct. “Real money” is whatever the Government declares to be “real” and that the population is willing to use. It doesn’t need to be physical money. And it is unquestionable that in the countries that have adopted the legal framework that allows their central banks to issue CBDCs, the money so issued this way is as real and legally equivalent to paper banknotes and metal coins.

The rules of this game specify by that no external oracle is allowed.

But I understand what you’re saying. Leaving law enforcement decisions to AI is problematic in its own right, however I don’t really have the time to go into depth about that. Mostly it has to do with the fact that AI will have the same biases as the data it was trained on, and in many cases, also the subconscious biases of the people who designed or trained it.

This one’s easy.

I’ll pretend not to notice material that violates these rules coming from fascist organisations while applying them with strict scrutiny to non-fascist organisations. When someone objects, I’ll tell them to fill out a long form, wait 6-8 weeks for processing, and then after that I’ll send a warning letter to the fascist organisations telling them that they had better stop breaking the rules or else I’ll send them another letter! !I’ll challenge every source cited by the non-fascists as not independent while accepting low-quality garbage sources cited by the facists.