Facebook - "My favorite part of Dune lore is about how they got rid of all advanced computers because AI was invented and subsequently tried to wipe out humanity, so instead they snorted space-worm butt-meth til they turned into giant shiny eyed psychic frogs and tripped balls so hard they could just k-hole themselves across the galaxy. Seriously, that's how it works.10/10 Better than Starwars and it has peepee Camelback suits"
Meme - "Follow today's unnecessarily gendered product... exact same ingredients but the men's one is cheaper?!"
"then buy the one for men, you stupid cunt"
The "pink tax" is a tax on stupidity
Received a package you didn't order? It could be a brushing scam - "Most people who buy things online just have to worry about their deliveries being delayed or never arriving. But some people are dealing with a different problem altogether: getting weird stuff like hair clippers, face creams and sunglasses they never even ordered at all.The Federal Trade Commission and cyber experts have been warning consumers about these deliveries, which can be part of something known as "brushing" scams.Here's how these scams work: Third-party sellers on Amazon, eBay and other online marketplaces pay people to write fake, positive reviews about their products, or do it themselves. To be able to post the reviews, these so-called "brushers" need to trick the site into making it appear that a legitimate transaction took place. So they'll use a fake account to place gift orders and address them to a random person whose name and address they find online. Then, instead of actually mailing the item for which they want to post a review, the brushers will send a cheap, often lightweight item that costs less to ship. Sending an item (even the wrong one) creates a tracking number, and when the package is delivered, it enables brushers to write a verified review. If you're on the receiving end, you usually aren't charged for the purchase and your real account isn't hacked"
The Impact of Income and Family Structure on Delinquency - "There is no more important issue in the economics of the family than the impact of parents on the behavior of their children. By providing rewards and imposing constraints, parents seek to affect their children’s behavior. The explanation of these actions is that the child’s conduct directly enters into the parent’s utility function. In this paper, we use that framework to explore the role of parental control over his or her child’s delinquent behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we estimate the impact of family income and various dimensions of family structure on a youth’s contact with the criminal justice system between the ages of 14 and 22. From this analysis, we conclude that the single most important factor affecting these measures of delinquency is the presence of his father in the home. All other factors, including family income, are much less important."
Clearly we need to give single mothers even more money
Five myths about prisons - The Washington Post - "1. U.S. prisons are full of nonviolent drug offenders... at a minimum, 55 percent of those in state prison have been convicted of a violent crime — and more than half of these people, or nearly 30 percent of the total prison population, have been found guilty of murder, manslaughter, rape or sexual assault, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Slightly less than 15 percent are incarcerated for drug crimes, even though most Americans believe the figure to be about 50 percent. (Drugs play a bigger role in the federal prison system, but that holds only about 10 percent of all prisoners; most incarcerated people are in state prison.)The share of those in state prison for committing violence is even greater than 55 percent, however. Prisoners are classified by the most serious offense for which they are convicted, not arrested or charged. So if someone is arrested for a violent crime but ends up pleading guilty to a drug charge, his crime is classified as a nonviolent drug offense, even if the underlying incident — like a domestic violence case in which the victim won’t testify — is the reason the prosecutor sought prison time.
2. Private prisons drive mass incarceration.
There are two central flaws in this claim. First, only about 8 percent of all state and federal prisoners are held in private facilities . Most of those in private prisons are held in just five states, and there is no real evidence that prison populations have grown faster in those states than elsewhere.Second, of the roughly $50 billion we spend on prisons, about two-thirds , or $30 billion, is spent on wages and benefits for public-sector employees. In comparison, private prison firms collectively earn a few billion in revenue and (more important for their incentives to lobby) about $300 million in profits — just 1 percent of the public-sector wage bill. So public-sector correctional officer unions have a reason to lobby against reforms that would reduce inmate populations, especially since prisons often provide some of the only well-paying jobs in the rural communities where they are located.
3. Long sentences are causing our prison population to age.
Among prisoners who are over 65, fully half have served fewer than 10 years, which means they were admitted in their mid- to late 50s. Much of the aging of the prison population plausibly comes not from long sentences but from our inability to address late-age violence properly...
4. A recidivist is a career criminal.
We can’t measure reoffending that no one detects. No one voluntarily reports crimes they committed that the police did not observe or that victims did not report. This can exacerbate racial disparities, too: Considering the communities most heavily policed, reoffending by whites is much less likely to be detected than that by blacks.The overcounting issue is less immediately obvious but arguably far more important. If someone shifts from committing one robbery per day to one per month, he could eventually be reconvicted and classified as a recidivist. That the amount of harm he caused fell by about 95 percent is immaterial. Ours is a binary metric; any one failure counts as recidivism. It’s a metric inconsistent with what we know about the rocky reality of desistance.
5. Not sending someone to prison saves about $35,000 a year.
Recall that about two-thirds of prison spending is wages: If we don’t cut payroll in proportion to inmate population, then the savings per prisoner will be much less. Other fixed costs, like water and heating bills, likewise do not decline steadily with the number of prisoners. The real savings of reducing the prison population by one person is often about $4,000 to $16,000, not $35,000."
Re: 1. This would also explain why more black people are in jail for drug offences than white despite similar drug use rates, which is commonly cited as being due to racism
Re: 5. This ignores the cost to society of crime, too
The Numbers Don’t Lie: It’s the Hard Core Doing Hard Time - "Based on a scientific sample representing 711,000 imprisoned felons, Lawrence Greenfeld of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics has shown conclusively that fully 94 percent of state prisoners had either committed one or more violent crimes (62 percent) or been convicted more than once in the past for nonviolent crimes (32 percent). Comparable national data stretching back to the 1970s make plain that over 90 percent of prisoners are violent or repeat criminals. The state-by-state data tell the same tale... What about mere drug offenders behind bars? While federal convictions for drug-related crimes skyrocketed between 1980 and 1993, at the state level, the number of persons incarcerated for violent crimes grew at 1.3 times the growth in imprisoned drug offenders. Moreover, as a recent study funded in part by the National Institute of Justice correctly observes, “the label ‘drug offender’ is a misnomer.” As the study notes, the term implies “a degree of specialization not supported [by a body of research] on individual offending patterns,” which shows plainly that drug offenders “commonly commit other types of crime, most notably robbery, burglary, and violent offenses.”For example, in a forthcoming Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI) study of the complete adult and juvenile criminal histories of prisoners from Milwaukee, WPRI analyst George Mitchell and I find that 91 percent of these urban criminals had one or more convictions for a violent crime. First-time drug offenders were less than 2 percent of the population. The imprisoned drug offenders had multiple arrests, bouts on probation, and adult and juvenile crimes, including auto theft, burglary, robbery, retail theft, domestic violence, sexual assault, drunk driving, jumping bail and, of course, drug dealing too."
On the myth that prisons are full of non-violent drug offenders, and that greater black vs white incarceration rates reflects racism though they don't use drugs more
AN ANALYSIS DEBUNKING THE MYTH THAT DRUG OFFENDERS IN STATE PRISON ARE “NON-VIOLENT,” LOW-LEVEL OFFENDERS - "Data from the Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) establishes that most inmates incarcerated in Florida’s prisons (56%) have been previously convicted of violent offenses, and over 95% of all prisoners are repeat offenders. Despite these facts, advocates for eliminating minimum mandatory sentences and releasing drug offenders 35% earlier than their judge-imposed sentences have recently identified these repeat criminals as low-risk, non-violent offenders. An analysis of inmate data from the Department of Corrections shows this assertion is wrong. A recent analysis examined the criminal history of 10,917 inmates in FDC custody as of October, 2019 who were convicted of a drug-related crime. These inmates accounted for a total of 394,019 prior criminal charges and 194,011 prior criminal convictions, or an average of 18 convictions per inmate, prior to their current incarceration.85% of these drug offender inmates committed a forcible felony, a burglary, or both prior to their current prison sentence. Forcible felonies are violent crimes committed against a person"
George Alexopoulos on Twitter: "https://t.co/M2vnny3W9B" / Twitter - ""Do you renounce whitenes and all its works?"
"I do!"
*pours Coke Classic*
"Then I baptize you in the name of diabetes!"
*Black woman rises*"
Report says that all-male physics departments don't result from bias - "More than one-third of physics departments in the United States lack a single female faculty member. That figure has been cited by some as evidence of discrimination. With women making up just 13 percent of the faculty members (assistant through full professors) in physics, could there be another explanation?A new report from the American Institute of Physics -- based on simulation analysis -- concludes that the large number of departments without a single woman is to be expected and is not the result of discrimination... there are two factors that explain the distribution of women among departments: the size of departments and the total number of female faculty members available. There are many departments with only two or three physics faculty members, the report notes. So "it is unlikely that these departments will have a woman among the faculty because the overall representation of women among all physics faculty members is low""
Chinese students in Australia are being scammed into faking their own kidnapping - "Chinese students in Australia are being coerced by criminal gangs to fake their own kidnappings as part of an elaborate global extortion racket targeting vulnerable overseas communities... First, the scammers make calls to random numbers, often speaking in Mandarin. This acts as a kind of filter -- Australians who don't understand Chinese typically hang up, while international Chinese students respond in Mandarin.Then, the scammers claim to be a Chinese authority, such as a member of the Chinese embassy or police. The scammer convinces the victim they have been implicated in a crime in China, and warn the victim they face extradition to China to face criminal charges in court -- or even threaten their families with criminal sanctions if they don't cooperate.Scammers often use technology to mask their physical location and to program the host number, so it appears like the call is coming from actual Chinese authorities. If victims look up the caller's phone number online, it will match the number of Chinese police or the embassy, said Dr. Lennon Chang, a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Australia's Monash University.The scam can then go two ways, according to the NSW police statement. In one scenario, victims are threatened or coerced into transferring money into offshore bank accounts. In the other scenario, victims are convinced to fake their own kidnappings, and their family is pressed for money. In this case, the scammers order victims to cease contact with their families and friends and rent a hotel room for their own protection and safety. Victims are told to photograph themselves tied up and blindfolded -- which are then sent to the victim's family overseas.When the family is unable to contact their child in Australia, they then send the ransom payment in exchange for their child's release. The scammer continues making threats and ransom demands until they can't obtain any further payments -- at which point the victim's family often reports the incident to police, said the police statement.The authorities often end up finding the victim safe at home or in a hotel... Among international students, Chinese students are also thought to be uniquely susceptible owing to mainland China's authoritarian legal system, under which activists, international organizations, and everyday citizens face detention, deportation, or other types of punishment for a wide range of crimes.Citizens have been arrested for something as innocuous as posting an online video of catching fish while wearing a red scarf. It's not that far a leap for young international students to imagine the police might be calling for some crime they didn't know they committed. Chinese students "tend to follow the authorities ... tend to believe the government is always doing the right thing," Chang said. "So when (victims) have a phone call like this, especially when we've double checked the number online, we tend to follow the instructions from the 'embassy people'. It's definitely a cultural issue here."... While these kinds of scams have been reported for years, authorities said they appeared to be increasing... "Our message today is one of prevention," he said. "The overwhelming message is to don't pay any money ... Call the authorities, or just hang up.""
Victim blaming! Don't tell us to protect ourselves. Tell scammers not to scam
Trudeau’s response to Keystone XL cancellation will deepen Canada’s regional divides - "many in Western Canada feel left out of Canada, not simply in an electoral sense, but due to the behaviour of the federal government.And Trudeau’s quick rolling over after US President Joe Biden cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline will deepen those divisions... People in Western Canada, especially Alberta, are seeing how different the reaction is when some parts of the country are struggling compared to other parts.Further, that doesn’t even include the fact that the government has imposed restrictions, taxes, and regulations that disproportionally damage the energy sector, while praising and boosting other sectors that use the products created by the energy sector."
As good as it gets, Jack Nicholson, How do you write women so well?, Nicholson responds, I think of a man and I take away reason and accountability - "I have worked around and closely with many women over my business career. A consistent comment that many women made was that they did not like working with or for other women and most preferred working for a man. Many women I have known have also stated that women are crazy. These comments were made without me asking or soliciting the comment."
