> Employees at Google, for instance, are offered the chance to nap at work because the company believes it may increase productivity.
What percentage of employee-days at Google actually involve a nap? 1%? 0.01%? Is it any higher than the traditional comic practice of "curl up under your desk"?
> What percentage of employee-days at Google actually involve a nap? 1%? 0.01%? Is it any higher than the traditional comic practice of "curl up under your desk"?
Complete anecdata but: I've seen people curled up on couches in the middle of the day plenty of times. I think the point is that, at Google, you won't be frowned upon for this. (Whereas it may be much more likely at other companies.) Not that you're mandated to nap after lunch or anything.
not entirely randomly, but processing stuff that's been "on your mind" and not packed away in long-term memory.
I imagine it (non-scientifically) as the brain's trash compactor, finishing up all the half-completed thoughts of your day, not necessary in any sort of logical way, like mashing the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together regardless of how well they fit, to get something that just barely fits together at a glance.
I'm fairly certain that Shuttleworth is coming to realize he'll never recoup his investment in Canonical, and his goal is to drive Ubuntu into the ground so he can close up shop and stop hemorrhaging funds.
You credibly describe the flaws of the prison system, but you don't offer any alternatives.
Frankly, given the choice of a rock and a hard place, it is better to have a criminal in jail half his life and terrorizing society half his life, then terrorizing society for his entire life.
>Frankly, given the choice of a rock and a hard place, it is better to have a criminal in jail half his life and terrorizing society half his life, then terrorizing society for his entire life.
If what you care about is the damage done to society, someone who spends half their life in prison and then gets out will (on average) do far more damage in that half-life than they would have done in a whole life spent outside prison. Prison is quite literally worse than nothing when it comes to preventing reoffending
(though community service is better than either prison or nothing, IIRC)
In my opinion, to situate this conversation in a framework where "alternatives" are to be considered is to already assume an authoritarian stance. I believe that the model you are assuming is one in which there is some sort of established "government" which selects among alternative systems sharing the property that they are maintained by varying degrees of implicit/explicit use of force.
I would never claim to know how to set up a working mental health system or a functional system of criminal rehabilitation. What I claim is that the properties that these institutions have in the U.S. are MAINLY determined by historical accumulation (trauma -> reaction) rather than by organic growth from well-defined principles. I advocate the decompilation of these institutions and the organic outgrowth of new, community-based (preferably non-governmental) institutions.
I agree that there may be cases in which a "criminal" (your word, not mine) must be separated out from society [1], but that these cases are far, far rarer than most people believe. Most "criminals" in the U.S. are ethnic minorities suffering under an incoherent and evil system of drug criminalization.
From an unsystematic/non-governmental standpoint, I also believe that society needs to do more work in increasing its acceptance of different psychological and mental needs from a younger age. I'm very lucky that I was put in a "gifted" program because, had such a program not existed, my rage would have been intense, long-lasting, and I honestly may have killed someone. If my talents had been treated as a "difference" in the way that most peoples' are (exclusion from social events, bullying, emotional and mental abuse, punishment, etc.) I would have turned out very differently indeed.
Perhaps the reason that I feel so strongly about this topic is that there is a great deal of darkness in me (I don't believe everyone is like this). I throw a tremendous amount of personal effort at overcoming it/transforming it/thinking about whether it's really "darkness." During certain periods of history (including this one) homosexuality was seen as "darkness" in many places - now we think back on these periods as being backwards/bigoted/wrong. I must accept that some of my personal darkness is NOT bad/evil (e.g. some of my perverse sexual tastes) but that it only APPEARS bad to many people in society. I have come, through discussion and queer community support, to accept parts of myself that I have been ridiculed for and told were evil from a very young age - which ridicule and torment drove me deep into despair and hatred.
I suppose that I am ultimately advocating acceptance of darkness because I don't really believe in darkness. I believe that if we accept what we currently think about as dark (ultimately, for instance, it would be great if we could accept death) then we will see that it is not so dark after all.
THEN WE CAN LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER, THE END.
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[1] Let me be clear, here. I can't even really name any. Maybe certain serial killers/mass murderers - but who else? Who, really, needs to be put in permanent time-out, anymore? Can you even name anyone?
After reading this, I can only say one thing: you're living in fantasyland. This is the real world, not some libertarian utopia. And regarding your last point, what about pedophiles? Rapists? Should we just surround them with love and forgiveness?
Yes, I believe we should surround them with love and forgiveness.
We also should -have- provided them with love and forgiveness so that they would feel comfortable talking about their problems before they could result in severe issues.
What do -you- suggest we do? Beat them up? "Teach them a lesson?" What will that accomplish, exactly?
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Let me just say that I sense a great deal of pain in you. This is not an attack. Your points seem to be based in fear and anger - you are being very reactive rather than clearly laying out a well-reasoned argument. E.g. contrast your response to my own - yours relies on ad hominem and caricature and then finally a straw man argument. You seem sad. I hope you're OK. Hope!
Sometimes what's best for society isn't what's best for the individual. Society benefits from having sadists removed from the equation. It doesn't matter much, from a societal standpoint, whether they're rehabilitated or incarcerated, as long as the sadistic entity is removed from the equation.
If there were no examples of sadists who could not be rehabilitated, your point would be obviously true. Unfortunately, there are many examples of sadists who resist rehabilitation. These people exist now, whether or not they could have been rehabilitated earlier by love and forgiveness. Even if you were strictly correct, you'd still have a bootstrapping problem, in the form of what to do with these people today.
I contend that there will always be people who become sadistic outside the reach of whatever institutions you attempt to create to shower love and forgiveness on them, and I further contend that many people who, once they become sadistic, cannot return to a state of empathy. For the first point, I only have to point to hunger. Food and shelter are obviously tractable problems, yet we continue to have a problem with hunger and homelessness. To think we can eradicate more complex social problems than those is really quite naive.
As to the second point I am open to scientific evidence to the contrary, but please bear in mind that from society's standpoint, a recidivism rate greater than zero may still be less preferable than lifelong incarceration for sadistic criminals. Most people would agree that once you've taken a few lives for the fun of it, it's not worth the risk to another member of society to "find out" whether you've been successfully rehabilitated.
As such, this is also one of the arguments for the death penalty. If that risk you speak of is too high to see any chance of rehabilitation, what good does incarceration do?
Still, this child has no repeat history that we know of, and probably wasn't reprimanded for his behaviour before. It is likely that he could be a psychopath with everything he said, but it is also likely that the veil of anonymity made him less sympathetic to the human plight of his victim, just as we all take what we see on the internet with a grain of salt.
EDIT: Ok, maybe not really a child, but in the eyes of the law you might as well consider a minor a child. However, I sure know few hackers who exploit their status as a minor as best they can to avoid legal consequences.
The point of not killing is that you can free the wrongly incarcerated when you discover a mistake. But I'm not arguing specifically for or against the death penalty here--my thoughts are so confused on that particular issue I could probably argue either way. Otherwise I agree with what you're saying here.
What if, due to his incarceration, the terrorizing he does for the half of his life where he is not in prison, is twice that of the terrorizing he would have done over the course of his whole life, where he never imprisoned?
Probably not, I am a tech aware, young adult with lots of disposable income and nowhere to spend it. I can see how they would prefer to target the teenage set. Though I guess that isn't their target either as they say "you are at your parents house", which would be sort of tautological if their target were teens. So maybe it is middle aged folks? Retirees?
Here is another possible explanation: they aren't some kind of master marketers who unfailingly target their niches and never fail in such attempts.
Why upset them at all? It's not like the target users who would enjoy this sort of snark are ever going to see the message. Seems like a zero sum game to me.
"Hey friend, it looks like you are using Opera. Beware, pal, that we don't go to the opera down here on the ranch, so there may be rough-riding ahead! Try one of these nifty browsers buddy, or sally forth into the unknown. OK, pardner?"
You can put all the disclaimers you want before a use and they will "venture forth into the unknown". However, they will ignore (if they even read/understood it) your warning and then bury you in support tickets, complain loudly to their friends, and leave you with a mess to deal with and no real clean/easy way out.
I second this... users rarely read anything & remember even less. If you let them in, then they expect it to work. Its unfortunate for Opera, but we're doing the same for our beta launch.
Ctrl-Shift-C in Chrome, or Ctrl-Shift-J in Firefox,
will give you a programmable computing environment more powerful and expressive than a 20-year old Atari, Commodore, or Apple.
Which means I have to have a computer already which is not < $200. Also, I really doubt I can use Firefox or Chrome to hook up some photocells to the machine and take readings or use the photocells as a musical instrument.
I get that deployment is easier when it is vendor hosted, but this really should be a local app using local storage, withe maybe transient server-side storage for syncing between machiens.
> Employees at Google, for instance, are offered the chance to nap at work because the company believes it may increase productivity.
What percentage of employee-days at Google actually involve a nap? 1%? 0.01%? Is it any higher than the traditional comic practice of "curl up under your desk"?