The comment to which I was replying listed several things: “hit his parents, hit his brother, broke things, and spat a cup of juice all over my laptop.”
By “outburst”, I specifically mean “showing outward signs of intense emotion that they are unable to handle appropriately”.
I never get to stop working, but thanks. Every day, all day, I get email and have to respond to a vast customer base. While I may not be coding away at my computer, I have to stop about 10 times a day to respond to customers, help them solve a problem, make an update, etc. It never ends, I never get vacation, I never get a weekend, I never get a holiday. I literally had a customer call me on Christmas last year because they got a new iPad and wanted me to help them put their domain email on it.
So, no. I do NOT just work a half-day, I prioritize, I multi-task, and it's very difficult to maintain this lifestyle.
Serious question, why bother? Any normal job would have you working less (assuming it’s true that you never get a free weekend or holiday, which I kind of doubt). What do you get out of this? The ultimate satisfaction of helping a stranger receive email instead of being with your family on Christmas?
That's a scary prospect considering all the studies and news articles that say that putting your kids in school as early as 4 can result in life-long benefits.
It's hard to be a parent these days, you feel like nothing you do is ever "right".
Yes, and for 51% of the time it's all a priceless, privileged joy. And the other 49% is you feeling guilty because you are short of time trying to parent, work, keep and maintain a house; you want to encourage a broader palate or cook once for everyone but they gripe about what you've cooked, antagonise each other, mess up the house in creative new ways, etc.
That's assuming you are an engaged parent and intended to have them.
I imagine school is an effective piece of the puzzle because it offers peers plus dedicated, trained professionals keeping everyone on track without having to also clean the house, take client calls, cook, etc.
Back up the comment chain though, I think in a year like this and at younger ages, you can relax any homeschool attempts. Months ago when quarantine peaked in South Australia, we took our kids out of school and had a very free-form program. Get up late, make bread together, do a bit of gardening, play Lego, building challenges, drawing, screen time, etc. Combo of bumming around at home with practical, learning activities. Fine by the kids and less stress for parents.
> Isn’t having a kid something you do exactly so you have someone to care for and nurture?
Ideally, yes.
In practice, not as often as anyone would hope.
Sometimes out of actual ill intent towards the kids.
Probably most times just due to parents being dealt a raw hand and them not having the wherewithal to give their kids the amount of attention they'd like to.
Single-income family that sent a kid to all-day pre-k reporting in. We offered our kid the choice, and they enthusiastically opted for the all-day option.
I don't think it was really a hard choice, from their perspective. "Do you want to spend 3 hours having fun with friends every day, or 6 hours?" That's right up there with, "Would you rather have one cookie or two cookies?"
I'm disappointed that some people associate not working full time and raising/teaching your children as somehow oppressive. Having to commute and farting in an office chair all day seems more oppressive to me.
I do not look forward to the time where something akin to Google Maps starts to approach real-time (yeah I realize the government can more or less do this, but I'm happy with being obscure enough to not catch their gaze)
You are severely mistaken. At will doesn't mean you can fire people for any reason without liability. Wrongful termination is a thing that companies are terrified of. There are so many protected classes in CA, and firing someone in a protected class can have dire consequences. I've witnessed it first hand.
It's not a mistake, and it isn't severe. You're talking about exceptions to the law, not the law itself. The law is exercised thousands of times a day and wrongful termination lawsuits account for single-digit percentages.
As the plaintiff in such a case you need to be able to provide evidence that it's "reasonable to believe" that you were fired because of whatever protected class you fall into.
It can be difficult to do, especially if you're blindsided and escorted out of the building and cut off from any sort of evidence (tip: if you think you could be fired because of who you are, start keeping receipts before you're fired).
Previous to winning my own discrimination case, I was a juror in a case where an employer almost got away with blatantly discriminatory firing. They thought they were being sly by sacrificing another non-protected employee at the same time... but then bragged about it to an employee they didn't realize would rat them out. If it wasn't for that email there wouldn't have been enough evidence to know for sure.
That aside, if you're not a protected class (the majority of people aren't)... good luck. You can be fired without cause at any given moment.
> You're talking about exceptions to the law, not the law itself.
Yeah, exceptions are the problem, there are many.
> That aside, if you're not a protected class (the majority of people aren't)
80% of the people I work with are in a protected class.
> Previous to winning my own discrimination case
All the suits filed against my company in the last 35 years (2) were frivolous and we settled both of them. Good for you for winning a non-frivolous one, but in my experience (talking with other COO's) frivolous cases are very common.
It's fear of these frivolous cases that drive LOTS of behavior.
EDIT: there were threats of other suits (3-5). All frivolous.
It’s true, but it misses the point that they can be sued for age discrimination, violating their own governance policies, not properly training the worker, intentional infliction of abnormal stress, etc. BTW, I couldn’t downvote you if I wanted. Lots of Apple people involved in this site.
The Sackler family should be completely liquidated. They acted with complete disregard and caused an unbelievable amount of pain. To think, there are people in prison for marijuana charges and these people still walk free. It's an absurd injustice.
I completely agree. They should be jailed, this unfortunately goes too deep. They are responsible for the death of millions. I would venture to guess close to the amount of people who die in wars
Clutching your pearls over language while these people kill hundreds of thousands and get away with it. Execution implies a legal sentence. This is a legal process. We should use it when it is appropriate.
You can't post like this to HN, regardless of how you feel about others or whom you happen to feel it about.
This is a bannable offence on HN, so please don't do it again. It's also completely unsubstantive. Fortunately that's not how your account usually posts.
Former FBI agent John Douglas argues in one of his books (I forget which one) that if general public knew the whole scope and details of the crimes perpetrated by any of the serial killers he prosecuted, the level of support against death penalty would be close to nil.
I mean, I hear all sorts of really heinous crimes…people who serially kidnap, rape, torture, kill victims in the most horrible ways possible. I am extremely doubtful that there is anything that is much worse than that, and yet I'm still against the death penalty. Perhaps he should explain what it is he sees instead of trying claim we're too ignorant to understand why the death penalty should be instituted?
Why? Why is it fair to execute someone who murders 20 hitchhikers, or 3,000 Americans on 9/11, but not someone who knowingly takes actions that lead to the death of (i.e., murders) 500,000 people?
It's not "better" to advocate for leniency (and anything less than capital punishment is leniency for these animals) -- for crimes of this magnitude it dishonors the victims. This is why societies always execute war criminals, and the Sacklers are definitely in the same category as a Saddam Hussein in the number of people killed. Hiding behind a corporation doesn't lessen the crime any more than hiding behind a government office or a military uniform.
If a political party ran on the platform of rounding up the top 1000 corporate criminals and sticking a needle in their arms they'd have my vote from President down to sheriff.
It's not fair to execute anyone. Many countries have banned the death penalty and prominent US politicians oppose it (including Biden). It seems like you're noticing:
"We execute people who murder 20 hitchhikers, but not billionaires responsible for the death of thousands."
And proposing that instead of rectifying that inequality by banning the death penalty, we rectify it by doing the death penalty way more to avoid dishonoring victims? Let me know if I'm misreading you.
That's just an opinion, and mine is different. I believe that with very few exceptions, every first-degree murderer should be executed. Note that "first-degree murderer" is NOT equivalent to "person convicted of first-degree murder" which is why I have a lot of objections to the death penalty as a matter of public policy.
How do you propose to sort out the two classes that you have indicated exist? The inability to do so perfectly is largely behind my opposition to the death penalty in general. You can't be meaningfully exonerated if you are not alive. If punishment is what people desire, the American prison system is perfectly capable of satiation. A life in an American prison is significantly worse, in my opinion, than being dead as being dead ends it immediately and life in prison forces a person to deal with the consequences of their actions for a life-time.
> I had a cat die of melamine-tainted Chinese cat food. The CEO of the company was executed.
This statement is downright wrong. The regulator was executed, not the CEO. The regulator also approved untested drugs, which killed people. The sentencing was probably not because of the cats.
It doesn't matter how bad the crime may be, as long as criminal justice is carried out by fallible humans, capital punishment will result in innocent deaths. As nice as retribution might feel, it only adds to the problem.
I feel like the death penalty does need to be on the table in very egregious cases. If you are responsible for thousands of deaths, then it is extremely improbable that the evidence against you would be anything less than overwhelming. In such cases, yes, capital punishment should be on the table.
Frankly, I am okay with having harsher penalties automatically applied to the extremely rich, including having the death penalty. Extremely rich should be defined fairly generously here, but it should be defined and treated as a separate class. Yes it creates a separate class of people, but lets be realistic -- the extremely rich already are in a separate class.
Username definitely checks out, but are you advocating for automatically harsher penalties, scaled by net worth? What problem would it solve, except for encouraging poor people to commit more crimes, since they'd now face relatively less severe?
No offence, but this reads like Tumblr "communism" propoganda gone too far.
The entire point of (Western) justice is to enforce impartially against the actions committed, not against someone's skin colour, gender, religion, or indeed, net worth.
I'm advocating for a disjoint function in terms of penalties, disjoint on net worth. I am not saying we apply a scalar factor based on a person's net worth; but I do think we do need to acknowledge that people who hold hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in wealth operate in different worlds from the rest of us. The justice system is different for them, and unless you completely get rid of money and its influence, that won't change. As such, there needs to be _some_ cutoff where we can largely all agree someone holds a disproportionate amount of wealth and power, and thus should be held to a higher standard.
I do take offense to this being called 'Tumblr communism'. Yes, Western justice systems should strive towards impartiality, but part and parcel of that is making punishments appropriate. If you fine someone making $35,000 a year $1000 dollars, you will do a lot of harm to them. If you fine someone making $35,000,000 a year $1000, they probably won't even notice. For a more practical example from my own backyard: carpool lane violators in the Bay Area. Before this pandemic, when traffic was still a thing, there would be a lot of BMWs, Audis and Mercedes violating the carpool lane. The common factor was that these were luxury cars and the owners were more likely to be able to slough off a carpool violation fine. They would rarely get ticketed, but for a lot of such drivers, even if they did, a ticket was just the price of business. On the other hand, if you were driving a '98 corolla that you could barely maintain and put the gas into, you would likely not risk a carpool violation just to save a couple of minutes, because if you did get the fine, it would be a serious impact on your finances. Because the law punished both these people the same, it made it financially viable for the wealthier people to ignore the rules, while poorer people had to follow them because they couldn't afford doing otherwise. If in this contrived scenario the punishment was scaled based on income, the fine would be sufficiently punitive for all strata of wealth, and thus no longer incentivize the more well off to break the rules.
I was somewhat haughty with my earlier words, and I don't think we should judge people differently based on net worth. After all, if you murder 10,000 people, does it matter much if you live in a palace or a cardboard box? But I do think the punishment should fit not only the crime but the person, and that the very rich should be penalized more harshly than the average person, for the same crime.
(As an aside, I'd also like to say that the username definitely does not check out. 'genocidic' is not a word, but it is meant to trip up people thinking it is and that it relates to 'genocide'. It's high school me being clever after watching Monty Python)
That is not in scope for this case. The facts of what the Sacklers have done are not in question. You can make an argument against their execution but it can't be "they got the wrong guy."
You’re not innocent if you’re convicted and the evidence is overwhelming. In this case, the evidence is overwhelming. I have no better example in recent US domestic affairs history for capital punishment being deserved.
Of course, don’t execute people when the evidence is uncertain or unclear. The evidence in this case is irrefutable, and the magnitude comparable to genocide (~250k deaths caused).
You don't think people haven't thought of that idea before? When innocent people are put to death, those involved almost always believed the evidence was absolutely certain.
The problem is: they're still sometimes wrong.
There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible. They all guarantee non-zero rates of innocent death.
How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death? And for what benefit? A feeling of retribution?
> There is no known system for applying capital punishment which is infallible.
This is a call to implement better systems around capital punishment, not to do away with capital punishment when the crime meets the criteria for it's implementation. As the old Texan proverb goes, “Some people need killin'”. This is not a pro-death, nor pro-revenge stance, this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform (and I believe there is enough criminal justice and behavioral science evidence that supports this thesis, but is beyond the scope of this comment).
> How many innocent people's lives should we exchange to upgrade a sentence of life-imprisonment to death?
As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable. There is zero doubt in what the Sacklers did, so I see no point in us continuing to argue over whether the evidence is substantial enough. If you want to hold the position capital punishment is still not acceptable for them, I'm sure I could find enough families and loved ones of those 250k people killed by the Sacklers' actions to rebut such arguments.
> this is the understanding that some humans are evil and beyond reform
Then they can spend their entire life in prison. Capital punishment adds no additional value.
> As I said, this should only be done in cases where the evidence is irrefutable.
The bar for putting someone to death is already very high. But when you put someone to death, you may be unknowingly excluding evidence that you are not yet aware of.
In most wrongful convictions, it is additional evidence discovered after the fact or a mistake found in the evidence previously used that indicates that the person was innocent.
But at the moment of death, everyone was sure they were guilty. Whoops.
For justice to be just, mistakes must be correctable when they are found.
"Got a call from some dreamers said they was out for revenge, got excited then I thought about it, started crying, because a year ago my cousin was killed looking for his".
I'm not saying somebody should Rambo it or anything like that.
We need an equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials or the International Criminal Court but for these kinds of deliberate corporate crimes that result in mass death and destruction.
In general there needs to be more personal liability for white-collar crime. Now in corporations it often goes something like this (implicitly or not): "So you say we'll probably earn [this amount] and, when discovered, we are likely to have to pay between [this and that amount] in fines? Well then, that's a great ROI you got there, Roy. I'd say we go for it". And they lived happily after.
How about all the doctors prescribing it? Same punishment? People can't get Oxycontin unless a doctor writes a script and if they weren't handing it out like candy it wouldn't have been as big a problem.
The DEA is supposed to do it in the US as well. Each doctor has a DEA number and the DEA has access to what they prescribe. I think one issue is if you're a doctor at a pain clinic or at a hospice, you'd prescribe very large amounts of opioids. If you're a family doctor, you shouldn't be. I don't know why the DEA wasn't cracking down more quickly.
There were examples of "pill mills" where doctors were writing scripts for hundreds of thousands of pills per month, which clearly shouldn't happen.
Yeah, that's definitely true. The DEA should've picked up on that faster.
I didn't make it clear enough, but I was also trying to get at the idea that even the guidelines might be corrupt. So maybe the issue isn't even in the hands of the doctors in the first place.
I know a doctor here in Europe and he's pretty vocal about his disdain for those guidelines in his particular field (oncology). He mentions things like new and expensive medication with unclear side effects being recommended over cheap, old tried-and-tested stuff, clearly with the motivation of making more profit. And by not following the guidelines you take a huge personal risk.
Right but Purdue was behind the push for doctors to do that.
If there's evidence of doctors pushing oxy for kickbacks or something like that then I absolutely think they should be punished. It's worth investigating what the procedures/dosing/etc was and the extent of the wrongdoing.
Yes, but Thiel has been saying this for many years, if not decades, and he did put his money where his mouth was, by paying students to drop out as part of the Thiel Fellowship program: http://thielfellowship.org/
so you can imagine it... because it happens