Prison should be to rehabilitate (i.e. ensure that convict doesn't re-offend after they are released) as opposed to just punish and ruin people lives for their mistakes for the sake of making random commenters on internet feel good. Also, consider that keeping people in prison is very expensive and is not an optimal way for the state to spend you tax money IMO.
Well, sort of. Prison should be a) to rehabilitate, and b) keep the unrehabilitated from doing harm. But the American prison system is not really interested in the first bit. I'd like to see a general change here, but SBF, given his entirely unrecalcitrant behavior, is among the worst people to make the argument with.
How can you rehabilitee someone like him? It can work even with violent criminals, whose crimes was strongly related to the circumstances they were in. A guy like him who stole billions? What could anyone ever do to convince him to not commit fraud again if given the opportunity...
> What could anyone ever do to convince him to not commit fraud again if given the opportunity...
IMO 10 years in prison should be more than enough to discourage SBF from repeating it. And if it is not enough, then 30 years won't be enough either...
Why? What would change in those years? I'd bet that he would be still extremely likely to commit fraud or other financial crimes (if presented the opportunity) after he got out. Maybe letting him keep a few billion would entice him to retire early (not sure if that's the most reasonable option).
> then 30 years won't be enough either
But it's not about deterring him. It's about preventing him from doing any more damage to the society and potentially deterring other people from committing the same crime. IMHO this is one sector where draconian sentences might be actually very effective, people in finance tend to be more rational and calculating than average. If you get a to steal a few billion and maybe somehow stash a proportion of that spending 5 years in prison might seem like a reasonable deal, that's pushing it but maybe even 10, not > 30 though.
> as opposed to just punish and ruin people lives for their mistakes for the sake of making random commenters on internet feel good
That is a strawman.
Besides (potentially) rehabilitation, prison serves to protect the populace from dangerous people who would harm others and as a deterrent to others who can see what punishment they might get if they do something illegal.
I am not claiming prison does a good job of these things, just that its goal is not to "ruin people's lives".
> Besides (potentially) rehabilitation, prison serves to protect the populace from dangerous people who would harm others and as a deterrent to others who can see what punishment they might get if they do something illegal.
It is not like he will be getting away with a slap on the wrist one way or another. I just don't see more years in prison past some reasonable threshold as a good deterrent.
> I am not claiming prison does a good job of these things, just that its goal is not to "ruin people's lives".
They usually have them in order to not spook the advertisers who don't want to see their ad near anything remotely objectionable. Don't see why they care about somebody sharing a document from their Drive.
Explicit writing without some sort age verification may be in a gray area. The classic "smutty writing magazines" of old were still on the over 18 shelf in the magazine store.
(e) "Material harmful to minors" means any material that:
1. The average person applying contemporary community
standards would find, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient
interest;
2. Depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way,
sexual conduct as specifically defined in s. 847.001(19); and
...
Media type is not defined - text may be interested to fall within that definition.
Google is also a multi-national company and would need to comply with laws in other countries too. If the individuals are represented as being minors (again, changes with jurisdictions) this gets into further complications in many places.
That share links are neither checked for age nor jurisdiction, google would be liable for knowingly distributing sexually explicit material without proper checks in place to limit consumption by minors or in jurisdictions where such content is restricted.
> Google is also a multi-national company and would need to comply with laws in other countries too. If the individuals are represented as being minors (again, changes with jurisdictions) this gets into further complications in many places.
Why is this particular example is being singled out? Calling current conflict in Ukraine "war" or "invasion" is also illegal in one particular jurisdiction. Would Google also ban me for distributing draft of a book about it via Drive? How about a fantasy novel about adventures on Winnie-the-Pooh in China?
> That share links are neither checked for age nor jurisdiction, google would be liable for knowingly distributing sexually explicit material without proper checks in place to limit consumption by minors or in jurisdictions where such content is restricted.
As far as I understood the draft was shared with particular group of people. It is not like author uploaded porn video on youtube and made it public.
It is not just 15$ a month. You need to pay someone to develop the website in the first place and then deal with all kinds of issues that eventually arise (updating the underlying framework and/or getting hacked and dealing with the consequences, solving random stuff like expired SSL certificate, etc.).
> Although I don't support it, would the internet be a better place with people being identified?
I don't believe so.
> For this to be a constructive discussion, can we assume companies have a proper and secure way to validate identities and store your data?
What?! No, we absolutely can't assume that. In fact, good default is to assume that data stored will be eventually compromised with high probability. Assuming otherwise is like believing in some magical backdoors in cryptography that only "good" guys can access and other such nonsense.
> I sometimes wonder if the internet as we know it and social medias pervasive influence would be much different if people were less anonymous.
Social media as we know it today mostly stems from FB which has a real name policy. Don't think FB is much better than others (by any measure that interests me at least).
No, it doesn't "clarify" anything like that. If google doesn't have phone numbers of some subset of the accounts requested... they will just specify so in their response to law enforcement since it is completely legal and google is not currently obligated by law to have phone numbers of all users of Youtube. Sundar isn't going to prison because of that or anything.
Saying that some PM at Google decided decade ago something like "hey guys let's build a database of our user's phone numbers to satisfy some theoretical future dragnet surveillance request from law enforcement and tell our users that it is for their own security" is actually quite ridiculous conspiracy theory if you think about it.
That's not a benefit of the tracking. That's a benefit of the advertising dollars.
I have yet to see any kind of meaningful study showing that tracking improves the ROI on advertising by anything remotely resembling enough to justify it.
> The article tries to make the point (perhaps fails), that companies do this intentionally to get the "consent" of people against their will, therefor running the tight line of breaking the law without breaking it.
That X button is right there at the top near the tab name. Not sure how a user could be forced against their will into staying on the site presenting them with a cookie banner.
