They might. I don’t rule it out. I have a more cynical view of the capabilities of the electorate.
Another possible interpretation is Trump brought in a lot of uniformed voters. That group brings people who don’t care about policy or fall for his repeated lies or like his rhetorical style. It’s not about achieving good policy, but about feeling like you are winning a realty TV style game.
Bringing in more uninformed voters through mandatory voting, will exacerbate the treatment of policies and politics as entertainment. That evolution will attract worse candidates and generate worse policy outcomes.
This opinion [1] from the judge in his case indicates that the murder-for-hire evidence was admitted during his trial. The document outlines the evidence for all 6 murder for hire allegations and explains why, although not charged, the evidence is relevant to his case.
It's surprising to me that the prosecutor is allowed to essentially insinuate crimes to influence the jury, without the need to prove them. That seems to undermine the process because it creates a "there's smoke so there must be fire" mentality for the jury.
There was plenty of evidence that he ordered the hits, and the defense had the opportunity to address the evidence in court. The chat logs go far beyond "insinuation"
It's ridiculous that people are pretending there is any doubt about his guilt because they like crypto and/or drugs.
Do you not think the optics are a bit weird when you sentence someone to life for something relatively small, but the reason is another crime you’re very sure he did but you didn’t bother to charge him with?
Prosecutors often choose not to pursue additional charges against someone already serving a life sentence. This approach helps avoid wasting court time and resources on cases that are unlikely to change the individual’s circumstances or contribute meaningfully to justice (none of the murders for hire resulted in victims).
I actually wonder if those charges may still be on the table now that a pardon has been granted.
If I understand correctly, only one of the "murder-for-hire" allegations was dismissed with prejudice[0]. However, he was suspected of orchestrating a total of six "murder-for-hire" plots.
Comically (horrifically sadly?) they were dismissed that way because he was already in prison for life with no possibility of getting out, so the court did not want to waste time on it.
Being a drug kingpin is not considered "something relatively small" under US law, as you can see from the sentencing. Being the leader of a large drug operation and ordering hits to protect your business would be considered worse than trying to take out a hit for whatever "personal reasons".
Obviously the hits are a lot messier to prosecute as well with the misconduct of the FBI agents, maybe you could hammer that enough to confuse a jury. But people are commenting like the evidence outright didn't exist - I can only think they have either heard it told second-hand, or are employing motivated reasoning.
Of course it is. Throwing in potential evidence of unrelated crimes to sway other people's (specifically jury's) opinion about the defendant without formally charging him is exactly what the word "insinuation" means[0]:
the action of suggesting, without being direct, that something unpleasant is true
> There was plenty of evidence that he ordered the hits, and the defense had the opportunity to address the evidence in court
Clearly not that much evidence if the state didn't bother to prosecute those charges. And why would they? The judge sentenced him as though he had been found guilty of them.
Coincidentally, on the same day, SCOTUS confirmed in Andrew v. White ruling [1] that admitting prejudicial evidence violates due process rights under the 14th Amendment.
That's a nice end-run around “innocent until proven guilty”: they didn't have to prove anything about those allegations beyond making them, because he wasn't charged with them.
The first person in the murder-for-hire allegations 'FriendlyChemist' was an undercover DEA agent or informant, and it's strongly possible none of the other people existed. It's also conjectured the hitman account 'Redandwhite' was being operated by the same DEA agent [*]. Moreover the bitcoin DPR sent the supposed hitman 'Redandwhite' sat in the wallet from 3/2013 till 8/2013, "which alone should have tipped out DPR about a possible scam" ie. that the killing never happened [0]. DPR never requested any confirmation pictures of at least 5 of the (fictitious) killings, nor was there any Canadian media coverage to suggest anyone got assassinated on the supposed dates.
The US Attorneys made a lot of publicity out of the murder-for-hire conspiracy allegations against Ulbricht in their indictments and in pre-trial media ("although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out." as the indictment itself obliquely says).
Ulbricht's defense could have come up with a plausible alternative explanations that he knew redandwhite was a scammer trying to extort him with a story involving nonexistent people, and was just playing along with him for whatever reasons.
[*] If the prosecution had not actually dropped those charges at trial, it would have been confirmed at trial which of the six identities were fictitious/nonexistent and whether all the accounts were managed by the same DEA agents. Hard to imagine that at least one juror wouldn't have formed a skeptical opinion about government agents extorting a person to conspire to kill fictitious people (why didn't the indictment just focus on nailing him on the lesser charges?). If this wasn't a Turing Test on when is an alleged conspiracy not a real conspiracy, then someday soon we'll see one.
To my mind, it doesn't matter whether a murder actually occurred for Ulbricht's culpability. He thought he was ordering a murder, he solicited proof, he got proof, and he asked for more hits. In his frame, someone was murdered on his orders. It's a burden to prove for sure, but the fact that he paid substantial cash equivalents in bitcoin to me mean he didn't think he was playing some fantasy game with scammers.
The chat logs show that he was quite stoic about the whole thing and treated it as a mundane business action to protect himself ("is a liability and I wouldn't mind if…"; "I've received the picture and deleted it. Thank you again for your swift action.").
Given that he is now free, and may have access to substantial cryptocurrency wealth, I think it would probably be best under the circumstances if everyone forgot about these allegations and just left him alone to live a quiet life.
FWIW, the two agents in the Ulbricht case, Shaun Bridges and Carl Mark Force IV, both subsequently went to prison for corruption, money-laundering etc. which they were perpetrating at the same time as the Ulbricht investigation, and tainted a lot of other prosecutions.
[0] gives a timeline and fills in lots of details.
Article [1] describes Bridges:
> Bridges was a cryptocurrency expert [... with offshore entities, including one that he had created after pleading guilty in this case]. According to AUSA Haun, his involvement with digital currency cases across the country caused a “staggering” number of investigations to become tainted, and subsequently shut down. She told the judge at Bridges’s sentencing that the corrupt agent had been looking out for opportunities to serve seizure warrants and somehow profit from it.
> The prosecutor also said that bitcoins were still missing, and they weren’t sure if he had worked with other corrupt agents. The US Attorney’s Office seemed to imply that there had been a lot of weird (but not necessarily chargeable) stuff that was still unaccounted for.
Article [2] describes Force:
> [Force's mental health issues]... his previous undercover assignments had ended disastrously. An assignment in Denver in 2004 had ended with a DUI. A second undercover assignment in Puerto Rico had ended in 2008 with a complete mental breakdown. Force was institutionalized, and did not return to his job until 2010. He was on desk duty until 2012, when he was assigned to investigate the Silk Road.
You missed that the "victims" did not exist and were invented (and Ulbricht's defense could have claimed that he was aware of that, and it would only need one juror to find that credible). I'm pointedly asking what a "real" plan is if it involves fictitious people invented by the two govt agents - both of whom (Bridges and Force) subsequently went to prison for corruption. If the conspiracy-to-commit-murder charges hadn't been dropped, cross-examining Bridges and Force likely would have destroyed the prosecution case (for conspiracy to commit murder).
UPDATE: apparently I'm wrong that "factual impossibility" is not a defense [0]. But Bridges and Force's criminal behavior tainted the prosecution case on this charge. Presumably why the prosecution made sure those two agents were not mentioned in the trial.
> You missed that the "victims" did not exist and were invented (and Ulbricht's defense could have claimed that he was aware of that, and it would only need one juror to find that credible).
But now we're playing legal tricks here. The real question would be if Ulbricht was willing to have people killed or not, regardless of what the defense can claim.
EDIT: just to be clear. Legally, I think it makes a big difference if someone decides to have someone else killed, tries to hire an hitman and that hitman turns out to be a policeman in disguise vs a policeman in disguise telling you "there are people doing something that is bad for you, should I kill them?". And it is perfectly right that the second case is crossing a line. But form a moral perspective, if someone answers "yes" in the second case, that still tells us a lot about that person, regardless of whether those people existed or not. The important thing is that those people were real in this person's mind.
" I would like to put a bounty on his head if it's not too much trouble for you. What would be an adequate amount to motivate you to find him?
Necessities like this do happen from time to time for a person in my position. I have others I can turn to, but it is always good to have options and you are close to the case right now. [...] As you don't take kindly to thieves, this kind of behavior is unforgivable to me. Especially here on Silk Road, anonymity is sacrosanct.
It doesn't have to be clean, and I don't think there are any funds to be retrieved [...] Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80k. Are the prices you quoted the best you can do?
I would like this done asap [...] I've only ever commissioned the one other hit, so I'm still learning this market. I have no problem putting my faith in you and I am sure you will do a good job. The exchange rate is above 90 right now, so at $90/btc, $150k is about 1670 btc. If the market tanks in the next few days, I will send more. Here are some random numbers for a picture: 83746102
Here is the transaction # for 1670 btc to 1MwvS1idEevZ5gd428TjL3hB2kHaBH9WTL4a0a5b6036c0da84c3eb9c2a884b6ad72416d1758470e19fb1d2fa2a145b5601
Good luck"
lmao
If that isn't conspiracy to murder, I'm not sure there is anything that would qualify.
I don't have knowledge of how the message exchange went. But if it was Ulbricht to contact the supposed hitman in the first place, then you're right that there isn't much to discuss about. Policeman in disguise or not, it is an attempt to murder someone.
> The first chapter of the book claims, "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature". The book approaches sociological or 'political' problems such as group chemistry and team jelling, "flow time" and quiet in the work environment, and the high cost of turnover
I’ve been drumming this for so long now, even before I heard of (let alone read) this book.
I feel that the development of psychology and sociology has been lost on the workplace and it isn’t well applied. Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves, even when study after study shows that for companies to perform optimally their workers must feel well compensated, well valued, balanced freedom in the workplace, chances for advancement etc.
In many respects you could apply psychology and sociology to how products should / could behave etc. as well, which I’m sure due to the monetary component some companies have taken seriously at least in some periods of their lifecycle, like Apple under Steve Jobs in his comeback
>Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves
Of course. This maximizes their relative power within the company.
Some executives are focused on the health of a company as a whole but not many. To most of them the pie can be assumed to be a fixed size and their job is to take as much of it as possible.
For businesses or business areas where excellent isn’t necessary and good will do, this attitude can even be considered to be in the best interest of the company. The more fungible employees are made, the less bargaining power they have.
Fair point. You could also imagine it's an easier management task to have fungible employees. Sam quits. No risk to the company. Our employees are fungible. Sarah can step right in.
I guess so. As a business owner/administrator it’s easy to see how your interests align in this way. As a worker your priority should be the opposite of course.
People tend to vastly underestimate how much the time needed for a new hire to come up to speed costs the employer.
This is true even of (theoretically simple) things like retail jobs, because even if you're proficient in the basic skill set on day one, coming up to speed on the rhythm of a specific workplace still takes time.
I'm buggered if I can remember where I saw it, but there was a study once that showed that (in that specific instance, I have no clue as to whether or not it generalises) a minimum wage increase actually *saved* retail/service employers in the area money overall, just because the reduced churn meant that over the lifetime of an employee with the company the fact that said lifetime was longer meant they were getting enough more value per hour out of each employee to more than compensate for the higher cost per hour.
Of course the study could always have been wrong, but it didn't seem obviously so back when I looked at it and it at the very least seems plausible to me.
Punchline at the end: "We don't say negative things about the art or the artist. Our stated goal is to collect, exhibit, and celebrate this art that would be appreciated nowhere else."
>>"We don't say negative things about the art or the artist. Our stated goal is to collect, exhibit, and celebrate this art that would be appreciated nowhere else."
Perhaps this is a 'whoosh' moment for me, but it seems that by simply housing the art in the Museum of /Bad/ Art, you are certainly saying something quite negative about the art and the artist.
The "Bad" is just a playful endearment, not an attempt to establish a definitive collection. Discarded as they were, van Gogh's or Kafka's works could have just as easily been part of this... had they been found behind dumpsters or at flea markets in the Boston area.
I watched the video and I don't see how cutting commentary like otteromkram pointed out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42168503#42173585 aligns with their intent to not say anything negative about the artist:
> MOBA curators believe this painting, as well as others in the collection, may have been affected by the artists' never having actually seen a naked woman.
> The model, whose red hair matches the wall color almost perfectly, leans to her right in a pose designed to help the artist avoid the difficulty of portraying her hands. In doing so, she seems to have dislocated her left hip.
This isn't some cubist work where the body distortion was deliberate, it's just a painting by an artist that hasn't mastered realistic anatomical perspective.
I admire the sentiment in the video, and I can appreciate how it's difficult to live up to it. I wish they would go through the commentary on their site and make it more uplifting — I think that would make their creative endeavor of curation more compelling.
LOL, humans are a uniquely vicious species and will never lack for either assholery or self doubt. There will always be sufficient human misery to foster growth.
Getting a little beyond the headline, we find they had people wear blood pressure monitors and accelerometers and concluded:
> More time spent exercising or sleeping, relative to other behaviors, was associated with lower BP. An additional 5 minutes of exercise-like activity was associated with estimated reductions of –0.68 mm Hg (95% CI, –0.15, –1.21) SBP and –0.54 mm Hg (95% CI, –0.19, 0.89) DBP. Clinically meaningful improvements in SBP and DBP were estimated after 20 to 27 minutes and 10 to 15 minutes of reallocation of time in other behaviors into additional exercise. [1]
There is a meeting or mismeeting between book and reader in math. Sometimes you are on the wrong footing to absorb a book. You bounce. Maybe you come back later and absorb the book.
As far as the title, just catching marketing I think. Might not appeal to all for sure.
In an overall excellent article with lots of tangible advice, I found the learning style bit weak.
Wikipedia: "Although there is ample evidence that individuals express personal preferences on how they prefer to receive information,few studies have found validity in using learning styles in education." [1]
FYI, this sentence -- "It seems like every jobs report is lowered after the news cycle picks up the inflates numbers and they're free to adjust to the real data" -- gave me the sense that you meant the numbers were manipulated to put out good news. I think that's what the other poster was picking up on.
a) the people who have the stock now want to keep it and be more wealthy
b) they don’t have much regard for your physical or mental health