I submitted this response thread about one of the Predicaments of Abundance: I propose the United States' relative prosperity has enabled it to be the most effective crime-solving and crime-punishing country on Earth, but that we're not any better off for our tremendous expenditures on "Criminal Justice". I don't have any meaningful engagement on the Twitter, so it only got a few views.

One of the people mentioned in this thread is my passenger who can't keep himself from screwing up his own life. This one could have be any of you. I think DevOps was his specialty, before he fell into the black hole of Criminal Justice. I drafted an Ask HN submission, then I saw that I recently mentioned him in a comment that got a few upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34237125 67

I'm still in contact with a woman I met on my 8th shift. She txt'd me for a ride ~4 days after her taxi ride. I remembered her, but couldn't figure out why she'd decided to call me back: 'I talk to everyone, but I didn't talk to them'. On her follow up ride she reminded me of the little informative txt message I'd sent them after I'd driven away, and how that little act motivated her to reach out to me when she needed to go to the store for a suitcase. She eventually made a short film that was inspired by how we met. The specific details are all wrong, which is why it's only "inspired by a true story", lol. The series of passengers that led me to my future-friend was 1. passenger going home from the hospital in central Phoenix [delay], 2. lady going home to Mesa [transfer fare - 15 miles], 3. Grandma going to the pharmacy [delay], then I got my 'appointment' to meet my future-friend in the metropolitan area's far southeast corner.

Sometimes my random questions revealed that my passenger had interesting experiences, such as the fellow who'd spent a lot of time on the secret bases in Nevada: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33640535 (My username was inspired by K5 user "Zombie Jesus Christ", whom I eventually visited in jail in California. Followup comment in this thread tells of my username's origin story.)

I've commented before about the passenger I bailed out of jail. I distinctly remember the night I met him at the convenience store at Cave Creek & Bell Rd: "Are you available?" "Sure, hop in." He'd come to Arizona on a technology contract with a big bank, but the contract was canceled. Then his van and everything he owned got stolen. I don't remember the series of fares that led me to be in exactly his location that night... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34157865

Lots of stories like this. One passenger leads to the next. When I was between passengers sometimes I followed my intuitions trying to figure out where I'd find my next passenger. I tried to talk to everyone: everyone has a story & I tried to figure out if they had something I thought interesting. Sometimes I had the sense that I had 'appointments', othertimes I had the sense that there was no one else to meet that day.

One of my standard lines of inquiry for couples, or people who mentioned their relationship, was 'how did you meet?' Sometimes it was a boring story ("met in elementary school"), sometimes intuition made their improbable connection possible.

(Intuition is when we do things that turn out well, without having a well-formed logical reason for doing so: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/well/intuition-gut-instin... )

One of my better stories was "Passenger Rescue" and "Passenger Rescue, Pt 2": http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/07/passenger-rescue.html / http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/08/passenger-rescue-pt-2.html (originally these were diaries on Kuro5hin.org [RIP]):

  When we got back to his father's apartment 
  complex my passenger asked, 
    "What's the fare?" 
    "This one's on me."

I’d wave this away as metaphysical waffle if I also hadn’t had a few too many almost ordained seeming moments. Right place, right time sort of thing, what on earth are you doing in this cornfield miles from anywhere at 3am, never mind me?

The silly thing is he probably had really good immunity from his actual case of COVID in '20. I don't think anyone claims that vaccine immunity > natural immunity anymore.

2021 was a weird period in history where one could make extraordinary claims without providing extraordinary evidence while those pointing this out were being ostracized.

One of my passengers, whom I helped get off alcohol, said her downward spiral started with stimulants. Her husband had brought cocaine home from 'work' in California. He had emotional problems related to childhood. When cocaine got expensive they switched to meth amphetamine. She realized it was causing problems for her when she realized she'd been short with her youngest child.

At one point her other boy was prescribed Adderall (amphetamine) for ADD. That experiment only lasted for two weeks. She kept these Adderall pills on reserve, and used them to wean herself off the methamphetamine. That's when her anxiety started. After a few months of medical treatment, she found the 'anxiety' was perfectly relieved with alcohol. Whoops. [She ran back to the bottle every time she got a little stressed. I eventually encouraged her to use cannabis to mellow out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21889546 ]

Our dear leaders should come out of their ivory towers and figure out what actually happens on the streets. The War on Drugs has been ongoing for over a hundred years. People cycle in and out of jail/prison, but they don't get better from being mickeyed up (incarcerated).

From my perspective as a simple former taxi driver, the drug war is just a make-work program for public defenders: the bad chemicals get confiscated and the bad people get locked up, but people still have the same amount of unaddressed distress. People are usually worse off after getting corrected than they were before.

Two of my passengers informed me that cocaine is a much more pleasant drug than meth amphetamine. I don't have any reports about heroin vs. fentanyl. [Someone on twitter pointed out the drug cartels transitioned to Fentanyl when it became apparent that Afghanistan's heroin production was going to go offline.]

Bringing back cheap plant-based drugs (cocaine, heroin, etc) is an important step of harm reduction while society figures out how to effectively address the reasons behind our suffering.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/war-on-drugs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chasing_the_Scream#Background_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#20th_century

I pay taxes, do you call that a War on Income? If so, when did it start?

No one ever called this a War on Income. My point is to the OP that claims the War on Drugs has been going on for a hundred years by pointing to any regulation of drugs. Lots of things are regulated and we do not generally call regulation a 'War on' something. It is okay to tone down the hyperbole.

My one passenger exemplifies the futility of Arizona's system of criminal justice (link in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34157865 ). He only had the one charge (drug paraphernalia - it was supposedly someone else's pipe) from... 2013 or so. He just can't get off probation because he bails himself out and can't show up for his next court date. I think he's terrified of being killed by the jail. His diabetes is uncontrolled, and the jail implements a starvation diet (which is why I asked /u/ddtaylor if the food was adequate in his AMA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34158365 ). His blood sugar is dropped by the forced time-release insulin injections, but the jail routine doesn't allow for him to check his blood sugar level or provide adequate amounts of edible food.

Three of my female passengers were definitely harmed by 'justice'. One got sent to prison for 5 years for having shared a single opioid pill with a friend (circa 2009), another had substance abuse problems that she couldn't shake.

This AZCentral article talks about Arizona's minimum-security prison in Perryville. My passenger who got 'moody' at menopause was sent there for her 3rd DUI. She tried to stay sober after being released, but then life happened and she hadn't learned how to cope. She's doing fine now, no thanks to her time getting 'corrected'.

I have all my notes - ought to write a book.

This article says the babies are separated from their mothers after 72 hours, as provided for by Arizona's version of a 'Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act'. But ... 72 hours is not enough to get a child off to a good start in life. Now that we have GPS trackers, there's no reason to not create a more compassionate system of supervision for mothers in the system. If not for them, for their children.

Congressman Thomas Massie (MIT Alumni) said he'd read all the quote-tweets of his query: "If you were in Congress, what would your priorities be for 2023?". I put a little effort into a thread about the predicaments of abundance and how Arizona's biggest job project is its criminal justice system: https://twitter.com/TaxiCabJesus/status/1609412832227110914

(minor edits - punctuation, mostly)

I think we need to stop the office of Sheriff being voted-in public office. It makes beholden politicians and schemers Sheriffs and they have way too much power to be just some random person with no insight or knowledge about laws or protecting the peace, or how to deal with incarcerations.

All law enforcement have the same dilemma: they're given a job with only a few tools. I had to call 911 a few times over my 3.5 years in my taxi. They were as helpful as they could be, but the machine does not always serve humanity's best interests.

If you add an email to your profile I'll send you updates - https://relay.firefox.com/ or some other forwarder would work.

thx again. :)

How was the prison library?

What did you learn from the experience?

My passenger [0] says the Maricopa jail wouldn't be so bad, if the food was better than 2 inedible meals a day.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34157865

Unlike public facilities the food there is much worse, but the guards are paid much lower and have significantly less training. The result is that they more-or-less don't want to get involved in anything and the facility as a whole goes out of their way to keep inmates occupied with things. The result is that they have up-to-date gaming consoles like Playstation 4 with a decent selection of games and because their guard staff is underpaid a much larger amount of drugs make it into the prison on a regular basis. The story from most who rotated through these facilities told me it was more or less just a "party pod".

In Federal the food is fine. All of the prisons in the entire country follow the same basic meal schedule, the highlights of which are usually every Wednesday is hamburger day and every Thursday is chicken day where each inmate gets a large baked chicken breast. I was told by almost every inmate that had ever been to State facilities that the food there is virtually inedible while they were happily scarfing down lunch.

> How was the prison library?

The facility I was at had a different library than what most people think of when they see prison in the movies. There was no big room with large isles of books or any tables to sit at while reading. It was a very small room where inmates could enter and browse the various catalogs (mostly in binders) and then ask the inmate working as the librarian to rent a book. Access to books was simple and there was a decent selection. Many books were more readily available if they were more popular since inmates often leave their books with the library when they are released. I found something on most every subject I was interested as long as it didn't get too niche and we even had a decent selection of Dungeons & Dragons books ranging back to 2E.

> What did you learn from the experience?

I learned that literally 85% of people are there for drug related crimes. Most "repeat offenders" are there because they had access to a firearm while on supervision. The result is that if you ask another inmate why they are there, almost every time you literally just get the sentence "drugs and guns" which is a catch-all statement inmates use because their story isn't interesting and just involves the usual "sold drugs, got caught eventually" stuff.

I learned that in Southern California (where many inmates originate) their legal system is so taxed that some of these offenders for drug crimes spent a total of 45 minutes with their court appointed public defender before being sentenced to an average of 7 years in prison. Some of them didn't even know the actual charges they ended up pleading guilty to. To be clear: they did sell drugs, and they are guilty of breaking the law - but they were also completely denied an adequate defense and in many cases English isn't their first language. Contrast that with my case and the dozens of hours I spent with my team of (public defense) lawyers and it seems unfair. Legally they either deem a case "complex" or not and mine was considered complex, whereas the drug offenders usually just get thrown to the least experienced public defenders most of which see no point in arguing against their potential future boss or judges they have to interact with daily to advocate for a client. (My public defenders were amazing, but I'm not from Southern California)

Who Are Your Lifelines? - https://www.taxiwars.org/p/who-are-your-lifelines.html (2015)

That passenger recently reappeared on me. He's still "imaginary", and is still working on getting a plastic ID card. Part of his predicament has to do with [redacted]. Supposedly. In 2016, this passenger's sister told me some of the details about how her brother got trapped in his little emotional rut, when he was about 18 years old. I still have the postcard he sent me from jail, circa 2016. He greatly appreciated my efforts to keep him alive while on the jail's starvation diet.

I exercise my mental phonebook regularly on account of this passenger.

My dad hates Mr. Putin because the television tells him Putin is a war criminal.

Other sources say Mr. Putin is the moderate who keeps the extremists in the Kremlin under control. That Russia fought in Ukraine with 9 fingers tied behind its back until it realized that there was no way to get the West to respect Russia's red line of Ukraine not being admitted into NATO. Someone on twitter said Russia's transition from 'preserve Ukraine's Soviet-era infrastructure' to 'destroy NATO's proxy army' was in September [0]. Russia didn't gave Ukraine's power grid the "shock and awe" treatment until November.

[0] https://imetatronink.substack.com/p/turning-point & various tweets - https://twitter.com/imetatronink

"[Putin] was a Lt. Col doing a mundane job in Dresden, Germany when the wall came down. He came back to St. Petersburg, Unemployed. He drove a taxi for a while. Got a job with Mayor Sochek's office, and anybody who dealt with him... said he was the most honest man he ever dealt with. ... He inherited a nation that had just undergone a decade of devastation, brought on by the west. But did he hate the west? No. He actually started his first years in office, trying to court the west, trying to come up with normalcy in economic relations. ... 2007 speech to the Munich security conference... The reality that the west is anti-Russia." Scott Riter, https://twitter.com/thatdayin1992/status/1583749384486891520 (emphasis added)

"Vladimir Putin is a Russian patriot, a moderate European-leaning leader who rescued Russia from the abyss. in Russia, he is not considered charismatic. He is supported because of Russia's economic and spiritual recovery. The Neocons hate Putin because they hate Russia." - https://twitter.com/DietHeartNews/status/1605275170138214425

Thought this video on Putin was interesting: https://rumble.com/vxm7sv-president-2015-documentary.html

Just curious what you meant.

[0] https://twitter.com/imetatronink/status/1605389284369784832

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/apr/09/boris-johns...

I don’t blame them either why would you negotiate with the army that’s raping and torturing your civilians?.

There’s no point to negotiation with Russia anyway they don’t abide by international agreements unless it benefits them and even they may break them later.

Any peace outside of an absolute Russian defeat would be temporary and just allow Russia to invade again later.

You've given no evidence or argument to back up this implied conspiratorial causality. The simplest explanation is that Johnson told Zelensky that if Ukraine wanted to fight, they would have the support of the UK and the greater West.

Also, how hard is it to imagine that a country that had been subjugated by Russia up until a single generation ago, knows the horrors of such and will do everything possible to avoid ending up there again? The further east you go into previously Soviet countries, the more support there is for Ukraine. If this really were a "both sides" issue, you'd expect the exact opposite.

Science keeps trying to fix itself, but the rigidity is persistent.