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  • Mogesh

“‘Xoros is the greatest bullfighter in the world,’ may be an obvious lie, but you are still tricked to believe Xoros fights bulls, or that he even exists at all.”

  • Birondelle

    • War of Omens
  • 0 Posts
  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I just don’t understand the logic here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of abolishing the Duluth Model and the requirement to incarcerate someone on a domestic violence call.

    But neither this situation, nor the story you linked to seems to have much to do with that policy.

    In both situations, the police acted completely out of bounds. It is a completely different problem.

    The story on the website was written in 2014 about an incident that happened in 1999, that’s almost 25 years ago. It can’t be considered relevant today. If there’s a real systemic problem of this kind, you should have at least a dozen cases like this every single year.

    Hopefully, in this most recent case we’ll get some body cam footage released so we find out what really happened.

    And also hopefully, the body cams is what will put this guy off the force forever. It’s the second time he seems to have done something like this, but I’d bet that the first time, body cams were not standard practice yet.

    Seems to me that the solution to stop this kind of thing from being a common problem is body cams, and that’s what we have.






  • Make it do they have to have it, to be able to loan it

    The banks do have to have it to be able to loan it.

    Fractional reserve says that they’re not allowed to loan all of it.

    So if you deposit 100k at the bank and there’s a 10% fractional reserve. Then they’re only allowed to loan 90k.

    Now you might ask, so if the bank can only loan 90% of the money they have where does the money multiplier come from?

    If person A comes and deposits 100k, and the bank loans 90k to person B. Then there’s still only 100k in cash, but now there’s 190k in bank accounts.

    So every time someone comes in to deposit 100k, they loan out 90k. Once they’ve got 1,000k, they’ve loaned out 900k and keep 100k cash in reserve.

    The important difference here is that loan only happen when there’s a borrow. And there are strict regulations about how reliable those loans can be. Which is why they tend to require collateral.

    So, really when a bank has 1,000k in people’s account, it only has 100k in cash. But it also has 900k in houses, cars and furniture.

    The whole system ends up stabilizing the value of money because it is backed by real tangible things through the loaning and collateral system.

    I also think it helps to keep money at a stable but small rate of inflation (1-2%). Otherwise people will just hoard the cash instead of growing the economy in the form of investments. But I don’t know what the literature says on that topic, or how reliable that literature is, in practice.

    My point is, getting rid of the whole system just because it looks complicated to you seems like a terrible idea.

    Like our focus should be on breaking up monopolies, progressive taxation and a solid well funded social support system. I think it’s safe to leave the management of the money supply to the bean counters for now. It’s clearly not perfect but it’s not bad either.


  • If banks hold 100% of the money and lend it all out x10 (fractional reserve) and earn 1% interest, the money supply is growing by 10% per year.

    You’ve got it backwards.

    Banks hold other people’s money and use it to issue loan. It’s the issuance of loans that creates money. The fractional reserve doesn’t magically multiply the money. It just (in a roundabout way) allows banks to loan up to that multiplier of money to people. But that only works if there’s people who want to borrow that money.

    If a bank earns 1% interest, that doesn’t grow the money supply. It transfers money from the people that borrowed the money to the bank which then uses it to pay executives, shareholders and employees (in that order of priority).

    The higher the interest rates, the less money people can afford the borrow, the more the money supply shrinks.

    Banks HATE high federal reserve rates, because that means people don’t borrow as much which means they don’t make as much money.

    When business and the wealthy class get richer, they want to get even RICHER. Prices rise. Which drives record profit, which makes rich people wealthier, which causes the cycle to repeat.

    This can only happen in a poorly regulated environment where the rich setup monopolies or oligopolies. Otherwise they’d lose all their customers if they raise prices.

    We just need proper incentive structures and regulation. But seeing as nobody has the guts to start figuring that out, the only lever we have is interest rates.

    I think you’re just speaking for yourself here. Before you start spreading misinformation on the internet, maybe you should find the guts to actually figure out what you’re talking about.

    High federal reserve rates can make things difficult for banks and that might be why the CEO of JP Morgan is butt hurt right now.

    Want to deal with inflation? Raise interest rates.

    Want to really improve the population’s purchasing power? Break up the monopolies and oligopolies.


  • I’m not well connected to law culture to know for sure. But it does seem like there is a fair amount of politics involved as well as guilt related.

    If you’re a man accused of raping a woman, whether you’re guilty or not. You’re not going to pick a lawyer with a track record of ending her tweets with hashtag KAM.

    If you’ve looked at the Johny Depp trial. Even expert witnesses will differ along an ideological divide (typically gender oriented ideological divide).

    So if you’re representing a man, you’ll want to use one set of expert witnesses. Whereas a if you’re representing a woman you’ll want to use a completely different set of expert witnesses. It might stand to reason that a lawyer will just pick one side of the ideological aisle and become an expert at it (and likely acquire the corresponding professional deformation and echo chamber ideology of that particular side of the ideological debate).

    So there’s plenty of reason to pick a lawyer based on their ideological association in this kind of case. Regardless of your own level of guilt.

    But at the same time, maybe there are lawyers who specialize in defending guilty people whereas others specialize in defending innocent people.

    I wouldn’t read to much into the choice of lawyers, but it can certainly be a red-ish flag.


  • I’m not claiming this is right or wrong. But here’s the justification.

    The criminal justice system is there to prove beyond reasonable doubt that a crime occurred. When it comes to distinguishing consensual sex from rape, it’s nearly impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt, because it ends up being just she said, he said. One tactic is to show a pattern of multiple victims. So if multiple victims independently come forward with a similar story of sexually predatory behavior, then you have compelling evidence that might be enough for “beyond reasonable doubt”.

    What this means is that, in principle, rapists can just start raping left and right and keep getting away with it. At least for a while. I don’t claim here anything about how frequent or rare these rapists may be.

    This can make life untenable for rape victims on university campus, in that they will not be able to keep going to class in the same room as the person that raped them. This creates even more injustice beyond just that of being victim of a crime that you can’t prove, because they’ll be forced to forego their studies.

    So that’s the justification given for why, morally, we need something that’s a bit easier than “prove beyond reasonable doubt” that will make it possible for the victim to continue their studies. Legally, Title IX, along with a lot of acrobatics, provides the legal framework to force universities to do something about it.

    In practice, it seems that at least in some universities you end up with a complete joke of a system. Universities are completely ill equipped to adjudicate such a complex situations. The whole thing is extremely politicized. The outcome of the investigation seems to be heavily based on the gender of the accuser and accused as well as political connections to the people involved in the process.

    Regardless of if the previous is true or not. Not being allowed to cross-examine the accuser in a she-said he-said situation seems completely insane.

    Personally, I think one party consent for legal recordings (recordings that can only be used for legal purposes in criminal proceedings) should become the norm world-wide. Then catching these rapists is going to be so easy that there won’t be any need to even think about these kinds of kangaroo courts.