From what I remember from writing an undergrad history paper on these dudes, it was used for lots of things such as a treatment for chlamydia (or another STI - I don’t remember exactly). These dudes were banging their way across America, especially the black slave they brought along as apparently the locals thought he had big magic.
I’m not condoning any of this sort of colonialism - just clarifying that these dudes probably single-handedly introduced some new STIs to whole populations, and they were dragging their leaky mercury-riddled dicks along in their boats.
Not only that, the interpreter will point directly to the line of code and possibly to the exact character that is the problem. Any programmer worth anything would find the issue or, worst case, retype the line of code and have the problem fixed rather quickly. “Illegal character” is a pretty easy error to diagnose.
But…I still chuckled a little at the intent of the joke. I’m sure there are better pranks one could come up with, though.
Right? I only ever use pics to refer back to certain incidents “like see, on the 8th of December this what happened that day Cindy you fucking liar” and so on
Well, Russia not being in the image doesn’t mean they are not fascist, still wonder why OP wouldn’t add them though, hope they are not a Russia shill 💀
I would say both sides are fascist Libya is the best example for Nato fascism. They nationalised the oil to benefit the people and stop western cooperations from pillaging them and got invaded by Nato forces to go from one of the most prosperous countries in Africa to a failed state with an open air slave market. Had nothing to do with human rights. And Ukraine has a Nazi problem. Not a reason to invade of course (I hate the Russian government too) but just reality.
Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power were the three principal advocates of war against Libya in 2011, setting the North African nation on a free fall ever since. Demonstrations broke out in some Libyan cities against the government of late Muammar Gaddafi in February 2011, in what became known as the “Arab Spring” that engulfed the region. However, Libya’s promised spring turned into a destructive autumn during which Gaddafi was murdered on 20 October, 2011, and Libya was left anguishing in lawlessness, courtesy of the three women.
Samatha Power currently runs USAID, nominated for the position by Biden. Until recently Susan Rice ran the Domestic Policy Council, also picked by Biden.
To say they’re only killing Nazis is a bit of a trolling oversimplification, and I wouldn’t essentialize Russia’s motives down to only liberating the people of the Donbas, but “russian troll” is RussiaGate BlueAnonsense.
As to whether Russia is doing imperialism, I’ll copypasta myself:
Honest question from a non-communist, based on your reply here. Does one need to support Putin to be a Marxist?
In a word, no. In a few more words, support for Russia (not Putin, as historical materialists don’t subscribe to great man theory) is only a partial, temporary, tactical one, in the context of imperialist liberation. Russia is still a capitalist state, though, so it’s a two stage strategy: first liberate colonized bourgeois states from colonizer states, and second revolution within those liberated bourgeois states.
Russia is an interesting case: it has already liberated itself from the post-Soviet “shock therapy” neocolonizers. This occurred during Putin’s administration, which is why he is especially hated by the US. So now the support for Russia is in the context of keeping the colonizers from recolonizing it, and supporting Russia to the extent that it helps other states liberate themselves. But Russia isn’t trying to “liberate” Ukraine, at least not all of Ukraine. It’s trying to resolve the genocidal attacks on the people of the Donbas, and it’s trying to resolve the imperialist military expansion at its border.
I was not fucking around 😂.
It started to sound like someone put a baseball card on a bike wheel and I had it packed full of mostly TV shows and moves I didn’t want to download again lol.
I’m better at it than I used to be but unfortunately I lost a lot of data to learn that lesson
My drive started ticking a long time ago, I thought I successfully saved my data but when I dug through the drive a bunch of directories were full of broken files
It’s always funny when liberals come from Reddit because the profit motive slowly ruined everything that once made Reddit fun and disruptive, but then absolutelty mald about Marxists and other leftists once they get here, the explicitly leftist answer to Reddit.
It’s especially bad on !Lemmy.world, where the majority of users are too idealistic to stay on Reddit but not well-versed enough in leftist theory or practice to actually engage with most of Lemmy.
It’s even goofier when these same liberals think they are leftists, but then still get upset at Marxists, and even Anarchists.
I was called a “fascist” for saying that Lenin was a Marxist. Not even for suggesting to read Lenin! Marx is whatever they want him to be, Lenin is whatever they want him to be (nevermind Lenin’s deep respect for Kropotkin), ideas shape reality.
Kropotkinskaya was therefore designed to be the largest and grandest station on the first line.
I think something both the Vaushites and PatSocs have in common is viewing things in a vacuum like liberals do, they try to carve up ideologies like football teams and insist that you cannot be an anarchist if you don’t swallow NATO propaganda, or that you can’t be a socialist if you acknowledge the unique struggles of LGBTQ people or colonized people in the US for example.
Meanwhile historically the lines are a lot fuzzier and both groups have aligned and clashed in various ways over a whole century.
We also do not need to keep rehashing hundred year old ideological beefs when we can simply examine the causes of those divides and also the points of agreement and learn from past mistakes. This should be something all contemporary communists of any tendency should agree on.
Yep, it’s 100% vibes based and excessively frustrating to deal with. You don’t even have to support the USSR or anything, just please be historically and politically consistent!
I have critical support for the USSR because they were clearly a net good and their existence gave leverage and power to workers’ movements in the US because they were terrified of us doing our own october revolution. It is glaringly obvious that the existence of the communist bloc held at bay the unrestrained voracious maw of capital because we can see what happened in the years since its (illegal) dissolution.
Sure, I largely agree. I don’t believe the USSR was perfect, but I see it as invaluable to seeing how a large-scale socialist project can actually work, and what parts didn’t. Regardless of tendency, it’s one of the best examples of Socialism at work, period, for good or ill.
Ok, that’s a new one. Calling you a fascist for saying Lenin was a Marxist…
I can usually take these liberal takes in stride, but this is like they invented some new kind of weapon. I feel this weird itch to engage with them somehow, and that’s not healthy.
It’s a genuine drain trying to feed Lemmy.world’s radlibs with any theory of any kind. Usually I try to avoid saying scary words and they will ultimately agree with the logic and analysis, which gives me hope that some can be convinced to actually educate themselves on leftism, but there’s such a strong anticommunist slant on Lemmy.world that it’s usually met with absurd claims with no basis in reality. Just knee-jerk vibes.
If you want to get into Marxism (even if it’s just to learn about what people are actually talking about), Principles of Communism by Engels and How Marxism Works by Chris Harman are fantastic pamphlets that really take no time to read through, though beware, Harman is a Trotskyist and that bleeds through a bit in his writing.
Marx mostly spoke about Capitalism and while no Marxist can avoid reading Marx, he doesn’t provide a great introduction to Socialism in the Marxist sense, if that makes sense. Still, Value, Price, and Profit and Wage Labor and Capital are fantastic intros to the critique of Capitalism.
Even if you’re interested in learning about Marxism-Leninism, jumping straight to Lenin before even understanding Marxism would be a mistake. Lenin builds his own critique off of Marxism, as a Marxist, so it is preferable to go through Marx first.
not well-versed enough in leftist theory or practice to actually engage with most of Lemmy.
The problem is that if your political world view requires actual study in order to understand and promote, you’re never going to get anywhere when it comes to affecting real change. Most humans don’t give a shit. You have to give them something simple and easy to make the core of their political identity. In our society capitalism has a head start because it’s baked into the school system, but you don’t get the luxury of forcing everyone to learn how you economic system works.
The problem is that if your political world view requires actual study in order to understand and promote, you’re never going to get anywhere when it comes to affecting real change.
Two war-torn feudal backwaters transformed themselves into spacefaring superpowers in the span of a single human lifetime. History has shown that mass political education is possible and effective. I mean hell, we all have to be instructed as kids about the dangers of fire, and that works. I don’t believe that educating people in Marxism is some sisyphean task any more than educating people in math. I think I can and has been done.
Do you control the public education system? Because until you do, you have to work with the educational background of the population you’re given, not the one you want.
Edit: the replies to this comment that I can see are so nonsensical or make so many wrong assumptions that it’s impossible to to even know where to start with them. I’ll just leave my reaction at “???”. If you, dear reader, want to explain to those people why their statements make no sense, I applaud your effort and the essay it will require.
If many millions of actual illiterate peasants who grew up with no school system at all can do it multiple times on different continents, it can absolutely be done here.
It really doesn’t require much study to understand and promote. You can go as deep as you like, but the underlying principles are straightforward and rather obvious, like class dynamics.
Additionally, Capitalism doesn’t have any “edge” over Socialism - it’s in a steady state of decline, has been declining, and appears to continue to decline. Capitalism cannot be permanent, it does not have a head start, and there is no need to force everyone to understand how Socialism works.
That’s really my point, you have these knee-jerk reactions because you are unfamiliar with the topics at hand, and do not appear to have tried to understand them further. The inevitability of Capitalism’s decline means you don’t need to be forced to understand Socialism by anyone, you’ll either learn on your own or will ride the tide.
You probably won’t agree with what I have said, but that’s more a choice you personally make, on whether to engage or disengage, and that’s fine.
“Redfash” or “horseshoe theory” is usually another giveaway. MAGA Communism and PatSocs certainly exist, but not in any serious number, and they aren’t here on the mainstream Lemmy communities.
How that preclude these models from being creative? Randomness within rules can be pretty creative. All life on earth is the result of selection on random mutations. Its output is way more structured and coherent than random noise. That’s not a good comparison at all.
Either way, generative tools are a great way for the people using to create with, no model has to be creative on its own.
I don’t think all creativity requires intentionality. Some forms of creativity are the accumulation of unintentional outcomes, like when someone sets out to copy a thing, but due to mistakes or other factors outside their control end up with something unique to what they were going for.
But you can still be creative if you keep every outcome, it would be very hard to prove creativity if you discard everything. The one could argue you’re creative the moment you select something.
A person sees a piece of art and is inspired. They understand what they see, be it a rose bush to paint or a story beat to work on. This inspiration leads to actual decisions being made with a conscious aim to create art.
An AI, on the other hand, sees a rose bush and adds it to its rose bush catalog, reads a story beat and adds to to its story database. These databases are then shuffled and things are picked out, with no mind involved whatsoever.
A person knows why a rose bush is beautiful, and internalises that thought to create art. They know why a story beat is moving, and can draw out emotional connections. An AI can’t do either of these.
Yeah, I know it doesn’t actually “see” anything, and is just making best guesses based on pre-gathered data. I was just simplifying for the comparison.
A person is also very much adding rose bushes and story beats to their internal databases. You learn to paint by copying other painters, adding their techniques to a database. You learn to write by reading other authors, adding their techniques to a database. Original styles/compositions are ultimately just a rehashing of countless tiny components from other works.
An AI understands what they see, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to generate a “rose bush” when you ask for one. It’s an understanding based on a vector space of token sequence weights, but unless you can describe the actual mechanism of human thought beyond vague concepts like “inspiration”, I don’t see any reason to assume that our understanding is not just a much more sophisticated version of the same mechanism.
The difference is that we’re a black box, AI less so. We have a better understanding of how AI generates content than how the meat of our brain generates content. Our ignorance, and use of vague romantic words like “inspiration” and “understanding”, is absolutely not proof that we’re fundamentally different in mechanism.
A person painting a rose bush draws upon far more than just a collection of rose bushes in their memory. There’s nothing vague about it, I just didn’t feel like getting into much detail, as I thought that statement might jog your memory of a common understanding we all have about art. I suppose that was too much to ask.
For starters, refer to my statement “a person understands why a rose bush is beatiful”. I admit that maybe this is vague, but let’s unpack.
Beaty is, of course, in the eye of the beholder. It is a subjective thing, requiring opinion, and AIs cannot hold opinions. I find rose bushes beautiful due to the inherent contrast between the delicate nature of the rose buds, and the almost monstrous nature of the fronds.
So, if I were to draw a rose bush, I would emphasise these aspects, out of my own free will. I might even draw it in a way that resembles a monster. I might even try to tell a story with the drawing, one about a rose bush growing tired of being pkucked, and taking revenge on the humans who dare to steal its buds.
“Beauty”, “opinion”, “free will”, “try”. These are vague, internal concepts. How do you distinguish between a person who really understands beauty, and someone who has enough experience with things they’ve been told are beautiful to approximate? How do you distinguish between someone with no concept of beauty, and someone who sees beauty in drastically different things than you? How do you distinguish between the deviations from photorealism due to imprecise technique, and deviations due to intentional stylistic impressionism?
What does a human child draw? Just a rosebush, poorly at that. Does that mean humans have no artistic potential? AI is still in relative infancy, the artistic stage of imitation and technique refinement. We are only just beginning to see the first glimmers of multi-modal AI, recursive models that can talk to themselves and pass information between different internal perspectives. Some would argue that internal dialogue is precisely the mechanism that makes human thought so sophisticated. What makes you think that AI won’t quickly develop similar sophistication as the models are further developed?
Philosophical masturbation, based on a poor understanding of what is an already solved issue.
We know for a fact that a machine learning model does not even know what a rosebush is. It only knows the colours of pixels that usually go into a photo of one. And even then, it doesn’t even know the colours - only the bit values that correspond to them.
That is it.
Opinions and beauty are not vague, and nor are free will and trying, especially in this context. You only wish them to be for your argument.
An opinion is a value judgment. AIs don’t have values, and we have to deliberately restrict them to stop actual chaos happening.
Beauty is, for our purposes, something that the individual finds worthy of viewing and creating. Only people can find things beautiful. Machine learning algrorithms are only databases with complex retrieval systems.
Free will is also quite obvious in context: being able to do something of your own volition. AIs need exact instructions to get anything done. They can’t make decisions beyond what you tell them to do.
Trying? I didn’t even define this as human specific
I couldn’t have put it better myself. You’ve said lots of philosophical words without actually addressing any of my questions:
How do you distinguish between a person who really understands beauty, and someone who has enough experience with things they’ve been told are beautiful to approximate?
How do you distinguish between someone with no concept of beauty, and someone who sees beauty in drastically different things than you?
How do you distinguish between the deviations from photorealism due to imprecise technique, and deviations due to intentional stylistic impressionism?
Every step of the way, a machine learning model is only making guesses based on previous training data. And not what the data actually is, but the pieces of it. Do green pixels normally go here? Does the letter “k” go here?
What evidence do you have that human cognition is functionally different? I won’t argue that humans are more sophisticated for sure. But what justification do you have to claim that humans aren’t just very, very good at making guesses based on previous training data?
I’m sorry that you’re struggling. Perhaps if you answered any of the questions I posed (twice) in order to frame the topic in a concrete way, we could have a more productive conversation that might provide elucidation for one, or both, of us. I fail to see how continuing to ignore those core questions, and instead focusing on questions that weren’t asked, will help either one of us.
You’re presupposing that brains and computers are basically the same thing. They are fundamentally different.
An AI doesn’t understand. It has an internal model which produces outputs, based on the training data it received and a prompt. That’s a different cathegory than “understanding”.
Otherwise, spotify or Youtube recommendation algorithms would also count as understanding the contents of the music/videos they supply.
An AI doesn’t understand. It has an internal model which produces outputs, based on the training data it received and a prompt. That’s a different cathegory than “understanding”.
Is it? That’s precisely how I’d describe human understanding. How is our internal model, trained on our experiences, which generates responses to input, fundamentally different from an LLM transformer model? At best we’re multi-modal, with overlapping models which we move information between to consider multiple perspectives.
Interesting take on LLMs, how are you so sure about that?
I mean I get it, current image gen models seem clearly uncreative, but at least the unrestricted versions of Bing Chat/ChatGPT leave some room for the possibility of creativity/general intelligence in future sufficiently large LLMs, at least to me.
So the question (again: to me) is not only “will LLM scale to (human level) general intelligence”, but also “will we find something better than RLHF/LLMs/etc. before?”.
I’m not sure on either, but asses roughly a 2/3 probability to the first and given the first event and AGI in reach in the next 8 years a comparatively small chance for the second event.
This argument was settled with electronic music in the 80s/90s. Samples and remixes taken directly from other bits of music to create a new piece aren't plagiarism.
And you’re absolutely right about that. That’s not the same thing as LLMs being incapable of constituting anything written in a novel way, but that they will readily with very little prodding regurgitate complete works verbatim is definitely a problem. That’s not a remix. That’s publishing the same track and slapping your name on it. Doing it two bars at a time doesn’t make it better.
It’s so easy to get ChatGPT, for example, to regurgitate its training data that you could do it by accident (at least until someone published it last year). But, the critics cry, you’re using ChatGPT in an unintended way. And indeed, exploiting ChatGPT to reveal its training data is a lot like lobotomizing a patient or torture victim to get them to reveal where they learned something, but that really betrays that these models don’t actually think at all. They don’t actually contribute anything of their own; they simply have such a large volume of data to reorganize that it’s (by design) impossible to divine which source is being plagiarised at any given token.
Add to that the fact that every regulatory body confronted with the question of LLM creativity has so far decided that humans, and only humans, are capable of creativity, at least so far as our ordered societies will recognize. By legal definition, ChatGPT cannot transform (term of art) a work. Only a human can do that.
It doesn’t really matter how an LLM does what it does. You don’t need to open the black box to know that it’s a plagiarism machine, because plagiarism doesn’t depend on methods (or sophisticated mental gymnastics); it depends on content. It doesn’t matter whether you intended the work to be transformative: if you repeated the work verbatim, you plagiarized it. It’s already been demonstrated that an LLM, by definition, will repeat its training data a non-zero portion of the time. In small chunks that’s indistinguishable, arguably, from the way a real mind might handle language, but in large chunks it’s always plagiarism, because an LLM does not think and cannot “remix”. A DJ can make a mashup; an AI, at least as of today, cannot. The question isn’t whether the LLM spits out training data; the question is the extent to which we’re willing to accept some amount of plagiarism in exchange for the utility of the tool.
The samples were intentionally rearranged and mixed with other content in a new and creative way.
When sampling took off, the copyright situation was sorted out and the end result is that there are ways to license samples. Some samples are produced like stock footage hat could be pirchased inexpensively, which is why a lot of songs by different artists have the same samples included. Samples of specific songs have to be licensed, so a hip hop song with a riff from an older famous song had some kind of licensing or it wouldnt be played on the radio or streaming services. They might have paid one time, or paid an artist group for access to a bunch of songs, basically the same kind of thing as covers.
Samples and covers are not plagarism if they are licensed and credit their source. Both are creating someing new, but using and crediting existing works.
AI is doing the same sampling and copying, but trying to pretend that it is somehow not sampling and copying and the companies running AI don’t want to credit the sources or license the content. That is why AI is plagarism.
Ray parker's Ghostbusters is inspired by huey lewis and the new's i want a new drug. But actually it's just blatant plagiarism. Is it okay because a human did it?
Please tell me how an AI model can distinguish between “inspiration” and plagiarism then. I admit I don’t know that much about them but I was under the impression that they just spit out something that it “thinks” is the best match for the prompt based on its training data and thus could not make this distinction in order to actively avoid plagiarism.
Not my point at all. Latent diffusion is a tool used by people in a creative manner. It's a new medium. Every argument you're making was made again photography a century ago, and against pre-mixed paints before that! You have no idea what you're talking about and can;t even figure out where the argument is let alone that you lost it before you were born!
Or do you think no people are involved? That computers are just sitting there producing images with no involvement and no-one is ever looking at them, and that that is somehow a threat to you? What? How dumb are you?
Dude I am actively trying to take your arguments in good faith but the fact that you can hardly post an answer without name calling someone is making it real hard to believe you are being genuine about this
I repeatedly agreed that AI models can be used as a tool by creative people. All I’m saying is that it can’t be creative by itself.
When I say they’re “plagiarism machines”, I’m claiming that they’re currently mostly used to plagiarise by people without a creative bone in their body who directly use the output of an AI, mistaking it for artwork.
That is not what you have said. Of course it can't be creative by itself, not can a paint brush or a camera. That's a non-argument. You keep using the word plagiarism as if it's in any way relevant. It's not. A camera or a paint brush can be used to plagiarise as well so drop that
A camera or a paint brush can be used to plagiarise as well so drop that
Unlike cameras or paint brushes, the overwhelming majority of generative AI is trying to cut out the artist in an artistic process (the rest is used for deepfake porn). Since the training data for the AI was taken without consent and the original authors aren’t credited, IMHO, it counts as plagiarism.
Your argument is bad and you should feel bad. What you have just said is bullshit and you know it. I'm done because I have had this stupid fucking argument too fucking many times and you lost it generations ago so please, just shut up and fuck off!
Please tell me how an AI model can distinguish between “inspiration” and plagiarism then.
[…] they just spit out something that it “thinks” is the best match for the prompt based on its training data and thus could not make this distinction in order to actively avoid plagiarism.
I’m not entirely sure what the argument is here. Artists don’t scour the internet for any image that looks like their own drawings to avoid plagiarism, and often use photos or the artwork of others as reference, but that doesn’t mean they’re plagiarizing.
Plagiarism is about passing off someone else’s work as your own, and image-generation models are trained with the intent to generalize - that is, being able to generate things it’s never seen before, not just copy, which is why we’re able to create an image of an astronaut riding a horse even though that’s something the model obviously would’ve never seen, and why we’re able to teach the models new concepts with methods like textual inversion or Dreambooth.
I get your point, but as soon as you ask them to draw something that has been drawn before, all the AI models I fiddled with tend to effectively plagiarize the hell out of their training data unless you jump through hoops to tell them not to
You’re right, as far as I know we have not yet implemented systems to actively reduce similarity to specific works in the training data past a certain point, but if we chose to do so in the future this would raise the question of formalising when plagiarism starts; which I suspect to be challenging in the near future, as society seems to not yet have a uniform opinion on the matter.
And yet so many of the debates around this new formation of media and creativity come down to the grey space between what is inspiration and what is plagiarism.
Even if everyone agreed with your point, and I think broadly they do, it doesn’t settle the debate.
But an artist cannot be inspired without content from other artists. I don’t agree to the word “copied” here either, because it is not copying when it creates something new.
I’m sure many artists would love having ultimate knowledge about all art relevant to their craft - it just hasn’t been feasible. Perhaps if art-generating AI could correctly cite their references it would be more acceptable for commercial use.
We’ll soon see whether or not it’s the same thing.
Only a 50 years ago or so, some well-known philosophers off AI believed computers would write great poetry before they could ever beat a grand master at chess.
I think the relevant point is that chess is discrete while art isn’t. Or they both are but the problem space that art can explore is much bigger than the space chess can (chess has 64 square on the board and 7 possibilities for each square, which would be a tiny image that an NES could show more colours for or a poem with 64 words, but you can only select from 7 words).
Chess is an easier problem to solve than art is, unless you define a limited scope of art.
We could use “Writing a Sonnet” as a suitably discrete and limited form of art that’s undeniably art, and ask the question “Can a computer creatively write a sonnet”? Which raises the question “Do humans creatively write sonnets?” or are they all derivative?
Humans used to think of chess as an art and speak of “creativity” in chess, by which they meant the expression of a new idea on how to play. This is a reasonable definition, and going by it, chess programs are undeniably creative. Yet for whatever reason, the word doesn’t sit right when talking about these programs.
I suspect we’ll continue to not find any fundamental difference between what the machines are doing and what we are doing. Then unavoidably we’ll either have to concede that the machines are “creative” or we are not.
Nah, your lifetime license will be fine. They’ll just slightly rename the products, release them as “entirely new, unrelated products” and cease updating it under the old name. You can still use the old, never updated product in perpetuity, if you want…
The first time this happened to me was a MUD client of all things. zMUD discontinued, check out the new cMUD! Also available with a lifetime license just like zMUD was!
It’s not uncommon to do what you said, but to also kill the old product so that they’re not available any more. Sometimes it’s the exact same product, but with a different name.
Sometimes it’s the exact same product, but with a different name.
That’s basically what zmud/cmud was. He basically slapped a different name on a major update and declared that since it’s a different product it requires a separate license and the old product would no longer be updated.
No need to kill the old product if you just let it stagnate. Things like OS updates and providing no support will slowly kill it for you, without you generating the ill will of prematurely killing lifetime licenses.
Honestly that would only mean no more updates for the 2.0 version though, right?
Like you already had to buy a new license for 2.0 so it would be like Affinity+Canvas going “we are releasing 3.0 tomorrow, sadly it’s subscription only despite our pledges because blah blah blah…” except in your case it’s a name change to allow them to do it without breaking their pledge, no?
Several countries use a dayfine system, we in Sweden have used dayfines since 1931, Finland since 1921, Germany since 1969, There are a few more countries using the system, but I could not quickly find any historical data about them.
A day-fine, day fine, unit fine or structured fine is a unit of payment for a legal fine which is based on the offender’s daily personal income. It is intended as a punishment financially equivalent to incarceration for one day without salary, scaled to equal impacts on both high- and low-income offenders. An analogy may be drawn with income tax, which is also proportional to income, or even levied at higher rates for higher incomes.
Jurisdictions employing the day-fine include Denmark (Danish: dagbøde), Estonia (Estonian: päevamäär), Finland (Finnish: päiväsakko), France (French: Jour-amende), Germany (German: Tagessatz), Sweden (Swedish: dagsbot), Switzerland, and Macao.
Great idea but still unfair. It is the same as a high salaried person being able to afford quitting their job and take a couple of months to look for another or go on parental leave. They can afford it because they have savings. A day fine will also hit the poorest the most, because they don’t have savings to afford paying such a fine.
Also, this would mean people with no money or income could do what they want without any consequences.
Im also failing to understand why successful people should supposedly be charged more. It doesnt make a difference if the person who committed the crime has more or less money, so they should be charged according to the crime, not what they have.
Im also failing to understand why successful people should supposedly be charged more. It doesnt make a difference if the person who committed the crime has more or less money, so they should be charged according to the crime, not what they have.
So the idea is that if something is a $10,000 fine, it will stop the average person from doing it, but it might not stop directors/owners of companies and it definitely won’t stop a company from doing it themselves.
If you believe one is wealthier because they deserve it, through success, hardwork, etc , then shouldn’t these apparent shining examples of success also be held to a higher standard?
Or should we somehow decide the economic cost of someone doing something illegal, then charge everyone that? For example: the risk of speeding increases quadratically (E =1/2mV^2), the higher the speed. I.e the risk of death. Do we then set a speed limit, anything above which is considered illegal. Above this level, a fine or charge is incurred based on the likelihood of a crash killing someone upto and including the cost of one’s life.
But then it’s legal to kill someone if you are wealthy enough, and the poor are inherently the most moral group.
Or we could flat fine it; which disproportionately punishes the poor. Which is like saying “ohh you are poor and that’s your fault, just like speeding. Get fucked lol”.
I’m sure that there are other options but it’s a good idea to consider the potential ramifications of fees, fines, and other punishment structures, and how they influence the society we live in.
It doesnt make a difference if the person who committed the crime has more or less money
Of course it does. A poor person might find themselves in a situation where they have to steal groceries or other necessities for pure survival. If I were poor and needed diapers and there was no governmental support program available I would also steal them. Or formula or whatever. A rich person can afford all of that. If they steal groceries it is for the thrill, not out of necessity.
Also, note that really bad crimes (murder for example) are not fined. In that sense it does not matter what the financial status of the perpetrator is. Although filthy rich people can sometimes even buy their way out of these crimes.
You have a point but what about stuff like traffic violations? Nobody NEEDS to commit one, so should these fines be the same for everyone?
Also, following your example, person A making 75k/year and person B making 150k/year both have no necessitiy to steal groceries. Yet, if the fine was income-dependent, person B would have to pay way more.
if the goal of the fine is to deter people from committing a traffic violation, the person making $150k will not be equally deterred compared to the person making $75k. If the fine has too little impact, it no longer works as a deterrent. This is especially true for things like parking tickets, where you aren’t necessarily putting yourself or others in danger like you might be for speeding (though, assuming the two people only differ in their income and all other variables – like how willing they are to drive dangerously – remain equal, then the point still stands).
Okay but then what about those poor people mentioned above that need to steal for necessities. Wouldn’t we want to deter them the most (as they are the most likely to commit the act)?
It doesnt seem logical to me to say that we should increase the fines to deter (wealthy) people more and at the same time say that we should lower the fines so (poor) people that are currently deterred can afford to break the law (?)…
stealing != traffic violation. while stealing may have a fine associated with it, it’s generally based on restitution for the goods stolen + legal fees etc. So, you’re moving the goal posts on me, and my feelings about how to handle theft of necessities is tangential to the discussion (for the record, my feelings are: if you see someone stealing necessities, no you didn’t).
You seem to not be getting that the goal should be equal deterrence regardless of income or wealth or whatever the most fair metric happens to be. IDK what the baseline fine should be, nor what the most fair way to scale the fines should be b/c i’m a chemist, not a sociologist or legal scholar. But at the end of the day, if the only punishment is a fine, the wealthy don’t have to give a shit.
Edit: for #2, let’s use time instead of money. If instead of paying a $1000 fine, you could do community service. But the “value” of your community service is tied to your wage/salary. So, someone making $10/hr has to do 100 hrs of community service, while someone else making $100/hr only has to do 10 hrs of community service. Is that still fair in your view?
Lets focus on non-necessity acts here (e. g. traffic violations).
Deterring people is not the only goal, it also needs to be fair/appropriate. And this is where, IMO, the income-adjusted fines fail.
Fines should be adjusted depending on the offense commited, possibly also taking into account the intentions. Personal wealth is not a factor that seems reasonable to me to take into account regarding the fairness.
Essentially, I believe that everybody should be treated equally before the law. Nobody should be treated better or worse (or have a better or worse punishment) just because of their social status. That’s why I believe that fixed fines are fair and the suggested varying punishments are not. I do recognize that they may deter wealthier people less.
I agree that everyone should be equal under the law, but that doesn’t mean that fixed fines are fair. The same amount of money has a different value to different people, and that perceived value changes depending on one’s income and wealth.
IDK if you saw my edit in my previous response with the community service example, but I think that might help clear up where we’re diverging. If it takes me 10 hours of work to make enough money to pay the fine, but it takes you 100 hours of work to pay the fine for the exact same offense because our salaries are different, were we really punished equally?
I guess that depends on the metric you use. You say they should be punished by time (and so people who earn money more quickly should have to pay more). However, I see many problems with that and I think it would result in much less fair fines than now.
Picture two persons, one living in the countryside, one in a big city. The second person earns considerably more than the first because life in the city is just more expensive. Both persons have the same amount of money left at the end of the month (after paying the bells etc) but income-adjusted fines would mean person B would have to pay way more.
If it’s posession-bases instead (i.e. your fines depend on what you have/own) then what about some person who inherited a large house that is worth lots of money and has an otherwise normal job. This person may also have the same amount of money left at the end of the month as the other two persons but because of his big house, he’d have to pay even more, potentially sell his house because of a small offense.
Do you think that rich people should have to serve shorter prison sentences because their time is more valuable? Do you at least SEE the parallel I’m trying to draw here?
And I already admitted that I don’t know what the optimal metric is. I just know that a flat fine that is the same for everyone, without taking into account their financial situation at all, is unfair.
Do you think that rich people should have to serve shorter prison sentences
Of course not. I completely get your point, you say (correct me if I’m wrong) that time is a fair metric for everyone. I respect that.
I agree, however I think money is too. Sure - some people have more or less money, and some people live longer or shorter lives. But everyone can still do the same in one hour and everyone can still buy the same things for 10€.
What I think is UNFAIR is trying to “convert” one metric to the other depending on personal wealth. If I get a fine, it should be a fixed amount of money IMO and if you charge me with time in some way then it should be a fixed amount of time.
Well we went down a road that I think we need to track back.
Poor people committing “necessary” crimes is not the focus and should not be. The whole idea of necessary crimes that should not be punished is awful - we should focus on building a society where people don’t end up in a position where they have to steal (etc.) to survive. If we are already thinking of how to better jurisdiction I’d argue we have space to assume we can also better their situation in general. We want to deter them from crimes the most, yes, but not by scaring them with the consequences of being caught - we want to deter them by making them unnecessary. No person should be poor, period.
I think what this comes down to is the question of fines themselves. It has almost something catholic about it. You buy yourself out of punishment. I’d argue that this concept is flawed in itself, no matter how you adjust it.
My guess is that this is what the post was supposed to say. Money in itself isn’t too much of a fair concept, or a just one. But punishment, law enforcement, etc, should be, despite taking place in a capitalist society.
What it comes down to would probably be something like social service (my guess). Is the crime committed violent and does the perpetrator pose a severe security risk to society? Then a correction facility that focuses on healing, mental and physical health, rehabilitation and reintegration into society should be the choice. The crime was something that could also be fined? Cut the fine, make it a social service. Picking up trash from sideroads, cleaning public toilets. This will benefit the public/society and no one can buy their way out of it.
Well, that would just shift the problem: Now, instead of wealthy people being less deterred, it’s the people with a bunch of free time that are less deterred (college kids screwing around, people with no job)…
Also, it doesnt benefit the society any more that the fine’s money would (assumuning the community service would be equivalent to the current monetary value). (There are also other problems like verifying the work is actually done and also small fines, like, am I supposed to pick up trash from the sidewalk for 2 minutes for jaywalking?)
A percentage of income still isn’t equitable though.
If you’re destitute a week’s income means you starve.
If you’re a millionnaire a week’s income stings bit doesn’t affect much.
If you’re a billionnaire there is a good chance you don’t technically have an income, and if you do you can lose half of your wealth without feeling it.
This is true, but you could still have a progressive fine. Very good point with the billionaire, though. They live in a completely different world, in terms of how their wealth flow works. Still, it seems like an alternative fine system could be worked out that would hit them hard.
The real solution is to remove the classes so high above everyone that the rules don’t apply. This is a difficult problem only because we’re talking about people who are so ludicrously wealthy a fine for literal hundreds of millions of dollars wouldn’t make them homeless.
I agree. John Oliver once referred to billionaires as something like a bug in the structure of the system, and I wholeheartedly agree with that analysis. Unfortunately, they’re a bug that’s not so easily dislodged. Until then, designing systems that are able to deal with their existence is the best way to deal with them.
The billionaire might not feel it, but the money gained could be significant for all sorts of good things that help lift the burdon of the lower class.
I’m only 18 and I’m already so fucking tired of existing in this world, seems like everything is going downhill and I’m just gonna be forced to live in an authoritarian dictatorship world where all the air is full of toxins and the water is full of plastic
Look on the bright side: it’s not as if this will continue forever. If our infrastructure is failing as deeply as it seems, society will reach a breaking point. The real question is where that point is and making sure you reach it. If it truly gets bad enough we’ll see the return of the guillotine, maybe even literally if we’re feeling spicy
The French Revolution wasn’t what pop-history suggests. It was a genocidal civil war that killed far more commoners than nobles. There was a point where they were killing so many people, the only way they could keep up was to drown them en masse by chaining them to a barge and sinking it.
I hate thinking so negatively about the future but the more the world seems to crumble around me the more I feel like we might be one of the last generations of humans that got to experience civilisation for a long time.
The planet is dying, fascism is spreading, the tensions are rising, and everyone has nukes! woo! future!
Would be more true if they stabbed the hand, because after they suggest budgeting, that employee will be put on a list and be first in line to be terminated due to being incompatible with the work culture of pretending to be shiny and happy living in subsistence.
It really is. We have to do a yearly health incentive thing that requires going through PowerPoint about certain topics. This is exactly the kind of shit.
“Feeling sad? Try a salad! Some greens are sure to put you in a good mood?”
“Grief got you down? A funny movie is sure to cheer you up?”
“Want to retire by 65? Put 70% of each paycheck into a high interest high risk account!”
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