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p3n

@ p3n @lemmy.world

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93
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • 20% of the worlds prison population

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  • I never said it would make it equal. In fact, I'm confident that it would not.

    The whole reason we started this argument is because you made a condescending comment implying either that I can't read, or that I don't understand what rate per-100,000 means. I understand what per-100,000 means, but I also understand that not all groups of 100,000 people are the same; removing a large sub-population of people that doesn't exactly match the overall population's average will result in a change to the overall population average.

    If you have a total population (T), and you are measuring the rate of an event (E), then E / T gives your average event rate for the total population, which you can then normalize to a per-X number. For example: T = 1000 people E = 10 incarcerations. 10 / 1000 = .01, normalized to per 100 capita would be 1 per 100 people on average, from the total population.

    If you have a sub-demographic in that population (Ts), and it has a different rate of an event (Es) then its rate is also Es / Ts. For example: Ts = 100 poor-people Es = 5 incarcerations. 5 / 100 = .05, normalized to a per 100 capita would be 5 people per 100 on average, for that sub-population.

    If you suddenly remove that sub-population, what happens to the rate of the overall population? That's easy to calculate: (E - Es) / (T - Ts) (10 - 5) / (1000 - 100) = 5 / 900 = .0055, normalized to a per 100 capita would be .55.

    Suggesting that a sub-demographic doesn't perfectly match the per-capita average of an entire population and that removing them would change the overall per-capita rate isn't nonsense.

  • 20% of the worlds prison population

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  • the idea that the CPC didn't incarcerate as many people per capita is because of the famine. This is nonsense.

    How is that nonsense? What was the per-capita incarceration rate of the population who died in the famine? What was the per-capita incarceration rate of the population that didn't die in the famine?

    There is probably no data for that, so we can't know for sure, but I showed that in the U.S. a large famine would result in a lower incarceration rate because poor people would starve at a disproportionate rate, and poor people are also incarerated at a disproportnate rate, so that would reduce the overall rate per capita. This doesn't necessarily apply to the situation in China, but I don't think it is nonsense with no foundation in logic.

  • 20% of the worlds prison population

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  • It's the system that determines how its run, not the people at the top.

    That is the catch. It only determines how it is run if the people at the top are following the system. The system is supposed to determine that, but if everyone in positions of power decide to disregard what the system is supposed to be, then suddenly the system that a government used to have or advertises as having, no longer represents the actual state of affairs.

    Responsibility means owning an outcome. If I take responsibility for the safety of your children and a meteorite literally falls out of the sky and kills them, I am still responsible. I'm not going to try to make excuses and make sure you know it wasn't my fault and there wasn't anything I could have done. I was responsible. Your kids are dead. The buck stops with me. That's what actual leaders do, they own the outcome.

  • 20% of the worlds prison population

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  • To be perfectly clear, I don't subscribe to the notion that communism is bad and capitalism is good. I think every socio-economic system has pros and cons and are prone different forms of degredation and usurption.

    I think the people leading a country and the people that comprise its society have a larger impact on life than their system of government.

    With that said, a government is ultimately responsible for the safety and well-being of its people.

  • 20% of the worlds prison population

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  • There was famine in China from natural causes

    From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine

    It is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history

    (Emphasis mine.)

    Also, regardless of the reason my other points stand: having millions of poor people starve to death will reduce you incarceration rate, and people might choose to live in a country with a higher incarceration rate if it means they don't starve to death.

  • 20% of the worlds prison population

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  • Let me address a few things. First, I didn't post my response because I think the incarceration rate in the U. S. is OK. It's not. Incarceration of non-violent criminals is especially aggregeous. Private for profit prisons are a horrible idea.

    I responded because the OP posted an image comparing the incarceration rates of the CCP's cultural revolution to the current U.S. incarceratiom rate. The implication is that because the per-capita incarceration rate was lower in China during that time, it was a nicer place to live than current-day America. That ignores the part where the Chinese government starved to death 15,000,000 - 55,000,000 people, or put in Americanized terms: somewhere between the entire population of Pennsylvania to the entire populations of California AND Pennsylvania.

    Claiming that a per-capita measurement normalizes all factors, makes a sampling error based on survivorship bias. It is highly unlikely that the overlap of people who starved to death during the CCP's famine had the same incarceration rate of those who did not. I'm guessing rich and party aligned individuals had a much lower rate of both starvation and incarceration.

    This would certainly be true in the U.S; Incarceration rates are much higher for low-income individuals: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html. Low income individuals are also more likely to starve to death in a famine* (*citation needed). Now imagine if the United States government starved to death the poorest 10,000,000 people in the U.S. and then started bragging about how much it's per-capita incarceration rates have improved!

  • 20% of the worlds prison population

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  • This happened right before the cultural revolution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine might have helped cut down the potential prison population...

    Edit, digging this up from 5 threads deep:

    ...I understand what per-100,000 means, but I also understand that not all groups of 100,000 people are the same; removing a large sub-population of people that doesn’t exactly match the overall population’s average will result in a change to the overall population average.

    If you have a total population (T), and you are measuring the rate of an event (E), then E / T gives your average event rate for the total population, which you can then normalize to a per-X number. For example: T = 1000 people E = 10 incarcerations. 10 / 1000 = .01, normalized to per 100 capita would be 1 per 100 people on average, from the total population.

    If you have a sub-demographic in that population (Ts), and it has a different rate of an event (Es) then its rate is also Es / Ts. For example: Ts = 100 poor-people Es = 5 incarcerations. 5 / 100 = .05, normalized to a per 100 capita would be 5 people per 100 on average, for that sub-population.

    If you suddenly remove that sub-population, what happens to the rate of the overall population? That’s easy to calculate: (E - Es) / (T - Ts) (10 - 5) / (1000 - 100) = 5 / 900 = .0055, normalized to a per 100 capita would be .55.

    Suggesting that a sub-demographic doesn’t perfectly match the per-capita average of an entire population and that removing them would change the overall per-capita rate isn’t nonsense.

  • I feel so relieved!

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  • To be clear, aside from the part I quoted, I agreed with everything else in your post and thought it was an interesting take, but again I have to take issue with this:

    as far as I’m aware, they don’t carry the clinical state-sponsored efficiency that is a hallmark of the Holocaust.

    I'm not going to analyze every single atrocity since 1945, but the Cambodian genocide was certainly state-sponsored, efficient, and horrific:

    "20,000 people passed through the Security Prison 21, one of the 196 prisons the Khmer Rouge operated,[4][28] and only seven adults survived.[29]"

    "The executed were buried in mass graves. In order to save ammunition, the executions were often carried out using poison or improvised weapons such as sharpened bamboo sticks, hammers, machetes and axes.[6] ... In some cases the children and infants of adult victims were killed by having their heads bashed against the trunks of Chankiri trees, and then were thrown into the pits alongside their parents. The rationale was "to stop them growing up and taking revenge for their parents' deaths."

    "People were imprisoned and tortured merely on suspicion of opposing the regime or because other prisoners gave their names under torture. Whole families (including women and children) ended up in prisons and were tortured because the Khmer Rouge feared that if they did not do this, their intended victims' relatives would seek revenge. Pol Pot said, "if you want to kill the grass, you also have to kill the roots".[169]"

    "There are many accounts of torture in both the Security Prison 21 records and the documents of the trial; as told by the survivor Bou Meng in his book (written by Huy Vannak), tortures were so atrocious and heinous that the prisoners tried in every way to commit suicide, even using spoons, and their hands were constantly tied behind their back to prevent them from committing suicide "

    "all medical experiments were systematically conducted without proper anesthetics.[173] A medic who worked inside S-21 said that a 17-year-old girl had her throat slit and her abdomen pierced before being beaten and put into water for an entire night. This procedure was repeated many times and carried out without anesthetics.[174] In a hospital of Kampong Cham province, child medics cut out the intestines of a living non-consenting person and joined their ends to study the healing process. The patient died after three days due to the "operation".[173]"

    "Twenty-six-year-old John D. Dewhirst, a British tourist, was one of the youngest foreigners to die in the prison.[17] He was sailing with his New Zealand companion, Kerry Hamill, and their Canadian friend Stuart Glass when their boat drifted into Cambodian territory and was intercepted by Khmer patrol boats on August 13, 1978. Glass was killed during the arrest, while Dewhirst and Hamill were captured, blindfolded, and taken to shore. Both were executed after having been tortured for several months at Tuol Sleng. Witnesses reported that a foreigner was burned alive; initially, it was suggested that this might have been John Dewhirst, but a survivor would later identify Kerry Hamill as the victim of this particular act of brutality."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields

  • I feel so relieved!

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  • Israel is suddenly the state committing the closest thing we’ve seen to the Holocaust since the actual Holocaust.

    I don't say this to excuse anything Israel is doing, but this is gross recency bias that is glossing over numerous genocides that have occurred since the Holocaust, including:

    Not technically genocides, but also worth mentioning in the same vein:

    So ya, other than those events, this is the closest thing to the Holocaust since the actual Holocaust.

  • Billionaire Sunjay Kapur has died after swallowing a bee at a polo match

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  • They certainly don't have to work as much, or at all really. I recognize that there is an enormous gap between someone struggling to put food on the table and a billionaire, but it is also very easy to focus on work and increasing financial stability/independence at the detriment of more important things. It reminds of the song Cat's In The Cradle: https://youtu.be/5u-KWa3tL-0?list=RD5u-KWa3tL-0 (especially appropriate on Father's day weekend). My dad worked long hours when I was growing up, and I slept in a hallway/laundry room because he couldn't afford to rent a larger place, but he still made time for me and my siblings, and I wouldn't trade my childhood for literally all the money in the world.

    Does that mean that people who are struggling to feed their family don't really need the money? No. Would it have been easier if my family had more money? Sure. But I have also noticed that peoples' lifestyles seem to grow to match their incomes, and it never seems like it is quite enough. There is always that next job or promotion or opportunity that will put you in a slightly better position and then finally it will be enough. Once basic needs met (air, water, food, shelter), I believe that money can start creating more problems for people than it solves. With tons of money comes tons of distractions, and temptations; there aren't any poor people on the Epstein list. Its easy for me to say they are horrible people and I would never engage in activities like that, but it also isn't an option for me. I can't honestly claim virtue for avoiding an evil that my situation in life doesn't allow for. Life seems much easier when nobody stops you from getting what you want, but I have to wonder if sometimes it is a blessing in disguise when they do...

  • Billionaire Sunjay Kapur has died after swallowing a bee at a polo match

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  • With the focus of wealth inequality, I thought I'd just share this morbid reminder from the middle ages that there is no inequality in death. It will find everyone. No amount of money will let anyone escape it. Just something to consider when you are thinking about what to pursue in life. To that extent, I do feel somewhat sorry when I hear that a billionaire has died, because I know that they likely spent most of their life pursuing things that are ultimately worthless, and it makes me re-evaluate just what I am doing with mine.

  • Karoline Levitt ditches religious necklace after Jon Stewart’s brutal joke: ‘Some sort of weird Pinocchio cross’

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  • Here is an easy way to tell: If someone wears a cross, that isn't a strong indication of faith. If a cross wears them, that's a pretty strong indication of faith.

  • what is north?

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  • The Weddell Sea, north of Antarctica, brought to you by the department of redundancy department.

  • Town hall erupts after GOP congressman admits to not knowing what he voted for

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  • Ya, maybe bills shouldn't be 1000+ pages so that people can actually know what is in them.

    This is a concept that somehow software developers seem to grasp, but lawmakers don't?

    Try submitting a pull request with 100,000 lines of code to the Linux kernel, or any other serious project. Nobody is going to review and accept it because that is a rediculous amount of code to change with a single PR. How much more important is a federal law than a software project? Yet one will have maintainers pour over it line by line while the other the "maintainers" don't even read.

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  • I guess I didn't communicate my point effectively. I wasn't trying to nitpick semantics. I was trying to say that people don't think critically because they assume impartiality.

    If the first thing people did when they looked at a study was to ask what possible biases or conflicts of interest the sponsors have, then conducting a meta-study concluding that biased studies are biased wouldn't be news to anyone.

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  • There is no such thing as an impartial sponsor; some are more obviously biased than others, but the belief in a fictitious impartiality is part of the problem. It shouldn't take a meta-study for people to see am obvious conflict of interest.

    I'm biased. You are biased. Everyone is biased.

  • It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System

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  • Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?

  • Once ‘dead’ thrusters on the farthest spacecraft from Earth are in action again

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  • I'm curious, do the same people who think that the moon landing was faked also believe that Voyager is fake? Because to me, Voyager is more impressive at this point.

  • "Pure Insanity": 1 Air Traffic Controller Reportedly Managed All Flights At Newark Liberty For 3 Hours

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  • Voting to make cuts to an already ailing ATC system makes no sense to me. Simply from a self-preservation aspect, I would think this is one service that all politicians and oligarchs would maintain. It doesn't matter if you fly private or commercial, everyone uses and needs ATC to fly safely.

    At least with something like global warming/climate change, I can see people selfishly believing it won't effect them during their lifetime, but the 2nd and 3rd order effects of removing ATC can be immediate and fatal.

    I only hope that a minimum number of bystanders are killed when poetic justice occurs.

  • he loves his bribes

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  • I am not arguing with the obvious corruption, but to provide a counterpoint to the second part of the argument: if we aren't allowed to make peace with former terrorists, then we can never stop fighting each other, and if we keep fighting each other, then we will keep creating the next generation of terrorists.