Explain to me how qualified immunity is better than any ill it is supposed to address? And how is it that if you sue the government and win, then the judgement doesn't automatically award reasonable legal fees?
The ill that it's supposed to address is people hassling government officials who are just doing their jobs. Their jobs require them to do things that people don't want them to do, like making you pay taxes or go to jail for committing crimes. They are prominent targets and can easily spend their entire career fighting off complaints.
Of course that promptly shifts the potential for abuse in the other direction. Supposedly, democracy is the control over that. If they are abusing their office, you vote them out. (Or you vote out the elected official supervising them, such as a mayor or sheriff.)
It actually does work out most of the time. The cases of abuse are really few and far between. But in a country of 300 million, "few and far between" is somebody every single day, and a decent chance that it's you at some point.
That said, it should be zero, and there's good reason to think that for every offender you see there are dozens or hundreds of people complicit in allowing it. The theory I outlined above can only handle so many decades of concerted abuses before they become entrenched as part of the system. At which point it may be impossible to restore it without resetting everything to zero and starting over.
> The ill that it's supposed to address is people hassling government officials who are just doing their jobs.
How? If they're doing their jobs, then they are in the right and would be defended by their agency. If they are doing something illegal, they'd be in trouble. But that's the point!
They might be defended by their agency (though being "in the right" doesn't appear to be a pre-requisite for that anyway). But they would/could still be subject to lawsuit after lawsuit, which hardly suits the intended goal of government, does it?
Poor people already cannot afford most legal services, and (other than a very small percentage of cases brought on a volunteer or nearly-volunteer basis at the goodwill of law firms) very rarely file suit without legal fees sought in restitution. Of those that don’t, it’s understood that recouping legal fees from lower income clients is far from guaranteed due to bankruptcy risk.
Still. I understand the officers having "qualified immunity". But not the agency.
If an agency has shitty officers doing dodgy stuff, it's on the agency. The agents may be declared immune to direct litigation, but any claims and reparations should be automatically shifted to the agency.
If the agency has become corrupt, tweaking immunity isn't going to fix it. Only voters can solve that by saying clearly "no, this is not the agency we want."
If that is what the voters want, then the victim minority can only reconsider their role in the social contract.
I do not understand officers having qualified immunity. They are armed for of the government and they have much lower expectations placed on them the normal citizens.
The fact that cops can break laws, actually harm people and then make prosecution basically impossible is bonkers.
It’s a sticky issue. Without QI, it seems very plausible that many law enforcement departments would be seriously hamstrung by continual waves of legal action and thus cost taxpayers a lot more to operate effectively. Not only would many people use a court of law as a fallback from the court of public opinion, but the legal industry would support this given the lucrative monetary and reputational advantages of suing the government.
And I’m saying that as someone extremely pro-curtailment of police/TSA/CBP scope and resources, and extremely critical and aware of the law enforcement abuse and overreach epidemic. This one just doesn’t have an easy solve—not without a massive overhaul of the entire US justice system down to the roots.
Especially when the implication in the article is the police tried to delete a video from evidence -- and still ended up getting to hide behind qualified immunity.
Two separate things. Qualified immunity is just immunity from individual liability afforded to government agents when conducting government business, as long as they are conducting it properly.
It might be true, it might not. Probably more useful to say "as long as they are conducting it properly" seems to have little impact on any of cases in which such immunity has been an issue.
Have you ever looked at legal proceedings involving criminals? It’s 95% noise and 5% signal. Criminals are, in general, bad people with a lot of time on their hands, and without qualified immunity you’d totally swamp the legal system with frivolous lawsuits.
The left hand scale is presumably dollars per ounce of silver. The right hand side is "margin requirement ($)". I can think of two interpretations of that, neither of which make sense to me. The first interpretation is that one recently needs a $25000 margin per $90 ounce of silver instrument - obviously absurd. The other interpretation is that once you have a $25000 margin you can buy unlimited silver instruments, which is only barely less absurd. How does reality work?
My 2007 Corolla odometer has been at 299999 since 2019. I've replaced the transmission once, but the rest is original, aside from expected maintenance - tires, brakes, fans, etc. - and an added stereo.
If your colleagues just don't feel the benefit of the extra .lit file, is there a way to pull their changes to the derived files into your own .lit files and to keep the .lit files in a parallel version control repo or branch?
Sorta? Noweb and org mode's support of it, at least, has a "detangle" and it worked surprisingly well last time I tried it. You can't edit the comments it puts in the source, for obvious reasons. And I'm sure it has trouble if you tried to get too fancy. But it did allow me to edit the generated source directly and pull those edits back into my literate source. I imagine if this was something people were more often doing, you could make it more reliable, even.
Nope. The current system may be misdirecting 95% of labor, but until we have sufficiently modeled all of nature to provide perfect health and brought world peace, there is work to do.
And not only that, but most >>changes<< to software shouldn't happen, especially if it's user facing. Half my dread in visiting support web sites is that they've completely rearranged yet again, and the same thing I've wanted five times requires a fifth 30 minutes figuring out where they put it.
I'm a python newby, so please correct the following: The first function looks quadratic in time and linear in stack space, while the second function looks linear in time and constant in stack space. Memoizing would convert the first function to linear in time and linear in space (on the heap instead of the stack). For python, wouldn't I always use the second definition? For Haskell, I would use the [1..] syntax which the compiler would turn into constant space linear time machine code.
Late response, but yes, you are completely right. You wouldn't use either implementation whether you're using Python or Haskell; you'd use what you said, because that's both the most obvious and the most performant method of achieving the goal. It's just a fun exercise to show that the version using a lazy map is equivalent to the obvious thing. Some people find it mind-bending and satisfying in the same way some people might find bit-twiddling hacks cool, or math nerds might find any of these mathematical identities cool.
I do a lot of ansible which needs to run on multiple versions, and their yaml typing are not consistent - whenever I have a variable in a logic statement, I nearly always need to apply the "| bool" filter.
This is likely hair splitting, but you are far more likely getting bitten by the monster amount of variance in jinja2 versions/behaviors than by anything "yaml-y"
For example, yaml does not care about this whatsoever
- name: skip on Tuesdays
when: ansible_date_time.weekday != "Tuesday"
but different ansible versions are pretty yolo about whether one needs to additionally wrap those fields in jinja2 mustaches
and another common bug is when the user tries to pass in a boolean via "-e" because those are coerced into string key-value pairs as in
$ ansible -e not_today=true -m debug -a var=not_today all
localhost | SUCCESS => {
"not_today": "true"
}
but if one uses the jinja/python compatible flavor, it does the thing
$ ansible -e not_today=True -m debug -a var=not_today all
localhost | SUCCESS => {
"not_today": true
}
It may be more work than you care for, since sprinkling rampant |bool likely doesn't actively hurt anything, but the |type_debug filter[1] can help if it's behaving mysteriously
That style is not restricted to Asian speakers. Reading (a translation of) Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" with its deep recursive layers of introducing a topic and then giving the backstory thereof - the firing squad from the first paragraph gets explained a hundred or so pages later - I immediately recognized my wife's normal pattern of discourse. I then congratulated her on having a Nobel prize winning speaking style :-)
I'm afraid I'm cheating -- I've never read the book but I am watching the Netflix series.
So I can't say if it's a faithful or reasonable adaptation of the book, but it is quite well done. I suspect that it's less deeply recursive than the book, but it captures a sense of magical realism for which I've heard the book praised. The camerawork is remarkable and the performances are excellent.
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