Luc

Publicly-funded media is great and all, but that’s because its bias is obvious and upfront, not because it is unbiased.

And here I again wonder where your from to have such a mindset

These people aren’t politicians…

a “centrist” bias where multiple extremes are presented as being equally valid.

You’ve not seen Dutch news. They don’t talk about hate speech as an equally valid option to our constitution the way that you’d expect with the current voting patterns and government composition if your statement were true. This uninformed opinion on what news can and must be, without having seen anything but english-cultural standards it sounds like, is what I mean…

I’d be curious what country/ies the downvoters are from. This is also how I see it but nobody online ever agrees. I suspect it’s a culture thing: most people online aren’t from the Netherlands and I can’t say if this type of news also exists abroad (Tagesschau seems okay but I haven’t looked at it in detail or talked with enough germans about it to say that with any confidence whatsoever, and I’ve got even less info on other countries)

In NL we of course also have some loonies who call the general news channels leftist propaganda, but overall I don’t have the impression that places like NOS spin things one way or another. It’s also government-funded which, going by the banners google now shows on publicly-funded youtube channels, probably means American readers of this message think I’m completely brainwashed by my government? Who knows, but then I’d be curious to hear what types of things they ever represented counterfactually

So if everyone would just do as the parent poster said, we’d not need to waste time reading the nonsense spins just to be prepared?

Somehow this doesn’t make me want to read spins but I applaud those who do with the goal of keeping everyone else sane

Consider whether your trusted sources would advertise it without getting paid to do so

Thanks, now I want to spend the afternoon playing Ragdollsoft games with Dimrain47 as soundtrack. (I have a Windows XP VM with Flash Player and offline SWF files)

Did you see a lot of hardware failures among USB sticks as an IT technician or what makes you have this professional opinion?

Presuming that OP doesn’t lose their backup drive constantly the way that I do USB sticks. I’d probably take better care if it actually mattered

What’d that be in Kelvin? Asking for a lord friend

25 AVERAGE?! So like 15 at night and 35 during the day is considered not “heat” where you’re from?!

Not fully, no. My understanding is that the available data of countries with and without general-citizen gun ownership, all else being equal, shows that normal issues (crime, personal conflicts, …) becomes gun-involved issues a lot more frequently so apparently it does help

Fwiw, there’s knives and there’s knives. What you describe is a category that’s afaik generally allowed. What’s not is the kind that extends with the push of a button (spring loaded, as I understand it; I’m not a weapons person). Opening it from the state you carry in need to be a two-handed process, presumably to make it less accessible to go for as well as giving the would-be victim a second to get the hell out of there or call for help or whatnot

Dutch police aren’t always I think (but often yes), and I seem to remember that Icelandic police almost never does. I don’t know for most countries but afaik it’s not as uncommon as that for them not to wear guns

Used to be 5km where I grew up in the Netherlands, nowadays living in Germany it’s 1km but uphill (don’t have those in NL!). In either case I don’t want to walk it and there’s not a chance I would if it’s 30 degrees out: that temperature means it’s probably in a month of the year where I burn within 10-20 minutes. I’d have to put on sunscreen for going to the store! They better have a sandy beach aisle

Unicode consortium stopped accepting new flags. Far, far from all current languages are in there. Don’t expect there to be an emoji for every language, and fewer and fewer as the current version ages and flags change

And that’s regardless of that flags are often a poor language selector (south african flag can mean a lot of things), but if you insist then SVGs of what regions you want to support might be a good replacement

Not sure if you’re aware that tac is not a typo but reverse cat, as in, it works like cat but prints the last line first. I use this semi-regularly

sl, now, that’s a typo. Nobody wants a free choo choo

I would expect that judges have a fine moral compass for which crimes are worse than others. Better if they don’t need to follow some administration’s counterscientific “tough on crime” whim

You make a compelling case for maximums though. I hadn’t thought of it as being a way to reduce torture or death penalty in the countries where that’s on the table in the first place

Then the prosecution brings case law where a person of color in a similar situation got a very different sentence, or someone without the rich parents etc.

I’m sure there’ll be biases but minimum sentences won’t undo those. I’d find minimum and maximum sentences very unfair for situations like described by the person you replied to. Case law and perhaps a blinding system (Justice is blindfolded after all) where at least one of the judges involved doesn’t get to learn things like “white guy with rich parents” might be a better solution if that’s the problem this is intended to solve

I’m not deep into this situation but my understanding is that no minimum sentence would have helped there. Nobody being above the law might have helped…

Why would a judge do that in the first place?

Or if they do, what prevents either side from going to the next court to get it overturned? And the next court after that

Idk if this is everywhere but the system I’m used to is this: the first two levels of court look at the case details in-depth, then there’s a third ‘last resort’ court for if you think there was a mistrial (this usually gets rejected), and they can send it back to the second court to re-do if something crazy happened that’s not in line with correct procedure as it sounds like it did in your example

If we don’t trust a whole series of judges to pass judgment fairly, then I’m not sure we should have judges. Personally I trust these more to apply laws and case law than if we’d put elected politicians on the seat of judge, as basically happens with them choosing the sentence parameters (and as you see more and more often in my country; older judges also speak of higher and higher sentences being expected, makes me wonder if we’ll go full-circle to medieval practices eventually)

Regarding the first paragraph, the way they measure this is observing the incidence in different circumstances. Similar country but higher punishment? See if fewer people do the crime. Oversimplified.

The research shows that the deterrence effect exists but, beyond a certain punishment level, it doesn’t do much anymore. What helps is primarily the odds of being caught at all (and then an appropriate punishment) and secondarily the time between violation and punishment (I didn’t realise this would matter for adults but apparently so)

Going to jail for two years, four years, or six years, either way you lose your social life, the roof over your head (once you get out), your job, everything. It’s a doubling or tripling of the sentence but is it really that different? If I’m okay incurring 2y prison sentence… I’m probably not the target audience for this but I imagine such a person would also risk 6y if they want someone gone that badly and the odds of being caught are low enough

Prevention is golden, as you say. But then rehabilitation is silver imo: if they lose everything, feel thrown out by society, what still drives them to do good afterwards? I’m sure many of them will simply want to better their lives but external motivation must also help

So I see it like the people who I saw saying upthread that rehabilitation should be the goal: if they’re a danger to society, idk, whatcha gonna do but control that? Need to lock them up or similar (ankle thingy, idk). But if there’s a good chance they’ll get back on their feet and become taxpayers instead of prisoners or crime group members, then that’s what we should asap strive for

Thanks! Good system that you can’t opt out imo, everyone needs to at least fund it even if (perhaps not good but idk) not everyone needs to also use it (thinking of rich people in power)