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A good start would be requiring police officers to carry individual liability insurance so that municipalities aren't paying for these lawsuits. If someone can't get insurance, they can no longer be a cop.

It's going to be cheaper for municipalites to have group insurance for this (or self-insure) than to have to pay the police enough that they can afford their own insurance.

The whole point of requiring individual insurance is precisely that insurance will be too expensive for people who are demonstrably high risk in that role, and less expensive for people who are low risk.

Some of the additional expense would be due to an individual risk profile, and some of the expense would be due to lack of bargaining power. The expense due to individual risk profile is a feature. The expense due to lack of bargaining power is not.

Police have unions.

Then the department can pay for each officer's insurance.

If it's uninsurable in the private market, that's a hint. Maybe they could pledge the pension fund.

Ultimately it's the civil authorities and upper brass that want these intrusions. The insurance issue is easily worked around by hiring green recruits at a very high "bonus" to be used as basically burner employees to burn through their insurance and do the illegal stuff under their identity.

It has to be a criminal thing because the top brass and civil servants need RICO like prosecution and tossed in jail along with the guy who gets the insurance ding.


It’s already a (very real) crime to do a Conspiracy to deprive someone of their civil rights, which is what you’re talking about. Occasionally someone gets sued under it, but it’s rare.

I don’t disagree, but can we really claim to have the rule of law if there is a class of people who can flagrantly violate criminal law and court orders and suffer zero criminal consequences?

Mayors, prosecutors, merchants, and local press get co-opted by police. This leads to systemic failures that, unfortunately, make dealing with this in criminal law less workable. Sometimes you gotta do what works.

Before that we need a vast overhaul of qualified immunity for state officials and expansion of Section 1983 to cover federal officials. It is incredibly difficult to sue state officials for violating your rights because of how qualified immunity works and Bivens is even weaker when it comes to suing federal officials.

I suspect you're getting downvoted because the phrasing of your question implies that you don't consider this type of surveillance to be a problem.

So we know the minotaur probably didn't speak English.

Many (most?) issues don't fit on a single dimension. Using your example, people hold positions that include "Absolutely!", "Yes, but also the rights of the mother.", "Yes, but I won't impose my beliefs on others.", "No, but I don't think people who feel otherwise should be forced to pay for abortions through taxes.", and many others.

In addition to the problem with biased questions you note, there are often built in assumptions that make yes or no responses impossible.


it's far worse than that, people don't even agree on the definition of words. In this example what a 'child' is.

Technically correct is the best kind of correct.


Power will always attract the corrupt and corruptible. The problem is the power. Reducing the size and scope of the federal government and devolving power to the states, communities, and individuals is the only way to minimize the negative effects of humans with too much authority.


Power is not the problem, because power exists regardless of who owns it.

We the people actually have a relatively high amount of power in our states and communities. We just don't use it. The real solution is to convince the masses to pay attention, which is harder today than it ever was.


This assumes that govt and individual families are the only players in the game. Now as in other historical periods large corporations hold arguably more power than either of those groups and reining in govt leaves little obstacle to them consolidating even more power and wielding it globally.


Reducing the size of the government just makes it where billionaires and corporations control everything instead, which we're already seeing now. You'd need a way to reign in their power/wealth as well.


+1... Reducing government is part of power reduction, not the sum total. To reduce the size of government you need to reduce the size of things it manages. So, for instance, anti-trust would need a huge buf in enforcement to eliminate concentrations of power in business. I'd think strongly progressive inheritance tax would cover the rest.


Abolishing private property is another way of defanging power


Has this been tried successfully anywhere? Seems like mostly a dead end as long as we have resource scarcity.


Let's start with your private property.


95% of the commenters on this post own no private property.


Is the knowledge of which finger to use protected as much as a passcode? Law enforcement might have the authority to physically hold the owner's finger to the device, but it seems that the owner has the right to refuse to disclose which finger is the right one. If law enforcement doesn't guess correctly in a few tries, the device could lock itself and require the passcode.

Another reason to use my dog's nose instead of a fingerprint.


I really wish Apple would offer a pin option on macos. For this reason, precisely. Either that, or an option to automatically disable touchid after a short amount of time (eg an hour or if my phone doesn't connect to the laptop)


You can setup a separated account with a long password on MacOS and remove your user account from accounts that can unlock FileVault. Then you can change your account to use a short password. You can also change various settings regarding how long Mac has to sleep before requiring to unlock FileVault.


I didn’t understand how a user that cannot unlock FileVault helps. Can you please elaborate on this setup? Thanks.


With that setup on boot or after a long sleep one first must log in into an account with longer password. Then one logs out of that and switches to the primary account with a short password.


As another alternative, rather than using Touch ID you can setup a Yubikey or similar hardware key for login to macOS. Then your login does indeed become a PIN with 3 tries before lockout. That plus a complex password is pretty convenient but not biometric. It's what I've done for a long time on my desktop devices.


I often see people use a "pin" on Windows and I never got it. What is the purpose of a pin makes it different from a password?


PIN numbers are easier to remember. Remember, 99% of the population does not care about defense against state actors, just stopping nosy co-workers or family members from looking at their stuff. The next group (which I would include myself in) is concerned about theft (both physical and remote), where someone can get "unlimited" access to your machine and may be able to defeat a short PIN but is unlikely to beat a strong password. If you are in the realm of defending against state actors, then that is something you have to take multiple steps to ensure, and a single slip-up will tank your operation (like with this lady).


Wait, wasn’t touch id phased out together with the intel touch bar macbooks? I’ve never used anything but a long password to unlock.


No, it's been part of the power button since then.


On my Macbook Pro, I usually need to use both touch and a password but that might be only when some hours have passed between log ins.


You can script a time out if desired.


uhm, are you saying its not possible to require an actual password to unlock osx?


My guess is they want to have a PIN as a short-term credential analogous to the Touch ID, that is, it only works for X hours per password auth before needing password auth again, and then you only get X tries on the PIN before it either locks the PIN out and you need the full password to reactivate it (or I guess it could wipe the laptop à la iPhone).


> uhm, are you saying its not possible to require an actual password to unlock osx?

uhm, are saying that i'm saying that? if so, please show me where i said that. thank you


no, thats why i was asking, as i was not fully sure what you meant


what im saying is that i dont want to type in a long ass password all the time

and biometrics have "legal problems" as stated above

a pin or allowing touchid to automatically be disabled after a period of time or computer movement ("please enter password to login") would be greatly appreciated

as it stands now, i have biometrics disabled.


seems reasonable


There's only ten possible guesses, and most people use their thumb and/or index finger, leaving four much likelier guesses.

Also, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that if law enforcement has a warrant to seize property from you, they're not obligated to do so immediately the instant they see you - they could have someone follow you and watch to see how you unlock your phone before seizing it.


0.1 in itself is a very good odd, and 0.1 * n tries is even more laughable. Also most people have two fingers touchID, which makes this number close to half in reality.


In the case of stealing tips, that's wage theft and the New York State Department of Labor has zero sense of humor about that. They will definitely investigate all claims on that topic. It might be too little and too late for the individual affected, but the business will pay.


> Takes like this seem to just have a completely different understanding of what "software development" even means than I do, and I'm not sure how to reconcile it.

You're absolutely right about coding being less than 20% of the overall effort. In my experience, 10% is closer to the median. This will get reconciled as companies apply LLMs and track the ROI. Over a single year the argument can be made that "We're still learning how to leverage it." Over multiple years the 100x increase in productivity claims will be busted.

We're still on the upslope of Gartner's hype cycle. I'm curious to see how rapidly we descend into the Trough of Disillusionment.


Tell him you need him at the code review to explain his coding decisions.


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