It would be perfectly logical for Nokia to have an alternative OS waiting in the wings, in case Windows stops being useful for them, or even as an incentive to discourage Microsoft from squeezing them too hard.
Of course, once upon a time, (Linux-based) Maemo/Meego was the OS waiting in the wings, which they were going to migrate to after Symbian stopped being useful to them, and look how well that worked out.
As I understand it, psychopathic traits are very good for getting what you want in the short term. If this author’s interview subjects had appreciated the long-term consequences of their antisocial behavior, they wouldn’t be behind bars.
Effective psychopaths never end up behind bars. They climb the corporate ladder. I've seen them in action and, as bad as they are for the companies they work in, you can't come away from seeing one in action without thinking, "Damn, he's good".
The violent ones are the lower class of psychopaths, and most prisoners aren't psychopaths. The smarter, high-class psychopaths are the corporate back-stabbers. They learn how to "manage up" because the ROI is so high.
"In a typical prison population, about 20 percent of the inmates satisfy the Hare definition of a psychopath, but they are responsible for over half of all violent crime."
Your claim is true but it is an oversimplification. There is at least a factor of ten over representation, since 1-2% of the total population are psychopaths.
Edit: Considering the large incarceration rates in the USA (more than 1% of the adult population), 10-20% of the total number of psychopaths should be in prison there... Oh my!
Edit 2: Consider 50% of all violent crime committed by 1-2% of the population... Everything else pales.
Your claim is true but it is an oversimplification. There is at least a factor of ten over representation, since 1-2% of the total population are psychopaths.
Many HN posters (including myself) have a genetic trait that makes them about 10 times as likely to commit a violent crime: the Y chromosome.
Or, as others here have suggested, simply give public defenders’ offices a budget comparable to the prosecutors’ offices.
If the interests of justice make it worth spending $100K of taxpayer money to prosecute someone charged with a relatively simple crime, then it’s also worth giving that person access to $100K worth of defense lawyering. If the government wants to spend $5M to prosecute an alleged mobster, that alleged mobster should have access to $5M worth of defense.
If the mobster has allegedly ill-gotten gains and the government wants to freeze them, then $5M of those gains would be placed in escrow; if the defendant is acquitted or later proves that the money was earned legitimately, then it would be deposited back into the public defenders’ fund.
>If the mobster has allegedly ill-gotten gains and the government wants to freeze them, then $5M of those gains would be placed in escrow; if the defendant is acquitted or later proves that the money was earned legitimately, then it would be deposited back into the public defenders’ fund.
I read this wrong the first time, but the thing I thought it said is an I idea I'm now very happy with: We should make all asset seizures from guilty defendants (which don't have identifiable victims) go to the public defenders' office.
That would in one fell swoop provide a significant amount of funding for the chronically underfunded public defenders' office, and deprive law enforcement of the perverse incentive to engage in de facto theft by asset seizure solely for the purposes of padding their own budgets (because at present that is often where it goes).
The perverse incentive wouldn't be to seize more assets -- it would be to generate more guilty convictions for defendants whose assets have been seized.
That's arguably a good point, but I think it's mitigated substantially by the fact that the overwhelming majority of those defended by the public defenders' office haven't had their assets seized (because they haven't got any), and any individual defendant with so many assets having been seized that it starts looking like a value proposition for the public defender to throw the case has probably got enough extra stashed somewhere, or enough friends, that they aren't being defended by the public defender anyway.
I'm not saying it would never happen, but it would certainly be a lot more rare than "hey look, this shady fellow has got a lot of money, let's prosecute him instead of criminals who are causing more damage to society because it's more profitable to the law enforcement agency who gets the money."
Edit: It would also be possible to just remove the moral hazard. In the rare case where the public defender is counsel for a defendant whose assets have been seized, then in that case if the defendant loses the assets don't go to the public defender, they go somewhere else. Like, say, lead abatement: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006368
Edit 2: Really, you're probably right. I think I'm just defending it because I had a thought late at night before thinking it through and immediately posted it, and now I feel like I should be defending my idea even if it isn't any good. Almost all of these "x found money is allocated to y thing" plans are the wrong way to go -- the amount of money something needs to operate is unrelated to the amount of ticket revenue or asset seizures or whatever.
But it shouldn't be allocated to law enforcement either, for the same reasons. That is what really needs to be changed.
Maybe it all should go to lead abatement -- putting it in the general fund just hands the perverse incentives to Congress. Allocating it strictly to lead abatement puts it in the hands of people with no obvious relation to asset seizures and so no obvious ability to unjustly increase the number of seizures or fraudulent guilty verdicts for pecuniary gain, and solves a serious problem that also happens to be an extremely cost-effective use of the money.
Why did you not realize that “this guy is worth it” until he already has one foot out the door?
If his only reason for being dissatisfied with his current job was the money, why didn’t he just go to his manager and say “hello, I was looking at salary surveys and other information about the job market, and reviewing all the ways that I have made money for you guys over the past year, and I think I deserve such-and-such more than I’m getting right now”? Why is he finding staying in the familiar environment of your company less attractive than job-hunting in his spare time, possibly even burning vacation time for interviews, and then going out to work with a bunch of strangers?
Not everyone knows their worth and some people avoid confrontation (you are confronting your boss in a way).
Some managers might overlook some people (not saying they are good/bad at managing if they do).
I had the experience of being underpaid (while I was still in school so it wasn't all about the money) but after I graduated I wanted to make at least close to what is going around here.
I had it pretty lucky that I could just waltz into the boss's office and say I need to make more.
It had been over a year and I had graduated in that time frame so I felt I had a bit of an argument and I am the guy who hates confrontation.
At that point it was pretty much only about the money as almost everything else I did like.
> Why did you not realize that “this guy is worth it” until he already has one foot out the door?
There are plenty of reasons this could happen. It's a mistake, and you should analyze the situation to see why it was made. But that doesn't imply you should let people walk out the door just because you made a mistake.
You assume that anyone who comes up with this thing implies a particular scenario, when it really doesn't. It could simply be that e.g. an employee got a cold call from some friends who recently got some funding and is toying with the idea of switching jobs, and the higher salary is the one thing that really makes him think of taking the offer.
Expedia is (allegedly) lying about one of their “partner” hotels in a way that drives customers away from the hotel. Isn’t this the kind of thing that a lawyer would call “tortious interference with business relationships”?
I once suggested to my wife that we use the RT bug-tracking system to keep track of household chores. And then, I said, we could create an RT account for each of the kids, and buy each of the kids an iPad Mini, with the Safari homepage set to the RT page, so that as soon as they opened their browsers, they could see what chores they had to do, and easily report on their progress!
I don't think something like that should be tied too much to the device itself; it should rather act like a hub than a device in that regard.
For instance, you could employ geofencing and remind them of daily chores they may have forgotten, when they leave the house. Of course, geofencing is pretty imprecise at the moment - at least on my iPhone 4.
Much the same way, you could ask them to fetch something from the grocery store, if they're nearby or already there. That way, it gets less annoying than a text message at work, instance.
Having to check a website or app for chores is something that itself feels like a chore. Automated reminders and such that ping the person are the way to go, I think. Or electronics built into daily appliances and such.
Something like this could be done with an app that I had helped to build called Reminders with Friends [http://www.slyceapps.com/reminders]. We allow you to create goefenced reminders and send them to other users.
You're not alone in wanting to leverage the power of an issue tracker for more mundane tasks (Eventum, in my case: https://launchpad.net/eventum). Efficient as they may be, even I was reluctant to allow family members to create tickets for me. But the main reason I haven't done it is that taking a break from work shouldn't mean spending more time at the computer. It would be handy for tracking major projects, though, especially since it helps to organize contact information in a meaningful context.
I use Astrid Tasks on my Android devices, and I've used it similarly. It lets you create task lists that can be shared among multiple users, so it's really handy to have some shared lists like "Home", "Shopping", etc. that sync across other people in the household. Plus it comes with a nice home screen widget, allows for recurring tasks, supports comments on tasks, and other helpful things.
I've been looking at chore monster and chore wars for much the same purpose. I've tried using dry issue tracking systems, and for as creative as these "gamified" options are, I still don't see them having enough hook to truly integrate into the family routine.
In the US, your employer can forbid you from revealing your pay to outsiders, but the National Labor Relations Act guarantees that employees have the right to discuss their pay with one another. (I believe this falls under the heading “you have the right to discuss with your co-workers whether or not your job sucks so much that you should try to organize a union.”)
Of course, once upon a time, (Linux-based) Maemo/Meego was the OS waiting in the wings, which they were going to migrate to after Symbian stopped being useful to them, and look how well that worked out.