faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
8d ago
Pro-lifers absolutely should be allowed to talk in general terms about how they think murderers should be punched, and also allowed to say that they think abortion is murder, and also allowed to say "you had an abortion so in my book you're a murderer". The current standard for where speech stops being lawful is when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action. I think that's a good standard.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
8d ago
There are also lots of people on the left (e.g. Kelsey Piper) who posted condemning the Kirk murder without reservations. Those posts didn't get much engagement, and so didn't get amplified very much, so you likely didn't see them unless you were actively following these people. But they were posted.
And if you ask the HSE people responsible for those jobs what this risk of injury should be, they will say "zero"
And they will be wrong about that, because we live in a world where tradeoffs exist. I think this "if you knew a risk was nonzero but didn't eliminate the risk, you are culpable for anything that goes wrong" mentality drives a lot of the sickness of our civilization.
and do absolutely everything in their power to reduce it to that level in terms of procedures that they can identify/control
or at least enough to cover their asses, yes.
much higher than that of them dying of COVID
ICE agents are mostly young and in shape. Their risk of dying of COVID is pretty much zero. If we're spending any significant energy on trying to make sure ICE agents don't die of COVID (beyond "here's a vaccine, it's free under your benefits plan if you want it") we're being stupid and should stop. I expect vehicle collisions are at least 100x more dangerous to ICE agents than COVID, probably a lot more than that.
Considering that there are literally targeted hit attempts happening on ICE agents right now
To be clear, I do support coming down as hard as possible on anyone who tries to kill a law enforcement agent (including ICE) and any of their actual accomplices. But murder-suicides are just really hard to deal with and I don't think trying to come up with ways to disincentivize them is likely to be fruitful.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
8d ago
"How much risk is reasonable" is a good question. I think a reasonable baseline to look at is private sector occupations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the number of violent deaths broken down by industry (NAICS code, specifically), and the Census Bureau gives total numbers of employees by industry. Dividing the one by the other we find that the most dangerous "normal" occupation is NAICS 485 "transit and ground passenger transportation", with 392975 employees and 25 violent deaths (out of 72 total deaths on the job). I think if working on immigration enforcement at ICE is around the danger level of driving for Uber but your agents fear for their lives anyway, the problem is with the perception of danger rather than with the danger per se.
when does the risk get bad enough that cops or ICE or political figures are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk
This is the wrong question to ask. Consider the following questions:
- When does the risk of terrorism get bad enough that airplane passengers are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?
- When does the risk of school shootings get bad enough that teachers are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?
- When does the risk of police brutality get bad enough that black people are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?
How I hope you answered all of these questions was "optimizing policy to address perceptions of danger is a fool's errand". This is particularly true in cases where triggering a destructive reaction is the point of the violence but even in cases where it's not, setting policy based of feelings of danger is still not productive.
That said, the US government should come down as hard as possible on people who attack law enforcement agents who are doing their job. The US government generally does a pretty good job of this already, I am not particularly worried there, but it's worth emphasizing that it is good and important.
That said, if someone is willing to take their own life to cause harm, we should go after those accomplices that actually exist and actually materially helped. Witch hunts for someone who is still alive who can be blamed, though, will not reduce the chances of further people looking to suicide-by-terrorism (and will likely hurt to the extent that the witch hunt increases the perceived glory of the person who wanted to be a martyr).
Side note, not important
there are no databases or tracking apps telling people where law enforcement is at every moment.
Funny you should say that because just yesterday the top story on HN was find SF parking cops, which took advantage of the fact that all parking tickets in San Francisco were published online in real time to make a map of where parking tickets were being issued across the city, and who was issuing them, in real time. The site has been taken down but the city is still publishing that data.
Not really an important consideration, the set of people who want to suicide by cop and the set of people who are willing and able to go through the inconvenience of taking slightly complicated actions like "look at where parking tickets are being issued to find out where the officers writing the tickets are" (or the corresponding action for other agencies, which I will not elaborate on) is basically an empty set. I just thought it was funny timing.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
That's not a policy goal I have so I haven't thought deeply about this, but probably something like "require employers to actually use the e-verify system we built 30 years ago to solve this problem, then do some high profile prosecutions of employers who failed to do so". Economic migrants are generally here for economic reasons. If the jobs go away the people who came here because there was work will leave.
I don't expect that'd fix any of the problems that the red tribe currently blames on immigrants but I bet it would lead to a bunch of undocumented workers leaving the US.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
Apparently there are only 6500 ICE agents in the entire country. Even paying them $200k / year would be $1.3B / year. That's $4 / year / US citizen. I would happily pay 10x, maybe even 50x that amount to live in an alternate reality where everything is the same except ICE does their job in a boring, effective, and professional manner.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
I vaguely expect that a central example of "assault" would have a >0.1% lethality rate, I could be wrong about that though. Humans are pretty resilient.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
FBI claims 79091 assaults on police officers and 60 officers killed in 2023. I expect most of those "assaults" are highly noncentral examples of "assault" but I'd expect the median ICE agent is at less personal risk than the median police officer in Baltimore (but probably much more risk than the median police officer in Boise).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
It shouldn't be 'law enforcement personnel must accept the exposure of themselves and their families to physical harm while they're alone and exposed at their homes because they decided to work for ICE'.
I think this is a case of "if your risk tolerance is literally zero you can't do anything".
We should take reasonable efforts to ensure the security of federal employees like those at ICE. Such as prosecuting people who actually break existing laws of the land in ways that endanger those employees.
There are limits, though. If the risks are higher than people are willing to deal with for the $50k / year we pay ICE agents, we should first try paying more. There are quite a few jobs that expose you to more risk than ICE agents face, and we are able to find people for those jobs. We're a rich country, we can afford to pay people. For a baseline, cops in San Francisco make $115 - $165k / year in base salary, often much more with overtime. If we're not paying at least that much for the apparently 4 digit number of people securing our borders, we shouldn't complain that we can't find people who will tolerate the risk.
What we should not do, before we have seriously attempted "prosecute people who break the law" and "pay people what they're worth", is shred the constitution. And "pass federal laws against stochastic support of crime", if I'm understanding your proposal correctly, amounts to shredding the constitution.
Sure. I support efforts to prosecute people who are actively trying to incite violence against ICE agents who plausibly could succeed at inciting said violence. I don't think I'm unusual in that opinion, even for people on the left.
I don't see much evidence that anyone is even attempting to prosecute the people breaking those laws, though. It feels like one of those "we've tried nothing and now we're all out of ideas" situations.
I don't support ICE intentionally saying "well, normal legal channels didn't work so we have to go full stormtrooper" when they haven't even tried normal legal channels. Having masked people in unmarked vehicles who refuse to identify themselves snatching people off the street should not be the first resort.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
Wait I thought the bullet had an anti-ICE message on it. The message was literally "anti-ICE"? I think I might be a conspiracy theorist too now.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
Your terms are acceptable. Doxing which is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action is already unlawful. We do not need new laws here, we need to enforce the ones we already have.
Effectively doing their jobs however includes an appropriate use of force against those they are arresting and also those attempting to disrupt law enforcement activities.
Yes. Emphasis on "appropriate" of course.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
perhaps by offering some concessions?
Do not negotiate with terrorists. If someone threatens you, and you visibly give in to their threat, you are incentivizing that behavior in the future.
Unfortunately, we really don't have a good way to deal with people who want to cause a lot of damage, are willing to give their own lives to do it, and don't have any prior history of violence. I don't think we can have a way of dealing with that while maintaining a free society.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
bullets with the phrase "ANTI ICE" written on them
God dammit "bullets with political slogans written on them" are going to be the new thing for attention-seeking crazies, aren't they.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9d ago
Unrelated note - it might be fun at some point for us to do an adversarial collaboration on covid vaccines, because I hold the position that the mRNA vaccines (the speed of development and production scaling) were actually a bright spot in the covid pandemic and gave us some tools which we should be investing a bunch more into. Pretty much everything the public health policy makers did during covid in the US was stupid but the vaccines themselves are a medical miracle.
The joke was "covid vaccination status fades into noise by the annual renewable term life insurance premium metric". It's similar in spirit to proposing that we keep plastic straws, but charge consumers a carbon tax for the carbon that goes into its production (i.e. proposing to keep plastic straws but tax them at $0.0002 each), except my proposal is also "let's spend lots of time getting price quotes on term life insurance for people in medical triage, trying to address equity concerns in a triage situation is definitely a good use of resources so we should make sure to do it right".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10d ago
To clarify, I think Trump does not have enough trusted people to delegate to that he could be as absent as Biden was, towards the end of his term. Trump is many things in this administration, but "inactive" is not one of them.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10d ago
Proposal: triage based on available annual renewable term life insurance premium for each patient conditional only on those attributes predictably downstream of a patient's choices. This plan would ensure that foregoing the covid vaccine resulted in a difference in triage ordering that was correct. This plan has no downsides. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10d ago
Biden wasn't yet that far gone in the first year of his term either. Trump still has 3 more years left in his term.
Trump also seems like he wouldn't make a very good absentee president.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10d ago
As a midwit funko pop collector who usually wants his hand held when reading for pleasure and particularly enjoys reading Sanderson when his brain is fried, I agree with this take.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
10d ago
I agree. That means that strength is not the main bottleneck to murder though.
I guess unless we define strength using the edgelord xianxia "absence of scruples and willingness to do anything to anyone to advance your own interests" definiton.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11d ago
A slow news week feels nice after the last while. I for one am happy that this is the controversy of the week.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
12d ago
Your most downvoted comment ever was this one, which as far as I can tell is trying to say that intelligence is a bad trait because being intelligent increases your ability to do things and some of those things are bad? Not really sure, some of the context is deleted comments.
Your second most downvoted comment ever is the comment I'm replying to right now, complaining that people downvote you for bad reasons.
It does seem like your takes on Ukraine in particular don't land with this audience. Aside from that it seems like you mostly get downvoted when you make low-effort dunks. And you just genuinely don't have that many downvoted comments.
All that said it seems like you genuinely do have different perspectives. I don't know that we have very many people who are fully immersed in Russian culture on here. I bet a lot of your stuff would land better if you expanded a bit on the things that seem obvious to you but which the rest of the people here seem not to be taking into account, particularly the things where mottizens are pushing for policies where there's common-knowledge russian history of how that went horribly wrong.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
12d ago
Ultimately the left is killing their enemies and celebrating it, that seems like strength to me.
To a first approximation, anyone can kill anyone. Doing so doesn't meaningfully require strength. Doing so without repercussions, sure, but that's not what happened here.
I propose taking "bioleninist" out of the one side (who even uses that term?) and adding "fascist" to the other.
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