General CE Chat

Javi said:
I'm not up to speed with U.S. criminal law but it seems to me that a person committing murder doesn't necessarily has to 'use his own hands' so to speak.

If we consider this simplified scenario: Obama gives orders to random military person in the desert to kill a civilian (and other people supposedly, 'targets') in the Middle East. Obama didn't actually 'pull the trigger', but used the military person as a simple tool it could be him that is the principal.

I'm now quoting a random book google books showed me (and I know it's English Law but I assume them to be similar, happy to stand corrected though) page 184 first sentence: "An exception to the aforementioned rule that the pricnipal must directly bring about the actus reus can be seen in the doctrine of innocent agency. This notion can best be compared to the doctrine of perpetration by means. If the person who actually committed the actus reus cannot be regarded as a participant (edit: in this case the military person) in the offence, because he acted without the necessary means rea; the master behind the scene who pulls the strings is regarded as the perpetrator. [...]"

So it seems that he actually can commit murder by ordering drone strikes, if we allege he was involved in one actual case not a general order like "using drone is legit".

What you could bring on your side is that it still needn't be murder if the casualty of a civilian is justified by some greater good aspect like it also killed Osama B who was about to blow up a market. That's very well plausible but it's a pretty big stretch still for criminal law because the actual danger coming from that person would have to be imminent and I'm not too convinced 'imminent' in the legal sense can be fulfilled from an intelligence point of view.
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Murder has to be unlawful. If the law allows him to do it, then it isn't murder. Murder does not mean 'to kill another person or be responsible for a persons death'. It's a specific word invented to fit a specific circumstance.
 
Zarlak said:
Murder has to be unlawful. If the law allows him to do it, then it isn't murder. Murder does not mean 'to kill another person or be responsible for a persons death'. It's a specific word invented to fit a specific circumstance.
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I was replying directly to your statement that he didn't commit the act himself as being the reason why it couldn't possibly be murder.

Still, why should it be lawful? The U.S. has no jurisdiction in the Middle East, it's not defending itself (at least not the way international law has it defined IIRC) and I'm sure there are cases where no U.N. security council resolution was in place.
 
Zarlak said:
Murder has to be unlawful. If the law allows him to do it, then it isn't murder. Murder does not mean 'to kill another person or be responsible for a persons death'. It's a specific word invented to fit a specific circumstance.
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Again, was Stalin a mass-murderer?
 
Another Moreno Valley employee, who has been a picker at Amazon for two-and-a-half years, says the company constantly sends messages to workers’ scanners telling them to work faster. They’ll run competitions such as a “Power Hour” in which workers are encouraged to work as hard as they can for a prize. One recent prize was a cookie. Another time, the winner of Power Hour would be entered into a raffle to win a gift card. “I don’t want a cookie or a gift card. I’ll take it, but I’d rather a living wage. Or not being timed when you’re sitting on the toilet,” said the man, who lives with his father because he and his girlfriend can’t afford their own place, and didn’t want his name used because he hopes to get promoted at Amazon.
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Wednesday at Stoke said:
This was a depressing read: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/amazon-warehouses-poor-cities/552020/

Amazon is a leach.
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I read this earlier. Extremely depressing read. Race to the bottom economy isn't sustainable for people's wellbeing. I blame the governments, local and central for encouraging this by giving Amazon tax rebates, cuts and whatnot when they are a company worth more than half a trillion dollars. The cuts they are giving are pocket change to these companies but would go a long way if spent in their communities. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if corruption wasn't rife in these kind of deals.
 
Ultimate Grib said:
I read this earlier. Extremely depressing read. Race to the bottom economy isn't sustainable for people's wellbeing. I blame the governments, local and central for encouraging this by giving Amazon tax rebates, cuts and whatnot when they are a company worth more than half a trillion dollars. The cuts they are giving are pocket change to these companies but would go a long way if spent in their communities. I wouldn't be one bit surprised if corruption wasn't rife in these kind of deals.
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The underreported part of that article is that if the Amazon grocery store idea takes off, they'd run the other unionised family owned stores like the Stater brothers mentioned in the article out of business.
 
Wednesday at Stoke said:
The underreported part of that article is that if the Amazon grocery store idea takes off, they'd run the other unionised family owned stores like the Stater brothers mentioned in the article out of business.
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I personally am all for supporting local business. feck faceless corporations with oligarchs like Bezos. He can use his wealth to improve his workers conditions before he moves on to vanity projects like fecking spaceships etc.
 
https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/cutting-cane-for-2000-hours
Cutting cane for 2,000 hours
With falling farm returns, many of Marathwada’s farmers are now working as labourers in sugarcane fields – for long hours over five months, despite health risks, low wages, and the loss of their children's education
“We started at 5:30 a.m., and this will not end before 7 p.m.,” he says, without taking his eyes off the target. “This has been my day for the past two and a half months [starting in November]. And this will be my day for the next two and a half months.”

His wife Mukta takes the stalks Umesh has chopped, places them over each other on the ground, makes a set of around 10, and ties them together with the wispy lace-like portions of the stalk. Then picks up the bunch, balances it on her head, and walks towards a truck parked in a field turned slippery with the cut cane. “After a while, we switch roles,” she says. “Our shoulders and forearms ache throughout this period. We sometimes take painkillers to keep going.”
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The women start working even before coming to the fields, and continue well after the farm labour for the day ends. “I wake up at 4 in the morning to make lunch for the two of us and our kids [aged 6, 8 and 13],” says Mukta. “When we get back after toiling in the fields, I have to make dinner. I hardly get 3-4 hours of sleep during this [cane-cutting] period.”

Mukta and Umesh have a debt of Rs. 60,000 from a bank, and Rs. 40, 000 from a private moneylender, taken during the four-year drought period in Marathwada from 2012-15. This ensures they are caught in a cycle of repaying and borrowing. Still, the two are somewhat better off than others. They belong to the same village where they have been assigned work by the contractor who provides labour to sugarcane factories, allowing their children to continue school.
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For Vishnu, life in the cane fields is merciless. “At times, we get injured while chopping sugarcane, but we cannot take a break,” he says. “We have to incur even medical expenses. We are paid a lump sum in advance and it is calculated against the sugarcane we cut. If we rest due to injury, we lose work – and money.”

Vishnu and Lata’s eight-year-old daughter Sukanya has come with them to look after her three-month-old brother Ajay while their parents work in the field. During these cane cutting months, she will not attend school. “We had to bring her along,” says Lata, sitting outside their small makeshift shed. “It was not possible to leave my newborn son behind. We know it will affect her studies [she is in the third standard], but there was no option.”
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Interview here: (turn on the subtitles)



 
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Funny how these powerful people don't care for power when it's turned against them.
 
berbatrick said:
The 1st James Bond plot to come true IRL

Coca-Cola And Nestlé To Privatize The Largest Reserve Of Water In South America
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I'd take it with a grain of salt, because the original source is just a 1-man operation in Brazil that I'd never heard of before (Correio do Brasil).

Also, in general, as much as left-leaning parties in latin america claim that the right-leaning parties want to sell everything there is to foreigners, in practice the right-leaning parties have their fair share of nationalists. So basically, what everyone agrees on in Brazil is that the gringos are evil.
 
Social transitions are increasingly common for transgender children. A social transition involves a child presenting to other people as a member of the “opposite” gender in all contexts (e.g., wearing clothes and using pronouns of that gender). Little is known about the well-being of socially transitioned transgender children. This study examined self-reported depression, anxiety, and self-worth in socially transitioned transgender children compared with 2 control groups: age- and gender-matched controls and siblings of transgender children.

Transgender children reported depression and self-worth that did not differ from their matched-control or sibling peers (p = .311), and they reported marginally higher anxiety (p = .076). Compared with national averages, transgender children showed typical rates of depression (p = .290) and marginally higher rates of anxiety (p = .096). Parents similarly reported that their transgender children experienced more anxiety than children in the control groups (p = .002) and rated their transgender children as having equivalent levels of depression (p = .728).


These findings are in striking contrast to previous work with gender-nonconforming children who had not socially transitioned, which found very high rates of depression and anxiety. These findings lessen concerns from previous work that parents of socially transitioned children could be systematically underreporting mental health problems.
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http://www.jaacap.com/article/S0890-8567(16)31941-4/fulltext
 
:eek:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018...progress-maybe-they-just-dont-want-to-be-poor


As ride-sharing apps have decimated the taxi industry over the last few years, Uber has consistently presented itself as being good for drivers. It has released absurdly overinflated estimates of average driver compensation. In 2013, the Wall Street Journal reported that “a typical Uber driver takes in more than $100,000 a year in gross sales” based on figures from the company. The company had to pay a large settlement after it recruited drivers using compensation figures that were flat-out false. In 2015 Princeton economist Alan Kreuger, the former head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, partnered with Uber’s head of research to produce an “analysis of Uber’s driver-partners” with impressive earnings statistics, showing that average drivers earned well above minimum wage, with their compensation significantly exceeding that of taxi drivers. Here’s a chart from the paper:

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These statistics were cited as proof Uber improves drivers’ lives. The Economist (who else?) ran the headline “Princeton economist explains why we should all stop worrying and learn to love Uber,” saying that the “ambitious study” had shown that fears of Uber driving down wages were overblown. (The press has credulously parroted Uber’s fabricated statistics since the beginning, with headlines like “Could Uber’s 90k salary disrupt the taxi business?“) The Kreuger and Hall paper’s findings, with a highly accredited economist’s name attached, were a formidable public relations tool for Uber, which has long be en fighting allegations that it underpays and exploits its drivers. The numbers proved, though, that if you’re mad at Uber, you should be even madder at the taxi industry, and that Uber is actually improving driver compensation. They also bolstered the pro-“disruption” argument that the taxi industry was little more than a cartel trying to protect the corrupt oligopoly that it had established over time. If Uber drivers earn more than taxi drivers, the arguments against Uber’s erosion of the taxi industry could not possibly be based on legitimate concerns for the financial well-being of those who drive for a living. The more Uber grew, the better it would be for drivers.

But the above chart is almost entirely meaningless. That’s because, as it notes in a small footnote, it doesn’t factor Uber drivers’ expenses (gas, taxes, insurance, repairs, depreciation, or possibly even renting the car itself) into its “earnings” calculations. If one column is “pre-expenses” and the other is “post-expenses,” then what conclusions can anyone possibly draw from this chart? Unless we know what drivers actually ended up with, we don’t know anything of value. I actually think it’s deeply intellectually dishonest for a reputable economist to produce a chart like this. Krueger said he didn’t include expenses in the chart because he didn’t have the data with which to calculate them. But if you don’t have the data, then you can’t make a comparison between Uber compensation and taxi compensation. Instead of declining to answer a question that he didn’t have the answer to, Krueger made a chart that showed an unsupportable claim.

(This is one reason why serious economists shouldn’t accept money from corporations to produce research about those corporations. The Uber-funded Krueger and Hall study was almost ludicrously propagandistic, from its use of “driver-partners” to its constant touting of “flexibility.” Look at this quote: “When asked directly in [Question 38], ‘If both were available to you, at this point in your life, would you rather have a steady 9-to-5 job with some benefits and a set salary or a job where you choose your own schedule and be your own boss?’ 73 percent chose the latter.” Talk about a biased question: do you want to be your own boss or do you want to have things “set” for you with “some” benefits? Shockingly, 73 percent of people would rather not have bosses!)
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This chart should have been junked in the 1st hour during peer review

And...
A new study out of MIT actually suggests that things may be much worse for Uber drivers than previously thought. From a survey of more than 1,100 drivers, the study’s authors concluded that the median pre-tax profit earned from driving is actually a miserable $3.37 an hour, and that 30 percent of drivers “are actually losing money once vehicle expenses are included.”
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