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NoToP

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The 1972 Knapp Commission into police corruption introduced some really great vocabulary to express "the rank and file are complicit".

"Meat eaters" and "grass eaters".

The meat eaters were the officers that actively pursued opportunities to be corrupt and spent a great deal of time on the job engaging in corrupt activities instead of police work. The grass eaters were essentially normal officers who would turn a blind eye or do things that had been normalized such as accepting or soliciting small bribes opportunistically.

In the words of the report, "the grass eaters are the heart of the problem".

Recently I've been reading the report of the Knapp Commission, which was a 1972 inquiry into police corruption in New York City. That sounds tangential at first but it really isn't, the findings of the commission are broadly applicable. One of the major points of it being that corrupt officers correctly judged they had very little to fear from prosecution. There's this great table on page 250 showing the complete lack of prosecutions in the years leading up to the commission, driving home the point.

The reasons for that utter lack of prosecution leading to massive corruption is a microcosm of the broader circumstance to which you've pointed out.

Having read the Knapp Commission report, I am no longer of the view I have anything original to say on this.

On account of the earth spinning, and all the globally universal constants that derive from this fact, from the magnetic field to the sun rising in the East, at the very least an orientation which puts a cardinal direction on top was inevitable.

So from what I gather, it wasn't outright rigged, it was just not well designed in terms of the ticket combinatorics and jackpot which made it exploitable to anyone with enough resources to buy up all the tickets, in combination with some fast and loose deals that enabled the logistics of buying every ticket but so far as is apparent no one was outright bribed or breaking a rule. They just weren't questioning things which weren't in their interest to question.

New Yorkers actually agreed with you quite vocally the last time someone tried to introduce a schematic map.

Hyperspace 1 year ago

The fact that copying doesn't copy seems dangerous. Like what if I wanted to copy for the purpose of modifying the file while retaining the original. A trivial example of this might be I have a meme template and I want to write text in it while still keeping a blank copy of the template.

There's a place for alias file pointers, but lying to the user and pretending like an alias is a copy is bound to lead to unintended and confusing results

Psst, the math joke here is that "the point at infinity" is literally the mathematicians version of folding in "this is an error case" with "valid coordinates". The "error case" in question being division by zero. Turns out there is good reason to do it, because it means the co-ordinate is always defined.