The majority of people in prisons in the US are incarcerated for violent crime. 64% of violent criminals are rearrested compared to 40% of nonviolent criminals. It really looks like the US is being somewhat efficient here and just has a lot of crime.
In my hope that violent criminals serve longer sentences than nonviolent criminals, perhaps there is a correlation between time-served and recidivism..?
Living in a workingclass neighborhood, many of my most-favorite neighbors are felons of the nonviolent variety – nobody wants back in to their old prisonplanet – just keep looking forwards.
Yeah, the longer you're in, the less employable you are, and are more likely to reoffend. Our prison systems do fuckall for rehabilitation because in general, the public sentiment is "lock them up and throw away the key, I hope they get raped, prison isn't supposed to be fun". Our prison systems are basically set up amplify crime. It's good for the for profit owners, and conservatives eat up the dehumanization of it all.
Like I said in my other comment, some are more likely to reoffend because their prison time, but other were already more likely to reoffend, especially multiple felons who commit an extremely high percent of all crimes.
In California, this is absolutely not the case. Regulations are strict, chemical emissions are heavily restricted and proper disposal of chemicals via specialized companies at great expense. Chemical companies have no need of formulating new versions because everything causes cancer under prop 65. They absolutely have numerous permits for chemicals, your claim that they don't denies reality.
This case probably fell through the cracks, was grandfathered in due to military importance, or is a symptom of the utter lack of industrial knowhow plaguing modern US manufacturing because much US manufacturing is legacy work from decades ago with little ability to modernize, at a plant that likely existing long before the nearby housing.
The plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violations dating to 2020 (including instances of incomplete records and missing permits). To be clear my intent isn't to single them out. I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
> I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
It's par for the course of many US companies and likely others outside the US. I have been in a lot of manufacturing/industrial facilities and find a lot of machismo coupled with greedy asshole bosses/owners/managers. You wind up with corporate culture of "keep your head down, do as your told, don't question, and get paid."
It leads to a normalization of deviance where you end up with resentful workers who don't give a shit. Then when things go wrong, management can then easily blame them for their crappy work ethic and fire them. Then hire a new person to demoralize in exchange for money. It's a scam really.
The only way to curb that behavior is to hold people responsible but we seem to be incapable of doing that because the people who need to be held responsible have too much money and power.
The answer to grandfathering things in is not to give them an indefinite examption from the rules; instead, give them, say, a 10 year period of exemption, giving the owner enough time to fix the defect and to spread the expense of doing so over time. It's not perfect, but eventually everything ends up being fixed.
It depends a lot on context. That's certainly a reasonable approach in some situations. However in this instance it's not clear to me that there's any possible way to comply with modern regulations. My impression is that in general it isn't permitted to keep massive tanks of hazardous industrial chemicals 500 feet from residential housing units in the middle of the city.
I think this is an example where it might have been reasonable for the taxpayers to foot a bill to facilitate their relocation 20 or 30 years ago.
Take this into context with the outsourcing of all such work to China though. Environmental regulations are assessed to be one of the largest impacts US GDP. We take that hit to protect human life, and then by all the stuff from China that they make without those regulations. We minimize any risk of harm to our citizens at the cost of their jobs, while putting the citizens of China at risk instead. My only point is that there is no right answer. It is a judgement call about how much risk we think is acceptable in trade for what modern conveniences. If paying to move the plant would cost more than what it produces provides us, we should decide whether we do without, or just accept that sometimes industrial accidents kill a few hundred people.
That's the deep dive that I want to see. A breakdown of the policy failures that lead to this situation.
Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas?
Why is this chemical allowed in an area that is considered light manufacturing?
> Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas?
Because the tank was there first and morons came later on and said they wanted to build housing, the land was cheap and no zoning was in place to prevent someone from building housing there.
Or in the past code just sat unpatched via obscurity because fewer people were looking. After all there are plenty of exploits from injection to CSS that we have fixed or migrated away from for code from the far past
The idea that everything is so broken that it needs to be patched is just wrong.
A C program which just manipulates strings and other data structures can have a remote code execution vulnerability because C is a shitty language with no memory safety, data and control flow can be mixed, etc.
But that's just not true for high level code, say, in Python. If you don't use some low-level hacks, Python code just cannot corrupt memory, by construction, and it cannot cause RCE. You can execute attacker's code only if you use a language function which might execute code, say, eval or unpickle. But there's only a handful of such constructions and Python developers could easily implement hardening which would forbid any such calls, guaranteeing that only code which was written by developer gets executed.
Yes, occasionally there might be a logic flaw in code which needs to fixed, but it's not same as weekly updates - framework version 1.2.3 uses package 4.5.6 which has a vuln. That's only recent lunacy.
I'm not saying that e.g. everything written in Python in safe - but that old platforms were almost ready for "works forever" software, and we don't have that anymore,.
It is not. Horses are chattel, bred by humans for the purposes of serving them. Humans, even the poorest humans, are free creatures and not analogous to horses.
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