[HN Gopher] Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him ...
___________________________________________________________________
Out of prison after 30 years and people telling him to find forms
on the web
Author : DyslexicAtheist
Score : 355 points
Date : 2021-03-19 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| neartheplain wrote:
| My first thought is how the prison system failed him. Computer
| literacy is a fundamental job skill in the 21st century, one
| that's relatively easily and inexpensively taught. I'd expect
| computer literacy programs in any prison system built around
| rehabilitation.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| While I was in federal prison (one year, just released months
| ago) I actually tried to setup a crash course that prepared
| inmates for the "real world" and teach basic skills. This is
| through a program in the federal prison system (BOP) called ACE
| - Adult Continuing Education.
|
| I sat down and spoke with the manager of the program at the
| prison. She barely removed her eyes from her computer screen
| and when I was done proposing my idea she just shrugged and
| said "that's not something we want to invest time into." I then
| asked her if she thought these skills were more necessary today
| than yesterday and compared to 5 years ago - basically
| establishing that this is only going to get worse not better.
| She just repeated that "this isn't what the BOP wants to do."
|
| It's worth mentioning what those ACE classes currently consist
| of. The ones I saw while I was in prison ranged from basic
| math/arithmetic (addition, multiplication, very basic algebra)
| to poetry and origami. Which is interesting because it would
| paint the picture that people in prison are dumb or not
| learning anything, whereas they actually are learning quite a
| lot since they have little else to occupy themselves with
| besides books - especially during COVID times (since we were
| essentially locked down the entire time during the pandemic
| while I was incarcerated)
|
| I met many inmates that were learning complex math and physics,
| computer programming and I met some that had never seen the
| "real world" in any capacity with Bitcoin or other emerging
| technologies that had a decent grasp of how they operated from
| the various books they had read.
| whymauri wrote:
| The US prison system did exactly what the US prison system is
| designed to do. It's never been a rehabilatory system and we
| will have to fight to improve it.
| jmkni wrote:
| The author of the Tweet is from South Africa
| ddtaylor wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that this doesn't mean it's currently
| designed to be punitive. It's really just evolved into a
| system that extracts a very large amount of money via taxes
| and uses that money to pay various correctional staff and
| industries to deliver absurdly poor quality services and
| products. For them, it's a really sweet gig and they're
| pretty happy that the overall public is apathetic to the
| situation.
| psychlops wrote:
| I disagree. In the US, the public also is pretty happy to
| lock people away for extended periods of time.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| For the most part that's a product of lobbying to
| increase minimum sentences and overall increase the
| prison population, since that increases the number of
| correctional jobs and the sales of the various contracted
| companies that provide their products.
|
| I was in federal prison until just 3 months ago I can
| safely say this is exactly what I saw while there.
| psychlops wrote:
| While I don't disagree (i was joking in my first comment
| :), I think that's a one dimensional point of view. The
| majority of people do not interact with the prison system
| at all and assume that everything is done correctly (if
| they consider it at all).
|
| I don't think there is a concerted conscious profiteering
| effort and it's just "Tuesday" business for
| municipalities and contracted corps. I'd contend more
| that the emotional appeals for tough on crime laws and
| media crime porn drive the mentality of imprisonment in
| the US.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I'd contend more that the emotional appeals for tough
| on crime laws and media crime porn drive the mentality of
| imprisonment in the US.
|
| But those are produced by people who profit from the
| system as it is. People didn't just arrive at the cruelty
| level they are at, they were whipped to it, and
| countervailing opinions are shut out of "serious"
| discourse.
|
| Note that I'm not talking about private prisons here, I'm
| talking about vendors, contractors, and the funders of
| politicians that need to preserve local human warehousing
| jobs.
| psychlops wrote:
| Indeed, and thank you for not wailing against private
| prisons only. Dealing with the system in any capacity one
| realizes that it is closed, deaf and completely lacking
| in accountability.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| If the goal for the prison system is to rehabilitate the
| inmates, then indeed it failed him. But if the goal of the
| prison system is to punish the inmates, then it has achieved
| its goal and even continue to punish him long after he served
| his time.
| [deleted]
| koonsolo wrote:
| The problem is of course that you want both. First you want
| to punish them so they, and others, are not motivated to do
| such a crime again.
|
| But at the same time, you want them to go out as a better
| person than they went in (else there is no point in releasing
| them).
|
| Punishing people after their release is not benefitting
| anyone.
| cestith wrote:
| Ideally you want to lower recidivism. Giving people who
| were stealing or dealing drugs a reasonable chance of
| making a good living in a legal way reduces recidivism.
| Getting people with unstable homes and unstable lives
| counseling and training reduces recidivism. Helping them
| get jobs reduces recidivism. The state really has little to
| gain from punishment. There's keeping people who are a risk
| off the streets on one hand. There's rehabilitation and
| changing the circumstances of the offenders.
|
| The interest in punishment is from politicians who want to
| appear "tough on crime" to their electorate. Those policies
| aren't tough on crime, though. They're tough on criminals
| in all the ways that lead to more crime in the end.
| holoduke wrote:
| Dozens of studies show that punishment is barely a
| motivation. The only way of making a society more secure is
| to prevent people stepping into the criminal world in the
| first place. Education, integration etc. And if they still
| do, as much effort must be taken to let them integrate back
| into society as soon and smooth as possible.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| yep, 30 years is enough time to pursue several degrees, let
| alone basic skills. What facilities do US prisons provide!?
| hans1729 wrote:
| The US prison system isn't designed around rehabilitation,
| but around profit. Just like the US justice system isn't
| designed around justice, but around righteousness. The fact
| that us-amerian judges fund their own election campaigns
| underlines the absurdity, and yet it's just one facette in a
| reality that's going well beyond the satirical ideas spun
| towards the end of the last century. Sorry if I'm rambling a
| bit, I don't want to waste anyones time. It's just hard to
| swallow the delta between ought and is.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >The fact that us-amerian judges fund their own election
| campaigns
|
| Whether judges are elected or appointed varies by state and
| the states with appointed judges do better at some things
| but not others.
| neartheplain wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but my impression is that most US prisons
| provide little in the way of true rehabilitation.
|
| Ironically, while computer skills courses may be unavailable,
| mobile devices (with Internet service!) are increasingly-
| common contraband items in US prisons:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterpavlo/2020/04/19/will-
| cel...
| pradn wrote:
| I remember my grandfather asking me why the newspaper website
| went down when he pressed the up button and up when he pressed
| the down button. I had no answer. And it was the only thing
| keeping him not bored as he spent a year in American suburbs,
| away from the warmth of whole community he's lived with all his
| life. It's hard for us realize all the random things we've
| learned over the years to live in the digital era.
| cestith wrote:
| I'm guessing this was on a Mac. Apple calls it "Natural scroll
| direction". If so, go to the Apple menu -> System Preferences
| -> Mouse and uncheck the box labeled "scroll direction:
| Natural".
| Balgair wrote:
| Aside: While we're on the subject of incarcerated education,
| please consider donating time or resources to your local
| incarcerated people.
|
| The American Library Association has a good list of book donation
| programs here: https://libguides.ala.org/book-
| donations/bookstoprisons
|
| After the pandemic subsides (whenever that may be), the Bureau of
| Prisons has a guide on how to help out the recently/incarcerated
| here: https://www.bop.gov/jobs/volunteer.jsp
|
| Here's a good piece on how a volunteer can help save lives (maybe
| this can be you!): https://prisonwriters.com/prison-volunteers/
| ericcholis wrote:
| This seems like an area that the USDS might be able to contribute
| to.
| zie1ony wrote:
| "he officially Zoomed as a free person"... not! Zoom is not e2e
| encrypted.
| igarcia wrote:
| Zoom is proprietary software, so it's another kind of prison.
| It would be good to try and free him from this soon and use
| Libre Software. :)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| all this rambling about bank systems and ATMs and stuff aside,
| this is a sad story about a guy locked up that did his time and
| never got any computer skills all these years and it's sad.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| This can also be a problem for homeless people. If you are
| homeless and digitally savvy, the internet and a tablet or
| smartphone or laptop or even library card can be huge, huge
| assets that make homelessness vastly less burdensome.
|
| But for some homeless people, job hunting is a nightmare because
| they don't have the internet savvy and, on top of that, they
| don't own a laptop and they may not know they can get access to a
| computer at the library (at least when there isn't a pandemic
| on).
|
| Kudos to her for taking the time to do this. I don't know how to
| solve this, though I run some websites and what not aimed at
| trying to provide useful info to homeless people and people at
| risk of homelessness and I advocate to whatever degree I can for
| trying to get smartphones and the like into the hands of homeless
| individuals and people at risk (and people with prison records
| are _at risk_ if you can 't infer the obvious just from reading
| these tweets).
| austincheney wrote:
| Twitter is such a horrible venue for a blog.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| The US government has gotten around its prohibition on "cruel and
| unusual punishment" in two ways. First, it outsourced the cruelty
| to private businesses, who are not prohibited in the same way.
| Second, in instances where it cannot be outsourced, they simply
| make their cruelty usual and commonplace, neatly skirting the
| requirement it be unusual.
|
| The prison system is an example of both.
| bitwize wrote:
| I saw a documentary on the personality-testing industry recently.
| They did an interview with an older chap fresh out of prison who
| was attending public job search classes, who said that when he
| went in. computers were running software from the 1980s and upon
| getting out he had to learn all about the "Google world" from
| scratch. It made me realize how fortunate I was: not only had I
| been exposed to the Google world from the outside, but had I been
| in prison all that time I could probably acclimate myself to it
| fairly easily upon leaving. I'd be outraged at the things the
| Google world does, but I'd have a clear head and shoulders
| advantage navigating it over someone who did not have my
| proclivity for all things computer.
|
| The Google-world guy stood out. I felt for him. The film's
| epilogue shows him successfully getting a job as a building
| supervisor, but what are we doing for people like him? Employment
| services in my state offer free computer courses to people
| seeking jobs, but is that enough? And are the services in other
| states more spotty?
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Can please you share the imdb link/name of the documentary?
| shishy wrote:
| https://m.imdb.com/title/tt14173880/
|
| i believe that one
| bitwize wrote:
| That's the one.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| Thank you
|
| "Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests (2021)"
|
| _Exploring the unexpected origins of America 's
| obsession with personality testing, this documentary
| takes a look at the profound ways that ideas about
| personality have formed the world around us._
| julienreszka wrote:
| 30 years without having to use tech is a privilege
| sadbutttru wrote:
| The digital world is its own prison with various wardens and cell
| blocks and so many rules that you will be kept in prison for
| breaking them without knowing.
| JxLS-cpgbe0 wrote:
| > Everything was hard--the icons & cursor, the touchpad, hovering
| over something for options, closing and opening tabs
|
| This is part of what "accessibility" covers, it's not just
| providing alternative text for images. A11y also deals with
| overcoming cognitive barriers, for example people with ADD
| benefit from a clear, easy-to-follow hierarchy of information.
|
| For this person (and many others) _accessible_ means easy to
| learn, and easy to follow.
| Farbklex wrote:
| In contrast, I am sure we all know some older people who were not
| in prisson for the past 30 years and still don't know how to
| write an email, what a zoom call is or when it's appropriate to
| double-click vs single click items on a computer.
|
| I know people in their 50s who pretend that "they don't need this
| technology" or "I can just go to the bank if I need something".
| Sure, if you're in your 80s you might want to dodge most of the
| digital stuff. But in your 50s? You're gonna have to live with an
| increasing digitalization for multiple decades.
|
| Rant: If you are not an IT person and need to work with Excel and
| PowerPoint for the next 20 years then ffs sit down and learn the
| in-depth tools and tricks in the tools over the span of two
| weekends.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I'm a software engineer yet I don't do online banking (I
| literally "just go to the bank if I need something"). I don't
| consider myself a "luddite", I just don't see the advantage
| over traditional "offline banking". Same with shopping and all
| the other little nuisances of daily life.
| adamrt wrote:
| A few:
|
| - being able to mange banking while traveling internationally
| (or to a state/province that does't have a branch)
|
| - 30 second transfers between accounts (or to other banks)
|
| - few minutes to open a new account
|
| - see posted (and pending) charges within a day or two
| instead of a month (I regularly import for my budgeting
| software)
|
| I'm a developer and actually do consider myself a little bit
| of a luddite. But online banking is helpful to me over
| traditional banking.
| gpvos wrote:
| Open an account in minutes? How many accounts do you use
| per month? I have had six in 49 years. Only the first and
| last of your list seem very useful to me.
| adamrt wrote:
| Not many, but I switched banks two months ago and doing
| it online made it trivial.
|
| I didn't say each point was of equal value or frequency.
| I was just trying to list some benefits for someone that
| asked.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Some version of this meme[0] has been circulating since
| before memes were a thing. I remember the Public School IT
| guy cracking a joke about packing heat in case the copier
| tried something funny (which sets a lower bound for the age
| of this joke because you haven't been able to pack heat in a
| school in three decades and haven't been able to crack that
| joke in a school in two).
|
| [0]https://i.imgur.com/6wbgy2L.jpeg
| dionidium wrote:
| I'm about to wire up some doorbells in our house and my
| wife can't for the life of her understand why we didn't
| simply buy, "one of those wireless ones." It's because the
| wired ones just work and always will just work and never
| don't work. No batteries. No internet. No computer chips.
| Etc, etc.
| macintux wrote:
| One cloud-based solution for opening garage doors, myQ,
| was offline for a few hours recently. People on Twitter
| were claiming, in all apparent sincerity, they had to
| literally break into their own homes.
| notJim wrote:
| As someone who has never really done "offline banking", I
| don't really understand how this works? Do you maintain your
| own ledger of all your accounts and their balances? Or are
| you driving over to the bank to check on things once or twice
| a month? If you have to transfer between accounts, do you go
| to one bank, get a check, then go to another bank? And this
| means you're entirely excluded from low-cost banks that don't
| have branches?
|
| Honestly this is kind of blowing my mind. I've only been to
| the bank one time in probably a decade, and it was when I
| needed a $30k check to buy a car. Even my mortgage was done
| mostly over email (though they did send a guy out to have me
| sign paperwork.)
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Honestly, I'm not sure if you're trolling or not :) But in
| case not: I have one account at one bank. I think there's a
| monthly fee on the account, but TBH I don't know how much,
| in any case it's not nearly enough to consider changing to
| other banks.
|
| Recurring payments (e.g. rent, internet, power etc...) are
| handled through automatic orders which I had setup once.
| For the very rare cases where I need to pay a bill
| "manually" there are service machines in the branch
| office's lobby, which is about 5 minutes walking distance
| from my home.
| notJim wrote:
| Not at all trolling :). Your setup sounds like it would
| be unusual in my spheres, where most people have probably
| close to a dozen different accounts (credit cards,
| retirement accounts, investments, mortgages, etc.) Online
| banking is very convenient for managing all this info.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| You get paper statements. Yes, you keep a ledger (ye olde
| "checkbook") and you write checks, use your debit card or
| get cash.
|
| (No, I no longer do this. I'm just old enough to remember a
| time before online banking existed when the hot new thing
| was being able to check your balance via the automated
| phone system.)
| sunir wrote:
| I would imagine you do understand the advantage of 30 seconds
| of time from anywhere in the world versus a 20-60min round
| trip to the bank.
|
| I imagine there are other reasons you value than time and
| space convenience. Why do you feel the physical trip is more
| valuable?
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Not OP, but my bank keeps pushing me to get their app to
| deposit checks. My phone doesn't do apps and I don't feel
| like taking up space on my tablet. Besides, there's a
| branch with a drive-through three minutes away from my
| house and another one a block away from work, so it's not
| that much time or travel and I get to talk to somebody
| outside of home or work for a few minutes. (Even if some of
| that time is spent declining their suggestion to get the
| app.)
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Wait, your bank's drive-through is _staffed_? Every
| drive-through at a bank I 've seen is just an ATM.
| jpindar wrote:
| TD Banks drive-throughs are staffed. I recently had to
| get something notarized and it was good to be able to do
| it without going in to the bank.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Yeah, the ones here have multiple lanes with pneumatic
| tubes to transfer stuff to and from cars, and one of the
| tellers wears a headset like a fast food drive through.
| When a car pulls up, they step away from the counter and
| serve the drive-through window, often multiplexing to
| assist multiple cars. It's kind of interesting to watch,
| and can be (or at least _feel_ ) more efficient than
| going inside.
|
| They typically only staff the drive-through when the bank
| lobby is also open, or a half-hour later. One of the
| lanes will also usually have an ATM and a dropbox for
| after-hours service.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I have to interact with my bank maybe twice in a year, and
| rarely do I have to show up in person. Speaking over the
| phone works just fine ;) In contrast I have to show up at
| dentist or hairdresser appointments in person, and I don't
| consider this "wasted time" either.
| matz1 wrote:
| how do you check your balance or transaction ? you only
| do that over the phone ?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I check the balance when I'm getting cash from an ATM.
| Transaction logs are sent by mail or I can print them at
| service machines. Really people, it's not that
| complicated, it worked before online banking was invented
| after all ;) I'm not sure if all those services (like the
| physical mail thing) are available to new customers
| though, I think those are nudged heavily to use an online
| account.
| 123jay7 wrote:
| I think when the world is trying to be more green-
| friendly ,you are creating unnessarity trips and waste.
| matz1 wrote:
| I only need cash for maybe once a month. Transaction logs
| sent by mail are way too slow.
|
| Yea that way much slower and much less convenient
| compared to online banking.
| ghaff wrote:
| I haven't gotten cash in over a year and I'll only need
| to get some more at some point over the next month or so
| because I was in a store whose credit card system was
| down.
|
| About the only thing I'd do with a bank in person (other
| than ATMs) would be either special transactions--much of
| which you can handle over the phone or on-line these days
| --or if I still had to deposit sheafs of checks like I
| did when I had a business years ago. (Though I assume
| these days most people would pay digitally in some
| manner.)
|
| I've observed over the past year that even brokerages and
| the like that pretty much used to require going into a
| branch have discovered that's actually not necessary.
|
| I don't care so much about the speed of transaction logs
| but that I can access my records, pay bills, transfer
| money, etc. with a few clicks.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I switched to cutting my own hair (and modifying my
| hairstyle slightly to make that easier) exactly because
| of the time wasted sitting in the lobby. I don't mind the
| value-added time (when the hair is actually being
| cut/styled), but the non-value-added time was too high
| for me.
|
| I switched dentists for a similar reason; prior dentist
| kept a buffer of patients waiting to optimize their
| throughput. I had a dental appointment yesterday [at the
| newer place] and I was annoyed that I arrived 15 minutes
| early, because I know they make it a point to bring
| patients in exactly on time. Sure enough, 2:00 hits and I
| get called back.
| dreen wrote:
| I cannot speak for him but kind of understand. Obviously
| depends on what is it you want to do. You go to the bank
| and express what you need in simple speech to another
| human, who handles everything. Depending on the bank, a
| journey to do the same on web/app may be less preferable,
| especially if handle a lot of mental load during the day.
| wilsonrocks wrote:
| Getting a human to change over a bunch of direct debits
| from one account to another is way better than doing it
| myself online.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I wonder what requests are being made - for myself the
| entirety of what I do in a bank is moving money from one
| account into another, and that is way easier online than
| trying to get a human to understand exactly what I want.
| post_break wrote:
| Banks around me are swapping tellers for atms. Like literally
| no way to talk to anyone inside.
| soneil wrote:
| I do prefer online-first, but I do miss being able to go to
| the bank. Self-service is great right up until it isn't. If I
| walk into the bank with a question, there's a near-certain
| chance I'll walk out with an answer. Instead of clicking
| around progressively darker corners of the site, I'll just
| stand at the counter until the answer comes to me.
|
| It sounds "so karen", but it's very difficult to ask for a
| manager online, and very difficult to refuse in-person.
| msla wrote:
| > I just don't see the advantage over traditional "offline
| banking".
|
| You must live somewhere with an extremely temperate climate.
|
| SUBTEXT: If you live somewhere with things like "snow" or
| "ice" or "Winter Storms" you'll change your tune once you
| begin to seriously worry how slowly you'd die after you break
| your hip on a sidewalk that's more snow-covered ice than
| concrete.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Budgeting using a tool like YNAB has allowed me to manage
| monthly funds more effectively, pay off debts faster, and
| save up more quickly for the things I want to buy. It's
| possible to use it by inputting all your receipts in manually
| but it's such a time sink. Automatic importing let's me see
| exactly where my funds are and budget quickly in a few
| minutes at the start of my day. When cards are not importing
| correctly it's such a difference importing stuff manually.
|
| As another example with online banking switching banks
| effectively becomes zero friction. When Ally slashed rates it
| took a couple days to move nearly all funds out to a savings
| account with a much better rate.
|
| Not to mention nearly all brick and mortar stores have
| savings account rates that are effectively zero. My first
| interest payment when I was a new Ally customer was basically
| what I got the entire ten year period I was at bank of
| america
| flohofwoe wrote:
| That's good for you, but it sounds like you are spending
| way more time managing finances online, than I do offline
| ;) I have an average weekly budget that I keep track of in
| my head, and that's it. That's also the reason why I prefer
| paying in cash. Easier to keep track of the outgoing money.
| adamrt wrote:
| > Easier to keep track of the outgoing money.
|
| It definitely is not. How is keeping track of random cash
| purchases in your head easier than a computer doing it
| for you automatically and instantly?
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Ok, technically I don't keep track of it in my head, but
| in my pocket. I start with a given amount of Euros in my
| pocket. Each purchase reduces that amount. If I want to
| check my current balance I reach into my pocket and see
| how much money is left. Checking this against the current
| date gives me a rough idea if I'm over- or under-budget.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| But how do you sell your purchase data for a 1% discount
| this way?
| Larrikin wrote:
| In the US atleast if you're making cash payments you are
| subsidizing all credit card and debit card transactions.
| I end up at the end of the year with hundreds of dollars
| (often times over a thousand if I was awarded a bonus for
| a new card) returned back to me in cash back. If I
| convert to miles they are worth even more. I never use
| cash anywhere that accepts cards.
|
| Online banking also makes it very easy to manage my cards
| to ensure I'm never paying interest since the first
| interest payment usually totally eats up any savings from
| cash back.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| What country do you live in?
|
| Here in the UK, the only time I've needed to step into a bank
| in the last 10 years is to have a meeting about my mortgage.
| Our online banking services are so good there's literally no
| reason to have brick-and-mortor banks for day-to-day tasks.
|
| For me, not having to travel to a bank and wait in a queue to
| do basic tasks such as transferring money is such an
| advantage.
| robthebrew wrote:
| Why then the huge queues on certain days? It could be
| luddites asking to withdraw their pension payments, or of
| course it could be business owners needing to deposit cash
| takings, or getting till floats for the day's trading.
| While I personally am in the same position as you, I feel
| that banks are listening to this kind of comment and
| shutting up physical stores.
| Macha wrote:
| Also on the flip side, our in person banking services are
| rather poor. I dread when there's something I need in
| person in the bank, because the branch only opens 10-4 M-F
| with a large break for lunch, meaning I need to take off
| work time to do it, and it's full of people who somehow
| apparently still manage to do their banking primarily in
| branch despite that.
| [deleted]
| genericstorage3 wrote:
| I also prefer to go to the bank. I got my issue solved just
| by giving my id and wait 10m.
|
| On the phone they couldn't even understand what I'm talking,
| ton of a security questions... I gave up.
|
| I tried online and had some issues. Some code didn't work
| even if I had it saved.
|
| Physical much more efficient. I can just relax 10m and get my
| things done just by saying 1 sentence
| deepstack wrote:
| Glad another software guy saying this. Digital infrastructure
| as how it now has no integrity.
|
| I prefer going to bank if I have time.
|
| Even the largest bank like Feds can have 3 trillion dollars
| operation error. https://thespeakernewsjournal.com/us/bank-
| wires-worth-trilli...
|
| Knowing what I know and the kind of security that is in
| online banking does not bring any confidence in me.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Why do you think the in person operations are less likely
| to make errors?
|
| I mean, go ahead and do what you want, but if checking
| recent transactions makes sense for online banking, it
| probably makes sense for offline banking too.
| deepstack wrote:
| You are right. Most security are really depending on
| banks whether they operate with integrity and your
| relationship with them. For security get to know your
| banker. And I wouldn't recommend any of large banks.
| Local credit union and small bank with good balance sheet
| are better bet.
| lolsal wrote:
| If I make an error, I eat it. If the banker makes an
| error, they eat it, or at least you have some ground to
| stand on.
| maxerickson wrote:
| The app for my bank account lets me view balances (and
| some other info), transfer funds between my subaccounts
| (for free), and deposit checks.
|
| There's not functionality in there to shoot myself in the
| foot.
| lolsal wrote:
| Keep trying, you'll find it.
| Macha wrote:
| I mean, you could transfer too much money out of the
| subaccount that rent/mortgage/etc. is paid out of
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| Increasingly banks are reducing the ability to do that.
|
| Here in Australia most banks have closed down branches in
| many smaller communities over the last 20 years.
|
| Many of the 'standard' accounts that people have either only
| one in-branch visit per month, or none at all - and charge a
| fee for it.
|
| Credit Unions and Building Societies are not much better, if
| at all.
|
| There's also a growing number of online-only banks which
| don't have any physical branches, and all your interaction
| with them is online or over the phone.
| Khaine wrote:
| What? None of the big 4 banks in Australia charge you for
| going into a branch?
| lolsal wrote:
| I have this same predilection and I have thought a lot about
| it and I am pretty confident I know where this comes from for
| me:
|
| When I was young, after opening my first checking account, I
| fat-fingered a transfer from checking to savings online and
| the bank software interpreted this as me trying to transfer
| more than I had, so it happily proceeded to give me a large
| cash advance and then charge me $75 for the trouble, and
| another $35 for the NSF fee.
|
| Now, maybe because I work in software, and maybe even moreso
| because I have literally written checking account software -
| I do not use online or mobile apps for non-trivial banking
| things. I call a person. Or I walk up to a person. I verify
| everything they are doing before they do it, and by acting as
| my agent during more complicated tasks they assume liability
| if they fat-finger something or mess something up (so far).
|
| For the curious: the online form had separate inputs for
| dollars and cents, and some JS regex removed punctuation
| marks. So when I typed "1,0,period, 0, 0", instead of trying
| to transfer $10, it transferred $1000. I absolutely breezed
| through the "verify the amount step".
| drewzero1 wrote:
| I hate, hate, hate when online forms do this. I almost
| accidentally bought a $500 gift card yesterday while trying
| to buy a $5.00 one because this exact same thing happened.
|
| It would have been nice to have a notice pop up when they
| dropped the decimal, the same way so many forms do for the
| "invalid character" in my last name. (But I have _no strong
| feelings on the subject whatsoever_.)
| tester34 wrote:
| >I know people in their 50s who pretend that "they don't need
| this technology" or "I can just go to the bank if I need
| something". Sure, if you're in your 80s you might want to dodge
| most of the digital stuff. But in your 50s? You're gonna have
| to live with an increasing digitalization for multiple decades.
|
| I'm in early 20s and I almost never used smartphone nor I'm not
| about to get one
|
| I'm SE.
| [deleted]
| rickspencer3 wrote:
| My wife teaches basic computer skills to older people (think
| 65+). I hear her teaching sometimes, and I find it remarkable
| what "basic" actually means to these people. She takes a lot of
| pride when her students are able to reply to an email, or find
| content and services online.
| iso1631 wrote:
| If you were in your 50s in the 90s I could understand avoiding
| technology. I have some sympathy for those in their 90s who had
| retired before the 1990s, but in the late 1990s Terry Wogan (b
| 1938) and his producer Paul Walters (b1947), with a breakfast
| radio show reaching 20% of the UK and aimed at fairly old
| people, showing that it wasn't too late for people their age to
| learn computing and send emails, watch webcams, etc.
|
| If you're a boomer, you were in your 40s when windows 95 came
| out, and internet was common in average households in your 50s
| - no excuse.
|
| For prisoners who were incarcerated, surely the rehabilitation
| and release process educates on basic information age
| technology like going to a library and using a computer to
| access public services
| _peeley wrote:
| I remember my first job in tech support where I'd have to walk
| 40-50 year old white-collar workers through basic tasks like
| opening files in folders, connecting to WiFi, resetting
| passwords, etc. I have no problem whatsoever helping people
| with that sort of thing when they truly need it, but it would
| always irk me when they'd just giggle and say things like "Oh,
| I'm just not a computer person!" This would blow my mind, like,
| could you imagine a carpenter having to constantly be told how
| to use a cordless drill and justify it with "Oh, I'm just not
| really a power tools person!" It's one thing to grumble about
| technology these days, but refusing to learn the basics of _the
| thing you use to do your job_ is ridiculous.
| tyingq wrote:
| It seems to be ramping up now. It was only 4 years ago that my
| bank drastically cut the number of "real people" you can talk
| to at the bank, for example.
| colllectorof wrote:
| _> You're gonna have to live with an increasing digitalization
| for multiple decades._
|
| Technology exists for people, not the other way around.
| refactor_master wrote:
| That rant, wow. It really resonates deeply with me. People
| would rather cumulatively spend some 10000 hours yelling at
| Office for the rest of their lives, instead of spending 10 over
| the course of some evenings/weekends to brush up on the basics.
| Even from an immediate-more-important-priorities-perspective it
| almost doesn't make sense to me.
| gh-throw wrote:
| I think computer geeks tend not to recall how many hard-won
| insights and how much time it took for them to reach the
| point where learning "the basics" of MS Office would only
| take ten hours of study & practice. We think it's easy
| because we're building on decent-to-good mental models of how
| computers & software & networks operate.
|
| Normal people don't have those, and every second of the
| thousands of hours it'd take to gain them would be miserable
| for them. Not everyone enjoys this crap. Most aren't born
| with the kind of good abstract and/or spatial reasoning
| abilities that makes this stuff relatively easy to figure
| out, either.
| PascLeRasc wrote:
| Will brushing up help when Microsoft moves all the menus in
| the next edition? How about when they add in new errors and
| make File Explorer not return correct results and Windows
| Search just searches Bing instead of your computer? Or when
| they add stuff like "you aren't allowed to attach that file
| to an email. It's because it's open in Word, but we're not
| telling you that. Yes, we know this only happens in Outlook
| and not Gmail." Its Office's fault that everyone hates it.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Microsoft moves the menus in office at most once a decade.
| They just kept adding onto the Office 95 menus for twelve
| years, then they introduced ribbons, now 13 years later
| they move away from ribbons.
|
| They aren't some SaaS company that moves things for fun
| Arrath wrote:
| All of which largely became unimportant when they
| introduced the "Tell me what you want to do" search box
| to Office programs. Blessed be its name.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Related to this: just how easy is powerful software meant to
| be?
|
| People who don't know how to drive don't blame it on cars.
| Farbklex wrote:
| Anecdote: As a young intern at a German bank I was sent to
| talk to an older colleague (probably in his 50s, no idea for
| how long he already works for the bank). I needed him to look
| up some account number or ID in a data export he had.
|
| 1. He opened the data export in Excel.
|
| 2. I told him the number for which I needed some additional
| information.
|
| 3. He started scrooling in this 1k + entries Excel file.
|
| 4. ...
|
| 5. I ask: Can you press CTRL + F and type in the number?
|
| 6. ...
| [deleted]
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's fractal, I see this even in the tech industry itself -
| people are reluctant to sit down with a manual for an hour to
| figure out how some software (or device) works, and prefer to
| forever call it "too complicated to use", just because they
| couldn't grok it in 30 seconds.
| etrautmann wrote:
| The flip side of this is that interfaces are changing
| _constantly_. As soon as I 've committed something to
| muscle memory, a forced app update will overhaul a UI and I
| need to relearn where to find basic commands. When
| compounded by the hundreds of programs I use across
| multiple OS's and platforms, I get used to just assuming
| that interfaces are and features constantly in flux. This
| means that I invest less in deeply learning any specific
| tool.
| vsareto wrote:
| >Rant: If you are not an IT person and need to work with Excel
| and PowerPoint for the next 20 years then ffs sit down and
| learn the in-depth tools and tricks in the tools over the span
| of two weekends.
|
| Until the IT people decide to change technologies on you
| because we do it so often to ourselves.
|
| Except Excel. I'm pretty sure that's immortal.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> if you're in your 80s you might want to dodge most of the
| digital stuff.
|
| If you are in your 80s today, you were in your 60s in 2000 and
| 50s during the 90s .com boom. I have no sympathy. Unless you
| were living under a rock you would have at least known of the
| internet. If you have reached your 80s today without "doing
| email" you are either Amish or repeatedly chose to avoid
| learning about technology.
|
| Once upon a time cellphones were new and we built models with
| fake dial tones for old people (the "jitterbug" phone). That
| product is done. Current Jitterbugs have buttons for calling a
| nurse, but no dial tone. Anyone still expecting a cellphone to
| have a dial tone is officially a luddite.
|
| (For any Amish reading this, I know that many of you do use
| email, but I suspect few are on HN.)
| klyrs wrote:
| TFA is about people in _prison_ , aka, living under a rock.
| Your attitude here is completely inappropriate.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Read the post to which I replied. It was not speaking about
| prisons.
|
| "I know people in their 50s who pretend that "they don't
| need this technology" or "I can just go to the bank if I
| need something". Sure, if you're in your 80s you might want
| to dodge most of the digital stuff. But in your 50s? You're
| gonna have to live with an increasing digitalization for
| multiple decades."
| npteljes wrote:
| >ffs sit down and learn the in-depth tools and tricks in the
| tools over the span of two weekends
|
| Even IT people don't know their tools as much as I'd like them
| to. Taking time out like this, to get to know the tools, is a
| worthy effort for all.
| Farbklex wrote:
| True. There are just too many.
|
| I should still improve my knowledge of git, gradle, intelij,
| various command line tools, docker and so on.
|
| That by itself isn't to much but all this stuff comes on top
| of just staying up to date with the plattform you are working
| on and learning the next framework or library which you
| immediately need. Looking at you, android and your yearly
| updates, Kotlin, and a dozen jetpack libraries.
| npteljes wrote:
| I get that, there's too much and changes too often. But
| there are cases where going a little deeper improves
| productivity a lot. Where I work we're assigned to projects
| that last at least a couple of years, so it pays off to
| spend some time learning the tools.
| gambler wrote:
| Very few tools designed today have any features that
| facilitate learning. Developers don't understand how learning
| works and don't really care. Operating systems mostly washed
| their hands of this issue as well. It's a mess.
| npteljes wrote:
| I agree. Jetbrains did well with their IDE I think, they
| show context aware suggestions often, but in a non-
| obtrusive way. This is effective because the information is
| there when you need it, not when you have no idea what to
| do with it.
| davnn wrote:
| I can't imagine that prison life is so disconnected from the rest
| of society; it certainly isn't in Europe.
| meddlepal wrote:
| The US prison system is all about punishment not
| rehabilitation.
|
| Theres a very strong "lock them up and throw away the key"
| mentality in many Americans view of justice.
| ReadFList wrote:
| Rehabilitation works for those handful of cases where a
| mother had to steal food to feed a baby, and wasn't a career
| criminal.
|
| I don't have any hope nor interest in try to "rehabilitate"
| rapists, murderers or child molesters. I don't even want them
| locked up for life, that's a waste of money and isn't enough
| punishment. I want the problem solved, I want them to get the
| death penalty.
| zodiakzz wrote:
| Worse. Many Americans for some reason think prison rape is
| the funniest thing in the world.
| ReadFList wrote:
| It's funny how the most progressive ardent defenders of the
| prison system reform overlap with people who find funny
| that their political opponents get raped in prison...
| elicash wrote:
| The US prison system is about indifference and more like
| factory farming than inflicting punishment -- the negative
| effects are mostly a byproduct of high volume and costs.
|
| I got really into this issue maybe two years ago, and it's
| been pretty sickening to observe. Things like multiple states
| denying surgeries based on alleged "one good eye" policies.
| Replacing in-person visits with virtual ones.
|
| Sure, there's profit involved, of course. For example, there
| are pushes to get rid of prison libraries and their books and
| music and switch instead to tablet devices, so that the
| families of incarcerated people (those in prison might be
| making as little as literal pennies per hour) can be charged
| subscriptions by various companies. But even that is driven
| by costs involved in checking donated books for contraband.
| At the end of the day, we need to incarcerate fewer people
| for shorter periods of time -- and I'm not just talking about
| non-violent offenders, either.
|
| The person in this twitter thread served 30 years. Let's
| start there.
| dr-detroit wrote:
| The 20 year minimum penalty is the only thing keeping poor
| people from coming in the houses of privileged people.
| tyingq wrote:
| Depends on which prison in the US. Angola, in Lousiana, for
| example is pretty notorious for refusing medical care,
| recreation limited regularly, forced labor in the fields, etc.
|
| Edit: She mentions "Corrlinks" which provides a sort of "email"
| like service to Federal prisons. So this person was in a US
| Federal Prison.
| tempest_ wrote:
| I was just poking around the wiki for that place.
|
| Pretty crazy.
| fallat wrote:
| Computer technology is naturally unusable.
| kyooyk wrote:
| I really think the point is not how long it might take someone to
| learn how to use tools, but the impacts of prison. I work with
| these folks through my company to help them become employed upon
| release.
|
| A few things, it is astounding but believable that when people
| are released they enter a world that is entirely unknown to them.
| Not only technology but their relationships and neighborhoods are
| completely different.
|
| In addition,They have no reliable way of getting back on their
| feet. They usually have zero money, no housing and no job - and
| there is why you have high recidivism rates. Not only that, but
| no one wants to hire justice involved individuals, even though
| significant tax credits are available for doing so - Walmart for
| example, takes extreme advantage of these.
|
| The training programs in prisons will train someone up to a
| certification, but fall short of letting them get that
| certification. People have completed their GED maybe 5 times
| inside serving sentences at different times because doing so can
| reduce their sentence, it doesn't help them in any other way.
|
| Without the ability to access training for in demand skills, many
| of these individuals get temp service jobs as flagged for
| construction for example. Doesn't make sense to me that we want
| to rehab people yet minimal opportunities inside are provided to
| break the cycle.
|
| Realize this. People serve a sent and then they are eligible for
| parole. Many people opt to serve their parole inside, rather than
| outside. I've been told they feel it is easier inside than out.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| > justice involved individuals
|
| Is that PC for "ex cons"?
| anonymousiam wrote:
| I've never served time, but from what I understand, the burdens
| associated with being on parole (check ins, drug tests, danger
| of associating with the wrong people, etc.) are so onerous that
| many prefer to serve the full sentence so that when they get
| out, they are not on parole.
|
| I would probably make the same choice.
| mike00632 wrote:
| I learned only recently that people on parole have to pay for
| parole. All of the mandatory meetings and drugs tests are
| paid by the parolee. What happens if they can't pay?-- back
| to prison. It's brutal.
| kayfox wrote:
| The two prison reforms I want to see the most:
|
| 1. Education programs that actually mean something and actually
| are adequately funded.
|
| 2. Retaining prison work, but requiring that prisoners who are
| not paid minimum wage where they are be paid the difference on
| release. (The Federal government may need to make this a
| protected fund or trust to make sure its not use as a fund to
| raid by lower governments and administrators.)
| kyooyk wrote:
| They have some education programs, they just are always not
| focused on skills that are valuable outside. There's also
| issues, believe it or not, about people not knowing these
| programs are avail. What we are doing is trying to create Edu
| programs for in demand skills and bring in a dif local
| business to teach each course. This way it breaks down the
| stigma for these businesses about hiring justice involved
| individuals, trains these individuals at a skill, and helps
| them get hired by these businesses after. And this is not
| training to work in fast food chains.
|
| There's also work release where certain members can go off
| location to work when they're getting close to release. In
| addition there stuff like unicore
| https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/unicor.jsp
| Unicore pays pennies on the dollar though. But this money
| helps people upon release have enough maybe to get an
| apartment for their first month out - which most cant afford.
|
| Some cool organizations trying to help, just as examples off
| the top of my head in case you are interested in looking
| further about solutions include:
|
| -remerg https://remerg.com/
|
| -KOBEYO https://www.kobeyo.com/
|
| -Justice reskill https://justicereskill.com/
|
| But main point is really these individuals that have served
| their time are not adequately given the resources they need
| to succeed. Tons of opportunities to contribute though - as
| with any u underserved demographic.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Shawshank Redemption did a great job showing a lot of this.
| AcerbicZero wrote:
| It's in fathomable that the government would put a person in jail
| for 30 years and dump them back into society without even a
| PowerPoint briefing on the state of the world.
|
| Isn't incarceration a two way street? If government takes away
| (for good reason or not) your personal freedom aren't they liable
| for your well-being during that time? And more importantly,
| responsible for the person "their" system returns to society at
| large?
| 95014_refugee wrote:
| Morally? It certainly seems like it.
|
| Practically? If there is no accountability, no loop closure on
| the delivery of such a thing, then no.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| My uncle spent some time in prison in the late 80's and early
| 90's and was able to learn FoxPro while there. In addition to it
| being hard to find work having a criminal record, by the time he
| got out, everybody was transitioning away from FoxPro.
|
| As is too often the case, the lure of money from selling drugs
| combined with not being able to find work meant he returned to
| prison. He got out again in the early-mid 2000's and this time
| around, there were no courses offered for study. When he got out
| that time, he didn't even know how to use the TV remote.
|
| One day, history will look back on how we treat our prisoners
| with immense shame. Instead of trying to rehabilitate them, we
| leave them to rot, and politicians never shy away from an
| opportunity to make the lives of prisoners more miserable, lest
| they risk being called "soft" on crime.
| Ccecil wrote:
| After briefly reading the comments I decided to chime in a little
| bit.
|
| First, 30 years on the inside...crazy. I don't think it is
| possible to put that in perspective. Cellphones were uncommon,
| the internet was still using "prodigy" and the likes, pagers were
| the "in thing". Forget trying to use the internet...these people
| have issues with the "number of decisions" in the grocery store
| (it is one of those areas where people quite literally freeze up,
| if you don't know feel free to look up the commissary options
| this person has had for 30 years). Nothing looks the same, not
| neighborhoods, cars, clothing, people... You have been staring at
| guards for the last 30 years and an PA announcement has told you
| when/where to move and when to eat. Every day has been on
| repeat...
|
| Now...30 years has passed and they let you out. What do you
| do...nothing but choices and a nearly constant flood of
| situations and experiences which you don't fully understand.
| Every task is something new to learn. And if you ask for help you
| are likely going to need to explain why you don't understand this
| stuff which may cause those people who were willing to help to
| second guess themselves and/or judge you. You have
| nothing...assume your family/friends have mostly moved on (this
| happens even when you are not in prison often) and your only hope
| to have enough to get back on your feet is to fill out the
| mountains of forms required to get a portion of what you really
| need to live. Now imagine your only way to get those forms is to
| use the internet...it is very fortunate this person had a case
| worker who was willing to spend the time to help...many don't.
|
| There is a non-zero amount of recidivism which is intentional.
| People get out and then decide the world moved on without them.
| They were better off not having choices or options they did not
| understand. Often, the hoops of parole are too much and they
| prefer to "top out" their time so they are not required to do
| things like keep a job which has paystubs (often you get paid way
| more under the table, as well as having bosses who don't
| undervalue your pay due to your criminal past), or find proper
| housing (halfway houses are required often for parole if you do
| not have someone who will vouch for you in a written letter). Not
| to mention that staying sober is hard at times, decide to get
| drunk on the wrong night or share a joint with someone and you
| are likely to face repercussions from your Parole officer.
|
| It is a difficult situation. I have nothing but the utmost
| respect for the case manager. She very likely kept this person
| from either reoffending or worse killing themselves.
|
| The programs on the inside are often not the best (depends on the
| state, program, and facility...some are private). If you think
| there is any way you can or would like to help in this situation
| maybe get in touch with some of the halfway houses or probation
| offices in your area. Your tech skills and abilities to navigate
| paperwork are much more valuable than you might understand. From
| there...you could look into possibly helping inside the prisons
| too (there may be other restrictions). Maybe even just look into
| mailing some books to the library there (last I checked they had
| to be shipped in by the vendor/bookstore). That book on Python
| may very well be the thing that changes their life...and possibly
| society.
| grumple wrote:
| ~17 years ago when I was in high school, my senior project was
| teaching old folks how to use computers.
|
| It was much harder than I expected. Clicking a mouse was
| something they just didn't understand - they used their whole
| hand! Had to get them to use just a finger. Many other concepts
| were difficult to convey as well.
|
| I think things have changed a lot since then (we have drastically
| better widespread tech literacy now), but it was an enlightening
| experience.
| macintux wrote:
| I taught a computer lab at a local university a few years
| before that and discovered through one unhappy encounter with
| an angry student a key attribute that I'd failed to apprehend
| previously.
|
| This student wanted to know exactly what to do when he
| encountered an error. I showed him my thought process for how
| I'd work my way back to a good known state and he was enraged.
|
| Computer literacy is in no small part a willingness to
| experiment and be unafraid of what can happen (or at least
| enough basic knowledge to know how to avoid the really sharp
| edges that can in fact cause harm).
|
| It's a very difficult thing to teach.
| gorpomon wrote:
| As a society we're just not being real about our digital divides.
| Your digital ability goes up and down in life, and the web HAS to
| be accessible to you at those lower points of ability:
|
| While caring for (or just carrying) a child. After an injury or
| stroke that limits your mobility. Living with chronic conditions.
| Changing technology or losing access to your go-to tools.
| Traveling to areas with a digital divide in some way. And many
| more...
|
| We've made the case for the for some sets differently abled
| people-- I'm hard pressed to find a developer who doesn't
| consider keyboard navigability for those who can't use a mouse--
| but you need to rethink interactions at a base level and we're
| just getting started with that. There's a lot of work to do here.
| zwischenzug wrote:
| I wrote a similar thread a while back while helping my 70-year
| old neighbour:
|
| https://twitter.com/ianmiell/status/1299742361854054401
|
| """One example of the insanity:
|
| "Enter mobile number to register" OK, 0793...
|
| "You already have an account with that number"
|
| "Enter mobile number to get recovery details" OK, 0793...
|
| "You do not have an account with that number"
|
| Turns out you have to put 44793..."""
| [deleted]
| trymas wrote:
| Clearly wherever this is (US?) prisons are not about
| rehabilitation and inclusion back into society.
|
| Weren't there any classes? Books? Library? Computer rooms?
|
| It's complete failure of a justice system if person comes out of
| prison like from a time capsule. IMHO it may just increase
| recidivism - what can a person do in a "free" world if he/she
| were not let to know about the world outside prison walls?
| Ccecil wrote:
| It varies by state, region and facility. Don't forget that
| there are privately owned prisons in the US. Some programs do
| not allow you access to certain materials and when they do very
| likely may be old/outdated.
|
| And of course...it just adds to their money if people reoffend.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"IMHO it may just increase recidivism"
|
| Keeping people in prisons might be just what the US prison
| industrial complex wants.
| [deleted]
| Ccecil wrote:
| Not sure why you got downvoted here. Private prisons are very
| much a thing in the US and in my state.
|
| Not to mention the Federal prison Industries
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Prison_Industries
| Revenue $531,453,000 (2019) "Under current law, all
| physically able inmates who are not a security risk or have a
| health exception are required to work, either for UNICOR or
| at some other prison job.[4][12] Inmates earn from US$0.23
| per hour up to a maximum of US$1.15 per hour, and all inmates
| with court-ordered financial obligations must use at least
| 50% of this UNICOR income to satisfy those debts"
|
| And that is just one of them...on the federal level...not
| state.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"Not sure why you got downvoted here"
|
| Some patriots probably got offended.
| meowster wrote:
| Please don't unnecessarily bring politics into the
| discussion. (It wasn't me, I don't have enough karma to
| downvote.)
| TimothyBJacobs wrote:
| Do you think prison reform is not a political topic?
| soneil wrote:
| I'm less convinced it's a failure of the system, but more an
| expectation of the system.
|
| Just look at the replies on the twitter post. They amount to
| "shouldn't have done the crime then". Get raped/attacked in
| prison? Whoops, shouldn't have done the crime then. Released
| unprepared and institutionalized after 3 decades in prison?
| Whoops, shouldn't have done the crime then.
|
| I strongly suspect there's a lot less interest in
| rehabilitation than we like to think. Being let down by a
| profit-driven incarceration system is only one facet of this.
| kyooyk wrote:
| There's a lack of addressing mental health issues inside.
| There's a lack of people thinking about what some people have
| dealt with since children and why they ended up inside.
| People wonder why there is recidivism or why people end up in
| jail. A lot of it has to do with the lack of opportunity and
| mentorship in peoples lives starting with childhood...and
| then especially after turbulent times, never introducing
| itself ever to these individuals. It's not like people want
| to end up like this. For many of these individuals they've
| never had the support and opportunities many of us don't
| realize we're so lucky to have.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Get raped/attacked in prison? Whoops, shouldn't have done
| the crime then.
|
| It's more than this - tough-on-crime rhetoric is largely
| explicitly built around interracial (black on white)
| homosexual rape and abuse fantasies.
| [deleted]
| Toutouxc wrote:
| While I agree that this is a huge failure of the prison system,
| I'm also convinced that it shouldn't take more than a month for
| an ex-convict to catch up with the average computer user. Most
| people I know are borderline computer illiterate. Even the
| educated ones.
| beowulfey wrote:
| it sounds like this particular person did so and figured it out
| relatively quickly, based on the thread. the things being done
| were more complex than what some of my relatives can do.
| b_t_s wrote:
| Borderline computer illiterate is a low bar(and probably an
| accurate assessment of average ability), but how are they
| supposed to clear that bar when they're fully computer
| illiterate and maybe, if they're lucky, can get occasional
| informal tutoring from someone who is only borderline computer
| illiterate? Maybe a month of proper lessons would do it at
| least for some. However, as a degreed professional, I've spent
| about 25 years fruitlessly trying to explain to my dad in every
| conceivable way "where it goes when you save it" and what a
| file is, so I suspect this is a massive hurdle for a decent
| percent of the population. There's a reason so many people are
| borderline computer illiterate.
| [deleted]
| mlthoughts2018 wrote:
| This long form Twitter stuff is so miserable. This seems like an
| interesting story, but I couldn't read past the second segment.
|
| And no, Threader doesn't solve it or help (even taking for
| granted the extremely unlikely assumption that I was willing to
| migrate the thread to another service and navigate to that other
| service just to read it).
|
| This is interesting in conjunction with the story itself, a man
| having a hard time adjusting to digital interfaces.
|
| So much of it is caused by the abject poorness of digital
| interfaces foisted on us that we just accept and stumble through.
| drfritznunkie wrote:
| I don't think anyone has any idea how disorientating tech can be
| until they've witness this for themselves. Also how hostile and
| large a divide tech creates that the industry doesn't give a damn
| about (I'm looking at you, Material Design and your crap low
| contrast fonts and lack of clear clickable buttons that has
| resulted in more support calls from my aging parents than
| probably anything else).
|
| Anyhow, a neighborhood homeless man and I became friends and I'd
| help him out with $$ and food and drink from time to time. We'd
| hang out and I get to hear stories of all the crazy shit he'd
| seen in the past 40 years in the neighborhood, from growing up
| through the civil rights era and seeing the city burn in 68, to
| the lines of people around the block waiting to buy crack at
| Rayful Emmonds grandmothers house. He'd been in and out of jail,
| run with gangs, the full nine yards. After getting hit by a drunk
| driver on his way to holdup a liquor store to get money to buy
| his new baby diapers, he'd ended up on the streets with nothing
| but his stories and a bum leg.
|
| Along the way, he told me about his wife and children, his stint
| at the Navy shipyards in Virginia Beach, and his childhood in
| North Carolina. He told me about how one day he'd love to travel
| back to his childhood home town and see his mother, who he'd
| purchased his childhood home for with the proceeds from his
| successful dealings at the shipyards.
|
| One day, he mentioned he'd gotten some money and wanted to send
| his mother flowers, but he couldn't remember what the address
| was. I asked if he remembered how to get to the house, and he
| said he did, so I grabbed my laptop, opened up Street View in the
| center of the town and asked him which way to go.
|
| I've never experienced quite such a reaction in my life. This was
| black magic fuckery to him and he thought I was using some secret
| government technology. I explained to him the general principles
| of it, and he just didn't believe it. Incredulous wouldn't
| describe a tenth of his reaction.
|
| That reaction wasn't anything compared to when we finally found
| his mothers house. He couldn't believe that he was looking at the
| house he grew up in, had purchased for his mother and that he'd
| not seen probably 30+ years. He teared up looking at it and got
| quite emotional. I offered to find her phone number so that he
| could call her, but it was too much for him at the time, and he
| waved it off.
|
| He eventually got housing through a city program, and I lost
| touch with him as he stopped frequenting the neighborhood.
|
| Old Dirty, if you're still out there, I miss your company and
| stories and hope you're doing well!
| fuball63 wrote:
| I'm sure many people here have experienced frustration helping
| older relatives or friends use computers. Recently though, I
| realized, that computers are just way too hard to use.
|
| In our pursuit to avoid cryptic black screens with command
| prompts, a user must now understand that their computer has
| Windows with all of its menus and functions, a browser window
| with all of its menus and functions, running a webapp, with all
| of its menus and functions. Whenever functionality bleeds into
| other layers ("how do I print this pdf file"), it is a huge
| hassle trying to explain "oh, it's not that print button, its
| this other print button".
|
| It makes me sad to think that people prefer their "appliance
| computers" (phones, tablets, chromebooks) over real computers,
| but I can hardly blame them.
| ghaff wrote:
| What a lot of people here don't get is that many people have
| zero interest in using a computer. They want to talk on the
| phone, order from Amazon, and play solitaire. That's pretty
| much the sum total of what my dad wants to use his
| computer/smartphone for.
|
| He has absolutely zero interest in learning how file systems
| work, the intricacies of networks, or anything else about the
| underlying plumbing that allows him to do the things he wants
| to do.
|
| I'd add that many of us have internalized how to use
| phones/tablets over time as they've become incrementally more
| complex. I still never remember all the details of having
| multiple windows open on a tablet given I don't use that
| functionality much and I periodically learn some trick I never
| knew about.
| orblivion wrote:
| I feel like someone should try to start from scratch and design
| a phone interface that any elderly person would be perfectly
| comfortable using and understanding.
|
| And then sell it to the rest of us as well.
| slantyyz wrote:
| I can't emphasize how much this needs to be done (granted,
| the population in the age group that needs it the most is
| shrinking).
|
| The current seniors phone are utter crap. I've tried a bunch
| for my dad.
|
| My dad, 80+, can't figure out how to use a feature phone (I
| got him a Nokia handset) much less a smartphone (have tried
| iPhone and Android).
|
| The thing is, he has no desire to read a menu, or figure out
| what an icon means, or what the text under the icon says. He
| can't even be bothered trying to understand up, down, left,
| right and OK in terms of navigating a phone's capabilities.
|
| What he does know how to use is a land line. He's got a
| Northern Telecom phone with some pre-programmed numbers, and
| he seems to have no problem with that at all. He doesn't know
| how to do voice mail on his phone, but he does know how to
| use an old school answering machine.
|
| If someone can make a phone that behaves more like a
| traditional phone (i.e., maybe a lid flips so that it's like
| lifting a phone off the hook, close the lid to hang up), and
| no send/cancel buttons, I think my dad would be able to
| figure it out more easily.
|
| On a separate note, the reasons above are the same reasons
| why he can't use a media player on a TV. He only knows the
| concept of sticking physical media into a player, and using
| the standard media buttons, and for the TV, he is used to
| punching in numbers to change the channel.
|
| Menu navigation, which is easy for most people under 60, is
| SO foreign to him.
| slantyyz wrote:
| Imagine being an 80+ senior who doesn't have a computer or
| Internet and being told that the only way to register for a
| COVID vaccine is online. That's how our initial rollout was
| handled (Ontario, Canada).
| Macha wrote:
| Even appliance computers are not immune to this. Had an elderly
| neighbour asking for help after struggling to forward a message
| sent by one contact on whatsapp to another contact on facebook.
| Having to explain:
|
| > Well there's usually an icon that looks like this, and
| sometimes it will bring up the android share menu, but
| sometimes it opens up something that only shows you contact in
| that app, and having someone on facebook is not the same as on
| whatsapp.
|
| > And oh look, apparently whatsapp and/or facebook has a bug
| where you select to share the video and you end up at the
| whatsapp contact screen but selecting a contact loses the
| video.
|
| > Well I guess you can go into your gallery and share from
| there. That seems to work. But not every app is going to expose
| its images in your gallery.
|
| And it became clear that even the simple devices aren't.
| pmarreck wrote:
| > Well there's usually an icon that looks like this, and
| sometimes it will bring up the android share menu, but
| sometimes it opens up something that only shows you contact
| in that app, and having someone on facebook is not the same
| as on whatsapp.
|
| _Back in my day,_ Apple had something called the Human
| Interface Guidelines and they adhered to them religiously,
| and IMHO it made computing a lot more approachable for a
| neophyte, compared to the mess we have today with "hamburger
| menus" vs. "triple-dot menus" (REALLY??), no general way to
| access the settings of any app, no general way to do anything
| really save for typing in text (and sometimes not even then!)
|
| Instagram and Snapchat (the worst offender here, you
| literally won't learn some inputs unless someone tells you
| about them!) have not made anything better.
| Semaphor wrote:
| besides some apps that do weird stuff, there is always a
| button to open settings, isn't there? Or is that just
| android?
| jimmaswell wrote:
| If this person can learn all this so fast then our parents who
| ask how to put a file in an email or change their TV's input
| source for the 50th time, not making any attempt to retain the
| information because they know we'll be their crutch, have zero
| excuse. It's disgusting. Good on this guy.
| dagorenouf wrote:
| Why did she get him a computer tough, it's the most complex
| machine there is to access the web. Just an iPhone or iPad would
| have been better. Children and old people usually fare better
| with these than with normal "computers".
| ballenf wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: I think government services and offices should
| remain offline-first forever. They should offer online
| equivalents, but they should never assume or require digital
| adoption.
|
| I think this has two big benefits:
|
| - Minor point: Greater resilience to downtime, interruptions to
| service
|
| - Major point: a check on becoming a faceless entity with no
| exposure to the public. Think Google or FB if you get flagged. If
| there's a number you can call or an office you can go to and a
| guarantee of service via those modalities, it provides at least a
| modicum of accountability.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| I agree.
|
| I also think that if Government keeps pushing everything to the
| internet, then the internet needs to be a utility.
| glitchc wrote:
| Offline-first or offline-only can be a major barrier to
| accessibility. Those who cannot travel (due to a disability) or
| cannot travel far (due to cost) are disadvantaged.
|
| Offering services online is a major game-changer for such
| folks.
| kube-system wrote:
| This is a reason why an accessible national mail system is
| also a good thing.
| [deleted]
| dr-detroit wrote:
| Popular opinion: I don't want to pay the tax bill for your
| ubiquitous comfort.
| alexashka wrote:
| You've forgotten to include cost, in your cost/benefit
| analysis.
|
| That's kind of important.
| EGreg wrote:
| UK thinks like you
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/magazine-35569281
| [deleted]
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Government services are available offline or via phone as well.
| The government has some of the strictest accessibility
| requirements for everything they do. It's one of the reasons
| that it's so expensive to roll out new government services.
|
| People are directed to the online versions first because it's
| fastest for everyone involved. We should be pushing everyone
| toward efficient online self-service first, while leaving the
| limited in person and call staff to handle the rare cases who
| need them.
|
| The mistake here was that the person was _only_ informed of the
| online version, rather than being told where to go or who to
| call to handle this offline.
| lurquer wrote:
| Ah, yes... they're available, they say.
|
| Reminds me of this scene from Hitchhikers:
|
| -----------
|
| "But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local
| planning office for the last nine months."
|
| "Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went straight round to
| see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of
| your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like
| actually telling anybody or anything."
|
| "But the plans were on display..."
|
| "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to
| find them."
|
| "That's the display department."
|
| "With a flashlight."
|
| "Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
|
| "So had the stairs."
|
| "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
|
| "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the
| bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory
| with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
| TrueGeek wrote:
| > Government services are available offline or via phone as
| well
|
| The US Embassy FBU in London has recently switched to email
| only. They no longer accept postal mail. [1] The FBU handles
| social security related matters for those out of the country.
|
| You can visit in person only for urgent visits with an
| appointment which they point out are limited. [2] They no
| longer list a phone number of their site so appointments must
| be made through email as well.
|
| Their territory reaches very far from London so in person
| visits for Americans in South Africa means event urgent
| requests are email only.
|
| [1]https://uk.usembassy.gov/u-s-citizen-services/federal-
| benefi...
|
| [2] https://uk.usembassy.gov/u-s-citizen-services/federal-
| benefi...
| gambiting wrote:
| Polish consulates everywhere have also switched to an
| online-only appointment system, you can't visit if you
| haven't got an appointment(except for emergencies), you
| can't book an appointment over the phone, you have to use
| the website.
| alibarber wrote:
| This seems to be the case for other embassies of other
| nations too (I am an expat). But I do get the feeling that
| if you have moved to another country then you probably are
| more able to access services online (buying the ticket to
| get there in the first place is a start) than some 90 year
| old 'back home' who's never left the village.
|
| I guess the flipside is your needs may be more complex
| (passport / family / citizenship issues always are) so
| having someone competent to talk to on the phone is
| necessary.
| TrueGeek wrote:
| Very true. For 99% of cases I would guess they're dealing
| with expats who didn't get a check or have a question
| about medicare coverage.
|
| The example they give of an emergency is "a 12 year old
| needs to have a social security number issued". I think
| social security numbers are issued at birth now, so I
| don't think it comes up often. (Coincidentally I did need
| to have mine issued very quickly at 12)
|
| But, to OP's point, there are services that are indeed
| moving to "online only".
| jbay808 wrote:
| Landing in another country is one of the scenarios where
| you're most likely to be unable to access
| telecommunications. For example, you find your internet
| provider doesn't work internationally, you can't enable
| roaming without visiting their website, your phone isn't
| compatible with the local spectrum, your credit card gets
| fraud-flagged when you try to buy a local sim card
| because you forgot to tell Visa you'd be travelling, and
| you discover there's rules against paying in cash for a
| phone plan.
|
| These are all just some of the things that can go wrong
| arriving in a foreign country!
| alibarber wrote:
| Yes that is unfortunate - but all out of the remit of
| what an embassy will help you with. Maybe if things have
| gone so wrong for you that you throw loosing your
| passport into the mix, or being physically detained by
| the police in the host nation then perhaps they'll help
| out.
|
| But, at least for my own country, they're definitely not
| there to help you with connectivity issues.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Yeah of course they're not. My post is about not being
| able to contact an embassy (or any other critical
| service) that offers only a web interface, when you have
| embassy-relevant business to discuss. It happens that the
| very time when you most might need the service of an
| embassy coincides with times when you are least likely to
| be able to access the internet: freshly arriving on
| foreign soil. The post is not about expecting the embassy
| to fix your internet connection, just to anticipate your
| lack of it.
| trhway wrote:
| Exactly. Otherwise what is the point of having an embassy
| if everything is to be done only online :)
| tallanvor wrote:
| Please keep in mind that some expats have been living
| overseas for 60+ years. They shouldn't be expected to
| know more about technology for any other senior citizen.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| The probably don't accept telegrams either. Maybe email is
| now easier/quicker/more cost effective than processing
| letter mail?
| pessimizer wrote:
| Not offering any way to communicate with them would be
| even more cost effective, but might cause difficulties
| for some citizens.
| mankyd wrote:
| > We should be pushing everyone toward efficient online self-
| service first
|
| I was with you until that statement.
|
| If we push online, self-service _first_ , then the offline,
| in person services will languish. This is what OP was driving
| at.
|
| Establish effective offline services _first_, with the
| intention of online, self-service, and you will end up in a
| place that better serves everyone.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| A few months ago I had to go fetch a simple registration
| form. Usually a matter of like 15 minutes at rush hour.
|
| Due to the pandemic, they had strict rules and required me
| to first book an appointment one week later for a specific
| time slot. Reserving that time slot was only possible via
| phone call.
|
| So I basically had to wait a full week for a one-page
| printout with a stamp on it. Should this be possible
| offline? Yes, but why not save most people the drive and
| waiting times if this could also be done instantly via a
| simple digital signature?
| mankyd wrote:
| I am not suggesting that online, self-serve shouldn't
| exist. I am not even suggesting that we shouldn't
| encourage them. I am merely pointing out that we can't
| implement those _first_ at what will inevitably be the
| expense of in-person services where needed.
|
| Develop the paper forms. Figure out what needs an gov't
| employee or other official to help with the necessary
| steps. _Then_ offer complementary self-serve options that
| can streamline the process.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| In-person doesn't mean that paper forms are required.
| Self-service kiosks are a perfectly reasonable way to
| support in-person needs, and that way all the information
| will flow into the system the same way: digitally.
|
| It's 2021. Why are we still talking about paper forms for
| government functions?
| mankyd wrote:
| >In-person doesn't mean that paper forms are required.
|
| Agreed. All I am really advocating for is that we don't
| expect people to have sign into a website from a
| computer/phone at home. Some people don't have that
| luxury.
|
| > Self-service kiosks are a perfectly reasonable way to
| support in-person needs
|
| That isn't true. A very significant portion of the
| population needs help with these systems.
|
| Hell, I had to order a hamburger from a fast food
| restaurant one time, and I was intimidated and confused,
| (I at least got my food eventually). Most the customers
| who came in tried to avoid the system and went straight
| to the cashier.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Agreed. All I am really advocating for is that we don't
| expect people to have sign into a website from a
| computer/phone at home. Some people don't have that
| luxury.
|
| We could set it up so that everybody does. Public
| libraries have traditionally been great at this, although
| they could certainly do with more funding.
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Online-first and even online-only services seem to be
| happening more often this year while in-person offices are
| shut down or restricted.
|
| I tried to get a form at the DMV a few months ago and when I
| got to the counter they sent me away with a printed slip of
| their web address. (They are currently only handling
| licensing and renewals in person; all title and registration
| processing forms are apparently supposed to be done online.)
| I tried calling their central office and they told me I
| needed to print the form from their website and mail it in.
|
| I suppose if I had asked them really, really nicely they
| might have mailed me a printed form, but it was never
| presented as an option (and that wasn't my issue anyway).
| It's also worth noting that this is state government and not
| federal, so compliance to accessibility requirements may not
| be as regulated or well-enforced.
| hn8788 wrote:
| I can vouch for how strict they are about their accessibility
| requirements. I was working for a contracting company that
| was making training materials and teaching a class for the
| government, and all the material had to have a voice
| recording for blind employees, even though that particular
| job we were teaching for couldn't be done by blind people. We
| also had to provide a script of everything that was covered
| and wasn't on the slides in case a deaf person was in the
| class. It made it difficult to teach the class because the
| instructor couldn't cover anything that wasn't in the written
| script, or else it would be considered discrimination against
| the deaf employees.
| taxidump wrote:
| In the US, I was in a government office a few days ago
| because I was told that if instead of uploaded documents via
| a website and waiting 10-45 days to have them reviewed I
| could go into a local office and provide these documents and
| they would review them on-site.
|
| So I set off on a 35 minute drive to the local office.
|
| While the wait times were shorter in the physical building I
| had to chuckle when I thought they were just collecting
| documents and uploading them to the same online portal I was
| warned would take a fair bit of time, but that I needed to
| allow a few more days past the 45 day limit because they fax
| them into the same remote place periodically. Their email
| system for the document collecting office does not allow
| email attachment of documents.
|
| My other option, I kid you not, was to used their "house"
| cell phone and login to sensitive accounts, bank ect. And
| screenshot the information and use the same web-form to
| upload said documents.
|
| Oh, and covid, I could not touch the "house" cellphone but he
| would wanted me to write my logins in a piece of scratch
| paper and he could navigate for me based on my direction.
| blktiger wrote:
| Be glad they don't allow emailing important documents, they
| certainly wouldn't encrypt them if they did.
| lozaning wrote:
| I had to drop off a bunch of property tax documents for
| the city assessor in a tier 1 city. There was just a
| cardbox box in a hallway with a sign taped to it
| 'Homestead Applications'. I could have taken all the
| other applications out of the box when I put mine in if i
| wanted to.
|
| Emailing unencrypted documents honestly sounds a bit
| better to me then leaving all my info in a publicly
| accessible box.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I've had this experience with better results. I had a tax
| issue that I tried to resolve via phone, email, and paper
| mail for over a year. Finally went to the local office and
| they resolved it on the spot in 10 minutes.
| offtop5 wrote:
| Agreed , it's not a bad idea to always have an offline backup
| system just in case. Like if you're filing for unemployment,
| you can only do that via the government, you can't just go to a
| different unemployment office. So having a way to send in the
| form manually is always a surefire thing. Even if it just gets
| digitized later, that's more than enough to prevent something
| like an oracle system's downtime stopping hundreds of thousands
| of people filing for benefits
| boatsie wrote:
| As far as your minor point, it is likely the person behind the
| desk will be looking at basically the same interface you would
| be online, then just typing things in for you. So if there is a
| service interruption, it's likely they would also be saying
| "Sorry, our systems are down."
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| I've found that the govt can get away with your second major
| point regardless of an online presence. My example is property
| taxes in Cook County, IL. Biggest shit show you'll ever
| experience. I had the board side with me and it took 3 years to
| get the money back. Keyword is back, money already paid. No
| number of calls, in person meetings helped. I must have gone
| there about 6-7 times and nothing.
| tim333 wrote:
| I guess both is the way to go though I'm not sure paper form
| filling produced much accountability. Being able to contact
| humans is good though especially for edge cases and screwups.
| WJW wrote:
| Indeed. There's a reason "Kafkaesque" was a word long before
| the internet existed.
| k__ wrote:
| Popular opinion: I think governments should invest at least a
| mangitude more money into adult education and life long
| learning should be normalized.
|
| Situations like the one mentioned here shouldn't happen.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The ship has already sailed on the major point. It really
| doesn't help that both the high level administrators, the
| unions and a non-trivial amount of the public push things in
| the direction of bureaucrats just being cogs in the machine
| with no agency.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Well the problem with this in Canada is that it's not a binary
| decision between paper forms from an office and submitting a
| web form; there are a bunch of in-between technologies that
| also need to be supported: fax machines, order paper forms via
| an automated telephone system, file by phone, fill out a PDF,
| print and mail - how do you decide when you can phase out any
| or all of these?
|
| Also counter-intuitively, a physical office you can visit or
| phone number where you're on hold for an hour plus, and need to
| access between 9am-4pm, M-F could actually be less accessible
| for a huge portion of society compared to 24/7 web forms. If I
| don't file required forms because I can't get to a government
| office who's accountable for that?
| southerntofu wrote:
| > If I don't file required forms because I can't get to a
| government office who's accountable for that?
|
| That is a big problem. But in my experience, we always manage
| somehow, if only by mandating someone else to do it for us.
| The level of unaccountability reached with online services
| here in France during COVID times is incredible. At least
| when we had physical places to go, i could always have
| someone face-to-face to have an argument about why the hell
| the system is broken. Now this is not an option anymore...
| Verdex wrote:
| I think it makes accountability easier as well. And this is
| actually the reason why I don't do online billing as much as
| possible.
|
| A stack of papers going back years showing that the corporate
| entity you're dealing with confirms that you payed them on time
| for _years_ feels a lot better defense than:
|
| Me: your honor, I swear I paid them Corp: our computer thingy
| says you didn't. also it's a tangle of 50 different sql
| databases, so we'll never know the truth for sure
|
| Similarly, if you have a bunch of paper showing that you did
| something with respect to the government that feels safer than
| officers showing up to your house because a database upgrade
| went sideways. Something is traceable. There's an artifact that
| can be used to reconstruct what really happened.
|
| And the government needing forms can be useful too. If an
| internal auditor (or reporter or something) shows up and finds
| a bunch of filled out forms in the trash or they see that some
| forms are intentionally not replenished, then they can bust
| some skulls. However, on the other hand if things are just "lol
| the computer says you can't have freedoms and liberty" then
| maybe it's because of a bug with respect to the hyphen in your
| last name or maybe it's because someone is persecuting you
| illegally, but nobody can prove anything and there's no trail
| to follow.
| mindcrime wrote:
| _A stack of papers going back years showing that the
| corporate entity you 're dealing with confirms that you payed
| them on time for years feels a lot better defense than:_
|
| I do agree with this sentiment, but I would like to point out
| that one _can_ achieve the same effect (or very nearly so) by
| saving the "receipt" page or confirmation page that you
| usually get with online transactions. You could either save a
| directory full of PDF's and only print them out if there
| actually is a need for them in court, or you could even print
| them as you encounter them and build up that "big stack of
| papers" over time.
|
| Yes this imposes extra friction, which does suck, but it's
| something.
| Verdex wrote:
| Yeah, this is true.
|
| But I personally like having paper that the corporation
| printed out versus something that I printed out. Like,
| technically, you can fake the "receipt" page because it's
| just some html etc. The only thing that proves that what
| you have is real is the confirmation number and suddenly
| you're back to hoping that the corporation that asserts you
| owe them money has and will provide all of their sql
| databases so that you can show that your confirmation
| number is genuine.
|
| On the other hand, if I have years of documents they
| produced and the styles and layout, paper quality, postal
| records, etc all match what everyone else has in their
| homes, then, yeah, it could still be faked, but it's a much
| harder pill for a judge to swallow. Like, at some point
| people are going to decide that you're either telling the
| truth or you are a super genius with way too much time on
| your hands. Either way they're going to tend towards
| letting you off the hook.
| alenmilk wrote:
| One possibility is signed PDF's. You can verify that the
| corporation created the document, that it has not been
| changed. That is more security than a piece of paper. You
| can forge a document.
| Verdex wrote:
| It's not really compelling to a jury though. Digital
| signature verification is just a magical computer saying
| something that the expert witness fails to explain very
| well.
|
| Meanwhile, the jury can look at 200 bill receipts and see
| the age of the paper for themselves. Like, yeah it could
| be faked, but it means they were planning on faking
| something for 20 years.
| pas wrote:
| I get digitally signed PDFs from service providers each
| month, similarly from various gov agencies.
|
| Sure, there are still a lot of people who simply isn't
| comfortable handling this, and for them send them printed
| versions.
|
| Auditors and reporters should audit the end-result, not look
| at paper baskets. We already know "oops liberty not found"
| happens in a lot of cases yet the powers that be does
| nothing. (Because it can't because it's a in a gridlock,
| because well, a lot of people are still just a xenophobic
| bigoted harmful dickhole waving their (single issue) flag.)
| Verdex wrote:
| > Auditors and reporters should audit the end-result
|
| I mean, sure. It's just that it's really hard to know how
| we got to any given end-result. Hey, we see a guy who is
| really having problems getting services for his kids from
| the state. Investigation time! Oh, it turns out he's got a
| bunch of money but he just doesn't want to spend it on his
| kids. So the reason why he's not getting the services is
| legit.
|
| MEANWHILE
|
| A guy isn't getting services for his kids AND we see that
| his forms are all in the trash outside of the statehouse.
| And there's Jimmy from the service department emptying some
| more filled out forms into the trash. Ah ha!
|
| If it was an electronic form, then Jimmy could just hit
| delete (maybe even accidentally) and we would never know.
|
| The point of paper is to make it harder for people in
| government to get away with not helping. Yeah, ideally we
| would investigate everything, but we just don't have the
| resources for that. Forcing someone to throw away paper
| into a basket is a shortcut to help people investigate.
| pas wrote:
| This seems to be some kind of epicycles argument. :)
|
| Paper is no different from digital documents when it
| comes to shady government business. It's just as likely
| for said magical auditors to find printed copies, email
| attachments, missing reports, missing data, misplaced
| data, forgotten backups, and so on. (Have I mentioned the
| tendency of digital things to be easy to get copied?
| Whistleblowers? Also I want to mention just to be
| redundant: backups!)
|
| Audits are conducted based on processes. If the process
| is so lax that it does not mandate adequate records
| keeping then that problem needs fixing. And ... reporters
| write about this all the time, paper or not, it doesn't
| matter.
|
| Just look at how the ATF's National Trace Center (the
| federal gun database) is still paper based to protect
| privacy. (To protect against a government overreach.)
|
| "Interestingly" other special interest groups were less
| successful in keeping their records out of searchable
| databases.
|
| If someone is not getting the money they are allocated by
| law, they usually sue. In the trial the plaintiff
| presents the evidence (documents in whatever form) that
| support (prove) that they are due whatever money they are
| not getting. Then it's the government's responsibility to
| contest that, show the problem with the argument, or show
| some document that changes the outcome of the assessment.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Which service providers are we talking about, if you don't
| mind sharing? Utilities, mortgages, that sort of thing?
|
| I don't recall ever seeing such an option.
| ectopod wrote:
| In the UK hundreds of postmasters were accused of stealing by
| the Post Office because their accounting system couldn't add
| up+. Many lost their jobs. Some were jailed. It took twenty
| years for the management to admit that their system was
| broken.
|
| I work in software and I do not trust it. Like you, I get
| paper bills. Where that's not an option I keep my own
| records.
|
| + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_(IT_system)
| brewdad wrote:
| This the same idea behind why I only push my online bill
| payments to service providers and never allow them to pull
| from my bank account. I want any mistakes to be my own
| rather than having to claw back a double payment that
| drains my account after the fact.
|
| I do allow some services to auto-bill my credit card.
| That's the bank's money first and credit cards offer more
| protection in the event of billing errors.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Right now the right to live and work of many EU citizens can
| only be applied for electronically and proven only through a
| webpage.
|
| If that database field ever goes from 'true' to 'false' they
| will be fired, deported and never allowed into the country
| again.
| dqx wrote:
| > Unpopular opinion: I think
|
| This part of the comment doesn't add anything. We can leave "I
| kNoW I'lL bE dOwNvOtEd BuT..." on reddit.
| dfgdghdf wrote:
| Agreed!
|
| And if government services _do_ go online only, then I think
| the government is obligated to provide free internet access and
| training to those who can 't afford it, in the same way that
| they provide roads and legal defense.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| A lot of people don't have reliable internet access still.
| varispeed wrote:
| I feel the opposite - any contact should be online only and
| traceable - this will minimise surface area where the
| corruption could creep in as any conversation prior to the
| decisions could be audited. You know there will be no table to
| slide the money under.
| nickysielicki wrote:
| My drivers license expires later this year, which is the first
| time that I have ever needed to renew it. Due to COVID, my
| license could be renewed online. I did it last night.
|
| The problem? I couldn't update any of my info from when I was
| 16 unless I went in person.
|
| What this ultimately means is that I will be 34 when this new
| license expires, using a baby faced teenage photo from 18 years
| prior, with physical descriptions that are out of date and
| inaccurate.
|
| Oh well.
| Arrath wrote:
| Same here. I'm nearing 32, with a baby-faced ill-advised high
| school ponytail headshot on my license.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Was it not an option to go in person?
| nickysielicki wrote:
| No, I could have gone in-person if I wanted. But who wants
| to take an hour out of their day to go to the DMV? What do
| I care if my government-issued ID is inaccurate? That's
| their problem.
| raunak wrote:
| It could also potentially be your problem.
|
| What if an officer pulls you over and has to compare
| current you to your ID? Could be cause for trouble.
| [deleted]
| duckfang wrote:
| > Unpopular opinion: I think government services and offices
| should remain offline-first forever. They should offer online
| equivalents, but they should never assume or require digital
| adoption.
|
| The converse is that the government _should_ provide free
| internet access to all citizens and immigrants, IF that is the
| primary way to communicate with the govt.
|
| I also reject that "mail is an option" when mail takes 6-8
| weeks to get to a federal/state inbox, and takes that much time
| back. Even contacts at agencies I work with have me send DVDs
| to their contractors to bypass federal months-long delays in
| sending required resources.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Also there should be programs to re-integrate prisoners after
| incarceration, or just generally give them better access to
| be able to keep up with the outside world.
| cestith wrote:
| There should also be a lot less carcerial punishment. We
| overuse the prison system. Far too much of that is due to
| either minimum sentencing laws the judges and even
| prosecutors tend to hate and to line the pockets of private
| prisons or private corporations servicing public prisons
| and inmates.
| duckfang wrote:
| Absolutely. But I'm also a realist that realizes that
| States have de-prioritized Covid vaccines purely because of
| optics placed above public health.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-
| correspondents/andr...
|
| https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-
| analysis/blogs/sta...
|
| Because of that, any plans that try to to help everyone
| MUST have no exceptions for offenders. In that way, it
| would have a better chance to pass since it doesn't
| directly call out offenders.
| tyingq wrote:
| 30 years, so he would have went into prison in 1991. Wow, yeah, I
| can imagine getting out would have been a surreal experience.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| To that point, I was thinking that.. in some countries, even if
| you are jailed for murder, after some time served, you may
| request and can be allowed to take some 'leave' (24/48h).
| Didn't he get the chance to take any such 'leaves' in the US? I
| honestly don't know US Justice system. Would there be the
| chance that his crime was so severe to not be allowed to get a
| leave at all for 30 years?
| b_t_s wrote:
| From an American perspective that's like giving the lion at
| the zoo a 24 hour leave to stroll around the city. It's so
| obviously absurd almost nobody would ever think of it
| unprompted. Many of the higher security prisons here are
| brutal dangerous paces. Sentences are long, often lifelong.
| Surviving a 30 year sentence without committing further
| crimes in prison that add to your sentence isn't so easy.
| Anybody with significant time left on their 30 year sentence
| would be a fool not to flee if given a 24 hour leave. Some of
| the low security prisons do have some resources focused on
| rehabilitation. But a lot of the higher security ones where
| most serious/violent/drug convicts end up are essentially
| warehouses for storing people who can't legally be executed
| until they're old and feeble enough to be released "safely"
| as pensioners/disabled/homeless. There's a reason criminal
| justice reform is such a big deal. Much of the country wishes
| we could dispense with the warehousing and just execute them
| all. While another contingent is very much tired of being
| thrown into those warehouses to rot based on
| race/socioeconomic status/the size of their bag of weed or a
| variety of other relatively harmless infractions.
| tyingq wrote:
| _" Didn't he get the chance to take any such 'leaves' in the
| US?"_
|
| Probably not. I'm sure some programs exist like that, but
| it's complicated. In the US, most prisoners are in State, not
| Federal prisons. Every state, and even every prison, has
| different programs and rules. Also, in general, US culture
| views prison as pure punishment and not rehabilitation.
| caseyscottmckay wrote:
| Leaves from prison (felons) are not common in the U.S. Leaves
| from jail (misdemeanors) are more common (e.g., leave for
| work during the day, then back to jail after work).
| technothrasher wrote:
| There have been some cases in the US of violent criminals
| being given furlough and committing further violent crimes
| while out. This has tended to reduce furlough opportunities
| here.
| liuhenry wrote:
| I grew up in the US and (unfortunately) this was the first
| time I'd heard of such a concept. I did some research and
| "prison furloughs" became a key political issue in the 1988
| US presidential election [1]. The federal prison system now
| only allows non-emergency furloughs for inmates if they are
| within 2 years of their release/parole date, and who did not
| commit a violent crime.
|
| Prison furlough programs existed in all 50 states in the
| 1980s, and "almost 10 percent of state and federal prisoners
| received a furlough in 1987". [2][3]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_Door_(advertisement)
|
| [2] https://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/12/us/study-
| says-53000-got-p...
|
| [3] https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/05/13/willie-
| horton-...
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I remember that one of Spider Robinson's Callahan's crosstime
| saloon stories
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callahan%27s_Crosstime_Saloon)
| had a similar situation with a guy getting back from being a
| prisoner of war or in prison in solitary for a couple of
| decades and being in effect a stranded time traveler (somewhat
| fuzzy on the details as I read it probably about 40 years ago -
| ironically enough)
|
| I also recall that there was a little fandom controversy at the
| time where people complained that it wasn't really a time
| travel story and what was this jerk Spider Robinson trying to
| pull anyway!
| dayofthedaleks wrote:
| Somebody please identify this story!
| nix23 wrote:
| What is that for a shit country that cant prepare the prisoners
| for a live in the open without having to fall back into old
| patterns?
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