It's not quite ready for production yet. There are still some bugs with dev dependencies and private repos that need to be addressed before we can use it.
I have. I think only sent emails to one or two companies in that month, and this one had me an offer in a couple weeks if not shorter. Much preferred their interview process to others.
And.. I'm still working there a year and a half later with no intention of leaving any time soon! The people are great and things are going quite well.
> And I maintain that your reply was indeed a strawman, because it was not at all answering to the point I raised, no matter how you look at it
No matter how you look at it. When I first read your sentence, I unintentionally read what you said differently than what you intended. If ambiguity in language allows for many interpretations of a statement, responding to one instead of the other is not a strawman.
Again, regardless, the purpose of my question was not about what prison was originally intended to be but instead what it's purpose should be.
I agree - I certainly did leave that out. I still think we need to have consequences for crimes with victims, especially violent ones. But that's still only part of the equation: we need to have deterrences and corrections in the same way that there's preventative medicine and treatment.
Even for violent crimes, I don't think that locking people up should be the only response. Victim-centered approaches, like restorative justice circles for example, could and should be used more where applicable. The victim is mostly left out of the equation in our current justice system. We should also try to view instances of violence not as deliberate evil actions taken by people, but instead culminations of bad circumstances and bad choices. This is not to say there shouldn't be repercussions for the bad choices, but we should also offer support and rehabilitation to try to improve the circumstances.
Of course, there will always be the people who are beyond rehabilitation. Even then, for these kinds of people, 'prison' doesn't sound quite right to me.. 'mental institution' seems more appropriate.
On [1], I don't support the death penalty because there are so many errors made in sentencing. Even if we managed to make the error rate much lower, I personally don't think the cost of innocent lives would be worth the potential extra deterrence the threat of death provides over life imprisonment. Hell, even if the rate were 0%, I still wouldn't support it for moral reasons.
> Strawman reply. I was commenting about the key goal of prison in the first place
Before crying straw man (by the way, that's a great way to stifle the discussion), remember that you first said: "Prison exists to ensure ...". There is quite a difference in meaning between that and what you are talking about here - my response was hardly a strawman if you interpret "Prison exists ..." in a certain way.
Exceptions are just that: exceptions. Buro9 is not saying that being born a black women guarantees failure, but instead that, in general, it makes one's life more difficult compared to others.
Mass incarceration, in this case, is the trend in massive upward growth in prison population since 1980 (up 790% federally) and also the way in which we rely on incarceration to deal with social and economic problems - for example, globalization and technological change have drastically transformed the economy and forced poor colored communities into the underground economy. Instead of finding ways to integrate former factory workers into the new economy, we have cut welfare and started locking them up disproportionately.
In short, the United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country, and we do it because we aren't brave enough to deal with our problems more directly. That is mass incarceration.
> who are dangerous or detrimental to society remain excluded from roaming the streets and causing more trouble
This is not the point of prison. Whites and blacks, for example, use drugs and sell drugs at the same rates. Yet blacks are incarcerated at a much higher rate relative to their representation in the general population.
Throughout the entire criminal justice process, from arrest to prosecution / plea bargaining to sentencing, blacks are discriminated against and receive much harsher treatment than whites.
More accurate would be, 'people who we perceive to be more dangerous'.
The number of federal and state non-violent drug offenders have increased by 750% and 1100% respectively since 1980. Do you really think that these people are so dangerous?
On top of this, a good portion of felony convictions are erroneous, and recidivism rates are near 67%, meaning our prisons are actively creating criminals.
Regardless, I was asking the question to try and inspire thought about what prison should be. I should have been more clear.
When recidivism rates are so high (67%), I highly doubt that locking more people up is, in the long run, going to reduce crime better than methods which actually attack the root cause of crime.
> once we get away from "non-violent drug offenders" i think the argument loses force.
I disagree.
97% of federal convictions and 94% of state convictions are the result of plea bargains. At least 4% of death sentences are erroneous. In 2007 there were 2.4 million prisoners in the United States.
I'm guessing death row convictions receive much more attention than normal convictions, especially convictions from plea bargains. In this case, we can conservatively guess that the rate of false conviction is higher for plea bargains.. let's say it's 6%. Extrapolate that to the entire prison population, and that's 144,000 people who are wrongfully locked up. That number is far, far too high no matter how you look at it, and I'm guessing it's even worse than that in reality. The way our system abuses the plea bargaining system is morally reprehensible. This alone should be enough to warrant reform.
> people are capable of really heinous stuff.
People who were raised in shitty circumstances tend to do shitty things. 68% of prisoners don't have a high school diploma. I think that's pretty telling on its own.
The real question is: what is the point of prison? Is it a place wherein troubled individuals can receive treatment and be corrected so that they may be reintegrated at some point and become functioning and productive members of society? Or is simply a place that we punish people indiscriminately?
Recidivism rates tell the story. In California, 60% of the formerly incarcerated end up back in prison. Prison is obviously not a place for treatment or healing or anything that might improve the lives of the people who enter it. It is a place that society simply locks the people up that it doesn't like - for the most part, poor black people.
But there is hope. When I see things like this: http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2014/05/13/rehab-program-boas... , it gives me hope that people will realize that the way we're handling 'corrections' produces more criminals than it stops. Our system currently doesn't work if the goal is to reduce crime in the long run. I wonder how many criminals we have created because of false convictions. Or because of the war on drugs, since the number of federal prisoners has jumped 790% since 1980 (do you really think people have been committing 790% more crime since then?)
I never really gave DDG a shot until now. I tweaked the link color as suggested above to the DDG orange #C9481C (surprised blue was the only option.. had to use custom color and dig into your CSS to find that) and I think I'll give it a shot for at least a week. !bang seems to make up for any deficiencies (I'll probably be using !gm the most, for when I need directions).. right now things are looking great. Keep up the good work!
The best teaching I found in my upper division experience was from GSIs. So yes, they do, especially since they're the ones that will become professors some day.
> But going to Berkeley gives you access to classes like "Qubits, Quantum Mechanics, and Computers" [1] that are offered almost nowhere else. Those classes can be extraordinarily hard, but extremely rewarding.
But there's a big problem here as well: such courses, that are only offered every once and a while, fill up extraordinarily quickly, which goes back to the issue of lack of funds and too large class sizes. Getting into any preferred upper division course is difficult now. It especially didn't help that I was always behind fellow students in my grade when it came to class registration times because I did not have very much AP credit coming in (my high school didn't teach to APs at all). This meant even some students a year or two below me got registration before me.
Another thing: if you wish to inspire students to take the difficult but rewarding classes that you're speaking about, having a mostly mediocre undergraduate experience does not help at all. If most of my upper division courses were, in my experience, taught poorly, why would I want to take even more difficult quasi-graduate courses, where poor teaching would be more impactful?
In the end, I did choose Berkeley over Carnegie Mellon and other schools. I feel a tiny bit of regret in having done so, only because I feel like a smaller prestigious private school would have offered a better undergraduate experience than Berkeley without sacrificing the awesome opportunities that you're talking about. Then again, there are many things about my experience here that I don't regret at all.
> The upper level courses, even at the undergraduate level ... are usually being taught by people who have made it their entire life's work to study that field, and at that level of University are often some of the best people in that field. That kind of perspective, depth of knowledge, and passion don't necessarily translate well to teaching (I can think of some math professors that I had...), but it often does
I personally don't see why 'often does' would be the case, at least in technical fields. I'm also thinking about graduate student instructors (GSIs), the ones who taught discussions. Few were genuinely good at teaching the material either - I always had to 'shop around' to find the few who were capable of explaining the material properly. All of them were very smart, but I think that it was often a drawback because they often seemed unable to empathize with not quickly developing an understanding of the material. Others simply weren't interested in teaching or at least didn't seem interested. There were, though, a couple that were both brilliant and seemed to genuinely think and care about teaching. This paralleled my experience with professors.
I was actually talking with my girlfriend about this because she thought she had a lot of good / great professors during her time at Cal. However, she was also in the social science realm. I have two very rough hypotheses to try and explain this difference:
One, I think that it might have something to do with the fact that most of my professors were originally from countries other than the US. Accents were never a problem, but I would guess that when it came to explaining more difficult concepts, there may have been some gaps in communication.
Two, more importantly, I think that the research done in computer science attracts a different kind of person than research in the social sciences. My girlfriend noted that much of the research that her professors were doing necessarily involved a lot of human interaction that extended beyond the academic sphere. On the other hand, I'm guessing that CS research is a lot more insulated, which may result in worse communication skills.
> even if it doesn't those professors are usually /amazing/ resources outside of class if you want to know more about (subject of choice), what the current problems in that field are, what's considered important or valuable, etc.
Again, this isn't helpful when it comes to actually learning the course material. If you want to do research, this is great. But I'm talking exclusively about the undergraduate educational experience.
> I'd hesitate to make sweeping generalizations, but I think that if you didn't manage to take as many advanced courses (particularly graduate ones. Good undergrads at institutions like that can almost always handle the graduate courses they offer after they have the sufficient background) with as many top people in a field (or fields) as possible, you wasted an opportunity if you were at a school like that.
I took 6 upper division CS undergraduate courses + 1 graduate CS course. Most graduate classes were only for graduate students or, if anything, took only A+ / 4.0GPA undergrads, at least in the few fields I was interested in.
I'm about to graduate from Berkeley, a so-called 'top' school. Besides the name of the degree, I can't think of anything that was particular top-notch about my education here. Class sizes were big and are only getting bigger. The intro CS class had a few hundred when I took it. Now? It can have up to 1100 students. I would say I've only had 4 good or great professors (enthusiastic, interesting, smart but also good at teaching) my whole time here - one in CS, one in EE, the other two in humanities. Everyone else ranged from useless or unbearable to okay. Many were simply too smart, so to speak. In other classes, the lecture powerpoints did most of the work for them.
In fact, most of my learning took place while taking notes independently on lecture notes / slides (rarely the textbook, although sometimes they were okay), sometimes watching lectures from other schools, and then trying to apply the knowledge to projects and practicing for exams. Discussion sections were only occasionally useful, generally for the more difficult classes where I actually needed an empathetic person who recently took the course to explain things to I.
For the most part, though, I feel like I taught myself most of what I learned here - I would have done fine if lectures didn't exist. Mind you, this only applies to the CS program. I took only the required EE courses.
The great thing about the institution is definitely the research. My graphics professor, for example, does a ton of awesome work both academically and professionally. Working with him would have been a great opportunity to get into that industry.
Otherwise, I don't see why I couldn't have just done my education by myself. The only problem would be motivation to slug through the difficult / boring but important stuff. My databases class got quite boring at points such that, if I were teaching myself, I may have just skipped over a good chunk of the class material. I'm imagining that if I just had a person to get on my case and me on them, it would be almost as effective as the concept of a GPA.