Ineffective at keeping people sober long term, sure (last I saw it was perhaps 1% better than force of will alone), but that isn’t what this kid needs. He needs socializing around the pain that abuse causes to others, not jail. I don’t care if he remains sober (though he probably should), and there are other ways to help with that. Naltrexone comes to mind.
But he needs to learn how to feel remorse, and a long lockup ain’t gonna do it.
I was specifically replying to your comment that, penalties aren’t much of a deterrence, since drunk drivers don’t expect to be caught. My point was, nor does any criminal.
I get that the intended outcome of drunk driving is just to get home or wherever. Perhaps the intended outcome of me firing a gun wherever I like is for celebration. The risk of killing someone from either action is high.
You know what’s worse than an autoplay video? An autoplay video hidden 20 posts down from the top of the page.
Boing Boing HATES that we still use the blog view.
AND one that isn’t “one and done”, but goes on to the next video automatically.
Even a vice president?
With such potential, surely am exception could be made!
Anyone else get impression Mom just ain’t that smart?
What’s that expensive on it? Shouldn’t we get a $200-or-so-in-parts, completely opensource version for much less money, including the development?
Boing Boing lost all video privileges in my browser long ago. If something looks interesting, it will get a new window with permissions.
What’s expensive about it is the same as any specialised lab gear: it’s a tiny market, so the suppliers price-gouge to an insane degree. I used to have to pay $14,000/gram for drugs that were selling on the street for $100/gram; the custom antibodies I used for immunohistochemistry cost us about $20,000,000/litre (used microlitres at a time, and you really don’t want to drop the bottle…).
These are the sort of cages I’m thinking of: http://www.tse-systems.com/download/tse-newbehavior-intellicage-rat.pdf
You can build your own for much less money (and we did; our labs were full of jury-rigged gear made from gaffer tape and fencing wire), but using homebrewed prototypes adds a major source of variability to your experiments and impairs replicability. Establishing the reliability and validity of a new behavioural testing setup is a thesis in itself.
It rather goes without saying that he didn’t already look Latino (let alone African-American), because even a spoiled rich kid couldn’t get away with that crap if he wasn’t white.
And I specifically never made such a comment. Instead, I said drunk drivers don’t expect to kill anyone. Not that they don’t expect to be caught. They don’t expect that to happen either, but they are probably much more afraid of being caught than they are of causing an accident.
26,000 people are caught drinking and driving in Austria each year. In 2014, 2,900 people were injured and 32 people died. The risk of being caught is more than eight hundred times higher than the risk of killing somebody. So the penalty for drinking and driving is also about eight hundred times more relevant for deterrence than the penalty for vehicular manslaughter.
I would say the risk of killing someone when firing a gun at a crowd for celebration is a tad higher than one in eight hundred. What are you getting at? Are you saying that Afghanistan-style shooting into the air at a wedding and accidentally killing someone should be punished the same way as shooting at the crowd? Or are you saying that drunk driving is worse than irresponsible shooting?
No, I haven’t. I have just read the “twelve steps” that the programme is based on. I see now there secular groups that modify those twelve steps. Do they exist everywhere that judges like to sentence people to mandatory AA?
Or he might need to learn about probability theory, or to better estimate his own skill level. Someone who causes a drunk driving accident might be an alcoholic who is unable to keep himself from drinking, or someone who was too dumb to realize that no, he’s not a genius driver who can drive safely even with a high BAC, so that nothing bad will ever happen.
Which in turn is better than the death penalty. Which in turn is better than being slowly tortured to death.
But it’s not always that easy to compare. Ten years of being not allowed to leave your country, and being threatened with 10 years of prison for drinking any alcohol, that’s definitely worse than a few months in prison.
I only just now realized that the video that “recently surfaced” was not something that someone innocently posted to a facebook page, but a deliberate attempt by someone to snitch on him. I wonder what kind of person that was. As in “look here, he’s at a party, so please put him in jail for 10 years”. That’s first-rate Blockwart mentality in my book.
I did a little bit more reading on the case and found this LA Times article that says that prosecutors want to add as many conditions as possible to his probation, and then just “sit back and wait for him to fail” and spend 40 years in jail. WTF?
Dear Americans, I deeply respect American constitutional tradition for having the strongest interpretation of free speech rights that I know of, but are you sure that the Eighth amendment is anything but a colossal waste of the paper that it’s printed on? Save the trees!
Well, that’s where we disagree :D. When I asked my father which he preferred, his two (three?) Stints in prison or probation and no drugs, probation and counseling won every time. (Botched armed robbery–long story–and two DUIs)
I will vote for any chance of rehabilitation before prison. But I am honestly a wide eyes optimist.
Yes, they do. And they aren’t great. But they do help tamp down on destructive cycles. Geez, I have four friends participating right now I think (voluntarily)
I’ve been to two, then realized while I need to cut back for the sake of my gut, hoo boy it opened my eyes. Scared straight is right 
Troubled … dangerous to other people. Ordering a pizza with your own cell phone when you know a warrant has been issued for your detention is like a cry for help.
Or a total naivety and lack of any clue how modern communication technologies work.
Or that. 
I don’t know that I think that’s the simplest explanation. Traumatized people — which sometimes seems like nearly everyone — can behave irrationally.
I have both hypothesized “how would I act on the run” (in a similar vein to the zombie thought experiments) and how have I found people that didn’t want to be caught. The downfall is always an irrational moment. It is nigh on impossible to avoid (as you suggested)
The local hackerspace crew built a thing like this. You may like it.
http://brmlab.cz/project/ratbox
