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  • 6 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoNews@lemmy.world•'Disturbing' recordings from inside child-predator sting shows police, MAGA operatives ignoring laws
    10·
    2 months ago

    I’m not 100% sure it’s being used correctly here, but entrapment in general is when a police officer convinces or coerces a person into committing a crime, and then arresting them for that crime. So, if a police office is standing somewhere and you walk up to them and ask to buy drugs, they can arrest you for that. But if they are like “hey man, want to buy some drugs? Come on, it’s only $10. You know what, for you, first time is free. Just take them”, and then you take them, that is entrapment.

    The reason entrapment is problematic is because it’s hard to tell if you would have committed a crime, had the officer not pushed you into it. Maybe you were just feeling pressured and wanted the uncomfortable situation to go away, etc.

    As for not exposing entrapped people, there is this moral dilemma in general that often gets dramaticized in cop shows and movies, which is that the person we know is guilty gets away on a technicality or procedural issue. And at first blush that looks like a flaw. But actually it’s more like the lesser evil of a bad situation. Because what we don’t want is police using powers that erode the freedoms of the innocent people, like breaking into people’s homes and going through their stuff, or wire tapping, or torture, or whatever. Things we don’t want police to do to innocent people.

    If doing these things were “frowned upon”, but we still used the information we gained from it anyway, then it would be a viable police strategy. It’s a cost of doing business, but it gets the job done. Even if a single officer got fired for it, they could choose to matryr themselves to do the bad thing and get the guy. But we don’t want cops doing these things, because anything they do against a person they think might be guilty is something they could be doing to a person that’s actually innocent. So we kinda have to make the rule be that any information, no matter how good, that was gotten in a bad way becomes bad information that we all agree never to use. Because that’s the only way to make sure the police don’t want to do the bad things.

    It may let some guilty people go free, when the police screw up, but in theory it protects all of us against an escalating police state.

  • psycotica0@lemmy.catoTechnology@lemmy.world•Apple is now banned from selling its latest Apple Watches in the USEnglish
    767·
    9 months ago

    Well… That’s actually probably fair as stated.

    BestBuy etc don’t sell Apple’s products on commission, they bought them from Apple for a wholesale price, they’ve got them in a warehouse and on shelves right now on their dime, and the only way they make that money back is by selling them.

    And the only way Apple makes money from a product being sold at Best Buy is that Best Buy will likely buy more stock to replace the stuff they sold, and they’ll buy that from Apple.

    So if it was banned everywhere it would be unfair to the retailers that already paid Apple for a product they now can’t recoup, and it wouldn’t impact Apple at all because they already made their money from Best Buy.

    This way the retailers can get their money back, but can’t get any more, which means only Apple is impacted.

    The only other way that’s semi-fair (but would be extreme) would be for Apple to be forced to do a recall or something and reimburse all the retailers the money they had already spent. Doable, and definitely more of a punishment for Apple, but a lot of extra work for everyone if the outcome of this is that Apple settles and then everyone can just go back to ordering more again.