While there are exceptions, and in general exceptions seem pretty common, they still require businesses to officially get approval and it gives power to parents to enforce rules that would otherwise be hard to do so. Even with the exceptions for children to legally be allowed to drink, I would be surprised if that led to more kids drinking than alcohol obtained illegally, which means the question should be back on how well does the law work (obviously not perfectly, but there is a large gap between perfect and so poorly that it is useless purely from an efficiency perspective).
The ban we have on gambling seems weak. From trading card games to loot boxes to those arcade games that look to be skill based but are entirely up to chance, children are allowed to do all. The rules feel very inconsistent to the point that they appear arbitrary in nature.
There are infinite many such strings, so that alone can't be used to prove the Turing machine of k states can check all strings. So that leaves open the original question, how do we know that a Turing machine of k states is able to have one of the stated outcomes for any possible bit string?
Is it terrible? If we were to remove the system and keep it gone for some set amount of time, once people realize it was really gone, would crimes not come back?
We can compare to other countries and see their rates of crime, but such comparisons are difficult to make accurately because you are judging all social differences at once, not just a different legal system. Including things like how much lead has the population been exposed to, effect of poverty and sense of community. Things far beyond the legal system.
> If we were to remove the system and keep it gone for some set amount of time, once people realize it was really gone, would crimes not come back?
Why are you comparing it to a lack of a justice system rather than to a more competent justice system?
> We can compare to other countries and see their rates of crime, but such comparisons are difficult to make accurately because you are judging all social differences at once, not just a different legal system. Including things like how much lead has the population been exposed to, effect of poverty and sense of community. Things far beyond the legal system.
Poverty is absolutely a part of the legal system—it takes the legal institution of private property, for instance, to ensure wealth stays unequal.
>Have all of the people scammed been brought whole?
Can you ever make them whole? Even if you pay them back all their money, there is the period of time without, the fear and pain from losing it, and similar that cannot be undone. For other crimes, there is often a victim whose state can never be fully reverted. If this is our view of justice, then justice becomes an impossible thing which can never be achieved. Does such a stance risk people eventually no longer chasing what can never be acquired?
The food bank I worked at had guidelines per item group. Different items had different levels of strictness, though any worker was free to throw away any item if they thought it was spoiled or too badly damaged. Dents were okay as long as it remained sealed.
My guess is the strictness of the rules is driven by availability of resources and the level of need being met by the organization.
Controlling for population density doesn't control for the impact of population density on the issue at hand, as these are two different factors which are related and which are named very similarly.
Consider this simplified example.
11 areas. 10 of these are isolated and have 10 people living in each area. The last area has 100,000 people living in it. Of those 10 areas, 9 have 0 incidents, and 1 has 1 incident. In the 100,000 area, there are 100 incidents.
Not controlling for the population:
The populated area has 100 incidents, the isolated areas have an average of 0.1 incidents. A 1,000 times difference. Populated area is much more dangerous.
Well that's obviously the wrong way to look at the data, so lets account for population:
Isolated areas have a rate of 1 per 100 population, populated areas have a rate of 1 per 1,000 population. A 10 times difference, in the opposite direction. So now we have established a link between being isolated and have more incidents, but we don't know why.
We still haven't controlled for the impact of population density on incident rates. We need much more data to solve this, as with the given information the result would be "Isolated areas have 10 times the risk of incidents" and then controlling for that factor we would see no more trends in our data. If we added thousands of more areas with different levels of population, calculate the per capita rate of incidents in each population, and then create an analysis of how populate density relates to incident rates, we could then control for both factors. The catch is that this last step is more difficult without enough data and often researchers aren't able to isolate single individual items to control for because they correlate too strongly with other issues.
Is there anything really special happening here? For a non-technical individual, it can be hard to tell when someone technical is providing value and when they are, to use the term in this post chain, being a parasite. A technical person has the same issues with non-technical people. I've seen different non-technical business areas have this issue with other non-technical areas. I've read reports where supposedly entire departments were cut and the result was that they mostly parasites and the business did better after losing them, along with times such a decision killed a company.
I'm not sure there is anything really special with engineers in this situation. It seems like one of many varieties of the same problem with telling who is producing value and who is faking the appearance of producing value.
Ultimately, the people making those decisions need to be technical enough to know. Having those decisions made purely by non-technical people is playing russian roulette. This is something that is in many ways easier in more technical domains because at least it's possible to semi-reliably see through the bullshit.
>The ball starting to move without anything acting on it would violate other principles of classical mechanics.
Isn't gravity acting on the ball? Ideally a ball balanced a the tip of a bowl has 0 net force, but only because it has the force of gravity pulling it into the bowl and an equal force from the bowl pushing back. This would require assuming a reality where there is no smallest particle, no atoms making up the bowl or ball as they are both perfect mathematical objects comprised of infinite points no matter what resolution you look at them at.
The issue is that such a system, if it can be created by rolling the ball up the bowl with perfect precision from any direction, indicates that it is unstable and may reverse at any point, but without any obvious reason causing it to do so. So either the system has some non-deterministic factor which allows for the perfect stability to break at an arbitrary time in an arbitrary direction or it isn't time reversible as the ability to roll the ball up the bowl cannot be reversed.
Looking at it another way, can you tell the difference between a ball I perfectly rolled to the top of the bowl 10 years ago and one I did 10 seconds ago?
I do wonder if we've added so many assumptions, with mathematically perfect objects and infinite precision forces that we have created some sort of paradox. We have hit levels of perfectly spherical cows that cause even the perfectly spherical cows to complain about unrealistic standards.
I think they have done that. The catch is that these scientists are likely to take their time, because they want to produce something with weight behind it. This isn't lab #5234's attempt to reproduce it which showed some weird behavior that might be a success, this is the expert report on the original material giving second opinion on how valid the first's claim is. That needs to have more care, which means more thoroughness doing the research and more time spent writing up the final result with care. If lab #5234's attempt ends up being a false positive or experimental error, it will be one of many and won't mean much, but if this particular report is wrong or has a major error, that is going to be impactful in a negative way.
