Schadrach

You only asked about rape/SA, so it was the only topic I responded to. According to FBI stats, the 8-10% is actually pretty typical for many other crimes too, but falsely accusing someone of most other crimes aside from something like murder is going to have consequences that are either shorter term or less severe (reputational consequences of being falsely accused of beating someone up are smaller than being falsely accused of rape, for example). Also, rape/SA often has the accusation itself as the primary or occasionally only evidence against the accused, and sometimes that is enough especially in older cases where any physical evidence would be long gone.

inconvenienced

“Inconvenienced” to several months in jail, or 5 years in prison and five of probation and registered as a sex offender until they were exonerated, and several of the ones in the Innocence Project archives are worse than that.

The 2006 Duke Lacrosse kids were “inconvenienced”, and even that involved threats, harassment and vandalism for a case where every piece of evidence except her claims worked against her claims - she also finally admitted to making it up, in 2024.

false accusations are a tiny fraction of accusations

In the 8-10% range by most studies, with some outliers going as low as 2% or as high as 40%.

The distinction between rape and sex is consent. Whether a given sex act is consensual or not exists only in the minds of those involved in it (consent is a mental state, not something directly observable from outside), unless communicated and when communicated only the communication exists which is likely not in any fixed form.

How bad does the damage from the false accusation need to be?

One I’m fond of pointing to as evidence that they happen is Tracy West accusing her ex Louis Gonzales. He spent three months in jail while it was being investigated, and only got out because he happened to have a very heavily corroborated alibi for the day that left only a 6 minute window during which he would have had to travel a total of 2 miles, obtain a duffel bag full of forensic countermeasures, subdue and rape the victim, dispose of said duffel bag in a manner it would never be recovered and return. And that 6 minute window was not when she originally said it happened, until they allowed her to revise her statement which became much fuzzier about when it happened. Also there was evidence that she was researching the way she was tied up in the days leading up to her being tied up exactly that way. By all appearances this case was about a custody dispute over their kid, and despite the case being dropped because it was physically impossible for him to have done it she still got to use it against him because fucking family courts. He eventually got a finding of factual innocence from CA courts and had the entire thing expunged from his record - to be clear, this essentially requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you could not have committed the crime. When he was interviewed by an LA paper about the case, he’d developed an obsession with being as publicly visible with as much paper trail as possible at all time, just in case because of how lucky he was with his alibi from this case (if he’d eaten before he left to get the kid, his alibi wouldn’t exist and that alibi is the reason he only spent 3 months in jail).

How about Brian Banks? Kid with a real chance of going into professional football, Falsely accused, threatened with 41 years, plead to 5 years + 5 probation + registering as a sex offender on advice of his lawyer. The accuser sues the school and wins $1.5M. 9 years later, his accuser contacts him on Facebook and they speak. He secretly records the conversation, in which she admits to having lied but refuses to tell authorities that because she was afraid that they might make her pay back the money. The video gets released publicly and the Innocence Project gets involved. He goes on to briefly join the UFL and then NFL after not having meaningfully played for 11 years (time that would have been the prime of his career if not for the accusation).

Speaking of the Innocence Project, what’s your opinion of them? It tends to vary for left leaning folks - either they like it because a lot of the people exonerated are POC or they hate it because a significant majority of people exonerated by it were imprisoned for some flavor of sexual assault. Go look at their list of cases: https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ According to the site when filtered for sex crimes 184 of the “more than 250” people were imprisoned wrongly for a sex crime. 124/184 of those exonerated by the Innocence Project that were imprisoned for a sex crime were misidentified by an eyewitness. For sex crimes, that eyewitness is very often the alleged victim.

SA is hard to get a conviction in.

Yeah. It turns out that something that usually has no witnesses beyond the accused and accuser, often has little or no evidence other than the accusation itself and the sole difference between it and an otherwise common and legal act exists solely in the mind of the accuser is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

I think there was a pretty short limit on how far in the future you could write someone’s death.

23 days. You had 40 seconds to write a cause of death and 6:40 to write the details, and could even pre-write the details and add the name(s) afterward but the Death Note could not effect anything that occurred more than 23 days in the future, with the exception of dying by a disease that would take longer than that to progress and not writing a time (in which case they develop the disease but die when/how the disease would take them). The real problem is that you also can’t use the Death Note to directly extend someone’s life by writing that they die after they normally would - if you try they just die however they would have died if you hadn’t used the note. You can however use the Death Note to kill someone who is a threat to another, indirectly saving their life.

So you can make a police officer shoot some random people but you can’t make him save a black child /s

Oh, now, you could make him accidentally save a black child. Or get blinded immediately beforehand so he doesn’t know the child is black.

The fourth is catnip. Always the 'nip.

Once my mom asked me to clear out a planter box that had become overgrown because she wanted to plant tomatoes. I pulled up this 3ft tall stalk plant with little purplish flowers, and as soon as I shoved it in the trash bag, the cat came running from the other side of the house and dove face first in the bag. After a minute or so, it was backing out of the bag with the stalk between his teeth dragging it out of the bag and once it was out of the bag started nibbling on it and rolling around on the plant. Looked up what the plant was and apparently I had just pulled up his catnip grow operation. When he came down, he was mad at me for a few days.

You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.

The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don’t care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who’s pushing for it.

It’s like due process - you don’t want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don’t understand why then it’s time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.

If a theory and every attempt at real world application of a theory yield wildly different results, shouldn’t that suggest something in the theory is deeply flawed?

Really it’s actually capitalism that supposes people are too dumb to make their own choices or know how a business is run, and thus shouldn’t have say over company choices.

Really it’s actually that businesses with that structure tend to perform better in a market economy, because no one forces businesses to be started as “dictatorships run by bosses that effectively have unilateral control over all choices of the company” other than the people starting that business themselves. You can literally start a business organized as a co-op (which by your definitions is fundamentally a socialist or communist entity) - there’s nothing preventing that from being the organizing structure. The complaint instead tends to be that no one is forcing existing successful businesses to change their structure and that a new co-op has to compete in a market where non-co-op businesses also operate.

If co-ops were a generally more effective model, you’d expect them to be more numerous and more influential. And they do alright for themselves in some spaces. For example in the US many of the biggest co-ops are agricultural.

The hypothetical was a world without advertising, not a world without capitalism. You could make a food blog for the love of it without caring if anyone reads it or not now, but you likely wouldn’t bother with SEO if you did for the same reason.

Right, but the food blog is still going to end up with an incentive for people to see it, so they’re still going to SEO because they can’t get subs/patrons/whatever they get income from from people who don’t know they exist. So, the implication is that search engines would preference a different style of food blog in the absence of advertising?

You have a long blog post because Google’s SEO favors that, and that’s tied into advertising.

So in your hypothetical advertising free world we also don’t have search engines, at all? Or at least search engine results specifically don’t favor long blog posts?

Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start.

This is less because of that and more copyright. You can’t copyright a recipe as such, so the framing and layout and bullshit narrative are there to fix that.

The blue check went through some twists and turns. Originally it was meant as “your identity is verified”, then it became a status symbol, then it had extra features attached to it. At one point the people approving them were literally taking bribes to expedite or guarantee your blue check (like personal bribes, not a payment to Twitter). And at some point along the way it somehow became a “Twitter approves” thing, because at least one person had their blue check stripped for going too far as a right wing troll (Milo Yianno-whatever). All of that pre-Muak.

Post-Musk, it’s just a subscription you pay for with some extra features and there’s now a different checkmark for corporate or government entities that merely verifies their identity.

Blocklist is literally empty.

They federate with everyone, including the insufferable right wingers, the insufferable tankies, and the people who draw loli (I think there’s only one lemmy instance still active that allows loli and it’s the radqueer one, and it’s tiny enough you don’t notice it unless you go looking for it). Most of the insufferable right wingers have also closed their respective instances.

If their mastodon instance is any comparison, it still federate with everyone including the instances that post loli. I suspect if an instance were posting stuff illegal in the US that would be grounds for SDF to defederate for legal reasons, but 1A protections are broader than speech protections in most of the rest of the world.

You can always block the community or even the entire instance of anyone you don’t want to see.

Or one with the broadest possible federation like lemmy.sdf.org, though they are US based if that’s a problem for you.

SDF does not defederate. The blocklist is empty. And it’s small enough and chill enough that it’s unlikely to get blocked by other instances much.

They’re a non-profit that’s older than the web and offers a variety of network and retrocomputing services including most famously a public access Unix server. They started as a dialup anime BBS.

I’ve never had that problem. Not on my instance’s web page or using Sync on my phone.

The circumference of some unit wheel. If you make a wheel that is 1 unit in diameter in any unit that you please and measure things by placing a mark on the wheel where it touches ground at your start point and counting off full revolutions as you roll the wheel, stopping when that same mark is at the bottom then your measurements are always going to be count X size of unit X pi. If you do more than one such measurement in total then all of your measurements are going to be divisible by the size of unit and pi. If there’s any record of what that unit is (and if you engage in a lot of trade there just might be), then the whole thing becomes kind of obvious when someone converts to the lengths to your units and always gets a multiple of pi.