Prison incarceration

"Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1kteuk79q"

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. The Declaration of the Rights of Man says, Be just! The Bill of Rights says, Be fair! Instead of announcing general principles—no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done—it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice. You can get off if the cops looked in the wrong car with the wrong warrant when they found your joint, but you have no recourse if owning the joint gets you locked up for life. You may be spared the death penalty if you can show a problem with your appointed defender, but it is much harder if there is merely enormous accumulated evidence that you weren’t guilty in the first place and the jury got it wrong. Even clauses that Americans are taught to revere are, Stuntz maintains, unworthy of reverence: the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” was designed to protect cruel punishments—flogging and branding—that were not at that time unusual.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/01/30/120130crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1ktaNLahT

Reminds me of Dave's "Its against the spirit of the law..."

Gay won't go away, genetic or not

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/opinion/sunday/bruni-gay-wont-go-away-genetic-or-not.html?src=me&ref=general&gwh

Its hard to identify any group genetically once the physical marker is removed. For example, if the gene for the presence of melanin would were excluded, what else would continue to make blacks black? A group can only be defined by physical characteristics because anything else might be subject to the environment.

Inevitability

As applied to the financial meltdown a la "Margin Call"? As applied to the movement of U.S factories to Asia?

A primary reason why I want to go into start-ups. Entrepreneurship prevents inevitability and provides a countering force to global corporate capitalism's inertia...

Systems

Reminds me of the same reason Yalies go into consulting and finance:

“The consumer electronics business has become an Asian business. As an American, I worry about that, but there’s nothing I can do to stop it. Asia has become what the U.S. was for the last 40 years.”

I think one has to believe that there are actions to stop inertia, actions to stop a path-constrained route.

Debt

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opinion/krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html

"Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years."