I think both sides of this conflict (Tan and Radley) are talking past each other and scoring points for their respective sides; Radley is famously an advocate of progressive prosecutors, and Tan (IIRC) worked to remove Boudin. I don't expect a totally accurate and balanced retelling from either side, in the same way that you should not expect a completely neutral report on inner-ring suburban housing policy from me (I'm a housing activist).
But I did come away from this with a lower opinion of Boudin's office.
(For what it's worth, I was extremely optimistic about the wave of progressive prosecutors led by Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, and while I have some Radley Balko issues, I've been reading John Pfaff on this stuff for a decade. What's happened to my worldview since then is that I feel like I've watched outsider-y progressives get elected into prosecutor roles and then fail their constituencies not because of ideology but over basic competency issues. I'd be foursquare behind a progressive prosecutor in a major city that ran a tight ship; we tried this in Chicago and didn't get that.)
† btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
Huh, I went through a similar journey in New York, starting as an advocate of criminal-justice reform and then getting fed up with the incompetence.
And while I wouldn't say ideological inflexibility is ideology per se, one of the contributors to ineffectiveness I saw in New York was a simultaneous inability to tolerate competent people with even slightly-divergent viewpoints (and there were a lot of red lines–I don't know what multidimensional beast could thread them), or, alternatively, an inability to fire or beach clearly-incompetent people because they were part of a priority community. (Read "community" broadly. It might be an identity. It was more often whatever union or local progressive club the person cropped up through.)
Strongly inclined to hire such a prosecutor. Has this model been successfully deployed in any large U.S. cities? My only experience is watching it struggle in a medium one.
On your last point: given the ethical responsibility of a prosecutor, I’d go one step further. If you’re the prosecutor for a jurisdiction where a journalist works, and you make any statement about the legality of the journalists works, you better be substantially likely to secure a conviction, otherwise you should mind your business.
(I have feelings here because we're in a mini-spat between our PD and our terrible local newspaper, which is upset that our chief won't give them an interview after the local police union gave her a no-confidence vote; where I live, that vote is, reasonably, viewed as a sign she's doing the job well. But either way: she's not going to give an interview on this!)
All discussion of the 'Misrepresentations' article is responsive to Gary's mention of it in the original article. And at no point does Radley appear to endorse its contents.
So, first, no, I feel like I'm saying the opposite of "they're dumb". I don't think either Foxx or Boudin are dumb. I think they're both interesting people with interesting and valuable views.
When I say "basic competence issues", I'm talking about the kinds of things that would go wrong if, like, you or I took over the CCSAO and started managing all the prosecutions in Cook County. For instance: having huge numbers of line prosecutors resign, in part because you totally fuck up the promotion ladder, in part because you shift staffing priorities away from line prosecution and towards internal policy positions, and in part because you fail to sell your immediate-term vision for how you're going to manage the agency.
The superficial way to look at veteran prosecutors resigning is that they're no longer culture fits, which you can look at as a good thing: Boudin and Foxx were hired to change those cultures. But a more practical and immediate way to look at them is that losing veterans puts the screws on your ability to execute the day-to-day of the agency. These prosecutor offices were incredibly strained before people like Boudin and Foxx got there. Which means: there was already an extent to which prosecution decisions were being made not just on justice, safety, or public policy more broadly, but simply on a triage basis.
When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions. Foxx tried to put a brave face on it, but nobody was buying it.
What's more frustrating is that Foxx was doing this at the same time as Illinois was rolling out SAFE-T, which ended cash bail in Illinois. I am wholeheartedly in favor of SAFE-T, and I think by-default cash bail is an idiotic system that unnecessarily amplifies the societal cost of law enforcement. But SAFE-T was ultra-controversial in Chicagoland, and Foxx went through all this stuff while people were freaking out daily about catch-and-release. It didn't help that all of this coincided with a huge regional increase in carjackings, the second most important urban index crime after murder. It further didn't help that she was accused of refusing to prosecute juvenile carjackers, and that when confronted by reporters about that, she didn't have a clear denial.
I hope this reads as I intend it to, which is: not ideological, just an assessment about whether someone is prepared to step in and run the office, most of which is boring and just needs to be done correctly.
(I think you can probably look at Krasner as an example of a prosecutor who has avoided these traps.)
In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!
This isn't really a statement on Boudin did or did not do since I don't have that knowledge but rather from separate experience seeing law enforcement shit itself during other elections.
Nobody has control over other people. If you want to overhaul the police, run as a legislator. Prosecution is most closely an executive function–you're expected to do the best you can with the cards you're dealt, not throw your toys out of the pram because you wanted an ace trail.
> When you start losing significant numbers of people, you lose the ability to set your own execution priorities; circumstances are making prosecutorial decisions. Foxx tried to put a brave face on it, but nobody was buying it.
So, circumstances were making prosecutorial decisions, and the new DA efforts to make fundamental changes did not fix those circumstances, and therefore all changes they made were considered to cause that state.
The office wasn't running. It is not the fault of the new guy that it keeps not running.
A problem I see all the time in these kinds of public policy debates is that people have ideological rooting interests. That isn't going to get you anywhere in a debate about a major metro prosecutor's office. You can't project out "this person was progressive therefore they were good" and you can't do "this person is a law-and-order tough-on-crime prosecutor so they're good" either. It's a very difficult job. Notably: I think you'd have a hard time finding credible people who believe Foxx did a good job in her office.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding! God so many people don't "get" this. Engineering leaders that come in and create and exodus of senior leaders, same thing. I started calling it organizational momentum. The speed at which you get things done, goes up as the organization gets to understand itself. A bunch of key people leave and BAM momentum goes to zero and suddenly all the milestones you are missing are putting all the wrong pressure on the org to get moving again.
Can you comment on why this is? Is it because it's common? Or so visibly impactful?
Importantly: the carjacking wave wasn't Foxx's fault (it was in fact Kia's fault). She was in an incredibly tough position --- she also had to deal with Chicagoland police departments that have not covered themselves in glory over the last 20 years. But she didn't rise to the challenge.
Political achievement via moral/ethical/legal means does not work. We expect a single person with extremely limited power to assume a relatively minor position in government, then somehow defeat incredibly wealthy organized opponents, in addition to solving complex logistical and social issues, and to do all that without ever doing anything wrong? It's nearly impossible. Progressives need to return to the good old days of corruption and coercion if they want to get anything done.
No, we expect them to do like one thing right without bungling the basics. The track record of the pre-pandemic era wave of progressive prosecutors was some combination of doing absolutely jack shit in the first category and/or being asked for table stakes on the latter and swallowing their chips.
Are we reading the same document?
The first example is almost a perfect example of what's stated in TFA. Lim is incredibly aggressive in making her argument, and not an argument based on real evidence.
Scanning through the rest, it reads as much the same.
Direct gdrive link for those who don't want to go back and scroll through the article again: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VZKYxe0oGq7HeC5Kj2lxf-X55r4...
edit:
> At one point it accuses Lim of "violating HIPAA", which is not a thing† (HIPAA constrains covered entities, not reporters).
Ehhhhh. I diagree with that reading. There's a clarification bullet point two lines down from the headline bullet (page 3). Emphasis mine.
> This suggests Ms. Lim was received a patient’s privileged medical records from another unauthorized source in violation of HIPAA.
I read this as the unauthorized source is violating HIPAA. But I guess neither of us are lawyers. So...
I'm confused where this came from. I cannot find this link in the original article as submitted:
https://radleybalko.substack.com/p/truth-power-and-honest-jo...
The most I can find is "But I found another place where someone has posted all 81 pages. It’s here. Feel free to look them over."
Where "here" links to:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21011168-responsive-...
That is the 81 page PDF referred to multiple times in the article and is titled "Responsive Records Lim - Balko correspondence_Redacted". I don't see "HIPAA" appear in it anywhere. Toward the end of that document on page 69 is a screenshot of a text that includes a Word attachment titled "Dion Lim Misrepresentati...". After that are screenshots that are excerpts of the gdrive document that you linked, but the HIPAA accusation is not in any of those screenshotted excerpts.
So how did tptacek even come across the HIPAA accusation, and how did you find the document that you linked that contains it?
Edit: ah, it's linked from this sentence "But in the interest of transparency, I’m posting it as well. You can read it here." where "here"[^1] links to the gdrive document.
Sheesh.
[^1]: Pet peeve - you've failed HTML 101 if you use "here" as a link. A few sentences earlier in that paragraph is the text that should've been the link text: 'the “Dion Lim Misrepresentations” document that Tan mentions in his post'.
i don't know about you, but i'm pretty confident a DA's office has a much better idea than me about what each of the HIPAA sentences in the document translate to in terms of "allegations".
That's a question about messaging, not the law.
> † btw: if you're the DA for a jurisdiction that includes a reporter, and you claim the reporter's journalism is unlawful, you sure as shit better have that right.
> That's an extremely charitable read of a DA's office alleging lawbreaking.
you seem to be inferring that the DA has made an allegation of unlawful acts, and that there could be consequences for that allegation. that sort of thing often entails "legal stuff". courts and judges stuff. hence, my spiel on "we are not lawyers".
i believe you stated an *uncharitable* take on the bullet points in the document. my point is that there is another reading. one where the benefit of the doubt is given to the relative experts in law. a sibling in the thread seems to agree that *a* violation occurred, not directly implicating Lim, which implies that they may have read it a similar way to my *charitable* take.
"COUNT 2 (Conspiracy to Wrongfully Obtain and Disclose Individually Identifiable Health Information) 19. Paragraphs 1-3 and 5-18 of Count 1 of this Superseding Information are hereby realleged and incorporated as though set forth in full herein. 20. At all times relevant to this Superseding Information: a. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) protects individually identifiable health information from wrongful disclosure or obtainment and seeks to set national standards to maintain patient confidentiality. b. In connection with HIPAA, the United States Department of Health and Human Services enacted regulations to safeguard the privacy of patients’ medical records and limit circumstances in which individually identifiable health information or protected health information can be used or disclosed. The HIPAA law and privacy regulations apply to, among others, health care providers, such as medical doctors, who transmit health information in connection with a transaction covered by the law and privacy regulations. c. Frank Alario, who is listed as a co-conspirator with respect to Count 2 of this Superseding Information but not as a defendant herein, was a health care provider and a covered entity under the HIPAA law and privacy regulations.
21. From in or about August 2014 through in or about February 2016, in the District of New Jersey, and elsewhere, defendant KEITH RITSON did knowingly and intentionally conspire and agree with Frank Alario and others to commit offenses against the United States, that is, to knowingly and without authorization obtain individually identifiable health information and protected health information to another person, and to knowingly and without authorization disclose individually identifiable health information and protected health information maintained by a covered entity relating to individuals, contrary to Title 42, United States Code, Section 1320d-6."
Here is another similar case of a non-medical person violating HIPAA.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdtn/pr/memphis-man-sentenced-c...
Take the L :-)
I'm commenting on the specific thing Boudin's office (inexplicably) wrote about this particular reporter. I'm not making a grand statement about HIPAA.
(I don't know anything about the reporter other than that they worked for ABC7 in SFBA and not like GatewayPundit).
I would categorically disagree with your statement.
Jeff Bezos
Elon Musk
Bill Gates
Mark Zuckerberg
All billionaires. All have created one (or multiple in Musk's case) products that have greatly benefitted society in numerous ways. The Gates Foundation has donated billions to causes all over the world. Bezos has committed over $3B to various charitable causes.
Also, More than 70% of lottery winners will run through of the money they've won and be right back where they started before winning. Further proving my point the people who win the lottery are not visionaries and have no desire to create products that will change people's lives. They're just happy to have the money.
Jeff (and the board) wonders if deliveries could be more efficient, and wants to find efficiencies to report to the board and the shareholders. However it's fucking dave, 6+ layers below jeff that is firing drivers for missing unreasonably tight delivery schedules because they had to stop to take a leak. So that dave can tell suan who can tell susan who can tell .... and finally jeff that deliveries are now 2.3% faster.
I do think that enough money and therefore a higher degree of control of your own life experiences does warp your perceptions of the world, however. I fail to understand why anyone with a billion fucking dollars in the bank just doesn't retire to a beach stocked with sex workers and cocaine and instead decides to continue torturing people through layers of unthinking bureaucracy though.
And does not even care how or want to know how, just attain the goal at any cost. Of course, when word gets out that people are forced to pee in bottles, he suddenly wants to change things, not because he cares about the conditions that led to it, but because it damages his image.
You have to say "Deliveries should be as efficient as is consistent with basic decency, anyone delivering Amazon packages will have breaks and schedules that are reasonable and achievable", in the same way that he mandated APIs[1]
You're right that the money itself does not cause it but what mattered with people like Olsen was that he had a Scandinavian background and was born in the 1920s. 'Saint' is a telling description because people like him came out of a, not necessarily explicit but still functioning culturally Christian environment with virtues that tempered the influence money had on them, he often remarked that humility was most important to him.
Very different person from the current class of individuals who are completely unrestrained by the values people took for granted for a long time.
It's a huge mistake to confuse that kind of deep cultural Christianity with what has been politically ascendant for a long time now in the US. That older, European set of values is still much more alive in say Sweden, which despite an even higher per capita rate of billionaires would not produce Garry Tan or Bezos or Musk.
Mixing wealth into this situation increases the blast radius and makes it more public.
Directors of small companies are the same, they're just not wealthy enough that they could do any harm.
Firstly, you will have the people who will praise your diamonds and everything and make you lose touch with reality.
But there would also be the more subtler ones whom you actually consider friends. there can be two things that you meet some people before hand and judge them or were already rich before having such friends, but even then the first group might just change knowing that you are now extremely rich and might want subtle favours and so act subtly different.
In a nutshell, I feel like extremely rich people might not know how people actually think of them because we have commoditized everything to money,opportunities and networks and in some sense, they are unable to trust their own real instincts too.
Also we are forgetting the fact that these people would change with so much external influences too and that some people would stop after a certain point so as to they will not reach the scale of billions but rather stop at millions.
All of these factors combined make for the most egotistical machines.
just a few thoughts on extremely rich people, South park creators seem to be one of the exceptions for me and it seems like those guys are just two friends who just like doing what they do and even said a massive fuck you to paramount even on television.
He regularly calls out "Marxists" on Twitter and rails against leftists, all while supporting mass surveillance and building a dystopia.
What a yucky person.
Centrist in America means institutionalist, i.e. gunning for the status quo. That's going to piss off lefist and right-wing fanatics because both want to blow up the status quo. (They tend to be seen as a spoiler for progressives and conservatives. Think: Joe Manchin or Susan Collins.)
Way too broad a brush to paint with. If we want to retain any sort of liberal democracy we need to stop with the rhetoric that "if you're not as far in X direction as I am, you must be on the other side". Its destroying the democratic party.
I'm a staunch democrat, and this is just sad to see. Progressive and centrist should both be able to coexist. We should be able to call out ineffective policies within our own movement without being called far right radicals.
Hey brown or yellow immigrants - the conservatives will gladly accept your vote, but the second you walk away they won't even refer to you by name in conversation, they'll refer you to with every slur in the book. I grew up with some very far-right types who had money...nice to "the help" in person, but soon as earshot is out of range, you hear the n-word like it's as common as the word "the". And just because you're not black, doesn't mean they don't hate you too. I've heard some horrid things said to Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Pakistanis, etc.
Anyone remember the young republicans club at Florida International University scandal? Lots of young male Cuban immigrants (or kids of immigrants) desperate to be seen as white. Problem is, you pull any one of those kids out of Dade county, they'll be called a Mexican and told to go make tacos.
Garry's actions on social media remind me of those kids, albeit someone with a bit more money, and a little less perspective on things.
>Boudin ... alleged... that the campaign was largely a Republican effort to remove him from power. Despite Boudin's claims, the recall campaign was publicly led by Democrats. 83% of donors to the campaign were from Democratic-registered voters or no-party-preference voters, with over 80% of donations coming from local San Franciscans. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesa_Boudin)
There's quite a lot on the reasons why in the article.
The status quo is easy, change is hard, and anyone benefiting from the status quo will do whatever they have to in order to prevent change. Progressive by definition want change, progress. Change is scary. Humans are most easily motivated by fear.
you won capitalism. go away.
Apolitical journalism started with the telegram wire services as a _marketing_ approach, not a moral one. It allowed them to sell to more local papers which were all politically aligned. You can see that in some of the surviving names. But local reporting stayed political in those individual papers the whole time. We have like a whole chapter in basic us history classes on the political implications of the Spanish American war journalism empires.
Apolitical tv was similarly a market condition. The airwaves were limited, so the content was controlled. That was apolitical in that it tried to appease both parties, but you wouldn’t see any topical coverage on political issues they both opposed.
So when people talk about politics entering journalism they are telling on themselves. They prefer a very narrow set of journalism that wasn’t ever some universal norm, and was itself political.
Which food you eat (are you vegan? carnivore diet? Both have implications in regards to animal welfare, climate change, soil use, identity etc etc), which media you consume (obvious), which job you have (which power structures do you strengthen with it? who benefits from your labor? who do you try to disrupt?).
To say one is "apolitical" is just voicing a preference for the status quo.
To decry something as political is just voicing one's political opposition to the view expressed.
I can assure you they absolutely are. Of course there isn't a well defined elected government here, but 'social politics' between children are absolutely occurring. Things like looks, material goods, clothes, ability to take care of themselves, etc all affect how they interact with each other and who is popular and gets to take the lead/be bullies/etc.
HN posters can be really clueless to the world around them at times.
What children? What park? The presence of a park pre-supposes a political society that has prioritized parks, the budget to enact those priorities, and the space to do so. Any one of those can spiral into its own political microcosm.
How is that park maintained? Is there a special kids area of the park? Is it "for kids" or is it "The kids area", implying that kids aren't allowed in the rest of the park? Are the children not allowed in the park after a certain time - and who decides that time, and why? Sometimes the park is used for town events, but can get rented out. Who decides that?
Complexity is inherent, from the atoms to the galaxies. Any rejection of that is just plugging your ears, willfully or not.
The "everything is politics" meme is old and annoying.
It's just not political for me.
I guess I'm not surprised that this cognitive trap about politics has spread - after all, people care more about deploying any tools they can to "win", rather than being correct.
“If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil” is an opinion that is judgmental, aggressive, frames the speaker as a bully with self-appointed moral superiority.
It’s not nice to tell people “you’re selfish and part of the problem if you just want to live a quite life away from all the crazy people who link politics to their self worth” and calling it “not nice” is a wild understatement. I see it as harassment. “Care because I think you should!”
Fuck that haha
You don't like to be called selfish for not considering how your actions might affect others, but others are supposed to care about how their actions might affect you? Seems like a pretty self centered attitude to have.
Incorrect. People were saying if you don't vote at all, you're supporting Trump.
>“Care because I think you should!”
Welcome to politics. Not only do I demand that you care because I think you should, but I will smash you with the full force of the law if you don't.
Now, if you decide to do nothing, well, you're getting your ass smashed by the full force of the law and whining like a little bitch saying "I'm not political, why did this happen to me".
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice".
And "There are no neutrals in the reality, entropy forbids it".
I never said “If you don’t participate in politics you’re evil”.
My point is that there is no not participating in politics. The lack of participation is a political choice in itself.
(I posted this article with its actual title a few days ago and it didn't pop at all, which is funny I guess)
"Usually it's the latter, because, who wouldn't want the needle to move even a little bit in the right direction?"
Which direction? The one you think is right or the other one, other people think is right?
Musk at one time said something like "I work 80+ hours a week, so the people around me should work that much too". They are completely blind to how sociopathic they are. It's a totally unhealthy amount to work for one, but for two is Musk himself will likely earn billions from those workweeks while the people around him will earn almost nothing except stress and then getting randomly fired by him on a whim.
They are not connected to the same world we are.
Beyond that, normal people also have other things besides work that will take up their time. It's a lot easier to work 80 hours a week when you're rich enough that you don't ever have to do laundry, clean the house, cook, take care of your kids, tend to a sick relative, sit in a waiting room for 6 hours, be stuck in traffic for 45 minutes, etc.
One of the reasons that working a lot sucks for most of us is that we still have to go home and do the laundry or whatever.
In this case, there’s no way this story would be considered worthy of front page placement if it wasn’t about a YC exec. We’ve overridden usual moderation policies and signals to keep it on the front page, as per our longstanding policy.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
When people tell you who they are, listen to