Hah! I've been thinking about this a lot lately ever since watching a documentary on a pretty internet-famous guy with autism (I'm not going to name him, but you probably know who I'm talking about if you've spent any time around the trollier parts of the internet).
I was thinking about what the ideal solution is for a guy like that. I actually thought he should be moved to a group home, for both his sake and the sake of others. Jail is a really horrible place for well-adjusted adults, let alone those who aren't.
> Can this be changed?
I dunno. How would you change it? I think group homes are the right idea, though maybe not the right implementation. Unfortunately it's not straightforward unless you're interested in proffering platitudes that never seem to really go anywhere: E.g. "We should spend more on mental health." Many of us agree with that, but when it comes time to pull out our checkbook most of us show how much of a priority it really is.
And that's not just because we're all dicks - there's just a shitload of terrible things going on in the world, and maybe mental health is priority #5 for us behind third-world poverty, or cancer research, or maybe we're just scraping to get by ourselves.
Typically we count on family to be the support system for people like Scooter, and that works if the family's capable of that level of care. But sometimes it ends up that either the parents can't care for them and admit it, or more frustrating, can't care for them and don't admit it. Group homes are probably the best option for adults with special needs that fall into those two categories.
Alternatively you could have a caregiver who acts like a family support system (checks in regularly, schedules appts, etc.) but that could be even more isolating - finding a peer group can be really hard even for more "well-adjusted" adults, and maybe a caregiver who treats you like family is actually really inappropriate if said caregiver has no intention of sticking around for the long-term.
If the solution is "let's all just be accepting and mindful of people with different wants and needs than our own", well shit, yeah, let me know when that happens. History is pretty much summed up as the antithesis of that statement.
Anyway, rambling over. It's a weird issue. I'm glad we moved away from sanitariums but I think we all agree we haven't come close to anything even good yet.
Eh, way in the future though. It's a classic tragedy of the commons. Each individual company is better off discriminating, but ultimately it causes a depletion in resources (i.e. employees) long-term.
Companies regularly last long enough to try and employ the children of their initial employees. 20 years is only getting into medium-scale planning in large amounts of industries.
> simply because it is so far remove from the actual engineering workflow.
Err, what? Fizzbuzz is NOT a riddle. It's intentionally meant to be a stupid simple test, and everyone has written stupid simple code at some point. Even as a "senior engineer" you'll have to write dumb business logic code, even if it's only occasional.
If you really struggle with fizzbuzz it would almost assuredly be a sign that you would really struggle to write quality software in a timely manner. It's also a sign that you really aren't familiar with even the basic control flow of your chosen language, which is similarly worrying.
The only part of fizzbuzz that's "removed from the actual engineering workflow" is MAYBE the modulus operation, which I'm willing to bet most interviewers probably won't give a shit if you goof on the syntax a little and write "%" when you should've written "%%".
And even then, a perfectly acceptable fizzbuzz can be written without using mod if you're not familiar with that basic arithmetic operation.
Eh, he's not wrong (even if he's being a Walter about it).
HR is not a union for employees. HR is there to protect the company: It just turns out that the company's theoretical (keyword there) interests and the employee's interests align frequently (e.g. keeping the workplace free of discrimination, keeping employee morale up).
> That means always out looking for great people who are also a cultural fit and bringing them in regardless of whether there is an open position.
> I speculate that there is a type of HR role that could fill this need
We have this at my company (not going to name, just to remain semi-anonymous). There's a whole group dedicated just to finding people who seem like good fits for the company. They're employees the same as any engineer would be.
I don't think it's that uncommon at bigger (i.e. > 100 employees) companies.
Isn't this just eerily reminiscent of what happened with depression babies?
Widespread, extended, negative macroeconomic event happens. Those experiencing these events at crucial development points in their lives (childhood, early adulthood) adjust their livelihoods to compensate. Even when the negative effects disappear, behavioral patterns have been set in stone.
Sure, there are obvious differences, e.g. we sometimes still fritter away our money on electronics we probably don't really need. Still, I think the similarities are pretty striking. We're a lot more like our grandparents than our parents.
As for the article, I think the car/housing situation is probably a really simple one to explain: millenials know first-hand how crippling debt can be (in the form of student loan debt). Even those lucky enough to escape that can see how awful it's been for our cohort.
Most of us are insanely debt-averse now (wasn't there just an article published recently that people under 40 are the most likely to have their mortgage paid off in full?), and cars and homes are the two items you might typically accrue debt for.
Bingo. My parents are from the Silent Generation, early enough to experience the Great Depression and WWII from the home front. And they're rather miserly with money.
This could be related to the observation that people who enter the workforce during a recession end up earning quite a bit less than those who don't.
When I tell people their first financial goal should be to eliminate their debt, I get crazy looks. Especially if they are older or are too young to understand college and other debt burdens.
As an aside, long-term (which is where we really care about "healthy" anyway), you would probably expect body builders to be healthier than some classes of athletes, with various circumstances obviously influencing that.
Professional sports are notoriously rough on the body (and mind) long-term. It's not a secret that athletes in certain sports (e.g. american football, boxing) often have debilitating health issues in their later years stemming from their career. I'd say Arnold is doing a hell of a lot better health-wise than Muhammad Ali, for example.
Hm, this article reads like kind of a puff piece for Amplio.
> similar efforts to “grade” American schoolteachers, for instance, have perhaps generated more controversy than results.
Yes, for good reasons, namely...
> It’s all about trust.
No, it's not. At all. The author even notes the problem with scoring systems, that happened in this exact field. When you start scoring people, they start gaming the system to increase that score. It's the same problem with "grading teachers". You give surgeons huge incentives to start "fudging the truth" about their patients' surgical risk.
"Oh blah blah blah it's private". Great. Hopefully everyone involved can see the obvious future problems (which 7 comments in, other HN posters have zeroed in on), but they haven't given any assurances that these fears will never come to fruition. Or any prevention plans.
> It’s like Vickers said to me one night in early November, as we were discussing Amplio, “Having been in health research for twenty years, there’s always that great quote of Martin Luther King: The arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice.”
I actually laughed when I read this. How pretentious.
2) If #1 is unavoidable, don't have friends (and don't go anywhere because you might get jumped because you don't have friends)
3) Never be in any photos, even by accident
4) Never sign up for facebook/twitter/etc
5) Never talk to the police
6) Plea deals are mostly bullshit (these last two I knew already)
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe someone more well-versed can help me, but:
> But the district attorney convinced a judge that most of the time Jelani spent in jail shouldn’t count towards that release. She argued that days spent gathering more evidence, delays in testimony by a police officer who was on vacation, or instances where she was unprepared to make her case did not figure into the six-month period
Would this not be a slam-dunk lawsuit for the Henrys that his sixth amendment rights were violated? Obviously not going to bring back lost time, but still, that seems insane.
That's seriously insane. Hypothetically (realizing there are numerous practical obstacles), could this be challenged in a federal court? It seems like an egregious violation of the sixth amendment.
The state's attorney and mayor's office have both called for major changes at Riker's and threatened to sue if conditions are not improved there. But sadly that won't solve the problem of a clogged court system that allows prosecutors to delay trials for months or even years.
Do you really not see the yawning chasm between your 1-4 and what's described in the article? There's obviously a lot more going on here than this guy being in pictures with gang bangers.
> While he was incarcerated, the police matched his DNA to another gun recovered near the scene of a gang altercation.
As for his brother Jelani, it wasn't Facebook that landed him in Rikers, it was a witness identification. Now, that's a tragedy, but the old fashioned kind: over reliance on eye witness identification and overly aggressive prosecutor tactics. 20 years ago, these prosecutions would've been based on the testimony of random people in the neighborhood about who was hanging out with who.
> As for his brother Jelani, it wasn't Facebook that landed him in Rikers, it was a witness identification.
That's not what I get from the article. It was a witness that got him accused it was facebook likes that lead to him being denied bail on the grounds of being "gang affiliated"/"part of a conspiracy".
His story wouldn't have been half as bad, if he'd just been falsely accused, and then had the case dismissed. That's how a working justice system should work: some innocents will be caught up in it -- but they shouldn't suffer any more for it than strictly necessary.
On another note, with such strong conspiracy laws in NY, maybe there's still hope to get some convictions down on Wall Street?
He was in Rikers, a jail used to hold people pending trial, because he was charged with attempted murder on the basis of the eye-witness identification. The article doesn't even say he was charged with a conspiracy or that the Facebook posts were used as evidence to charge him with a conspiracy. It appears the prosecutor uses the Facebook posts to show gang affiliation, which is a factor in deciding whether someone is a dangerous criminal who shouldn't be granted bail (i.e. being set free pending trial).
> It appears the prosecutor uses the Facebook posts to show gang affiliation, which is a factor in deciding whether someone is a dangerous criminal who shouldn't be granted bail (i.e. being set free pending trial).
I might have been unclear. This was my point. It appears that he might have been charged with attempted murder either way, but might very probably have been granted bail if not for the facebook likes. So it's not a far stretch to say that the likes landed him in jail?
I see your point, but that's a pretty "cute" way to phrase what happened. It makes it seem like he was arrested and charged for what he did on facebook.
It's important to remember that jail is for innocent people, prison is for those that have been found guilty. We don't know why the case was dismissed, but I think it is rather safe to assume that it wasn't a very strong case. So bail might "ordinarily" have been rather likely.
I do think it is pretty bad that you can be jailed for a year because of hanging out with childhood friends in pictures.
Unless I misread this, the reason he was incarcerated to begin with:
> Asheem was charged with conspiracy in the third degree. The evidence was the gun charge to which he had already pled guilty, and photos, which he says dated back to the time when he was 14 and 15, showing him and other boys under the banner of Goodfellas.
> Alethia says that in Asheem’s case, the judge told him he was looking at a possible sentence of 15 to 30 years. It was a frightening length of time that convinced Asheem to take a plea deal that could range from 16 months to 4 years instead.
The gun charge just upped his prison sentence to 6 years instead of 1-4.
edit - Also, we all read the same article. You cannot claim the same article we all read as an extra source of information revealing knowledge that the article itself would have you believe otherwise. Well, you can. But it is bullshit.
> "Nobody wants to see 14- and 15-year-old kids getting locked up," says Chris Watler, Project Director at the Harlem Community Justice Center. "But if a kid is picking up a gun, or shooting other kids, we need to stop them from doing that. If you have a kids posing online with a gun, what is the obligation of law enforcement? There is a legitimate public safety concern."
And that's a freaking community-justice type talking.
To be fair to New Yorkers, they probably don't get to see the good sides of guns, like the time someone's Aunt Daphne got saved from a bear, or something.
In a city guns are for murder. They serve no other purpose.
But until the US stops celebrating guns like some religious totem that supposedly defends the common folk from a nuclear armed superpower, guns will be in US cities.
edit - I don't think guns should be banned, but I think they should be licensed. And to put it in perspective, I think that a gun license should be harder to get than a car license but easier to get than an explosives license.
It's funny, right now there's a big debate on the use of torture in the united states and the priority in terms of the issues surrounding it tend to go like this:
1. whether it's effective in producing valuable intelligence
I was thinking about what the ideal solution is for a guy like that. I actually thought he should be moved to a group home, for both his sake and the sake of others. Jail is a really horrible place for well-adjusted adults, let alone those who aren't.
> Can this be changed?
I dunno. How would you change it? I think group homes are the right idea, though maybe not the right implementation. Unfortunately it's not straightforward unless you're interested in proffering platitudes that never seem to really go anywhere: E.g. "We should spend more on mental health." Many of us agree with that, but when it comes time to pull out our checkbook most of us show how much of a priority it really is.
And that's not just because we're all dicks - there's just a shitload of terrible things going on in the world, and maybe mental health is priority #5 for us behind third-world poverty, or cancer research, or maybe we're just scraping to get by ourselves.
Typically we count on family to be the support system for people like Scooter, and that works if the family's capable of that level of care. But sometimes it ends up that either the parents can't care for them and admit it, or more frustrating, can't care for them and don't admit it. Group homes are probably the best option for adults with special needs that fall into those two categories.
Alternatively you could have a caregiver who acts like a family support system (checks in regularly, schedules appts, etc.) but that could be even more isolating - finding a peer group can be really hard even for more "well-adjusted" adults, and maybe a caregiver who treats you like family is actually really inappropriate if said caregiver has no intention of sticking around for the long-term.
If the solution is "let's all just be accepting and mindful of people with different wants and needs than our own", well shit, yeah, let me know when that happens. History is pretty much summed up as the antithesis of that statement.
Anyway, rambling over. It's a weird issue. I'm glad we moved away from sanitariums but I think we all agree we haven't come close to anything even good yet.