> No one is voting for more superfund sites. We can agree on that.

Why would you think that? Lots of people vote for that every other year.

Why is disliking racists political. What do words even mean.

> These banned industrial processes sum to making almost every physical object

The processes are obviously not banned, only an idiot would think that. You just can't do the process and dump all the pollutants into the nearby river.

> China has more naval vessels than the US

... what?

Do you know what "the means of production" actually is?

It's weird how the implication of "every government is bad" is that we should stop trying to improve them or worry about the ones that are the worst.

So when can I expect your update to the american population?

> what is and is not acceptable with the only litmus test being its... corpus frequency?

How do you suppose we determine acceptability now?

Not with corpus frequency. Just has to exist a single time in agreed upon dictionary.

And the dictionary chooses words based on... how often people use them?

> The extreme punishments for breaking the law might have something to do with it.

Historically speaking, this is almost never true. People constantly think the solution is crueler punishments and we have hundreds of years of records of what happens.

People who commit crimes generally do not think they will be caught and therefore the punishment is of no concern to them. The better way to deter crime[1] is to convince more of the public that people who commit crimes are usually caught. Preferably by actually catching people who commit crimes.

1. aside from the obviously effective but difficult to implement deterrent of meeting everyone's physical needs

A lot of crimes are also committed by people who genuinely don't think about the consequences when they are acting. It doesn't matter how bad or how certain the consequence is, because they aren't thinking about it at all.

But apparently there are far fewer such people in Singapore. How would you explain this?

I think the explanation is that growing up in an environment where even small infringements are consistently punished makes people think about the consequences more.

This is exactly right. People who get away with some rule-breaking, whether it's large or small, once will start to think maybe they can get away with it a second time. Get away with it a dozen times and you start to think you can get away with it every time, leading to the "people who genuinely don't think about the consequences when they are acting" that cortesoft mentioned. That sort of behavior isn't just a facet of personality, it's trained (or it might be more accurate to say, it wasn't trained out of them — all children act on impulse, it's the nature of children, but if their parents consistently punish them for sneaking cookies out of the cookie jar and they never get away with it, they eventually learn not to do it in the first place and to think about the consequences before they act).

So when a lot of people grow up in an environment where small rulebreakings are consistently caught and punished (the former is more important, can't punish what isn't detected), they learn from an early age that rulebreaking carries consequences nearly every time, and you end up with far fewer people willing to break the rules.

This is just... wildly vague. People break rules for all sorts of reasons, ignorance, desperation, mental impairment, sometimes just plain maliciousness or greed.

It's one thing to discuss something like a school campus with a small cohort of relatively similar wants and needs and a relatively small set of rules, it becomes much more complicated when dealing with the entire society's interaction with laws.

How would you explain the observed difference in behaviour then?

Skull shape. They obviously are predisposed to having the right set of skull bumps.

That's one way to avoid an unwelcome conclusion.

I don't think that is a significant proportion of crime, though it certainly exists. Most crime is organized (theft, pickpocketing, robbery, kidnappings, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, racketeering), or it exists in an atmosphere of impunity, where there is a baseline assumption of no consequences (Epstein files, rape culture in certain industries).

> People who commit crimes generally do not think they will be caught and therefore the punishment is of no concern to them.

The mere possibility of severe butt-pain keeps all the would-be criminals in line.

I can definitely get away with it, but just in case I cannot - it's not a mere jail holiday that I face as consequence - I wont be able to even sit down without screaming like a baby -> The foolish criminal becomes wise and the hardened criminal becomes enlightened with this fundamental realization.

The Possibility of Pulverizing Pain via the Holy Cane is the Divine Motivation to Obey the Law.

"Hundreds of years of records" sounds like a big exaggeration. I don't think we can reliable talk about more than 150 years, and even that would be sparse, covering only some lucky countries. And this data is hard to evaluate as adjusting it to culture shifts, economy changes, and even to what constitutes "cruel" in different periods isn't easy.

I think, it's reasonable to suspect that demonstrative cruelty in crime punishment may have bad side-effects in the long run, but there are just a few cases in recent history where at least short-term outcomes seem to support the claim that it may reduce crime levels.

> but there are just a few cases in recent history where at least short-term outcomes seem to support the claim that it may reduce crime levels

Those studies would be interesting to read, can you link them?

That's... amusing.

Just like "computer engineer" is a silly term, it should be "computer operator".

"Operator" has a long history in computing. In the pre-microcomputer era, the people who managed computers were referred to as operators or sysops; the O in BOFH was Operator.