Bay 12 Games Forum

The most common context I see this sort of statement in is basically a joining of the criminal and civil legal systems. As it is, somebody who, for example, burgles a house provides restitution to the state by going to jail and/or paying fines. If the stolen property is easily retrieved it gets handed back to the owner, but otherwise the only way to "make the victim whole" is to pursue a civil lawsuit. Which is of limited utility because the guy's being thrown in jail and can't possibly afford it.

So there's an argument that the proper thing to do is simply send the burglar back to work and make him repay the cost of whatever he stole. This gets a lot fuzzier when you're talking about crimes against organizations, and crimes with less concrete and measurable sorts of harm, but it is not an unreasonable starting point.

Restorative justice:

Person X robs person Y's convenience store and gets caught. Instead of person X doing a trial and then going to prison, or just returning the stolen item, person X and Y, along with people to support them and other members of the community, and a facilitator, all sit together and talk about what happened and why. Person Y explains how they feel about being stolen from. Person X explains why they stole. The rest of the community talks about what it means to them that this crime happened in their community. Eventually, through the dialogue, people figure out how the community needs to change in order to get person X to stop (he was secretly Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread for his sister's starving child, so feed him) and what should be done to help support person Y, what person X needs to learn in order to not make the same mistake again (a career other than tree-trimming, I guess).

Why to do this: it apparently greatly improves victim satisfaction in the process of justice, makes people less likely to catch PTSD, makes criminals more likely to comply with what they're asked to do and understand how what they did is wrong, and decreases recidivism. It also stops treating crime like an individual moral failing and starts treating it like a problem that can and should be resolved by the community.

Yes, this is apparently more effective than prison in the case of nasty things like rape. People really like to think that there's a one-to-one correspondence between people who have sexually violated someone and people serving time for having sexually violated someone, but this is overwhelmingly untrue.

Texas probably wasn't expecting all their wind turbines to freeze solid, which they've become increasingly more reliant on over the past few years.

[1] Solar zeros regularly, every night, and dips under clouds/etc, but it's not enough of the grid to count. Winds can drop (or be too much, depending on the generator design) far more irregularly. Otherwise: you know when your hydro-source is getting low,; mostly (prior caveats excepted) fossil fuel is fossil fuel and supply issues are seen approaching; nuclear is even more proof from sudden stoppage, except for actually breaking the complex in one way or other...

While ice has forced some turbines to shut down just as a brutal cold wave drives record electricity demand, that’s been the least significant factor in the blackouts, according to Dan Woodfin, a senior director for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid.

The main factors: Frozen instruments at natural gas, coal and even nuclear facilities, as well as limited supplies of natural gas, he said. “Natural gas pressure” in particular is one reason power is coming back slower than expected Tuesday, added Woodfin.

“We’ve had some issues with pretty much every kind of generating capacity in the course of this multi-day event,” he said.