Does the cost of policing affect what laws are enforced?

I’d (naïvely?) imagined that there would be some kind of institutional firewall in place, analogous to the division between advertising and content in a newspaper, or the various Chinese Walls inside financial firms. That is, that decisions on which types of crime to pursue would be separate from decisions about how to pay for it.

Is that not the case? Brooke Magnanti (belle de jour) writes:

Another way in which opposing sex work brings financial benefit is through the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Police know, for instance, that if a brothel owner is prosecuted, since running a brothel is illegal, any money and property retrieved from the ‘crime scene’ becomes theirs. When police resources are limited, does the temptation of profit possibly influence victimless crimes being prosecuted more vigourously than they otherwise would?

…

It’s impossible to know for certain, but one can imagine plenty of situations in which police – with restricted time and money – must make choices: unknown violent criminals who may be difficult and expensive to catch, or women technically breaking the law standing right in front of you, with cash assets?

Similarly, there’s a debate about the cost of evicting travellers from Dale Farm:

The cost of evicting travellers from Europe’s largest illegal camp could spiral to £18million, councillors have revealed.

The occupants of Dale Farm in Crays Hill, Essex, have threatened violence if bailiffs move in, pushing up the bill to remove them from £3.5million just 18 months ago.

Basildon Council has set aside £8million for the operation – almost a third of its annual budget – while Essex Police has a £10million ‘worst-case scenario’ fund.

…

Despite the huge cost, Tony Ball, leader of the council is determined to press ahead if the families choose not leave by their own accord.

Mr Ball said: ‘No one wants a forced clearance of this site and we have spent ten years asking the travellers to work with us to seek a peaceful resolution.

‘However, it is important the law is applied equally and fairly to all people and if we do not take action in this case, we would have little moral right as a planning authority to take action against future unauthorised developments.

So it sounds like the cost of enforcement is taken into account in policing decisions, whether at the level of the police themselves or their political masters. Is that the case? If I break the law in some way that’s expensive to identify, can I expect to get away with it?

Cory Doctorow on the joys of writing for teenagers:

That’s one of the most wonderful things about writing for younger audiences — it matters. We all read for entertainment, no matter how old we are, but kids also read to find out how the world works. They pay keen attention, they argue back. There’s a consequentiality to writing for young people that makes it immensely satisfying. You see it when you run into them in person and find out that there are kids who read your book, googled every aspect of it, figured out how to replicate the best bits, and have turned your story into a hobby.

…

young people live in a world characterized by intense drama, by choices wise and foolish and always brave. This is a book-plotter’s dream. Once you realize that your characters are living in this state of heightened consequence, every plot-point acquires moment and import that keeps the pages turning.

Next in the continuing saga of Rolling Stone printing surprisingly good long-format journalism: The Stoner Arms Dealers.

Packouz was baffled, stoned and way out of his league. “It was surreal,” he recalls. “Here I was dealing with matters of international security, and I was half-baked. I didn’t know anything about the situation in that part of the world. But I was a central player in the Afghan war… It was totally killing my buzz. There were all these shadowy forces, and I didn’t know what their motives were. But I had to get my shit together and put my best arms-dealer face on.”

The author, Guy Lawson, seems to have written a string of in-depth articles on international crime in Rolling Stone.

Although you suspect Rolling Stone is also dropping serious money on lawyers, to let them say things like:

The Albanians cut him out of the deal, informing AEY that the repackaging job would be completed instead by a friend of the prime minister’s son. What Trebicka had failed to grasp was that Thomet was paying a kickback to the Albanians from the large margin he was making on the deal. Getting rid of Thomet was impossible, because that was how the Albanians were being paid off the books.

I suspect part of the reason Rolling Stone can support this kind of journalism is that they force their writers to be

entertaining

. Not only does this mean people read and appreciate the long-form articles (and thus build demand for more of them), but it forces the writers to properly get to grips with their subject.

Adrian Mogos describes the use of forced labour in Central European. They were producing food for Tesco, among other outlets:

Corina says they worked in the fields under Ukrainians carrying shotguns who hit anyone that dared ask about the wages they’d been promised or protested over the conditions and hours.

Around 400 hundred men and women were kept working around the clock, sleeping in a dormitory, and they were not allowed to leave the fields unless their Ukrainian bosses transferred them to constructions sites or slaughterhouses.

…

After two months of working for free under these armed guards, Corina knew she’d never get any money. When she and her husband protested, they threatened to sell her off to a pimp to work as a prostitute in Prague. Finally, she, her husband and one brother-in-law fled the camp by night in the summer of 2008.

To open in vim all files matching a regex:

$ grep -l foo ./* | xargs vim -p

Vim has a plugin for outlines, clearly described here. Create a file with the extension

otl

, and you’ll get some visual help in managing an outline.

Whitespace denotes indentation level, colons mark text content. It builds on the vim folding commands:

• 
  zc
  
  : collapse hierarchy
• 
  zo
  
  : expand hierarchy one level
• 
  zO
  
  : expand hierarchy all the way
• 
  [z
  
  : move to header (]z move to next header]

There are also some commands specific to vimoutliner. these are introduced with a double comma, and listed in the documentation

Finally, it’s possibe to get ascii checkbox functionality, a little like emacs org-mode. This requires installing a plugin-for-the-plugin, and I’ve not yet tried it. Details in

:help vimoutliner

The real

get out of my head

command is this perfect incarnation of my own notation for marking tasks as done:

 ,,T  normal   Pre-pend timestamp (HH:MM:SS) to heading

I’ve lately been poking around in the UN Comtrade database. This records international trade in detail that is mind-boggling, and I suspect not entirely reliable. So today I learned that:

• The UAE
  
  spent half a billion dollars on swords
  
  in the space of 2 years. How many swords does that buy you?

• The UK is the world’s leading importer of cufflinks, responsible for a quarter of the world trade. We export, too. The leading customer? Nigeria.

Whenever I try to put code snippets up here, I end up frustrated that they turn up deprived of any highlighting. So I’ve tried following these instructions to fix things. With luck, this post should be an example

So this goes in <head>:

And for the highlighted text you have 2 options.

First is with <pre> tags:

or a slightly more longwinded version, which provides for escaping of html tags:

<script type="syntaxhighlighter" class="brush:html"><![CDATA[ <a href="http://exampe.com/blah">blah</a>]]</script>

This, alas, interacts badly with blogger’s pre-posting HTML validation. It’s easier to handle the escaping from the command-line beforehand:

$ xclip -o  | perl -MHTML::Entities -ne 'print encode_entities($_)' | xclip

And the reason for

that

faff is to start using this blog more to keep track of snippets of code and config that I’m constantly re-using. That is, the things you have half inside your head anyway, but need to look up exactly what the command is.

One from today: setting up basic HTTP Authentication with Apache:

vps:/etc/apache2/sites-enabled# htpasswd -c /etc/apache2/anaad.passwd admin
New password: 
Re-type new password: 
Adding password for user admin

edit .htaccess:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Anaad"
AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/anaad.password 
Require valid-user

Oh boy, I find myself agreeing with Peter Thiel:

Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is over-valued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.