undefined | Better HN

0 pointspjc508y ago0 comments

If it's truly a "post-scarcity" society, people can have all the free stuff they want. If they can't, then it's still a scarcity society.

More law enforcement is rarely the solution to any long-term problem: that's how you end up with the East German situation where 1/4 of the population was Stasi informers.

0 comments

ant6n8y ago

The stasi informal informers where there to monitor attitudes of people, not prevent crimes and either way the system wasn't particularly effective. Overall in East-Germany, people were not very afraid of police ('friend and helper'). Police didn't randomly shoot people.

I'd say the US is a better example of a police state than the GDR.

pjc50OP8y ago

> Police didn't randomly shoot people

Well, unless they went over the wall while trying to leave.

The GDR has been synonymous with "police state" for my entire life, although it's not the place that coined the phrase. The US has colonial policing and people who believe that slavery should not have been abolished.

ant6n8y ago

Well plenty of people got shot crossing the wall, but that's not really a "random shooting". Certainly much less random than "walking while black" or something.

Apparently there were 139 wall-victims in 29 years, so less than 5 per year, or about 0.03 deaths per 100k people per year. Apparently, twice as many people died of natural causes while crossing the border.

The US seems to have about 1000 shootings by police per year [2], which would be about 0.3 deaths per 100k people per year.

So the US has 10x more police-shootings than the GDR had wall-deaths per person.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todesopfer_an_der_Berliner_Mau... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

ant6n8y ago

I'd say the US is a better example of a police state than the GDR.

pjc50OP8y ago

> Police didn't randomly shoot people

Well, unless they went over the wall while trying to leave.

ant6n8y ago

Well plenty of people got shot crossing the wall, but that's not really a "random shooting". Certainly much less random than "walking while black" or something.

The US seems to have about 1000 shootings by police per year [2], which would be about 0.3 deaths per 100k people per year.

So the US has 10x more police-shootings than the GDR had wall-deaths per person.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todesopfer_an_der_Berliner_Mau... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse