To put in programmerese what I’ve put elsewhere: The US penal system is the /dev/null of social justice. You don’t know where things go. You just know you put

To put in programmerese what I’ve put elsewhere: The US penal system is the /dev/null of social justice. You don’t know where things go. You just know you put stuff you don’t want (error codes, annoying output, side effects) in there. It could be rerouted by your hosting platform of choice to an S3 bucket for all you know. You just know things go away. And that makes you happy. The abstraction of why an overuse of /dev/null or blind reliance on the penal system leads to problems down the road, is left as an exercise to the programmer.