8 ms·

Having a mental health crisis should not mean that you're free of consequences. It's not like random people are driving up to their house to harass them, they'r

Having a mental health crisis should not mean that you're free of consequences. It's not like random people are driving up to their house to harass them, they're reporting them to a regulatory body who will investigate themselves and prosecute if needed. And if they are having a mental health crisis, they should be able to plea insanity. All is this is compounded by the fact that, at least according to another commenter, they're head of operations at another company. If someone in control of a lot of money with duties to other just vanishes (and according to other commenters, they do have legal duties in the UK), they should face consequences. People didn't donate to Fosshost so one person can disappear and take their money with them.

maxbond 4y ago
> It's not like random people are driving up to their house to harass them When you direct law enforcement to investigate someone, you should anticipate this as a strong possibility. > And if they are having a mental health crisis, they should be able to plea insanity. I think the bar for this is much higher than having a mental health crisis, and that even if successful it won't result in you maintaining your liberty but being institutionalized instead of imprisoned. But IANAL and certainly not a UK lawyer (barrister? solicitor?). > [T]hey should face consequences. Personally I don't buy the notion of retributive justice. It seems like the volunteers of Fosshost are taking lessons from all of this, and creating a new project with better governance. I think that's a productive and healthy response, and the place where effort should be focused. To me, creating a new, better project to continue the mission, that's what justice is. That's what people donated their money to do, too; to support the mission. Personally, I plan to donate to their new project. I'm not in a position to contact authorities (as I had no involvement in their last project), but I wouldn't if I could. Everyone makes up their own mind about these things, but I hope anyone considering contacting law enforcement really weighs the potential for harm and what exactly the likelihood of a good outcome is (and what that even means) before acting.
- phendrenad2 4y ago
  Well, your sentiment is nice and all, but you're effectively dooming every nonprofit to spectacular dissolution if their CEO decides to not answer the phone. Non-profits, you know, those things that are supposed to serve the public good? But I guess public good is on hold if the CEO goes AWOL.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    Am I? This group wasn't able to separate the executive function from treasury function (despite their efforts to do so, it seems like this executive simply refused) - isn't that what caused this mess? If you structure an organization such that there is a single executive who cannot be held accountable - then your bus number is 1. Law enforcement cannot improve your bus number. It doesn't matter if your executive steals your money or gets hit by a bus, eventually something is going to happen to them and then your organization won't be able to recover from it. If this was unclear, I'm not in favor of theft and am in favor of public goods. I'm not advocating for blind trust and am in favor of accountability - to peers in real time, not to law enforcement when the damage is already done. If you want to know what I think, it's that horizontally organized groups, composed of as few people as possible (accepting redundancy to improve your bus number and allow for vacations and other contingencies), with a narrowly scoped mission, and without accepting more money than is necessary (as too much money leads to mission creep & perverse incentives) are the best way to do almost anything. A pyramid terminating with a single person is probably the worst.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      > Law enforcement cannot improve your bus number [...]eventually something is going to happen to them and then your organization won't be able to recover from it. In this particular instance, the regulators absolutely can. If the CEO is failing to discharge their duties, they will be disposed of as a company officer, and a new officer will be installed, who can get access to bank accounts and other resources (websites, domains, taxes) backed by the force of law. Not going to regulators is what wil lead to an irrevocable failure in this instance, but it appears the volunteers have already resigned to that fate. I find rather suspect that the CEO registered a private company with a name similar to the non-profit they already run. I don't have full context, but that alone sets off alarm bells for fraud and/or self-dealing: I'd definitely contact oversight on that basis alone, if I had standing.
- kelnos 4y ago
  I absolutely agree with you that police often make things worse than they need to be. But we can't just allow people to do bad things, shrug, and move on. Even if the CEO of Fosshost has a legitimate excuse for what's going on, taking no action at all just tells the true sociopaths among us that they can get away with whatever they want, because people will assume there's a reasonable explanation, and not involve authorities. That's not an outcome I'm comfortable with either. And I am very sympathetic to your statement in another subthread about preferring 1000 guilty people going free over even 1 innocent person going to jail. But where's the threshold? How about 10,000 guilty people? 100,000? A million? As much as it pains me to say this, at some point we do have to accept that innocent people will get caught up in the system. Because if we refuse to take action against any guilty people due to a fear of hurting the innocent, then the guilty people will just take more and more advantage of that, until society itself is untenable. I don't think you're directly advocating for a breakdown in society, but I think that's the eventual outcome of your policy. Don't get me wrong, the system as it is... is terrible. It needs boatloads of reform. There are many issues that police are ill equipped to handle, and yet end up handling -- poorly -- anyway, because there is no one else empowered and funded to handle those situations. Even the best police officers can handle situations outside their training poorly, and unfortunately there are many police officers who are very far from being the best, to put it mildly. I don't have solutions here. Policing is incredibly broken, and I don't really know what will fix it. But I don't think a productive response to that is to just let people get away with doing bad things, regardless of their intentions or their personal situation. To the actual matter at hand, posts like this one -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849353 -- lead me to believe that the CEO was intentionally doing something shady. No, I don't have proof of that, but I don't think anyone is going to figure out what was really going on without involving some sort of authorities. At some point you just have to judge for yourself if you believe someone was acting maliciously or not, and take whatever action you think is best. The people working on Fosshost are certainly in a much better position to do that that than we are, here.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    It's clear from your reply that you've read closely & made an effort to hear me out despite disagreeing with me, and it's appreciated. I don't have all the answers here either; I can point in what I think is the right direction, but my understanding on this is a work in progress, and I'm not any sort of genius of sociology or political theory. I don't expect to be the person who cracks the code on the human condition. But I'll try to address your comment with the same respect you've addressed mine. The question of how many guilty people we can let go free per innocent is like the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; a vital question to which there is no answer, but which must be evaluated and re-evaluated ceaselessly. I think it's important that we keep trying to perfect society. I think it's important that we come up with utopian visions and try to implement them, knowing full well that we won't reach them. We must avoid the pitfall of looking at the tools available to us, finding them unsuited to the task, and then saying, "well, these are all the tools that I have to work with" - when we find ourselves with only bad options, what we need are more tools. Every tool we have was created by that same process. Coercing people to follow the law with violence is just not a great plan for many reasons. There are unjust laws. There are abusive police. Fundamentally, it is a reactive system; it responds to injustices that have already happened. The idea that we punish people when they step out of line as an example to everyone else doesn't really solve the problem - if it had, surely we wouldn't be having this discussion. Desperate people will commit crimes anyway, and their punishment will only enhance their desperation. People with significant privileges realize that they can't be held accountable. Overall retributive justice treats crime as some sort of affront that demands a violent response, an eye for an eye, but I think it's more productive to think of it as a problem which demands a solution. When you view it through the lens of problem solving, it changes your perspective and what you imagine to be possible. We should eliminate desperation and perverse incentives that lead to crime wherever possible. When that isn't possible, we should seek to detect & reverse it immediately, within the organization or community where it's happened, and excise or reprise that community member as appropriate. We should be accountable to one another, through peaceful means, and not the state through violence. It's a common concern that, without the threat of violence, society would fall apart, as you expressed. But I don't believe that is what will happen. I think the root of this is a Hobbsian view that the fear of violence is what binds us together - if you hold this view than naturally, without violence, that binding force would be gone. But is that true of your own life? I believe people are generally motivated by care for one another more often than fear of violence. When I think about the actions I take in a given day, and I ask myself why I did them, virtually all of them are because I want to take care of the people around me. That's why I did the dishes and cooked meals for my household today; that's why I checked up on my friend who was supposed to call me, but didn't (they're fine); that's why I've been shopping for gifts; etc. I think violence in our society serves to shape our behaviors to fit a particular mold, that benefits those in power and which we wouldn't submit to voluntarily. But without that violence, I think we would still have a society, and a more just one at that. It hijacks our society for a particular purpose, but it isn't the glue that holds it together. It's easy to find ways my ideas are imperfect, I'll readily admit that. You can't simply detect and reverse murder, being an obvious one. I'm not so naive as to think a perfect society can be achieved without perfect humans, and I don't see that as a real possibility. But I hope I can convince you that it's worth looking at things from a problem solving perspective, rather than a coercive one.
- nibbleshifter 4y ago
  The UK is very different to the US. Reporting this incident to the charities regulator won't result in any police involvement unless said regulator find that serious fraud has been committed. As it stands, the director should be struck off the register of directors and prohibited from directorship by companies house, for the protection of everyone else.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    Thank you for this context, that is interesting.
DanBC 4y ago
> And if they are having a mental health crisis, they should be able to plea insanity. "Not guilty by way of insanity" is an incredibly high bar to meet, and it happens very rarely. What usually happens (in England!!) is that the person is tried, convicted, and sentenced, and then given a hospital order. At that point they stop being a prisoner serving a sentence, they become a patient getting treatment at a low secure, medium secure, or high secure specialist commissioned hospital. I've spoken to patients in low and medium secure units, and they often say they'd prefer to be in prison doing time rather than being in hospital getting treatment. I have some poorly formed thoughts about the need to set a high bar on criminal convictions, especially when people have made major errors, perhaps driven by mental poor health, rather than criminal intent. Mens rea and actus reus are a pretty important combination. And it's not a binary prosecute vs do nothing, there are a range of community restoration measures and protections that can be put in place leaving criminal prosecution for unrepentant criminals.

maxbond 4y ago

> It's not like random people are driving up to their house to harass them When you direct law enforcement to investigate someone, you should anticipate this as a strong possibility. > And if they are having a mental health crisis, they should be able to plea insanity. I think the bar for this is much higher than having a mental health crisis, and that even if successful it won't result in you maintaining your liberty but being institutionalized instead of imprisoned. But IANAL and certainly not a UK lawyer (barrister? solicitor?). > [T]hey should face consequences. Personally I don't buy the notion of retributive justice. It seems like the volunteers of Fosshost are taking lessons from all of this, and creating a new project with better governance. I think that's a productive and healthy response, and the place where effort should be focused. To me, creating a new, better project to continue the mission, that's what justice is. That's what people donated their money to do, too; to support the mission. Personally, I plan to donate to their new project. I'm not in a position to contact authorities (as I had no involvement in their last project), but I wouldn't if I could. Everyone makes up their own mind about these things, but I hope anyone considering contacting law enforcement really weighs the potential for harm and what exactly the likelihood of a good outcome is (and what that even means) before acting.

phendrenad2 4y ago
Well, your sentiment is nice and all, but you're effectively dooming every nonprofit to spectacular dissolution if their CEO decides to not answer the phone. Non-profits, you know, those things that are supposed to serve the public good? But I guess public good is on hold if the CEO goes AWOL.
- maxbond 4y ago
  Am I? This group wasn't able to separate the executive function from treasury function (despite their efforts to do so, it seems like this executive simply refused) - isn't that what caused this mess? If you structure an organization such that there is a single executive who cannot be held accountable - then your bus number is 1. Law enforcement cannot improve your bus number. It doesn't matter if your executive steals your money or gets hit by a bus, eventually something is going to happen to them and then your organization won't be able to recover from it. If this was unclear, I'm not in favor of theft and am in favor of public goods. I'm not advocating for blind trust and am in favor of accountability - to peers in real time, not to law enforcement when the damage is already done. If you want to know what I think, it's that horizontally organized groups, composed of as few people as possible (accepting redundancy to improve your bus number and allow for vacations and other contingencies), with a narrowly scoped mission, and without accepting more money than is necessary (as too much money leads to mission creep & perverse incentives) are the best way to do almost anything. A pyramid terminating with a single person is probably the worst.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > Law enforcement cannot improve your bus number [...]eventually something is going to happen to them and then your organization won't be able to recover from it. In this particular instance, the regulators absolutely can. If the CEO is failing to discharge their duties, they will be disposed of as a company officer, and a new officer will be installed, who can get access to bank accounts and other resources (websites, domains, taxes) backed by the force of law. Not going to regulators is what wil lead to an irrevocable failure in this instance, but it appears the volunteers have already resigned to that fate. I find rather suspect that the CEO registered a private company with a name similar to the non-profit they already run. I don't have full context, but that alone sets off alarm bells for fraud and/or self-dealing: I'd definitely contact oversight on that basis alone, if I had standing.
kelnos 4y ago
I absolutely agree with you that police often make things worse than they need to be. But we can't just allow people to do bad things, shrug, and move on. Even if the CEO of Fosshost has a legitimate excuse for what's going on, taking no action at all just tells the true sociopaths among us that they can get away with whatever they want, because people will assume there's a reasonable explanation, and not involve authorities. That's not an outcome I'm comfortable with either. And I am very sympathetic to your statement in another subthread about preferring 1000 guilty people going free over even 1 innocent person going to jail. But where's the threshold? How about 10,000 guilty people? 100,000? A million? As much as it pains me to say this, at some point we do have to accept that innocent people will get caught up in the system. Because if we refuse to take action against any guilty people due to a fear of hurting the innocent, then the guilty people will just take more and more advantage of that, until society itself is untenable. I don't think you're directly advocating for a breakdown in society, but I think that's the eventual outcome of your policy. Don't get me wrong, the system as it is... is terrible. It needs boatloads of reform. There are many issues that police are ill equipped to handle, and yet end up handling -- poorly -- anyway, because there is no one else empowered and funded to handle those situations. Even the best police officers can handle situations outside their training poorly, and unfortunately there are many police officers who are very far from being the best, to put it mildly. I don't have solutions here. Policing is incredibly broken, and I don't really know what will fix it. But I don't think a productive response to that is to just let people get away with doing bad things, regardless of their intentions or their personal situation. To the actual matter at hand, posts like this one -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849353 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33849353 -- lead me to believe that the CEO was intentionally doing something shady. No, I don't have proof of that, but I don't think anyone is going to figure out what was really going on without involving some sort of authorities. At some point you just have to judge for yourself if you believe someone was acting maliciously or not, and take whatever action you think is best. The people working on Fosshost are certainly in a much better position to do that that than we are, here.
- maxbond 4y ago
  It's clear from your reply that you've read closely & made an effort to hear me out despite disagreeing with me, and it's appreciated. I don't have all the answers here either; I can point in what I think is the right direction, but my understanding on this is a work in progress, and I'm not any sort of genius of sociology or political theory. I don't expect to be the person who cracks the code on the human condition. But I'll try to address your comment with the same respect you've addressed mine. The question of how many guilty people we can let go free per innocent is like the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; a vital question to which there is no answer, but which must be evaluated and re-evaluated ceaselessly. I think it's important that we keep trying to perfect society. I think it's important that we come up with utopian visions and try to implement them, knowing full well that we won't reach them. We must avoid the pitfall of looking at the tools available to us, finding them unsuited to the task, and then saying, "well, these are all the tools that I have to work with" - when we find ourselves with only bad options, what we need are more tools. Every tool we have was created by that same process. Coercing people to follow the law with violence is just not a great plan for many reasons. There are unjust laws. There are abusive police. Fundamentally, it is a reactive system; it responds to injustices that have already happened. The idea that we punish people when they step out of line as an example to everyone else doesn't really solve the problem - if it had, surely we wouldn't be having this discussion. Desperate people will commit crimes anyway, and their punishment will only enhance their desperation. People with significant privileges realize that they can't be held accountable. Overall retributive justice treats crime as some sort of affront that demands a violent response, an eye for an eye, but I think it's more productive to think of it as a problem which demands a solution. When you view it through the lens of problem solving, it changes your perspective and what you imagine to be possible. We should eliminate desperation and perverse incentives that lead to crime wherever possible. When that isn't possible, we should seek to detect & reverse it immediately, within the organization or community where it's happened, and excise or reprise that community member as appropriate. We should be accountable to one another, through peaceful means, and not the state through violence. It's a common concern that, without the threat of violence, society would fall apart, as you expressed. But I don't believe that is what will happen. I think the root of this is a Hobbsian view that the fear of violence is what binds us together - if you hold this view than naturally, without violence, that binding force would be gone. But is that true of your own life? I believe people are generally motivated by care for one another more often than fear of violence. When I think about the actions I take in a given day, and I ask myself why I did them, virtually all of them are because I want to take care of the people around me. That's why I did the dishes and cooked meals for my household today; that's why I checked up on my friend who was supposed to call me, but didn't (they're fine); that's why I've been shopping for gifts; etc. I think violence in our society serves to shape our behaviors to fit a particular mold, that benefits those in power and which we wouldn't submit to voluntarily. But without that violence, I think we would still have a society, and a more just one at that. It hijacks our society for a particular purpose, but it isn't the glue that holds it together. It's easy to find ways my ideas are imperfect, I'll readily admit that. You can't simply detect and reverse murder, being an obvious one. I'm not so naive as to think a perfect society can be achieved without perfect humans, and I don't see that as a real possibility. But I hope I can convince you that it's worth looking at things from a problem solving perspective, rather than a coercive one.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
The UK is very different to the US. Reporting this incident to the charities regulator won't result in any police involvement unless said regulator find that serious fraud has been committed. As it stands, the director should be struck off the register of directors and prohibited from directorship by companies house, for the protection of everyone else.
- maxbond 4y ago
  Thank you for this context, that is interesting.

DanBC 4y ago

> And if they are having a mental health crisis, they should be able to plea insanity. "Not guilty by way of insanity" is an incredibly high bar to meet, and it happens very rarely. What usually happens (in England!!) is that the person is tried, convicted, and sentenced, and then given a hospital order. At that point they stop being a prisoner serving a sentence, they become a patient getting treatment at a low secure, medium secure, or high secure specialist commissioned hospital. I've spoken to patients in low and medium secure units, and they often say they'd prefer to be in prison doing time rather than being in hospital getting treatment. I have some poorly formed thoughts about the need to set a high bar on criminal convictions, especially when people have made major errors, perhaps driven by mental poor health, rather than criminal intent. Mens rea and actus reus are a pretty important combination. And it's not a binary prosecute vs do nothing, there are a range of community restoration measures and protections that can be put in place leaving criminal prosecution for unrepentant criminals.