It's pretty rich that almost this entire thread is arguing about the prison not respecting Sunde's vegan wishes and his personal wealth and ideals. There are more than ninety comments here and all of them hang off nearly-dead comments.
The entire point of prison is to suck, otherwise it wouldn't serve its role, which is to deter crime. Louis CK has a bit about this in one of his recent specials:
...but we really need the law against murder, for
one simple reason: the law against murder is the number
one thing preventing murder. We'd like to think it's
because "oh, I would never do that," no, it's because
it really sucks getting caught murdering. A lot. [1]
Debating the prison's respect for Sunde's vegan wishes misses the forest for the trees. Honestly, if that's your biggest concern from reading this article, you have really messed up priorities. How about the fact that he went to maximum at all?
Anyway, just an oddly off-topic thread here, thought I'd point it out. It's even more fun because I've been detained, so reading some of the arguments makes it clear that I'm one of the only people with that experience here. Prison's not something you can just try, to see what it's like, so unless you've been there it's usually wise to assume the worst things are true rather than being optimistic about rights and common sense. If one thing is true about detention, it's that rights and common sense don't matter at all when the door's closed and nobody's looking.
> The entire point of prison is to suck, otherwise it wouldn't serve its role, which is to deter crime.
Prison serves many purposes other than punishment - one of which is rehabilitation. Making someone's life miserable for several years, purely to punish them, does nothing in the long-run - hence why re-offending rates can be so high.
Two orthogonal factors undermine your observation: (1) the prison system is drifting toward private, for-profit prisons, and rehabilitating offenders incarcerated therein would be damaging to the long-term profits of the institution, and (2) believe it or not, a significant number of inmates in the American system do not want to be rehabilitated, which is directly linked to various external factors.
It's easy for those outside America to put the United States Criminal Justice System in a vacuum -- it's happening all over this thread and it's honestly ridiculous -- and try to explain to Americans that strategy A doesn't work because recidivism B, and country C actually tries strategy D so America should implement strategy E, but the fact is that the American justice system reflects a lot of other problems in the United States that need to be addressed. Key among those is a significantly substandard education compared to other parts of the world, especially the oft-cited Scandinavian countries for the purposes of this discussion.
It is my personal experience that rehabilitation in an incarceration setting only works in the majority if the criminal has some kind of education and desire for a better life. Those citing Norway's prisons, have you ever considered that education is better in Norway and most folks don't break bad by default? Norway has the 7th best education in the world. The United States is much further down the list.
Even in minimum, the majority of the people I was in with did not especially mind being there nor look at it as a serious event. "Oh, I got arrested for check fraud again, can't wait to get out and go back to selling meth, much less risky income." To most people I talked to, it was an inconvenience and mild disruption from their life of crime. The hardest of the hard criminals want to be in prison because they can actually have power in several systems run from prison, including an entire infrastructure of gangs.
To be quite honest, I think pointing at American prisons and saying "your job is to rehabilitate" is a nice, ivory tower sort of feel-good explainer for sending people to prison, but the fact is going to prison in the United States is a complete life-ender for "doing good" in almost every case. My felony just fell off my record and even in this industry, I was nearly unemployable -- my conviction wasn't even computer-related, but most people pull a report and see "felony" and discard the entire candidate. Prison is only a portion of the consequences for committing a crime.
Regardless of how you might feel criminal justice should happen, right now in the United States the policy is one of deterrence. Your life is pretty great until you pick up a felony, then you'll spend the rest of your life trying to undo the damage. And, to be honest, I can understand the logic there: your government has an implicit contract with you that the liberties offered and protected by the United States are yours as long as you don't do any of these hundreds of crimes, and once you do, the contract is void. I can understand the thinking that brought us there. I also don't think the failure thereof is necessarily the fault of the system, as criminal rehabilitation absolutely cannot exist in a vacuum of policy. Life isn't SimCity. You can't tweak a "prison life quality" slider and magically fix recidivism. There are other external inputs into that equation and any discussion thereof must include the whole picture.
But he didn't go to a maximum security prison at all, infact he was at Västervik a "säkerhetsklass 2" prison. [2]
"Säkerhetsklass 1" would be a maximum security prison, class 3 is the lowest class and those don't even have walls meaning that a class 2 would essentially be a "vanilla" prison.[1]
Furthermore, the prisons in the nordic countries are among the few in the world which actively do practice rehabilitation rather than just "suck", as OP expressed it. I believe that is the reason the vegan diet was brought up as a big deal - he was treated OK in most other regards, especially when considering how prisons work in other parts of the world. Take a look at this documentary:
Yeah I agree, I am however somewhat surprised that they didn't manage to provide him with vegan meals. I mean it shouldn't be that difficult im sure they already offer vegetarian alternatives.
I dont think the role of prison is to suck. The idea of justice has three components retribution, deterrence and prevention.
As a society it is of paramount importance how we define these three components and the fact that we adhere to those definitions. If it has to suck, it has to be defined apriori to what extent it sucks.
In the US, the prevailing strategy of prisons for handling all 3 aspects is to make getting caught so shitty and destructive for the person involved that people don't do things that would lead them there.
You can, of course, view any number of metrics to identify how well this is "working".
Prison being shitty covers retribution and deterrence. Prevention is provided merely by having strong walls and razor wire.
If somebody is locked in a cell, then they will be physically unable to rob the local liquor store. How well or poorly they are treated is irrelevant in that regard.
Why not let the cops simple shoot the man once convicted ? Isn't that retribution, deterrence and prevention all in one ?
People should know a-priori the consequences of their actions. Otherwise it is very likely that there is will be manny shitty prisons and some VIP cool prisons.
Murder has always been illegal, in every society, throughout history. Nevertheless murder rates vary widely from one society to another. So no, "the law against murder is the number one thing preventing murder". There is much more to it.
Murder is killing someone when it's illegal. Otherwise it's not murder. Yay circular logic! Oh you were defending yourself? Then it's not murder. Oh, you're a soldier? Then it's not murder. Oh, you're a cop? Then it's not murder.
I strongly reject Louis CK's assessment. I don't believe there has ever been anyone who has reconsidered murder because of the law. If anything the law protects the murderer - without it, retaliation would be far more appealing.
Kind of annoying when people who don't sound as if they comprehend or care-to-comprehend about the complexity of capital punishment have a really hard line opinion about it. Your citation of Louis CK aside.
Is treating someone inhumanely for years going to make them actually behave like humans when they are released? Is it actually better for society to do it? America has some extreme examples of bad conditions.
Who is talking about capital punishment? I'm pretty sure the point of the thread was incarceration, and even then I'm not actually offering my opinion on the efficacy thereof, only pointing out that the picture is far simpler than most people who have not been there believe.
Western society once considered prisons to have multiple functions; punishment, deterrent and rehabilitation. Now it seems the punishment part has become it.
Obviously, this seems to go along with the assumption that the only thing stopping committing crimes is there fear of getting caught. I think that's probably much more true for hacking a bank for a million dollars than murder (which most people aren't just itching to get away with).
The rehabilitation assumption goes along with the idea that if person improves, if they are uplifted, they won't commit crimes. The punishment assumption goes with the idea that everyone is a criminal and the question is who can get away with it. And the "everyone is a criminal" assumption certainly makes with those presently at the top of society making out like bandits (aside from having made laws which make their actions legal).
So, perhaps what you say is true at the moment. But it's truth involves us being diminished.
To stretch even further, they are even better than some dormitory rooms I've seen across the world. Check the picture at the top of this article that shows the maximum security prison's cell in Sweden:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/dec/01/why-sweden-cl...
> Debating the prison's respect for Sunde's vegan wishes misses the forest for the trees.
The forest is big and scary and honestly a bit abstract. I've heard about it from childhood; I don't know where it begins and where it ends. I'm supposed to stay away from it, so I do; it serves a useful function, or so I hear.
But a single tree I can see at once. I can walk up to it, look at exactly how tall it is, imagine getting trapped under it, fear just how dark its shade is.... and then I can understand just how dangerous the forest is, in a way that my parents could never convey to me from the safety of my home.
You've been lost in the forest, so this isn't new to you. But for me, appreciating the enormity of a single tree is one of the few ways I can actually begin to comprehend the terror of the forest.
> How about the fact that he went to maximum at all?
Agree. It seemed obvious to me, an outside observer, that he was being disproportionately sentenced. Someone, whether influenced by the RIAA/MPAA cabal or not, decided that he should be made an example.
I wouldn't say that is the sole role of prisons. They kind of have 3 functions:
1. To remove a troublesome individual from society.
2. To rehabilitate an individual.
3. To disincentivize crime (as you say).
In our society they are often talked of as having a further role to "punish" an individual. I guess this may actually effect policy, which I guess is effectively revenge. This doesn't seem like a useful notion however.
I'm not sure that prisons being nicer would really make me consider crime as a more viable option. It sounds pretty bad even if I don't consider the culinary options.
I'd like you to point out to me what opinion I offered or conclusion I reached in the comment to which you are replying, and then consider if instead of an opinion that you are upset about you have instead encountered an observation regarding our shitty world. Then dial down the indignation you have for me by a couple notches.
Prison still sucks even if you can follow your diet. Its not like prisoners who have allergy reasons for avoiding things like dairy and honey are having a great time.
The fact that he went to high security holding and didn't have access to his normal diet are entirely related as part of the oppressive nature of prison that goes beyond just removing someone from society for a period of time.
Louis C.K. wonders how different the world would be if murder was legal, or at least a misdemeanor, in his HBO special "Oh My God": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHnsajl-kB8
> about the prison not respecting Sunde's vegan (...)
The other half of his complaints are about boredom, which is equally non-exceptionnal in prison. And he's been there only 5 months, that's very moderate for someone who's been a fugitive.
No, the point of prison is to be part of the legal system. The point of the legal system is to keep society hale and hearty. If that means prisons are horrible torture pits, so be it. If that means prisons are touchy-feely slices of utopia, so be it. "Reducing crime" is important, but whether you do it through the carrot or the stick (or a third method or a combination of methods) is up for debate.
So no, the 'point of prison' isn't 'to suck'. That's an overly simplistic view of the issue.
Is it really much different than Jews keeping Kosher or Muslims keeping Halal? Prisons are for punishment for crimes that we consider significant enough to jail people, they don't have to dehumanize the prisoners.
The cost of 'specialty' food for a few tiny percent of prisoners is a minuscule figure in the total cost of imprisonment, and could easily be accommodated within the wider food offerings. If every meal had Kosher / Halal / Vegan offerings as a subset of the total meal, we could both imprison people and treat their ethics and morals with respect. Seems like a win-win.
It's still unelegant and inconsistent. If I claim my diet requires high-quality food determined by me daily, that gets ignored.
I understand Kosher for commercial enterprises like airlines: with a minimum of effort, they can satisfy many customers. But governments should have consistent treatment of citizens.
Even if a diet choice is voluntary, if the choice is grounded in religious or ethical reasons then it is an infringement of personal freedom to deny that. Yes, prison itself is an infringement of freedom, but some believe that certain freedoms should remain permanent.
Well, religious diets are arguably not voluntary. I'd say it's far different to allow a Kosher meal than it is to plan, purchase, prep, and serve a special diet to one inmate who has a preference of diet because that is how they chose to eat on the outside.
Religious diets are not voluntary, but choice of religion is voluntary.
Vegetarian/vegan diets adhering to an ethical philosophy are not voluntary, but choosing to accept an animal rights philosophy is voluntary.
Either both are a choice or neither are a choice, depending on how you define your terms.
Now, if the vegan diet was for personal taste or even for health reasons (as long as there was no significant health impact from going off of it), then it's a different story.
>Religious diets are not voluntary, but choice of religion is voluntary.
Care to elaborate on this? Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but I cannot see how a religious diet is not voluntary. Surely someone on a religious diet could eat certain foods if they choose to or not, no?
> Religious diets are not voluntary, but choice of religion is voluntary.
Agreed
> Vegetarian/vegan diets adhering to an ethical philosophy are not voluntary, but choosing to accept an animal rights philosophy is voluntary.
Not agreed. Your right to accept certain philosophies while in prion is forfeited upon conviction. This means, if you are not eating meat because you simply feel it's wrong -- well, the prison has no obligation to oblige you. If you are not eating meat because of your religion, that is different. Sure - one may "convert" to a new religion to obtain a certain preferred diet, but that is still applying the rule evenly and fairly.
> Now, if the vegan diet was for personal taste or even for health reasons (as long as there was no significant health impact from going off of it), then it's a different story.
This would be the foundation for an awful law which would be enforced with bias and randomness. How do you actually determine if a diet is being followed for pure taste reasoning, or if it's something based on personal ethics? You cannot, and therefore this cannot be a rule. Rules and laws must be based on a foundation that can be applied evenly and fairly to all, not left up to judgement by a sometimes-in-a-nice-mood-sometimes-in-a-bad-mood warden.
Where are you drawing this line between religion and ethics? Jews believe it is wrong to eat pork, vegans believe it is wrong to eat animals. What makes one of these beliefs a protected status and one not?
>How do you actually determine if a diet is being followed for pure taste reasoning, or if it's something based on personal ethics?
One can also lie about religious affiliation, or magically "convert", to get better or alternative meals, and in fact some prisoners do this. I don't see your point.
Religious belief and ethical belief both reside in someone's mind and nowhere else.
Your misrepresentations of the reasons some people are vegan or vegetarian are so severe it makes the conversation pointless. Some people have beliefs about eatig meat that are equivalent to religious belief.
The document you linked to does not protect personal choice of diet.
> 2.3.9 European Prison Rules
> See para (1.2.4) above for an explanation of the European Prison Rules. Rule 22
states “Prisoners shall be provided with a nutritious diet that takes into account their ... religion, culture ..."
> 2.4 Vegetarian and Vegan diets
> In some countries, the food provided to all prisoners may be vegetarian (non-vegetarians may have to buy meat).
So the inverse is true with prisons that serve meat.
> Receiving vegetarian or vegan meals in prison may not be an easy process. In some countries, you may be required to show that your request for a vegetarian or vegan diet is based on ethical or religious beliefs.
Again, the EU portion of this document does not protect ethical beliefs, only religious ones.
Not really -- the direct parent of my comment was making the point that ethics are indeed a reason to obey prisoner's dietary desires. As I pointed out -- they are not.
Well obviously the prisons disagree, and since they are fundamentally rooted in the denial of freedom then I don't think anyone involved in the prison industrial complex (even in Sweden) is going to care to hear arguments about how they should be nicer to prisoners.
There are plenty of people workig on makig prisons nicer for prisoners. This includes respecting their religion (as guided by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
> It's still unelegant and inconsistent. If I claim my diet requires high-quality food determined by me daily, that gets ignored.
Wardens are not robots and are capable of applying common sense and judgment. If a prisoner claims that his morals require him not to eat animal products, he's likely to be telling the truth. If he claims his morals require Kobe beef daily, he's probably lying.
Because one of them is an earnestly held belief and the other is you lying to get special treatment, and humans are capable of telling the difference. See the bit above about using common sense and not being a mindless rule-applying robot.
Also, because people who request kosher, halal, vegetarian, or vegan diets in prison aren't generally demanding higher-quality food, just different food. When accommodated, they generally still get low-grade prison fare. Thus there's little motivation to lie about it.
As soon as you develop an honest and genuine belief that your moral system requires you to eat pancakes, I'll consider the notion that prisons should be required to serve you shitty, leathery pancakes.
The thing is, you're not going to do that, and neither is anyone else. Policy should not be guided by ridiculous hypotheticals.
>The cost of 'specialty' food for a few tiny percent of prisoners is a minuscule figure in the total cost of imprisonment, and could easily be accommodated within the wider food offerings.
Agreed, this would seem to be manageable without much burden on the system.
On the other hand however, this reasoning discounts scenarios where inmates are pushing these subjective demarcations, for furthering their own needs, at the expense of being fair to everyone.
For example, in many states prisoner's may earn exemptions based off their religious practices.[1] If, an atheist prisoner, was denied sex, just because of their beliefs, I suspect they would have a right to be upset.
One should keep in mind, that it's quite possible to be supportive of increasing prisoner's rights and benefits, whilst also pushing for prisoner equality.
Because the only goal of forcing someone to eat something they consider immoral is to punish. It certainly won't help rehabilitation efforts (likely hurt them, in fact).
That need not be a goal, and it certainly wouldn't be the only goal. The primary goal would be cost and logistics. I don't think prisons have chefs custom making meals for each prisoner.
Short term savings for long term costs. How much is recidivism costing the US right now? They have made massive savings per prisoner but their reoffending rates are 60% Vs. 30% for Sweden.
And you're wrong. Food quality is a small piece of the big puzzle of how prisoners are treated, which obviously affects how they will reintegrate in society, which is something that recidivism rates measure.
Prisons should not be about punishing people. Punishment would lead to just more drain on society. I would have hoped we'd have outgrown this childish yearn for revenge in the 21st century.
You, like many people in this thread, seem to imply that punishment only serves to take revenge, or to balance the cosmic scales of justice. But you miss the obvious purpose of punishment: that it deters crime.
... which doesn't work. And if the victim's family is allowed to observe the execution of the prisoner, for example, that has nothing to do with deterring crime. There are countless other examples, especially in how both public officials and law enforcement agents, and the media portray court cases.
All the talk about justice being served is missing the point: if punishment is meant to deter crime (either by subduing/rehabilitating the prisoner or by serving as an example to would-be criminals), the feelings of the victim or the victim's family are irrelevant.
But we can actually measure whether punishments are a useful deterrent. Harsher punishments aren't better deterrents. In fact, they may even have the opposite effect: if you're already committing a crime that incurs the practical maximum (i.e. life-long imprisonment or the death penalty), the potential punishment for further crimes can not provide any deterrent at all. What can you practically add beyond that? Torture? Mutilation? A slow and painful death?
I'm not going to argue that the complete absence of punishment would be better. But in order to serve as a useful deterrent punishments often would have to be comically disproportionate to the actual harm of the crime. And that's exactly what we have in the US.
There are exactly three possible explanations to why the US is beating the entire Western world in terms of prison population: a) every other country in the Western world is overrun by criminals because we don't lock up enough of them, b) Americans on average are much more likely to be criminals or c) American prison terms are absurdly disproportionate. I know the right-wing media (or by non-American standards: the far right-wing media) likes to promote a) and Hollywood might be sold on b), I think we both know the answer is c).
Parent post argues that forcing inmates to eat food they consider immoral contributes to their "fuck the Man" mentality, and contributes to the recidivist mentality.
By spinning that into an argument about prison food being so good as to attract reoffenders, you are being childish and dishonest.
There are a lot of things I don't like to eat and I'm pretty sure that I would find eating in prison quite troublesome, regardless of what the food is.
It's one of the many prices you pay for breaking the law, but surely losing your freedom and seeing the world move on without you should dominate this unease?
Well there is a major distinction here. We aren't talking about "i don't care for meat." We are talking about someone's deeply held convictions on morality. Oftentimes vegetarianism is a major part of their identity and culture.
A vegetarian diet can be part of a relgious practce. Plenty of Indian religions emphasize a vegetarian diet - Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism. As well as well as the Seventh-day Adventist, a Christian religion.
People can willfully choose their own religion too but it is considered unethical to force a group of people to convert to your preferred religion. In fact that can be considered a form of ethnic cleansing in some situations.
FYI - i personally am a vegetarian (for over a decade) for ethical reasons and being forced to eat meat would be extremely horrific for me. And i don't think that i would be able to eat fish at all without vomiting. Feel free to make fun of me or whatever.
> People can willfully choose their own religion too but it is considered unethical to force a group of people to convert to your preferred religion.
That's why I asked for a test procedure. Someone can claim that they genuinely believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and therefore must wear a colander on their head, and without a test, how do you distinguish that from a clothing restriction from a major world religion? You either need some internal test on the mindset of the individual (e.g. a polygraph, if those worked), or an external test on the claimed religion (e.g. a minimum number of global followers).
"A fixed or firm belief" - hm, sounds like religion all right. So, just like a person can't choose a religion, neither can they willfully choose a conviction?
I see the distinction, I'm just saying the prisoner's ethics are irrelevant: the society decides what rights and privileges prisoners get in prison, regardless of what they think they are entitled to.
I think it's significant that you switched the parent commenter's "something they consider immoral" to "something you don't like". It does sound pretty mild if it's something you just don't like for mild aesthetic or taste reasons. That's definitely not the way many people think about some of the things that they don't eat.
How the prisoner perceives this deprivation is irrelevant:
"I need to eat filet mignon once a week"
"No"
"But it's immoral for me not to"
"Oh okay then"
Prisoners are granted privileges based on how society and its laws perceive their demands. Nothing gets automatically granted just because of morality or religious choices by the prisoner.
That's really just a difference of opinion. As far as I'm concerned, the loss of freedom from being in prison is punishment enough, what happens to you there shouldn't be unnecessarily cruel or punishing.
The fact that our punishment-heavy system doesn't help recidivism should be a sign that purely punishment isn't effective at rehabilitation.
Entomophagy - eating insects - provides cheap protien. Would you be happy if you were forced to eat insects?
I don't think you understand how ingrained some of these "voluntary" diets are; how strong taboo is.
EDIT: also, forcing people to eat a certain diet is disproportionately punishng them. Do we give those prisoners reductions in their sentence just because they were life-long vegans before they went to prison?
Just because you don't happen to share their values doesn't make this the same thing as being a picky eater. I don't think you'd be so cavalier if the prison were doing something that goes against your values — for example, if the prisoners were forced to eat human meat.
You're in prison because you disregarded the values that society put in place, surely the society has no obligations to respect your values in prison (although it still goes to some length to do that).
"You shoplifted an expensive purse, so now we can force you to eat your late mother" is a positively medieval stance to take. Prisoners are still human beings, and forcing them to do horrible things like that is a violation of both the general idea of human rights and several parts of the US Constitution.
My point still stands regardless of the extreme example you decided to illustrate it: you disregarded society's values and in return the society will disregard some of your values.
The prisoner doesn't get to decide what is cruel and unusual punishment to them.
> Prison is punishment first, rehabilitation second
That is not a society I want to live in. Prison should protect the remaining population and rehabilitate, punishment should be a consequence of the means necessary to do so. Prioritizing in that order (protect -> rehabilitate). In my opinion anyways..
I think you dismiss the deterrent effect of punishment too hastily. I actually think that should be the primary purpose of prison (apart from forcing criminals to work to compensate their victims, but that one's probably too radical).
Rehabilitation should obviously be another goal, but for violent crimes I don't think there's a good way to predict recidivism that couldn't be gamed. If someone could theoretically be rehabilitated in a year for mass murder, should they be released? I don't think so, because that would drastically reduce the deterrence against murder.
But thise prisons are stupid. They're very expensive and they just don't work.
And by removjg diets you are disproportionately punishing some people. A Muslim given the same sentence as someone with no religion will suffer more as a result of imprisonment purely because of the lack of dietary choice.
"Prison should suck" is a horrible sentiment, and runs contrary to the UDHR. I understand that American hasn't ratified that, but that's not because they disagree with it.
I didn't say it was right. I said it is the society we live in. Subtle difference but a key one, since you ran with it and ascribed things to me I didn't say (I'm not sure where you read -- and quoted -- me saying "prisons should suck," so this is a really crucial misread). It is very important to understand that I did not share an opinion with that observation.
To that end, I've been there. You think I'd come out and go "gosh golly, that was sure an effective means of handling my situation?"
Living in Norway, I don't feel that to be the truth. You have a great point though! But I think removal of freedom, and in some cases isolation, suffices as deterrent.
>Prison is punishment first, rehabilitation second
Says who? Punishment (beyond the punishing nature of the denial of one's freedom) need only be a part of prison because some peoples' (defective) morality demands it.
The first priority of a prison is to protect the people at large from the expected behavior of convicted criminals.
>Of all the consequences of breaking the law, being forced to eat something you don't like certainly sounds pretty mild.
What reason do you have to believe that forcing vegan prisoners to eat a non-vegan diet (or starve) will have any rehabilitative effect? Or are you happy to mete out punishments arbitrarily based upon individuals' personalities?
Prisons already accommodate a multitude of diets for various (mandatory) reasons. It really isn't expensive to accommodate one more.
I don't know paul, and his comment reads like a counter-troll, but the implicit statement that the audience of the statement incorporates their own perspective on the morality of the crime into their perception of the remedy is valid.
The question about diets for prisoners that accommodate the needs of the prisoner is generally a 20th century concept[1]. And generally case after case has sided with the prisoners[2].
[1] I've yet to find a case prior to the treatment of prisoners of war in WW 1 that discussed diet but I haven't looked particularly hard so I offer this opinion with confidence but not certainty :-)
This sort of thing is pretty off-topic, but at least in the US, some states (like Florida) have laws requiring prisons offer kosher meals. Considering both diets are voluntary, it does seem unfortunate that certain ideologies are state sanctioned while others are not.
Well if (I assume) you're coming from the mindset of how US prisons treat their inmates, expecting prisoners to be treated with any kind of humanity at all would certainly seem rediculous.
Heres a short program that the Finnish Broadcasting company did with an American visiting Nordic prisons/correctional institues, just to show a different thinking. Punishment or Rehabilitation.
http://arenan.yle.fi/tv/2428667
As a former minimum security inmate, you couldn't be more wrong. Security status has nothing to do with treatment. Just from your comment, I know that you've never so much as been detained.
Prison is a lot better than county detention; in prison, there is a loose respect structure between COs and inmates (you live there, they don't). In county, inmates are dehumanized beyond nothing as a form of control and a mechanism to encourage plea bargains. It happened to me when I spent four months in county: "just accept this plea deal and you can go home," and when I refused I got "lost" in the system on the way back to jail. For 48 hours or more (I lost track). With no food or bathroom facilities. Twice.
All pretrial detention comes with a deadline, for the most part (beyond which you must be sentenced or released), and another tactic they use is to get you to "waive" that time so they can "better investigate your case," they say. One dumb individual I spent time with accepted this offer and had spent nine years in county jail without a sentence. I'm not making this up.
I became a much more cynical person during that experience and hate when I see people defending that system in any way. Whatever you think you know about our detention system, you don't. Whatever you think you know about minimum, you don't, too, and I have several scars to show you if you don't believe me.
> Most of the inmates in our prison system are treated "with humanity."
This is not true whatsoever. Fundamentally, if the system that feeds prisons treated people with humanity, a large number of people would never be prisoners in the first place.
My vegetarian friends say that they literally can't eat meat any more, in the sense that their stomach physiology (acids? bacteria? not sure) isn't capable of digesting it. Yes, it was voluntary at some point, but it's not clear that you can still apply that label.
As someone with food allergies, I could understand (and be unhappy) if a captor decided to feed me allergens as intentional punishment, but I'd be pretty upset and feel pretty dehumanized if a captor just did so because it was the cheapest way to prepare a meal.
"in the sense that their stomach physiology isn't capable of digesting it"
Its a very popular strightdope urban legend discussion topic. You'd die pretty quickly if you couldn't adsorb complete proteins. Astrologically speaking, iron ions from spinach are dramatically different than iron ions from a steak, but your biochemistry won't know the difference.
You can get three interesting effects:
1) Any time you mess with your diet you mess with your gut flora and ... residue. Not to mention the "feel" in your stomach before its all broken down to constituent molecules indistinguishable from plant sources (other than less fiber) So minor tummy ache is theoretically possible. Less fiber intake = less... output the next day, etc.
2) From my M-i-Ls adventures in gallbladder problems, its theoretically possible for vegan types to chug olive oil especially in the form of salad dressing, but to really consume huge quantities of oil/fat all at once you need a greasy triple cheeseburger with bacon. So you can have some bile / gallbladder related fun (whoa I just ate three days worth of oils/greases in one meal, totally freaking out my gallbladder type of reaction). You'll be fine.
3) Psychologically you can get really messed up. Try eating some dog sometime in a foreign country and then focusing on your stomach (assuming you're standard American) is going to be all messed up. Still meat is meat and if they told you it was pork you wouldn't have blinked, but here you are feeling like you're gonna hurl. Its really not as much fun as my description sounds. Think of that soy stuff instead of cows/chicken/fish/pigs/dogs and you'll be just fine as long as you can avoid getting all anxious. Being anxious is never fun, no matter if due to diet or relationships or tiny enclosed spaces or public speaking or whatever.
It's actually for the same reason people get sick when the visit countries with poor water quality and drink the water. They aren't used to the pathogens.
Check page 2 of this Consumer Reports article[1] for an example.
> Enterococcus was the most common bacterium we found, occurring in 79.8 percent of our samples. Next was E. coli, in 65.2 percent of them; campylobacter, 43 percent; klebsiella pneumoniae, 13.6 percent; salmonella, 10.8 percent, and staphylococcus aureus, 9.2 percent.
It's part of the reason that only some people experience the problems as a lot of it depends on how long you have not eaten meat, at what age you stopped eating meat, the overall strength of you immune system and just if you were unlucky the first time you resumed eating meat and ate something with higher percentage of pathogens present. Also, if you regularly cooked and ate from a kitchen that was mixed use or non meat.
> Astrologically speaking, iron ions from spinach are dramatically different than iron ions from a steak, but your biochemistry won't know the difference.
I don't believe your friends. They may notice the meat in their stomachs and feel more 'full' than usual, even feel bad. But 'incapable of digesting it'? Not likely. What, the toilet has whole hotdog pieces in it?
I stopped eating meat as a regular part of my diet nearly four years ago, and now eating more than a little tiny bit will make me physically ill with severe stomach distress. I would certainly count that as 'not capable of digesting', and to say otherwise is pure pedantry.
And if you're putting whole hotdog pieces in your stomach you might want to consider chewing a little more carefully, that way leads to choking.
I think the point is that 'not capable of digesting' is an inaccurate description of the issue. Most likely it would just take some time to integrate meat back into their diet... I've made much smaller changes to my diet which caused discomfort, but it lasted a week or two, and my body was fine with it. Likely this friend's transition would be more uncomfortable, and lengthy, but I can't imagine that if for some reason they HAD to eat meat again, their body would completely reject all meat indefinitely.
To counter your anecdote: I was vegetarian for 26 years (and had been vegan for 5 of those years) and I had no problems eating beef, mutton, lamb, or pork.
Anecdotal evidence is stupid and pointless (includng my anecdotal evidence) and it's weird to see it so often on HN.
Wait, why is it stupid and pointless in this case?
We have multiple anecdotes indicating people have had problems; we have at least one indicating people don't. This is, to me, clearly evidence against both "Everyone has problems" and "Nobody has problems" and in favor of "Some people have problems", and for the specific policy question at hand, we're trying to evaluate "Some people have problems".
I suspect - but can't be sure without some form of experiment - that just like it took time to get you to adapt to not eating meat it will take time to re-adapt to eating meat again. The only way to be sure is by sticking to a meat diet for a longer time after going vegetarian for long enough that you're no longer supporting a set of bacteria that can easily digest the meat.
I'm not sure how long that would take and if it would happen with all people but just like it takes a while before newborns can digest food properly I suspect that a similar adaptation would not happen overnight in adults that radically change their diet from one set of foods to another.
Apropos: vegetable matter is far harder to digest in general than meat (due to plants having cell walls that need to be broken down first).
No in fact with questions of religion, psychiatry, diets, etc it usually comes to 'large bodies of populations' or even 'majorities of populations', you're going to find 'some' of everything.
Sure. The question is whether your body can sufficiently adapt to voluntary dietary choices that it would be cruel for a prison to feed you food that you can no longer tolerate. If you can find "some" of it, then I would say yes, a mature society should be inclined to treat this as a legitimate concern.
Whether there's any particular guarantee of this happening is another question entirely and completely irrelevant. It would be relevant if you could determine that there is a guarantee this won't happen, but that's it.
Any new diet can cause digestive issues at first. People generally aclumate over time.
[Note: i personally am in full support of prisoners being allowed to keep their diet while being incarcerated. Especially as someone who has a special diet myself. ]
Well, you would have to introduce it slowly. I lived in an anarchist separatist vegan collective in my time in germany (long story), with the result of me not eating any animal products for over a year. The first time (after 11 months) that I ate meat after that (a steak. bleu) I puked my guts out and had the runs for over a week.
It took about a month of slowly introducing meat before I was back to normal. There are others that made the switch cold turkey without problems though.
Why should a prison accommodate people who don't eat certain things based on religious guidelines? People are rarely vegan because they associate a vegan diet with one of luxury. They choose not to eat animal products because they have an ethical objection to them.
Which makes the whole discussion rather bizarre. So you don't want meat slop on beans and rice, fine, take two scoops of rice and beans instead without the slop. Don't want pancakes and bacon, fine, take an extra pancake instead. If the servers won't cooperate, trade a slice of bacon to your neighbor in exchange for a pancake.
I suppose you could intentionally sabotage someone by putting bacon in with the beans, so just avoid mixing expensive bacon in with the cheap beans and I think everyone will be happy?
My guess is dietary sabotage is intentional, even if it takes more money and more effort, as a kind of psychological torture. "The guards will beat you if you don't put bacon bits on your salad because they know you're a vegan" type of thing.
(edited to explain, I ate years of institutional food in school lunches, then the Army, and then at University, pretty much my first quarter century of life, and I assumed its "about the same" in prison. Which is very interestingly, apparently, completely wrong. Prison is apparently more like every inmate gets "the" TV dinner today and there's no sharing/trading allowed.)
Someone's been watching too much Hollywood. That's not how food inside works. Your meal is selected for you and given to you in a container, depending on facility. Some prisons have a system similar to what you describe, but inmates' hands are not on the serving equipment and you're only saying "yes"/"no" to things. The facility has strict counts of calories to maintain and putting a serving spoon in the hand of an inmate is a good way to throw a budget away.
In almost all cases in county, the food is already prepared in a plastic container and if you refuse what is offered to you, you do not eat, which means even kosher folks go without for a couple days until the records "catch up."
From a purely practical point of view, food is something it's very easy to hunger-strike over.
I'm willing to bet there have been a number of hunger strikes over a lack of kosher of halal foods. It wouldn't surprise me if there have been a few prisoners who have refused to eat animal products behind bars, even when the vegetarian products were not nutritionally sufficient.
I would be highly surprised if there were any sustained hunger strikes over lack of gourmet food.
I agree with the fact that it is problematic to say that prisons should accommodate any kind of voluntary diets (vegetarian, vegan, halal, kosher, etc.). I do not say this because prisons should "punish" inmates, but because it would require to draw a line between "common" or "reasonable" voluntary diets, and other diets. (Of course, this does not apply to special diets required for medical reasons.) In fact, I have the same problems with voluntary diets being honored in other State-run facilities such as school canteens.
However, I do not see why, as a general principle, prisoners should not be allowed to buy food and have it shipped to them, using their own money.
Vegan; vegetarian; Halal; Kosher; medical; none of the above.
These rules cover most religions and most lifestyle diets; these do exclude wishy-washy bullshit.
Not providing foods guided by a person's religion is probably a violation of article 5 and is a violation of article 18 of the universal declaration of human rights.
You can ask that the prisonor provides evidence of adherance to the restricted diet in their lofe before they became a prisoner. For example, a prisoner who claims to be vegetarian could show that they had been a member of the vegetarian society in their life outside prison.
Plus it's easy to cover more than one group with the same meal, that is, a vegan meal would be fine for a vegetarian inmate to eat. Kosher and Halal are theoretically very close, presumably some meat producers must comply with all the handling and prayers to certify as both, etc.
Or, since it doesn't seem have been suggested previously, why not a Kosher, Halal vegan meal plan for all inmates? If it was nutritionally complete, it should be cheaper than even the presumably cheap meat-based diet most prisoners are currently fed...
> These rules cover most religions and most lifestyle diets; these do exclude wishy-washy bullshit.
What about people who only want to eat free-range eggs (and not any products derived from eggs from caged hens?); or do not want to eat fish from non-sustainable fishing? Sure, they can stick to the vegan diet, but isn't it discriminatory that their specific preferences are not taken into account, and that they are mixed with a larger group? (In the same way that, I guess, you would not find it acceptable if people who want to eat halal or kosher were directed to eat vegan food; although note that kosher can be more restrictive than vegan due to requirements on checking for possible insect infestation of certain vegetables.)
Who is to make a decision about which practices are "bullshit" and which ones are "serious"? or whether one was "sufficiently" committed to a practice in the past? If you specifically accommodate some of these practices but not others, you are discriminating against people following practices which are too rare or not sufficiently established. In this spirit I think your original list would be discriminatory relative to the other practices I have listed above.
My claim is that a prison has to manage the practical life of the inmates and feed them (with a default option; I do not object them buying different food items from external suppliers), and when you have to do this you cannot satisfy all preferences. Then, it is discriminatory to satisfy some preferences and disregard others because they are more common, or they have an established name ("vegetarianism" vs "not eating pineapples shipped by air freight"), or they are motivated by religious reasons. As long as the diet cannot be justified by a medical necessity, you are accommodating a personal preference, no matter the underlying reason; and it is discriminatory to favor some at the expense of others, and impossible to rate whether preferences are "valid" or "serious" (except by a doctor, for the medical cases).
It is probably a good idea to offer diverse food options to increase the odds that people find something that suits them, but as soon as you go out of your way to satisfy a specific observance, I think it has the potential to be discriminatory.
> Not providing foods guided by a person's religion is probably a violation of article 5 and is a violation of article 18 of the universal declaration of human rights.
If you interpret the "right to observance" as implying that the State, when detaining you, must accommodate your beliefs, then as I have argued it is practically impossible to do this in a non-discriminatory fashion.
(To give more background about my opinions: I am quite influenced by French laïcité https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La%C3%AFcit%C3%A9 whose current interpretation is often that, to avoid discriminating against any religious creed, as you cannot recognize them all, you should endorse none.)
I had a US jail as a client for my long ago RFID business and they had 4 types of meals: 2 kosher (jewish and islamic), "normal" and medical/special as I recall.
I used to tell people our app tracked inventory that was trying to escape.
What is ridiculous about it? One of the primary goals of prisons, at least here, is to rehabilitate the inmates. Whether that works in practice or not, it's recognized that if you can't practice your most basic beliefs, whether those are religiously founded or otherwise, your mental health and general well being is going to suffer.
So what happened to the votes here, BTW? Earlier today, this and quite a few other comments descended from it were downvoted to invisibility. A few hours later, I checked in and they're all back in black. Are the Million Moms Against Vegetarians running a sockpuppet campaign, or what exactly?
Religion is voluntary, reading books is voluntary, using exercise equipment is voluntary, using a phone or room to talk to your family is voluntary. A prisoner doesn't have to do any of those things, and plenty of prisoners get by without doing each one of those. Do you have a problem with these voluntary activities as well?
No you're certainly not alone, however the vast majority of prison systems have very high recidivism rates.
You have to ask yourself whether you want prisons to punish people or to get them to not commit crimes in the future, if your goal is to punish people, then sure, feed them the opposite of their preferred diet.
If your goal is to change their behaviour then the breaking of bread can be instrumental in creating change. By showing respect for their culture you can begin to bridge the gap and help them respect yours.
>The Prison Yoga Project was founded in the belief that yoga, taught specifically as a mindfulness practice, is very effective in releasing deeply held, unresolved trauma, allowing us to address the resultant behavioral issues
>Our objective is to provide prisoners with a mindfulness tool to draw on their yoga practice when they’re not doing yoga. If they’re tangled in a confrontation on the yard, or upon release, or tempted to go back to using, they can draw on what they have learned from yoga for practical solutions. They can do it without actually having to do a yoga pose to get the value. That’s the transformational, rehabilitative value of yoga.
Lunch with family (in the prison) sounds like a great way to improve recidivism rates. I'd bet that yoga or another form of meditation would also be beneficial.
Sure. If you have celiac disease, try California. Your doctor can write you a note so that you don't have to eat food that could be debilitating or life-threatening.
Simple health issues aside, it's a weird fact I have trouble wrapping my head around that there's an uncrossable chasm between people who think prisoners should be given some measure of dignity and people who find the very idea laughable.
I would just wish for you (and for us all) a moment of vivid imagination and empathy. Imagine that the meat on the menu is dog or cat or human. Not just something you find distasteful, but something that provokes genuine sadness, and whose consumption you don't want a part of. By being convicted of a crime, should you lose the ability to say no to something you find morally unconscionable?
The focus on "prison as punishment" for some people seems to also mean "complete removal of any dignity". Prison can suck without forcing people to eat and live against their moral values. Do we really thing rehabilitation works better when we show no respect?
I am a meat eater, but this whole discussion is laughable in many ways. I think veganism is a healthy conviction. Stepping on that is likely to just make people more angry and feel more alienated by the system.
A bit unrelated: Back in the days when I had no money at all I lived on rice, pasta, beans, broccoli, cabbage and an occasional glass of milk for 3 months (meat is expensive, at least when your budget is about 1 euro a day) without getting any notable deficiencies (went to see a doctor when I got money). If you provide means for someone to get B12 and calcium (while serving legumes daily) there wouldn't be much trouble catering to vegan needs.
TIL: Once people have decided that someone is a hero, facts cannot change their outlook. I thought HN was populated by smarter people than that, but I was wrong.
> Although Sunde did not provide Ars with specific financial details regarding The Pirate Bay's operational expenses, he did argue that the site's high bandwidth, power, and hardware costs eliminate the potential for profit. The Pirate Bay, he says, may ultimately be operating at a loss.
I'm generally in favor of TPB, but "may be operating at a loss"? How the hell do you not know if your bottom line is going up or down? This sounds fishy to me.
I think when you're in that line of business, your entire infrastructure could be taken from you at any moment. That could make knowing your financials kind of difficult.
At a first approximation, your hosting costs are very obvious: you get a monthly invoice from your hosting provider. If you use multiple providers, add them up. If you use a CDN, add that in too. Very simple. Whether or not your infrastructure will be seized changes nothing about the fact that they are receiving regular invoices for the services they consume.
Revenues are similarly easy to calculate: add up all the payments received by whatever ad networks, affiliate programs, partnerships, and so on they use. Some may pay weekly, some monthly, some quarterly... whatever. But it should be trivial to add these up over the course of a 3 month, 6 month, or 1 year period.
Any competent 10 year old should be able to take the revenue and expense information and calculate a net profit or loss. Barring that, anybody in the same position should at the very least be able to consider whether the statement "I regularly dip into my personal savings to pay for the site's operations" rings true for them or if they never had to do that. If the revenue and expenses were co-mingled with their personal bank accounts, it should be easy to separate out other sources of revenue and look at income vs. expense from site operations.
True, but you're assuming they were even remotely systematic about their book keeping.
Depending on how much their income did fluctuate and how irregular their expenses might have been (especially if you consider "one time" expenses like hardware with an indeterminate life expectancy) and if you then consider that they likely had their hand in the cookie jar while also throwing "their own" money back in when they needed to, it can be a huge ball of mud.
You could determine the total loss/gain by adding up the business-related expenses and income, but that assumes they were interested in doing so.
I'm sure they had at least a general idea of how well they were doing "right now" (i.e. assuming no catastrophic hardware failures or drastic changes in revenue, etc), but unless they were certain they weren't making much money (or even operating at a loss), they had no incentive to put their exact net profit/loss into clear terms.
Considering how easy it is to burn large sums of money without really being aware of where it all went, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt that they actually didn't know if they made a ton of money. But I'm fairly certain they knew the general direction they had been heading well enough not to be honest about the specifics.
That's all their claims. They were not able to show that they were losing or making money in court. There were no records, at all.
However, they would have to been incredibly incompetent not to make millions off the advertisment, based on their amount of traffic. This was key in the procedings.
I mean.. right now thepiratebay.se is at top 90 in the alexa ranking. More traffic than e.g. nytimes.com, ebay.co.uk, redtube.com, dailymail.co.uk, etc etc.
Meanwhile, the hosting cost for this service is comparatively extremely small. Saw some list recently of 20 servers. Perhaps true, but seems inefficient. Still, at that level, peanuts compared to the ad revenue.
The issue is the provenance of the ads, there's way more ad publisher interested in nytimes, ebay, etc... it's even worse when you consider that people that surf piratebay probably use an ad blocker or won't be interested to buy any product.
I have an hard time though to believe they would be losing money. How could they afford to keep it online at that scale if they had to use their own money.
Considering they have a ton of ads being served this line of thinking is very unlikely, as they are clearly attracting advertisers who are spending money.
Well, they have a higher Alexa ranking than the Pirate Bay, so it's probably easier for them to get advertisers. Also they're a near-monopoly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MindGeek On top of that, while porn may be objectionable to some advertisers' brands, it's still worlds better than the straight-up illegal content on the Pirate Bay.
There's a potential paying customer on a pornographic website, there's none on a illegal torrent tracker (or at least, there's less). There's always the possibility to advertise or sell live stream, access to other pornographic website, etc...
You never saw any pornographic ads on Pirate Bay? That's mostly the ads that I saw the last time I went there, but I wasn't searching for porn at all. I'm pretty sure though that people that goes to pornhub want porn, so theses ads should generate more profit on pornhub than on Pirate Bay.
We could also talk about brand association, etc... but I hope you already understood how it's easier to make money out of porn comparatively to illegal torrent tracker.
Economics 101, things are only worth what others on the same market are willing to pay.
Ask what market tpb advertisements are on. Is it more similar to those of nytimes, or to a spam network using botnets to send emails?
A botnet that send spams can easily reach more eyeballs than any top 90 ranked website, and thanks to security researcher, we do actually have a good idea how much they earn. Unsurprisingly, its far far less than a nytimes.com makes per eyeball.
What people are willing to advertise on tpb, and what are the competitor on that market. My guess: spam networks. based on that, revenue from tpb is going to be very similar to the hosting cost, or even below that.
I can believe they weren't making much but I have an hard time believing they were actually losing money. At that scale, if they were losing any money, it would be way more than they could afford to.
When did they stop hosting .torrent files? Hosting only magnet links means they have nearly nil bandwidth costs (just some sparse HTML pages, by far the biggest piece of content on a tpb results page are the ads) and require very little infrastructure.
In contrast, they have banners on the results page, pop-ups when you interact on the results pages, and massive banners on the item pages.
A good chunk of their clientèle hopefully runs adblock, and I also can't imagine the ads they're serving are very lucrative since few legitimate companies will want to do business with them, but I can't imagine that it balances out.
You missed the affiliate links - they also peddle crapware for $$$, in addition to the ads and popups that might be blocked.
Even if 1/2 their traffic is using adblockers that still leaves billions of ad impressions a month. There is no reason to believe their lies about how much servers cost, especially on a site like HN where many people have first hand experience of more elaborate hosting costs and advertising.
On the flipside, I cannot imagine clickthrough rates and impressions that lead to purchases is high on a site that markets itself as a place to pirate digital content even for those not using adblock. And the nature of the site can deter larger advertisers from using it.
I'm not saying they made no money, but I doubt it would have been as lucrative as if those page views were dedicated to, say, www.wickerbaskets.com or something else.
They don't have any shortage of advertisers so there is obviously demand for the space = companies paying for it. There are also piracy-complementary services that seem to be popular in the ads like VPN and privacy stuff, seed boxes, torrent clients etc that people do pay for.
I really don't think "shortage of advertisers" matters, you can sign up for a Juicy Ads[1] account and place those pop unders and CPM ads on my programming blog if I want, I don't have to communicate with the advertisers I just use an ad platform.
Since they ran a multi-million dollar business for like ten years without "having any idea of how much money the ads brought in" (as stated over and over in the court proceedings) that is a pretty big assumption you made just there.
I would have thought that court might have looked into this, and possibly added to the charges in consequence, but the coverage I can find doesn't mention it at all.
They've always covered their money trail, it's been a critical part of the illusion they portray where they're good people doing good things for nothing.
Given that the rest of the internet at their popularity level manages to generate enough $$$ to cover thousands of employees, produce their own whatever etc, it's ludicrous to expect TPB's traffic to 'cover hosting' as is the popular rumor.
A similar site, SurfTheChannel, was found to be generating ~$78,000 per month with order(s) of magnitude less traffic.
At least in Denmark, not paying e.g. $1 million in tax and especially if it's clear you didn't forget but conspired to avoid tax could be a far longer prison sentence than what this guy got away with. It's surprising this was not mentioned given the Scandinavian credit card operations where foreign credit card heavily used in the country were scanned to see if they belonged to not tourists but tax evaders.
Personally I hope hes rich, They did not invent torrents, they did little to improve the market for them directly, but they have provided something valuable in making one of the most takedown resistant sites on the Internet. That kind of technological exploration is incredibly valuable, and they provide a service a lot of people wanted, and it makes sense to profit off that if you can.
The entire point of prison is to suck, otherwise it wouldn't serve its role, which is to deter crime. Louis CK has a bit about this in one of his recent specials:
Debating the prison's respect for Sunde's vegan wishes misses the forest for the trees. Honestly, if that's your biggest concern from reading this article, you have really messed up priorities. How about the fact that he went to maximum at all?Anyway, just an oddly off-topic thread here, thought I'd point it out. It's even more fun because I've been detained, so reading some of the arguments makes it clear that I'm one of the only people with that experience here. Prison's not something you can just try, to see what it's like, so unless you've been there it's usually wise to assume the worst things are true rather than being optimistic about rights and common sense. If one thing is true about detention, it's that rights and common sense don't matter at all when the door's closed and nobody's looking.
Also, welcome back, Peter.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQUr2RkjykU