Because your economy is in bit of a mess? And I wonder if this was part of the -08 stimulus, why this is come to the news now?

Come on, that wouldn't work at all. Imagine if there would be a huge police brutality scandal all across the US soils, imagine what would happen to the directed tax revenue to the police forces. I mean your idea is good on paper, but in reality it wouldn't work much. It's better the tax money is going to a big pot first and then from there on split to correct portions, well would be better if there wouldn't be any stupid sinkholes.

Ditto, I mean here is a actual example. Here he is, the "King of Pork" himself, the late Mr. Robert Byrd:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pl … obert_Byrd

Ahh, but that's the thing! In my supposed case, the police would be held directly accountable to the people, and thus would think twice before committing foul play, and they'd have to keep up positive public relations.

Besides, more people make the case for having police, than they make the case against police, even if they get ticketed for speeding or parking. There're always going to be people who're hard asses, who support the police, and other people, who, for lack of a better expression, don't.

The whiter and wealthier people tend to be, the more they actually want the police around...racist, yes, true? Yes.

Me, I'm willing to pay for police, when they actually keep gangsters from doing drive by shootings, or keep urchins off the streets who just want to mug and pick fights.

But when I stop for a stop sign, and then get pulled over by an officer who alleges I rolled through past the sign without stopping, not so much. Case-in-point: Stay put when an officer rolls by, then go after they're gone.

I think you'd have to agree, when you're afraid of the police even without having committed any crime, that's a bad situation there. Often times, with the police, it's not a matter of what you've done, but what they think you're GOING to do.

I probably would be afraid of american police forces if I would be visiting US, but it could be because some of the media has painted american police forces as brutallity loving sobs who just mess with you to get their kicks, even if you do small mistake. Though I would be more afraid of the customs, I don't want my ass to be probed.

But gotta say, your idea of people choosing where their tax money goes is nice. Maybe it could be somewhat integrated in the taxing, so for instance there would be actual % from your tax going into separate places. I mean, knowing that 4 dollars per month from your paycheck goes to the police etc. would probably make things somewhat different. But before that's gonna happen, the economy must be fixed. Even if it includes taxing people selling stuff in eBay. But then, how many in here does really manage to get $20k and 200 items in month or was it in a year?

Berny and his cops thing again....

Ok, I can't say I'm in love with cops either, and yeah, they can inflict consequenses on your life that can make it a real drag, but the key issue here seems to be abuse of power right?

Anybody in a position of power can abuse it. Hell, I'm going to have to deal with one such person in a little less than two hours. A person that is pretty much bulletproof because they "know the right person." However, it just like anything else, you got to learn how to play the game. (Not talking about Triple H here....)

Life is a game you learn as go, sometimes you lead sometimes you follow, don't worry about what you don't know...

For the record I really hate country music.

Lets see, the law says when in a stop sign you must come to a COMPLETE stop. That means, your velocity has to go to zero. So if you rolled past the stop sign, you just broke the law. Police are there to enforce the law. When they see someone break the law, they have the right to pull you over. Will you get pulled over for rolling through a stop sign? Maybe... and you might or might not get a ticket. However whose fault is that? Your fault.

Also, if you're afraid of the police without committing a crime, then I would say you're either paranoid (which appears to be the case with you), or you're going to commit some crime and are scared you'll get caught. Most police officers are just doing their duty, and yeah sometimes it sucks that they stick you with a speeding ticket (happened to me once) but hey, you can't blame them when you break the law.

i like to keep urchins in my sashimi...

Are you trying to fool us, or are you truly this naive? Your statement presupposes that those who hold power are always good and just and that they never abuse their power, although any fool with half an eye open to the world *should* be aware of that clearly not being the case. In the case of the police, police brutality and corruption is rife and far from every occurrence can be explained away by "the victim broke the law, he/she had it coming". Are you by the way familiar with one Rodney King? If not, you have some reading up to do.

What you wrote is just another re-phrasing of the most retarded argument in human history - "if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear". Tell that to the countless suckers throughout history and today who did nothing wrong but still got the shaft.

That's exactly what I'm proposing!

The problem is, it's not going to stop with the limit. Eventually, all purchases or sales made online will be taxed to the extent that it just won't be worth doing them anymore, thereby discouraging economic growth in small businesses, and business in general! It never starts off extreme, but over time, gets out of hand!

When there's no business left to tax, where, then, will the government obtain tax revenue?

If anything, I'd draw back on making any new taxes, or further cut more taxes, and let things develop again, and THEN try taxing people when people actually have the money to give!

Made quite an impression, did I?

I know exactly what you mean, and I agree entirely. It's not that the government itself entails corruption, but the people inside that government who are either corrupt, or whatever the opposite of corrupt is. The question is, when you're making your election, how do you recognize someone with a sense of...what the opposite of corrupt is, and someone who's going to take your money and run? And once you elect the ass shmuck to office, how to dispose him when he betrays all the promises he made? Or worse, fulfills all the promises that no one wanted him to keep?

Dude, I stopped for the damn stop sign...I make sure to stop abruptly so any person in viewing distance can see that I JERK to a stop, then count from 0 to 3 in even intervals (0, 1, 2, 3) before moving again, I believe, is the general driving rule for stopping before moving again.

Oh, I accidentally did read your earlier propose as in that people could choose where the taxes go, like choose "ok all my money goes to education only", not as in that you could see where your tax money actually goes.

Pretty sure things won't become such extreme things that every purchase/sale made by online will be taxed. Probably the limit can go down a bit, but not much.

Well, hard to make that when economy is in a bad shape, it usually makes people who make the decisions go into some sort of absurd panic mode. But then, I can't blame them much, not being into economics much.

Does 0.02% constitute rife in your book??
No, my statement does not presuppose anything. I did not say all police are perfectly honest, because there's some level of corruption in any given environment. However, the vast majority of police in this country are honest and do their job. Since their job is so much in the public eye, when you do have a corrupt officer it's easy for people to say '"they're all pigs!"  I won't deny that police brutality does occur from time to time, but to say that it's "rife" is such an exaggeration. In 2006 a study was done and showed that 2000 cases of reported police brutality (out of an initial 26,556 cases) actually had merit. In this case, police brutality meant use of excessive force. Do you know how many arrests are typically made in the US each year? Well over 10 million! AND that does not include traffic violations (DUI, etc)!!

2000/10,000,000 = 0.02%

I won't deny it's still 2000 cases too many, but I'm not going to be paranoid every time I see the police, nor am I going to lose sleep thinking they're all out to get me! Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of big government, and I'm leery of those in charge, but when people watch movies, play video games, waste so much time on the net, etc... they get these delusions they refuse to give up. There have been lots of studies on this in fact, and a very well-known example is 9-11 where people are certain it was all an inside job and that the government knew about it etc etc! Anyway, I'm getting slightly sidetracked, but I think I've made my point. For reference start with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_bru … ost_9.2F11
http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/arrests/index.html

I agree with you that there's no need to be paranoid about it and that most police officers are probably honest folk. However, the way you worded it just sounded off, like every time the police cracks down on someone, they deserve it. I find that kind of sheepish acceptance deeply troubling, to be honest.

LOL, you really like figures, don't you? Excuse me if I don't take those figures too seriously. Why? Well...

1) They are taken from a 2006 Department of Justice report, meaning that you're getting figures from the government in order to absolve said government. Circular reasoning much...? Excuse me if I'm being a pesky critic here, but as a trained historian, that's a big no-no in my book. If you want to prove your point, at least give us some independent data. The other link you provided is also - surprise - the US Department of Justice. The imperative sentence in your first link is of course: While the prevalence of police brutality in the United States is not comprehensively documented, statistics on police brutality are much less available. And if we suspect that members of a branch of the law enforcement apparatus are committing brutal acts, do we go to another branch and expect to get honest figures on that?

2) You can't feed us a number that easily and just expect us to swallow it, especially when one should reasonably expect the real number to be much higher than the reported one. In all sorts of crime that include a violent assault on a person (physical assault, sexual harassment, rape, homicide, etc.), it is foolish to expect that every occurrence even gets as far as being reported, mainly because the victim is too shocked, frightened, or incapacitated to do so. This seems to be the case especially with rape, with one study concluding that only 39% of rapes even get reported. Now, if we consider this for a moment, if people are reluctant (for whatever reason) to report when they get assaulted or violated by common criminals, don't you think that they'd be even more so if they're assaulted by a police officer, a representative of the public law enforcement authority? Its impossible to know how large the "dark number" of unreported cases is, but considering the often utter futility in reporting it - unless you're "fortunate" enough to have hard evidence like the video clearly showing those officers beating Rodney King - we can only assume its much higher than any figure the US Department of Justice cares to feed us with (and here we again return to point #1: what are your reasons for thinking that they'd be honest about this in the first place when they're sitting in the same boat with the police itself?).

I thought you're a scientist, avatar!? Where is your critical streak? In cases like these, mindlessly churning numbers and statistics is a poor replacement for actual critical thinking.

Without direct evidence you are only guessing. You can always say "assume its much higher", but you're doing just that -merely assuming. If you had to defend your argument in court, the judge would toss your argument since assuming things is nothing more than hearsay at best. As for being a scientist, that's exactly what the numbers are for. I need hard evidence. Even if it's not perfect, you have to use what you have. Perhaps historians can make things up by saying "well, people are brutal, police are brutal, the government is crooked, so surely there is much more police brutality than what we see", but again you're just applying your own bias without any real evidence. Now, IF you can give me statistics, numbers, from sources other than the government, THAT has scientific value. Keep in mind, I'm not saying that there are no cases of police brutality that go unreported, since there likely are, however without scientific and documented studies it's asinine to just assume things. Secondly, the government is NOT one big machine you realize. Various parts of the government have often sued and won cases against other parts of the government! Your implication that the government would absolve any other branch of the government of any wrongdoing is absolutely wrong! I can give you NUMEROUS cases where the government has caught and prosecuted other government employees (everyone from police offers to senators) for breaking the law. In fact, when I was called to jury duty, the judge (a member of the Judicial Branch) told us right away that we are NOT to trust the word of the police offer (the other government employee) who was to testify more than the word of any other citizen. Look, I realize there is corruption, I realize there is some police brutality, I do think citizens should always be leery, but nevertheless it seems like some of you guys around here GREATLY exaggerate the situation!

As I pointed out in point #2 above, "direct evidence" is not easily available in questions like these. Again, the link you yourself posted even says While the prevalence of police brutality in the United States is not comprehensively documented, statistics on police brutality are much less available.

What you want is some easy numbers you can toss off to justify your own bias. As for "hard numbers", the one statistic you provided is anything but. Let's see what is says, shall we?

First thing to note: statistics on the subject are few.
Second thing to note: out of these few statistics, one can be found in a 2006 Department of Justice report.
Third thing to note: what this one statistic says is that "out of 26,556 citizen complaints about excessive use of police force among large U.S. agencies [...] in 2002, about 2000 were found to have merit".

From these premises, you somehow conclude the incidence of police brutality to be 0.02%, when all this fragmentary statistic really says is that 2000 out of 26,556 citizen complaints in 2002 about excessive use of police force were found to have merit. That means that out of those cases investigated in the report, about 1 in 13 were found to have merit. We know nothing more than this, neither what sample was used, whether the report focused on any particular group of crimes, geographic areas, age groups, etc.. Yet you somehow see it fit to just arbitrarily divide those 2000 cases by 10 million because that's how many arrests there are in the US in one year, which doesn't have anything at all to do with it. The figures given are citizen complaints of police brutality, it has nothing to do with the number of arrests. We do not even know if these figures represent the total number of citizen complaints, or just a sampling used in the report. So I'm sorry, your number isn't "hard evidence", its not even correct, its just something you came up with to try to muddle our eyes and shut us up with numbers, isn't it?

And that is just one side of the coin. The link you posted yourself goes beyond the merely reported cases to state:

Other studies have shown that most police brutality goes unreported. In 1982, the federal government funded a "Police Services Study," in which over 12,000 randomly selected citizens were interviewed in three metropolitan areas. The study found that 13.6 percent of those surveyed claimed to have had cause to complain about police service (including verbal abuse, discourtesy and physical abuse) in the previous year. Yet only 30 percent of those who acknowledged such brutality filed formal complaints. A 1998 Human Rights Watch report stated that in all 14 precincts it examined, the process of filing a complaint was "unnecessarily difficult and often intimidating."

Something to contemplate, perhaps?

All of that said, I agree with you that the discussion has taken a somewhat paranoid turn... Most police officers are indeed honest people just doing their job. But still, 2000 cases of brutality from those who are supposed to "protect and serve" society is 2000 cases too many.

Clearly, I did not just arbitrarily divide! Where do you think 26,556 complaints come from? They come when people come into contact with police! When does this happen? The VAST majority are when people either get pulled over for driving violations, or when they actually get arrested, cited, or summoned for an offense. In 2005 there were over 14,000,000 people arrested (not counting traffic violations). Taking an upper limit, I said let's divide the number of cases of claimed police brutality by 10,000,000. Therefore the 0.02% - 0.2% is a theoretical upper limit. If you count traffic violations (which is actually where most people come into contact with police, and is not even included in the 14,000,000 arrests), then the actual percentage of police brutality would greatly decrease. The point is, and hopefully you can see this, that the numbers say your chances of actually being in a violent confrontation with the police (ie brutality) is very very slim.

I do agree with what you said at the end, which is that most police are honest and doing their job. I've actually found them to be helpful, and lets face it they do put their lives at risk far more than an average person. Of course 2000 cases of brutality is far too many! Even one case is too many. As you noted, the discussion has become paranoid, and frankly it seems to be that many people who hate taxes, hate the government, and hate police, still take advantage of the system and just cry how life is so unfair. Bleh!

That being said, I'm usually up for a political discussion (hey, I think we don't have enough "intellectual" conversations around here)! Oh, and even though I have no qualms on bashing your argument Daniel, I still respect your right to have it.

avatar!, did you miss the second part of my last post? The fact that you didn't include it in your quote seems to suggest so. You can't divide those 26,556 cases by the total number of arrests in the country, because you (or I) have no idea whether these 26,556 cases represent all registered complaints during that year. You're just grasping at a number here. Contrary to what you seem to think, "any number at all" just doesn't cut it, you have to make sure its relevant to what you want to say.

Furthermore - and this part is even more important - your assumption is further invalidated by what I wrote in the second part of my last post. Since you didn't seem to notice it, I have to be so rude as to post it again. Please read carefully, its from the first link you provided above:

Other studies have shown that most police brutality goes unreported. In 1982, the federal government funded a "Police Services Study," in which over 12,000 randomly selected citizens were interviewed in three metropolitan areas. The study found that 13.6 percent of those surveyed claimed to have had cause to complain about police service (including verbal abuse, discourtesy and physical abuse) in the previous year. Yet only 30 percent of those who acknowledged such brutality filed formal complaints. A 1998 Human Rights Watch report stated that in all 14 precincts it examined, the process of filing a complaint was "unnecessarily difficult and often intimidating."

Now, you asked for hard numbers and statistics, and I gave them to you. In the above passage we have two statistics, one from a government source and another from an independent watch-group (the validity being made stronger by use of multiple sources). They both strongly suggest that far, far from every case of police brutality even gets as far as being reported. The first study finds that 13.6% of people asked had had trouble with the police. That is 13.6 percent out of a total of 12,000 randomly selected people, definitely not a small sum, and quite above the 0.02% you propose. Out of that number, only 30 percent filed formal complaints. This means that the actual number of incidences of police brutality is not equal to the number of filed complaints, which significantly weakens the one statistic you provided, as it is based on only reported cases.

Here you might retort and say "well, if people don't file complaints when they're abused, they only have themselves to blame". Fair enough, you can take that attitude, but you still have to deal with the fact that a lot - probably most - of police brutality goes unreported and thus falls outside your statistics. As the second study quoted above shows, in 14 out of 14 precincts examined (100%!), "the process of filing a complaint was "unnecessarily difficult and often intimidating"". I do not doubt that statistic at all. I've had a couple of friends who've filed complains about government agencies (not the police, but close), and the process is a long and grueling one where you really have to have a strong personality and be able to stand up for yourself to take it to the end. Far from everyone has that strength, and if we're talking about something like police brutality, where you in addition also have to deal with the traumatization of a violent episode at the hands of those who are supposed to be guarding the peace in society, I can only imagine it being much, much harder. This is the point that I've been trying to make: a lot of things happen "in the dark" and never reach the light of day in the courts, so any "official statistic" you might provide us with in this question should be taken with a handful if not a bucketful of salt. The figures might be plain and readily available in the natural sciences, but the situation is often not that simple and straightforward in social studies, so don't make the mistake of thinking that once you have a number, you have the whole problem figured out.

Hey, does anyone remember Rax?

No, I did not miss this point, nor does it invalidate my numbers. I won't run through my argument again, since you seem to refuse to accept it, and I'm not saying that my value of 0.02% is the most accurate. In fact, I'm saying it's an upper limit based on our current data. As for the number you quote above, 13.6% "had cause to complain" is NOT the same thing as police brutality. Notice that one of the complaints is discourtesy. What does that entail? If a police officer pulls you over and tells you that you were speeding and 'you better be careful or you could hit someone!'is that discourteous? Where do you draw the line? Of the 13.6% did 13% complain about discourtesy and only 0.6% complain about verbal abuse? Unless you can clarify where police brutality (excessive physical force) comes into that number, that 13.6% is just a hodgepodge of complaints and it really can't tell us what's going on. Furthermore we don't know how many of those actually have merit. As for the other statistic, the one concerning 14 precincts, that is something that has more merit, however I don't know what constitutes "unnecessarily difficult" nor "intimidating". Where were those precincts? Were they randomly chosen, or are they from some of the most violent cities in the US? I will say that there should be more studies in police brutality. 1998 wasn't long ago, but some regulations have changed. I believe every police officer in the country now is required to have a camera on their dashboard, so when they pull someone over for being drunk or whatnot, they have to arrest that person in front of the camera. In other words they can't say this person was belligerent so they had to use force, since the whole affair is on camera. Obviously that doesn't necessarily apply to other situations, but I'm just saying that as a whole, I think the country is much more aware that police brutality does sometimes occur and precautions are being taken by both people and the police themselves.

Your numbers are bogus, avatar!, that's what I've been trying to show you. Dividing 2000 with 10 million is ludicrous, because 2000 is the number of citizen complaints filed and found to have merit by the Department of Justice in the year 2002. It is a gross oversimplification on your part to claim that this equals the actual number of incidents of police brutality in reality. As has already been shown, far from every case gets filed as an official complaint, either because the process itself is too heavily bureaucratic or that the victim is too intimidated or just reckons it to be pointless, because many people are convinced the courts would never turn against the police anyway.

We don't know anything more than the numbers given. I agree that its hardly likely that those 13.6% were all subjected to force, but still, 13.6% out of 12,000 randomly selected people is quite a lot... Even if we grant that as many as 90% of those people only had to suffer "discourtesy", that still leaves 10% that had to suffer something more severe. With that many cases, there's bound to be more incidents of shady stuff and foul play than we would be comfortable to admit.

But in any case, 14 out of 14 is quite a lot, wouldn't you agree? I find it to be a quite troubling statistic, even if it happened to be taken from the most violent cities. It shows that there's a net of bothersome bureaucracy in place that prevents many cases from even being investigated.

Its funny how critical you are to my interpretation of the numbers, and how generous you are to your own. It just goes to show how elastic random statistics are, they bend and fold to the biases of whoever is using them.

No the numbers are perfectly legit. It's called an order of magnitude approximation. It's the best you can do with limited data. If you want, you can even take all 20,000 complaints (even though only 2000 were thought to have any merit). Take 20,000/10,000,000 and you arrive at 0.2%. Ten times larger than 0.02%, but still very small. As for "has already been shown, far from every case gets filed as an official complaint" I do agree that a certain percentage of cases do not get filed. I don't know why this is, nor how many. We need more data. At any rate, your argument that my numbers are bogus is just wrong. I already said the number is not accurate (the actual number might be 0.00983% or 0.0624%) but the point is that based on the data this is the best conclusion we can draw. You seem to refuse to believe this because of your conspiracy-like-theory, that is, you admit that you doubt that "only" 2000 cases are legit, because it was reviewed by the Department of Justice. You are SURE they are hiding lots of legitimate cases, right? Well,

1)As pointed out, even if you take all 20,000 cases, it's still only 0.2%.
2)Since you absolutely believe you can not get legitimate values from the government, the only thing to do is to wait until data comes from other sources.

Basically, I don't think it's worth trying to dissuade you. Once people have made up their mind on a subject (be it scientific, political, or otherwise) it's impossible to dissuade them. I'm sure you're just dying to say that I'm the same way, but I'm actually more than willing to change my perspective if I see *LEGITIMATE DATA* not just so-called "critical thinking" which in this case is based on speculation without any real hard data.

You are exactly the same, avatar!. You clearly have a strong pro-police bias which shines through in your reasoning. Now, IF you're willing to be "dissuaded" as you say, hang in in the thread a little while longer.

You are completely making a straw man figure out of me here. I haven't advanced any conspiracy-theory and I'm not out to throw dirt on the police. I don't doubt that the figure is legitimate, I just think your usage of said figure is completely wrong. Its a classical textbook example of highly selective interpretation of statistics to suit one's own needs.

Anyone who knows anything about statistics will know what accuracy and validity means. Accuracy is whether the number itself is correct in what its trying to say. Validity, on the other hand, is whether that figure can be used for what one is trying to prove, whether it is even relevant at all to the issue at hand. What I've been trying to tell you that you seem unable to grasp is that the accuracy of your figure is correct, but it completely lacks validity for what you're trying to prove. You've already admitted yourself that the figure loses some of it's validity because not all cases are reported (thus not all cases are represented in the figure). Let's go a step further and ask the question: how can you use the total number of arrests in the US in one year (10 million) as one of the variables in your equation, when an incident of police brutality can just as well occur completely unrelated to any arrest? If we imagine that a cop hits or beats up a guy without trying to arrest him, this would completely fall outside of your numbers and thus further invalidate them, right?

This is NOT an attempt to further some anti-police conspiracy-theory or to muddle the picture, it is a LEGITIMATE methodological objection that you'd have to be able to meet if you were doing a serious study on the subject. That you keep clinging to a statistic, the validity of which has all but been torn to shreds suggests to me that you're after all yourself one of those people who are not willing to change their minds on anything once its made up.

None of us have such data, that's what I've been trying to tell you. The figures presented in this discussion have been pulled off Wikipedia without much thought and they can be attacked and discredited in countless ways, if we really wanted to say anything at all of substance on the matter, we'd have to do a huge study and consider as many variables as possible. So, avatar!, you really have no "hard data", you just picked a number from Wikipedia which seemed to confirm your view, then closed your jaws adamantly like a bulldog. I'm not the one making a hen out of a feather and launching any positive claims, all I've been doing is advancing legitimate objections. What I've been trying to do with the usage of my so-called "critical thinking" that you seem to scorn (funny attitude for a scientist, I must say... ) is to make it plain that you're drawing big conclusions from minuscule data in a way that works on an online forum, but would not work in a serious study.

holy crap dudes, this here is a game music forum,, we dont take too kindly to your type and your intellectualistic battles.
can't you just settle this the good old fashion way? by that, of course, i mean some online chess or something...

<pretends to insert picture with caption about arguing on the internet and special olympics>

LOL! You're entirely right, its pretty pointless, as we're not going to "settle" anything here. But still, sometimes these "fights" are amusing (in a rare blue moon even rewarding), and we're all friends still. Right, avatar!?

Now where ever did I displace my copy of Statistical Nerd Monthly...?

I really did like the turns this convo took, first it was about Ebay Tax, then it was are taxes useful etc. and then it was POLICE BLOODY BRUTALLITY. But that's why threads never should be moderated much, especially to push back to original topic or split. Otherwise gems like this one never happens.

I'll drink to that. Well, after work I guess.

Of course we're still friends Daniel, despite the fact that you're wrong
You do make some good points, but I disagree with a number of key points you make. Still, it's probably time we put this topic to rest for now. I actually forgot that the original topic was taxing eBay profiteers who make over $20k (and I see no problem with that)! I guess we can talk about more mundane things now, such as how great Etrian Odyssey III is (after the dismal failure that was Etrian Odyssey II)!