Given a predicate is_insulting_price, write a recursive
function which determines the minimum amount for which a
target may be killed without risk of the plot being exposed
to the police by an individual receiving a lowball offer.
The function will be passed an arbitrarily high value, and
should recursively call itself with (1 - epsilon) * price
whenever is_insulting_price returns false.
For bonus marks, quantify the tradeoff between error range
and stack depth, the latter representing the number of
people who need to know about the plot.
> Tan, who hired the original hitman, was jailed for five years, while Xi, the first hitman, was sentenced to three years and six months. Yang Kangsheng and Yang Guangsheng were sentenced to three years and three months, Mo was sentenced to three years
5 years seems grossly insufficient for premeditated attempted murder. If the man was actually killed, I'm assuming the sentence would have been far more severe, such as 20 years. It seems ridiculous that someone can get a 75% reduction in their sentence, just because they were incompetent in their execution.
It gives you an incentive to change your mind. If the delta between attempted and performed murder is small, if you have doubts at the end you might as well go ahead and perform it, as at least one witness is now gone.
This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness. Though the effect of the crime on the victim can last a lifetime, at least they will be alive.
> This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness.
FWIW this probably doesn’t make any sense in practice. Most rapes are done by people who think they will get away with it either because it’s very hard to catch or because they have sufficient social power. Now, these people are clearly huge pieces of shit, but they’re probably not going to decide to murder the victim to minimize legal risk just because the potential penalties if convicted are closer. Murder is much harder to get away with and social power is much less likely to save you. Also, people don’t like committing murder generally, even if they’re apathetic enough to commit rape. The proposed logic feels like it describes the world in which rapes are committed by scary men who randomly break into your house because they’re just criminals. Not to trivialize the unfortunate fact that the latter does happen and it’s very sad, but it’s relatively rare.
"but they’re probably not going to decide to murder the victim to minimize legal risk"
If someone "has sufficient social power" as you put it, to get away with such a crime, then why do you think they wouldn't be able to make a person "disappear"?
Say, we were talkingn about basically an organized crime figure who ended up running a corrupt state. If you were a victim, would you bet that nothing would happen to you if you made a criminal complaint, filed a lawsuit, or went to the media?
This scenario is not a "scary man who randomly breaks into your house" - that doesn't seem at all implicit in the parent comment.
Isn’t that just for “crime of passion” type offenses?
Surely the penalty for murder would mean something if your business is murder, just like taxpayer bailouts affect your appetite for risk at an investment bank.
Anyone interested in the topic should take a look at _When Brute Force Fails_, by Mark Kleiman[1].
Briefly, a drug policy guy makes the case that "swift and certain" punishment with pretty usually not very severe outcomes does a lot better as deterrence than what we do now.
There's a lot to digest, and I don't think anyone is going to agree with all of it - he gores a lot of oxen. But it is meticulously researched and reasoned, and hard for this non-policy professional to argue with. Really worth at least borrowing at the library for folks who like grappling with reality at a policy level.
Mark was also a prolific blogger who died recently. I didn't know him, but did read his blog.
Studies have shown that extremely harsh penalties have minimal deterrence effects compared to moderately harsh penalties. More specifically, they advocate for a response function with a gradually decreasing gradient. Unfortunately, they have no recommendations as to what makes for a "moderately harsh" penalty, and they even acknowledge that some studies have shown deterrence effects from policies such as California's 3-strikes law.
The studies I've seen failed to take into account that the difference between no penalty (not getting caught) and one year in prison is (usually much) greater than the difference between N and N+1 years, never mind more subtle issues.
Or, as biztos brings up, mostly looked at criminals who weren't making a considered decision in the first place.
> This is why a horrible crime like rape is typically not punished as strictly as murder: if the penalty were the same, why not do away with the witness.
As an aside, something feels off about this example. Choosing to differ the penalties to incentivize not murdering the victim suggests that the murder outcome is less desirable, i.e. the crime is more horrible. The argument implicitly assumes that murder is the more horrible crime while making a case for why the punishments differ. Given that punishments are generally expected to be in proportion to the horribleness of the crime that assumption suggests that the punishments would differ to begin with.
There's a nice paper by the philosopher David Lewis (http://andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Punishment_Chance.pdf is a copy of it; I don't know whether it's in any sense a legal copy) that offers (though it doesn't exactly endorse) the following justification for this:
1. Imagine a system where the punishment for murder is exactly the same as the punishment for attempted murder, but that punishment has an element of chance: you might get a longer or a shorter sentence.
This doesn't seem particularly unreasonable. Now we're going to make successive modifications to the system, which (Lewis claims) don't obviously make it worse.
2. Now suppose that we attempt to make the punishment for more wholehearted attempts at murder greater. It's hard to tell what was in the criminal's heart, so as a reasonable proxy we try to evaluate, somehow, how likely the murder attempt was to succceed, and we punish more-likely-to-succeed attempts more harshly.
3. Now suppose, more specifically, that the way in which we punish more-likely-to-succeed attempts more harshly is by increasing the probability of getting the longer sentence. In fact, we'll say that the probability of getting the longer sentence is to be the same as our estimate of how likely the attempt at murder was to succeed.
4. How to estimate that probability? One effective but obviously impractical way would be to run some sort of reenactment or simulation of the crime, and give the longer sentence if and only if the victim dies. Aha! But we can simplify and improve this by using the original crime as the reenactment, and give the longer sentence if and only if the actual victim died.
And now we've arrived at pretty much our present practice!
Doesn't seem compelling. After all, the root of the argument is about probabilities, but the argument then goes on to propose that we base our decisions on a single simulation of a result drawn from a weighted random distribution.
Specifically step 2 sounds like it’s skipping the important bit that people disagree with on the original problem. Again, compare hiring the cheapest hit man vs the most expensive.
Then you're on a slippery slope of judging the intentions (which is what we are doing nowadays, but I don't think we should be). Intentions are muddy. Decisions and actions just come to us and it's later that we invent a story about how they came to be (at least that's AFAIK our current understanding of how consciousness works)
Once you've hired a hitman, the outcome is basically out of your control. Is there an argument where someone had hired a hitman with the intent they're unsuccessful? That seems far fetched to me.
I can buy your argument if they had intended to commit the murder themselves, because they can change their mind at any point up to actually doing it.
Similar situations to the hitman exist, too: planting a bomb, poisoning food, etc. Just because they're a bad bomb maker, or the poison wasn't potent enough, or the target doesn't drive/eat the food/etc doesn't change that they clearly intended to kill someone. To be clear, I draw a distinct line between possessing a bomb and actually planting it in someone's car - the former might be still be a crime but is clearly not the same severity as actually killing someone, whereas the actions the perpetrator took in the latter are indistinguishable, regardless of outcome.
Most legal systems seem to apply some variation of the "no harm, no foul" rule. Or at least "less foul". It also applies if you shoot and miss, or the bomb goes off at the wrong time, or if you get lost on the way to the assassination.
It seems to make sense? I mean, it's not like someone is getting off scott free. But at least there isn't a body, and that should count for something. Attempted murder is overall less bad than actual murder.
Maybe this makes sense if you think of the punishment as having a deterrent component and a retributive component. Someone who attempts a crime but fails needs to be deterred from future crime, but does not owe the same magnitude of retributive debt to society.
I'll note that despite the above I'd probably prefer a justice system that focuses on deterrence and rehabilitation, and omits retribution.
+1. There's no material societal benefit in retribution. (True, it makes some people feel good, but so does burning a cross in someone's yard.) The purpose of a justice system is to keep us safe. Someone who hires a hitman should be punished, so that future people don't do it. Whether they succeed is irrelevant.
A counterargument I can imagine is that if we punish the unsuccessful hiring of a hitman more lightly, then future hirers are more likely to err on the side of a hitman with a lower probability of success. But that seems improbable to me -- one doesn't hire a hitman to see them fail.
> The purpose of a justice system is to keep us safe. Someone who hires a hitman should be punished, so that future people don't do it. Whether they succeed is irrelevant.
One small step further: someone who plans to hire a hitman should be punished, so that future people don't even think about it. Whether they manage to hire one is irrelevant.
Now you're punishing a thought crime and equating that with successful murder even.
Merely thinking about hiring a hitman is bad, yes, and should be punished, yes.
But I would not equate it with hiring one. That's because the expected damage from planning to hire a hitman is smaller than that from actually hiring one. A year of punishment hurts the criminal the same regardless of which of those two scenarios holds, but the social benefit of punishing them is less. Therefore we should punish them less. (Unless we don't care about the welfare of someone who's been convicted at all. I think that's a sick position to hold -- even setting aside the possibility of false positives -- but it has its adherents.)
A real eye-opener for me regarding these questions of weighing the costs and benefits (i.e. the economics) of punishment was Thomas Friedman's book Law's Order. Until I read that, I thought the whole question was just a political fight. And while it certainly is a political fight, there's a much more objective kind of analysis available -- in fact, it's the norm in economics.
> Maybe this makes sense if you think of the punishment as having a deterrent component and a retributive component.
It also makes sense if one rejects retribution as illegimate but accepts proportionality as a
basis for limiting on punishment. (Many doctrines of criminal punishment accept both retribution as a goal and proportionality as a limit, so...)
Proportionality on outcome or proportionality on intent? If the assassin's gun misfires nobody is harmed. A punishment proportional to the outcome would be no punishment at all. But a punishment proportional to intent should not distinguish between the scenarios where the gun does and does not misfire.
Imagine you hire someone to mow your lawn, they accidentally destroy the neighbors' lawn, run over their dog, then set their house on fire. Also, they were drunk and on the way home from the job drove into a crowd of people. Should you be responsible?
These aren't comparable examples. If you hire a hitman, there's a reasonable expectation that people will die. No such expectation exists for hiring someone to mow your lawn.
Under what circumstances is one responsible for someone else's acts. Just because you hire someone to do something illegal, you are not responsible for all the illegal acts the other person might commit.
The mere fact of putting something in motion does not immediately mean one is responsible for all the outcomes of all actions in the chain.
There's a reasonable expectation that the victim will die, but not anyone else. I guess you can argue that there might be a risk of collateral damage, but there's also a risk of collateral damage in hiring contractors for your house (eg. the plumber starting a gas leak resulting you and your neighbor's house getting blown up).
Slippery slope? Our entire legal system is based on intention, which is why there is a huge difference in sentencing between crimes like negligent homicide and premeditated murder.
For a murder conviction and a long sentence there has to be both: someone killed and "malice". You punch someone in anger and they die: murder, years in prison. You punch someone in anger and they are not seriously injured: relatively minor. You accidentally shoot your wife while cleaning your revolver: relatively minor.
What I don't like is when they try to convict people for having conducted some kind of feasibility study. Sometimes this results in people who would have decided against committing the crime going to prison for decades as if they had committed it. Sometimes it results in people who would have committed the crime going free because the jury thinks, "This is ridiculous". I know it's more expensive and often a bit dangerous, but probably the police should wait until the gang actually arrives at the bank, or whatever, before making their arrests, rather than trying to prosecute a bunch of people who were talking about perhaps raiding a bank.
I agree; minority report and other fiction works aren't talking about some future where people are judged on potential futures. They are talking about now.
Why would your understanding of consciousness change whether we should judge intentions? Either way we have a person who is acting on a decision to murder.
If we discovered that a robot had been programmed to murder after it tried to kill someone, we wouldn't let it back into society sooner if it failed in its attempt. We'd do our best to make sure it wouldn't murder anyone when released first.
There is a difference between programming a robot to kill, compared to a human that had events happen (without will over them) and where the events almost led to a murder. The human isn't programmed to kill by those events but they almost led to the act. You have to acknowledge absolute vs uncertainty in the problem.
We're talking about people performing actions with the goal of causing another person's death, not someone who's completely at the mercy of fate and has nothing to do with murder.
If it helps, you can think of the robot as having a bug that leads to try to kill people sometimes if the right events happen around it. Should we only fix the bug in robots that have carried out successful attempts?
> We're talking about people performing actions with the goal of causing another person's death, not someone who's completely at the mercy of fate and has nothing to do with murder.
That's an assumption and it very well can be the outcome of fate alone. It's not like there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that people have control over their actions. Neuroscience exhibits people are just cause & effect.
Imagining a robot that has a bug is similar to the outcome of fate. Outside the realm of blame being on the robot but the universe that made the bug possible & happen.
Let's look at the robot some more. The universe made the bug possible and happen. I think we should try to fix the bug, even though it wasn't the robot's fault. I also think we should restrain the robot to prevent it from being able to kill again until we think the bug is fixed, even though it wasn't the robot's fault.
Do you disagree with me on either of these points?
> I think we should try to fix the bug, even though it wasn't the robot's fault.
Humans have been striving for this goal since the beginning of time. Of course I think the intentions are correct.
> I also think we should restrain the robot to prevent it from being able to kill again until we think the bug is fixed, even though it wasn't the robot's fault.
The word "restrain" shouldn't be used with what's done by the current justice system (specifically in usa). Anyhow my view of murder/any crime is similar to a person that caught an illness (like the flu for example). Outside one's control like everything else. I think the correct course of action is educating how reality really is for the unfortunate and a process that doesn't have any lingering punishment associated to it. Although the idea of knowing if a murder is no longer a murder is close to an impossibility with current day science. Similar to knowing if someone is capable of murdering when they haven't done the act.
> Why do you think we shouldn't rehabilitate attempted murderers?
I don't necessarily think what the justice system associates with rehabilitation is what I associate with the word. To answer your question, yes a person shouldn't be doomed to jail and when everything is outside one's control.
Furthermore, if you study killology the reality is that the majority of humans cannot take the life of another human. The statistics in World War II was approximately 25% of soldiers would actually fire their gun. Today the number is grossly higher and the academic research has the cause being from military adopting psychological training methods for dehumanization. This is interesting to understand with the topic. Since, I theorize the majority of attempts couldn't actually carry it out and didn't realize until reaching the moment where they couldn't do it.
Everything is outside your control regardless of whether the murder is successful. You seemed to be arguing earlier that there was something different about attempted murder that means it shouldn't be punished while murder should. Are you just saying that no one should ever be put in jail?
Do you think attempted murder should be treated differently if the attempt demonstrated ability to carry it out, but the victim survived due to luck?
> You seemed to be arguing earlier that there was something different about attempted murder that means it shouldn't be punished while murder should.
Sorry, for that impression. I think all crimes are like illnesses.
> Do you think attempted murder should be treated differently if the attempt demonstrated ability to carry it out, but the victim survived due to luck?
Well, in an ideal world if I could design the justice system. I would think that every negative outcome is like an illness. Some illnesses are more unique than others but being able to carry murder is definitely different than not being able to but tried. So the illnesses would have to be cured differently.
no, no. you totally misunderstood. You're arguing we don't know the specific circumstance so we shouldn't make moral judgments. My reply was to ask you to suggest some situations where hiring a hitman to kill a business rival would be morally ambiguous.
That would be the job the of defense, not the job of the prosecution. They would be using your argument. Whats the morally ambiguous case here?
That's the whole point of a legal(criminal) judgement! The only thing that matters is your intention. Your intention is what the prosecution needs to prove and you need to defend against their accusation.
You can literally kill anyone and get away with it if the prosecution can't prove your intent has either negligence or premeditation and you were not intending to kill in a way approved by law (e.g.: did the soldier intend to kill his enemy within rules of engagement or did he intend to kill the enemy out of personal need for vengeance or hatred)
If you kill somebody by purposefully driving into them, even if the prosecutors can't prove whether you intended them to die or just be severely injured: Murder.
If you _try_ to kill somebody with your car but you fail: Attempted Murder.
If you were just trying to "scare" them, or if you weren't on a road at all and they died "by mistake": Manslaughter
If you inadvertently kill somebody while driving drunk: Causing Death by Careless Driving while Under the Influence of drink or drugs
If you were so very bad at driving that it should have been obvious that you might kill someone: Causing Death by Dangerous Driving or Gross Negligence Manslaughter.
If you were just bad at driving: Causing Death by Careless Driving.
Of course if your husband is an American spook you can just lie and then hurry aboard a flight home before anybody realises where you went...
In criminal law, strict liability is generally limited to minor offenses. Criminal law classifies strict liability as one of five possible mentes reae (mental states) that a defendant may have in pursuit of the crime. The other four are "acting knowingly," "acting purposely," "acting with recklessness," and "acting with negligence." The mens rea of strict liability typically results in more lenient punishments than the other four mentes reae. Typically in criminal law, the defendant's awareness of what he is doing would not negate a strict liability mens rea (for example, being in possession of drugs will typically result in criminal liability, regardless of whether the defendant knows that he is in possession of the drugs)."
That means the person is liable for their mental state correct? As in they could have taken actions to prevent that situation but they intentionally chose not to?
With possession laws and statutory rape for example, the liability is that a reasonable person is expected by law to take steps to prevent their posession of co trolled substance or in case of statutory rape to discover the age of their partner. Intent does not need to be proven because the law (controversialy) defines the action to be sufficient proof of criminal intent.
Case in point: a mentally handicapped person or a small child cannot be convicted of these crimes, even under strict liability because they are incapable of criminal intent(and therefore criminal liability). even with intent or strict liability identical to that of a sane reasonable person,their inability to reason sufficiently means their intent is not considered criminal. I say that as argument that if strict liability has nothing to do with intent then inability to reason is irrelevant,because if for example mental handicap exempts a person of strict liability,it is because they are not behaving with reason and awareness of their actions and intent right? Or if someone (say a policeman) throws a bag of cocaine at you and you catch it,are you liable under strict liability? (Not being rhetorical,Honestly curious)
Strict liability does mean intent does not need to be proven but only because the law defines the action sufficient proof of criminal intent. If you can defend against this "proof" ,will you still be liable? I mean, it is my understanding that if you prove someone planted drugs to frame you or that your sexual partner showed fraudulent evidence (fake ID for example) of their age you will not be held liable, is that not the case?
No, that means what they thought or intended has absolutely no bearing on if they are guilty of having committed the crime.
The thought side of a crime, or the intent is mens rea, while the action of that crime is actus rea.
Normally in a crime both factor into the decision. For instance, should you murder somebody you committed the act of murder. What you intended or thought about before or during is the intent side or the mens rea part. Planned and murdered is a different charge than accidentally killed somebody.
So suppose we say the bar for murder is mens rea of "acting knowingly", and the act of the victim dying by your direction action.
But, manslaughter is mens rea of "acting with negligence", and the act of the victim dying by your direction action.
These are in effect two different crimes. The difference between them is what your intention was. If you want certain classes of murder you have to prove premeditated intent, because it's a part of the crime.
Now, strict liability says, "Mens rea does not matter here, it is not a part of the definition of this crime." What you thought or intended is simply not a part of what the court is there to consider.
The court is only there to consider is the action was done by you, and if so, you are guilty.
Edit: The handicap and small child, as far as I understand are not protected from being prosecuted in a strict liability charge in a court, but are simply less likely to make their way to a court.
> Now, strict liability says, "Mens rea does not matter here, it is not a part of the definition of this crime." What you thought or intended is simply not a part of what the court is there to consider. The court is only there to consider is the action was done by you, and if so, you are guilty.
I don't think this is an entirely accurate characterization. Strict liability is more of an assertion that improper intent is a foregone conclusion, i.e. improper intent is a necessary condition for the statute violation to occur in the first place, because people are responsible for taking precaution not to violate the statute.
> Edit: The handicap and small child, as far as I understand are not protected from being prosecuted in a strict liability charge in a court, but are simply less likely to make their way to a court.
The distinction is actually relevant to this scenario. Young children and people with significant mental disability are incapable of committing crimes (even statutory crimes) by the principle of criminal responsibility. It is not the case that statute law applies as you have described, because were it so it would also apply in scenarios where the perpetrator has immunity on account of inability to have criminal responsibility.
Usually the action is a crime and the intent scales the crime. If you accidentally kill someone due to negligence that is manslaughter. If you intended to do it that is murder.
As I replied to a different comment,negligence is proven which means the person intended to act in negligence. Manslaughter won't hold up if the person did their due dilligence as would a "reasonable" person in that situation would. Any crime at all requires criminal intent.
Then you're on a slippery slope of judging the intentions
I mean, who hasn't spent more than 40x the average disposable income in their country on a hitman just to jump out at the last minute and yell "IT'S JUST A PRANK BRO"?
What even is a "hitman?" Seems like it's just an arbitrary term that can be used to mean anything. Maybe I'm a hitman. Maybe you're a hitman. Who gets to decide what a "hitman" is and what that means? What is their agenda?
And "murder?" We don't even know what life is, how can we be so arrogant as to define something like "murder" on so murky a premise as the ending of "life?" That's like dividing by zero. The commonly accepted list of the characteristics of a living thing (it consumes material to feed itself, it can grow and reproduce, it can die and respond to its environment) also apply to fire, so obviously firemen are also committing murder, and firemen are also hitmen.
Someday when we all tumble into the Orwellian nightmare this slippery slope is sending us down, we'll all be "hitmen" and everything will be "murder." This whole "hitman" thing is so obviously just another thinly-disguised form of thoughtcrime perpetrated against free-thinkers who don't blindly conform to the status quo.
This point is constantly brought up on message boards like its a valid point, but in reality a large chunk of the law is literally about judging intent to determine the severity of the crime.
Someone accidentally hitting someone with a car and someone intentionally doing so are very different things. The key is what evidence you have to show one or the other. If there is evidence someone hired a hitman then I don’t see how that can be muddied. The person intended to murder someone.
I’d also like to see a source on your claim about consciousness. I’m not sure how decisions and actions can just come to us and then we can purposely add a motivation afterward (but not before?).
I read an article somewhere that said most "hitmen" who are available for hire (i.e. those who are not exclusively at the service of a drug cartel or something) have no intention of actually killing the target. The client can't sue a hitman to get their money back if the target turns out to be alive. So the crime might be more akin to fraud than attempted murder.
Tan wasn't the hitman. He was the original guy that ordered the hit. All the other guys, too (except the last), were acting as middlemen, ordering the hit and skimming some off the top. They were all requesting the murder of someone else by paying a 3rd party to do it.
Our legal system seems to be like that a lot. Someone can nearly run you over, or nearly shoot you, and you survive only because you manage to escape or dodge- you're going to have a hard time sticking them with anything. (Unless you are an officer)
Not only that but China is notorious for its brutal laws. A Canadian was executed on rumors of drug trafficking. You often see people accused of financial crimes executed. China's court system has something like a 99.9% conviction rate.
It should go without saying, but without context, a high conviction rate could be from convicting people who are not clearly guilty, or it could be because only people who are clearly guilty are prosecuted.
Someone hires a hitman - the hitman kills a different person by accident. Is the contract giver guilty? They never intended any harm to the person that got killed.
Analogy with software development : you hire a contractor, who outsource it to a local developer, who hires a development house in India, who hires a programmer, who hires some college kids that actually do the job.
> who hires some college kids that actually do the job
Sounds about right, except that
> hitman number five was so incensed at how much the value of the contract had fallen, that he told the target to fake his own death
the job was actually not done, but faked.
The last developer from India that my company hired (2009 or so) left us with some sub par script, which had some 500+ lines of code for some data validation that was actually never executed.
We then switched to people from the Eastern Block, and we never looked back.
Why would I, Middleman Hitmeister, tell the marksman I'd hired about taking a cut and passing the job on?
"They hired me for $500K to get this done. I'll pay you $250K to get this done." Now I risk the guy killing me to take the full $500K for the contract.
Last employer before I started wanted 3 iOS apps built to copy the in house android apps, they hired ATT for some reason, who outsourced it to an Indian firm, who outsourced it to three random teams of people they found. $400,000 later, they got 3 crappy apps that took twice as long as estimated to be finished. I wound up rewriting most of the most important one. All 3 apps seemed to have been derived from a common ancestor and then disconnected and given to three teams; the code mutated separately from the common ancestor, so fixing things was like hunting down Ebola variants.
I've seen UK company -> US company -> German company -> Ukrainian company
Although I worked for the UK company I did actually get to speak to one of the chaps from the Ukraine and they seemed a good team - though they had no idea who we were or why they were making the changes they were implementing. The Ukrainian team eventually disappeared though and this being 2014 we did wonder....
During the outsourcing craze, I came up with a business idea, to create a fake job shop in India, but actually have the work done by programmers in the US.
No, he paid so much that everyone thought they'd make money and not do the killing themselves. Had he offered say, $30k, the killer would not have outsourced it.
…and the job might have been done (might because the first person in the chain may never have intended to do the killing himself. The intermediates may just be brokers needed to move from the circles of rich Chinese to the circles of killers)
Of course, offering too much also runs the risk of “Chinese Whispers” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers) the initial message “Foo will pay $X to kill bar” could end up as “bar will pay $x to kill Foo”.
Moral of the story:
Pay a decent price and then pay someone else to kill the killer. In most countries you have an idea how much it takes to kill a person, with prices varying depending on the target and degree of law enforcement. If word is out that there's a contract on X...you're screwed since you might be #1 on the list of said person's enemies
That works because the second "eat" is in the present indicative. But you can't stack those. With three "eat"s, the second one needs to be followed by an object, not another verb.
You have a compound noun "fish [that] fish eat". Call that X. Then you have a larger compound noun, "fish [that] X eat". And as with the original you can tack an 'eat' on the end as those fish eat some unspecified food. Of course you can then go further and define Y as "fish that X eat", etc. It can be infinitely recursed.
It's convenient using "X" as a placeholder, because that specifically masks the problem of stacking up verbs.
"Fish fish eat" is indeed a sensible noun phrase. And we can make that noun a subject of the verb eat. But "fish fish eat eat" is not a noun phrase, and we can't make it the subject nor the object of a further "eat".
"fish fish eat eat" isn't a noun phrase, no. The noun phrase in question is X = "fish fish eat". Which you can embed between "fish" and "eat" to make a bigger noun phrase:
(1): X' = fish X eat ("fish that X eats")
You can continue forever by repeatedly applying equation (1) to make bigger and bigger noun phrases. Producing:
(2): X = fish fish eat
(3): X' = fish {fish fish eat} eat
(4): X'' = fish {fish {fish fish eat} eat} eat
At the end of which you can stick an "eat" on the end to make a sentence.
First of all, that wasn't the original sentence. What you've got is "fish fish fish eat eat", whereas the original was "fish fish fish eat eat eat".
It would be nice if English worked recursively like that, but it doesn't. Maybe I was wrong in focusing on the verbs; the problem is also stacking nouns the way the sentence does. By splitting the object, subject, and verb so dramatically, the sentence doesn't end up making sense.
Obviously if you take it as axiomatic that this algorithm does work, then you can keep claiming it's grammatical. But even the first round (fish fish fish eat eat) doesn't add up. The word "that" isn't a mere helper; there is no English sentence in which "fish fish fish" (all as nouns) can make sense.
The sentence is very difficult to parse, yes, but it is grammatically correct. You can make a noun phrase with an arbitrary number of repetitions of 'fish', call that F, added to F-1 repetitions of 'eat'. IE, 'fish fish fish eat eat', or 'fish fish fish fish eat eat eat'. Each of those is one big noun. You can make it as long as you want.
I'm not sure how to demonstrate this any more clearly than it already has been, but I'll try one last time. "fish that fish eat" is a compound noun. I think we agree on that. And you can shorten that to "fish fish eat", and it's still a grammatically correct noun. "fish fish eat" is a thing. Now you can build a sentence around that thing. For example, "The water fish fish eat swim in is cold." Right? It's easiest to parse if you say the 'fish fish eat' noun more quickly than the rest of the sentence, like, "The water fish-fish-eat swim in is cold."
Of course, we can replace the noun water there with more fish! "The fish fish fish eat swim with are small." In fact, you don't need the 'the' there. "Fish fish fish eat swim with are small," works too. As does, "Fish fish fish eat eat are also small." Note we just replaced 'swim with' with 'eat' there. Now we have actually built a larger compound noun, "Fish fish fish eat eat." Finally, we can replace the verb 'are' at the end and we get, "Fish fish fish eat eat eat," a grammatically correct sentence.
This is an example of center embedding, which is generally considered grammatical but difficult to process with more than a few levels (to the point where people don't naturally produce such sentences).
The version I heard was that the fifth hitman contacted the victim-to-be, who agreed to fake his own death. That plan was foiled, leading to everyone in the chain getting caught. I have no idea if this is actually true, though; I think my source may have been a tumblr post.
From the article, which apparently here actually no one read:
> However, hitman number five was so incensed at how much the value of the contract had fallen, that he told the target to fake his own death, which eventually led to the police finding out about the plot, Beijing News reported.
Combined with the quote you posted in response to my comment, this does make the article (which didn't load for me) seem confusing. One one hand the fifth hitman 'eventually told the police', but on the other hand 'he told the target to fake his own death, which eventually led to the police finding out about the plot'. On balance it seems like hitman 5 didn't initiate contact with the police, but confessed when caught.
Blackmail is hard. Each one in the chain, decided to defraud the earlier one, because it was easier. The target pretended to go along, but as an already wealthy businessman, neither blackmail nor fraud would be appealing.
Let the whole chain go to jail, though, and the target gets to sleep better at night.
„ Tan, who hired the original hitman, was jailed for five years, while Xi, the first hitman, was sentenced to three years and six months. Yang Kangsheng and Yang Guangsheng were sentenced to three years and three months, Mo was sentenced to three years, and Ling was sentenced to two years and seven months.”
A bit funny how the sentence gets lower for every next hitman in the chain, even though technically they all commited the same offence :)
They were actually all acquitted by a lower court years ago and the prosecutor had to appeal to get a guilty verdict this year.
I believe there was some technicality that made proving intent difficult - the original contract was vague enough that the defence could argue that killing was never the plan and they only wanted to intimidate the victim enough to drive him out of town, and somehow the message got distorted down the chain of outsourcing to become a hit which was never carried out anyway.
I think that would still count as just conspiracy to commit murder. Not a good thing to do by any means, but not everyone follows through on their plans, so it's a lesser crime.
An attempt likely requires an actual failed attack against the target. It's much more severe.
EDIT: On second thought, I can see how you could consider hiring a hitman as an attempted attack, since once you have agreed upon the hit, the "weapon" has in effect been "fired".
many layers of middle men each taking a fat cut is an indicator of huge inefficiencies in the given sector of the market and a sign that that sector is ripe for disruption.
True, but when he offered $250+K he must've figured that killing him is worth it that amount. Considering that you cannot put in on eBay or Fiverr he took the offer.
Why does it take much to kill e person in China, cameras and surveillance ...?
I would imagine it's not a particularly efficient market. The person offering the contract likely had no particular way to discover the correct price to pay, and there is a high risk in offering the contract (the recipient of the offer might go to the police) so he just aimed high.
Just seems like he was going about this ALL wrong. US Spec ops guys moonlight as "security contractors" basically doing assassination missions in Yemen for ~$25,000/month[1][2]. You mean to tell me a Chinese guy with $250,000 to throw around couldn't find a recently-retired Chinese Special Operator to do this job reliably? I would think that anyone with that much money would have at least SOME Communist Party connections or People's Liberation Army connections. Hmmmm, unless his intended target was the one with such "protection".......that would make more sense actually.... maybe nobody in good standing with the CCP would take on such a contract, hence the above-market-rate compensation offered, and the fact that only unreliable, desperate, two-faced idiots accepted the job.
Generally citizens doing things against other citizens doesn't seem to be dealt with all that harshly (as opposed to citizens doing things against the state, or - worse - encouraging other citizens to do so).
I've seen domestic violence dealt with in China by putting the victim and perpetrator in a jail cell together and telling them to talk it out.
The harshest sentences are reserved for those who refuse to participate in official corruption. Citizens-on-citizens is sort of intramural.
This latter attitude is familiar in the US. When mostly black people were killing mostly other black people over drug turf wars, it was not treated very seriously. You may imagine that in China, anybody who is not a party member doesn't deserve much attention.
I'm not in that business but it seems that behaving like that doesn't build up a good reputation. It could get difficult to find customers, or survive vindictive prospects.
OT: look at the chairs in the back area of the court in the second photo, where spectators would sit.
That is way fancier than I've seen in US courts. In US courts, it is usually just plain benches. I have seen pictures of US courts with chairs, but the kind of chairs you'd expect to find in a doctor or dentist waiting room--adequate but not something you'd want to sit in for a long time.
Those chairs in the Chinese court actually look comfortable. Is this normal in Chinese courts?
I am having trouble finding the sentencing guidelines for this crime, but I am quite certain it is analogous to a conspiracy to commit capital murder in the first degree and treated, and as such is punished similarly to capital murder.
The contract finally came to the fifth hitman, Ling Xiansi, who eventually told the police. ... Ling was sentenced to two years and seven months.
Ling told the police but then was still sentenced to 2+ years in prison. Maybe the ‘moral’ here is to just pass on the contract as no good deed goes unpunished.
He contracted with someone to commit a murder. That's doing something. This makes him part of a conspiracy to commit murder.
The article doesn't specify what Ling was sentenced for. I assume it's for this conspiracy, but it may have been for other crimes the police learned about after Ling admitted to being a career criminal (unless this was their first contract). If you tell the police you're a murderer, they'll likely try to get you for it.
It's not clear that he committed to a contract or was offered a contract. Generally, the elements of a contract are: offer, acceptance, consideration, mutuality of obligation, competency and capacity. We don't know.
Conspiracy is easier: two or more people agree to commit an illegal act and take some step toward its completion. But I don't think if Joe asks me to kill Bob for $100 and I say sure but then go to the police that I've actually agreed to kill Bob.
The article is very light on details and certainly doesn't mention what the charges were for Ling. Also, this is China with a different legal system.
Given that the article is light on details, why are you assuming that Ling was just an informer and did nothing wrong? The details we do have indicate that Ling did enough wrong to warrant a sentence of 2 years and 7 months.
It might be conspiracy to commit murder, or it might be fraud, if he was intending to take the money but not kill anyone.
What do the police do when they catch someone who was selling fake illegal drugs? It can't be a drugs offence, can it? But I'd hope they prosecute them for something.
I once worked for a subcontractor who received contracts from a Ukrainian company who received contracts from a foreign company that was sitting in a shiny skyscraper (the tallest in Europe) and branding itself as a top class agency, charging outrageous fees from top of the top level customers
In this case it didn't work (rubber hose?) but the longer the chain the less likely you are to be exposed. The original hitman can testify that YOU paid him to kill John. The fifth hitman can only offer hearsay, that he heard from the fourth hitman that the third has said that the... ;)
There was a story by Lem where a Machine built to solve a problem requested more parts, with which it built another machine to solve the problem, which...
Why did the 5th hitman take that crap deal? He could have said no. Obviously he had "sell my lethal services for an exceedingly low sum" remorse or something like that..
Just say no and force the 4th hitman to follow through. Unlikely any other assassin would have taken that bad deal. Obviously glad he did and it worked out that no one was murdered, but still, he could have said no.
I could easily imagine a company getting paid 32× the salary of a 10× engineer.
Plenty of people do accept 1/32 of their output value (and plenty of people don't know the value of their output). I think you are just saying you don't deliver much value (presuming you are on a salary).
I know consultants that have been paid $x and have delivered value of 100 times x. When you work on a 100 million dollar project, and you do something to save 10 million, it is difficult to capture 1 million of that saving as a consultant or employee.
(Rule of thumb: if you are a 1× engineer, you should be delivering value at least 2× your cost of salary).
Please do not take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's repetitive, and therefore off topic. Worse, it destroys the curiosity that HN is meant for.
I clicked through a few of the Metro "crime" links - dear god, what an horrific world we live in.
I really would like a newspaper that had some kind of "sense of perspective" meter - where reading an article of "woman starved and mutilates her own child" also puts down "we estimate this sort of thing happens in one out of 100,000 households - and is out weighted by parents who gave up
drugs to look after children in 1 out of 30,000 households
But a daily diet of that shit unbalanced would certainly drive your world view and politics to demand "something must be done".
Given a predicate is_insulting_price, write a recursive function which determines the minimum amount for which a target may be killed without risk of the plot being exposed to the police by an individual receiving a lowball offer. The function will be passed an arbitrarily high value, and should recursively call itself with (1 - epsilon) * price whenever is_insulting_price returns false.
For bonus marks, quantify the tradeoff between error range and stack depth, the latter representing the number of people who need to know about the plot.