Could someone with a background in law explain the advantage of a reclassification over imposing the same penalties on this particular group of substances?
Because outside of the legal definition, I would not call those “weapons” in everyday language. They are a thing on their own…
I don't have a background in law, but here are some suggestions. The German penal code often imposes harsher punishments for the same offense if a weapon was involved. Rape, for example, carries a minimum sentence of two years. If a weapon is present, it is a minimum of three years. If the weapon is used, the minimum sentence is 5 years.
Before the change, date rape drugs would have fallen under a minimum of three years because of a separate clause.
Classifying them as weapons would also affect crimes other than rape.
Additionally, if legal substances can be used as date rape drugs, classifying them as weapons would give the police more authority to act in certain situations.
One avenue, couched in specifics of US law, but I presume the ideas have analogs in Germany's legal system:
A battery occurs when a harmful physical contact occurs. Contact with a weapon is pretty much by definition battery.
The use of such a drug in the commission of rape or other violent crimes would then be a very easily proven case. If the substance is present in a victim's body, then battery has occured, basically by definition.
Given that rape and other violent crimes that are committed with the use of such drugs may not leave other physical signs on the body of the victim, then this may be the only physical evidence.
The examination for presence of such a drug in the bloodstream is also much less intrusive than for a typical rape kit exam.
There's nothing binary or black and white in such investigations, so this is an additional avenue to provide evidence to support the prosecution of these violent criminals.
There is a possibility that the accused has nothing to do with it, you still have to prove it wasn't some third party or the victim who procured and took the drug.
Let me clarify. I meant the following. Assume ghb is found and evidence of sex. The woman claims she didn't take it and didn't want to have sex. Wouldn't this be enough for a conviction?
if the jury believed the woman's claims, yes, it's enough for conviction. conviction rates are high not because it's easy to prove guilt, but because district attorneys don't bring case that are likely to be lost. the scenario you describe might not be considered strong enough to win, and resources are limited, so this hypothetical case might not get a hearing.
i'm not talking about a plea bargain, i'm talking about declining to prosecute, not filing charges after an arrest, or asking the court to dismiss the charges
i am sure that every victim allegation does not lead to a prosecution in Germany
Perhaps it has to do with the fact that Germany has a written legal code. This could mean that punishments are more strictly classified than under a, say, precedence-based common law system. Changing the classification could move these kinds of crimes into harsher punishment bands.
The law being written does not prevent changing it[0]. Someone changed the written law once to add these weapon-specific provisions, they can do it again. And unless the optimal provisions for date rape drugs are identical to those for weapons, they probably should do it again.
[0] It might actually be easier to change a properly written law. I hate our stupid precedent-based system in the US.
If aliens land in Germany on a field and a peasant shoots them with his shotgun, he would have committed no crime in my opinion. No murder, since Aliens are not humans. It would not be illegal hunting, since aliens are not animals. Illegal discharge of a firearm?
That is definitely not how German law would deal with the situation in practice. Aliens would certainly be considered people and protected by the law, even if they weren't humans, and they would definitely still be animals.
Shooting an alien robot though, then you would have something legally problematic. Ownership? Is it so advanced it's a person? But you'd probably get something like those Star Trek episodes with legal weirdness rather than any no-crime-without-law reasoning.
You don't understand the problem. If we encounter aliens, they would likely make a law to protect them. In the situation I came up with, this is their first encounter with us, and they would NOT be protected.
You are very optimistic that they will be considered animals. For example they would have to live on organic matter. And they would have to have a spine to get more protection since living things with a spine are considered more valuable (Wirbeltiere).
GROK (And using all the Roman law principles on what German law is based):
Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (Art. 103 Abs. 2 Grundgesetz + § 1 StGB) is the decisive wall that the prosecution would smash into in a real first-contact case under current German law.
This principle has four sub-requirements (all must be fulfilled for a conviction):
Lex scripta – there must be a written statute
→ Yes, §§ 211, 212 StGB exist.
Lex certa – the statute must be sufficiently precise
→ “Mensch” is precise if you are Homo sapiens. It is not precise (in fact completely indeterminate) when the victim is an unknown extraterrestrial species.
Lex stricta – no punishment by analogy, no extension to the detriment of the defendant
→ This is the killer.
→ Extending the word “Mensch” in §§ 211/212 to include extraterrestrials would be a clear case of forbidden analogy that worsens the legal position of the accused.
→ German courts are constitutionally barred from doing this in criminal law (unlike in civil law or constitutional law, where they sometimes stretch concepts to protect victims).
Lex praevia – the law must have existed before the act
→ Also fulfilled, but irrelevant here.
Ah. Yes. You are right. I had to read the law. I can understand the choice to write 'human' there, it becomes very clear, assuming there will be no aliens.
You don't understand the problem. If we encounter aliens, they would likely make a law to protect them. In the situation I came up with, this is their first encounter with us, and they would NOT be protected.
You are very optimistic that they will be considered animals. For example they would have to live on organic matter. And they would have to have a spine to get more protection since living things with a spine are considered more valuable (Wirbeltiere).
GROK (And using all the Roman law principles on what German law is based):
Nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (Art. 103 Abs. 2 Grundgesetz + § 1 StGB) is the decisive wall that the prosecution would smash into in a real first-contact case under current German law. This principle has four sub-requirements (all must be fulfilled for a conviction):
Lex scripta – there must be a written statute → Yes, §§ 211, 212 StGB exist.
Lex certa – the statute must be sufficiently precise → “Mensch” is precise if you are Homo sapiens. It is not precise (in fact completely indeterminate) when the victim is an unknown extraterrestrial species.
Lex stricta – no punishment by analogy, no extension to the detriment of the defendant → This is the killer. → Extending the word “Mensch” in §§ 211/212 to include extraterrestrials would be a clear case of forbidden analogy that worsens the legal position of the accused. → German courts are constitutionally barred from doing this in criminal law (unlike in civil law or constitutional law, where they sometimes stretch concepts to protect victims).
Lex praevia – the law must have existed before the act → Also fulfilled, but irrelevant here.
You can't write a law for every possible situation. And many laws were introduced because they were committed, and they realized, there is no law to punish the person.
English common law had many good ideas. The US criminal system may be a mess, but the underlying ideas are good. Not everybody can be Norway.... ;-)
I wasn't able to find any information on how exactly that reclassification is happening. Everyone just quotes that one sentence by the Federal Minister of the Interior that they are doing it.
My best guess is that they don't see a chance to get a law to this effect passed (see also the note about the other related bill being postponed), so they are taking some measure that's in the existing jurisdiction of the ministry. That might be the ministry passing regulations to this effect, or the federal police trying to declare date rape drugs as illegal weapons
They fall into the same fuzzy area as chemical weapons imo. They have a non-standard form factor, sure, but they’re still primarily intended to harm people
it's just a bad quickly written comment that only has surface level thoughts I was writing a paragraph about it, but realized that in the end it boils down to any kind of sexual actions during intoxication is same as statutory rape (cannot give consent) and really shouldn't happen at all, in reality the comment was just outsourcing this conclusion instead of thinking about it for more than few seconds.
There’s so much conflicting advice out there. Reality is: When you want to go from overweight to healthy, nothing beats calories in/calories out. Beyond that, like if you’re on project “visible abs”, tweaks might make the difference: you could go deep into the rabbit hole of insulin, anti-nutrients, etc. but then: what works for you, is probably different than what works for others, so there’s a lot trial and error.
That being said, the key to all of this is discipline and consistency.
So, for a book, pick one that you find plausible, entertaining (in terms of reading and in terms of trying the recipes and protocols), and that aligns with your lifestyle or the rate of change you’re willing to accept.
For me, I started with 4 Hour Body. This might not not perfect from today’s knowledge but I liked the way, Tim is presenting the material, his way of thinking and the pragmatic approach. From there on, and after seeing significant and fast results, I went down the rabbit hole and tried almost every “biohack” routine i could find.
Try a couple of books, then pick the one that you enjoyed reading the most and then mercilessly stick to it to the letter. That should help. If it doesn’t, try the next one. Not a single human being in history lost weight from just reading. Take action!
- compared to the MacBook Pro, you basically get the same power with a slightly inferior display and without active cooling (which can inhibit long running high-cpu tasks)
- compared with AMD/Intel: It will give you the better hardware (build quality, trackpad, battery lifetime) for a markup. Depending on your use cases, compute power can be either better or worse (gaming on M* is not that great, for example)
- If you want to go beyond the base models, Apple charges ridiculous amounts for RAM and SSD, and those cannot be upgraded after purchase
- Operating system/ecosystem is a matter of personal preference
I personally still love Apple (Unix with decent UI), but like too much things these days, the list of disappointments grows longer. Not as long as with Windows, though.
That being said, if you're on a budget, you're good with a decent AMD/Intel notebook (e.g. a Thinkpador XPS) with Linux. That'll be a work horse and probably lacks some of the "wow, that's nice" effects that you might still get with a mac.
When I was in my twenties, a friend of mine had a catering lease at a golf club. I never worked seriously in the catering industry, but I always enjoyed helping out there (in service, in the warehouse, in the kitchen). It was a welcome change from constantly staring at a screen, and at the end of the day, it was a different kind of tiredness (the physical kind, you know).
> What sort of feature/tool would get you to stop using Discord/Slack/etc for secrets?
An integrated solution for the whole environment. I pick a project, it opens the IDE, sets environment variables, fires up other services/infrastructure, lets me select secrets (that might be shared between projects), lets me share secrets (with other people)... Probably something like tilt, but simpler, integrated into an IDE, and with support for secrets.
A secrets extensions for my backend app would be quite easy though, I think. It's just re-implementing the cli tool.
From the IDE command palatte you could:
- Settings.backend_host = private Doocot backend || public backend
- Settings.username = (automatic)
- Settings.identity = (automatic) something like ssh key data
- Share.Individual = "select from list of identities on backend"
- Share.Group = "select from list of groups I am in"
- Share.Link = "store secret and return a valid one-time url for a non-dev"
- Read.SharedSecrets = "list secrets shared to me or my groups"
Then it'd just be some thought into the simplest way to setup and maintain groups.
You've piqued my interest in it again though, as it doesn't seem much extra work to do the above. Given the backend more or less does most of it already.
Although it's not the full environment integrated solution you're looking for, I think one step forward in terms of how we share secrets is still useful.
After all, supplements are also artificial compounds
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33584011