Basically, the Post Office leadership could not understand why someone would buy a PO franchise. It's a substantial amount of money up front, and people aren't allowed to buy multiple franchises, so every PO was an owner/operator position. Essentially people were "buying a job".
The people in leadership couldn't understand why someone would buy the opportunity to work long hours at a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary at the end of the year. They assumed that there must be a real reason why people were signing up and the real reason was to put their hands in the till.
So they ended up assuming the postmasters were stealing, and the purpose of the accounting software was to detect the fraud so it could be prosecuted. When the accounting software started finding vast amounts of missing funds, they ignored questions about the software because it was working as intended. I bet if the opposite had happened, and it found very little fraud, they would have become suspicious of the software because their priors were that the postmasters were a bunch of thieves.
Growing up half in England and US I feel British culture is more attuned to the class aspects to this kind of event. Traditionally America likes to pretend this kind of class contempt doesn't exist (think of, people on welfare angry at welfare queens, unaware they will be affected by legislation they support).
It just manifests as racism.
I think Vivek Ramaswamy found out how that worked out for himself in politics and at DOGE as a billionaire.
I suspect your view of very, very few is suspect.
The founding ideas of MAGA certainly cling to it. The 60-70 million voters for it have zero issues with it.
Of course, but the 2010's it was decided by the powers that he to re-introduce identity politics as the new form of class warfare. Which was 80% sexism/racism and 20% classisn.
If they didn't do that to other middle class families then they saw you as less than them. Seeing people as less comes both with charity and contempt, not just one of those.
As an immigrant to the US from latin america that has spent significant time in britain, this statement is the complete opposite of my experience to the point of ridiculousness.
Britain is the most openly classist western country I have ever been in.
The example of lower class people not recognizing so in the US is meant to be an example of lack of class awareness/recognition; not of less (or more) classism (prejudice based on class)
Constant hoops to jump through to prove they're looking for work or still incapable.
Or in the case of illness to prove they're still sick. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59067101
Catch-22.
In order to be given disability you must jump through so many hoops that no one whom is actually sick could complete them. Or how in unemployment you must prove you must spend your time proving you are looking for a job so you cannot spend you time actually looking for a job. My personal fav because its almost universal is sick-day policies that codify 100% abuse of sick days because people are punished for not using them because some people were "abusing" their sick days.
In the case of the book to be discharged from military service they must prove they are insane which no insane person could complete.
The macroeconomic effects of welfare programs create a society that is better for everyone to live in. Reducing the issue to a matter of personal responsibility is a reframing that allows you to completely lose sight of the big picture, and create programs that are destined to fail by not reaching many of the people they need to.
Government running charity interferes with the normal feedback in society. And the need to ask politely, justify one's apparently bad decisions and change failing behavior.
People become "entitled" to regular cash so a lot of the fear that ordinarily motivates the rest of us goes away.
Any system that asks nothing of people is a bad system.
I grew up on welfare. I've also seen how a lot of people on welfare actually live and how they spend their time. They don't spend it cleaning, I can tell you that.
How about UBI coupled with repealing the minimum wage?
Er... why wouldn't UBI be more expensive?
I'm not even arguing against UBI here, I'm just trying to make sense of your claim, which seems quite dubious.
I just don’t see any realistic way to make it actually happen.
No, that seems like mostly you. Most people are not motivated by fear.
We exist in a world where people can be unable to work or even advocate for themselves through no fault of their own. As we raise the bar for how people have to prove that they "need" help, there will be people who die because they don't have the capacity to prove that. In theory we have social workers (as a societal role) but in reality they're underfunded/don't have capacity for the same reasons.
This feels like the same moral argument behind the presumption of innocence in the American legal system: far better to let criminals walk free than to falsely imprison an innocent person. Why do we not apply the same logic to welfare?
I mean, I know why: we're worried the system would get taken advantage of and not serve the people it's "meant" to help.... but then, who does it help? How much effort is it worth making people spend to prove they need help when that effort comes with a blood cost?
I agree with GP that welfare systems make for better societies--see also, public healthcare. I have several friends who are alive because of welfare systems. I grew up with people whose family squandered the welfare they got, but I don't view that as sufficient reason to withhold welfare from anyone else; I just accept that's the cost of a system that helps people.
It makes no economic sense. It’s not more humane/helpful. But it’s what we ‘choose’ over and over.
Ok bro, while you're out there building morally pure systems the rest of us will do research and learn what actually works in the real world.
It's enough of an issue that even Labour (left wing) is having to deal with it. Though as usual Starmer has chickened out (I think this is like the third thing that was obviously a good move that he's backed down on after dumb backlash).
However you can infer a lot from a) the insane rise in claims, especially mental health related:
https://obr.uk/docs/box-chart-3-f.png
Has the mental health of the nation got twice as bad in 2 years? Obviously not.
And b) whenever the BBC does touchy feely profiles of people there are always some weird red flags:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gpl4528go
£400/month help with her bills because she struggles with time management? I'm sympathetic to her problems but that is a shit ton of money!
Even some of the people receiving it agree:
> "I was shocked by the ease with which it was granted. I was expecting to be interviewed, rightly so, but it was awarded without interview and he received backdated pay for the maximum amount." > > She was also surprised that her husband got mobility allowance for not having a car, even though she had a car and could drive him around.
(This reminds me of WFA where plenty of people receiving that also thought it was ridiculous.)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn0ry09d50wo
> Paul Harris, from Barnard Castle, gets £72.65 a week in PIP payments to help with extra costs associated with his anxiety and depression - such as for specialist therapy apps and counselling.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn4llx4kvv8o
> Nick Howard, 51, from Cambridge, is neurodivergent and has been claiming Pip for five years. > > "Without Pip I would not be able to work as it pays for my transport to and from my workplace. > > "I'm currently buying an electric bike on credit, others I have had have been stolen or vandalised," he added.
Great... but I don't think paying PIP for 5 years is a good way to buy someone a bike.
Obviously not all cases are like this, but clearly something has gone wrong. And this isn't a partisan issue. Both parties agree that it has to change. The Tories just ignored the problem and Labour gave up after predictable "N people will die!" press.
And to be clear I'm not anti-poor or anything like that. I also thing WFA is ridiculous and that mostly goes to the rich. Child benefit also goes to lots of people (myself included) who totally don't need it. They all need reform, but look what happens when the government tries...
Assuming that's true, do we know if the new claims are fraudulent, or are they valid claims that people simply didn't claim for before?
> £400/month help with her bills because she struggles with time management? I'm sympathetic to her problems but that is a shit ton of money!
£4800/yr is a shit ton of money? Things must be pretty rough over there!
> Child benefit also goes to lots of people (myself included) who totally don't need it.
Is that a bad thing?
For the average person in the UK, it definitely is.
It's a shit ton of money for the government to just pay to people. I wasn't saying it's enough money to live on or anything. Obviously.
> Is that a bad thing?
The government is just a little short on money and they're wasting it by giving WFA and child benefit to people who definitely don't need it.
This should be obvious.
I think this is the parent’s point: this is the POV of the rich and powerful who lead the organization. They can’t imagine someone in a different position seeing these franchises as a way to secure good (or at least decent), long-term, stable employment.
The UK is class-obsessed, which is not as immediately clear to the rest of the world (especially US). Lends a lot of credence to your theory.
In the UK it doesn't really matter if you become a millionaire or billionaire, you still won't be able to perforate the perception of "where you came from". This leads to all kinds of baseless biases such as OP's observation / point.
Americans use stuff like occupation, home area, and education as the manifestation of class, with a sprinkle of racism.
The Thatcher years created an opportunity for working class (who traditionally lived in rent controlled properties due to low income) to purchase their houses for pennies on the dollar.
Suddenly, millions of families felt they had moved up a class. They were no longer at the mercy of landlords and had moved up in society from a tenant to an owner.
The traditional three tiers of lower, middle and upper class changed to lower, lower-middle, upper-middle and upper.
From my observations the lower-middle class are still adjusting not to having money but rather _access_ to money previously denied. Having equity in a property as a guarantee of a loan opens up a world previously off limits by the banks.
A bit like when someone turns 18 and they have access to credit cards - lots of cash easily available!
I come from a family where (with the exception of a mortgage), if you can't pay for something in cash (and still have plenty in reserve), you can't afford it. My folks were very proud of raising a family with zero debts (minus the mortgage), and I'm forever thankful.
The families I knew (and by extension others living on the typical "cookie cutter" UK housing estate) were swimming in debt. What surprised me the most was how "normal" it was - 3yr (or less) car on the drive; massive flatscreen TVs (in 2007); multiple cruise holidays per year; flying off to a warm destination mid-winter.
Many of them said when they were younger they never experienced such things and told stories of growing up in near poverty. Going into debt for holidays and having a new car on the drive was normalised.
These were nurses, postmen, truck drivers, retail staff, hospitality etc. all traditional working class jobs with low salary expectations.
They were trying desperately to _appear_ like they were middle class at whatever cost.
I'm of the belief it will still take a few generations before the wave of lower-middle class learn that it's not about having a new car on the drive but rather having that cash in the bank as savings - and a significantly cheaper (& older) car on the drive.
And yet the UK school system doesn't teach pupils about sensible financial matters - we all rely on our parents to guide us - so escaping the "buy it now on credit" mentality will be easier said that done!
These days you can get a big mortgage on a cheaply constructed apartment and still get hit for huge maintenance charges by a grasping building management firm.
In the US I get the impression that it is much more about money. And therefore less static.
There were two phases though: the initial rollout, and sometime later the coverup.
If they had asked very reasonable questions about the software during the rollout there would have been no need for a coverup. No software rolls out without any bugs and it's really reasonable to ask why so many post offices had missing funds and if they were sure if it was real or not. The PO leadership basically ignored all evidence that there were bugs from the very beginning, and that makes no sense until you realize that they were starting from the premise that the postmasters are thieves and this software is going to catch them.
This, so much this. Not ONLY that but they kept DOUBLING DOWN for YEARS.
I SO SO wish they would be held accountable for the pain, suffering, Chapter 11's, AND the suicides.
It would be reasonable, but that also assumes the ass-covering started post rollout rather than pre rollout.
If I were in leadership, I'd assume there are edge cases I'm missing and take responsibility accordingly. Id just assume that is my job, as the leader, that is why I am paid, to make important decisions and stop the company from making big mistakes.
This isn’t a critique of your view—just an observation: there's a recurring theme on HN that leadership shouldn't be held responsible when things break down, as if being a CEO is just another job, not a position of accountability.
Where does this come from? Is it a uniquely American or capitalist norm?
I recall ( i dont think incorrectly) 1980s Japanese leadership—tech/auto who took failures so seriously they’d resign or even mention/think of sudoku.
CEO is the top of middle management, but still middle management all the same. The board and owners sit above that position, if you want to picture it as some kind of hierarchy, and are the driving leadership. They call the shots. The CEO has to answer to them.
Perhaps what you are trying to say is that middle management should carry more accountability? But if we were to go down that road, why stop at CEO?
And how high up do you go? The common narrative is that the owners/board are the highest up, but in reality they're working for the customer. The customer is the true leader. It is they who make the decisions and who the owners/board have to answer to.
Or are they really the true leader? The customer will have customers of their own. Everyone works for someone. In reality, there isn't a hierarchy at all. It is approximately cyclical.
dude
I was at a company acquired by silicon valley company. Our tech support department was folded into another tech support department. Immediately the folks in the valley were upset that we closed more cases / had far higher customer satisfaction scores ... by far. They made no secret that they assumed that us mid-westerners doing the same job had to be inferior at the same job.
Eventually a pool of managers in the valley developed a full blown conspiracy theory that we were cooking the books by making fake cases and so on. It just had to be that right? No other explanation.
They finally got someone in an outside department to look into it. They found folks closing cases prematurely and even duplicating cases. The people doing it all worked for the managers pointing fingers at everyone else ...
Sometimes the folks who talk about fraud think those things because that's how they work.
You've hit the nail on the head "why would anyone want a middle class life" yeah they have never known anything less than that.
The other factor to me is the careerism, all that matters is the project success, who cares if the riff raff end up committing suicide. Honestly listening to some of the tapes of those meetings makes me feel sick. Thing is, I think so many career orientated people I know wouldn't even consider that what went on in the meetings was beyond the pale. It's black mirror level.
I'm from Ireland, but I live on "mainland Britain" the UK class system is mind boggling. I think the establishment here despises the "great unwashed". God help any working class person who ends up in the courts system.
One final thing, Paula Vennells was an ordained church minister. She was preaching while she was overseeing the destruction of so many innocent hardworking people. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
I don't know why that makes this all worse but some how it does. Somehow it speaks to what the UK is or has become.
I doubt she'll get the prison time she deserves. Actually I doubt she'll serve any time at all.
She was very nearly parachuted in a Bishop of London, off the 'success' of her term in the post office:
It makes it worse because most people are familiar with the tenets of christianity and know that this behavior is counter to that value system.
I think it's one of the most redeeming points of christianity/religion in general -- there is a standard to which people can be judged and agree to be judged. That's why it makes it worse, this person is not only doing terrible things, but doing terrible things while professing to believe a value system that would not condone it.
They also talk about postmaster's motivations for buying a franchise and how sitting behind a retail desk in a small town with a modest but steady income is actually one of the best outcomes available to the type of working-class Briton who was buying the franchise.
The origin of Horizon is that ICL won the tender for a project to computerise the UK's benefits payment system -- replacing giro books (like cheque books) with smart cards (like bank cards):
https://inews.co.uk/news/post-office-warned-fujitsu-horizon-...
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmselect/cmtr...
Sure, it was also expected to detect fraud, but overall it was a "modernising" project. The project failed disastrously because ICL were completely incompetent at building an accounting system, the system regularly made huge mistakes, and the incoming government scrapped it.
ICL was nonetheless still very chummy with government, as it was concieved of by 1960s British politicians who basically wanted a UK version of IBM because they didn't want Americans being in control of all the UK's computer systems. ICL used to operate mainframes and supply "computer terminals" to government and such, which is why they needed a lot of equipment from Fujitsu, which is why Fujitsu decided to buy them.
ICL/Fujitsu still kept the contract to computerize Post Office accounting more generally -- Horizon. Post Offices could literally have pen-and-paper accounting until this! Yes, the project was also meant to look for fraud and shrinkage, but at its heart it was there to modernise, centralise and reduce costs. If only it wasn't written by incompetent morons who keep winning contracts because they're sweet with government.
2) The post offices were geographically distributed pretty evenly throughout the UK so there were positions in far-flung locations well outside London. In many of these communities it was a good and stable job compared to what else was available.
3) Many of the postmasters reported liking working retail positions where they get a lot of face time with customers. In many small towns the post office was a central part of the community.
Especially if you’re on the older side, it sounds like an absolutely wonderful way to spend your time. Assuming the post office doesn’t try to ruin your life afterwards.
There are situations where franchisees don't offer other services. These folks tend to be older and for most of the life of the franchise haven't had the need for additional income earlier in the life of the franchise. They don't have the energy and don't want to take on the risk of expanding now. When they retire, they'll probably close up shop as their children have other jobs.
The rural Post Office where I grew up in the 80s and 90s was accessible to a wide area just off the main road. It served a wider area than the current one. The Postmistress' family also farmed. When that closed the natural place to setup was in the closes village because that was projected to grow in population. That development would result in the old Post Office building being knocked down to make way for a dual carriageway. Eventually a few more Post Office franchises appeared with their shops in that part of the county.
People can read more at https://runapostoffice.co.uk/.
And yes, a lot of people are willing to go into debt to effectively pay to have a job.
Edit: A timely news article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg8llxmnx7o
That's the same _class_ element that OP was talking about, no?
I guess most of the people on HN don't see issue with people going into debt to get a degree, which is supposed to get them a job.
So how is it different to people going into debt to buy a franchise?
It's even a more straightforward way to actually get a job, while a degree, if it goes out of fashion on the job market, would have absolutely no use, and you'll have to flip the same burgers as the lad with no degree and no student debt.
> a retail position and end up hopefully clearing a middle class salary
Normal retail work is below the poverty line.
Beyond that i think it might be the social/community aspect. I simply can't use the post office in my town as its used as a social club for everyone over 70. Some people are just in to that kinda thing i suppose.
Demand for postal services is, on a long horizon, generally more consistent than demand for any particular junk food.
The better question is: why the hell would the government sell a PO franchise?
I'd wager there was a solid amount of general incompetence involved at the PO "corporate" - management politically couldn't admit that their consultingware could be anything other than perfect, because they signed off on the decision to buy it, and probably on all the work orders that got them to that point.
If anyone from PO management or that of the consulting firm (Fujitsu, I believe?) ever get any work again, it will be a travesty of justice.
She has since been thrown under the bus, though, of course, not prosecuted or imprisoned (despite ordering wrongful prosecutions of over 900 others)
The politician responsible for her was Vince Cable, who since became leader of the Liberal Democrats, and holds 10 positions, most of which are either funded by the government or related to it.
But when the ball started rolling, as the software rolled out and was finding missing funds everywhere, you'd think a normal person would have asked "are we sure there are no bugs here?" That was never done, I believe, because the software was matching the leadership's priors.
That has to be the most egregious confirmation bias I've heard about.
This does explain why the leadership was so stubborn.
This isn't a classic embezzlement of public funds, where the people receiving the money are also the people deciding whether it was well spent or not and hence could easily divert some of the money through behind the scenes deals with contractors without getting caught.
The "embezzlement" here is on the level of getting an invoice and not paying it.
"Every system creates,
the bullshit it deserves"
1. Immediately after Horizon was rolled out, issues were reported. But ignored
2. Prosecutors didn't bother to verify if there is another explanation before accusing thousands of people of stealing? Isn't it common sense to pause for a second and think, "could we please double check the evidence? how can thousands of postal workers suddenly turn into thieves?"
3. local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the “pregnant thief.” - of course, UK tabloids. Click baits and write whatever the fuck they want, no matter whose lives are destroyed
4. post office has said that it does not have the means to provide redress for that many people - so they have the means to falsely prosecute and destroy the lives of thousands of people, but they don't have the means to correct their blunders?
This happened more than a decade ago. Citizens are expected to do everything on time (pay taxes, renew drivers license...) or get fined/jailed, but the government can sit on their butt for 10 YEARS and do nothing about a blunder they caused?
What about Fujitsu? Why can't the government make Fujitsu pay for the destruction caused by their shitty software?
Jeez. This is just fucking nuts
[1] https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-...
The link is to a book by a PhD neuroscientist investigation the scientific basis for shaken baby syndrome.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/us/the-trial-that-unleash...
Because the software didn't cause it.
Look, by all accounts the software was/is a piece of piss, but what made it such an egregious scandal is how the Post Office leadership dealt with things. There was really no good reason for that to happen. They just ignored reports of problems (proper reports written by auditors, not vague rumours). They lied to postmasters by saying that no one has problems (when, in fact, there were hundreds of people). Lots has been written about all of this and I won't repeat it all here.
So I must object to the phrasing of "caused by their shitty software". Of course lots can be said about the failings of the software itself and Fujitsu also lied and covered their tracks so they are not entirely blameless. But they emphatically did not "cause" any of this: it was the Post Office leadership who primarily caused this mess.
Lots of things go wrong in the world, lots of things are defective. What often matters the most is not so much the mistake or defect itself, but what the response to that is.
Fujitsu/ICL won the contract to develop and run Horizon. They got a commission on every EFTPOS sale. They paid for all the computers, all the network setup, all the staff training. They literally ran the helpline. If you were a sub-postmaster and had a problem with Horizon, you called Fujitsu.
It was Fujitsu that then told you that the bug you found in Horizon wasn't a bug and nobody else was experiencing it, at exactly the same time their internal IT tickets had fully documented the bug and their staff were trying to patch up that bug before it happened to anyone else.
Fujitsu also claimed, in many court cases, that they had no remote access to Horizon. But they did. They also let engineers use it, and push one-off code fixes, to "fix-up" known errors that had been made in ledgers on the computer in your Post Office, so there was no source of truth anywhere in the system. If courts had known this, almost every Post Office private prosecution would have been thrown in the bin for unreliable evidence. Instead, courts ran on the belief that computers were like calculators, and can be assumed to be reliable unless proven faulty.
It was Fujitsu not volunteering this fact, and indeed barristers coaching Fujitsu expert witnesses on what to say and what not to reveal, ignoring procedural rules that the barristers knew had to be followed that say you have to reveal pertinent facts to the defence.
Fujitsu were in it up to their necks along with the Post Office. They made material gains by denying bugs existed, denying they had remote access, falsely claiming their system was reliable, and having their staff perjure themselves in prosecutions brought by the Post Office.
Without Fujitsu's complicity and mendacity, the Post Office might not have succeeded in prosecuting anyone - and of course, without the phantom losses caused by their broken software, they'd have no cases to prosecute.
It is the prosecutors conduct that is maddening here. They need to have higher standards - it is their job to prosecute actual criminal behavior, and not be lazy in fact checking
Secondly, I don't think you understand the situation if you talk about the "prosecutors conduct". The Post Office itself - a private company (owned by the government at arms length) - was the entity doing the prosecuting. These were private prosecutions.
You're hearing it right. The aggrieved party is also the prosecutor, in the criminal courts. They are not a claimant in the civil courts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prosecution#England_an...
The Crown Prosecution Service (who work with the police, act for the government and prosecute most criminal cases in England and Wales) were not involved. In fact, much of the criticism of the CPS in the Post Office scandal is that they could have been involved; they had the statutory right to take over a prosecution, and if appropriate, discontinue it due to lack of evidence. But they did not intervene.
I was a lead Technical Architect and authority on behalf of HM Treasury for a while, and I will tell you this: this is just the tip of the iceberg in government procurement.
I've witnessed faulty systems in DVLA, DEFRA, DWP, Home Office, MOJ and Scottish Government. Systems that have directly resulted in suicide, false convictions, corruption and loss of money to the public purse.
The problem with Horizon and Fujitsu is that in the end the government has to sign it off, and there will be someone who is the Accountable Officer (AO). More often than not, all parties (customer and supplier) become incredibly motivated to protect the AO because it protects profits, protects reputational damage and essentially builds a good news story around the whole thing.
It's just elitism, wrapped up in cronyism, veiled in lies so that AOs can fail upwards into positions with suppliers. I've seen it too many times and I'm fed-up with it. Government is completely and utterly corrupt.
Fujitsu falsely claimed that they couldn't remotely modify data.
They used technical info to obfuscate things for the accused and the judges.
The only people who received criminal charges were the sub postmasters.
One thing I would say is that if somebody is convicted in the UK, it's acceptable legally and culturally to call them by the crime they committed.
The problem is that in this case the Post Office had unique legal powers, and was being run by people who did not want to "harm the brand" by admitting they had made mistakes, so kept digging.
There is also a fundamental flaw in how the courts - and the Post Office prosecutors - were instructed to think about the evidence in common law.
Bizarrely, it was not (and may still not), be an acceptable defense to say that computer records are wrong. They are assumed correct in UK courts. IT systems were legally considered infallible, and if your evidence contradicts an IT systems evidence, you were considered a liar by the court, and a jury might be instructed accordingly.
Yes, that's awful. Yes, it's ruined lives.
But also, I think all involved have realised pointing fingers at one or two individuals to blame hasn't really helped fix things. Like an air accident, you have to have several things go wrong and compound errors to get into this amount of trouble, normally. There were systemic failing across procurement, implementation, governance, investigations, prosecutions, within the justice system and beyond.
I already know people who have worked for Fujitsu in the UK are not exactly shouting about it. And yet, they're still getting awarded contracts before the compensation has been paid out...
We've seen this time and again. Organizations would rather throw people under the bus than damage the organizations reputation/brand. For example, the Church of England has tried to cover up numerous sexual abuse scandals. This is a recent and particularly nasty case:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cje0y3gqw1po
The irony is that the coverups generally don't work for long, and the reputational damage is all the worse for the coverup.
run by people who did not want to "harm the brand"
Oh well, now their precious brand has been harmed, how exactly do they expect to gain the trust, respect of the people back? Maybe they think the public will forget and move on? These people suck...
If legislation, jurisdiction and law enforcement forget about basic principles and human rights in favour of looking productive, collateral damage is pretty much more or less expected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_childcare_benefits_scand...
There are incentives to cheat
There is moral panic about "undeserving poor"
Increase taxes and make services and benefits free, including a UBI.
Increase and collect taxes.
The whole privatized postoffice setup was a profoundly unattractive investment-- at least to those who thought of it on investment grounds (e.g. return on investment+costs)-- and so there was a presumption before the computer system went in that many must have been in it to steal.
> Is there some kind of perverse incentive for the prosecutors
One of the broken things here is that the postoffice themselves were able to criminally prosecute-- so the criminal cases lacked "have to deserve the state prosecutors time" protection.
Which certainly contributed to the suicides.
Is this not the case in other countries?
Words can have multiple similar definitions with small variations. If I look up "defamation" I get:
> Defamation is a legal term that refers to any statement made by a person, whether verbal or printed, that causes harm to another person’s reputation or character. --- https://legaldictionary.net/defamation/
> Defamation is a communication that injures a third party's reputation and causes a legally redressable injury. The precise legal definition of defamation varies from country to country. It is not necessarily restricted to making assertions that are falsifiable, and can extend to concepts that are more abstract than reputation – like dignity and honour. --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation
English libel law is an evolution of the former English law known as scandalum magnatum -- "scandalizing the mighty". Basically, if you say bad things about powerful people, those powerful people will crush you with the law.
As an example, Robert Maxwell embezzled millions from his company's pension fund, and also used that money to sue anyone who slighted him - including anyone who said he was embezzling from his company's pension fund. He was never prosecuted for embezzling millions from his company's pension fund.
He escaped that. By dying. Probably suicide.
The walls were closing in
I don't like the idea of prosecuting people for this, but I don't think it's illogical.
But I genuinely didn't know that other countries do things differently. What does defamation even mean if it doesn't include the concept of untruth?
FWIW I'm only really familiar with the American usual.
Perhaps you mean slander/libel?
Libel = defamation in writing. Slander = defamation in speech.
This will change when elected officials start getting hoisted by their own electronic petards.
The Venn diagram of midwit enterprise developers who build systems with audit trails yet could not swear under penalty of perjury that the audit trail is absolutely correct in every case is almost a circle.
I was attempting to emphasize the absurdity of any software system being “absolutely correct at all times”. I don’t believe such a system can exist, at least not in such strong terms.
A government with the power to censor the tabloids is also a government with the power to censor the news outlets that you do like. I'd be careful about opening that can of worms.
Rather than throwing our hands in the air, maybe we could expect our governments to craft laws in such a way that we can punish people for willful lies resulting in death while still preserving our right to free speech and the press.
Lots of people in my replies are telling me that I'm wrong, but no-one has yet answered my question: what specifically should the government do?
What could be done: (1) Stronger penalties, perhaps tied to proportionate burdens of proof. (2) Criminal penalties.
A weak burden of proof with mediocre penalties is just a cost of doing business.
[1] UK has 1/4th of the population of the US but The Sun has 4x the circulation of The New York Post. The Daily Mirror every day puts out 4x the number of papers that The National Enquirer puts out in a week.
Also, I never hear anybody talk about what the tabloids are reporting. There's a lot of social stigma attached to them in the US.
GP was saying the government should do something. What more can the government do?
They genuinely thought that the new software was uncovering a lot of theft that previously went undetected. This actually spurred them on even further thinking that the software was a godsend.
The sickening part is the people responsible won't ever see the inside of a prison cell despite sending many to prison for their failures.
Yikes, such people shouldn't be in working in law enforcement then
It is not too much to ask for prosecutors to be a bit more careful, bit more factual, understand the powers that come with their position and use it wisely. If they are not able to do that, they should pick some other profession which has lesser potential to cause damage than law enforcement.
Also - now that the software has proven defective, are they doing to go after Fujitsu or those who tested/signed off on the software? Probably not, maybe they will find a scapegoat at best.
But everybody is like this to an extent, so you need to fix this in other ways too. This is why reasonable countries have a whole bunch of process around legal punishment, and don't just throw someone in prison after a police officer says so. All the restrictions on how evidence is gathered and what kind of proof needs to be provided are ways to work around this problem. The police and prosecutor might decide someone is guilty, but they still have to convince twelve ordinary people. (Or whatever the process is in your country of choice.)
It sounds like this is where things really fell apart with the postal scandal, and the courts were willing to convict with insufficient evidence.
One of the things that frustrates me with how ethics is taught in computer science is that we use examples like Therac 25, and people listen in horror, then their takeaway is frequently "well thank god I don't work on medical equipment".
The fact that it's medical equipment is a distraction. All software can cause harm to others. All of it. You need to care about all of it.
Though, I used to work on fighter jets and SAMs. People do die due to my work.
Which maybe we (I also work in "defense") deserve to burn in hell, but who are you to be self righteous? For example, if you ever put up a Ukraine flag sticker you'd be a hypocrite too.
This might change, partly in response to this case: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evid...
Quite interesting article about this: https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/the-presumption-t...
When these sorts of things happen, the source can be subpoena'd with the relevant legal tool, and reviewed appropriately.
Why governments don't do this is beyond me. It greatly limits liability of gov procurement, and puts the liability on the companies selling such goods.
Why are the vendors so incentivized? Well, coming back to Fujitsu and the Post Office, the answer is that refusing to share the source was worth about a billion dollars: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgm8lmz1xk1o
I hope lessons are learned, but I doubt it.
An escrow approach is quite common to protect the government in the event of a vendor going bankrupt or similar.
Brown envelopes most likely and de facto non functioning SFO.
That is just mind bogglingly stupid - who the hell are the idiots who wrote a law like that? Any of them wrote a line of code in their life?
Imagine a witness says "I saw him go into the bank at 11:20. I know the time because I looked up at the clock tower, and it said 11:20".
Defence argues "The clock must have been wrong. My client was at lunch with his wife by 11:15".
Clocks are simple enough that we can presume them to correct, unless you can present evidence that they are unreliable.
This presumption was extended to ever-more complicated machines over the years. And then (fatally) this presumption was extended to the rise of PROGRAMMABLE computers. It is the programmability of computers that makes them unreliable. The actual computer hardware rarely makes an error that isn't obvious as an error.
The distinction of software and hardware is a relatively recent concept for something as old as common law.
Breath test results are routinely challenged (sometimes successfully) by demanding records showing that the device has been tested and calibrated according to the required schedule.
You can demand a blood test, but you have to know. Most people do not know
That's not what "common law" means.
This is horrifying. I presume software is working incorrectly until proven otherwise.
I hope they're taking a hard look at past cases where they've done this.
Many people were scared into pleading guilty just to avoid the upfront legal costs and the ruinous fines if contesting and found guilty (“the computer is always right”).
Often the PO knew that they didn’t have much of a case but just used their special status to bully them into submission.
> The Post Office itself took many cases to court, prosecuting 700 people between 1999 and 2015. Another 283 cases were brought by other bodies, including the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS).
> A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates, forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.[4][5]
It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
So it may have looked like "it was TV what done it" but the wheels of justice were turning long before the show came out.
Private Eye too, I hear
The TV programme made it a political football
The case was done with by 2019:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_%26_Others_v_Post_Office...
The mini-series aired in 2024. Perhaps it was a bit more obscure pre-airing, but things were sorted out already.
I first saw news about this scandal and the early evidence of wrong doing by the Post Office in 2008.
We were in the middle of an election cycle. If you were paying attention you were aware of the scandal slowly grinding its way through legal slop, but most people probably weren't that clued in (as per normal).
But that mini-series threw it into the current public consciousness, and so suddenly it wasn't just the judicial system working through it but the Tories now gave a shit (briefly), because they thought showing that they care might save them (it didn't).
Holy shit. You might see big corps like the post office fund big dramas as a way to sway public opinion. A tool in the pr playbook.
It didn't work because it was a terrible movie and blatant propaganda, but I could see someone doing this successfully if they were more subtle about it.
Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions
Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec
> In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual’s mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual’s history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-great-post-office-...
"The report alleges that even before the program was rolled out in 1999, some Fujitsu employees knew that Horizon could produce false data."
"As the years went by the complaints grew louder and more persistent [...] Still the Post Office trenchantly resisted the contention that on occasions Horizon produced false data."
hmm sounds like silicon valley work ethics
Horizon is the case that should replace Therac-25 as a study in what can go wrong if software developers screw up. Therac-25 injured/killed six people, Horizon has ruined hundreds of lives and ended dozens. And the horrifying thing is, Horizon wasn't something anyone would have previously identified as safety-critical software. It was just an ordinary point-of-sale and accounting system. The suicides weren't directly caused by the software, but from an out of control justice and social system in which people blindly believed in public institutions that were actually engaged in a massive deep state cover-up.
It is reasonable to blame the suicides on the legal and political system that allowed the Post Office to act in that way, and which put such low quality people in charge. Perhaps also on the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't. But this is HN, so from a software engineering perspective what can be learned?
Some glitches were of their time and wouldn't occur these days, e.g. malfunctions in resistive touch screens that caused random clicks on POS screens to occur overnight. But most were bugs due to loss of transactionality or lack of proper auditing controls. Think message replays lacking proper idempotency, things like that. Transactions were logged that never really occurred, and when the cash was counted some appeared to be missing, so the Post Office accused the postmasters of stealing from the business. They hadn't done so, but this took place over decades, and decades ago people had more faith in institutions than they do now. And these post offices were often in small villages where the post office was the center of the community, so the false allegations against postmasters were devastating to their social and business lives.
Put simply - check your transactions! And make sure developers can't rewrite databases in prod.
There is also no "deep Amazon" or "deep Meta". Amazon is Amazon, Meta is Meta and the state is the state. People working for or representing the state have their own agenda, have their cliques, have their CYA like people everywhere else. And the state as an organization prioritizes survival and self defense above all other goals it might have.
However, the state is not a monolith. It's an organization of all sorts of sub-organizations run by individuals with their own agendas. They have names, faces, and honors: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67925304
(The honors systems is deeply problematic because about half of them are handed out to insiders for complicity in god knows what and the other half are handed out to celebrities as cover for the first half)
Most employees of AT&T had no idea it was even going on, so to lump every AT&T employee into the same batch of "you're bad because th company you work for was doing X" when they had no idea the company was doing X isn't really fair.
By the same vein, Stephen Miller trying to round up and cage innocent civilians just trying to live their life is a very different part of the government than Suzanne at NASA who's trying to better the future of mankind. To act as if there's no distinguishing between the two is just silly.
Whether you have an issue with the specific term "deep state" I'll leave be. But please don't try to oversimplify large organizations. The higher up the chain the more responsibility you can place for what the organization as a whole does, but the reverse isn't true when speaking outside of their specific area of ownership.
"you're bad because th[e] company you work for was doing X"
Which I didn't write.
All the other parts about Suzanne, also not what I wrote.
"But please don't try to oversimplify large organizations."
I didn't, I feel your comment misrepresents what I've said.
"The higher up the chain the more responsibility you can place for what the organization as a whole does"
No. Al Capone killed no one himself. People did that for him. They share the responsibility. My boss made me do it is not an excuse.
Any company has the right to bring a private prosecution under UK law, and this was the basis for the prosecutions in question. It just means that the company pays for some of the costs involved.
Whether or not private prosecutions should be allowed is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion. Let's not muddy the waters with misinformation about the Post Office having some kind of parallel police and courts system. It just doesn't.
That's a simplification. The Post Office has a more privileged position due to its history; it has both formal access (e.g. to police computers) and informal deference from CPS that regular companies do not enjoy.
It may be that the CPS would have taken over these prosecutions and dropped them if the company in question had been, say, Tesco. But I don’t see how we can be sure of this.
It refers to people in the government with a lot of power and little public exposure, and perhaps some indication of using their power against the will of the general public, and yes there’s tons of these people, and it’s quite good to have the public generally worried about them.
American political history is littered with deep state plots that turned out to be true - Iraq war being a big recent one, the insurance policy FBI agents another.
My argument is that these are not deep state plots, these are just plots. This are plots that states are doing. This is the state. This is an organization of millions of people. There is no deep state. The state is just like any other large organization.
Take for example the eBay stalking scandal.
"The eBay stalking scandal was a campaign conducted in 2019 by eBay and contractors. The scandal involved the aggressive stalking and harassment of two e-commerce bloggers, Ina and David Steiner, who wrote frequent commentary about eBay on their website EcommerceBytes"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_stalking_scandal
The CEO was not involved.
There is no "deep eBay", there is just eBay. We don't use the phrase "deep eBay" for a reason. And in the same way "deep State" does not make any sense.
The CIA was very clear that there was nothing there, and the publicly appointed leadership (Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney, etc) badgered them until they gave in and made some wishy-washy statement that Powell could pretend was real.
The war was led from the top - Sec Def and VP. That Bush was a moron and appointed liars to Sec Def and VP is on him. Cheney and Rumsfeld had a long history of making things up, going back to the 70s.
Even if we agreed Iraq wasn’t a good example, it’s irrelevant to the point as I don’t think anyone actually thinks there aren’t powerful and largely behind the scenes figures - defense, lobbying, billionaires, and so on that aren’t actively steering the government away from the will of the people.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/18/panorama-iraq-...
They went after the intel they wanted to find to justify their position. It didn't matter if it was real or true, it just needed to come from the intelligence apparatus.
It’s a red flag, so there’s that.
As you want to call a spade a spade, can we agree that the software engineer who testified repeatedly under oath that the system worked fine, even as the bug tracker filled up with cases where it didn't, is undoubtedly among those who are morally (if not legally) culpable to a considerable extent?
I don't think you needed to ask for agreement.
In corner cases, culpability for uncertain expertise can be a tricky issue - you may recall the case of the Italian geologists, a few years back, indicted for minimizing the risk of an earthquake shortly before one occurred - but the case here seems pretty clear-cut (again, I'm speaking morally, not legally.)
I try to give the legal and ethical perspectives. These systems should be auditable and help and not hurt people.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/cia-allegedly-bought-flawe...
Well, yes, they did screw up, but the fallout was amplified 100x by bad management.
If your accounting software has hundreds of bugs then you are really in the deep shit.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal#:~...
That is not to say that bugs are good. They are bad and should be squashed. But the Horizon failure, IMO, is with the management, that pretended that the system was bug free and, faced with the evidence to the contrary, put the blame on postmasters. My 2c.
If you're on trial for doing X and your jury is told by a prosecution witness "mrkramer did X" and under cross they admit that's based on computer records which are often bogus, inconsistent, total nonsense, it doesn't take the world's best defence lawyer to secure an "innocent" verdict. That's not a fun experience, but it probably won't drive you to suicide.
One of the many interlocking failures here is that the Post Office, historically a government function, was allowed to prosecute people.
Suppose I work not for the Post Office (by this point a private company which is just owned in full by the government) but for say, an Asda, next door. I'm the most senior member of staff on weekends, so I have keys, I accept deliveries, all that stuff. Asda's crap computer system says I accepted £25000 of Amazon Gift Cards which it says came on a truck from the depot on Saturday. I never saw them, I deny it, there are no Gift Cards in stock at our store.
Asda can't prosecute me. They could try to sue, but more likely they'd call the police. If the police think I stole these Amazon cards, they give the file to a Crown Prosecutor, who works for the government to prosecute criminals. They don't work for Asda and they're looking at a bunch of "tests" which decide whether it makes sense to prosecute people.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/about-cps/how-we-make-our-decisions
But because the Sub-postmasters worked under contract to the Post Office, it could and did in many cases just prosecute them, it was empowered to do that. That's an obvious mistake, in many of these cases if you show a copper, let alone a CPS lawyer your laughable "case" that although this buggy garbage is often wrong you think there's signs of theft, they'll tell you that you can't imprison people on this basis, piss off.
A worse failure is that Post Office people were allowed to lie to a court about how reliable this information was, and indeed they repeatedly lied in later cases where it's directly about the earlier lying. That's the point where it undoubtedly goes from "Why were supposedly incompetent morons given this important job?" where maybe they're morons or maybe they're liars, to "Lying to a court is wrong, send them to jail".
They've started the process of thinking about if that law makes sense given this case: https://www.gov.uk/government/calls-for-evidence/use-of-evid...
They can, actually. Anyone in the UK can launch a private prosecution. It's rare because it's expensive and the CPS can (and often do) take over any private prosecution then drop it.
Nevertheless, the power exists and has been intentionally protected by parliament. I think most would agree it needs reform, however.
Its one of the offerings from TM-Eye aka one of the "private police forces". https://tm-eye.co.uk/what-we-do/private-prosecutions/
It is an actual example of a two tier justice system since those who can afford the private prosecution skip the queue for the public system but will still normally have the taxpayer pay for it.
There is currently a consultation underway as per below article which, incidentally, mentions a more recent dubious example of private prosecutions which got slapped down.
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/oversight-and-re...
[Edited: Got the Futurama quote wrong, fixed that]
I imagine digital records are involved in nearly every trial at this point. Good luck getting this point admitted by the justice system.
and the post office management had no interest in proving otherwise
they should be going after the management
In this case it should have been very easy to provide evidence to override the presumption that the Horizon system was working correctly. That this didn’t happen seems to have resulted from a combination of bad lawyering and shameless mendacity on the part of Fujitsu and the Post Office.
Don’t get me wrong — the whole thing is a giant scandal. I’m just not sure if this particular presumption of UK law is the appropriate scapegoat.
Defense had to prove that only one Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software was buggy and the whole prosecution falls apart e.g. If John's Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software has bugs then Peter's Horizon/Fujitsu accounting software most probably has bugs too.
One case where defense did get access to the code (FST developed by NYC) led to discoveries (https://www.propublica.org/article/federal-judge-unseals-new...) that led to it being retired from use.
I’d argue that some kind of weak presumption along these lines clearly makes sense and is probably universal across legal systems. For example, suppose the police find that X has an incriminating email from Y after searching X’s laptop. Are they required to prove that GMail doesn’t have a bug causing it to corrupt email contents or send emails to the wrong recipients? Presumably not.
Yea and who is responsible for engaging them?
UK courts don’t (can’t) do that, that’s up to the plaintiffs or defendants.
At any rate, it was the persecuted postal workers who committed suicide, not the software developers.
I kinda understand the false guilt these postmasters must have felt when they were wrongfully accused. These people should not be dead like that, those who puts them into that living hell should.
Oddly though, the justice of this world usually don't work like that. Usually, it's the people at the lowest level who suffer the worst fate/abuse, simply because they are the most defenseless, while the people "on the top" pets themselves for "resolving" the problem they created.
It's a odd place to mention, but from one of Donald Trump's story (The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge one where he noticed the unnoticed engineer) I've learned it is important that one must actively take what they deserved (recognition in his story, justice in this case), and at least don't be silent when other people is stealing it away. This is "a nasty world", and if you want to make things right, you must "Fight! Fight! Fight!" and never give up.
Now you will remember to at least skim the article before posting.
I cried when I was reading the book. So much suffering. Bought a copy for all the it architects in my company and asked all of them to read it. Should be part of curriculum for aspiring software engineers.
Recently, a snark/bullying community on Reddit resulted in the suicide of their target (a woman responsible for rescuing foxes).
That kind of targeting and bullying is horrific for any individual to process, let alone people who don’t have the press teams and training that celebrities do.
Would you want to be called that if you make a light jab at a middle aged bald guy?
I'd be more afraid people would kill themselves just to get retribution on their tormentors and it would increase suicides.
I do agree with the sibling post that suicide would be weaponized which is the real problem.
And much like assessing how physical violence might contribute to the end result, so could this be actually assessed. I don’t know why people reach for binary classifications strawmans like this.
I think there’s still a lesson to be learned here about computers needing to be locked when not in use. I find it utterly bizarre how many experienced technical employees will leave their computer unlocked when they step away from it for extended periods of time.
These still occur on modern touchscreen laptops (work-provided Dell Latitude 7450 and mandated to use Windows with a lot of restrictions). It's not an everyday issue, but a once a month one.
Other than that, completely agree with your assessment: the ruining of those lives was a completely avoidable tragedy that was grossly mishandled.
The "victims" who suffer after a suicide are the living, not the dead. These kinds of "modernizations" are transparent PC nonsense made up by well-intentioned do-gooders who have no idea how to represent the interests of other people who have a lived experience that they don't understand.
The person is dead either way. There's literally no way to sugarcoat this fact. We'd rather you just speak in plain, honest language than trying to make it sound less bad somehow.
But really it's the transparent and ham-handed attempts by some others to smooth over the sharp edges of reality merely by re-phrasing how things are written.
People generally don't want pity, but these re-phrasings accomplish nothing other than to make clear that one person feels sorry for another.
No one is an island. We’re all deeply intertwined/interconnected. We’re the sum total of our lived experiences and without a doubt some have lived far more challenging lives than others and are influenced by factors that would lead just about anyone down a dark path.
The grief felt by those left behind is the result of that aforementioned interconnectedness.
Getting back to the quoted bit, isn’t this a bit like saying “attributing grief to anyone other than the person experiencing it is oxymoronic”?
My point is not to diminish the impact on those left behind in any way. Clearly this is a traumatic event that causes excruciating grief.
But I think we also need to be honest about the environmental factors that lead to suicide. Hopelessness is one of the large causes. If there are systemic reasons causing people to feel hopeless, and if those systemic problems could theoretically be changed/improved, and such improvement lowered the suicide rate, there’s a strong case to be made that the systemic factors share the responsibility.
> Yes life is complex and whatnot -- that's a given, we don't need a reminder every time anything happens.
I don’t think it’s a given. Clearly some lives are far more complicated than others. There exists a subset of people for whom that complication will become an insurmountable problem. Often those people have been traumatized, or have never learned the tools necessary to work through their feelings.
Some people are bullied into killing themselves. Should that be attributed wholly to the person who was bullied?
Yes, everything causes everything, there is no one single thing to blame. Life is hard and complicated. Every rule has exceptions. Every truth has contradictions. Every one is a hypocrite. The world is big and complex.
We all know this already. We don't need this disclaimer to every statement that anyone makes. At a certain point, it just becomes noise.
No, passive voice is not in general designed to conceal or obscure the actor. Especially not in the sentence here.
There were valid similar complains about crime reporting. But the language there was different. The sentence "The innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation" is trying to hide culpability. We can discuss that. These two are incomparable:
- A deputy-involved shooting occurred. (Ok, we are avoiding the actor. We do not know who was shooting.)
- A person died by Suicide. (Clear to anyone who done what.)
The former correctly attributes the action to the person who killed themselves. Certainly the motivations and causes that drive people to suicide are complex, but ultimately it is a choice the person makes.
"Committed" is perhaps not the best word, since it's associated with crimes (and suicide is not a crime in many places anymore), but it's at least more active.
Think about it this way: I have relative who is vegan, so she has been trying to convince me to kill myself for many years now.
I can still choose whether I do it though, and obviously I chose not to so far, although during COVID I didn’t have much other social interaction, so I nearly went through with it.
I had agency throughout though. I’m not dead because I chose not to go through with it.
That’s the difference.
Keep in mind there was a point where I was vegan, I know several vegans, so I know what I’m talking about.
They’re not shy about it either—look up That Vegan Teacher on YouTube for relatively middle-of-the-road vegan behavior in action.
It's possible that both you and your dad are victims in different ways.
I guess some people take comfort in the idea that suicide is thrust on people and they take no responsibility for their actions.
It follows from that fact that if someone kills themselves, at least one of those things was not true. And those things can and often are thrust on people, or at least occur against the will of the person.
In this case, a bad situation was thrust on a whole bunch of people, and it ended up killing some of them.
Correct. This has no bearing.
> it ended up killing some of them.
No, and it's irresponsible and unhelpful to act like agency and choice is not part of the equation. As if to say that basically everyone chooses the same way (euthanasia) in the face of terminal illness, or depression.
Tautologically, if you want to convey that help is out there and that a better life is possible, then you're saying people have a choice to make.
There is agency, but it's equally irresponsible and unhelpful to act like outside factors are not part of the equation, and that someone who drives a person to suicide is blameless.
Let's say someone jumps out of a burning building and they're killed by the fall. Did they have agency? Responsibility? Should we describe that as "committed suicide"?
Software development was merely an accessory to the crime in this case.
The essence of this story is how the UK establishment can lie, and be corrupt to levels that will shame big time criminals.
[1] "...Vennells was the CEO of Post Office Ltd during the latter part of the Post Office scandal, which involved more than 900 subpostmasters being wrongly convicted of theft, false accounting and fraud between 1999 and 2015 because of shortfalls at their branches that were in fact errors of the Horizon accounting software used by the Post Office.Thousands of subpostmasters paid for shortfalls caused by Horizon and/or had their contracts terminated. The actions of the Post Office caused the loss of jobs, bankruptcy, family breakdown, criminal convictions, prison sentences and at least four suicides. In total, over 4,000 subpostmasters would eventually become eligible for compensation..."
"...In 2013, Post Office Limited hired forensic accounting firm Second Sight, headed by Ron Warmington, to investigate the Horizon software losses. Warmington discovered the system was flawed and faulty, but Vennells was unhappy with Warmington's report and terminated their contract. Prior to her role as CEO, Vennells was the Chief Operating Officer of Post Office Ltd, a position in which – according to the evidence of the then CEO, David Smith – she had responsibility for management of the "operational use" of the Horizon software...."
"...During the case, the Post Office's conduct under Vennells's leadership was described as an instance of "appalling and shameful behaviour..."
"...During her testimony, Vennells consistently stated she was unaware of the facts or, when confronted with documents that showed she had been made aware of them, said she had not understood them..."
I dont deny the management was criminally complicit in the cover up, but it starts with bugs, then lies and dishonesty and cowardess of technical staff - and only then it has a chance of becoming what it became because of atrociously unethical management. They all belong in case studies taught to both tech and business majors.
Hum, no. Horizon had nothing to do with problems of software development.
It's a case of unaccountable judges, lying attorneys, and the entire police system acting in a conspiracy to hide information and gaslight the society at large. The fact that there is a software error there somewhere isn't relevant at all.
I mean, common. Everyone knows what suicide is or means. No, it does not make it sound like an act of God for anyone who is above A1 level of English.
These deaths had an unambiguous causal actor other than/in addition to themselves.
It's an exceptional condition particularly since if you are harassed by any ordinary person you have a multitude of recourse-- up to fleeing or going into hiding and so we should be very very hesitant to attribute suicide to the actions of a third party in general. But in the case of harassment perpetrated by or via state power the victims are far closer to an inescapable situation and because of the vastly greater power the state must carry vastly greater responsibility for the total consequences of their malicious and improper actions.
“X died by suicide” is a sentence in the active voice. “Die” is an intransitive verb and cannot be passivized in English.
Let’s not use conspiracy-theory language.
It was a coverup by Fujitsu and The Post Office.
MPs and ministers (part of the state) used their parliamentary privilege to expose it after the campaign by the postmasters brought the issue to light.
No ‘deep state’ conspiracy, it’s just an arse covering cover-up (pared with outright incompetence) which had particularly devastating consequences.
The legacy of the Post Office having prosecution powers was clearly a big part of the problem.
> “Perfectly respectable”
Maybe in some fringe circles, but this term is certainly attached to a huge amount extreme propaganda and conspiracy that attempts to undermine western democracy and institutions.
> Maybe in some fringe circles
I would say the fringe circles co-opted it over the last couple of decades, and the term's obviously become heavily associated with them in some people's minds (eg. yours). But it's an older term than that.
Edit: Why would the loons have adopted it, if it was such a disreputable term?
I agree. The are part of the state. They are a standalone company, but wholly owned by the state. But other aspects of the state (eventually) reacted to the injustice: MPs, select committees, ministers, the public inquiry, and hopefully next the legal system as some of these people should be in jail.
> But it's an older term than that.
Fine, I’m happy to accept that. Just like I’m happy to accept that R&B has nothing to do with BB King any more (well, actuality I still struggle with that).
Definitions and usage change. The current usage is the one that matters. Not the legacy definition.
When the original poster wrote “massive deep state cover-up” I think the implication is that shadowy figures throughout the state are pulling cover-up levers, when it was one privately owned company and one publicly owned company. The rest of the state moved (albeit slowly) to expose this and make it right.
But particularly with regard to politics, I don't think you should let go of useful ideas because arseholes pollute them. At least, it feels uncomfortably like letting the arseholes win, to me.
> The postmasters killed themselves because the British state was imprisoning them for crimes they didn't commit, based on evidence from a buggy financial accounting system.
That's just better writing!
It's literally what we call it in Norway. In English it's compared to miscarriage (i.e. spontaneous abortion), "miscarriage of justice". Here we call it murder of justice (justismord), whether anyone actually died or not.
I do think it gets the seriousness across, and the focus on it as a deliberate act, rather than an accident as in English. Some people actually made a deliberate act to let innocent people take the blame.
> Some people actually made a deliberate act to let innocent people take the blame.
And those people are at fault and should be criminally prosecuted for the harm they caused.
That's a really odd take.
It's not odd when the sentiment is widespread, for example, look at the other comments in this thread that talk about it.
The phrasing could be made more accusatory, but I don't think that's inherently better.
I encourage you to read the current thinking on this evolving language, which offers some explanation as to why we're moving away from damaging language like "committing" suicide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_terminology#%22Committ... https://www.iasp.info/languageguidelines/
You may disagree with my assertion, but there has been considerable research into the role of media and reporting in suicide, indicating that contagion is real and that words matter when reporting on these issues.
Today I would say that framing suicide as "immoral" in secular society is banal and has no traction, but most, excepting certain circumstances, would suggest it is a bad choice. That surely follows if you as well as I would try to talk an able person out of suicide.
I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following tough circumstances. That's the message I am getting from the euphemism treadmill game, and I reject it.
The message should be that you can go through hell and recover, and you still have a choice. And granted there's always nature vs nurture; just as we are not entirely the product of our environment, the environment does shape us. But it's not all-or-nothing.
The article linked by the parent comment explains it well and references plenty of considered material. But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.
Consider how people would like your death, or the death of a loved one, described by others. And if you can't, maybe consider how others might be affected.
The projections are doing the work here. Colloquially today what's understood is that "commit" merely means they did the deed. People can judge that to be immoral or not regardless; most people don't, except through the lens of religion.
They might judge it to be the wrong choice, as I surely do, and I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following any given circumstance.
Isn't the stigma desired anyway? It keeps people from going through with it. That's why society deliberately creates and actively cultivates the stigma.
I doubt removing "committed" removes any stigma to seek help. What sucks about suicidality is that everyone is so sterile about it. Removing the word is more of that. IMO the sterility discourages the not-yet-at-rock-bottom suicidal from reaching out.
My pre-edit comment was that just about sterility and linking to: "Envying the dead: SkyKing in memoriam" https://eggreport.substack.com/p/rehosting-envying-the-dead-...
That’s a very optimistic take on how “rational” society tends to be. The thought that “if things are in a certain way in society, then it must make sense (from a moral or societal point of view) for them to be that way.”
[1] https://cambridgeblog.org/2023/05/a-journey-into-the-shaken-...
I mean, it's no Norway, but to remind you the United States, which has continued just straight up executing people who may not have committed any crime, is currently trying to make some of its own citizens stateless, then ship them to a foreign oubliette. Russia doesn't bother with courts and people who are out of favour just have deadly "accidents" there.
IMO common law is still better than case law at least.
You may have been kidding, but I’m sure someone will genuinely think so and have some decent arguments for it.
The UK had this rather antique thing called the "Lords of Appeal in Ordinary" aka "Law Lords" who were in theory just some Lords (ie people who are arbitrarily in the upper chamber of the Parliament, maybe because their dad was) but served the same purpose as a final court of appeal in practice and so had for a very long time all been Judges because duh, of course they should be judges, that's a job for a judge, just make some judges Lords and forget about it. They met in some committee room in the Palace of Westminster, because they're Lords and that's where the Lords are, right? So, there was practical independence, but the appearance was not here.
About 15 years ago now, the dusty Law Lords were in the way of an attempted reform of parliament. A Supreme Court sounds like a good idea, so the UK got a Supreme Court. It fixed up a nice building nearby, gave the exact same people a new job title and sent them over the road. Done.
But the UK version does what it says on the tin. It said on the tin they're politically independent. In the US of course this "independence" is bullshit, but in the UK since there's already a politically independent process to pick judges the same process continues for the Supreme Court. So a Prime Minister might hate the supreme court but they can't pick the judges.
The US Supreme Court says it's politically independent. And so the UK's Supreme Court just did that. It wasn't difficult, unlike the US the rest of our court system, including the predecessor "Law Lords" were in fact chosen by an independent non-political process already, the law making a Supreme Court more or less says "Oh, when we need more Supreme Court justices do the thing for judges again, only more so"
It's actually for this reason that for hundreds of years until the early 21st century there was real concern about having a Catholic prime minister. There was even hand-wringing over PMs of other denominations, but the history of Catholicism in the UK in particular raised concern. Why? The PM has final approval of the Lords Spiritual - the bishops from the Church of England who are there to provide a protestant spiritual dimension to all debates before that House.
It's allegedly for this reason that Tony Blair (married to a Catholic) waited until after he left office to convert. I think it was either Brown or Cameron who then got the law explicitly changed to not bar Catholics and other religions to serve as PM.
None of this matters for the Supreme Court, and thus for about 15 years now. It's true that the Supreme Court's justices are made life peers (its original members were of course already peers having previously constituted the Law Lords, but new members are granted a peerage) - however that's merely a convention, if you don't make them a life peer it makes no difference to their job on the court, it just makes you look petty. I don't even think it's contempt now, because the law saying they should be elevated was repealed - unless the new law also says they must be given a peerage when they get the job, I glanced through it and didn't find that, but it's a huge law because making a Supreme Court was not its main purpose.
Poe's Law strikes again.
The American legal system isn't even the best legal system in the US.
Huh? What does this mean? Are there other systems in the US that I’m not aware of?
/s
The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose. It should be an embarrassment to a country that considers itself a member of the developed Western world.
This defect is present in all justice systems to some degree or another. For that matter, most crimes (serious or otherwise) rarely have the sort of smoking gun evidence that would satisfy us all that it wasn't circumstantial. Worse still, when the evidence isn't circumstantial, it's still usually testimonial in nature... some witness is on the stand at trial, describing what they saw. Or, perhaps more accurately, misinterpreting what they saw/remember.
The only difference this time around is that they were misinterpreting what their software logic meant.
In the most shocking case, with Martin Griffiths, there were attempts to hold him responsible for robbery loses he had absolutely nothing to do with:
> On 2 May 2013 a robbery occurred at the Post Office which resulted in a net loss to the Post Office of £38,504.96, which was reduced to £15,845 after some of the money was recovered. Mr Griffiths was injured during the robbery; he was present in the branch when it occurred. The Post Office Investigator advised the Post Office that Mr Griffiths was partly to blame for the loss sustained by the Post Office and that he should be held responsible for part of the loss. [1]
Such a claim wouldn't even be colorable in most jurisdictions.
I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France. Individual cases might not be handled perfectly, but this is a systemic miscarriage of justice where at every turn individuals were prosecuted without any evidence of individual wrongdoing. It was believed money was missing, no attempt was made to discover how it went missing, and the post-masters were held responsible without further inquiry. The legal system upheld these non-findings as facts and convicted people based upon them.
[1]: Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, 3.49
This is hilarious... in the land of "you can't defend yourself or especially your property", he was partly to blame. That one is hilarious.
>I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France.
In the US, the US Mail is sacred, so I agree it could never be attacked like this. But other industries, other scenarios? That level of prosecutorial malfeasance isn't unusual at all. I will concede that the scale of it may differ, but only because I have no ready examples, not because I believe that there is some sort of safeguard that would prevent it.
https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Post-Office-Horizon-s...
Not sure if this requires sign-in/subscription, so apologies in advance. I did neither and have access to the full article.
Edit: I think this one: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-... Also related article: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2021/07/15/what-went-wrong-with...
It was an internal developer bearing witness that made a material difference here. If you're the developer logging in to fix errors and the postmaster scandal is in full swing, then it's time to look at being a whistleblower. If you're the developer writing code to hack emissions tests in cars, again, look at your ethics.
It's sad to see all these people losing their livelihoods and beliefs. And it gives me hope to see how they fought back and started to help each other over the decades.
But honestly I'm not even slightly surprised as this is coming from the same "people" who invented the window tax.
- Confusing and buggy UI causing clerks to duplicate or mis-enter transactions
- Inventory getting “stuck” in branches after the product was discontinued; the attempt to remove it hid the inventory but caused its value to reappear on the books again each accounting period
- Failing touch screens entering spurious purchases overnight
- Incomplete rollback of distributed transactions
- Byzantine failures during hardware replacement causing multiple transactions to be assigned the same ID and overwrite each other
- Fujitsu employees with unaudited write access to the production database making one-off modifications
- The point of sale system simply telling the clerk to give too much change back to the customer
There’s no “one bug” here; the main failure was that those responsible continued to dismiss any problems as users being either in error or outright malicious, despite massive amounts of evidence that the system had technical flaws. Better quality software would have reduced the problems, but no system is bug-free and in many cases very little effort was made to identify the root causes of problems, much less to prevent similar ones from happening again.
[1] https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bates-v-...
Their data model appears to have been akin to having a single accumulator sum up things rather than to use something like double-entry bookkeeping or an account graph so that the source of errors could be traced.
It’s less “a bug” and more a coincidence that the application worked when it did.
What can you do when you know you are innocent but the court trusts the software more than it trusts people? And you are asked to repay something you never stole which off course leads to your financial ruin/divorce/... your kids bullied because you as a parent were deemed a thief... Imagine your spouse leaving you because of something you didn't even do...
Someone absolutely needs to go to jail over this. This kind of software is supposed to go through a lengthy compliance and certification process, so clearly whatever person put their signature on that "certified" document is responsible for these death.
See Nick Wallis' coverage: * https://www.postofficetrial.com/2019/03/the-smoking-gun.html * https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/ecce-chambers/
> [Anne] Chambers closed the ticket with a definitive: “No fault in product”.
> The cause of the defect was assigned to “User” – that is, the Subpostmaster.
> When Beer asked why, Chambers replied: “Because I was rather frustrated by not – by feeling that I couldn’t fully get to the bottom of it. But there was no evidence for it being a system error.”
...
> Chambers conceded: “something was obviously wrong, in that the branch obviously were getting these discrepancies that they weren’t expecting, but all I could see on my side was that they were apparently declaring these differing amounts, and I certainly didn’t know of any system errors that would cause that to happen, or that would take what they were declaring and not record it correctly…. so I felt, on balance, there was just no evidence of a system error.”
> No evidence. [Sir Wyn] Williams pointed out that it surely was unlikely to be a user error if both trainers and auditors had recorded the Subpostmaster as inputting information correctly. Chambers replied:
> “Well, yeah, I… yes, I don’t know why… I’m not happy with this one. But I still stand by there being no indication of a system error and the numbers that they were recording just didn’t make a lot of sense.”
https://www.bcs.org/membership-and-registrations/get-registe...
Has anyone, ever? I've met precisely one.
You had lawyers quizzing people from all ranks of the Post Office and Fujistu; very interesting.
Ever since, I’ve worded my work related electronic communications with the supposition that a lawyer may read them at some point in the future.
If I’m ever asked to do something seemingly unusual or ‘out of the box’, it must be put to me in writing.
Anyone who has worked on a large migration eventually lands on a pattern that goes something like this:
1. Double-write to the old system and the new system. Nothing uses the new system;
2. Verify the output in the new system vs the old system with appropriate scripts. If there are issues, which there will be for awhile, go back to (1);
3. Start reading from the new system with a small group of users and then an increasingly large group. Still use the old system as the source of truth. Log whenever the output differs. Keep making changes until it always matches;
4. Once you're at 100% rollout you can start decomissioning the old system.
This approach is incremental, verifiable and reversible. You need all of these things. If you engage in a massive rewrite in a silo for a year or two you're going to have a bad time. If you have no way of verifying your new system's output, you're going to have a bad time. In fact, people are going to die, as is the case here.
If you're going to accuse someone of a criminal act, a system just saying it happened should NEVER be sufficient. It should be able to show its work. The person or people who are ultimately responsible for turning a fraud detection into a criminal complaint should themselves be criminally liable if they make a false complaint.
We had a famous example of this with Hertz mistakenly reporting cars stolen, something they ultimately had to pay for in a lawsuit [1] but that's woefully insufficient. It is expensive, stressful and time-consuming to have to criminally defend yourself against a felony charge. People will often be forced to take a plea because absolutely everything is stacked in the prosecution's favor despite the theoretical presumption of innocence.
As such, an erroneous or false criminal complaint by a company should itself be a criminal charge.
In Hertz's case, a human should eyeball the alleged theft and look for records like "do we have the car?", "do we know where it is?" and "is there a record of them checking it in?"
In the UK post office scandal, a detection of fraud from accounting records should be verified by comparison to the existing system in a transition period AND, moreso in the beginning, double checking results with forensic accountants (actual humans) before any criminal complaint is filed.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/06/1140998674/hertz-false-accusa...
"How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives" - 2024 | 331 comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39010070
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
> I guess some people take comfort in the idea that suicide is thrust on people and they take no responsibility for their actions.
You (pre-edit): "The problem many of us see with saying 'unalived by suicide' rather than 'committed suicide' is the artificiality of the sentence and the implication that the language we speak has to keep up with the correct newspeak due to the latest euphemistic moral cleansing lest we appear uncouth and uncultured."
My point stands.
Several times in recent years I've had people significantly financially and emotionally affected by what amounts to just fairly minor errors of judgement that the state treats as deliberate criminal acts and will follow up on with absolutely no human judgement or compassion.
An obvious example of this is tax law which despite being extremely complicated is followed by the state with no human consideration for individual circumstances. I guess upper-middle-class people must just know from osmosis every letter of UK tax code, but I've had so many people in my family not realise that they need to fill tax returns for certain things like Bitcoin disposals, OnlyFans earnings, eBay gains, income from helping neighbours with building/gardening work, etc... And the state can be absolutely fucking brutal when you make a mishap like this. They do not give a crap about intention or whether you've otherwise been a law abiding citizen. Case in point is HMRCs name and shame list which I believe was intended to name and shame high-profile tax evaders, but has basically just become a list of working class dudes who (perhaps stupidly in our eyes) didn't realise they had to manually file tax returns on their income.
Even extremely mediocre things are treated with brutal enforcement... For example, a street by mine recently changed from 30mph to 20mph overnight and this resulted in literally thousands of people being caught exceeding the speed limit by 10mph. There was no understanding that these people obviously didn't expect the speed limit to randomly change over night, instead they were all sent a letter from the government stating the government's intent to prosecute them for their offence... Any human would have thought, hm, yeah the fact thousands of people were caught when we made this change might imply that people didn't deliberately exceed the speed limit but we didn't make it clear enough that it had changed.
Obviously this is a totally different magnitude to what these people went through, but again I think it's all a result of overly systematic rule following that makes people feel completely powerless when the state decides they've done something wrong. There's absolutely nothing you can do to say, "hey, you know me... I wouldn't do this. You've made a mistake." Nope, sorry computer says no, and that's the end of it.
I get what I'm suggesting here isn't practical and this is just a side-effect of a large state which must depersonalise and systematise everything, but when you're a person caught on the wrong side of that system it's fucking scary because no one will listen to you or relate to you as a human being. And everyone you talk to can ruin your life at the click of a button and you know it's their job to do it when the system tells them that's what they must do.
Obviously these people had some legal assumption of innocence, but on a human level the assumption was always that they couldn't be trusted and were criminals. If you've ever experienced this before, where it's just assumed that you are guilty because of some faulty or misleading information it's psychologically brutal. You feel helpless, powerless and you're treated as if you lack humanity. It's horrible feeling and completely unsurprising to me these people decided to do the only thing they could reasonably do to take back control of their lives.
Sadly we'll learn nothing from this.
I'm sure we're see justice for her actions. /s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Vennells
Remember her: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPYo_gq329w
She needs to go to jail yesterday.
Making factual statements from a position of power without making sure they are correct is lying.
I do think that both the suffix "-cide" and the transitive verb "committed" insinuate wrongdoing and I in fact appreciate avoiding that phrasing out of respect for the deceased and their families.
On the other hand my younger sister took her own life in 2014 and my uncle took his own life in 2017, and that's the phrasing I've used, whenever I've felt the need to share these biographical details. Doesn't discard their agency, but also doesn't stigmatize. I can't help but think that the style guide would be better served by this established vernacular. It's both clear and respectful, and I wouldn't even really call it a euphemism.
I agree with your final paragraph, disagree in part with your second, and disagree with your first.
To the second: I don't doubt there's an implication of wrongdoing baked into the etymology of "committed suicide" - after all, suicide is a sin in Christianity and was historically a crime in England, and I imagine when the term first arose there was an intent for it to be condemnatory. But I think modern usage of the term is generally not understood to inherently carry that implication. IMO sometimes, as here, terms become established as first-class citizens in the language, speakers and listeners consequently don't even think about their etymology any more, and consequently the connotations logically implied by their etymology just cease to be salient to the vast majority of people.
(I also don't think the -cide suffix implies wrongdoing. Homicide is not necessarily illegal or wrong, and then of course there are words like "fungicide".)
But in any case if the term is to be eschewed, there are alternatives that avoid the implication of wrongdoing in the word "commit", are already well-established in the language (thus avoiding confusion about meaning) and avoid the new set of distasteful/offensive connotations that "died by suicide has". "Took his/her own life" is one; simply "killed himself/herself" is another. That is - we agree on your third paragraph, even if we disagree on details along the way.
To your first paragraph - I am perplexed. Did you (or anyone else) really just read this term for the first time (whenever you first came across it) and intuitively understand it was simply a new term for "killed themselves"? I struggle to imagine anyone grasping what the term was meant to mean without going to Google to figure out how it was meant to differ from the usual "committed suicide" (or either of the other less common but still well-established terms above); certainly I did not.
But suicide is an act (even if often either an irrational one committed by people in a disordered state of mind, or perhaps a desperate one by people with no path to happiness), and understanding any particular suicide is going to require understanding the thoughts and motivations of the person who killed themselves.
framing suicide more like a disease that acted upon them
Could you or I be 100% certain we wouldn't react the same way?
Probably not - but when I say that we should not deemphasise their agency, I don't think I imply otherwise. The opposite, in fact: to even ask or try to answer the question you ask here - to consider how I would act if put in the circumstances of another person - is to view their suicide as agentic.
(Observe that you could not meaningfully ask, of someone who got lung cancer and died due to asbestos exposure, whether I could be certain I would not "react the same way" to asbestos exposure! That is the difference between the "disease" framing and the "act by an agent" framing.)
Many, many professional organizations use clinical language around suicide because it’s always been a sensitive topic.
You also see this everywhere in when people use euphemism instead of saying it directly.
Bloody woke libtards in Victorian era!
compare and contrast: - he committed suicide - he was a victim of suicide - he died by suicide
each implies different levels of legality and passivity, and therefore control, and responsibility.
in this particular case the passive voice is extra important because to any reasonable person the post office management / fujitsu / uk gov are the responsible parties.
Too much focus is put on retroactively heaping blame on involved persons whenever things go wrong, but that is a really bad approach in my view; enforcement/punishment for things like this should be as light (and consistent) as possible.
But instead we get insane inconsistency (depending on exact outcome) thanks to media amplification and selective outrage.
All that achieves in the end is that people become better at shirking responsibility and playing the blame game, and it hinders not only investigations of past incidents but even increases future risk by incentivizing everyone to cover their ass first and actually fix things second.
Negro, black, African American, person of color... it's not the term, it's the implication. Solve the fact that the treatment is that of second-class citizens and there won't be a need to create new terms.
("But that's hard and as an individual I feel powerless so instead I will use a different term I guess." Probably the same phenomenon causing people to direct energy against vaccines more than pollutants and chemicals)
"Disabled", "handicapped", "differently-abled" -- we've never needed to rename "tall", have we?
Another post office operator, Seema Misra, was pregnant when she was sent to prison. She said in testimony that the local newspaper had published a photo of her and labeled her the "pregnant thief." While she was in prison, her husband was beaten up and subjected to racist insults, she testified.
But no they would say "died by homicide" not "died by murder".
Not in English. Although it's a verb in many languages, which is why "he suicided" is a common ESL mistake.
In this case, these people were driven to suicide. I would argue that those responsible for the Horizon scandal are guilty of at minimum manslaughter of these poor people.
I agree that the wording isn't ideal, and I agree that the headline fails to capture the nuance of the circumstances that lead to suicide, but I disagree that subeditors who write headlines need to encapsulate that nuance. That's what the article is for.
In 2025 English, suicide is most commonly a noun.
No it isn’t. You can’t say “He suicided.”
A business can accuse you of a crime, but they will be very careful before they do as the consequences of bring wrong are very severe - for a business. Corporations can fire you or sell your data or send you targeted adds. But the risks associated with government are far worse.