tart-lemonade

An audible alarm encourages people to tamper with it when it breaks and starts misfiring. Sure, they should put in a maintenance request, but they frequently take things into their own hands, even if maintenance is good about these things. And if the audible alarm just dies and there is no central management, how would you know? Stores don't really want to have to pay people to stand around with a stopwatch to determine if a time-based audible alarm still functions properly, and they also don't want to scare customers when things go wrong or when the alarm correctly goes off for a door just slightly ajar (and thus it wouldn't be immediately obvious which one needed to be closed).

With centralized monitoring, this all becomes much easier, and you can inspect a whole row of freezers in less than a minute. You can even do it remotely, just watching when customers open and close the doors on a security camera and checking that the control system registered it correctly.

See also: dump trucks that have alarms if you start to move while the bed is up. It's a great safety feature on the highway, but it's annoying on the job site if you can't just dump everything out while standing still, so it frequently gets disabled by the workers, especially if it starts to misfire. This is how you end up with dump trucks going highway speeds with their beds up taking out overhead signage and slamming into bridges. The stakes are much higher, yet workers would still rather rip out the alarm.

People always underestimate the moat that is institutional agility/ossification. There may be no theoretical moat in software, but every time you switch HR or financial systems you find out the hard way just how many integrations have been built (directly or indirectly) around a specific way of thinking about organizational data imposed by the software containing it, all of which require significant rewrites for the new system's conceptualization. The costs of switching add up fast and the risks of delayed payments/paychecks significant, which is how you end up with companies paying $$$ for extended support on discontinued HR and financial software.

It's the same reason companies will pay for GSuite and O365 subscriptions concurrently because a handful of departments refuse to give up their desktop applications and others have Excel-based workflows that do not work in Google Sheets and do not care enough to learn Python or find someone in the company who can write a better system.

In a criminal case, if you refuse to cooperate, ignore warrants, etc, the state can and will send in the police to arrest you and continue their investigation while you sit in jail.

In a civil case, that power doesn't exist; opposing council cannot order your arrest or send the police in to break down your door and execute a subpoena. This presents an obvious question: if there is no way to compel cooperation in a civil trial, why would anyone play along if they were guilty? To provide an incentive to do so, civil trials have sanctions, penalties issued by the judge to the offending party, which ratchet up in accordance with the severity of the misconduct displayed in the proceedings.

Alex Jones/Free Speech Systems/Infowars repeatedly withheld and spoliated evidence, ignored subpoenas, verifiably lied under oath, committed bankruptcy fraud to delay the proceedings, and sent woefully unprepared corporate representatives to depositions in direct defiance of court orders. Their conduct was so egregious that two judges independently handed down default judgements: for refusing to cooperate at every step of the way, they lost the right to argue their case in front of a jury, so the juries would just decide how much Jones et al owed in restitution.

If the juries felt Jones et al had been wronged and there was no real merit to the case, they would have awarded the Sandy Hook families $1 judgements (look up nominal damages, there is lots of precedence for this), but in both cases, the juries felt Jones' conduct was so egregious that they gave large judgements to the Sandy Hook families.

In both trials, the judges went out of their way to go along with all the dumb arguments FSS's council was putting forth to ensure no appeal could ever succeed on the merits. All Jones had to do was give the appearance of cooperation and then he would have been allowed to argue to the jury that he was innocent, but he couldn't reign in his worst impulses, defaming the victims during the trial and chasing away every competent attorney he had, leaving him with Norm Pattis (CT trial) and Andino Reynal (TX trial), attorneys who have no qualms catering to a client in ways that might jeopardize their law licenses.

The real kicker is that defamation law is full of snakes, attorneys laser-focused on money with no morals who will happily do things like put rape victims on the stand to interrogate them on every detail and turn innocent misrecollections into wins for the rapist. That Alex couldn't even keep one of those around speaks volumes.

Alex sacrificed his right to a trial to determine his innocence. He and Free Speech Systems then declared bankruptcy because he knew paying for the consequences of his actions was impossible, and when you declare chapter 7 bankruptcy, everything is for sale, including the "news" outlet he ran.

Alex isn't being silenced (and even if he were it's not the government doing it so the constitution doesn't play a role here). He got Judge Lopez to rule his Twitter account was not an asset that can be auctioned off, and he's been working to shift his audience over there so he can continue his grift, with his merch now being peddled by The Alex Jones Store, a company owned by one of his friends (Bigly), which will likely be untouchable by the bankruptcy court, so he's not going to end up on the streets unable to spread his message.

> Reasonable by what metric? I've seen judgements that are tiny fractions of this for corporate crimes that affects hundreds or thousands of people.

I fully support greater penalties on corporations that break the law. That said, I still view Jones' judgements as well-earned and reasonable.

> Behind the scenes, the atmosphere is so rooted in paranoia that former Knicks players warn one another about rooms being bugged, and staffers worry about being watched when they go out to local bars. [...]

> On May 5, 2021, the Rangers were playing the Washington Capitals. The game started out nuts, with 14 players fighting in the first five minutes. But Eversole's crew was more concerned with policing the fans when the Capitals took a commanding lead into the third period.

> “Just heard a sell the team. Any idea who screamed it,” Eversole asked a Signal group chat of MSG security staff reviewed by WIRED. Two minutes later, he added: “Now Dolan sucks. Where is it.”

> “All of Section 109 now,” texted one of his subordinates. “Section 110,” added another. A few minutes later, the perceived instigators were located. “Forwarded the IDs to the Intel team for work-ups,” a third staffer texted.

> “Thank you,” Eversole responded. “Load in facial.”

They are actively monitoring audio feeds, but it sounds like they're probably recording as well.