>“One man came and said he took two bags because he went crazy when he saw the crowd,” Piotr said. “He apologized, and everything was fine. But there are also those who took dozens of tons.”
Literally always it's a few bad apples ruining the bunch. If a bunch of people came and took some for personal use, it would've been fine. I mean, still a problem, but the farmer would probably still have some damn crop left to sell or replant or whatever you'd do with those potatoes for the best recovery at that point.
If they thought the potatoes would rot unless they were all taken it makes perfect sense. This wasn't a "have a potato on us and have a good day :)" situation.
A civil suit is exactly the government sticking their dick in the problem. You're having a government employee (the judge) either decide the case themselves in a government building at taxpayer expense, or impanel a jury in a government building at taxpayer expense. Either way you're going to be using laws and rules of civil procedure decided upon by the government in order to try the case. Then the trial hands down a verdict that the government has the ability to enforce through seizure of things of value or by curtailing a person's rights.
The fact that the government is the arbitrating party in a civil suit is incidental to the nature of the dispute.
It may very well get settled out of court in as a result of mediation.
Regardless, it's quite possible that the parties in the wrong here make it right or right-ish somehow before this even lands in court.
I think the fact that everyone thinks the .gov needs to dogpile on with civil or criminal enforcement before that has had a chance to play out or not speaks volumes about the typical moral character around here.
But not without the court. The court is deeply involved in the pretrial process. The court's rulings will influence if and how much a settlement there will be.
Well, you see, we setup a system of private judges who decide cases like this. And of course, we need to monitor those judges, so we create a system of judge reviewers that, of course, you pay for to figure out if the judge being used is a good judge. But then you also need to make sure the reviewers are legitimate, so we make a private system of meta reviewers to make sure the reviewers are good.
And of course, in case the parties can't agree on the judges we put up a polymarket bet so we can crowd source which of the judges should be picked. And if that's disputed then we go out and hire a private police enforcement force to make sure the other party is complying with our desire for the right judges. Of course, we arm them just to be sure.
Harm was caused by the prank performer, so there is a forgery case possibility. Your post proves why a "jury of your peers" is a flawed concept--most people don't know the law, they just have opinions.
A forgery case seems to make sense, but a theft case doesn't (unless for example evidence is retrieved from the poster in the form of stolen potatoes).
As for a jury, I think that perhaps it makes more sense to free a person than to find them guilty.
I think the fraud is against the one who put up the "free potatoes" post. The people picking up the potatoes were innocent, just reacting to a great deal.
Here in the states, IMO, the last thing you ever want to do is go to trial with a jury of your peers. Too many close cases are decided by people who, even though they have the law explained to them, don't grasp the gravity/concept of what the authors of the laws meant. Then, years later, if there's a break in the case, the state could take a very long time to release you, if they ever do. And God help you if you're a minority!
There are a number of legal principles that you are completely, and totally, incorrect on.
The key legal principle is causation. The poster's false statement was the direct cause of the farmer's losses. Under general tort principles, a person who makes false statements that cause foreseeable harm to another can be held liable for damages, regardless of whether they participated in the actual harmful act.
Negligent Misrepresentation: The poster could be liable for negligently spreading false information without verifying its accuracy. Even if there was no intent to harm, the law recognizes liability when someone carelessly disseminates false information that a reasonable person would know could cause harm.
Proximate Cause Doctrine: The legal reasoning follows the principle that the poster's false statement was the "but for" cause of the theft. Without the false Facebook post, hundreds of people wouldn't have descended on the farm believing they had permission to take the potatoes. The intervening acts of the potato-takers doesn't break the chain of causation because the mass theft was a foreseeable consequence of the false post.
I don't know if all of these exist in Polish Law, but they tend to hold across most western legal systems in some form or other.
To bring it down to the "its a prank, bro" defense you are invoking. The accepted counterargument is "doesn't matter if it was a prank, bro. The actions of the poster were the direct cause for the damages."
You did invoke that the act was a prank in your original reasoning ("The original poster performed a prank..."). That actually hurts the posters case, since it points towards intention, and a reasonably foreseeable outcome.
In any event, you can absolutely be charged for a crime that you did not participate in, but that you incited in a huge number of jurisdictions.
Under many legal systems, when multiple parties contribute to a single harm, they can be held jointly liable. The poster created the initial false information, and the people who took the potatoes acted on that information. Both contributed to the farmer's loss.
Additionally, incitement is frequently a separate crime that can be charged in some jurisdictions.
to take it to the logical ends, if you posted a bounty on someone's life as "a prank", and it led to that person being murdered, you would absolutely be charged with murder in most jurisdictions.
Meh. In the US, this prankster would stand a good chance of getting charged with some crime. Also the farmer could probably obtain a civil judgement against the prankster in the amount of the estimated market value of the potatoes.
(I don't know enough about the criminal code of any of the 50 states to say what crime specifically.)
The person who made the post should face consequences for sure, but one thing I wonder about: if during the frenzy even one person (under the impression these were being given away for free) even thought to go find the farmer and say "thank you."
I realize he wasn't home, but discovering that fact I would imagine (maybe?) would raise some flags.
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I don't really get the entitlement that some folks have thinking their mere existence dictates what should and shouldn't appear on this website.
Not saying it’s not interesting, I’m saying there miiiiight be a malicious reason someone would buy an old domain, wear the skin of its former owner, post “viral” content, and then submit that content to a popular link aggregator.
> In May, Vice Media announced it will create a joint venture with Savage Venture to relaunch its websites, such as Vice.com, Munchies, Motherboard, and Noisey.
An online ad offering everything in the house for free left one landlord with quite a shock: By the time she realized what was going on, the house had been stripped of its light fixtures, hot water heater — even the kitchen sink.
But big crowds showed up early, while the family was out, breaking into the house and taking practically everything inside, in part because the way that the craigslist ad was written gave them the idea that everything on the property was up for grabs.
> A rumor on Facebook said a farmer was giving away his potatoes. By sunrise, 150 tons of his hard-earned work had disappeared.
I don't know if you can blame the viral post itself. This has been my experience with humans in general. Take halloween. Leave a candy bowl out and ask people to take one or two 10-20% will comply and the rest will try to take the entire bowl.
The article itself said the farmer wanted people to "help themselves". It was his responsibility to set the rules and enforce them. Perhaps polish law is different but I doubt the police would do anything in the states (or any other western country). It's not theft when you say take what you want. I don't believe it's blaming the victim here to say that the farmer should've done a lot more work to meter out his potatoes.
This is just another example of the tragedy of the commons. You can't have truly shared resources because a minority will take the majority and ruin it for everyone. Every single time. This is also why food pantries and homeless shelters meter out food carefully. You even see this with super sales at the grocery store. I remember during COVID people were filling truck beds with discounted meat/fish/vegetables completely disregarding other people will need to eat too.
You misread - the farmer himself had nothing to do with the post. Some random person trying to go viral took a video of the potatoes saying they were free.
> Others loaded up to 60 tons at a time.
I have a feeling these are the ones that are the problem rather than folk with a hand basket.
Saw this similar quote:
>“One man came and said he took two bags because he went crazy when he saw the crowd,” Piotr said. “He apologized, and everything was fine. But there are also those who took dozens of tons.”
Literally always it's a few bad apples ruining the bunch. If a bunch of people came and took some for personal use, it would've been fine. I mean, still a problem, but the farmer would probably still have some damn crop left to sell or replant or whatever you'd do with those potatoes for the best recovery at that point.
If they thought the potatoes would rot unless they were all taken it makes perfect sense. This wasn't a "have a potato on us and have a good day :)" situation.
That’s genuinely evil by the original poster
The poster needs to be identified, charged and sued
[flagged]
A civil suit is exactly the government sticking their dick in the problem. You're having a government employee (the judge) either decide the case themselves in a government building at taxpayer expense, or impanel a jury in a government building at taxpayer expense. Either way you're going to be using laws and rules of civil procedure decided upon by the government in order to try the case. Then the trial hands down a verdict that the government has the ability to enforce through seizure of things of value or by curtailing a person's rights.
The fact that the government is the arbitrating party in a civil suit is incidental to the nature of the dispute.
It may very well get settled out of court in as a result of mediation.
Regardless, it's quite possible that the parties in the wrong here make it right or right-ish somehow before this even lands in court.
I think the fact that everyone thinks the .gov needs to dogpile on with civil or criminal enforcement before that has had a chance to play out or not speaks volumes about the typical moral character around here.
> This is exactly the sort of thing that a civil suit is perfect for.
... who do you think decides the outcome of a civil suit?
>... who do you think decides the outcome of a civil suit?
The overwhelming majority of civil suits are settled out of court by an agreement between the parties involved.
The reason people settle out of court is because the threat of having it decided by court. No threat no settlement.
But not without the court. The court is deeply involved in the pretrial process. The court's rulings will influence if and how much a settlement there will be.
Well, you see, we setup a system of private judges who decide cases like this. And of course, we need to monitor those judges, so we create a system of judge reviewers that, of course, you pay for to figure out if the judge being used is a good judge. But then you also need to make sure the reviewers are legitimate, so we make a private system of meta reviewers to make sure the reviewers are good.
And of course, in case the parties can't agree on the judges we put up a polymarket bet so we can crowd source which of the judges should be picked. And if that's disputed then we go out and hire a private police enforcement force to make sure the other party is complying with our desire for the right judges. Of course, we arm them just to be sure.
/s
The interview with the farmer (distiller?) is here (0:33 in):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxTj9wwlbAU (Youtube has a setting for translation you'll need to turn on)
Hopefully the original poster is prosecuted for theft. The farmer needs to report this to the police.
[flagged]
Harm was caused by the prank performer, so there is a forgery case possibility. Your post proves why a "jury of your peers" is a flawed concept--most people don't know the law, they just have opinions.
A forgery case seems to make sense, but a theft case doesn't (unless for example evidence is retrieved from the poster in the form of stolen potatoes).
As for a jury, I think that perhaps it makes more sense to free a person than to find them guilty.
I think the fraud is against the one who put up the "free potatoes" post. The people picking up the potatoes were innocent, just reacting to a great deal.
Here in the states, IMO, the last thing you ever want to do is go to trial with a jury of your peers. Too many close cases are decided by people who, even though they have the law explained to them, don't grasp the gravity/concept of what the authors of the laws meant. Then, years later, if there's a break in the case, the state could take a very long time to release you, if they ever do. And God help you if you're a minority!
There are a number of legal principles that you are completely, and totally, incorrect on.
The key legal principle is causation. The poster's false statement was the direct cause of the farmer's losses. Under general tort principles, a person who makes false statements that cause foreseeable harm to another can be held liable for damages, regardless of whether they participated in the actual harmful act.
Negligent Misrepresentation: The poster could be liable for negligently spreading false information without verifying its accuracy. Even if there was no intent to harm, the law recognizes liability when someone carelessly disseminates false information that a reasonable person would know could cause harm.
Proximate Cause Doctrine: The legal reasoning follows the principle that the poster's false statement was the "but for" cause of the theft. Without the false Facebook post, hundreds of people wouldn't have descended on the farm believing they had permission to take the potatoes. The intervening acts of the potato-takers doesn't break the chain of causation because the mass theft was a foreseeable consequence of the false post.
I don't know if all of these exist in Polish Law, but they tend to hold across most western legal systems in some form or other.
To bring it down to the "its a prank, bro" defense you are invoking. The accepted counterargument is "doesn't matter if it was a prank, bro. The actions of the poster were the direct cause for the damages."
[flagged]
You did invoke that the act was a prank in your original reasoning ("The original poster performed a prank..."). That actually hurts the posters case, since it points towards intention, and a reasonably foreseeable outcome.
In any event, you can absolutely be charged for a crime that you did not participate in, but that you incited in a huge number of jurisdictions.
Under many legal systems, when multiple parties contribute to a single harm, they can be held jointly liable. The poster created the initial false information, and the people who took the potatoes acted on that information. Both contributed to the farmer's loss.
Additionally, incitement is frequently a separate crime that can be charged in some jurisdictions.
to take it to the logical ends, if you posted a bounty on someone's life as "a prank", and it led to that person being murdered, you would absolutely be charged with murder in most jurisdictions.
I never said that the original poster cannot be charged
You literally wrote:
The original poster performed a prank, and could be found guilty of it.
"He could be found guilty of a prank" is functionally identical to "he could not be charged".
I am not
That's exactly what you did, and I quoted it at the top of this comment, in case you don't recall.
> I guess they don't teach objective reasoning in school.
You should have gone to school!
Didn't we just establish that they don't teach objective logical reasoning in school? I urge you to re-read the comments, carefully this time.
Poland doesn't use juries. This case, if brought, would be decided by a panel of professional and lay judges.
Meh. In the US, this prankster would stand a good chance of getting charged with some crime. Also the farmer could probably obtain a civil judgement against the prankster in the amount of the estimated market value of the potatoes.
(I don't know enough about the criminal code of any of the 50 states to say what crime specifically.)
Inciting people to commit a criminal act is a criminal act in itself.
The person who made the post should face consequences for sure, but one thing I wonder about: if during the frenzy even one person (under the impression these were being given away for free) even thought to go find the farmer and say "thank you."
I realize he wasn't home, but discovering that fact I would imagine (maybe?) would raise some flags.
If you want to find who started the rumor, look for who took the 60 tons. That requires machinery which requires planning
1) what is this doing on hackernews?
2) Vice filed for backruptcy in 2023 and shuttered vice.com in 2024. Who the hell is running this?
3) Whoever it is, is just ripping off rando Polish local news sites?
I have no idea what’s going on here, but maaaaaybe this should not be here.
"Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I don't really get the entitlement that some folks have thinking their mere existence dictates what should and shouldn't appear on this website.
Not saying it’s not interesting, I’m saying there miiiiight be a malicious reason someone would buy an old domain, wear the skin of its former owner, post “viral” content, and then submit that content to a popular link aggregator.
And no one here seems to have noticed.
It seems like this is still the same Vice?
> In May, Vice Media announced it will create a joint venture with Savage Venture to relaunch its websites, such as Vice.com, Munchies, Motherboard, and Noisey.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Media
Next time I see a "this farmer had to give away his crop for a pittance" posts I'm going to reply these posts arent harmless.
A couple of similar examples from the United States
2007 Tacoma, WA https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-stripped-in-craigslist-ho...
An online ad offering everything in the house for free left one landlord with quite a shock: By the time she realized what was going on, the house had been stripped of its light fixtures, hot water heater — even the kitchen sink.
2012 Woodstock, GA https://www.11alive.com/article/news/local/foreclosed-family...
But big crowds showed up early, while the family was out, breaking into the house and taking practically everything inside, in part because the way that the craigslist ad was written gave them the idea that everything on the property was up for grabs.
One day, when I can afford, I will live in a condo, because it feels like I'm deep inside a fortress.
He didn't think he needed surveillance cameras because the potatoes have eyes.
So they're kidnapped more than being stolen? Has there been a ransom request?
The Internet is a scary thing.
Similar pranks happened in England back in the 1800's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners_Street_hoax
> A rumor on Facebook said a farmer was giving away his potatoes. By sunrise, 150 tons of his hard-earned work had disappeared.
I don't know if you can blame the viral post itself. This has been my experience with humans in general. Take halloween. Leave a candy bowl out and ask people to take one or two 10-20% will comply and the rest will try to take the entire bowl.
The article itself said the farmer wanted people to "help themselves". It was his responsibility to set the rules and enforce them. Perhaps polish law is different but I doubt the police would do anything in the states (or any other western country). It's not theft when you say take what you want. I don't believe it's blaming the victim here to say that the farmer should've done a lot more work to meter out his potatoes.
This is just another example of the tragedy of the commons. You can't have truly shared resources because a minority will take the majority and ruin it for everyone. Every single time. This is also why food pantries and homeless shelters meter out food carefully. You even see this with super sales at the grocery store. I remember during COVID people were filling truck beds with discounted meat/fish/vegetables completely disregarding other people will need to eat too.
You misread - the farmer himself had nothing to do with the post. Some random person trying to go viral took a video of the potatoes saying they were free.
The farmer didn't want any of this to happen, the post saying "free potatoes, help yourself" was by someone else.
>I don't know if you can blame the viral post itself.
Edit: nevermind, I just read the article again and the viral post is 100% to blame.
Is a farmer not supposed to have a basic locked fence around his farmed produce? (I'm not referring to the farm itself.)
So can I just take whatever materials the highway department or their contractors leave on the side of the road?
Just because something isn't under lock and key doesn't mean it's abandoned and fair game.
Oh, a free potato!
I want to take you seriously but I feel like you have skin in this game somehow.
If you live in a rural village this probably doesn’t (or didn’t) seem necessary.
Sounds like a nice way for someone to get a free fence.
No. Also, irrelevant.