Note that the accused TdA member claimed to be a college student in Venezuela. He was not enrolled in any US school.
Not saying he deserved to be deported to a third country, just that there's nothing publicly available that substantiates his side of the story. Part of not burying one's head in the sand is acknowledging when someone might not be the most reliable narrator.
How is that germane to this discussion? I already made it clear I didn't think the Venezuelan migrant in the segment should have been deported to a third country under those conditions.
This feels like an attempt at a setup instead of an actual discussion of the thread's subject. That's especially glaring since you went trolling through my post history, a signature of Reddit users looking for a 'gotcha' moment more than HN users engaged in dialogue.
> Print inevitably precipitates a face-to-face community, giving it the capacity to represent and in turn catalyze real-world movements.
I've never gone to a people-who-read-$PERIODICAL party. Ever. Maybe it's common for pro-union zines that the author used to contribute to, but Popular Science, Newsweek, or the like don't have any corresponding community associated with them. There's no Architectural Digest-affiliated underground interior decorating scene.
I think the author far overestimates the importance niche zines like the one they were a part of, or Palladium for that matter, have in the national dialogue.
As far as I can tell, I'm doing that right now with a new higher-end Samsung television. The installer showed me how to make it boot directly to the active HDMI source and skip the Samsung smart hub. The TV has never been online and I don't see any reason to change that — what possible improvement could a firmware update bring? I don't use any of the television's software-enabled features.
Existing LTE is fine. If they wanted to embed modems in the TVs they could do it now. I'm guessing they simply don't have to, simply because a huge number of consumers will dutifully hand over their Wi-Fi passwords.
Uh, no. They stopped because they were being punished for pulling over ethnically disproportionate numbers of drivers. This is likely due to several factors but the end result was making traffic stops a politically sensitive area, so they just pulled back.
That got labeled "mass incarceration" and even Joe Biden (a 'law and order Democrat' to the core) had to walk back support of what he viewed as one of his greatest achievements, championing the 1994 Crime Bill.
A large part of the deal is that ALPRs flag on hotlists and cannot be accused of racism. There's no way to argue a vehicle stop is the result of profiling when it's a machine recognizing a plate on a list and issuing an alert. The stats don't go in the same bucket.
At the end of the day, avoiding accusations of racism is behind much of modern policing's foibles (like the near-total relaxation of traffic law enforcement in some cities).
I think the broad thrust of your argument is right on the money. Officers' perception of heightened (or unfair) accountability has turned every police interaction into a risk for the officers and department, too. However, I think the problem actually goes even deeper. The incentives are all aligned to launder responsibility through automated systems, and we'll end up sleepwalking into AI tyranny if we're not careful.
Where I am, police officers get paid healthy 6-figure salaries plus crazy OT to boot. $300k total comp is absolutely not unheard of. I think the police have basically figured out that the best way to stay on the gravy train is to do as little as possible. Certainly stop enforcing traffic laws entirely, as those are the highest risk interactions. Just rest n' vest, baby. So you get to hear about "underfunded" and "overworked" police departments while observing overpaid police officers who are structurally disincentivized from doing their jobs.
The bottom line is: People want policing, but adding more police officers won't deliver results and anyway is too expensive. What to do?
Enter mass surveillance and automated policing. If we can't rely on police to do the policing, we'll have to do it some other way. Oh, look at how cheap it is to put cameras up everywhere. And hey, we can get a statistical inferential model (excuse me, Artificial Intelligence!) to flag "suspicious" cars and people. Yeah yeah, privacy risks blah blah blah turnkey totalitarianism whomp whomp whomp. But think of all the criminals we can catch! All without needing police to actually do anything!
While police are expensive and practically useless at doing things people want, this technology can actually deliver results. That makes it irresistible. The problem is that it's turning our society into a panopticon and putting us all in great danger of an inescapable totalitarian state dominated by a despot and his AI army.
But those are abstract risks, further out and probabilistic in nature. Humans are terrible at making these kinds of decisions; as a population we almost always choose short-term benefit over abstract long-term risks and harms. Just look at climate change and fossil fuel consumption.
Re: random countries, sometimes with PIA the Panama exit has a crazily low ping time (I'm physically in California). I wonder what leads to it? Hawaii I can understand, there's a cable landing not far from my physical location, but Panama is a mystery to me.
I am all in favor of broad cannabis legalization, but there there is something to the gateway theory.
Most users of harder drugs indicate past use of marijuana. Additionally, marijuana gives many their first taste of doing business with drug dealers and 'breaks their cherry.' When they decide they want to try something else they have already gained experience locating dealers and engaging with them. Legalizing cannabis helps here because its users won't engage with dealers to score, they'll go to the store and buy a regulated product.
It's definitely a gateway drug, but only from the perspective that you've forced people to establish black market financial connections. Once you've figured out how to get something illegal it opens a whole new world.
Not saying he deserved to be deported to a third country, just that there's nothing publicly available that substantiates his side of the story. Part of not burying one's head in the sand is acknowledging when someone might not be the most reliable narrator.