I can tell you are not a serious person, as you pretend impeachment means anything.

My vote is “sent feet-first through a woodchipper running at quarter speed.”

Same with Musk. I was teaching engineering courses at the time of the first falcon heavy launch. I actually stopped my class so we could watch the launch. When those boosters landed in a perfect synchronous ballet, I told my class it was “engineering as poetry.”

Why couldn’t Musk just stay the fuck out of politics?

No. You’re just making the illogical error of assuming “police” and “law enforcement” are synonyms. Nuance matters.

Our modern police grew out of slave catchers. That’s the root of the institution. Traditional law enforcement methods were more fair and just because they kept law enforcement within the actual communities. In Medieval cities, it was common for every able-bodied male to have to spend a certain number of nights per year working in the town guard. It was your civic duty, just like jury service is today. There were no cops on the streets of ancient Rome.

Policing in the US right now isn’t local. Cops rarely actually live in the cities they work in. Ideally police would work in their own communities so that they have a firm connection to them. However, police had laws written that prevent cities from only hiring residents to work their police forces. That’s why in many American cities police feel more like an occupying army than an actual expression of the people’s legal authority. They don’t feel like they’re part of the community, because they literally aren’t part of the community. Police don’t like to live where they work.

Making law enforcement a full-time profession was a terrible mistake. It creates a barrier between citizens and the people that are supposed to be their public servants. Sure, some specialties, like crime scene investigator or detective, require a professional approach. But average beat cops should be replaced with citizens serving short-term roles as community guards.

Honestly, if you’ve seen how police respond to calls, I would trust the average citizen with a weekend quick course under their belt a lot more to respond to a 9/11 call than a police officer. Such temporary officers wouldn’t get infected with the us-vs-them “warrior policing” mindset that has so damaged the American police profession. It’s hard to smash an innocent person’s skull against the pavement when that person is your next door neighbor who you have to look in the eye every day.

Making beat-cops a full time job was one of the greatest mistakes we ever made. And it is one we have the power to correct.

Abolishing the police does not mean embracing anarchy and abandoning law enforcement. There many ways of enforcing the law other than mob justice or a professional police class.

Police have only existed for about 2% of the history of human civilization, and yet you cannot imagine a future without them. You’ll accept physics-breaking technologies like transporters and warp drives. But a world without cops? That’s a bridge too far.

At least Facebook has Facebook Marketplace.

We can automate the production of spare parts, but that may not mean much. Look at something as simple as a door. You can buy a door without hinges, cut mortices for it, and hang it in place. Most people instead buy pre-hung doors. The time saved installing the door frame piecemeal is worth the cost of buying a whole manufactured assembly. Yes, some things can easily be replaced. A battery can easily be swapped out if a device is built to allow it. But most components can’t be so easily replaced. And usually it’s not possible to design a device to have every part easily serviceable. You are vastly understating the time and difficulty of repairing things.

Think about the early 20th century, when consumer electronics were simple and designed to be repaired. In that world, most people still didn’t do their own repairs. Most people took their broken devices to repair shops. Even if you have access to spare parts, it takes a lot of time to repair something even as simple as a radio. It took enough effort that it made sense for people to specialize in it and make it their career.

And this will only continue in the future. Automation makes human labor more valuable, not less. Our capabilities to do things increases, but the bottleneck is always human labor. And the more we can produce, the more value those scarce human labor hours have. Unless you can automate the entire repair process, increased automation will make us more likely to throw things away.

And worse, automation makes it easier just to start from scratch. You can always take a broken device, throw it in a crucible with a mountain of other broken devices, and just melt the whole lot down. And automation also gives us cheaper energy, as it makes it cheaper to install ever-more solar panels and batteries.

We’ll just lock everyone in education pods from ages 12-20!

Even without software lock in making repairs difficult, I imagine the same trends of the past century will continue. Repair will likely to continue to become more impractical. It’s always going to be easier to automate the production of goods than the repair of goods.

App? What app?

Internment camps are built for criminal reasons or to hold political prisoners. Concentration camps are built for eugenics purposes - to concentrate, contain, and control a target ethic group or population. ICE does not exist to address a crime problem. It exists to address the ‘problem’ that America will soon no longer be a white majority country.

The term concentration camp is accurate. When your goal is to engineer the demographics of an entire country, then you’re firmly in the territory of concentration camps. If Trump announced a new open-air prison to hold thousands of “Antifa members,” then that facility would be an internment camp. A facility is labeled based on who it holds:

Actual criminals guilty of real crimes like rape, murder, etc.: prison/jail

Political prisoners: internment camp

Targeted ethnic/demographic groups: concentration camp

Exactly. Look back at the Jim Crow era. That’s the goal. Jim Crow didn’t work by white people stealing the vote. It worked by writing laws that openly made it so black people couldn’t vote. Ultimately it’s a lot more sustainable to simply write laws that serve your side than it is to try to hold onto power by repeated election fraud. With the latter, you ultimately have to worry about the military just refusing to acknowledge clearly fraudulent elections. But if the elections are crooked but entirely within the law? Much more difficult for the military to refuse to acknowledge those.

Let the world know that in my great humility, I’m also agreeing to decline any nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

I wonder how much flexibility is possible with Congressional districts? Does a district even have to correlate to a geographic area? Could a state separate its districts, say, by age?

Imagine what that would look like. Each state gets the same number of districts it does otherwise. If a state has five representatives, its population pyramid would be divided into five equal-area chunks. People in each of those chunks would then vote together. So the youngest 20% vote for one representative, the next 20% vote for another, etc. The boundaries would shift automatically. There would be no possibility of an unfair district, as you’re basically just lining up your entire state’s population in a line sorted by age, dividing the line into equal chunks, and asking people in each of those groups to pick a representative. It would cancel out a lot of the effects of differing voting rates by age.

Honestly, TSA itself creates a huge terror target. If some latter-day Bin Ladin wanted to disrupt the air travel system through acts of mass violence? The airport security lines themselves are a huge target. IIRC there actually have been cases of terrorists attacking airport security lines. If you’ve ever been to a packed airport on a busy travel day, it should be obvious. Giant TSA line, hundreds of people packed in like cattle. What keeps someone from just wandering up with a bomb in their carry on and detonating it right there in the line? Nothing. And nothing can. You going to make people wait in a security line to get into the security line?

And in terms of actually disrupting the infrastructure of travel, disrupting society, the economy, etc., such attacks have impacts similar to blowing a plane out of the sky. How long is that airport going to be out of commission now that the mandated security line is now a mass crime scene?

Anyway, these are the darker thoughts I think in the back of my mind when stuck in an endless TSA line…

Don’t watch the first few episodes of The Walking Dead while actually in the hospital under heavy opioid medication. That’s how you end up with extremely terrifying and vivid dreams of a zombie apocalypse in the very hospital you’re currently in! Ask me how I know!

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NY Times, you sack of shit, the word you’re looking for is “an act of treason,” not “an escalation.”

No one has been able to explain how Epstein got his money to get this whole thing started. He did also have a lot of ties to the Mossad and senior Isreali leaders. It’s pretty likely his work was an Israeli influence operation. Fund someone to build a sex island and staff it with illegally young girls that can’t be found in such numbers anywhere else. Provide means for the rich and powerful to discretely access the island. Fill the place with video and audio recording equipment. Create records of everything that happens there. Then, invite as many members of the American ruling class to rape children on the island as possible. You now have lifelong blackmail on every one of those people. For the cost of a few tens of millions, Israel bought itself control of the American political and business elite. Even if they only manage to snag 1 in 10 of these leaders in their web, it’s enough. That guarantees that whenever a big decision is made regarding US-Israeli relations, there will be someone in the room that the Mossad has lifelong blackmail material on. There are few more powerful forms of blackmail imaginable than telling someone “we literally have video of you raping children.”

It does go a long way to explaining both parties’ total capitulation to Israel. Up until the 1990s or so, Israel was an ally, but we didn’t see this fawning supplication we do now. Presidents were willing to actually stand up to the Israeli government and use American funding to rein them in. At the same time, Israel also wields the Mossad, probably the single most competent espionage, influence, and assassination outfit on the planet. Look at what they managed to do to all those Iranian nuclear scientists or the mass pager attack. The Mossad are terrifyingly competent, and they truly believe in their cause. Blackmailing the US political class on a massive scale is something entirely within their capability.