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Cake day: September 6th, 2024

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  • 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.




  • 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.





  • 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