frezik @ frezik @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

Dime a dozen. It's not hard to get a used cop car at auction.

Actual impersonation. From a CNN article:

Around 3:35 a.m., another call came in when officers were proactively checking on Hortman’s home. When Brooklyn Park police officers arrived they noticed that there was a police vehicle in the driveway with emergency lights on and what appeared to be a police officer at the door, coming out of the house, officials said. That individual immediately fired a weapon at them, Evans said, and exchanged gunfire took place during which the suspect was able to escape.

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/14/us/minneapolis-targeted-shooting

I don't think a cop doing this would shoot back at other cops. They'd report back that the perp was long gone and they saw nothing.

Edit: lol, the guy is a rent-a-cop

Guessing Tucker is more in bed with Russia than Trump. Russia is in bed with Iran. Now it's the worst foursome scene on Pornhub.

He's the guy who looked directly at the eclipse, so yeah, he'd probably do that, too.

Bets on Donnie forcing it to go ahead anyway?

Honestly, they'd be horrified at a bunch of things, some of which are on MAGA, and some on progressives. Maybe we shouldn't be taking the ideas of slaveowners from over 200 years ago as seriously as we do.

"You guys cured smallpox, and there's people who are working against the cure?" - Also Ben Franklin, who lost one of his sons to smallpox

Or one of those centrifuges. Would sustain it longer.

AWS has a multitude of different offerings with confusing pricing structures. They have zero incentive to make them understandable.

That said, chances are your new company has people who understand this already and know how to manage it. Hopefully, they'll put up some guardrails that prevent you and others from running up a big bill. I wouldn't expect a junior programmer to know how to do this, but that's ok as long as the company is managed right. Granted, that can be a big if sometimes.

Big Tech has done everything they can to convince people that they absolutely cannot be trusted with this.

A contingency in case of...what?

unzip
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As the article notes after '94 the number of Democrats the NRA could support steadily dwindled.

Cause or effect? Did NRA contributions dwindle because Democrats changed their mind, or did Democrats change their mind because NRA contributions dwindled? I know what the article says, but that's not the only possibility.

No amount of political donations to Democrats, or anyone else, should have insulated them from the consequences.

Which is nice to say, but we all know how that works. If both parties were in their pocket, it's far less likely they would have been a target.

They used to donate significantly to Democrats, as well:

https://www.governing.com/archive/tns-nra-campaign-contributions.html

An issue with only having two political parties is that a special interest group can split their donations to both election candidates and win either way. At some point, the NRA forgot that and only funded one side. That left them vulnerable when there was widespread financial fraud in the organization; only one side was willing to come to bat for them.

Honestly, people make more of this than it is. I say that as someone whoes reading level in the 8th grade was rated "post-High School" in tests. Though IIRC, that particular test wasn't considered accurate past a 10th grade reading level or so. Suffice it to say, though, I was always rated at least a few grade levels higher than my actual grade level when it comes to reading.

If you pick up examples of post-High School writing, you'll find it's hard to read. Basically, check any abstract on a paper for a technical field. It'll be full of field-specific jargon and long sentences. Copy and paste it into a writing assistant like Hemmingway, and it will scream at you to simplify the sentence structure.

Converting to terms of Lexile level, Fellowship of the Ring has a rating of 860L. By a conversion chart, we would expect 50% of students to be able to read it by the spring of 4th grade. Even the bottom 10% of students can read it by the beginning of 10th grade.

That's a relatively hard book; harder than what most fiction asks of you. Of Mice and Men, which is on plenty of High School reading lists, only has a Lexile level of 630L. Conversely, Romeo and Juliet can go up to 1260L (though this varies depending on the editing of different editions).

The Greatest Generation was horney. Really horney. Once they got that Hitler fella sorted, they went home and literally fucked Baby Boomers into existence.

Eh, it's a fun meme, but the whole thing was Palps playing both sides. Even Dooku was just a patsy in the end.

Now, Mon Mothma did go on to setup the New Republic in both canon and Legends. Neither version really worked out. Say what you will about Saw Gerrera, but he did recognize that the Republic wouldn't have fallen if it governed well in the first place, and going back to that was a mistake.

I read a bit of the book. There's some framing around it by the authors and popular press that I don't think quite matches up with the data. In the end, it is true that movements that are predominantly nonviolent tend to win more often, but there is often a violent element that plays a role.

(Apologies for any mistakes in my transcription from the book.)

To quote it:

Our central contention is that nonviolent campaigns have a participation advantage over violent insurgencies, which is an important factor in determining campaign outcomes. The moral, physical, informational, and commitment barriers to participation are much lower for nonviolent resistance than for violent insurgency. Higher levels of participation contribute to a number of mechanisms necessary for success, including enhanced resilience, higher probabilities of tactical innovation, expanded civic disruption (thereby raising the costs to the regime of maintaining the status quo), and loyalty shifts involving the opponent's erstwhile supporters, including members of security forces.

Which sounds like nonviolent campaigns win, right? Reading on shows it's not quite that simple.

It is appropriate here to briefly define the terms to which we will consistently refer in this book. First, we should distinguish violent and nonviolent tactics. As noted earlier, there are some difficulties with labeling one campaign as violent and another as nonviolent. In many cases, both nonviolent and violent campaigns exist simultaneously among competing groups. Often those who employ violence in mass movements are members of fringe groups who are acting independently, or in defiance of, the central leadership; or they are agents provocateurs used by the adversary to provoke the unarmed resistance to adopt violence (Zunes 1994). Alternative, often some groups use both nonviolent and violent methods of resistance over the course of their existence, as with the ANC in South Africa. Characterizing a campaign as violent or non-violent simplifies a complex constellation of resistance methods.

It is nevertheless possible to characterize a campaign as principally nonviolent based on the primacy of nonviolent resistance methods and the nature of the participation in that form of resistance.

Later in the chapter:

As one might expect, there are several good reasons why social scientists have avoided comparing the dynamics and outcomes of nonviolent and violent campaigns, including their relative effectiveness. First, the separation of campaigns into violent and nonviolent for analytical purposes is problematic. Few campaigns, historically, have been purely violent or nonviolent, and many resistance movements, particularly protracted ones, have had violent and nonviolent periods.

Classifying any given movement as strictly nonviolent would not have worked. The data is too messy for that.

Even the definition of success is tricky:

Success and failure are also complex outcomes, about which much has been written (Baldwin 2000). For our study, to be considered a "success" a campaign had to meet two conditions: the full achievement of its stated goals (regime change, antioccupation, or succession) within a year of the peak of activities and a discernible effect on the outcome, such that the outcome was a direct result of the campaign's activities (Pape 1997). The second qualification is important because in some cases the desired outcome occurred mainly because of other conditions. The Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation, for example, is not coded as a full success even though the Nazis ultimately withdrew from Greece. Although effective in many respects, the Greek resistance alone cannot be credited with the ultimate outcome of the end of Nazi influence over Greek resistance alone cannot be credited with the ultimate outcome of the end of Nazi influence over Greece since the Nazi withdrawal was the result of the Allied victory rather than solely Greek resistance.

In fact, they classify basically all resistance (nonviolent or violent) to the Nazi regime as a failure. There are a few exceptions, such as the Rosenstrasse Protest. However, the Nazis fell predominantly due to the actions of the armies of other nation states, not the local resistance groups (though they certainly played a role in helping, such as funneling intelligence to the Allies).

The current situation will tend to sweep away a lot of institutions. The Republican Party almost certainly won't survive Trump, and there's a chance Democrats won't either. Even if they do, it's not like they could hold on to being a singularly dominant party forever. Not when there are so many people voting for them only to make sure Republicans don't take power.

They'll have to adapt to that situation or perish. New political parties can spring up quickly. We're not used to that in the US, but it's happened here before, and happens around the world all the time.

Yup, black cats in bright sunlight bring out brown tones. People usually don't realize it unless they have had a black cat.