>what entitles you to free access to any song, movie or book?
Does this sound profound to you? When you see yourself type it out, does it seem like you've really came up with a zinger?
What entitles them to come in and police my hard drive platters with "you can't write that sequence of bits to storage, that's our sequence of bits"? It's sort of a weird idea, sounds kind of medieval. Like King Cnut has granted them license to "the birds in the forest, and the timber, and the water that runs through the meadows".
This is a shallow piece, if ever there was one. Sure the word "warrior" and its connotations are dangerous, but that barely skims the surface of the problem. Why are police given military ranks? Corporals and sergeants and captains. Hell, some are majors and colonels too. Why are their uniforms styled to look martial at all? Has anyone considered that perhaps they shouldn't be armed like soldiers? There doesn't need to be an assault rifle in the trunk of each squad car (isn't this the point of having SWAT? why bother if everyone is SWAT?). Can we even safely call them officers? We call the command structure of the army and navy "officers", but we also use that term for those who aren't military, so maybe it's safe.
to me, the most interesting, actionable police-ology has been reforming two trends:
- modern 911, which rewards reactive, rather than proactive, policing
- the ever expanding mission of police officers. there's only one uniformed police officer class. experts and police all want specialization, just like in the medical field.
from a police chief:
> We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it…. Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems
warrior versus guardian isn't really actionable - what are you going to do, pass a law that says that training materials have to say guardian? versus, pass a law that appropriates funding for specialized workforces, that's par for the course in municipalities.
Words indicate intentions, and framing changes mindset.
Starting by changing the names of the ranks to British-style ranks and changing the training materials to the American guardian / British Peelian mindset wouldn't suddenly fix everything, but it would at least be a start.
I'm in a Commonwealth country, so our police ranks derive from the Metropolitan Police of London - there's still a sergeant rank, but otherwise it's constable, inspector etc.
...and those rank titles were deliberately chosen at the formation of the Met to make it expressly look non-military. The Peelian principles are still a good read.
why not? if its a professional force. plenty of other countries people use as models have military and police linked together, imo we're (USA) just missing the punishment part. Need to court martial police more :).
Whole point of police is internal force application right. Can't really enforce any laws without use of force.
I think a lot of the questions you pose have some interesting psychology behind them. Other countries don't have this same level of policing, but also have different prison systems.
I think a large amount of the danger American police face is due to how easily a single arrest can ruin your productive life. One facing the loss of their home, pets, job, important documents, sentimental items might not see the difference between losing everything, and losing everything and taking the guy who's taking it from you, with you.
If we had an actual system based on reform rather than punishment, I think the danger police would be in would be greatly reduced.
You also have things like qualified immunity and general protections for police against being sued for an unlawful arrest. An officer can incorrectly arrest you and you could lose everything and be simply shit out of luck.
If there's no repercussions for bad cops, there's no justice. If there's no justice, why would one play nicely with the law, therefore police are in danger.
> I think a large amount of the danger American police face is due to how easily a single arrest can ruin your productive life. One facing the loss of their home, pets, job, important documents, sentimental items might not see the difference between losing everything, and losing everything and taking the guy who's taking it from you, with you.
I don't think it's that complicated. Rather, I think that a lot of cops think they're in more danger than they really are. The vast, vast majority of people aren't going to gun them down for a traffic stop or for providing a warning about something. The situations where they're likely to get shot are exceedingly rare. By treating policing as some tremendously dangerous job we're completely ignoring the actual statistics, which show that firefighters and construction workers are far more routinely in physical danger.
The police then get carte blanche to walk around treating everyone like some dangerous creature ready to explode at the slightest provocation when most of us are just trying to get by and are pretty accepting of the benign law enforcement interactions we get.
Isn't it maybe because of the gun use here? in other countries is not like anybody can shoot you, even a civilians here feels like sometimes people get mad and just shoot each other
If you've ever walked up to your neighbor and politely asked them to do or not do something then by that logic you're putting yourself at immense physical risk. I think the vast majority of people, even gun owners, are generally civil and don't wish other people harm.
Given that gun owners skew conservative and the Republican party seems to currently exist to harm people conservatives don't like (e.g. trans people). I'd say that the majority of gun owners defiitely wish other people harm, if they didn't then they wouldn't have voted for the guy who ran on a platform of causing other people harm.
> even a civilians here feels like sometimes people get mad and just shoot each other
Outside of Florida, with its incredibly relaxed "stand your ground" laws, this isn't really an issue in most of the US. When civilians do go around shooting people like that, they usually get arrested and imprisoned. In Florida, especially if you're a retired cop, you can shoot people for talking on their phone in a movie theater, though. So maybe avoid that state if you value your life.
Or South Carolina where you can shoot or shoot at or wave your gun at people who are shoplifting or who you just feel like are shoplifting. Hell, shoot them in the back as they run away, having not stolen anything, after you waved your gun at them, and find yourself acquitted. Better not tell the jury that this isn't your first time doing it, though, or they might be prejudiced by thinking this is starting to become a habit!
The biggest danger American police are traffic accidents. Mostly because they spent a lot of time on the streets and accidents happen. They don't get shot at all that much.
What actually happens is that American police is basically unaccountable. It must be really egregious and on multiple camera for them to face any scrutiny. And even then it is easy for them to engineer situation where it is actually ok for them to kill or be violent. Meanwhile, non-cop is supposed to have perfect self control, perfect awareness of situation and be able to follow mutually exclusive instructions yelled at him from multiple cops simultaneously.
Unaccountable groups of people always end up behaving badly. Be it priests, isolated cults or cops.
this right here, our issue is mostly the accountability. Accountable people are much less likely to apply force when not needed. Trying to remember some citations, but there's really interesting data out there on citizen involved shootings v police ones. and I suspect the accountability is key.
I think it is more than a bit circular, though. Police and corrections unions are some of the biggest "tough on crime" lobbyists, to the extent that the latter have never been seen to go on the record for decriminalization of marijuana, for example.
And it's asymmetrical. "You can beat the rap, can't beat the ride" does a lot of heavy lifting: Sure. You might spend a couple of days in jail, though, you might need money for an attorney. And even if charges are dropped, or not even filed, many states make arrest records public regardless. Hell, the state of Florida will send you a bill for your jail time regardless of disposition, and guess what, not paying it is a felony.
And we've gone out of our way to protect police from the consequences of actively negligent or even malicious actions, because those same unions fear monger about cops quitting in droves if they have to face consequences for their actions.
You can get the 8-bay Synology, with its two expansion chassis that's room for about eighteen 24tb drives. Anna's Archive, Libgen, and archive.org provide enough bandwidth that your problem becomes even knowing what titles to download. For the first year or so, you have big long lists of things you know you must have, but even though you didn't quite write them all out (often you just jot down "everything by [author's name]" you eventually finish that up. You start grabbing every book title/cover you see anywhere... and though I'm not particularly proud of it, 4chan often outperforms HN (and though no one would believe it, most of those aren't Mein Kampf).
Really, we need a gigantic bibliography project of some sort. These 2648 titles are the core computer science bibliography would be a big help. Or these 17,852 titles are the core 1970s harlequin romance novels.
>Digitization reminds me of part of the plot of "Rainbow's End" (Vinge), where physical books get digitized, t
He wasn't able to predict that they'd just shred the books without bothering to digitize them though.
That's actually what I did - upgraded from a 5-bay Synology to an 8-bay in December (before HD prices skyrocketed even further than they had since my last NAS build), still have a couple free slots, but doubled my overall available storage space. eBooks are not the bulk of what is one there though...
For how many thousands of years were books equivalent to absurd wealth. Kings might own a book, or several. Libraries were amazing, but places never seen by the proles and serfs. Thousands of years is a duration more than long enough to give our species some instinctual reverence for the object, reverence that is only reinforced by what we learn from an early age about those. And it's not just the wealth, at least for some sizable fraction of the population, we come to know books as things of knowledge and power, so slurring them as mere commodities is low-handed.
Books are, I think, in some small way, sacred. And I don't want to associate with people who think otherwise. I don't think you get it at all.
Then you apparently do not want to associate with the vast majority of professional librarians, who do not fetishize every individual physical instantiation of the printed word.
Some books are sacred. But if they all are, then none of them really are.
>My first thought is how accessible these books are. If a book hasn't been checked out in years, and there's another library in the interlibrary loan network that has a copy, there's no practical reason to keep another copy.
These libraries do not coordinate the deaccessioning. If it ever gets down to 2 copies, there's a non-zero chance that they will deaccession their copies simultaneously, and then there are none.
You worked for a library. Did they ever check first to make sure some other library had a copy? Did they warn that other library "we're getting rid of ours, please don't get rid of yours"?
‘“I think some faculty worry
that everyone is going to discard
willy nilly and then before you
know it there won’t be anything
left,” Walker said. “No, libraries
have gotten together, research libraries and others, and joined a
consortium called LOCKSS – Lots
of Copies Keep Stuff Safe – and
people have agreements like Harvard is the place that will always
keep a print copy of x. And there’s
multiple ones of all of it. So there’s backup in case Harvard gets blown
away by a nor’easter or something.”’
> Did they ever check first to make sure some other library had a copy? Did they warn that other library "we're getting rid of ours, please don't get rid of yours"?
Yes. They have a shared catalog. All of this is coordinated. It's literally the whole point of being a librarian.
Yes. I have my nose in it constantly. It's a fallacy to ascribe more coordination to this than actually exists. What mechanism is it that you think exists that would sound the red alert when the last library (or even the second to last) is about to get rid of the very last copy?
> What mechanism is it that you think exists that would sound the red alert when the last library (or even the second to last) is about to get rid of the very last copy?
Doesn't need much coordination. Before getting rid of a book, search for it in that shared catalog you allegedly have your nose in constantly. If you're the last or second to last copy, then you know. Unless two libraries are independently doing this at the exact same time.
I can't imagine my opinions just being AI slop that I've parroted. Surely you embellish just a little? Claude's so often bone-headed about things, this horrifies me. Gemini's worse. Even when the model agrees with me, it starts making me wonder if I'm not somehow wrong.
Reading connotes all sorts of hard-to-measure advantages and growth that nothing else even comes close to. And while there are works that are better and worse, no matter how lowly the thing is that is being read, that growth still accrues. You could have a child who read nothing but cereal boxes and truck stop restroom graffiti, and he'll be ahead of his classmates on every single thing you can score.
It's not the work, but the medium. Bad dimestore romance novels are therefor superior to someone watching one of those drivel tiktok soap opera things (no idea what they're called). The audio book might be the exact same story as the paperback, but the effect is not equivalent.
> Reading connotes all sorts of hard-to-measure advantages and growth that nothing else even comes close to.
For example..?
> And while there are works that are better and worse, no matter how lowly the thing is that is being read, that growth still accrues.
What growth and based on what evidence?
> The audio book might be the exact same story as the paperback, but the effect is not equivalent.
Again, what is this 'effect?' You keep repeating some ethereal benefit that has yet to be named. While audiobooks and paperback are not perfectly equivalent, the two are not meaningfully different.
The "true work" is sporadic. A business will need an engineer to work hard for long hours for a few weeks, then they won't need him at all for weeks more except to be on hand if something goes wrong. Then maybe some more work, and even longer lulls.
But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse).
Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).
Does this sound profound to you? When you see yourself type it out, does it seem like you've really came up with a zinger?
What entitles them to come in and police my hard drive platters with "you can't write that sequence of bits to storage, that's our sequence of bits"? It's sort of a weird idea, sounds kind of medieval. Like King Cnut has granted them license to "the birds in the forest, and the timber, and the water that runs through the meadows".
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