Just for clarities sake, there is one big sticking point here that I want to make clear. Pay, hours, etc cannot incentivize a fix to this system because it’s not about attracting good people or bad people or dumb people or smart people, it’s about the system. If cops made $120k starting with 5 weeks of vacation and only had to work 32 hour weeks, we would not see significantly different outcomes because it is simply the institution and systems and culture that are the problem. Honestly, that would probably only increase the problem since it just further removes police from the normal humans they’re policing. Probably also instead of attracting people that are mission driven, it attracts mercenaries, basically. This is how we get billionaires; they’re mostly not evil, just so far removed reality and doing one of the most human things possible – rationalizing our own behavior for our benefit.

The idea that there are purely good or purely bad people is mostly a myth. There are people that we could objectively define as purely good or purely evil, but they’re the outlier. Nazis for example. The truth is even scarier than the myth. In most of our depictions, nazis are homogenous blob of pure evil. While nazi’s certainly had some purely evil people, the truth is the vast majority were just average people exposed to a system that creates an evil outcome. Of course, there were also purely good people in that as well, but the system often led those people their graves, or they had to be the right combination of good/smart to resist and stay alive. But most people just participated or closed their eyes and went about their day.

The problem is not the people, it is the system and pay and benefits aren’t going to fix it.

Now all that said, the Uvalde cops clearly over-index on little tiny dick bitch ass cowards and kinda blow a hole in my thesis. I wouldn’t call them evil, but just speaking statistically you would think even one of them out of the scores of cops there would have had even an underdeveloped backbone. The cowardice shown here should be something that lives into myth and legend and the way people say “Benedict Arnold” to mean “traitor” they should say “Uvalde cop” to mean “coward.”

I don’t think the mom and pops are really the problem (in fact, this is I think one of the few viable ways for regular people to actually get ahead) but all of the things surrounding housing. One can get place renting for $2k, but can’t get approved for that mortgage amount even with tons of history showing it’s paid. Corporations owning massive amounts of property are also a much bigger problem. Appealing to an individual (mom and pop) is generally a lot easier than to try to appeal to a corp in which you’re just Lessee #4949857 who’s spreadsheet tells them to squeeze you for more money because.

Past that, I’d also argue renters need much more support when it comes to their rights because quite a lot of the things that people are posting here as anecdotes to why their landlords are shitty are already illegal, it’s just extremely difficult to get anything done about it. I’d suggest also that there was some regulatory body (if one doesn’t exist already) responsible for certifying housing/landlords because then at least shit would get fixed once a year.

My only half-decent experience renting was a blue-collar mom and pop who leveraged their own home to buy a second home to rent, that they rented significantly under market value. If anything, we should be trying to setup more systems that allow this outcome (they fucked me on the deposit though, but that’s the part about renter’s rights.)

Indeed is reporting that the average starting salary is like $50k, and the average in the US is $60k. Policing also isn’t even in the top 25 most dangerous jobs. That link is also talking base salary, but even in the situation you’re describing, you’re talking overtime in the $20k+ range.

The problem with bad cops comes down to two main things:

• they’re not here for public safety or here to protect and serve, they’re here to protect capital.
• well, it’s really just the first one, but keeping that in mind, the system is setup in a way that the only outcome can be a corrupt police force. Legal civil forfeiture, qualified immunity, overly powered police unions (the only time I’ll complain about unions), deliberately low standards in hiring, deliberately not require the police to even know the law they’re supposed to enforce and probably a dozen things I’m forgetting. Police aren’t there for us, they’re there for capital.

Finally, police funding and increasing the number of cops has almost nothing to do with crime rates which is what calls to defund the police actually mean. Police are basically systematized violence where pretty much the only tools in their literal and metaphorical toolbelt are increasing levels of violence. The call to defund the police is more about funding the things that actually reduce crime – better education, economic outcomes, and people trained to deal with the types of issues that police are probably less qualified to deal with than the average retail worker like mental health crises. Advocates for defunding the police are instead advocating for spending to be allocated to people who are qualified to actually deal with these problems.

Anyway, tl;dr – if we offer cops better pay and better hours, we’re just going to be getting more expensive cops stealing our shit, incarcerating us at one of the highest rates in the world, and murdering people with less consequence than the cashier at Target gets for not upselling credit cards enough because while plenty of good people* become cops, policing as an institution in the US is corrupt.

* “Good” people and “bad” people are mostly a result of the systems and culture they exist in and very few are truly “good” or “bad.”

Jefferson Davis and Robert E Lee were some of the few that were barred from holding office until like, the 70’s, when it was reversed posthumously. As with all things Trump, entertaining the question to begin with is pretty fucking stupid.

Treating Trump with any sort of legitimacy is how we got here. We have laws designed exactly for him. He shouldn’t go on the ballot. The right is only emboldened because they’re constantly getting away with fucking everything, skirting the lines of the law if not outright breaking them. We should entertain him being on the ballot like we’d entertain someone who’s 20 or wasn’t born in the country – it’s absurd.

Yeah, I think it’s pretty clear that the president shouldn’t be immune even based on the text of the article itself, just with this US SC, I don’t trust that they are going logically interpret the article. There’s a podcast called Strict Scrutiny that covers the court with legal experts hosting, but in a fairly approachable manner, and basically this court is just pulling things out of their ass. They’re not even consistent in their own court, much less adhering to previous court doctrine.

I probably won’t ever forget New Zealand having football/soccer matches in a big-ass stadium like normal. Many other countries got back to normal way, way before we did.

Right now, Haley is polling significantly behind DeSantis, who is already significantly behind Trump. I honestly thought it was more likely that she was angling for a cabinet position or something, but the Koch money injection is interesting. That said, even with money it’s a pretty uphill battle. Given that Trump is far and away the front runner, the number of old school republicans is pretty low. She’s running as if she’s in the general, where a more moderate approach would make a lot of sense (or maybe she’s just trying to dodge creating soundbites for Biden campaign ads which DeSantis seems to have no problem with) but in the Republican primary moderate isn’t going to get very far.

Even if she manages to clear the first hurdle and overtake DeSantis, she is kinda stuck with her finger’s crossed that Trump is for some reason ineligible to run because he’s such a clear favorite. It would be like going into a room of Swifties and trying to explain why you’re better than Taylor. Spoilers, it doesn’t matter, and the corpse you leave behind is going to look like something out of a horror show.

Even assuming your point was accurate

Hang on, need to stretch a bit so I can get my head far enough up my ass to see their point.

The whole primary is the punchline. It’s either going to be Trump as the nominee, or Biden is going to sweep. R’s are far too racist to nominate Vivek, and even if everyone else in the primary died I have a feeling they’d just write in Tucker or something. That leaves Haley, who is trying to appeal to a Republican base that hasn’t existed for 15-20 years, and DeSantis, who is trying to run as the “is Pepsi okay?” to Trump’s Coke, while he also seems to be simultaneously mumbling “dude Coke is so much better.” The only way this makes any sense for him is if he thinks that Trump is likely to be in jail or barred from running, because that’s the only way he’s getting the nomination.

I kinda wish that weren’t the case. If it were Biden v DeSantis, Biden sweeps. DeSantis is far too extreme for dems and probably even slightly center/slightly left of center, his whole campaign seems to be designed as if he just has a cuck fetish. And the one thing that I think everyone can all agree on is that as soon as he opens his mouth, you just get the overwhelming urge to shove him in a locker. I also think that almost no one likes Trump’s policies, they just like him and it’s pure cult of personality (and the way they vote seems to confirm that; Trump-like candidates lose, it’s only Trump that has any traction) and DeSantis obviously does not have that. And he’d be running against an incumbent, which is already an uphill battle.

I mean, I think as long as no one else does an insurrection, we’re probably fine? The text of this is quite specific, applying this law required a previous decision to legally declare that Trump committed an insurrection. The specificity of this is probably actually what gets the ruling overturned. The text doesn’t call out the president specifically in the way that it calls out electors, congress people, etc.

They did. A few years later, a carve out was made that allowed basically everyone (except Robert E Lee and Jefferson Davis) to hold office. Those two would remain the only ones barred in this manner until the 70’s when that restriction was posthumously (obviously) lifted. There is a great podcast ep that just came out from What Roman Mars Can Learn about Con Law that talks about this very thing.

I really, really doubt that this is going to be a concern. First, while technically Mastodon can interact with Lemmy, in practice how often does it happen? It’s not zero, but it’s not a lot, either, and I doubt that Threads will change that much because while it’s a neat technical feature, link aggregators and micro-blogging platforms are pretty incompatible culturally.

And then we have to remember that we’re talking about Threads normies. Do we really think that a bunch of Swifties and Kardasholes and other influencers are going to look at the absolute zoo of Marxist/Anarchist/Linuxist users on Lemmy and be like “this is the type of content I’ve been waiting for, I need to interact more with that community”? This reminds me a lot of neckbeards saying they wouldn’t date Megan Fox because she has weird thumbs.

And then we have the whole thing with the actual fediverse and the tech behind it. There is still going to be no algorithm artificially inflating the popularity of what are thinly veiled ads. Meta has no mechanism for introducing ads into the Fedi. Lemmy is not suddenly going to be massively interested in the vast majority of content on threads and start upvoting to the moon.

And the dev team behind the fedi I would wager is going to prevent any sort of real technical takeover, so that means that at any point defederating is possible, and with basically no loss to the fedi.

Serious question though - how would you? Meta can’t push content in your feed. The only reason you’re going to see Meta in your feed is if the community here (or people you follow on mastodon) decide they want to show it.

Im equally likely to curb you if you use an iphone.

If all of you that judge people over their phone can get together and not fuck, would really be doing the human race a solid.

I think it’s even slightly different in that Firefox has some dependence on Google (a scary level, actual, if Google ends that deal Mozilla is pretty much fucked) that the fediverse doesn’t - the people on the fediverse right now are enough to keep Fedi alive and moving, and I’d find it really, really hard to argue that they aren’t there deliberately to avoid being subject to the whims of Meta/Twitter/Reddit, etc. Like, in a lot of ways, it’s a sacrifice to be on these services because the bulk of content still exists in the proprietary silos. Because the actual protocols and main developers are also intrinsically motivated by the this separation, it’s hard to picture how they could even try to extend/extinguish here.

Like, if Threads fully federates, I’d guess that quite a lot of people block their instance just to keep their hands clean. Those that interact with Threads via Fedi probably fall into the boat that I would. I want some particular content or to follow some people, just not shoveled at me however Meta decides it should be, and not in a way that they can profit from showing me ads. If Meta pulls some bullshit, it’s likely the Fedi would more or less just block them entirely then give up and start a Threads account. And I have a hard time seeing a world where they go to Eugen or basically any of the other driving forces in the Fedi and are like “we need you to change Mastodon so we can [do some typical Facebook bullshit” and Eugen are like “yeah cool with me.”

I think its more likely that Threads users are eventually going to see fedi users dropping a long comment or some post that is about how it’s nice to have a clean ad-free feed and move clients if not over to the fedi in general. It won’t be enough to really matter for Meta other than to say “see we don’t have a monopoly!” and hey, if the fedi gets a little bigger it’s all good for the rest of us.

I just want to pause here and say that this kind of thing, much like basically any bumper sticker ever, is stupid as fuck and I hate it. Whether it’s my dumb fucking cousin saying “Killary” or equally annoying mouth breathers talking about “Drumpf.” Like, I’m as atheist as the day is long, and holy shit does it make the parent comment annoying to read. Your super great “hillary lied, people died” bumper sticker, the “honk if Trump should go to jail,” just all of it. It sucks, I hate it, it’s the laziest form of persuasion (spoilers, it’s persuading no one, it’s just pissing off the people you want to convince.) Oh you didn’t capitalize the ‘g’? Well fuck it’s me the pope, let’s peace out and go get tacos this Jesus thing was dumb anyway.

You know, watching religion decline in the west largely as a result of the more fanatical like Johnson, I kinda hope their side wins so we can be done with it. There are few things that are more of a cancer on society (globally as well) than religion and the dogmatic approach to the world that it espouses.

When I was in high school, I really, really wanted to play football (egg ball, for the non-Americans.) Went to the camp before starting my freshman year, had a lot of fun, was decently good and by all accounts would have started. Finally got the waiver to bring home, basically “your kid might get hurt and we ain’t paying for shit” and so ended my football career. I actually probably need to make a phone call after this one, because I do remember being told we don’t have insurance and that’s why I couldn’t play, and I do remember being both pretty obstinate that I would not get hurt and this was basically an impossibility (youth, am I right?) and being an asshole because there was probably no bigger injustice in the world.

Of course, now I know that probably a single trip to the ER for anything would have probably bankrupted my family.

And you all are robbed because you don’t have me now as a great football start to look up to (just kidding, I was slightly above average in a small town.)

Anyway, America. 'Tis a stupid place, let’s not go there.

Oh they absolutely will. With Biden, they seem to selectively edit together clips of his minor speaking mistakes, with Trump they edit together the spots where he’s coherent.