cucumber3732842

The year is 2030. You are reading a breathless article on HN about how horrible Texas is for air conditioning their prisons but not their school.

Way down at the bottom is a dead comment: "Texan here, schools are managed locally, prisons are managed at the state level"

If they can't raise rents to cover expenses plus "enough profit to make this PITA worth it" then things (slowly over time) grind to a halt.

The way it likely works is that SOP is to not visit or if you do don't "notice" stuff you can see from the air because if they use the GIS as their source they get to back date the fine to the date of the last GIS aerial photos and then use their magical powers of "we're the government, either sue us or bend over and take it" to let that fine stand unless they subject of the fine produces evidince of when they installed the offense which they then use to make the fine more defensible if the subject ever goes get in front of a real court.

That's how a lot of the worse municipalities roll in my state that is very politically similar.

Also, 9mo ago data centers weren't boogeymen the government wanted to flamboyantly turn the screws on make a "look we're serving your interests" show for the peasants.

They got fined a million bucks for not having properly permitted their backup gensets, which were almost certainly included on all myriad of drawings that were part of the permitting application.

Reeks of "someone comb over their papers and fine them so it looks like we care"

>. The land value tax can’t be dodged by leaving nor can it be passed on to renters

ROFL what? I'd bet the author a lot of money that costs WILL roll downhill, the source matters not.

Everything they could was a lot less back before the fruits of industrial productivity allowed people to have their basic needs met while giving a huge fraction of their surplus to the state to do what it pleases with.

Your wording is kind of misleading. While the human reaction time to the unexpected is not great it's the human's ability to predict within reason what the likely next things to expect are expansive.

Like just running a first pass sanity analysis on the 1-2sec timeline fails because if it were true in practice all those idiots who screech about how normal traffic doesn't keep following distances worthy of semi trucks to the traffic ahead would be proven right as every braking event would cause a pile up. So either humans react much faster to the unexpected (not likely, we've measured) or humans have a huge "context window" for what to expect that makes the 1-2sec number not relevant in the base case.

This article just neglects to mention that this "commissary relationship" is a substantial ongoing cost that is not in proportion with sales the way supplies and labor are. Yes a new truck might not have capital for a commercial freezer or meat slicer to speed up prep but they also don't have the stable revenue to pay for a BS club membership even if the facilities are nice.

A commissary relationship is the kind of thing you need to be of a certain scale to afford. You're essentially contracting out a fraction of your work. You need enough business coming in to keep you busy to justify that recurring expense.

The rest of the reasons are equally flimsy. Like even if a food truck operator has a relationship with a commissary kitchen that's not gonna stop them from filling up from a sketchy water source or dump something in a dumpster if that's what it takes to make that day's schedule work if they're the kind of operator who already would have done that.

The "makes regulatory compliance easier" angle neglects to mention that the commissary or another tenant may very well throw you under the bus if the inspector is up their butt over something.

The author ought to run low margin high regulation (i.e. not software or white collar consulting) business before running her mouth.

Absolutely, but there were several instances where the US, regardless of how disparate the interests in it are, was more or less at the negotiating table and then Israel started blowing stuff up.

On the flip side, when your allies know they can count on you you stuff like them picking stupid fights because they know you'll back them up. Israel dragging us further into Iran during the first ~third of the conflict when the US was trying to find a clean place to stop the escalation is a pretty good example of that.

It always starts that way so the useful idiots can feel right.

Give it a decade and they'll be using it for everything.

While it's not pleasant angry people who are wrong or unjustified doesn't burn out employees.

Angry people who are right burn out employees.

Nobody likes being a human shield for their employer.

>It's not open Q&A. There's nothing preventing them from speaking on their preferred issue online, or even outside. Otherwise public meetings quickly devolve into anarchy. If a specific time was allocated to talk about speed limits, do you think it's fair game for TERFs to use that time to complain about gendered bathrooms?

Bring on the TERFs. Better it be a dumpster fire that get's DOS'd from time to time than people not be allowed to speak their minds.

>Violent threats only sound like a good idea if you can only imagine them being used by people you agree with.

You mean like how they used the "you can't speak on an issue because we've decided we're not talking about that" rule to have this lady hauled off?

Gather up a dozen friends, dress like Indians and throw the politician in the harbor. Yes I know I'm mixing and matching historical references, that's the point. Have one guy dressed as Elizabeth Warren, another guy like the redskins mascot and a third guy as Abu from the Simpsons like they didn't understand the assignment. The point is to maximize the meme-ability of it so that you get a court of public opinion trial and not the usual kangaroo court trial that people who thumb their nose at government get.

Flipping various members of your government the bird has probably been ruled free speech up and down every federal district in the country at this point. The Supreme court affirmed it at least once, maybe two or three times now.

I don't think it's even that the service that is delivered is unsatisfactory. I think it's that what the government is engaged in actively runs counter to what the people broadly want.

Like when people say we need better sanitation, there's too many tent cities, this needs to be fixed, etc, etc, and the city goes and hires a bunch of employees who then get to work fining residents for trash bin violations no shit they get heckled even if they solve some token amount of the core problem (invariably just enough to let the liars in the comments go to bat for them without the lies being obvious). And you see this kind of thing on damn near every axis of government enforcement and social services these days.

> This bylaw is probably targeted toward citizens that come in and berate staff because they find out they have an unpaid parking ticket from 2 years ago that they have to pay before renewing their license (for example).

That's how the (evil) people who support it will construe it. In reality that kind of stuff doesn't really bother employees all that much because it's just part of the job, they knew it going in and everyone agrees those sort of people are out of line.

What bothers employees is when they get heckled for doing (in the course of their job) stuff that just about everyone agrees is wrong, bad, stupid or heavy handed, because most of those employees know deep down they're in the wrong, and having it pointed out and having enough of the public agree with the hecklers in message if not in delivery is a real morale killer. And then your burnt out employees stop giving a shit, do a bad job, get caught on camera enforcing the "you had to lie through your teeth to defend it to begin with" policy in a way that lays bare how f-d up it is. And that's what they're trying to avoid by threatening to fine any peasant who opens their mouth.

I've just been calling them gay (because fed cops are famously secure about their sexuality) for years. Is there a meme I'm missing?

You cannot use stand ins for the product being sold. You can photograph your cereal in glue because milk makes cereal soggy or you can drizzle your chocolate syrup over mashed potatoes because ice cream will melt but neither of those examples would be legal if you were selling the milk or the ice cream. There's some gray area at the margin but this is how the law has been interpreted and what has been enforced for decades.

>I suspect a lot of the malaise afflicting the Rust Belt today is that most of the smart people left, leaving the social infrastructure strained by their absence.

They left because they read the regulations and realized that the mills were never coming back. Sending the smart people back won't fix that state of affairs except perhaps by making formerly industrial america more uppity which may in 50-100yr time get those boondoggles fixed.

We shouldn't have to carry insurance cards or copies of our registration

If the papers ever conflicts what the goddamn cop pulls up on their computer we all know what the result is gonna be so skip the stupid step and just look it up.

I've got many a sun burn standing as has anyone else who's toiled away outdoors doing something while shirtless and white...

I suspect it's more of a "hassle ain't worth it to lose 20%" type situation.

Could absolutely be worth if you can make that 20% back dodging permits because it's not flagrantly visible on the aerials like roof panels are.

>It seems like it would be more effective to simply put all the solar panels in a field, and construct a cheap shade over the entire canal no?

Yes, absolutely. But if you try and do that kind of stuff and the regulators show up and kick you right in the dick. "You got a permit to put panels on this land?" "Where's your SWPPP?" "Where's your environmental impact assessment for shading that canal?". And HN cheers.

But if you say you want to cover the canal with solar panels out comes the rubber stamp because that's what the powers that be want to "incentivize" this week.

Does the success of populists make a little more sense now?

Because they're more reliable or because the cars are more expensive and therefore owners are statistically richer and take nicer care of things?

Like you can see this pretty clearly with Camry people vs Altima people

And when the fanboys that pollute every automotive discussion take issue with that comparison you trot out the Crown Vic vs Grand Marquis comparison....

The rate at which you burn through brakes and tie rods and struts and bushings and all that other crap MOT complains about is gonna have a lot more to do with where, when and how you use the vehicle than the source of the vehicle's motive power. And the rate at which vehicles show up with "marginal" stuff like tires and brakes hoping they'll get a break is a straight wealth proxy.

I guess there's no exhaust to leak though which is nice.

It's considered unethical for food marketers to use marketing photos that aren't of the actual product. Sure, it's a perfect example staged under perfect lighting with perfect presentation but when you see a Dorito on the bag it's a real Dorito.

Why are photos of people any different? There needs to be some grounding of the presentation to what you're actually selling.

(It's also illegal for food, but that's beside the point, you shouldn't get your moral compass from the law)

Less legitimate activity to obfuscate it amongst.

You can't launder an entire cartel's worth of money through a sandwich shop.

Plenty of cities have absolutely off the rails individual precincts or specialty tax forces.

>I don't know how they afforded 5 police officers are all

Do they have a state or interstate highway running through? Predating on motorists and commerce that does not vote in their jurisdiction is a tried and true strategy for a "zero cost" police department.

They're related because of an ironic lack of diversity of thought.

If they could have pried any one of the dozen line cooks that Standford RD&E surely employs away from the hookers and blow or got the drunkest frat boys to put down the bottle for a few seconds to ask them they would have been told that AI replacing people with different races and slimming people up is slimy enough that you should give a black girl a free hoodie if that's what it takes to get her to be the token for your stupid staged photo.

To quote one of the most prolifically insufferable linkposters of HN: "Demographics are destiny."

So, you fill your university marketing and publication department with people who think this is ok and this is the sort of PR faux-pas whoopsie you eventually get.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that this sort of marketing material needs as many races represented as possible so as many people as possible can at a glance see someone that looks like them and identify with it but something tells me the university isn't gonna come out and own it like that and even then using AI to make a replacement when you have a student body to pull from is kind of icky.