skorpeon87

> The King County Municipal Court is dishing these out left and right,

Hardly, the number of tweakers they throw into rehab is nothing compared to the number of tweakers on the streets. A small percent of tweakers being thrown into rehab isn't going to solve the problem if most of them aren't thrown into rehab.

> suburbs dumping

Local politicians always love to blame others. It's never their fault, of course, and the blame casting always comes with fantasy solutions that will never be implemented, like your idea to "track all non-city LEOs". And each year the problem gets worse. The city is filled with people who think as you do, elect ineffectual politicians who think as you do, and so the city gets what it deserves.

There is simply no evidence that American military training would produce better police than extant American police. Nothing other than the self-aggrandizing claims of people who claim to be veterans on the internet. Claims that usually go unchallenged, and repeated uncritically (as above), because this country has a culture of soldier worship.

Besides the evidence to the contrary which I have already posted, I think you need to be more skeptical of the claims American soldiers make about their conduct in Iraq and Afghanistan. Talk about rules of engagement is cheap, what matters is the actual execution of those rules. American soldiers were made to behave as police in those countries, and in neither case were they good at it.

American police are bad enough already, the last thing they need is even more military training.

> multiple (as-claimed-on-the-internet) soldiers complain about cop-malfeasance with respect to the situations in which gunfire is allowed to occur.

Soldiers tooting their own horns; this self-aggrandizement is not to be taken seriously. There is evidence that police with military backgrounds are more likely to be involved in shootings. Police who are combat veterans are even more likely to be involved in shootings. Soldier training does not make good police.

https://academic.oup.com/jpubhealth/article/41/3/e245/511435...

Exactly.

> Wild to see the Seattle Chamber acting like he is making things better in Downtown when 2 blocks down the hill from City Hall 7-Eleven closed up shop due to all the tweakers.

This apparent contradiction is easy to explain.

Forcing people into rehab is considered inhumane. Tweakers are deemed to be victims of society, and therefore the 'correct' solution is to have more tolerance for tweakers. More tweakers out on the street is evidence that the tweakers feel tolerated, which must mean that it's working.

This won't change until you vote out the local politicians who believe these premises: that forcing people into rehab is inhumane. That tweakers are victims of society's intolerance, and that tweakers wouldn't be a problem if we had more tolerance for them.

A single bomb core is a sub-critical mass; needing either neutron reflectors or another source of neutrons to start a chain reaction.

But if you pile a bunch of such cores up together like they were cannon balls, that inherent safety goes right out the window.

Pu-239 is an alpha emitter, but that's not the end of the story. All plutonium weapon cores are also neutron emitters because all weapons grade plutonium is impure and contains 2-7% Pu-240. Pu-240 is very prone to undergoing spontaneous fission which emits neutrons. So the presence of neutron radiation around a plutonium weapon core is unavoidable.

Furthermore, when Pu-239 is struck by neutrons (from the Pu-240 contaminant, for instance), it has a chance of undergoing fission and that results in the release of more neutrons which can cause additional Pu-239 to undergo fission. This chain reaction is how Pu-239 bombs work. A properly stored core will not sustain this chain reaction because the core is in a sub-critical configuration.

So there is in fact a very serious critical mass concern with plutonium bomb cores.

A private contractor would not have sovereign immunity, so you can sue them without the government's assent. They would not receive special legal protections, like the signs the TSA put up threatening you with steep fines if you "verbally abuse" the TSA workers (even police in America don't receive such protection against verbal abuse, but apparently TSA workers do.) If they consistently understaff their security checkpoint, as the TSA routinely does during periods of anticipated heavy travel, the airport could fire them and hire another contractor who can do the job properly.

Airport security in America used to be done by private contractors. The TSA didn't exist before 2001. And before 2001, airport security checkpoints generally ran much smoother and faster than the TSA.

(I am not a libertarian, so spare me the jabs.)

As far as I'm aware, America is the only country that makes you take your shoes off. Certainly it's not the norm.

What's the real difference between the government stationing armed soldiers in your town to maintain the peace, and stationing armed police in your town to maintain the peace? The former became unfashionable so it was replaced with the later. Such soldiers were renamed for "PR" but the situation is functionally equivalent. Officially there are some differences, like police being accountable to civilian courts instead of military courts... but I think it is now generally acknowledged that civilian courts have a double standard for police. So this distinction is more theoretical than practical.

In my view, it's fair to consider anybody who carries a gun for the state as a soldier, in an informal sense.

The overwhelming majority of the time, "arrests" on airplanes are made by regular passengers and the flight attendants, who beat up the offender then hogtie him with duct tape. Air marshals are completely pointless.

Air Marshals and the TSA are both pointless jobs programs and security theater. The problem of hijackers was solved in the morning of 2001/9/11 when the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 fought back against the hijackers. Since then, there have been numerous cases of passengers beating the shit out of any jackass trying to start trouble on a flight.

Locked cabin doors are also good. Metal detectors at airports would be fine, if they were staffed by private security contractors rather than the unaccountable TSA. Also their xray backscatter machines are pointless, their paranoia about shoes is pointless, and their insane paranoia about water-bottles is pointless. Other countries don't have these things, and things are fine for them. By all means have people walk through a metal detector to stop carryon handguns, but the rest of this crap is completely pointless.

> The DoD has far more than just 4 satellites up there.

Yeah, and they want a hell of a lot more. Seriously, read up on NDSA. For the transport layer they want hundreds to thousands of satellites in LEO.

The only real meta is to treat everybody as an individual. Pay attention to how they react during different stages of the conversation and tailor your own behavior to make them more comfortable. Some people respond well to being asked about themselves. Other people become nervous and evasive. Pay attention to how they respond and react accordingly.

Besides that, there is no "one size fits all" approach. The only approach that works for everybody is to treat everybody like an individual with a unique personality.

Additionally, don't attempt to banter even if the Brit initiates it. Brits think that Americans cannot banter and will assume that any banter from an American is intended as a sincere insult. Don't try to explain that Americans frequently banter among each other and no offense is intended, they won't believe you.

It is better to remain cordial as they 'banter' at you, but to never reciprocate.

I find the most frustrating conversations are with people who can't stop talking and who fail to distinguish what is or isn't important information for other people in the conversation.

> How was your flight?

> Oh it was great, I sat next to a man named Joe Smoe, wait no I think his name was Joe Blow... no he said his name was Jim Blow... wait no his name was Jim Smoe... he said he was bus driver.. or was it a truck driver?...

How do you politely say "I'm never going to meet this man, and you'll never meet him again, so who cares what his name was? Get on with the story!" I know some people who can waffle around like this for 10 minutes easily, trying to remember a detail that nobody else could conceivably care about. By the time they remember the detail everybody else has already forgotten the rest of the story anyway.

The only virtue Tim Cook knows is money. Everything he pretends to believe in the context of America goes completely out the window in the context of China. Why? Because money.

Probably. In a war I don't think they'd hesitate, since they've already demonstrated their willingness to cause huge clouds of LEO debris with simple tests. But the upside is that it's much less of a problem for the rest of humanity. Losing access to space for a few years is certainly not something we want, but in the context of a major war between two space powers it will be among the least of our worries.

Note also that "Kessler Syndrome" is not a binary condition. As debris gets worse, the expected lifespan of satellites in those orbits drops, and as does the success rate of launching rockets through the effected altitudes. However these don't drop off to zero immediately. If the satellite is important enough to justify the elevated risk and additional expense then you can simply plan to launch several of them to get one of them through. Manned missions would be a bad idea, but odds are good that vital weather satellites and the like would be kept aloft.

Rage against it all you want, people are judged by the company they keep. Ideally not in court rooms, but in everyday life? Abso-fucking-lutely. You don't have to like it but that's how life works.

> The DoD already had something like Starlink.

The NDSA doesn't actually exist yet, and SpaceX is presently the only company that could launch the larger versions of it.

You're talking about boost-phase interceptors, not mid-course interceptors. Starship to replace GMD (as suggested by credit_guy) doesn't make much sense, but Starship does have the technical ability to launch a massive constellation of space-based interceptors for quite cheap. With Starship, it should be possible to put tens of thousands of interceptors into LEO, and to rapidly replenish the constellation.

As for the "general consensus that weapons in space are bad", there's also a general consensus that war is bad, so we should all breath easy! Wait no.

How do these cell systems respond to the network no longer existing? Do they continue trying to ping towers that no longer exist? Do they give up eventually and turn themselves off forever?

> So I’m not sure why Signal should drop them other than because of the general volatility in crypto.

The affiliation to a cryptoscheme casts the entirety of Signal in a disreputable light. Not least because it gets Signal tangled up in stories like this one.

Children don't decide what neighborhood they live in.

And your position is... "this is an obscure HN meme" (it isn't.) And "therefore you're wrong". Very persuasive.

Who cares if you feel bad for them? Who even asked? Crime isn't supposed to be legal when you victimize other unsympathetic criminals.

I'm very familiar with it. It's a minced oath used by those who disrespect free speech so intensely they suspend any pretense of decorum and resort to childish wordplay. It's the same as FOSS activists who insist on writing "M$" instead of Microsoft.

> (or who's old enough to remember Polanski)

That's not a resolved matter by the way. He's still alive, still a convicted rapist, still a fugitive, and still defended and respected by Hollywood-centric media. He continues to evidently be immune to 'cancellation' because... influential people in movie industry like his movies I guess.

There's probably not much point explaining the cultural value of free speech to somebody who thinks free speech is so awful they can't even bring themselves to mention it without using a minced oath, as though they fear even the term itself.

Dogs, like rat terriers, are much more effective for exterminating rats.