I completely agree. In any field of sufficient complexity, 2 years isn't enough time to learn enough to have an informed opinion on reforming it.
Like many others here, I work in IT and that's the kind of thinking that led to every new project being "Ruby On Rails" about 12-15 years ago and every time a new underlying library gets updated, a bunch of code breaks. Meanwhile, C/C++, COBOL and FORTRAN programs from 30-50 years ago are still running the infrastructure of the world.
Considering how many people go into law enforcement because they want to play with military toys without the burdens of military service, it's going to be hard to pull them away from that.
Yes, this, exactly. Two different people who bullied me in high school aggressively (for my sexuality and general nerdery) have gone on to be cops—they were the type to post pictures of themselves on Facebook shooting guns.
I would run from them without hesitation if they ever pulled me over. They're not the right type to be cops. And I'm relatively confident that many, many cops are like them. It's chilling.
I spent several years as a security guard, so I've interacted with cops on the regular both when they are on duty and moonlighting as security guards themselves and all I can do is validate this perspective.
Yes there were the cops who really did believe in/want to protect people. This was possibly even most of them. Then there were the cops who were downright scary. Talking about want to drag people into the street and beat them up. Or idolizing Jason Statham in the transformer movies as some kind of "supercop" (their words). Or the guy who refused to tell the teenagers skateboarding in the parking garage they had to leave because he wasn't allowed his gun. A gun, seriously, to confront a few tell a few teenagers with skateboards to leave.
Should I ever have to interact with the cops again it honestly scares me which of these groups I'll get.
In my opinion, there are 3 types of people who get into law enforcement.
1. People who legitimately want to serve and protect their communities.
2. People who want a steady government paycheck and benefits.
3. People who have a psychological need to be in control of other people.
I post pictures on Facebook of myself and my children shooting guns.
I had one high school classmate who wanted to become a cop. He was a runt who discovered weightlifting and steroids. The thing that kept him from becoming a cop was that he got caught stealing from vending machines when we were teenagers.
It's fantastic that he didn't get to carry a badge and gun.
Yeah! I totally don't mean to cast such a wide net, but I think it was part of the character I saw in them as someone abused by them.
I'm personally not much of a gun person myself, but I've been to a range a few times with friends, so gun ownership & use is not a "one and done" indicator by any means, but it's a concerning sign when correlated with various other negative personality ticks.
The difference between people who have guns as a sports tool, and those that have guns as an expression of their personal identity. Hunters & trap shooters, versus ammosexuals.
I'm probably one of those people that you hold in contempt.
There are more guns than there are fingers in my house.
I am unabashedly pro gun. I have testified at hearings on behalf of gun owners.
Still, the point I'm making here is that there is something especially troubling about those cops who see themselves as the protagonist from an 80s action movie.
Yeah, this seems like the most urgent cultural shift.
The Right insists policing is an extremely risky job, but
statistics suggest otherwise. That said, policing would be much more risky if we had police who actually took the risks they signed up for. Instead, American police by and large do not take seriously their duty to serve the people. Look no further than the despicable failures on the scene at Uvalde Elementary.
No, they don't. They clearly show it is a dangerous profession. I'm sure you're going to say something like "Being a pizza delivery driver is more dangerous than being a cop", because that is exactly how this conversation always goes, because it is a meme at this point that you're just repeating instead of thinking, but it doesn't make any sense, and would probably work better on reddit than on HN.
Do you wear a seatbelt in a car? I'll assume so - why would you do that? Driving in a car without a seatbelt clearly isn't dangerous, because motorcyclists have a much higher rate of injuries while driving. See, that is a really stupid thing I just said. And it is the same exact logic that you're using to say being an officer isn't a dangerous profession.
> Look no further than the despicable failures on the scene at Uvalde Elementary.
So you're judging millions of people on the actions of a few people? That sounds suspiciously like a pretty serious flaw in rational thinking that "The Right" commonly falls subject to.
Someone that passionate can probably be mentored into the skill set necessary to do the job.
I spent a year at a TA at a University and in that time I had two students who were really stellar. They were outstanding programmers. They paid attention detail and wrote elegant but easy to read code that worked. I took the time to offer both of them my assistance if they needed any help after graduation.
I play video games with one of them. The other one got out of CS and changed her major to something art related.
At the time (2000) BeOS was the only interesting enough operating system that I spent days or weeks to pirate over a slow phone connection because it wasn't available to purchase in my country. Even if I used a download manager, the code was corrupted somehow and installing crashed after I tried to boot from the CD. CRC was wrong. I had to retry a few times. Phone bill was crazy and I had to justify it to my parents. But it was worth it, I enjoyed BeOS more than any other OS at the time. Windows, Linux, SkyOs, AtheOS/Syllable.
Mine is if Apple actually bought Bungie (which they reportedly missed out on my three days), Halo would have been killed and Bungie dissolved, and who knew what would have happened to Xbox and the console market.
Halo was originally demoed at Macworld for the Mac! I'm sure it would have launched, but I can't imagine Apple would be very good at running a games company.
I think money wasn't as big a problem as it's been reported.
Take this snippet from the wikipedia:
"Apple CEO Gil Amelio started negotiations to buy Be Inc., but negotiations stalled when Be CEO Jean-Louis Gassée wanted $300 million;[11] Apple was unwilling to offer any more than $125 million. Apple's board of directors decided NeXTSTEP was a better choice and purchased NeXT in 1996 for $429 million, bringing back Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.[12]" [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS ]
It seems to me that BOTH $300M and $429M are greater than $125M and $429M is greater than $300M.
Having been both a NeXTStep and BeOS developer, I can assure you that NeXTStep was a MUCH more mature product than BeOS. Was it money? maybe. a little. Was NeXTStep better value for money? maybe. probably.
I rankle every time I hear the story about Gassée being greedy. He might have been asking for more than Apple wanted to pay, but I think it's simplistic to say it was only about money. NeXTStep morphed into Rhapsody and MacOS reasonably quickly. And the MetroWerks compiler for BeOS was DEFINITELY buggy.
I think there was no discount Gassée could offer that would make up for the longer time-to-market for a BeOS based next-gen Mac OS.
What's missing from this is what each OS brings to the table. It's entirely possible that they considered BeOS to not have as many desired features as NeXTStep delivered. Whatever the perceived relative value of each, I don't think it makes sense to consider them equivalent, as Apple apparently didn't. In other words, obviously $300 million wasn't too much for Apple to buy an OS for, but they seemed to consider too much to buy that OS for.
This would certainly have destroyed Apple, right? BeOS despite its cult followers was really almost useless and JLG would not have initiated the projects that made Apple a success after acquiring Next.
I agree in the sense that BeOS wouldn't have saved Apple, though this has less to do with the merits of BeOS and more to do with Apple's circumstances. Even with the purchase of NeXT, there was still a considerable time period between December 1996 (when the purchase of NeXT was announced) and March 2001 (when Mac OS X 10.0 was released) where Apple's customers still had to use the aging classic Mac OS (and even then Mac OS X didn't start getting widespread adoption among Mac users until the Jaguar/Panther eras). More to the point, Apple's operating system strategy wasn't the only issue Apple faced. NeXT's OpenStep API and OPENSTEP operating system weren't enough by themselves to turn around Apple; it was Steve Jobs' leadership and the successful launches of products such as the iMac G3 (1998), the iBook G3 (1999) that kept Apple afloat until Mac OS X was released. I don't know if Apple would have survived had Gil Amelio remained in power or had Jean-Louis Gassée took control.
My experience is anecdotal but I have observed that in Pittsburgh, the thing that was accomplished by adding bike lanes was to increase traffic congestion on roads that weren't ruined by the bike lanes.
It's helping law enforcement maintain high budgets.
The drug war fuels the violence of the drug trade and that violence requires the police be well equipped to handle it.
> It's helping law enforcement maintain high budgets.
And not just in the obvious, direct ways of pointing out drug crime and asking for funding. E.g., I recall studies of DARE’s impacts showing that it had no measurable impacts on drug use, drug abuse, or drug-related crime among students directly participating or communities, but did have a measurable positive impact on participating students attitudes toward law enforcement.
Like many others here, I work in IT and that's the kind of thinking that led to every new project being "Ruby On Rails" about 12-15 years ago and every time a new underlying library gets updated, a bunch of code breaks. Meanwhile, C/C++, COBOL and FORTRAN programs from 30-50 years ago are still running the infrastructure of the world.
Newer doesn't always mean better.