Shakes
14d ago
But it's not even fraud and corruption! WMATA is a good service operating under very unusual political constraints. Fraud and corruption would be government employees stealing money under false pretenses; WMATA is a program designed to satisfy totally contradictory urban transit goals, at any cost.
Shakes
14d ago
Every agency in DC has an absurdly large police force. It's unclear how much of this is standard bloat and how much of this is cover for secret capital protection schemes.
Shakes
14d ago
DC has self-driving trains. We always did, but there was a fatal accident a decade ago that spooked everyone into turning them off. Supposedly that accident didn't even involve the self-driving ATO system at all, but it was still disabled anyways. (One wonders why.) However, recently, WMATA started a trial program to restore self-driving service on the Red Line, which was fairly successful and it appears it's been restored on all lines now.
Shakes
14d ago
What are you talking about, WMATA is a great program! One of the best metro transportation systems in the United States, and it works pretty well. The trains are always on time, the stations are relatively clean and safe, service is reliable.
WMATA specifically is bounded by a few unique concerns that make it a poor fit for UBI (which I'll get back to):
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WMATA serves Washington DC, the nation's capital. It was never designed to run a profit. Nobody cares if it runs a profit. WMATA is entirely designed to serve the needs of a few hundred thousand government employees. Out of the resources of the entire nation. This is like complaining that the Washington Monument runs at a loss. There's no limit to what the government is willing to spend. Ok, maybe there is a limit, but it's way higher than what the free marker, or the resources of a less important city, would allocate.
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WMATA doesn't have a dedicated funding stream. The DC metro in general is split between DC, Maryland, and Virginia, who all jealously fight for every scrap of infrastructure spending, on top of which the federal government sits. You can't build anything in the DMV without everyone keeping score and making sure they get their cut. To get around this, WMATA is not funded with a direct tax or other revenue source. DC, Maryland, and Virginia simply agree to allocate so much money to the system, which is never enough, and then every year WMATA threatens to cut services until the states cough up more dough or the federal government steps in.
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WMATA isn't even designed for the convenience of the DC Metro. It's designed for the convenience of federal workers. The original WMATA grid plans (rather famously actually) didn't build stations where population density was greatest. It was deliberately designed to change the landscape of the DMV. An example of this is that WMATA lines extend way, way far out into suburbs no other urban metro line would ever serve, past any sort of free-market calculus. The silver line out to Dulles, for example, added ten miles through mostly empty-suburbs just to connect to Dulles Airport. But it was felt that the nation's capital needed a metro connection to its second major airport, and that this was more important than all other considerations and constraints.
This is not a program that could have been modest but was blown out by patronage graft. WMATA is not expensive because it funds generous sinecure do-nothing jobs. WMATA is expensive because it is throwing the resources of the entire federal government at a strictly local program, with no care for constraints. This is not like UBI at all. The guys who maintain the nuclear button probably also gets a lot of sloppy wealth redistribution, but nobody cares when it's considered important enough.
Besides all that, the metro is fairly well-run. WMATA GM Randy Clarke has been expanding service and WMATA has recovered the best from Covid of any American metro outside New York.
Shakes
27d ago
When I read about radicals in the 70s it always seems to come back to Ann Arbor and Berkeley.
Today it’s Minneapolis and Portland.
Part network effects, chance, circumstance. There are only so many radicals to go around and when they start to concentrate somewhere, like begets like. Same as hipsters or country music stars.
Shakes
28d ago
She was a left wing activist chasing ICE in her car to participate in resistance. You could argue she was naive about how this would escalate and maybe rational to fear for her life. (Note that, as far as captured on video, she did not appear to fear for her life.) But she wasn’t ignorant about who these armed men were when she floored the accelerator
Shakes
28d ago
I didn't hear the phrase "you're under arrest" anywhere in the video.
It sounds like you have made up your mind and will never be pleased. She hit him with her car and you’re arguing that some other conduct that’s not on video we can never know the truth of is probably exculpatory context
Shakes
28d ago
I’m not sure. This angle that was going around yesterday is pretty ambiguous (forgive the editorializing in the tweet this was the first one I could find):
https://x.com/nicksolheim/status/2009658214577831994?s=46
The officer seems to receive some kind of blow, his head and body flail around for half a second, then the car intervenes between his body and the camera. It’s very grainy and hard to make out.
New footage of ICE shooter
Forgive another high-level post but the body cam (or cell phone?) footage of the cop who shot has been released by AlphaNews and this may significantly change perceptions of what happened (to those willing to have perceptions changed):
https://x.com/alphanews/status/2009679932289626385?s=46
To my eyes it appears that:
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The ICE agent is clearly hit by her car and goes down
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The ICE agent was not standing in front of her car but walking from one side to another
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The driver’s wife is not passively observing but actively shouting at the agents (this should undermine the idea that the driver and her wife were somehow neutral people accidentally caught up in everything)
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Perhaps most importantly, but maybe most open to interpretation, it appears to me that the driver looks directly at the ICE agent before driving forward. From this bodycam angle, her face is clearly shown looking directly ahead where the officer is seconds before she moves her car forward.
I suppose a lot of new interpretations are possible, but to me this video footage clearly debunks several going interpretations I have seen proposed. At the very least, maybe reasonable people can agree that the cop did not shoot the driver in cold blood from the side window.
I would also not be surprised to see the idea spread that this new video is AI.
Edit: per corrections from others below, this is not bodycam but cell phone footage (my mistake as it’s clearly even labeled as such) and this explains why it tumbles at the end of the video. Thanks!
Shakes
28d ago
Your idea seems to be that the ICE officer is a “fuckwit” for not actively aiming his gun at a woman in a stopped car. Your very strong opinion that he should not have been in front of the car is based on very ambiguous video evidence, nobody can even agree if he was in front of or to the side of her car before she turned her wheels. And now you want citations to prove that cops don’t wave their guns around at civilians and can’t walk in front of a parked car.
This is very stupid. I’m not sure there’s a nicer word. You would be better off arguing that the ICE officer should have exercised magically perfect split-second decision making. Because what you are actually suggesting is that the ICE officer shouldn’t have shot her, he should have just aimed his gun at her. Actually I don’t need a citation to know that’s not how cops work.
Shakes
29d ago
Crazy how she ended up in the middle of a ICE enforcement activity at random after following them around all day
Shakes
29d ago
If drivers knew they'd get shot and killed for driving into armed cops, they'd probably do it less.
Shakes
29d ago
Fuckwit B, having previously been hit by a car driven by another suspect in the line of duty, decided it would be a great idea to again stand in the path of a suspect's car, thereby turning any escape attempt into an assault with a deadly weapon. Rather than brandishing his weapon and making his threat explicit, he waited for her to move the car forward. At that point, he drew his gun and shot her, an act which would not have saved him if she had aimed for him. By the time he fired his shots, he was already out of danger.
What are you talking about? An officer is not supposed to just "brandish his weapon" at someone sitting in a stopped car. There are rules about that. Likewise, where do you think an officer is supposed to stand relative to a stopped car? You're not supposed to make it easier for someone to escape in case they decide to use lethal force. There are rules about that.
You're calling the guy a "fuckwit" (cringe) for following standard police protocols.
Shakes
29d ago
Now what? Now you have to ask: Is catfishing someone on Grindr professional misconduct? Is meeting a colleague for bathroom sex professional misconduct, or only if one person changes their mind? If Mr. A was also planning to have sex at work, does he also get sanctioned? What's the standard? How do we enforce it?
Meeting someone (colleague or not) for sex in a work bathroom is obviously professional misconduct. It's also the case that a lot of gay hookup norms are a kind of conspiracy against broader cultural norms. They're not the first gay men to meet for sex in a workplace bathroom! But you're not supposed to talk about it, in the same way that gay men all have porn of each other but you've only ever heard about the Senate Twink.
Shakes
29d ago
She put herself in the middle of an armed situation and then resisted lawful orders. Doesn't really matter if at the exact moment her foot was on the gas she meant to hit him or not. Play stupid games win stupid etc.
Shakes
1mo ago
That’s why you would invent a superset, to add type-checks and other context checks. You throw all your existing python that your non-technical professors and data scientists and math majors worked out. Then as you generate new “scrython” code you are reasonably confident it isn’t creating more problems to solve later. That code will be rigorously defined and checked by a linter which will constrain the universe of possible AI errors.
I don’t think this is the only way to add guardrails around AI but eventually someone will have to do something like this. The sheer volume of python written and being written means AI will be asked to write python for a long time to come.
Shakes
1mo ago
Rust is an interesting programming language, because it perfected the nanny-state compiler. Rust is infamously difficult to get to compile if you don’t know what you’re doing. You can spam .unwrap() and unsafe and write unsafe code, but it requires you to at least actively choose to accept these flaws as opposed to passively letting them by accidentally.
If AI is going to write code, I think Rust is actually going to point the way toward the future. AI can make writing code very easy but introduces all sorts of potential zero-day bugs and faults. Rust actually solves much of this because many bugs the AI could write in other languages are not even valid Rust. The future of programming languages belongs to whoever develops an even more restrictive and advanced compiler that eliminates whole categories of AI errors from running. (A superset of python or typescript would be very appealing here.)
Shakes
1mo ago
I’ve always thought of this in terms of the “yes Chad” jpg meme. There’s no caricature or attack that can’t be defeated by more or less saying “yes”.
“You’re a communist who hates America!”
“Yes”
“You’re a holocaust denier who thinks the Jews are running the world”
“Yes”
Etc. etc. It works because we’ve lost consensus about what things we’re supposed to believe as a nation.
Shakes
1mo ago
Immigrants are taking our jobs, except when they're mooching off welfare.
That’s not even a conspiracy theory, let alone a contradiction. Both of those things do indeed happen. (They don’t even need happen from the same immigrants, although that also happens.)
If you wanted a right-coded conspiracy to balance out your selection you could have just referenced Q.
Shakes
2mo ago
The essay was bad in a totally representative way, almost all college essays are that bad. That being admitted it’s probable the instructor did discriminate in giving her a zero, although probably it was fairly benign. (“This dumb Christian argument has no merit” not “I hate Christians mark it zero”.)
That said universities started this game by systematically discriminating against conservatives in academia for generations. Academe as the last holdout of genuine Marxism in the West was a joke in the Reagan years. I have brilliant family members who were personally discriminated against in their academic careers for being conservative. I don’t suppose that counts as evidence to anybody with their heads in the sand, but it seems obvious to say that that’s what happened in academia over and over again. It’s not as though conservatives just woke up one day and said, “we’re stupid, we hate those liebruls and their funny learning ways.”
But time is slow and I don’t expect this to percolate into much of a show of force immediately. Conservatives abandoned academia as it turned on them — there wasn’t much fighting back. It will take more time for that attitude to change. If we get a Vance administration that’s when I would expect to start seeing big national fights over collegiate discrimination.
Shakes
2mo ago
After a court ruled that SNAP benefits could be withheld, he not only appealed the decision, but said he wanted the states who had paid benefits to return the money.
Well, no. SNAP ran out of money because Congress didn’t allocate any. A judge ordered Trump to pay SNAP anyways. “With what money?” Trump asked the judge for guidance. “Pay it,” the judge ordered, without any guidance. At the time the shutdown negotiation ended the admin was being ordered to take the money from school lunch programs.
Maybe your interpretation is how the public actually interprets this issue, because who really cares about the minutiae of rogue judges when Trump’s face is right there. But that is an interpretation, it’s not a neutral statement of fact, and in taking one party side it’s likely that something close to half of the electorate disagrees with you.
I think your post here is riddled with such interpretation errors. That’s fine, I guess, we don’t have to have the same opinions here, but I suspect this kind of analysis would have predicted 10 of the last 5 Democratic victories.
Shakes
2mo ago
This is my fault for not elaborating a point in the first place, but if I had it would have been something like: OP doesn’t make much of an analysis at all except looking at two different numbers and drawing a trend. I don’t think that’s very credible.
You can elaborate a larger case for why Trump and the Republicans are doomed by adding more numbers. But I think any serious political analysis has to come back to acknowledging our limitations in looking at the numbers because — well because the election is a year from now. A year’s worth of time has to pass.
Shakes
2mo ago
Trump is unique in that 1) he literally cannot
Trump is not our first lame-duck president. Lame duck presidents do care about winning midterms and mandates and successors.
his brand is about aggressively not giving a fuck (about you)
Trump’s brand includes “They’re after you I’m just in the way” and “Kamala is for they/them I’m for you”.
Thinking that Trump cares what (you) think is absolute tomfoolery and if anyone wants to attempt to defend that point I'd love to see them try
This is ridiculous, come on. If Trump didn’t care about any of this he would have stayed in his Tower circa 2015 or he could have run on some sort of Conservacon platform.
You wrote this as if in an attitude of just-telling-the-truth as though everyone has to give it to you. But this is a basic failure to have a theory of mine for Trump, or of American politics over the last ten years at all. Is Trump faking it every time he calls a grieving widow? When he gets up on stage and channels the crowd? When he says controversial things to defend his base that no single other politician was willing to represent?
Trump obviously trivially cares or we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.
WMATA isn't run on UBI or Bullshit Jobs. For every lazy inspector photo-copying old measurements there are construction workers, maintenance patrols, janitors, cops, lawyers, managers. White-collar jobs like "managers" might sound like a bad joke but it's not a do-nothing job in a system that is constantly aging and wearing out, where every metro stop needs to be serviced, every service causes chaos throughout the entire network, and there's not even a reliable operating budget out of which to make decisions. These are all hands-on jobs and the existence of sloppy workers just collecting a paycheck is not unusual by any historical example. (Even big Silicon Valley companies pay some of their employees just to sit around all day because they prefer that to having them working for a competitor.)
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