roystgnr
1d ago
Formatting fix:
Q: Why would they need to be infiltrated by NSA agents?
A: They'd hand over emails given a warrant.
roystgnr
3d ago
I suppose? It's more like the optics of a street gang fight to me, honestly. A bunch of people on both sides who like to talk shit and throw hands, ready to smash things or deliver a beat-down to someone who they think earned it, none of them with any kind of faith that a judge might be able to deliver justice instead, going armed but still swinging and shoving and stepping up like they can't risk their pride or can't imagine the guns might add any weight to those choices, and then some point a gun flashes and someone's panicked and suddenly there's screaming and flying bullets.
roystgnr
3d ago
I don't think it was bias; the clip I ran across was focused on him smashing the tail light, and actually committing a crime is more damning than just running his mouth off.
But there is something to be said for dramatic irony, too. Thank you very much for the source!
(The clip I ran across wasn't from that APNews page - does that page actually publish any of the Pretti videos? You'd think a story headlined "New videos show..." would show new videos, but the only video player I can find on that page just gives me a mix of ads and unrelated headlines.)
roystgnr
3d ago
"assault me motherfucker!"
Are the words in quotation marks here a quote? Could you link the source? The only copy I've found of the earlier video didn't have anything like that, but possibly because the clip was too truncated.
roystgnr
3d ago
Government agents killing people in "panicked split-second decisions" does not make it not an execution
Of course it does. "Execution" isn't a word that includes legitimate or illegitimate attempts at self-defense, involuntary manslaughter, or even anything covered by the felony murder rule. The etymology is a contraction from "execution of death" (i.e. a death sentence) which uses the general/original meaning of execution, "the carrying out (of a plan, etc.)".
If a killing was pre-planned, it might be described as an execution. If a killing happened unplanned because the killer was on a hair-trigger and "Someone said gun!" then, even if it was criminal, it wasn't an execution.
roystgnr
3d ago
You're definitely not paranoid here. Anything done against federal officers would be a federal offense, so finding a prosecutor shouldn't be hard, but getting a fair jury might be trickier.
Even ending with jury nullification would probably be better than what actually happened, though. At least the arrests would get threats (whether to the officers' vehicles or to themselves, in hindsight) off the streets temporarily, and the optics of "Minnesotans think criminals should run free" would be much better for them than the optics of "DHS thinks due process is no substitute for violence". Plus, arrests come with arrest reports, which aren't nearly as good as bodycams but which are still less patchy than "we found some guy with a cell phone video a couple weeks later". Did DHS tackle this guy because they were pissed that he vandalized their car? Did he vandalize their car because he was pissed that he broke their rib, but there was some prior reason for the tackle?
roystgnr
3d ago
We now know ICE knew he was dangerous and crazy.
Did they? The DHS statement was that "DHS law enforcement has no record of this incident." A smashed-up DHS tail light, and a protestor with a broken rib, but apparently that's just another day ending in 'y' to everyone involved? Unless the first shooter happened to be one of the same officers from a week and a half before, by the time Pretti was killed he'd be just some guy to them again.
How did nobody involved in that first incident decide to make an arrest or file a report? Apparently that rib was broken while Pretti was tackled and pinned by five agents, but the agents afterward "quickly released him at the scene". I get that arresting people involves paperwork and isn't nearly as fun as breaking bones, but it is the standard approved method for getting criminals off the streets! To touch back on the topic of the original post: if our officers are going to act like Freikorps, then to reflect that status their uniforms don't need to be better, they ought to be worse!
roystgnr
4d ago
I'll counter with "(heat-safe) silicone cooking utensils", the ideal material for a house full of semi-competent cooks. All my stuff is 15 or 20 years old, and over that length of time everything eventually gets accidentally left on a hot pan, where wood surfaces turn to char, nylon and other plastics turn to goo and poison-smoke, and good silicone just shrugs it off and stays good-as-new.
Plus I'm too lazy to hand-wash (much less oil) wooden spoons like I do with my wooden cutting board, and I've noticed that wood tends to get gradually ruined by automatic dishwashing.
roystgnr
4d ago
I have a carbon steel wok, and it seems like the ideal material for that (light enough for wok tossing, quick temperature changes when I need them), but I can't see why I'd want it for a skillet. My wok doesn't season as nicely as my cast iron skillet, I don't move my skillet around while cooking so I don't care about light weight, and I do care about heavy weight - retaining as much heat as possible when we (sometimes over-...) load it with steaks is like 90% of the point of that skillet! For anything that doesn't need a long sear, what's the advantage of a carbon steel skillet over (thick, quality) stainless?
roystgnr
6d ago
FRED actually already has at least one discontinued M1 series, which was weekly data.
That's really interesting!
From a discoverability standpoint I'd think that the solution would be a simple hyperlink - the discontinued M1 page has a link to the new M1SL; just add a link in the other direction too and we're good.
But from a epistemological standpoint? The mathematician in me wants to say that it's silly to call the new data a new series, so long as it's the same thing being measured, even if it's evaluated with a different frequency. But the engineer in me is bowing in awe to whomever decided something like "we're using a different evaluation process at the lower frequency, therefore it's a different measurement even if it's the same measurand, therefore we're putting it in a different series".
roystgnr
6d ago
Yeah, that makes sense, but defining a new measure that we can calculate and giving it the same name isn't actually a solution to our inability to keep calculating the old measure, it's just a very interesting case of the streetlight effect error. We should end our M1 graphs at the date where we can no longer calculate the original M1 definition, start our "M1b" graphs at the date where we have enough data to calculate the new M1b definition, and never plot them as the same line on the same graph. OP here isn't the first or even the tenth person I've seen who didn't realize that that graph discontinuity was an artifact of a definition change, despite (or, really, because of) the paragraphs underneath that are needed to explain that.
roystgnr
6d ago
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Seriously, whose idea was this? We should have just kept calling the old definition M1, and created the new definition as M1.5 or M1b or something. Instead we've got a definition of M1 that's so screwed up, explaining precisely how screwed up it is is a famous problem in philosophy.
roystgnr
6d ago
I was debating whether I should move this to the new thread for visibility, but I just saw your "More as a way that I can refer to my own thought sin the future." edit and I'll respect that.
I think of violence being a knob for the left and a switch for the right.
I tend to sympathize with the position the right takes here, though it does get tricky: the physics of violent threats are a continuum, yet we have to break that continuity somewhere because the game theory of responses to violence demands discrete Schelling points.
I'll double down on your 2010s sci-fi-writer citation with a 1980s sci-fi-writer citation:
- Never throw shit at an armed man. Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man.
Niven uses as an example the events that Wikipedia call the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, though Google wants to autocomplete "1968 dnc" with "riots" ... and yet that's a surprisingly tame example, in hindsight? Hundreds of injuries, on both sides, but only one death, of someone who shot at the cops first? Impressive trigger discipline, despite widespread reports and video of the Chicago cops showing ... less discipline ... with clubs and gas and mace. If they were operating on a "switch" mentality, it seems it was a ternary rather than a binary switch, and they managed to hold it to that middle position.
And I don't see that the knob-vs-binary-switch distinction accurately describes the left-vs-right side of the conflict this time. Calling the officers in Minnesota "the right": are they really Switch people?
One of my most-upvoted comments on TheMotte (+34,-2) discusses the problems you get into when knob mentality meets switch mentality: when someone suddenly knocks you to the ground, thinking that they've just turned up that knob a bit, a Switch might reasonably decide that such a sudden and improbably-but-possibly-lethal attack means a switch has been flipped from "non-lethal" to "lethal".
In the latest videos of Pretti I've seen, his last intelligible words before the incident seem to be "do not push them into traffic!", and the officers only oblige in the sense that shortly afterward we see the officers suddenly shoving a woman into the curb instead of the street. Even if we presume that she's done something criminal, is this proper arrest procedure? It seems to be literally accelerating motion rather than arresting it. Pretti should have just filmed a sloppy arrest (or even an illegal assault under the color of law, if that's what it was), not gotten literally into the middle of it while armed, but in the end he was more-than-amply punished for not thinking like a Switch while trying to defend the woman knocked to the ground. Will there also be any punishment for the offense? None of the DHS officers drew a gun until after one took (and too-ambiguously announced) Pretti's un-drawn gun, so they likewise didn't seem to believe that the violence thus far had flipped a binary switch.
Perhaps they're a bunch of Knobs too.
Wait - are they calling you boring, or themselves? I've heard of a stereotype of some single women who badly want to be entertained despite being utterly unengaged themselves, but in the stereotype they're not self-aware about it.
When credentials weren't so important, efficiency made it seem sensible for teaching and student evaluation to be done by the same institution. Once credentials' importance skyrocketed, game theory concerns became paramount, but the mistake is now too ubiquitous to change.
I use Windows and OSX too, but I do everything I can on Linux because I prefer the user interface.
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