In California cops, family members of cops, and related personnel (e.g. police union officials) can get a special insignia on their license. So when they're pulled over and are asked to present their license....
The FOP (Fraternal Order of Police). Also a thing in NY and NJ.
Fun facts... the insignia you put on your license or on your car also has a thing like a registration tab... The FOP says its "to show your ongoing support", everyone else with a room temperature IQ knows its "to show you're 'paid up' on your protection money for the year".
Oh, and some enterprising souls have created "counterfeit" FOP insignia and stickers and other regalia (or for those tabs), and sold them on eBay... only to have the weight of the police union's attorneys come down on them with cease and desists, etc.
It's probably for the better they're taken down. In California, and perhaps NY and NJ, too, the status shows up on your DMV records, so when a cop runs your license or your plate (and I presume plates are scanned and run automatically), they'll see the discrepancy immediately. So someone is just asking for trouble by using fake stickers, just like if they went around flashing a gang sign when they're not actually a member.
That in itself blows my mind, why on earth should someone see your membership in this order? It's not a LE agency, and in many states the FOP allows membership for retired cops.
I do agree with what you're saying, though, but the issue to me is why that's even something that should show up when your plates are run, "Oh, you're a cop somewhere, or used to be".
I don't remember if the DMV status is actually FOP, or something else, but I knew a lawyer who worked with a police union who had this status. But that's just icing on the cake compared to stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers%27_Bi...
I have a friend who's a union leader (as in actually runs a sizeable union) and, in the eyes of most people, a straight-up socialist. He convinced me public sector unions are a horrible idea precisely because of the above. I had known about the above, but I always had trouble squaring my support for the right to unionize with the problems with public sector unions. He basically gave me permission to call a spade a spade.
What about the Federal register of LEOs who have been terminated or resigned to avoid termination? Very useful concept for transparency...
... but the police unions that represent approximately 70% of the nation's police have negotiated it into their CBAs that this register "cannot be used for hiring or promotional purposes".
I think the FOP stickers are quite bad, but it's obviously not a "protection racket"; virtually nobody around here has them, and for a protection scheme to work there has to be some pressure to buy in.
I think you're generalizing too much. Rural communities take gun safety seriously. Farming communities take farming equipment seriously. Kids grow up internalizing the seriousness of these things, which is communicated expressly and tacitly their whole lives by countless people around them, including their friends. Plus they encounter walking examples of what can go wrong, like a missing finger, burn scars (not careful around bonfires or burn pits), or bullet holes (I knew at least 2 or 3 kids growing up with scars from shot). But put those same kids or adults who are careful with those machines in a similarly dangerous but novel situation, and they'll do dumb shit like anyone else. I'm tempted to argue they're more likely to do something dumb because they have a false confidence from their experience with other dangerous situations, whereas suburban and city kids may be more likely to be too scared to play around with any dangerous machine or situation.
I lived on a farm for a year as a young kid (farmer rented a couple of trailers on his land). I remember one day I was hanging around the hog pen watching the giant hogs mill about, probably contemplating trying to pet one. Mr Austin came by and sternly told me to not to reach through the fencing, then knelt down and showed me his ear, which was missing a big chunk.
On the flip side, plenty of Rural and Suburban people are terrified by the city, which kids growing up in the city shrug off.
Rural folks might learn to respect a PTO or the varmint rifle by age 10, but city kids learn how to navigate the bus routes and subway. They learn how to walk on crowded streets, how to live among a lot of different people, including dangerous people(and how to avoid the conflict).
It's all quite interesting. Different kinds of toughness, different kinds of mental fortitude.
I think that there's a major difference in the resulting mindsets that the two types of experiences form, though.
The first learn that nature is always present and doing its best to kill you / wreck your harvest, and that it is only through man's intelligence and social bonds that we thrive. I would argue a corollary of this is that one cannot tolerate malicious or grossly neglectful people around.
The second group learns that other people are a liability and that bad actors are just a fact of life to be tolerated and worked around.
Both approaches are clearly optimal for their respective environment. The former seems like a stronger foundation for building a civilization on, though.
This is becoming such a weird romanticisation of rural Americana!
Your civilisation is being destroyed because a largely rural constituency is able to clean a rifle in 60s but appears to have no critical thinking skills when it comes to a certain New Yorker.
Yes it’s good to learn how to be resilient in nature, but it’s also important to learn how to get along with and manage relationships with larger groups who are not always to be trusted.
The point missing from this discussion is that because of hysteria over stranger danger (not supported out by any real evaluation of or changes in risk) and because we allow cars to dominate our urban spaces, city kids are being denied opportunities for independence they previously had.
That’s the real change that’s happened … and we’re replacing real urban experience with corporate attention economies.
City kids can get on the bus or urban rail in actual big cities. Even in places like urban philippines or mexico where there is [often] no public transport, collectivos take up this niche. Kids abound in these places even in places like Manila where traffic is way worse and way more homicidal, and they take the jeepnee to go to the next barangay.
It's really mainly in the suburbs where neighborhoods are choked off by bike unfriendly freeways and no for-hire transit.
> The first learn that nature is always present and doing its best to kill you
> The second group learns that other people are a liability
Sounds like nature is simply survival + entropy and sometimes that leads to mixed incentives. Rural folks also understand people are dangerous. Per capita violent crime and murder is higher in Rural areas.
That's why I find it interesting, they're different expressions of common survival needs.
San Francisco doesn't have alleys, either, not anymore than NYC. In older buildings, including older apartment buildings, trash cans are kept under stairways, in service rooms, in ground-level hallways, or for single-family homes in garages or backyards, then wheeled out to the sidewalk the night before collection day, blocking pedestrians. Then the garbage men have to roll those bins into the street, maneuvering around parked cars, etc. NYC doesn't have trash cans because New Yorkers perennially chose to continue to throw their trash on the ground like they always had. Blame unions, blame habituation, but you can't blame NYC's architecture and layout; nothing about it is unique compared to other cities globally or even nationally.
The fact China had a huge smog problem, with hundreds of millions of people choking on coal emissions like it was 19th century London, also had something to do with it.
And Shenzen as an example would be an absolute hellhole if they hadn't mandated all electric vehicles, from tuktuks, motorbikes (must be electric) and taxis. This would have impacted ability to engage in the rapid economic growth seen there.
In a city like San Francisco, relative to the status quo ante easier development is more likely to result in slower growth in home prices, not a reduction in home prices.
But that's not the reason most San Franciscans oppose development. The primary reasons are 1) they're convinced more development will raise prices, 2) they believe affordability must be mandated through price controls or subsidies (e.g. developers dedicating X% of units for below market prices), 3) they insist on bike shedding every development proposal to death, 4) they're convinced private development is inherently inequitable (only "luxury" housing is built).
Pretty much the only group of people in the city worried about housing stock increases reducing prices are developers trying to sell-off new units. But developers are repeat players, and they're generally not the ones lending support to development hurdles. Though, there is (was?) at least one long-time developer who specializes in building "affordable" housing--mostly at public expense, of course--who did aggressively lobby for development hurdles, but carefully crafted so he and only he could easily get around them.
Alternatively, since we're spit balling, the administrators and/or accounting staff decided to strategically error on the side of a shortfall because its politically impossible to get the state to fully fund the pension obligations or to stop effectively raiding it.
The Iran War never looked good on paper. The only people who thought it would succeed were Trump and the cast of characters he surrounded himself with. I doubt if many congressional Republican chickenhawks thought it would succeed.
The only way to oust the regime is with ground troops, ripping out the Revolutionary Guard and its tentacles. For all its corruption, Iran is far from a failed state, and there aren't factions waiting in the wings, ready and willing to take over the government with force. (There are political factions, to be sure, but they're already integrated into the government, though without leverage over the Revolutionary Guard.) The only armed group remotely capable of even trying would be the Kurds, but the US and in particular Trump screwed them over in the past, multiple times. Even if they thought they could go it alone (which they couldn't), there was zero chance they were going to enter the fray without the US committing itself fully with their own invasion force (i.e. success was guaranteed), because failure would mean ethnic Kurds would be extirpated from Iran, and might induce Iraq and Syria to revisit the question of Kurdish loyalty to their own states. And, indeed, Kurdish groups took a wait and see approach, assembling some forces but waiting to see how the US played their cards.
It's just so ridiculous. Nobody is going to be writing books about the mistakes or hubris of US intelligence, military strategists, or political scholars and analysts. Even the most diehard American proponents of regime change in Iran, at least those with any competence, could have predicted (and did predict) this outcome. This was 100% a Trump fiasco, though the whole country shares some culpability for this kind of epic failure by allowing someone like Trump to win the presidency... again.
It's a little ironic that its due in part[1] to Trump's reticence to commit ground forces that we've come to this pass. I hesitate to criticize that disposition, but at the same time it's malfeasance to start a war without being willing and able to fully commit to the objective.
[1] Assuming the war had to happen, which of course it didn't.
> The Iran War never looked good on paper. The only people who thought it would succeed were Trump and the cast of characters he surrounded himself with.
Not to nitpick, but “looked good on paper” was an euphemism for “the powers that be think its doable”. Amd yes, yiu are right: Trump surrounded himself with “loyalist” this time that won’t go against hime like in the previous administration, but with the very undesirable effect of amplifying the echo chamber he lives in.
And like someone said in this thread, lots of hubris.
I am no expert on Iran, but all documentaries that I’ve seen about this reach the same conclusion: you don’t invade Iran using ground forces.
An invasion likely would turn into a quagmire, but what keeps regime proponents eternally hopeful is that unlike Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc, Iran has a robust political system. The dictatorship notwithstanding, it has a vibrant parliament and, by global standards, a decent electoral system. The Ayatollah rules by following the maxim, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. If you could excise the Revolutionary Guard (a big if), you wouldn't necessarily need to change the government or its institutions. The existing liberal and moderate factions could quickly fill the vacuum, and would be happy to do so. You wouldn't get a pliant Iran, but that's for the better.
So by invasion the idea would be to rapidly, physically excise the apparatus the Ayatollahs use to maintain control. The structure and identity of that group is well known. It's a large group, and you couldn't catch all the leaders, but so long as you can stop their ability to enforce their rule through execution, you give the rest of the country time to shut them out of the institutions. In theory just weeks.
The problem is the very thing that makes regime change a plausibly good idea--a stable polity and modern, liberal-ish institutions--is the very thing that could result in failure. The Ayatollahs understood that a fragile, backwards system would be a weakness to their rule. Their military and bureaucracy are professional; they know how to follow orders, without being micromanaged, and even if everyone wants regime change, there's a huge collective action problem.
I use anchovy fillets in alot of recipes to add umami and nutrients, not just sauces but also things like meatloaf. Fishiness dissipates pretty quickly with heat, even faster with acidic ingredients like tomatoes, citrus, or vinegar. It's pretty easy to modulate fishiness, even with just acid. I double or triple the anchovies in a typical caesar dressing recipe, and if I feel I over did it just adding more lemon juice tamps it down.
One of my kids is pretty picky, even sensitive to onions, but doesn't seem to pick up on the anchovies. She'll eat fish, though, depending on mood, so maybe she's not the best benchmark.
I use massive amounts of anchovies in my cooking and various types of processed fish generally. They do not trigger the extremely strong “rancid fish” effect of e.g. Vietnamese fish sauce that some people can taste even in small quantities.
The anchovies disappear into the food. For people like me, the fish sauce never does, you just get a mouthful of rancid fish taste. People gave up trying to hide it from me years ago because nothing really seems to work.
IIRC, the Inuit reached North America from the West right about the time the Vikings reached it from the East, but they managed to colonize and stay, displacing the native inhabitants and eventually spreading to Greenland, again displacing the natives. Their technological advantages were their kayaks and hunting strategies, so presumably the displacement was less violent.
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