Yes, it has always worked that way, an arrest is not a conviction, it's an unproven claim. Body/car cams on cops may weed out some of the bad apples but here in Oz the cops are on the whole are decent people doing a dirty job and it should be noted that the vast majority of the body cam videos show citizens behaving badly and cops behaving with self-restraint and caution.

Having said that, when the cop's political masters start outfitting police stations like they do a military base and promote the regular use of guerilla tactics such as "no knocks" and swat teams in a residential setting, you are a fair way down the road to a police state, which is an entirely different thing to a police force. As the Stanford prison experiments so vividly demonstrated humans very rapidly descend into a violent master/slave relationship if the environment they find themselves in meets certain criteria (eg: Abu Ghraib, Nazi Germany).

It's a very deep seated behaviour in humans, we all have a ruthless dictator and a cowering slave with us just waiting for the right environmental triggers to emerge. Religious people have called it "good" and "evil" for millennia but incorrectly blamed it on angels and demons (as opposed to the naturally evolved behaviour of our species). Other than being aware we are all susceptible we can't do much to avoid such behaviour in ourselves, but we can set up political and social systems that discourage such environments from forming in the first place. The fact the US still embraces the death penalty and has such a high number of prisoners compared to the rest of the planet, is IMO a 'canary in the coal mine' for the emergence of a police state, statistically speaking the canary is dangling from its perch by one leg.

Capitalism has several logical impossibilities embedded in it that don't make sense to anyone but an economist, aside from "perfect information" we also have invalid assumptions like "rational actors" and "infinite growth".

Uber's victims are all the honest, hard working, drivers and companies that choose to obey the law.

"No fault" divorce laws would fix that problem, under such laws the content of the call would be considered irrelevant.

I lived in a small aussie town in the 80's, picking up the phone and finding two strangers having a conversation on the other end was a common occurrence.

They were afraid the drones would be sucked into a jet engine or smash through a windscreen, they are also afraid of large birds for the same reason but there is fuck all they can do to stop natural bird strikes.

I don't know about this particular fire but the growth is plausible in the right conditions, the big fires here in Oz that are driven by strong desert winds are capable of igniting spot fires up to 20 km downwind from the main front. Not much you can do to tame a fire that spreads that quickly and ignores firebreaks, except get out of it's way. 20 minutes in the early stages of such a fire is a very long time and can make a huge difference to the outcome.

Not sure that shooting drones is the most practical solution, I think pointing a firehose at the thoughtless pricks using them would be much more effective.

Money is not the worst part of divorce.

The business model appears to be, entice people to behave badly for free then blackmail them for $20 each when they change their mind, I assume they picked $20 because it would come under the minimum threshold for most 'small claims' courts. It beggars belief that commercialised blackmail is not a criminal offense. Sure most of the victims are amoral cockroaches scurrying for cover, still doesn't make it right.

Watch the clip I posted below. I believe the GP's point is there appears to be; no flock, one flock, multiple flocks, and the flock can appear to 'instantaneously jump' from place to place. IANAQP but I think it's a very neat way to visualise a quantum jump. If you understand the math of QM that's great, math is the language used for the best description we have of nature. The rest of us who barely remember what an eigenvalue is from the math degree we did decades ago have to rely on tenuous analogies and imperfect metaphors when describing it with a 'natural' language, such as english.

Disclaimer: I don't think an electron is composed of a flock of smaller particles, I visualise it as a kind of "knot" in a force field, sometimes the field lines are "pulled" tight enough to observe the knot. Other times it's like a loose extension cord, you not sure if there's a knot until you start to untangle it.

Thanks, that's the way I understand it. I haven't heard the flock of birds analogy before but I have seen large flocks like this one in Australia.

Give people a fucking warning before you post.
That sudden hard-right turn into political lala land almost gave me whiplash.

Clue: If you're watching a woman work and she looks up and flashes a smiles at you, you smile back. It's not at all "scary", at worst it's good manners, at best it's an invitation to approach her.

The far side was hilarious and works wherever the English language is spoken, Bloom county has never made me chuckle, I find the points it makes obvious rather than clever. Perhaps it is cultural, after all Bloom County is squarely aimed at an American audience.