That's the real problem. Not the cost of locking them up but the cost of firing them.

We turned police training into a racket for well-connected political operatives.

This means that even though the training is substandard and focused on mostly violence that the vast majority of police officers will never get a chance to engage in (73% of cops will never draw their sidearm in their entire career) we spend a fortune training them.

This means that every single municipality is desperate to snap up any police officer who is already trained and that they don't have to spend the money training again. And that means you can fire them all you want they're just going to go to the next municipality over and all you've really done is giving them a 30 minute commute.

On top of that for tax purposes you have a shitload of municipalities because well to do people don't like paying for the services they use in the main city so they incorporate their own cities a few miles away from the main line City so they can avoid paying taxes for the stores and services used there. This has a side effect of there being a virtually unlimited number of municipalities for fired cops to run off to. They will have a long since retired by the time they run out of them with cops who have hopped munis three or four or five times not being uncommon.

As for locking them up that's basically impossible. The supreme Court and the courts in general have granted them immunity from anything and everything unless the public gets so pissed off they start threatening to riot or worse vote Democrat.

There is a complex system and a complex mess here that would need to be completely dismantled. And unfortunately the American left weighing are dumb as dirt so instead of talking about that in a useful and effective manner they come up with shit like defund the police and freak the public out because nobody ever taught them marketing or what a dog whistle is

Seeing some very negative prices in the mid west (I think that's the right term) states too. Not even free electricity, people are being paid to use it.

Can you get a tariff that pays you to use energy in the US? Here in Europe we have some, and if you play the game right with a home battery your energy can be pretty much free.

Solar panels are actually very good for the environment. They can help over-farmed land recover by providing shade. Livestock and some crops can live under them very happily.

They are good for your house too, they reflect some of the heat away in the summer.

I'm glad that they made the pre-orders fair. I'm not after one, but too often they open in the middle of the night (for Europeans) and by the time we are awake are sold out or all the "early bird" deals are gone. I hate that, I'm not paying more that someone else just because they found out about it first, or I had to be asleep so I could work the next day.

This way where there is a large window and then the queue order is random is much better.

They've been pretty open about it. At least when they don't think anyone is listening.

The most famous example is probably mitt Romney being recorded by the help potentially costing him the election. But a quick Google search for something like "billionaires talking about the labor market" yields plenty of good results.

They are a little more careful since Romney but they still slip up all the time because frankly they don't think very much of you.

They're after low wages. You have to think about the labor market as a whole not just your slice of it. When you get to the c level that's what you're doing. You're hanging out with your other multi multi-millionaire or billionaire golf buddies talking about how you're going to lower wages in your industry so they can lower wages in their industry so that everybody's wages can be lower.

This is important because even if it costs you slightly more overall you get a lot more power out of it. And it's not about money at that level. It's about power. It's about the ability to tell you what to do and you have to do it or they take away your access to food and shelter and healthcare.

That's the difference between you and them. They think in a completely different way about everything.

This is just a camera that makes sure the driver is looking forwards out the windscreen, and doesn't have their eyes closed or looking down at their phone for extended periods. The data isn't sent anywhere or recorded, there is no spying.

There is plenty of shit to be angry about, without making up more.

Actual journalists didn't stop doing journalism by choice. They were fired and it's difficult for them to get by without an income.

There are some people left trying to do journalism. Mostly keeping their heads down and hoping that psychopath like Elon Musk don't rip them off while waiting for the public to come back to their senses...

I guess what I'm saying is I'm not blaming the journalists. The propagandists can go fuck themselves. Anyone working for Fox News knows what they are. I dabbled a little in journalism in high school and college and I respect actual journalists. It's a tough and miserable and largely thankless job.

Most of that money was spent bribing politicians because what they're doing is illegal. They also were paying the drivers a reasonable amount of money in order to tell the public that it was okay that all of the traditional protections for workers had been gutted.

So yes Uber did have a short-term amount of money they had to put out in order to do something profoundly illegal and antisocial and something that your great-grandparents died to prevent...

But they weren't losing money because of a lack of profitability or even how much they were paying the drivers. They could have of course competed honestly with the taxi cab system but they were massively underpricing taxi cabs.

So like I said yes paying the driver's okay will cause fares to go up slightly. This means that people who take Ubers for casual use like say I don't feel like driving to the grocery store or kids putzing around in them will no longer be able to afford them. That will more than be made up for by the people who have to take a taxi cab for a variety of reasons. For example every year I go see my eye doctor and I don't have a choice I have to take a cab because everyone I know works during the day so I don't have anyone to drive me in the middle of the week and when they dilate my eyes I'm basically blind. So yes they can double the price of my trip and I will pay it.

But here's the dirty Little secret they already doubled the price of that trip. Because they have a shitload of data and they know I have to pay it

You need to accept that you're wrong. That we can have a decent civilization that pays people a living wage and you won't have to give up your lifestyle for it. That we don't have to torture people just to make you happy.

On the other hand you might not want to accept that because you might be one of those deeply unhappy people who desperately need somebody else to be even more unhappy. I meet a lot of guys like that and they are always anti labor and right wing

People still need cabs. Also Uber is a highly profitable company.

On the other hand if the only way we can have a transportation system is borderline slave labor then you might have a point. But they're not going to curl up and die what's actually going to happen is that the need for cabs is still there the prices are going to shoot up and people are going to have to pay it. Yeah you might have fewer people using them for convenience but when you need to get to the airport you need to get to the airport.

If however our economic system is so dysfunctional that we have to have 15 to 20% in abject poverty for it to be functional then that's not sustainable and there's going to be Mass violence very soon.

And always remember, no matter how good a shot you are or how good a shot you think you are you're always going to run out of bullets before the world runs out of desperate people with nothing to lose.

The part that pisses me off is that the company responsible for the shoddy work flat-out admitted it was their shoddy work. Of course they didn't do this until they were at risk of being under oath but you know how that goes...

And the part that pisses me off is that anyone who pays any attention to Trump has to know or has to at least easily be able to find out that he is constantly lying to them in the most obvious ways imaginable implying he has the lowest opinion of them possible and they still love Trump.

So this may sound insane but you can actually use the internet for something besides getting angry. You can do a little bit of googling and pretty easily confirm what I said.

The point of my comment was I was not aware that Gloria Steinem was a CIA asset at all. Of course no I did not take a handful of Internet comments at face value. But I found it striking enough to be worth doing a little bit more reading.

That's how critical thinking works. You get a new piece of information and you decide if it's worth confirming and if it is then you confirm it.

Journalists used to. If you're a good journalist then somebody should be accusing you of harassment.

In the 2024 election we basically fired all the journalists. And by we I mean the billionaires who own our media. I watched dozens of journalists get dog walked for really basic elementary journalism. The slightest criticism of trump was enough to get you shit canned. It got so bad we created a new term for it, sane washing.

If you've ever wondered why the coverage between Trump's mental decline and biden's mental decline was so different there's your answer.

Back in the day it's what the civil Rights guys called good trouble.

Shows up the break them up... Or at least the pinkertons. Fun fact the Pinkerton detective agency still exists and they are still union busting.

Gloria Steinem died recently. I never paid her much mind I knew the right wing had a giant hissy fit about her all the time. But it turns out the left wing didn't like her either. She was a CIA plant. Like you can do some googling and discover that it's real.

Basically the labor movement and the feminist movement were cross-pollinating so the CIA recruited people from the feminist movement to break that up and they were quite successful. I found this out when I read a few comments sections after she died and people were complaining about that...

It is absolutely crazy that elements of our government have repeatedly been used directly against labor movement in an effort to lower pay and wages and we all just kind of either pretend it's didn't happen or shrug our shoulders and say what are you going to do that's the government? No. That's not the government. That's not how governments are supposed to function. You have to actually take part in politics to keep that shit under control. And you can't just do away with the government because if you try that somebody else will build the same power structures. It's called a power vacuum and you can't pretend it's not a thing. I mean you can but you'll still have the consequences...

It's like finding out that the Federal reserve raising interest rates is how they engineer a recession. And then reading all the euphemisms for that from economists...