We've had a marked increase of these fixed license plate readers popping up all over my community (~30,000 pop) supposedly for the purpose of catching kidnappers. I know of at least 4 between my house and my office (7 miles).

That is absolutely a noble cause and according to grok there are roughly 2000 per year in my state. However it also notes that less than 4% of those "not family disputes" related, and the stereotypical abduction is only several hundred a year country-wide.

Which means that's a rather large expense (liberty, and dollars) for an extremely rare event. Which also means that can't possibly be the real reason for these fixed plate readers that are popping up all over South Western Virginia.

20 years ago when it required a human in the loop watching traffic camera feeds looking for a specific vehicle/plate it seemed reasonable limit of the technology that kept the privacy aspect somewhat in check.

But now with AI vision, each plate can be detected a location/time stamped and stored for decades. Given police historical access to every vehicle that ever passed one of these readers for all of time; Someone robs a 7-Eleven and only knows the guy was in a red truck... now every red truck that was ever picked up by a reader in town within 30 minutes of said robbery is a person of interest.

Do they mean a 45% increase in installs, or a 45% increase in the quarter-over-quarter upgrade rate?

I.e., did they really gain almost a half a billion installs in 3 months? That's hard to imagine even considering the deprecation of Windows 10.

But if they went from 10,000 users a month to 14,500 users a month that is MUCH different story.

I've been calling it my "Artificial Intern". You still have to assume it doesn't know what it's doing without constant instruction, however it's happy to do it over again without complaint.

Do you then suppose that double-checking an potential false positive is somehow more expensive than sending a squad to a school?

One does not necessarily imply the other, I hope you can see that. There are literally millions of people that are hear illegally - none of which are considered citizens of the US according to Law.

So it is possible that 'enemy' within is actually reference to those that have illegally entered the country AND with the intent to do us harm.

I don't buy the boogieman argument that all illegals want to do us harm, or come to live off our social programs. But I'd be an idiot to assume that ALL of them are here to be a net benefit to society.

It absolutely is your opinion - well at least your opinion on how you interpreted the meaning behind 'enemy within'. I'd hope you'd at least grant that there are other completely valid interpretations of that statement.

And a Democrat president DID do similar; Your guy Obama used ICE to deport 3.1 million illegal immigrants during his administration. Please show me the outrage then? He even had a nickname "Deporter in Chief".

So since you begged the question; I'll ask you - Did you support Obama when he used ICE to deport 3.1 million illegals?

You usually have decently insightful posts, but in no possible way was NCLB a purely right-wing agenda. Sure Bush (R) is the one that formalized it in 2002 - but the Senate passed it 91-8. I can't fathom how anyone would call that right-wing when it was completely bipartisan vote.

And NCLB isn't law any more, it was replaced with ESSA in 2015 by Obama (D) - and was passed by the Senate 85-12 - again almost completely bipartisan support.

So BOTH sides fucked this up, this isn't a republican vs. democrat problem - this is a government has all but proven it isn't good at education problem.

https://ballotpedia.org/No_Chi...

https://ballotpedia.org/Every_...

TLDR; DeekpSeek will happily have a honest discussion about Tienanmen Square.

I run DeepSeek R1 locally, and this is the 'chat' I had with it. I did remove the 'Thinking' stages for brevity.

> What significant even happened at Tiananmen Square?

> What was the worst thing to happen at that event?

That's why I shifted to Jellyfin. I don't think it directly supports remote streaming - but that is likely solved with some dynamic dns tricks.

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League would disagree with you. They flat out said it was an awkward gesture, but not a Nazi Salute.

https://x.com/ADL/status/18814...

My point was, at least to the parent comment I replied to, it that Trump is in NO WAY responsible for the current technology tariffs that Biden's administration imposed.

Your counter-point is exactly what? That ours is "literally the best economy in the world right now".

Please define economy for me. Lots of people would point to GDP, and in that case your absolutely correct. We have the best GDP right now, as we also had the best GDP when Trump was president, as well as Clinton, Bush, etc.... In fact, compared to the World we've had the best economy since at least 1960. So you can't give ANY president in recent times credit for that one.

https://statisticstimes.com/ec...

But I think what people FEEL is related to inflation, because that directly affects the pocket book right now. And Biden's were the highest they've been since the 1980's. Yes it's been easing off, but even this years numbers are higher than the any other of the 10 years before Biden.

https://www.macrotrends.net/24...

So in summary, GDP wise not much has changed in comparison to other economies of the world, but inflation wise we've (global, not just US) screwed up big time. And right or wrong, globally every country has blamed their own current administration for their respective woes, which is why globally it seems most major elections have shifted hard right.

The FED only has one lever to pull (interest rates) to get inflation under-control, and to Biden's credit I believe they did just that. The voters also only have one lever to pull (R vs. D), and it sucks.

Please remind me who has been president for the last 3 years, I must have missed something.

Straight from NBC, emphasis mine.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/w...

That's a good question, and one I've spend way too much time thinking about.

We are have some simple things like not being able to yell fire in a theater - because it can/does lead to direct harm.

I always wondered, would it be fair to enforce a system such that if a News outlet said something that turns out to be provably false, then they must spend and equal amount of time (in the same general time window, not 2am) talking about how they got it wrong.

i.e., if they spend 2-3 hours over the Month stating that some Senator from Texas was a Pedo, and he's later found to be innocent, then they should be required to spend 2-3 hours admitting they were wrong.

Now I fully understand that forced speech is just as bad. But if we are talking about licensing... Should we as a society continue to tolerate media outlets that knowing lie/slander/mislead? Or should we expect more from them - only reporting facts not offering opinion. I mean how awesome would that be to just report facts. And if they are caught lying, or implying, or opining, they they either accept the terms of the punishment, or lose their broadcast rights.

Ah yes, the standard Democrat method of jumping straight away into personal attacks. That's the best way to convince someone that they are wrong. Not.

Jan 6th was just another protest - I'm not sure how your mental gymnastics make it anything other than that.

And if you thing BLM was a noble cause... well I see nothing noble about burning down entire cities.

Was the BLM protests secretly the Republicans?

Oh Jan 6th happened, zero doubt there were a few idiots (~150) that stormed the capital and cost upwards 1.5 million in property damage.

But we also haven't forgotten the "mostly peaceful protests" that lasted for most of 2020 and the first half of 2021 - that cost the US 1-2 Billion dollars in damage.

I'm sorry, but Jan 6th is a micro-event compared to the BLM protests; 150 arrested vs over 10,000 arrests with BLM protests.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda...

I'm not quite as old as the grandparent poster, and I understand his position and I don't think it comes from a place of superiority - not so much a "I loved Metallica before you did", but "I loved this at a time when looked down upon". I can easily see how the two can get conflated.

When I was a kid in the 70-80s, any one who was good with computers was a geek. Not the kind of cool/smart kid geek that folks think about now. We were the downcast, the picked on, we were the bottom of society. We loved computers more than we loved people.

So while, yes there were some who weren't that good, for the most part folks were programmers because they loved the challenge, loved the creativity of it, and loved seeing what new tech came next AND were willing to pay the social cost. Once it was popular and the social cost disappeared, it naturally attracted a more broad scope of folks. And once the money was good, it would attract the folks that were only attracted to the money, leading to a markedly wider distribution of ability.

But I see it as a net positive personally; I'm no longer consider the downcast, people have a respect for what I can do - and with the rise of popularity there is a much much larger pool of people who are willing to consider it, many of which are really good at it.