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robin21

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then disperse them

This is more difficult than you expect. Police are drastically outnumbered in any crowd control situation. You can watch videos from Minneapolis riots where police just watch windows being smashed and shops being looted because they don’t have enough people.

It takes more than once officer to arrest someone too so things like Kettling need to be done for safety of everyone.

The rules are simple: if you get dispersion order it’s time to go. It’s not like they are not given a choice. I think a lot of people showing up to protests are just a bit unaware of the law. The number of times you see someone complaining about being asked to move on and they shout back that they are “on the sidewalk - can’t I just walk in my own city blah blah”. It’s just a misunderstanding of the law or a willingness to violate democratic law.

The vast majority of people never have negative interactions with police and actually are thankful for them keeping their communities safe. The ones that do have problems are those that resist arrest and detainment in a society where everyone is armed.

Hence, I wouldn’t know the taste.

I acknowledge the historical precedent but it’s been a long time since such things and I prefer to look at the facts of the situation at hand (as would be done in a court of law) rather than implying conspiratorial motives from history.

Only comment on the entire thread that makes sense.

It’s amazing that every comment seems to imply sinister motives to every action by every police officer, when the more obvious answer is that most police actually do their jobs well and there are circumstances they must deal with that commenters here are not privy to or want to perpetuate a narrative.

The same commenters of they met police or had friends who were police would think very differently. Police are dehumanized to the extent that people want to go out and attack them in the streets

I don’t think any officer goes out wanting to attack people and start fights. Look at videos of police. They stand in a line and have projectiles thrown at them and verbal abuse yelled at them. 90% of the time they have to stand there and do nothing. And if it gets too much they clear the protests.

The vast majority of society do not want to go yell at police in the street.

The biggest problem is takeovers of protests by anarchists and I don’t know the solution to this. If anarchists consistently escalate protests then it takes away people’s rights to protest. But I see this as a problem to be solved by protestors.

Do cops think there are thugs cloaking themselves in fake press gear ?

Yes. Everyone has phones now. Everyone can claim they are press or they have a YouTube channel. These people don’t wear press gear.

A lot of the time the police are not suspecting press and they get more access so people claiming they are press are more of a threat, which is why they must verify.

Say you are trying to light a fire in a police station or break a barricade. Should police allow you to loiter and go wherever you want rather than stay with the crowd?

If you think it through you will realize that unless identification is done it creates immense risk.

Journalists will always complain on an individual level, but police are working on reducing threat level and maintaining order of a wider context.

You ignore the facts of this specific case. Anecdata indeed.

Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington says throughout the night, and particularly from 8 p.m. onward, officers came under threat from a variety of new individuals who began to approach and contest the area around the police department with items like baseball bats, plywood, shields and "liquid products."

There were reports of some protesters shaking the perimeter fencing, while lobbing objects over the fence at officers on the other side.

Harrington outlined how attempts to breach the outermost ring of fencing by more belligerent protesters was handled with some amount of restraint, with officers repairing the breach and backing off rather than immediately proceeding to clear the area around the station.

While law enforcement leaders say they had hoped to continue facilitating the more peaceful elements of the demonstrations with a more distanced approach, there were pockets of aggressive behavior that posed a threat to officers, as well as attempts to breach the station's outer ring of fencing, which spurred action from law enforcement to clear the immediate area.

The protests became unlawful and rightfully so.

A lot of journalists like myself were slow to leave the area,” Colt said. “We didn’t think we needed to, and we wanted to cover what was happening.”

Colt described police then corralling protesters and media into one group and yelling for them to get “flat on our stomachs.”

Sounds like if you had the full context it wouldn’t be so outrageous.

How do we know people are press and not pretending to be to sneak behind police lines and set fire to the police station or things like that.

Thanks for the insights. I like the more nuanced spectrum you present. I find myself too often in a simplistic left/right divide. I think there is great value in a more fine-grained spectrum coming into common usage.

The conundrum that stands out for me though is when one group defends another group’s right to censor, and then that group uses that right, to censor the other. I think that’s where we are today. The legislative restraint of the Republicans to regulate seems they are living up to their principles to their own disadvantage. But this just leaves them to be taken advantage of by the other group to the point of severely damaging the next election prospects of Trump runs again.

Will defenders of freedom always be subjugated to those who want to use freedom to restrict others? Sustaining this freedom is the challenge of humanity and a very careful balance. We’ve seen so many free countries fall to left/right authoritarianism over the ages. It’s almost like we cycle back and forth between authoritarianism and freedom. This century will surely be a big test.

I think we are quickly heading into left authoritarianism which is ironic because the most vocal complaints are of right authoritarianism which I really didn’t see any evidence of the past 4 years. It was just a trendy thing to say. I don’t even know where the accusation of Trump authoritarianism began.

Mm it’s a tricky situation. Ideally the free market would solve it by coming up with another service with an alternative moderation strategy. Which may yet still happen. In 50-100 years maybe Twitter and Facebook will no longer dominate and alternatives will emerge. I think there is a big resistance to big tech that will only grow and ideology of social media company employees and leaders will balance out.

Because big tech is controlled by liberals they can get away with this stuff without repercussion. But it’s quite obvious that if this happened in reverse...which there is plenty of precedent throughout history...you would see the left complaining.

The reasonable person would think: this is a bad precedent to set and it’s the reason we allow free speech because if the tables turn on the censors, they wouldn’t like it.

Liberals outside of the US find it troubling too.

Anyway, let’s hope the free market solves it in the end. I think tech ideological diversity is changing too for the better.

74MM ppl voted for someone who used to be President and is now permanently banned from all social media platforms. This article agrees with that. If you were one of those people, you would not want to associate with this company.

This is the reason I don’t like this whole “everyone should do therapy” movement and also the “mindfulness/meditation” movement.

It creates this hyper-awareness which creates more problems by making everyone over-analyze each other and overly-sensitive to things.

This over-sensitivity is such a negative for US culture. If you think long enough about things you can find everything triggering in some way.

This really needs a tl;dr summary. And I think especially so given that they want to make things “simple”.

data structures

Spending too much time upfront thinking about the perfect data structure is a bad idea.

Long walks on the beach and fasting is not going to deliver your perfect data structure.

People (other than yourself) using your product and observing evolving requirements over time will reveal an optimal data structure.

Rapid iteration and real-world usage is the key. I can’t count the number of times I thought I had the perfect design only to implement it and not find it useful to myself - after having thought so long about it.

node

Node is great. And it’s great at iterating quickly which should be the goal of any project.

The post comes off very naive and a classic grass is always greener vibe.

And it sounds like the exact kind of algorithmic kludge a programmer would introduce if her underlying foundation had a few flaws.

Why use a gendered pronoun here? It’s a bit unfair that the only non-specific gendered pronoun relates to a bad programming practice.

The only war with China is a trade war and that is only fought by convincing the public to endure the pain. I think everyone would welcome the ability to cut China out of the global supply chain if they could, it’s just about getting the people to go along with it.