I preordered one for $20k (so I'd get it earlier), but it's going to live in only public areas of house, outdoors, etc., due to privacy concerns. I think it will probably be sufficiently useful to be worthwhile, but I'll probably wait a few weeks from public launch to be more sure.
Seemed weird to me that they turned it into a secondary site; we were fighting relatively incapable-of-force-projection people in the mountains and deserts at the time, but even if Russia wasn't a clear threat in 2008, it seems like it should have been obvious EMP, conventional infiltration attacks, etc. would be reasonable threats in the future. Unless you're willing to go to fully dispersed command (and thus risk a commander at theater or below level launching on his own authority...), or run 24x7 airborne looking glass (which ended in 1990, and presumably was even more costly than modernizing Cheyenne Mountain Complex), what we had from 2008-2015 was clearly less survivable.
According to Daniel Ellsberg the US did implement a scheme where regional commanders could use nuclear weapons without explicit authority from the President:
"Walking out of the theater, Ellsberg turned to his friend, another nuclear denizen, and said, “That was a documentary.”"
In descriptions of the process it always amuses me that they talk about failure to receive Radio 4 being the test (perhaps of it also being broadcast on long wave)...
I don't understand why this suddenly happened (except if asked by the USG in response to the recent scare/reality over rare earths).
The 50% ownership by a sanctioned entity was a reality for a while, and was an issue as soon as the purchase. This didn't change recently. So, this action should have been part of the pre-purchase review (CFIUS in the US...I assume there is an equivalent in China). On the face of it, this all could have been avoided by having a non-sanctioned entity (including another random Chinese company) own enough of the company to get sanctioned entity ownership below 50%.
Definitely US pressure. NL is always eager to get on the good side of the US, even if they get nothing in return. For example participation in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza today.
There are a few other downsides to borosilicate vs soda lime in a home kitchen (I still have euro and vintage only); if borosilicate breaks it is somewhat more dangerous.
I am in awe. Their cookie banners were consistently annoying but probably didn’t hurt any individual this much. If I were an EU resident I would probably learn about “you can just do things” from this.
I am an EU resident and I'm about to cancel the APP3 order that I made. If Apple doesn't want to comply with the regulations that protect me(1) I'm not blaming the EU, I'm talking my money somewhere else.
Actually this is the second time I'm frustrated by this, I was surprised to discover that iPhone Mirroring is also blocked. This is strike 2 for me, one more and I won't buy another Apple product.
1) the EU has a lot of stupid regulations but the DMA is not one of them
Only they know what they are afraid of. But seems obvious that a feature like that should also be available with third-party headphones, the translation happens in the phone, not the AirPods. There is no technical reason other than locking users into their products.
I'm sure Apple would say that the experience would not be the same with other (lesser) headphones, and that damages the user experience, etc. Some people would believe that's the reason, but the EU won't and neither do I.
They are complying in the same way that the rich kid who keeps getting called out for using his hands on the football (soccer) field complies with the rules by taking his ball and going home.
If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.
(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)
For me it doesn't really raise any interesting questions at all: things are statistically not 'bad' per se, besides, you could trade your democracy for an autocracy or a dictatorship and end up 'safe' from small crime but meanwhile have your whole country looted.
Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).
Democracy gets traded for dictatorship because someone shows up and says "I might not be perfect but I'm a hell of a lot better than these schmucks who've been ruining things". And when that person saying that stuff shows up at a point in time when the people who have been in charge of things have run the country into the ground with wars, debts and policies that give people no hope that things will get better, it's a pretty compelling message.
It would be, if it were true. But the premise isn't true and the solution isn't true either. It just sounds good and people tend to respond from fear and other emotions rather than rationality.
> I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them
What do you count as garden variety here and what makes you say the government is trustworthy? I think law enforcement has become extremely bureaucratic and that generally lawyers, but especially DC lawyers, view the criminal justice system as racist so they made it much less punitive and much more bureaucratic. The end result is more crime. Trump saw an opportunity and he is exploiting it even though it's stupid to fight crime this way. I would bet the worst that comes from this is we run an expensive experiment in seeing if NG patrols reduce crime. In a few months, this will be forgotten about. If I am wrong and this turns into a coup d'état or autocratic takeover, you can collect $100 from me.
All of them. In the context of a political appointment, "merit" reflects ability to carry out the President's political agenda. Trump's appointees have been phenomenally effective at doing what Trump promised to do.
“Merit” can mean different things depending on the nature of the job. Juilliard using auditions instead of SATs is still merit-based admissions. But “merit” never means someone’s race or ethnicity.
Put differently, DEI is when you have double standards based on race. Colleges do think test scores = merit, because that’s the primary criterion for selecting among within the group of whites/asians. It’s DEI when they use other factors to try and achieve desired racial balancing.
1) DEI can be done badly, of course, and in an ideal world would be unnecessary, I think anyone on either side of any spectrum wants merit over anything else, but for various historical, systemic, as well as unconscious bias [1], this has not been the case, statistically. DEI on the ~interviewer~ side, not the interviewee side can and has addressed [1]. I fail to see the downside. The only way to claim it's unfair would be to confess that [1] is real, meaning some solution is needed, meaning DEI has done ~some~ good [2].
I agree that quotas are certainly bad in principle, and many times in practice, but I have seen no credible claim where the status quo is a meritocracy, leading to the blatant showing in the current admin.
2) Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous (or any previous) administration.
It’s not only unnecessary, it’s illegal. If you think historic discrimination had negative effects, just target the negative effects among all people similarly situated.
> Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous administration
Aggressively pursuing the President’s agenda: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. Political appointees are just that—political. The relevant standard of merit isn’t who is the best nerd, but who will best carry out the agenda the President campaigned on. The whole point is that voters can change the direction of the executive branch through electing the President, who in turn appoints like-minded cabinet secretaries.
> Speaking in an NPR interview in November, Kennedy said Trump had given him three “instructions”: to remove “corruption” from health agencies, to return these bodies to “evidence-based science and medicine”, and “to end the chronic disease epidemic”.
Do you believe political agenda to be a suitable merit here as opposed to education and field work?
It doesn’t matter what I “believe,” what matters is what kind of job the constitution creates. The appointment of department heads is an exercise in democratic and political accountability. The point is for people to vote for a president who will staff the administration with people who will carry out his agenda. The Supreme Court explained this function of the Appointments Clause in the Arthrex case: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1434_ancf.pdf (see pp. 6-8 in particular).
Here, “education and field work” matter only to the extent voters care about those things. Obama voters cared about those things, so Obama appointing the best nerds is consistent with the constitutional design. But if voters have lost faith in Harvard Medical School, then education is actually contrary to “merit.”
In this context, RFK is the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history. He campaigned with Trump talking about his kooky ideas and then people voted for the ticket. People voted for the guy who promised to do something different because they had lost faith in the nerds. The whole point of the constitution is for people to be able to do that. Trump moreso than any recent President got on stage with the people who was going to help run the country if you voted for him. That’s the constitutional design! That’s democracy!
> The whole point of the constitution is for people to be able to do that. Trump moreso than any recent President got on stage with the people who was going to help run the country if you voted for him. That’s the constitutional design! That’s democracy!
No one has argued differently. My argument stemmed only from your, to me previously unfamiliar, definition of merit.
> But if voters have lost faith in Harvard Medical School, then education is actually contrary to “merit.”
> In this context, RFK is the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history
I take this to mean we agree that the current cabinet is the polar opposite of the previously historically stable definition of meritorious, but are wholly merited appointments under your clarified definition.
Though to be nit-picky, RFK Jr would not be the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history, but rather ranked based on either voting results or approval rating as merit is then simply a function of the elected representative appointing them.
What distinction would you make between the terms democracy and meritocracy? Are they functionally the same under your definition of merit?
> My argument stemmed only from your, to me previously unfamiliar, definition of merit...
> What distinction would you make between the terms democracy and meritocracy? Are they functionally the same under your definition of merit?
I don't think I'm using "merit" in an unusual way. I think you'd agree that the specific criteria that constitutes "merit" depends on the nature of the job. You use different criteria for NFL players versus college professors.
I think the problem is that we're talking about political appointees, which because of the nature of democracy are very different from other kinds of jobs. In the political context, "merit" is a meta concept that depends on what the voters prioritize. In some contexts, voters want a traditionally credentialed person. This is true even in the Trump administration: Scott Bessent is a Yale graduate hedge fund manager. But in other areas, Trump voters have grown to distrust the institutions, like the medical establishment and the intelligence services, and "merit" in that context means someone that will upend those agencies.
Actually answering the question you quoted would inform whether or not you're using "merit" in an unusual way. How does "meritocracy" exist as a term when "democracy" already encapsulates the political representation of merit you describe?
That is not the definition of merit that I'm familiar with. You are welcome to your own set of definitions, of course.
The only thing the Trump appointees (including the supreme court ones) have been phenomenally effective at is deconstructing the USA. And they're not done yet.
Trump is systematically engaging in performative actions to distract from the simple fact that the USA has elected a conman, criminal and serial abuser of women to the highest office. And you are cheering him on.
The only change I would make there is the "to" in "to distract".
On the basis of his behaviour in courts, I recon there's a common cause for performative behaviour and him being a convicted criminal, rather than it being an instrumental behaviour intended to distract. He doesn't behave as if he has a mental model for the difference between "I did a bad thing and should be ashamed" vs. "I am having power struggle and must fight dirty", nor any concept of a lie beyond observing that "liar" is an insult.
This isn't really an improvement, and other people may be playing him in this way for their own power games.
The criminal justice system is racist. The solution to crime is more complicated than “let all the criminals go” but sending in the National Guard is definitely not the solution. Also, given the current state of affairs, this will be forgotten about — because Trump will do something even more outrageously authoritarian. And your $100 won’t help when the regime kidnaps me out of my home.
I beg to differ mostly. The criminal justice system is heavily staffed by people of all colors and ethnicities, including many, many blacks, who in some cities predominate among the police (and general population, at least in some neighborhoods). Despite this, it's often just as bad towards civilians and minority civilians as a mostly-white police force.
More specifically, the criminal justice system is classist, and that minorities are often part of the poor and underclass in many cities makes them much more targets than their coincidental skin color, though it sometimes seems to serve as a useful visual marker for police to who it's easier to target on sight. The idea of so many police officers and other law enforcement officials who are themselves black or some other visibly non-white ethnic group nonethless targeting civilians who are of the same color, for race reasons, doesn't really make sense from a racism perspective, but it does make sense from a class perspective.
If the classism is indistinguishable from racism and often manifests in results where one race is particularly disadvantaged, then it's also racist.
Racism and classism feed each other. We've known that since even before the civil war. Claiming classism doesn't make racism - poof - disappear. It actually reinforces it.
I wont argue that the racist aspect of the justice system isn't entwined with it, and with wider society in certain ways, but I still stand by it being more classict by far than simply racist. To claim only racism doesn't entirely address certain problems that could maybe be fixed, and it also runs the risk of ignoring when certain racial groups that don't fit into most ideas of racism are also heavily harmed by police and the entire apparatus above them. As I said, there are cities in the U.S. where police, prosecutors, judges and many other criminal justice officals are largely black or of some visible minority, and in these cities, the civilian victims of their procedures and biases, suffer no less, despite often being of the exact same ethnic makeup. I don't see how one can reconcile that with just racism unless one also discusses the issue of tremendous classicm, and I'd argue, also bureaucratic/police self-exceptionalism, with strong authoritarian tendencies, regardless of race.
Spreading the net a bit wider, you can also look at the recent and massive ICE crackdowns on illegal migrants (and sometimes US citizens along the way). Just by looking at photos of these incidents, you quickly note that many ICE agents are themselves black, Latino, Asian, etc, enforcing draconian crackdowns against other visible minorities. That's not simply something you can label under racism and be done with defining it. Other systemic factors are at work there.
> many ICE agents are themselves black, Latino, Asian, etc,
That's because there's two types of racism: individual, and systemic or institutional.
Individual racism is the low-brow obvious type of stuff. Slurs, clutching your handbag walking next to a black person, that type of thing.
Institutional or systemic racism is more abstract, but also much more harmful as a whole.
Take, for example, the DEA. Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug despite not being nearly as harmful as even most schedule 3 drugs. That's not a coincidence.
That reflects the widespread institutional racism of the DEA. Marijuana was chosen to be scheduled 1 because of its association with black Americans, deliberating inflicting more widespread harm onto them.
Okay, so why does this matter? Because within racist institutions, you yourself are forced to be racist. Even just existing in the institution is an act of racism, similarly to how working for a military contractor is itself an act of support of War.
These institutions have a culture and set of expectations and rules, and to exist within them you must comply.
For example, you cannot be a police officer and simply choose not to criminal marijuana and instead criminal white drugs like cocaine. You have rules, and you must follow them.
You being black does not override that. You being Asian doesn't override that.
So, the big picture. ICE, as an institution, is racist and has goals to particularly harm specific racial minorites. It mobilizes on these goals via its policy, it's expectations, and even it's culture.
Being a brown ICE worker does not detect from those goals, and just by existing in ICE and doing their bidding you are implicitly racist. Because the institution is racist, and you support it. And their goals are racist, and you're a big part of making their goals a reality.
As a side note, this is also why "I have a black friend" arguments don't work. That's a refutation of individual racism, not institutional racism.
For more examples of systemic racism throughout US history, please see: redlining, gerrymandering, Jim Crow, segregation, the FBI, and the CIA
You refute that violent crime is a large factor that caused authoritarianism in El Salvador? The post I was responding to made it seem like democracy and violent crime can somehow coexist or that they aren't in strong tension with one another. When it's pretty clear that they are. I was not saying it's the only cause of authoritarianism, or the most relevant cause in the current US moment.
> Dude, no it’s not. Everyone is parroting the “crime dropped from 2023” line, but nobody mentions that the 2023 spike pushed DC’s murder rate to as high as Haiti. Not Haiti normally, but the recent events in Haiti where gangs took over the country, causing the homicide rate go spike from about 10 per 100k normally (safer than DC has ever been) to about as bad as DC in 2023.
Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline? And 2024 as the year to use for reference (it is the last year for which complete data is available, after all).
And as for NYC, that wasn't dealt with on the Federal level but on the state and city level. And it left a power vacuum in the crime world that was soon taken up by others, which should have been dealt with rather than ignored. Who knew that policing cities of millions of individuals over decades is hard? Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.
As for the comparison with Haiti you make (and not to mention Iraq, as you did elsewhere in this thread): countries, especially countries at war and places like Haiti do not excel in record keeping. As such you probably should take the numbers reported from those countries as somewhat polished before being presented.
> Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline?
Because numerous people in this thread have been parroting the line that homicides dropped since 2023. I'm pointing out that this is cherry picking, since homicides spiked to record highs in 2023.
1991 isn't a good baseline because policing trends started reversing in the 2000s. We did mass incarceration from 1980 until the early 2000s, and homicides dropped dramatically. El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
> Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.
That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
So, your answer to cherry picking - by your claim - is more cherry picking?
> El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
Right, and Washington DC is just like El Salvador? You've got to be joking.
> That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
Puerto Rico, in spite of the name, is poor and has a huge divide between poor and rich. It's not quite Johannesburg but - and I've been there - the divide is massive and in places like that you get a lot of crime, and some of those crimes will involve homicide. The way to address this is to reduce that gap.
Incidentally, the United States also has a massive wealth gap and this is set to further increase. Of course, as an affluent person you'd end up being scared of the unwashed homeless masses so the solution is to put the blame on them, forcibly incarcerate them (and never mind due process) or to simply get rid of them.
'Putting a small fraction of the population in prison' -> that, historically speaking never ended the way it was intended, unless it was done with all of the rules of due process in place. If you propose to abolish those think about how bizarre it is what you are suggesting here. We can solve all homicides (except the ones in prison, I guess) by putting everybody in lockup. So all we have to do is find the line between 'good' and 'bad' people so that there never will be any more first offenders. Problem solved!
Poverty does not cause crime. Instead, poverty and criminality are linked by common behavioral causes (high time preference, low impulse control, etc.). You cannot reduce crime by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, because the poor are not committing crime to escape poverty.
Intelligent people are very bad at modeling the minds of people like this. It's a blind spot I see fairly often.
You keep making the weirdest comparisons. What does your dad's village in Bangladesh have to do with crime rates in DC or any other city in the United States? This is just absurd, you're pulling in utterly unrelated factoids - which are anecdata at best and which we are going to have to believe at face value - to supposedly support your point, which if we generously assume that they are true still would not do so.
I assumed the person asserting that poverty causes crime was generally familiar with the crime statistics for poor countries in asia and africa (Bangladesh being an archetypal poor country in Asia). Specifically, the homicide statistics, which are the most reliable proxy for crime because homicides are well reported even in developing countries.
And if you aren’t familiar with the homicide statistics in asia and africa, how can you have an opinion on poverty and crime?
That's fine to say when there is another cause you can identify. For social statistics, most of the time it's people attributing two things together when the underlying cause is money.
In this case that's just a rationalization for what you want to be true.
This paper is literally just authors coming up with some model and simulating it, without any real world evidence whatsoever. It’s an argument from fictional evidence. Is this the best you can do?
There is a huge wealth of research on this topic, even if you want to reject it. Do you need a third, fourth, hundredth paper? Try reading past the abstract (and comprehending it)
Again, this paper just looks at the correlations, and does not touch causation at all. You can run a hundred studies, each of them finding high correlation between wet streets and having rained recently, but you cannot conclude from that that the wet streets caused the rain to fall.
Hi, all causation can be doubted- that's a key aspect of skepticism, and in general, is important for philosophical development. In this case, it's clear that it is not a substantive objection to these papers or others. It is clear that you have set out this discussion with prior belief and are trying to reject that wealth disparity drives crime. You're not acting in the spirit of skepticism (and only are applying skepticism selectively here, because you think it sounds smart).
Read the papers. Apply your logic evenhandedly. Follow the leads and research on your own. It may be scary- you may discover things that force you to change your life (or you may learn something about yourself you dislike).
> Finding the line between “good” and “bad” people is pretty easy
Who is going to draw that line? You? Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting, and I would not want someone in charge who believed in this wild oversimplification. There are good people who commit crimes, and bad people who don't. Let's not be so quick to "easily" judge and label them.
> Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad.
That was tried at some point, but it didn't quite have the effect that the proponents of that scheme hoped for. Unfortunately we didn't learn a thing, or so it seems.
> People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting
This seems like a religious belief. I’m not going to argue religion with you, but the data shows that 2/3 of all crime is committed by just 1% of people: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807 (“The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.”).
El Salvador dropped the homicide rate by a factor of 50 in a decade by imprisoning just 2% of the population. Let’s say we can’t go that fast because we have due process and whatnot. But once someone is convicted of a violent crime, why can’t we just double the sentences to keep them off the streets longer?
I’d even be willing to make the prisons nice, like in Norway. The point is to get them off the streets.
Puerto Rico (I've lived here since 2018...) is basically awash in guns for criminals. Since 2020, it's gotten a lot easier to buy/carry guns as a normal person (previously you had to appear before a judge for a ccw, now it's a 1h class and $100 for 5 years). It's the only non-warzone I've lived in where the default criminal gun is fully automatic (usually glocks with switches, but a few other things too). Absolute guns per capita isn't really what matters, it's gun accessibility to criminals.
(And the bigger crime issues in PR are due to dysfunctional/bankrupt government, specific kinds of poverty/culture, drugs (both local and transshipment), gangs, etc. Also really high domestic violence rate. The crime is largely contained to housing projects, inter-gang fighting, etc., and it feels like less petty property crime (at least in the areas where I go) than I remember of SF 2016+, but I'd rather have someone break my car's window than have to shoot people breaking into my home at night.)
As with the parent, I prefer civil liberties and small amounts of crime to any alternative.
Which is why the playbook for authoritarianism traditionally starts with lying about how much crime there actually is, thus justifying a crackdown.
If Trump wants to cite excessive crime as his reasoning, then he should provide statistics, not the unsubstantiated off-the-cuff insults he has thus far.
>Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)
If anyone thought the Trump Administration had any credibility after their first four years, all of their actions in the last 8 months - most recently firing a non-partisan budget analyst over releasing accurate job numbers instead of ones that made the administration look good - mean that by default we must assume any of their claims are lies, including this one, until proven otherwise.
The Justice department has been spewing rampant political bullshit and obvious lies, and every court other than the Supreme isn't standing for it.
This administration has been firing anyone that disagrees, has disagreed, or might disagree with it, including "shoot the messenger" tactics on straight forward data reporting agencies. As such, I have no doubt that any stats on crime in DC from this point forward will highly favor a picture of reduced crime.
If they're aren't any records of the crime, in their minds then the crime never occurred, including the crime perpetuated by government agents against civilians.
Did they make it go down for real it is or because they made the number go down through redefinition, reclassification and a "not worth your f-ing time to report it, peasant" posture?
Stats are so obviously untrustworthy these days. People who live there that I know say it's worse than it was in the late 2010s but better than it was during the early 2020s. But of course people who like the picture the numbers paint will say those are just anecdotes. IDK what to believe.
You can look into the reclassification fear of yours. Typically murders are used to compare. Meaning, 1 murder and 10 robberies. Next year 3 murders and 1 robbery. Some of pattern like this with the murder rate up or flat, but the crime down otherwise. Generally the point is that people will do a good job reporting murders (hard not to) and in the short term variance in the other crimes may have more to do with reporting characteristics.
One big divide is that people aren't talking about the same thing. Person A says they're less likely to die in location B. Great! Stats say violent crime is down! But there are a million pick pockets and I get robbed without a weapon every time I go downtown.
^alt SF version; every Tesla gets a window smashed.
Point being is two people can observe that and person 1 celebrate the lack of murders and person 2 flummoxed how come no one cares about the kids running out of Target with a T.V or the petty crime.
> The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May. That happened just a week after Pulliam filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the complaint.
> Union officials said there is a larger trend of manipulating crime statistics.[1]
Crime stats do indeed have the obvious problem that when crime is pervasive people stop reporting because reporting just exacerbates the harm of the crime by wasting your time.
One way to deal with this is to look only at murder stats, as there is a lot less reporting optionality there.
Unfortunately, that method is biased by changes the ratio of murders to other crimes. And particularly when the hypothesis is that there is rampant lawlessness and property crime as a result of law enforcement and prosecutors failing to enforce against those less severe crimes, a divergence between murder and other crimes is almost inevitable (unless the failure to arrest and prosecute also extends to murder...).
Of course they're corrupt and abusive. But that's fairly tangential to crime rates unless they take it to an extreme.
I think we ought to walk backwards from your question a bit. Is the position that the police are corrupt and abusive something that I'm supposed to disagree with? Is it supposed to be something obviously untrue (hint: it's not)?
If you look at homicides, which are the most reliable statistics, they are elevated in DC compared to 2010-2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/dc-homicide-tra.... Yes there was a drop from the absolute peak in 2023, but the clear pattern is a trend of consistent decrease from the 1990 peak, to a low point around 2010-2012, and then a steady increase since then.
Thank you! It is extremely disappointing that the parent post was upvoted so highly while stating that crime was "so bad for so long." This was not a statement grounded in any reality and reads like propaganda.
HN (and the tech industry writ large) has increasingly embraced authoritarianism, even when not in service of any tangible objective, and seemingly for its own sake. It should at least be exposed for what it is.
Dude, we here on HN are the moderates. My muslim immigrant mom the other day posted on facebook “NYPD should independently rull [rule] NYC.” You have no idea how much the average person in the world hates criminals and social disorder. You’re just marinated in half a century of western liberal propaganda.
You're part of the problem that I'm talking about. Instead of engaging with the issue at hand, you jump to wild assumptions about my positions, as if there were no alternatives between absolute anarchy and full-on authoritarianism.
That's what I mean by "poisoning the well", you have 124268 karma and yet you can't help yourself but discuss in bad faith.
I didn't call anyone a Nazi because I don't like the inflationary use of that term. But the "Nazi bar problem" is, unfortunately, an established metaphor. It doesn't have to be about literal Nazis, it could be about tankies for all I care. The problem is the same.
I'm going to keep calling people right-wing authoritarian and possibly fascist not for supporting more policing, but for supporting a person who has shown repeatedly that they want to rule as an authoritarian leader and is now implementing another step of that policy.
It literally doesn't matter how bad crime in DC is, because the danger of allowing a person who has denied losing an election for 4 years to single-handedly take over the capital of the most powerful country on earth is so high, in the same way as it didn't matter whether communists actually did or didn't set fire to the Reichstag.
This is what this is about. Not reasonable disagreement about policing, or immigration.
But of course, your only response to opposing authoritarianism is that one has to be some sort of anarchist.
Rest assured that I would react exactly the same if I was talking to a Tankie who was supporting some sort of Stalinist dictatorship.
The “problem” you keep referring to can be boiled down to: extremes exist. HN, like any large population sample, is a bell curve of opinion, which, by definition has tails of extreme opinion at each end. However the most extreme and toxic opinions rarely get seen because they are taken care of by community flags and moderator bans.
They are covered by the first two words of the “In Comments” section of the guidelines: “be kind”, which apply to all of us, including you, in the way you are engaging with others in this thread.
> the way you are engaging with others in this thread
The only person I engaged with negatively here was a person who called me "marinated in liberal propaganda", something that notably you didn't take issue with. I will admit that I should have just ignored that person and will try to disengage in the future. Or maybe just avoid this site altogether.
I did however call out that there's a sizable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian and I stand by that assessment. I also disagree that these toxic opinions "rarely get seen", I see them a ton. And my ultimate point is that this serves to ultimately drive away more moderate voices.
Whether or not you consider that to be a problem is up to you.
Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
As for there being “a sizeable and vocal minority of users that are very right wing authoritarian”: without links to comments or account names I'm not able to gauge what you mean. But I'm in the threads every day and the political skew is clearly in opposition to the U.S. administration and to the the left of the broader population, which you would expect of a population sample dominated by tech industry employees and freelancers. But it's still a bell curve, which means, yes, there are some people here who are to the right of centre. That shouldn't be surprising or undesirable if we want to debate important topics.
If you see toxic material that hasn't been flagged/killed, you should flag it and/or email the moderators about it. It's fine to criticize us if you've done that and we haven't taken adequate action, but you've cited no cases of that.
> Rayiner takes a lot of arrows on HN because he is (particularly these days) one of a tiny few who is notable for advocating conservative/libertarian positions. Those words in his comment weren't great but they were more of a commentary on society than a personal attack.
Thank you, this reply tells me everything I need to know.
I've suspected that Rayiner's posts were held to a different standard of moderation than others for _quite_ some time. Thank you for explicitly confirming this.
That's false. Any comment that breaks the guidelines should be flagged and killed, whether it's by rayiner or DonHopkins or anyone else. What we see with rayiner is that many of his comments are flagged because people object to his ideology, not because the comment is clearly in breach of the guidelines.
We don't give rayiner any special treatment; many of his comments get killed by flags and are left that way after we review them. But, whatever you think of his politics, he is an intelligent [1] and thoughtful person who has contributed to HN for over 15 years, and is deserving of the same kind of fair, respectful treatment by moderators and fellow community members that we'd extend to anyone else in that category. I don't see how discussions on HN would be improved if the number of notable conservatives/libertarians was much lower than it already is.
That's a very unrepresentative link. Someone interested in moderation bias should filter on flagged comments instead, if some search engine supports it. Let's just say that it doesn't require a sociology degree to see it.
We can learn much about someone from the best of what they post, and it can help us to put their worst into context. I feel like your comment is more cryptic than it would need to be if you had a clear point to make or a clear idea of what we should do differently.
I’m very moderate by world standards. For example I think we should give gang members trials before we put them all in jail forever. In my home country we don’t have a gang problem, but we have an Islamist problem. Our former PM handled that by having military special forces just kill islamists. She had a 70% approval rating before a bizarre coalition of leftist students and islamists overthrew the government.
Western liberals are just outside the Overton window in terms of their toxic sympathy for criminals and disorder.
It's frustrating precisely because even a small amount of bad faith actors can serve to poison the well. It's a problem that ultimately every online community has to deal with in some way.
If you're insinuating that crime is not actually down and statistics are merely lying, then you are mistaken.
Crime, pretty much everywhere in the US and by many different metrics, has been falling for over 3 decades.
It makes sense. Crime is getting harder and harder to committ with the advent of the Internet and new surveillance technology. Crime is, like all things in life, a risk-reward calculus.
Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime.
With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime. You're often better off just... not... And getting help through provided channels. And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
> Most criminals aren't criminals because they innately like crime. Rather, they choose crime because they think the reward is worth the risk. If the reward falls, or if the risk is too great, many won't turn to crime.
This "noble savage" view of criminals is often repeated in polite society but is pretty far removed from the reality of actual criminals. There's very little risk-reward calculus involved. Very little impulse control. Very little reasoning about whether they're better off committing crime versus getting help.
> And then if you do committ crime, it's extremely likely you get caught, even for small crimes.
Small crimes absolutely go uncaught and unpunished as a matter of routine. Most years, in DC, a full third of homicides go unsolved[0], so even the worst crime in one of the most highly funded police departments in the most closely watched city and the capital of a globe-spanning empire often go uncaught. The US isn't a police state, as much as some claim.
Or, in a police state, the point isn't solving crimes.
In my city, any protest over a half dozen people gets a police response. However they may show up a couple hours late to you being robbed, but will probably tell you to go to their website and file a report they won't follow up on.
Paradoxically, as you reach more and more of a police state, the point of the police isn't to solve or prevent crimes. It's to use violence against threats to the police state.
“With newer social services and things like the ACA, there's less reason to committ crime.”
Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance. Rather, crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics, policing or lack there of, surely not by aggregate health care spending lol.
Medical debt is one of the most common kinds of debt in America. Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates. So is anxiety over bills. Untreated mental or physical health issues can come into play as well.
I’ve known criminals, and a lot of people with huge debts, even known a few people who have had to declare bankruptcy. I assure you nobody is robbing or stealing or raping or killing people over medical debt. Student loans on the other hand…
> Debt and poverty are absolutely correlated to crime rates.
Correlation is not causation. In this case, the same factors that make one more prone to criminal activity also make them more prone to poverty; therefore, you cannot solve criminality by solving poverty, because the confounding factor is still present afterwards.
A man was released from prison after his murder conviction was overturned to great fanfare by the Innocence Project. He received $4.1m for his troubles. A few years later, he killed another man over a $1200 drug deal gone bad[0].
Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
> Do you really believe that people are committing crimes in order to make money to pay medical bills? Breaking Bad is a work of fiction.
I think the vast, vast majority of people are committing crime to make money, and I think your singular counter example, which isn't really a counter example, is worthless.
Yes, SOME people are just bad and will always commit crime. Some.
However, most criminals do it for monetary gain.
Why do people even sell drugs? Surely, if their goal is to be evil and just make a lot of people hooked on heroin, they'd just give it away for free right?
Well, that isn't their goal. Their goal is to make money.
> Crime was certainly never driven by the cost of private health insurance.
Its a simple question - is crime motivated by money or not?
If you answer yes, then you're wrong - things like the ACA that lessen financial burden MUST lead to less crime over time.
If you answer no, then you're probably not reasonable. Who legitimately believes that crime isn't caused by money issues?
> crime is driven by things like alcohol and demographics,
Demographics absolutely do not drive crime, otherwise you have a broken world view. Being of a different demographic is a SYMPTOM, not the cause.
Being black does not cause crime, or being in a zip code does not cause crime. Being poor does, that zip code having poor education does, that zip code providing no opportunities does.
There isn't a major city in the country in which crime isn't a complete embarrassment, objectively intolerable, and a major hazard. Every other perspective is equivocation.
I'm starting to understand the "touch grass" meme.
Have you been to a city? They're thriving in many ways. I am grateful for my city. In my mind the biggest hazard is concentrated power in local areas of the city, and wasted budgets, but not <<this equivocation about the hazard>>
Born and raised, and still living in an area that you likely wouldn't. You have no idea.
To be clear, not advocating for the military on the streets.
However, the people who do sympathize with that will forever increase as ineffectiveness in policing crime does.
If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
The question then becomes, even with the military outside of their windows, would the people who start stuttering the word "fascist" in response have hindsight regret in not better enabling civilian policing to inhibit crime?
Or will they continue to deny the tipping point?
At what point is undermining of civilian police the same thing as advancing us toward military streets?
No one can have everything. If a balance isn't kept, then aberrations in norms will begin to occur. Going either way.
> If the military is on the streets, and there is broad support for it, then objectively speaking it's because we're at a tipping point of imbalance in policing crime.
Where is this "broad support" coming from? The actual people living in Washington DC, or rural outsiders who have conjured up some picture in their minds of "crime infested cities?" If you did a poll of everyone in DC, would the majority be in favor of increased policing?
It always seems like the people who are most vocal about crime in big cities are always the people who don't live in or visit those big cities.
You questioning my experience and where I live isn't an argument.
In liberal circles, we "believe" people. Remember? Especially those with bad experiences.
You questioning me just means that you can't tolerate people with differing experiences having opinions and perspectives that are counter to your own.
What I said is factual.
You're a sheltered person with a false entitlement to an opinion on this specific matter.
I live in a major city between Boston and DC. I've implied enough of my experience to warrant telling you to shove your rude scare quotes up your a*.
I've also lived in NYC. I have family that still lives in NYC. Who was just punched in the face for the second time in a couple of years, walking home at night. And that's in "safe" lower Manhattan.
What does where you live have to do where I live?
Just like the "person who walks with cameras", the only thing that you are communicating is that you are privileged and awful on a couple of levels. One of which is having zero perspective and real experience living in an urban area that is outside of wealthier zones and, especially in poorer cities, is only barely managed by police. Bourgeoise bubble living does not entitle you to having a policy opinion on how the poorer areas of cities should be managed, what it's like living in them let alone growing up in them, and on how they are doing on the street level. "Relativity" aside.
There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes.
In Seattle I'm sick of people who think the whole city burned down in 2020 or that you can't go downtown without a homeless person stabbing you with a needle. People who don't live here and watch Fox News are afraid. People in the suburbs who never go into the city are afraid. Anyone who spends any time in the city knows otherwise. For more than a decade I've walked the streets in every neighborhood here weekly, often after dark, carrying thousands of dollars in camera gear, not bothering to hide my watch, phone, or whatever, and never been harassed.
Hmm, to your anecdotes I will add mine. I have been harassed in the International District at around 10:00 pm by drug dealers - was offered drugs, told them to go away so I was yelled “Get off my block”. A hobo spilled his beer on my wife while riding the bus. A female coworker was offered oral sex by a hobo and asked to take her glasses off to “see her pretty eyes”. At a bus school stop on Fairview (right next to Amazon Campus) a hobo with his pants down to his knees was exposing himself in front of some kids (their mothers were trying to make some shield around the kids)
All of these around 2021-2022-2023. We moved out of Seattle in 2023. Maybe these snecdotes are not a big deal for you. For me they are scary.
>There is no undermining, as everyone living in the cities realizes.
I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
You aren't paying attention. I stated that I was born and raised in a (major) city, and I still live in an area that many on HN and virtually all bourgeoise urban-bubble people would not live.
And so who are you trying to gaslight, exactly?
I don't assert that Seattle is perfect, but Seattle is a cakewalk. One of the nicest and per-capita wealthiest cities in the country. But with a sizeable population of bored grown toddlers. A subgroup of whom are professional terrorists, while living in a priveleged city on the World scale. Spare me your faux "urbanite on a walk" homily.
The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.
We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down? How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there? How many times did that lead to a full blown street fight, out of self-defense? How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk? How many friends of yours have been targeted and murdered on the sidewalk? How about while in grade school? Yes, I'm Caucasian. I'm overeducated, including graduating on a full-ride from a school that existed a long time before the United States did. That makes no difference.
You deserve a string of derogatory names, but decorum prevents.
>I remember that "Defund the Police" is the general mantra of one side of the isle.
And I remember that that was about focusing police on policing and spending more on having specialists provide social support and the kind of things that prevent crime, which cops aren't trained to do or any good at.
Not OP, but yes, "defund" meaning to reverse the excessive budgetary increases of the past 5-10 years, which increased militarization of police, alongside increasing qualified immunity precedent. Some people took "Defund The Police" to mean "No Police" (there will always be extremists, sincere or planted), and it turned out to be a terrible slogan for this reason. There's a healthy middle ground in which the police force is reduced to a reasonable level, and other services are funded, so the police with their guns and military training aren't the first responders when e.g. someone is suicidal or spraypainting graffiti.
And even if the suicidal person is holding a knife, or it's my house being spraypainted, I don't want the person shot!
>The nine months of rioting in 2020 were nine months of partisan terrorism purposefully leading exactly up to an election. Funny that, in the context of those so concerned with democracy.
>We were terrorized, absolutely. It caused me to think twice about voting at all, out of fear. During one weekend in which police were hamstrung by the mayor in favor of rioters, we had two large bombs go off in my neighborhood. While the power happened to be off for 72 hours. Have you ever felt the deep vibration from a close domestic terrorist bomb in the dark? Twice? How about during election season?
The only city in the USA that fits that seems to be Oakland.
I did some minimal searching for Seattle and explosions in 2020 and I found plenty of sources reporting on different supposed explosions, at different times and places (within Seattle). Seems perfectly plausible to me.
None of those sources detail anything that I would describe as “two large bombs”.
And I can’t find a 72 hour power outage in Seattle in 2020.
Can you help me out?
mrangle also later said [0] they live “in a major city between Boston and DC”. So they aren’t describing Seattle. (Or actually any city in the US based on what they have shared so far)
I'm observing how this is breaking down into questioning where I live (in another post), or whether what I say happened actually happened.
Should I not believe that people's post's here defending cities are from legitimate experience (at least as stated, in their bubbles)?
What happened to the "believe" people ethic?
I don't live in Oakland. What do you want me to read carefully, super-sleuth? To what purpose? In spite of your masterful rhetorical question, you're wrong about the event in question and location.
Consider that a lot of the country was terrorized in a manner that you and much of the nation is blind to. These are people who will be forming opinions and voting for a long time to come.
Given that the Press's obvious mandate was to whitewash the violence so that it continued.
You can't be good with nine months of nationwide riots and then ever think that you understand the impact or can get a handle on everything that occurred via zero-start google searches.
Those other commenters are talking about named cities which the rest of us are able to verify what they say based on simple internet searches.
You are describing an unnamed war-torn hellscape that matches no city in America. It’s like something out of a fictional writing class.
Which of those two types of comments are something you would believe?
>Consider that a lot of the country was terrorized in a manner that you and much of the nation is blind to. These are people who will be forming opinions and voting for a long time to come.
We are _trying_ to consider them. But we are unable to make the leap from reality to the fantasy world you’ve been describing, so it’s really hard.
>Given that the Press's obvious mandate was to whitewash the violence so that it continued.
I guess it is a pretty good thing we live in a modern world with an internet that lets anybody that wants to share actual evidence. Unfortunately it also allows people to post they made up accounts they use in a conservative fireside story telling event, but those are identifiable by including outlandish details that would be easily verifiable, but also refusing to provide evidence, like names of cities.
>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many gun barrels have you stared down?
More than one.
>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just standing there?
More than once.
>How many times have you been robbed on the sidewalk?
Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge.
So. Where exactly did all this stuff happen to you, eh? I call bullshit on your "horror stories."
I've been beaten, pistol-whipped by a group and had to go to the hospital, had a kid try to knock me out from behind (remember the knock out craze fifteen years ago?), seen people beaten and shot, and had the cops draw their guns on me and threaten to blow my head off on more than one occasion in New Haven (and if you're curious, I'm not a criminal, but was just an adventurous kid who tried to defy the segregation in the city).
As someone like you who has also been the victim of violent crime, I definitely do not want the military patroling any city. I hate violent crime, but that is not the way to solve it, period. It takes community policing and the slow process of raising people out of poverty, desperation and hopelessness, by undoing the damage that has been done to them through decades of economic oppression.
>Inflation was high and people had to convert their salaries into German marks the same day they got pay checks, otherwise the money was worthless the next day. Basic goods were unattainable. People had to smuggle coffee, bananas and jeans across the border. Of course if you were a part of the red nobility, your life was easier as you got access to special stores and got to enjoy the fruits of the labor of your fellow equals.
And things are, right now, exactly as you described in this comment[0], right?
No need to be snark. Unlike your comment, where you iterated what happened to you without any time specifics, my comment was for a specific time period as evident from the discussion.
There was nothing clearly stating any dates or years.
Just like you did, I assumed what you said all happened in the past three weeks.
Especially since I said[0]:
"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the Brooklyn Bridge."
Because we grow up fast here in NYC. A month ago I was a child. Now I'm pushing 60. All in the past three weeks!
>> Did you?
Literally the first line was starting with ">> Yugoslav communism...".
#Especially since I said[0]:
#"Once, as a child because I wasn't paying attention. As a teen? Several #attempts on the subway, on the street and other places. As an adult? On the #Brooklyn Bridge."
That was for the robbery and before that you said:
#>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime? How many #gun barrels have you stared down?
#More than one.
#>How many times have you been punched in public by a stranger, while just #standing there?
#More than once.
Nothing specific there. Why are you so antagonizing about it and trying to straw man something with my comment that doesn't exist? I only told you how I read (I'm probably not the only one) your comment and pointed out some context was missing and when you explained it, I accepted it.
>Would you like to go into my personal experiences with urban crime?
Not really. Maybe you just have really punchable face? Given the diarrhea you're spewing, those traits combined would probably make most people want to beat the crap out of you.
Which would explain quite a bit. Hey. Let's be careful out there![0]
I hope you don’t find yourself in one of the out groups in the fascist state you seem so eager for. There’s a reason you don’t turn the military on the citizenry. They’re for fighting the enemies of the nation and the police are for maintaining order. When the military become the police, the citizenry become the enemy of the nation.
Costa Rica (a country my wife and I are seriously looking at moving to in retirement and planning to spend a couple of months there every year starting next year) famously doesn’t have a military to prevent military coups and to put more money into their excellent universal health care system among other things.
Costa Rica's homicide rate is 17 per 100,000 people. You probably won't notice it living in whatever expatriate enclave you and your wife are looking at, but that's a crushing burden on the average person in the country.
You’re conflating two different things. The number of guns in absolute terms doesn’t matter as much as availability to people who are inclined to commit crimes: a collector / prepper going from 10 to 11 guns affects the total count but doesn’t impact the crime stats the way an angry teenager going from 0 to 1 gun does.
This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
> Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
The comparative lack of people in Idaho is accurately accounted for in its crime rate.
Are you suggesting that density causes crime? Some of the world's most densely populated cities don't have anywhere near the crime rate of American cities, which aren't all that densely packed by world standards.
>This is why it’s misleading to talk about state-level stats without accounting for density: Idaho has a lower crime rate because it is mostly rural and has a single large city, which isn’t that big. Crime is a function of population, not land.
Don't you mean function of density or was that a slight of hand rather than a typo? Like compare Wyoming to 1/16 of NYC or 16x Wyoming and compare it to all of NYC. They're about equal in population but the rates per capita are per capita so they're unchanged whether you multiply one or divide the other.
Yes, density would have been a better choice - what I was trying to get at is that when you have a lot of people in close proximity you have more social interactions which can turn negative. For example, here in DC violent crime is largely limited to a few areas where drunk people get out of bars late at night and various crews are fighting over territory, so the numbers go up but most people in the neighborhood aren't affected. The crime rate always goes up in the summer because people are out on the street where they can get into arguments, and everyone's a bit touchy during a heat wave.
You certainly have things like rural gangs, too, but if things are spread out you just don't have that critical mass to ramp the numbers up. This also plays out in other types of crimes – cars get stolen anywhere there are cars, but thieves are playing the odds and it's easier not to attract in a dense population while they'd stick out if they started going up some stranger's driveway in a place where there's no other traffic. When that Kia lock exploit was in the news, there were bored teenagers basically treating street parking as a shopping mall because the supply was huge and until they actually touched a car there was no crime in walking down a sidewalk.
Household ownership doesn't matter if the people who own them aren't likely to be involved in crimes - if a 50 year old farmer has a hunting rifle, their risk profile to society is really different than an angry 19 year old with a handgun.
While crime rates are per 100,000 people, population density makes a big difference because a low density, homogeneous population is going to have fewer interactions which turn negative. That's why people comparing crime stats usually compare cities or regions to avoid falsely reporting a correlation which is nothing more than a function of urban vs. rural density.
And considering that the US has the highest murder rate among first world countries, highest incarceration rate and spends the most on the military. Obvious the US is doing something wrong.
Costa Rica is also turning into the new haven for the drug cartels to run ops, after they were evicted from El Salvador, and the lack of a military certainly does not help here.
Let's not look at overmilitarized countries like the US. And yes, for most countries in Latin America such as Mexico and Colombia, direct conflict with cartels is handled by the military, while internally handled by the police and justice branches.
The city I spent all of my childhood and went to college in had a murder rate in the 20s per 100,000 the year I graduated. It wasn’t a large city.
Retirement is a long way away. But next year, we have an Airbnb in Escazu, a suburb of San Jose that is safe. It’s a high rise condo 2/2 with a gym and a pool.
The murder rate in “Atlanta” is also still around 20 per 100,000 and I lived in various suburbs of metro Atlanta until 2022 and was never in fear of my life going into the city. But I also lived in a suburban enclaves there.
For what it’s worth, I’m not going to be one of these ignorant entitled Americans who refuse to learn Spanish. I am close to A2 level Spanish now and should be there by the time we go next year. I can hold simple conversations.
Are we working from your private dictionary, or from the history books? My recollection is that Italian industrialists got along just fine with with Mussolini, and that he did not much tamper with private property.
Mussolini forced businesses to join fascist-controlled employer groups, and workers to join fascist-controlled labour unions - Trump appears completely disinterested in doing such a thing.
Hitler banned all youth groups except for the Nazi Party’s Hitler Youth. Mussolini tried to do the same; but the entrenched power of the Catholic Church meant he was forced to tolerate its youth groups competing with the fascist ones. I haven’t heard of any “Trump Youth” and Trumpism appears to lack the fascist focus on banning all civil society groups except those formally affiliated with the ruling party.
Both leaders enacted explicitly antisemitic legislation - Hitler with enthusiasm; Mussolini possibly more due to pressure from Hitler and a desire to please his Nazi allies than genuine antisemitic conviction. I’m not sure what Trump’s answer to Hitler’s Nuremberg Laws and Mussolini’s Leggi Razziali (Racial Laws) is meant to be
Calling Trump a fascist requires ignoring many things which Hitler and Mussolini had in common but which Trump lacks
In Italy under Mussolini's fascist regime, private property was generally respected, but with significant state intervention and control. While private ownership wasn't abolished, the state exerted considerable influence over the economy through the corporate system, regulating industries and labor.
Private Property: The fascist regime in Italy did not abolish private property. Mussolini's economic policy, known as corporatism, aimed to organize the economy through corporations representing various sectors (e.g., agriculture, industry).
State Intervention: While private ownership remained, the state played a central role in economic decision-making. The regime established a Ministry of Corporations to oversee the economy and regulated labor relations through the Charter of Labour.
Corporatism: The fascist regime organized the Italian economy into 22 sectoral corporations. These corporations were intended to represent the interests of both employers and employees within each sector, but in practice, they were largely controlled by the fascist state and party members.
Limited Independence: The corporations and labor organizations had limited independence, and the state played a significant role in regulating their activities and resolving disputes.
Influence on Production: The fascist state influenced production and economic activity through various agencies and institutions, such as the Instituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale (IRI), which held shares in key industries, and the Instituto Mobiliare Italiano (IMI), which controlled credit.
As in more regulation (leftist), not less (current admin)
Fascism is the expansion of the state, anti-small-government.
Again, you don't know what you're talking about.
Propaganda isn't something that only happens to poor brown people in 3rd world countries. Its foolish to think that the people who do this overseas would never do it to you.
Doubling down on this when you're wrong is like someone in an abusive relationship that keeps running back and defending their abuser.
Centralizing power and removing obstructions yet being against censorship and wanting to arm the public?
Again, its incompatible with your warped view and understanding b/c you've heard the word again and again that has no meaning.
"A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism"
Straight from the dictionary, I'm going to stand by my words here.
Which doesn't apply to the current administration, just fantasyland.
A small government regime, that wants to arm the public, is against censorship, wants to de-regulate industries, pro-capitalist, etc.. is not compatible with fascism.
How the hell is your fantasy a reality when you're literally wanting to arm the public and expand free speech?
The last guy wanted to get people fired from their jobs over an experimental jab (Nuremberg trials, anybody?), while his supporters were in favor of taking their kids and imprisoning parents into camps - expanding the government, increasing regulations, and literally forming a Ministry of Truth (DHS Disinformation Governance Board).
We've normalized bad behavior (ie: immigration law, Disinformation Governance Board, etc..) in this country for years and ignore laws governing that, so when we have to correct that behavior people tend to forget how we got here. I saw more systemic racism and discrimination under Obama & Biden than I have under Trump or Bush. I saw race and antisemitism heavily weaponized to divide and conquer under liberal administrations more than I ever have under centrist or right leaning administrations.
Its not fascism. Its just fools cherry picking things to live out some weird good guy/bad guy fantasy of theirs.
If this were a tech document, I'm sure the understanding would be far greater - but somehow that type of thinking and understanding goes out the window when it comes to this.
At various points, several western European nations have been "democratic socialist", with varying degrees of success. Not so much of those since the end of the Cold War, but they were generally on the liberal side when it came to personal freedom. For example, the UK — and sure, the UK had The Troubles and all the associated awfulness, and the Empire for some of that period, ditto — the police forces in England, Scotland, and Wales were not (and still are not) routinely armed.
Well, yes, but the next problem to talk about is definitions. Democratic socialism is a name that's not really socialist. Socialism is state control of the economy. That's fundamentally different to creaming the top off a capitalist economy.
Now if the UK enlarges the state to the point where the NHS owns everything and all resource allocation is directed by some bureaucrats, then, sure it's actual socialism. Until then it's capitalism with a giant all-powerful anchor attached called the state.
When the police are already militarized, and can utilize military-grade vehicles and weapons on those who don’t have the right height of grass, does it really matter much anymore?
I’m not sure if I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying but I think it does matter. First of all, the police shouldn’t be militarized, so the fact that they already are doesn’t make it any better. Second of all, the military is fundamentally different from the police, who are at least nominally controlled by the city (yes, I know the President can and has taken control of the D.C. police). The people of D.C. shouldn’t be policed by a force that doesn’t answer to them, especially since the vast majority of them didn’t vote for the federal administration that’s currently seizing control of municipal law enforcement.
>When the police are already militarized, and can utilize military-grade vehicles and weapons on those who don’t have the right height of grass, does it really matter much anymore?
Why is grass height any of the government's business? Who voted for the people who did that? Who came up with the legal theories under which those laws exist? Why were these ever a justifiable pretense for the government to threaten people with force in the first place?
We all know the argument. It's some mumbo jumbo about mice and pests and public health, about blight and property values, and government interest in those things. But now the people (demographically, if not literally the same individuals in some cases) who were the ones peddling it are the ones threatened by it and it's made immediately clear to them how bullshit their justification was.
I feel like I'm the fucking goose chasing the guy in the down coat and I don't want to be.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC
I don't know how you could measure this, since DC saw a very significant reduction in crime last year without any interference from the National Guard. If there are further reductions this year, that would be a continuation of a trend, not a new phenomenon.
So you don't trust the stats from last year - which show a decline, but you've already implied that you _will_ trust the stats from this year, if they show a decline.
Additionally, this administration has already shown a propensity toward firing people when they report inconvenient data - jobs data, climate data, etc. That renders any stats reported by this admin going forward very suspect.
You are engaging in motivated reasoning, at best. Not objective analysis.
If you don't trust the stats, then again, how would you know what effect the National Guard has? I can give you my subjective assessment as a DC resident, which is that crime is pretty low and it's a great place to live, but that isn't very useful to anyone who doesn't know me personally.
If you don't trust the stats then the Guard is being sent in for no reason and there will be no way to determine what impact they have. That is a terrible situation for everyone.
> It’s nice to be data driven but that isn’t really possible in our low trust society.
I don't think these concepts (interpersonal trust vs. accuracy of government statistics) are very related. For example China has one of the highest levels of interpersonal trust in the world (https://ourworldindata.org/trust), but notoriously unreliable government statistics.
It's not terrible for everyone. It's great for people who control the National Guard as well as has the ability to control what people are told about their impact.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
(This is not related to the content of your post - I just needed a place to put this reply.)
Ah yes the famous police state of the netherlands. "We have higher crime rates than nordic countries so therefore we must have more and more and more militarized police" is not exactly my idea of reasoned thinking.
Why should I live in a more dangerous society than the Netherlands (which isn't "nordic")? Or Australia? I fit in those places fine. Why can't we have that at home? Why is this level of crime acceptable just because it is lower than 1980? What liberty do I give up by having some guardsmen standing around?
His point is that the crime rate being lower in these places does not happen due to them having militarized police, so assuming that militarized police in general, much less literally using the military for policing will drop the crime rate doesn't track.
You can see my comment below for some facts about the Netherlands. They do, literally, have a militarized police (the gendarmerie) which has civilian duties while operating under the defense ministry (and having military duties as well). They operate at airports, do border control, protect state assets (especially in capitol), do crowd control at major events, contain riots etc. You will see them if you go and even try to look.
Their normal police is very similar to America's in number and capability. They may be trained better, which seems like an argument for better training.
I have the opposite hypothesis: I think more police, even from the NG, will help. I think if our society is more criminal, for whatever reasons, it should be policed more. I do not see any good arguments for how having a few hundred NG deployed will strip me of any important liberty, and I think it is much better than tech solutions in that regard.
We now have a test case, and we can come back and see.
The Royal Marechaussee is 1/10th the size of the National Police Force and as you noted have quite specialized tasks. They are not the people handling day to day crime and interactions with civilians for mundane police actions. They also receive plenty of training related to the policing duties and are trained on how to police civilians. The national guard does not, and even MPs receive very different training and operate in a very different manner to the regular police.
This is very different than universally militarizing your police force across the nation or employing soldiers untrained in policing as police.
What do you believe the venn diagram of soldier and police skillsets looks like?
I think it looks like a normal venn diagram. Some things are similar and some different and it depends on what deployments or forces each has worked on. That's why NG troops are getting extra training in police duties and working together with normal police.
Police training academy is already generally considered to be insufficient, which is part of why cops continue to receive so much ongoing training as part of the job.
Getting a few rushed bootcamp style classes is not going to do anything to remotely bridge that gap.
My point is that an ever more militarized police directed by a vengeful president is not actually going to make society safer. I too would like programs that actually address the causes of crime but instead we are going to get more violence done to the poor, racial minorities, and people using their voices.
DC has incredibly strict gun laws. I doubt many of the weapons used in crimes are legal. I don't think you will be truly any less free having national guard soldiers walking around. Actually seems better than the usual dystopian tech solutions people come up with. Maybe they will try it for thirty days and people will like it.
DC isn't an island. It's super easy for people in the region to get hold of guns, it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun. The question of whether guns used in crime are legal or not seems moot to me, they are equally deadly if misused.
> it's just that they'll be in a lot of trouble if they get caught actually doing crime in DC with a gun
Actually, the whole issue is that this is not true! Statistically speaking, the average crime in DC, whether involving a gun or not, goes uncaught, unresolved, and ultimately unpunished.
Because it's not like it is surrounded by countries with lax gun laws. You can't buy a semi-automatic rifle or a handgun and a pile of ammo with the same ease in, say, Belgium that you can in West Virginia. Like, which country in Europe do you think has the laxest gun laws, for comparison? Having lived in both Europe and the US, I don't think you appreciate how easy it is to obtain a gun in the US.
There are a lot of weapons from the former Yugoslavian war still floating around in Europe, both single pieces an much larger caches. These pop up with some regularity in crime busts and given the number of weapons that went missing (> 1 million weapons remain unaccounted for) this will likely remain a problem for a long time to come.
At least the Ukraine/Poland border now scans the bulk of the vehicles to prevent the next issue like that. But the ones that are already in the EU are going to surface only bit-by-bit as they get used or uncovered. Given how hard it is to obtain weapons here they are very valuable.
It's so different that for as long as I've lived here I have seen a gun maybe a handful of times, the vast majority of those were guns holstered on the hips of police on patrol (and not even a single time in their hands) and a gun that a private owner was maintaining who uses it exclusively to shoot at a range. Other than that, no guns here, at all.
No, I think the answer is that is only different in that Americans in DC are more criminal. Both places have strict gun laws with licensing requirements. In both places you can get illegal guns, and these are the ones used in crime if a gun is used, otherwise it will be an illegal knife. However in the Netherlands the laws are followed and/or policed better. Maybe now in DC the laws will be enforced better too, and maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave. I predict that few people lose any liberty and that this experiment reduces certain crimes (like street murder, assaults, random robberies/muggings) a lot.
I've spent time in both countries. The difference could not be much larger when it comes to policing.
Laws certainly are not policed better here. The big differentiator is the much smaller wealth gap (though it is still sizeable and should be further reduced) as well as the much more relaxed attitude towards things that we consider illness and/or self-harm, a lot of which ends up being dealt with as crime in the USA. Furthermore, a hospital procedure isn't likely to bankrupt you and when you do become homeless there are - if you want - institutions that will help to get you out of that situation.
It is far from ideal. But it is night and day compared with the USA. I don't recall seeing as much police anywhere else (including such diverse places as Colombia, Panama, Canada and almost every country in Europe), nor did I see people in general being afraid of the police. Sure, you still don't fuck with them but as a rule they're really there to serve and protect, which - ironically - they have to write on the side of their vehicles in the USA, either to increase the pretense or as a personal reminder to the occupants of the vehicle, it is hard to tell which.
I will add that in addition to my longer comment, I doubt that "wealth gap" has much at all to do with these differences in criminality.
Yes, the US has a high gini coefficient. But the median income is very similar to the netherlands, with NL being maybe 5000$ higher. Median wealth per capita is very similar between the two and Americans have slightly higher purchasing power, although again pretty similar. I don't think crime is higher in the US because rich people are sending the poor into a murderous rage, and if it is so then it just indicates there really is a culture problem.
Bureau of Justice statistics says that the US has about 1,200,000 police across agencies. Given a US population of 340 million this is about 283 people per employee (it says this includes civilian personnel, idk how many): https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/census-state-and-lo....
The Netherlands has about 51,000 police officers. They also have 14,000 support officers and some other civilians with some law enforcement powers (I will leave these out since idk how civilian support officers counted in BoJ stats). That is something like 352 people per officer (18 million over 51,000). On top of this there are around 7,000 gendarmie who you will see around at events or government sites, under the ministry of justice.
Australia has a little less per capita (27 million people, 65,000 officers 415:1) but also their defense forces have some domestic authorities that in the US might be law enforcement. Some forces are protesting because they want to hire more people, take that for what you want.
I wouldn't call this a drastic difference and in my anecdotal experience, as opposed to yours, the police are about as visible in all three places, maybe more so in Australian cities because they walk around in large groups wearing hi-vis.
Note that these are similar police presence rates despite probably higher crime in the US (I guess this would depend on offence). If you have higher crime, why wouldn't you have more police?
In contrast to what you say, crime clearance seems to be much higher in the Netherlands. The homicide clearance rate is around 80% compared to 50-65% in the US (depends on year). I believe clearance rates for burglary are also several times higher. So the laws are better enforced.
Colombia, since you brought it up, has a very similar police presence to all of the above. They should probably get more since they have 5x the murders of the US.
I do not really see the relevance of the attitude towards healthcare bill costs to this discussion. Your view of the US as extremely over policed compared to other societies seems misguided based on the data, and maybe driven by ideology since you bring up mostly irrelevant facts like hospital costs (these don't generally bankrupt the homeless in America because they usually don't pay anyway, since they have no money and just go to emergency room). The statistics I see on homelessness do not even indicate that America has a particular homelessness problem in comparison to the Netherlands, for example, in fact they are right next to one another on this list (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_...) with Australia being higher. I am sure you can quibble about how the statistics here are collected or what it means.
My thesis is simple. I think Americans commit more crimes because they are more criminal and it is more normalised in society. I think we have all the laws we need, but a lot of inertia preventing us from enforcing them. I think this is particularly true in certain urban areas. I think deploying hundreds of national guardsmen in the capitol is an interesting experiment which stands some chance of changing this a bit, and that it comes as minimal cost to civil liberties of law abiding citizens. Maybe it will work or maybe not, but it doesn't seem outrageous for a city with 200 murders per year in the richest country on earth. I think a more criminal population requires more intensive policing than a less criminal one.
I've spent close to 45 years out of 60 in NL, and I've interacted with the police a handful in that time, and usually I initiated the interaction (other than random alcohol checks). I've spent less than a year contiguously in the United States and have interacted with the police there on every visit, sometimes multiple times per visit. And I never initiated the contact.
> maybe Americans just need a little more show of police force to behave
I say this as someone who's split his life between the US (on both coasts) and Europe: the US's police forces are far more visible, and employ far more force, than in Europe.
Is it really? It is not hard to go the hague and see gendarmerie. I see police all over Europe when I go. If they apply less force, it may be because the population is less criminal, or perhaps they get better people into their forces. I think Europeans have way more regulations that are enforced.
The claim that "more" won't change anything is empirical. Let's come back in a few months and see if DC is safer or not--I will admit if I was wrong.
Again, I think this is an interesting solution because it is actually less invasive than all the tech solutions to just have guys on the street who watch and maybe come up and talk to you and then forget about it. If you are just going about your day peacefully, are you going to lose anything here?
We seem to have gotten a surveillance state with cameras and sensors (and censors) everywhere that somehow doesn't police easily solvable/preventable crime. If I thought there was some big civil liberties tradeoff I might think differently, but it seems like we lost those while still having to buy our deodorant from behind locked cabinets and occasionally getting shot by some guy with ten priors.
The complaints and protests that this goes against civil liberties has just started to ring hollow because there are few visible serious efforts to protest the real abuses of civil liberties which mostly come from tech and the surveillance economy. Somehow the energy is directed against guys in uniform standing around making sure the street doesn't get turned into a drag race.
There are 1.21 firearms for every person in the USA. There are .15 for every person in Europe.
If you don't understand how having 8x the number of firearms per capita increases the ease in which criminals have access to them, I'm not sure what to say. Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access.
I'm not even for gun control - I feel like the genie is so far out of the bottle at this point that there's no real sense in trying to put it back in, and the only way for everyday citizens to be on level ground when it comes to self defense, home protection, etc., is being armed themselves. But acting like states or cities with strict gun control actually have the ability to prevent criminals from having access to them is silly.
"Strict laws and licensing requirements mean nothing if it is still trivial to gain access."
So have more police to enforce the laws? Why is there this belief that increasing police cannot do anything? Again, I bet this works and that DC has lower crime during the period the NG is there. It is empirical, let's see.
Gun smuggling is not the kind of crime that national guardsman standing around looking menacing stops. This is the sort of work detectives and specialized units do. Specialized surveillance, physical and digital, informants, etc. People taking plea deals in exchange for additional info.
How would a military force without the training or skillset required to do this help? Without the community knowledge? Without the contacts in it?
The issue isn't whether or not more (and better trained) police would help - they almost certainly would. But that is different from deploying the national guard.
The other problem is that even if crime rates are reduced, that is one statistic in a vacuum - how much damage does it do to public perception of the police? We know it does - see above. What incidents might occur from the lack of training the NG has in policing civilians? What damages does it do to the fundamental freedoms within the country?
What fundamental freedoms are people in DC going to lose? See my other comment---I think this is much less intrusive on civil liberties than adding more surveillance.
National Guardsmen may not find many guns if they arent searching people, but people will think twice about using them with guardsmen standing around. They will get into and escalate altercations where guns might be used less. There are plenty of prior cases where more policing has reduced crime like this, and DC was not doing enough, so this is going to be tried. If the police decide to work together with them enthusiastically, then even more can be done with the extra manpower.
I don't think public perception of police will change much, and anyway it always hovers around 50% confidence in surveys.
Oh, you just have to look around the world to see how effectively a dictator's deployment of national armed force reduces the official crime statistics. There's absolutely positively zero doubt in mind that will be a reported outcome :-)
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC
Beijing is the safest city I've ever lived in. A heavily policed city with an authoritarian government will give you all the safety and low crime rates you desire.
It comes at a cost. Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.
The degrees to which this is true varies tremendously, depending on how much the concept of "rule of law" is applied. In China (and other police states) the rule of law is not applied, in most European countries and the US (at least prior to this administration) it is (generally speaking; there's always corruption here and there).
In India where a social media post pissed off someone. It was sarcastic criticism - no threats, no slurs). But won't get into details, sorry. (Also arrested a few times for participating in mass protests against corruption, but that was in a large group, so wasn't all that stressful.)
I also had bad luck when traveling to the US. Got detained by the CBP - I think because I accidentally sneezed on the officer and pissed him off. (Either that or I looked like some terrorist). Had to stay in a cell for more than a day. I wasn't even questioned!
Thankfully, nothing happened after that. Was good to catch up on sleep though, since there was nothing to do.
The whole point of the District of Columbia not being a state is that the United States is an equal compact between the states, and it would not be fair for the seat of the federal government to be in a state. So I'm a hard pass on DC statehood. I find GP's suggestion better.
Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?
> Would you be as favorable to DC statehood if they were guaranteed to vote the opposite of you?
Yes I would, the people of DC should have representation, but using retrocession to get there would dilute any influence they have on their own politics and local control. I understand that the founders were worried about fairness and no state being favored over another by selecting one to be the capitol of the country, but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today – especially if that state were made up out of whole cloth from the people who had already lived there.
> but I don't believe that'd be a concern for almost anyone alive today
On the contrary, it is a significant concern for me and I'm sure I'm not alone in my thoughts.
Fully half of the top ten richest counties in this country are suburbs of DC, a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying. I find this to be an absolute travesty that shows just how much incentive and corrupting force there is in the federal government.
Return the land to the states. Keep a small federal territorial enclave for actual federal buildings and functions. Make a lot more of these territorial enclaves all around this vast country so that power is less concentrated in one place. That's one thing the Germans got right, in their federalism.
> a place that has no industry other than politics, administration, and lobbying.
Uh, I'd expect someone posting here to know better, given that Amazon HQ2 is in Arlington and us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.
And you skipped over aerospace/defense, not to mention biotech. (Even if there is a lot of bloat in the defense sector, it's not all useless.)
It's in Arlington because... lobbying! Bezos wanted to absorb more defense spending in AWS and chose to be physically nearby to rub shoulders and get deals.
> us-east-1 is in Northern VA. There's also a videogame company called Bethesda that you might have heard of.
I doubt us-east-1 employs more than a handful of people. Datacenters are primarily hands-off. Bethesda supposedly has ~650 employees across 6 continents.
But I think you're missing the point: am I to understand that having datacenters and game developers in the area leads it to having the highest median household income in this fantastically wealthy country? Not New York with Wall Street, or Los Angeles through whose port the two largest economies in the world trade, or San Francisco with its own world-class port and all of its software industry?
Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?
You completely skipped over the defense and biotech industries, I notice. Not to mention DC being the HQ of the US military-industrial complex and the intelligence community. Like I said, there's a lot of bloat in the defense industry, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that it's 100% waste.
> Do you really think suburban DC would be so rich if it wasn't for people wanting to pay to be near the seat of a globe-spanning empire, to be better positioned to peddle influence and get rich off of the taxpayer's back? Do you not find that to be at least a little disgusting?
IMO it's perfectly legitimate for organizations to advocate for their interests as long as they do not engage in bribery. They often have subject matter expertise the government does not, and more information allows for better decision-making. Would you rather the government operate in a vacuum, completely disconnected from what is going on in the rest of the country? Btw, it's not just corporations that lobby, there are plenty of NGOs doing the same thing.
If you want to blame someone for this dynamic, blame the founders of this country, who decided to create a federal district rather than put the capital in an existing city with an existing industrial base.
Now, I'm not a student of politics, so I may be making some error, but I'd say (1) only about 2/3 of the ones on that list* are in a decent political position, and (2) that in any event a shifting of the balance of power between states (not just US states, any states) and their corresponding federal government is a big deal and not to be done lightly.
Of course, because I'm not a student of politics, I also don't take any strong position about what the USA should or shouldn't do with DC. If y'all turn DC into Trump's personal walled castle and themed gold-plated golf course, all I'm gonna do is get some popcorn, I won't stop you.
* including e.g. the one I live in, where the president has far less power than in the American system and real power is with the chancellor, and also the voting system is completely different and supports a plurality of parties not just two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...
Just to clarify: I meant the fact that the capital of a country needs some kind of special exception. That normally really isn't the case.
NL is kind of special: the capital of the country is Amsterdam, but the seat of government is the Hague. But in Belgium, which is about as divided as it comes, the seat of government is Brussels, which is itself bi-lingual.
I don't think this is a problem that requires a particularly convoluted solution. What it does require is for people to simply play by the rule of law. And that's the thing that the United States is currently putting to the test on every metric that matters.
All DC statehood proposals cut out the capitol complexes from the territory that would turn into a state. The seat of power would remain not in a state.
I don't think that matters though. I'm more concerned about the broader metropolitan area where all the people with all those powers and all the people who are on their coattails reside. Which is currently Virginia and Maryland. Shrinking DC proper is basically a no-op on that front.
If anything were to happen it should probably be the creation of a "middle" Virginia on some sort of Northeast southwest line so that the metropolitan area is split among three states to dilute it.
Failing that just split it among VA/MD, that'd basically leave the status quo unchanged with regard to interests and power but at least make less people's lives subject to political football.
The crime rates in DC have been dramatically falling over the last couple years, just as they have been falling across most cities in the country for the last couple decades.
For one I would not accept that trade off at all. But secondly it's exceedingly unlikely. Policing has barely any impact on crime rate. The governor of NYC deployed national guard to the subways and they stand around doing nothing. Police also routinely stand around doing nothing. Crime spiked from the pandemic and dropped when it ended. No public policy has made more than a marginal impact. Crime rate is dictated by economics.
What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.
Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.
"Each week during the slowdown saw civilians report an estimated 43 fewer felony assaults, 40 fewer burglaries and 40 fewer acts of grand larceny. And this slight suppression of major crime rates actually continued for seven to 14 weeks after those drops in proactive policing — which led the researchers to estimate that overall, the slowdown resulted in about 2,100 fewer major-crimes complaints."
"“In their efforts to increase civilian compliance, certain policing tactics may inadvertently contribute to serious criminal activity,” the researchers wrote. “The implications for understanding policing in a democratic society should not be understated.”"
"“Our results imply not only that these tactics fail at their stated objective of reducing major legal violations, but also that the initial deployment of proactive policing can inspire additional crimes that later provide justification for further increasing police stops, summonses and so on,” the authors wrote."
I've lived in NYC since the mid-90s which was about the peak for crime so that's exactly what I'm commenting on. The police did some things better, but the dropping crime rates were not just local or even national, but global. No mayor or police chief can take credit for it. Similarly if you want to attribute the 2020 crime wave and recent ebb, it begins and ends with COVID-19. No humans involved at all.
The capital of a country, especially one in a special status like Washington DC, should be a shinning star of perfection, nit in the top 20 hell holes you'd never want to be caught dead in at midnight alone.
That sounds like a reference to North Korea. If that wasn't your intention: the capital of a country is usually (but not always) also the largest city. The largest city will have the largest group of people on the fringe. By definition it will never be a 'shining star of perfection', but neither are they in the 'top 20 hell holes', they have more of everything, and that - unfortunately - includes more crime. But the DC version is a bit more complex in that the biggest criminals are not found on the streets but in various offices.
> If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
> [...] raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.
Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.
DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.
The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.
> DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe.
DC is not safe. The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023. Not even Haiti in a normal year, which is around 7-10 homicides per 100k. DC is as bad as Haiti during the recent unrest, where homicides quadrupled from 2020 to 2023. DC is only a little bit less bad than the civilian death rate in Iraq during ISIS, which peaked at 50 per 100k in 2014.
"Safe" is below 1 homicide per 100k annually, like most of western europe, which only a handful of cities in the U.S. match, like Boise, ID or Irvine, CA. "Relatively safe" are places like Massachusetts, Vermont, Utah, Oregon, or Iowa, which are similar to Canada at around 2 per 100k. San Diego and New York City, in the 3-4 per 100k range, are "safe-ish."
DC is safe. The 2023 spike was an anomaly and it has been falling sharply in 2024 and 2025, but even in that year it was highly focused on specific groups. If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk at 3am in certain neighborhoods, it had no impact on your life. Fox News likes to describe it as Sarajevo or Mogadishu but it just isn't - go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches. There certainly are crimes happening but anyone telling you it's out of control or that the police are powerless to stop it is lying to you for political reasons.
> DC is safe. The 2023 spike was an anomaly and it has been falling sharply in 2024 and 2025, but even in that year it was highly focused on specific groups.
I feel like when you say “DC is safe” you mean “DC is safe for affluent white/asian people who stay in the designated safe zones.” Because it’s not safe for the majority of the people who don’t live in those areas.
Objectively speaking, DC’s 27 homicides per 100k people in 2024 is almost double what it was in 2012. If actually started going back up before the pandemic. And in absolute terms, DC has about 8 times the homicide rate of a relatively safe american city like new york or san diego.
> If you weren't part of a gang or making yourself an easy target for a mugging out drunk
It’s ultimately driven by gangs, but most people killed aren’t gang members per se. They’re gang adjacent, or siblings or friends who get caught up in the gang wars. Also, the gangs aggressively recruit young men in the neighborhoods where they operate. It’s very “you’re with us or against us.”
> go to any of these SUPER SCARY neighborhoods and it's like people waiting for the bus, moms jogging by with strollers, and old people hanging out on porches.
I’ve lived in downtown Baltimore, DC, and Wilmington Delaware. I know how cities work. But the violence is a constant for the people who live there. We got to know an Indian family who had a great Indian restaurant in the ghetto in Wilmington, which has a similar homicide rate to DC. Yeah, on any given day you won’t see someone get murdered. But they had someone get killed on the street outside their restaurant. And EMTs wouldn’t come for hours because they were worried about getting caught in a gang firefight. Then another person got shot in the street near my wife’s office at 5 am waiting for the Nike Store to open. That was just in one year. Imagine growing up there and not being rich each to isolate yourself from the violence.
> I feel like when you say “DC is safe” you mean “DC is safe for affluent white/asian people who stay in the designated safe zones.” Because it’s not safe for the majority of the people who don’t live in those areas.
It’s the opposite: there are a handful of small hotspots which are less safe, but even those aren’t that bad. I live in a fairly mixed neighborhood (none of my immediate neighbors are white, 20% of the ward earn less than $50k, etc.) and it’s just not something people are worried about in daily life.
There is a hotspot about ¾ mile away where we had a couple of gang members kill each other. That’s not great, of course, but it’s literally one building and behind closed doors (the police arrested the perps from Maryland last year, and it’s been quiet since). Nobody else in the neighborhood is changing their plans, local businesses aren’t affected, etc. If you go by in the evening, it’s people walking dogs and kids playing, not hiding inside with the doors locked.
Again, there are real problems and I wholly support the continued programs to solve them, but the imagery being used to claim an emergency is a work of fiction. If they wanted to do something about crime, they’d start taking cars away from unsafe drivers as that’s far more likely to be harmful to most residents here.
> The homicide rate in DC in 2023 was about 40 per 100k. That's about the same as Haiti in 2023.
Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population. Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce vs. a nation that didn't see significant covid unemployment. Focusing on one particular statistic that happens to be extremely bad in the US (and worse in the south) due to 2FA nutjobery. Also I'm frankly pretty dubious that you have good numbers for Haiti anyway.
Show a chart, basically[1]. DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's. The contention I responded to that it was notably bad is simply incorrect.
> Cherry picking. Urban core vs. rural population.
The GP elsewhere in the thread pointed out that in like-to-like comparisons of Washington, DC against peer world cities, it fares really poorly in violent crime.
> Post-pandemic peak in a highly disrupted workforce
I doubt that the people who are committing crimes were disrupted from the workforce.
> DC's violent crime rate is around one third of where it was in the 90's
Both things can be true: DC used to be worse in violent crime, and today's violent crime is still unacceptably high.
DC is part of the United States, which has high levels of income inequality and easier access to guns than any other advanced country. The drug war keeps pulling people in because we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people. In other countries, you have better medical care (fewer people buying fentanyl on the street because they can't get legal chronic pain treatment), and if people don't have easy access to guns the homicide rate is lower because while there are people just as mad at the world they're getting in fist or knife fights rather than shootouts which are more likely to be lethal and affect more people. Yes, people still get seriously hurt but if all you're looking at are homicide stats you really need to think about how those are affected by technological changes which greatly increase lethality.
In particular for DC, note also that Republicans have blocked for many years efforts by DC's government to restrict the supply of guns and the lack of a national strategy means that someone who can't buy a gun in DC goes a few miles away to Virginia. In most other countries, you don't have the option of even a short walk offering access to very different laws. This also shows up in the crime stats: in my neighborhood there've been a couple of fatal shootings over the last decade – and in every case both the perp and victim were people from Maryland who came over the border to do a drug deal because they can switch jurisdictions in 5 minutes and thus confuse a police response.
> if all you're looking at are homicide stats you really need to think about how those are affected by technological changes which greatly increase lethality.
Funnily enough, academic work suggests the exact opposite, that the homicide rate in this country could be 5x higher were it not for advancements in trauma care[0]. Inner-city hospitals are applying battlefield medicine techniques and saving lives, turning homicides into aggravated assaults.
> we have a lot of unhappy people buying, and economically marginalized young people
The state of West Virginia, which has more guns and a higher share of unhappy, economically marginalized young people than Virginia, has a lower homicide rate than its eastern neighbor.
Ultimately, we likely disagree on "the root cause of crime", as it were. I don't believe that more aid for the poor or reducing income inequality will materially reduce violent crime rates, because by and large people do not commit violent crime in order to escape poverty. Instead, people are poor for a lot of the same reasons that they commit crime: they have poor impulse control, high time preference, and little consideration for those around them. We have not yet figured out a way to apply money to people in such a way to change these undesirable behavioral patterns, so I am against spending more of the taxpayer's money in this fruitless endeavor. The ways that do work have fallen out of favor in society.
I believe what will make a material impact is lengthier sentences and more pretrial detention; that is, policy must favor the rights of the law-abiding majority over the rights of repeat criminals.
No, DC and Chicago are not Fallujah. I travel to DC frequently and have never had any reason to fear violent crime. I take the metro. I walk long distances, including late at night. I have relatives who live there. They do not worry about violent crime. They certainly don't consider it "Fallujah". I've also seen aides to the same republican politicians who spout all this fear mongering rhetoric out at night at DC bars without any apparent fears for their safety. Frankly, it's an incredibly insulting to say that DC is Fallujah. There is literally an article on the Department of Justice website from January with the title "Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low". The statistics that you quoted are several years out of date and you conveniently neglected to mention the decline after 2023. You chose a number from 2023 of 40 per 100k, but the number from 2024 was 27 per 100k. That's cherry-picking data to make a point. It's dishonest. You also neglect to mention the differences in data collection practices between the United States and a country like Haiti or Iraq. Exactly how trustworthy are wartime homicide statistics in a country undergoing complete social collapse?
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...
If you look at the actual list of homicides in a major American city, the victims are often people who are involved in the drug trade. Homicides are often highly concentrated in small areas. A large portion of the city sees no homicides at all in a given year. I don't know if an equivalent map exists for DC, but you can look at a map of homicides in Boston in 2024. There are a few areas where there are clusters with 2-3 homicides within a few blocks. Then there are whole neighborhoods where there are no homicides at all, or just one or two. https://www.universalhub.com/crime/murder/2024
Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
For decades now, the media has painted a sensationalized picture of big cities. I was traveling once and was talking to an older couple from a rural area. When I told them where I lived, they were genuinely concerned for my safety. I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
I've read the same "30 year low" press release. 30 years ago, in the 90s, DC's homicide rate was hovering around the 70-80 per 100k range, which are truly frightening numbers not be seen outside of literal wartime[0]. It's good news that violent crime is down since then, but it speaks to a blind spot[1] that you do not find the current violent crime rate to be utterly unacceptable.
> Typically a tourist to a major US city doesn't have much reason to fear violent crime. People commuting into the city to work or living in more affluent neighborhoods don't have much reason to fear violent crime. People living in poorer neighborhoods often do have reason to fear violent crime, but it really depends on the neighborhood and things can vary from one block to another. People involved in the drug trade in particular neighborhoods have an extremely good reason to fear violent crime.
I agree with the overall statement of fact in your paragraph, but perhaps we disagree on where we go from here. One is that in my opinion, we have seen in recent years a spillover of violent crime into ordinary people living in big cities. Another is that my concern isn't as much for tourists or those living in wealthy neighborhoods; it's more for those living in poor neighborhoods in close proximity to people engaging in criminal and antisocial behavior. I find it to be a travesty that those working hard to better their situation in life must, in addition, bear the burden of living near people who should be locked up.
> I was completely mystified because in the years that I've lived here, I've never had any reason to feel unsafe.
As the old saying goes, a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
[0]: Did the GP make a ninja edit around Fallujah?
[1]: For whatever reason, many Americans take the presence of alarming rates of violent crime as almost like a natural disaster; something that happens and must be accepted.
I think what I was trying to convey is that the image of life in an American city that the parent was portraying, when he described a beautiful, wealthy city as "Fallujah" (which he has now deleted), and what this couple clearly had in their head, is just completely alien to most people who actually live in those cities. The impression that you get from conservative media and often local TV news is just completely divorced from reality - or at best the media has taken the experience of a relatively small number of people who live in particularly dangerous housing projects, or particularly dangerous streets, and presented it as how the city works in general. I know Boston better than Washington, so I'll use that as an example. Admittedly, it's a city with much lower crime than Washington, but I've had plenty of experiences talking to older, more conservative people who live in suburban and rural areas, and seem to think it's crime ridden. I used to work in several neighborhoods that are considered dangerous - Roxbury and Mattapan, and I've spent time in some of the rougher parts of Dorchester. I've been inside a number of low-income housing projects. I've walked and ridden buses in these neighborhoods. What I noticed was that whatever concern I felt about my safety came from things that I had heard from the media, not from anything that I personally saw, or even anything that happened to anyone I knew. There are a few exceptions to this, like a few blocks in the South End where homeless addicts congregate where I would genuinely be concerned about something happening. The neighborhoods where I've lived - which are not necessarily affluent - have all felt perfectly safe, with the exception of some petty thefts - particularly bike thefts.
I am not trying to argue that there is no crime problem anywhere - of course there is and people shouldn't have to live in unsafe areas. But as someone who has intimate knowledge of a major American city, it very much feels like there's a propaganda machine that's pumping out distorted images of life in American cities, either for political purposes or simply because sensationalizing crime draws more viewers. People who don't live in these cities are left with a view that completely lacks the nuance and complexity of actual life in a major city.
Boston and New York are in a totally different league than DC. Even at DC’s best in 2012, it had a homicide rate more than three times as high as those cities. And currently, DC’s homicide rate is more than six times as high.
And I’m not unfamiliar with how cities work. I lived in downtown Wilmington Delaware, in Baltimore not too far from Sandtown, and work in DC. But your point boils down to “yuppies aren’t going to get shot if they need to buy something in Anacostia” and that’s a stupid argument.
The pro-criminal yuppies in DC are out of touch, hypocritical assholes. Sure, I felt safe living in my new apartment complex in gentrified Chinatown and taking an Uber to Eastern Market. But I couldn’t help but notice that everyone around me was also white/asian and college educated. It’s like everyone knew and followed the city’s unstated rules of segregation. It was safe—for the yuppies—under those circumstances.
The point that I'm trying to make is that relentless propaganda from right-wing media gives people a false impression of life in cities like Washington DC. Hence the poster I was responding to casually comparing Washington to Fallujah and Haiti, one a literal war zone, and the other a place where the social order completely collapsed and even basic services like electricity and clean water were not available. It's an absolutely absurd comparison, and yet many people who only get their information from this propaganda machine absolutely believe this.
What is out of touch is declaring that the crime problem, which is actually improving, is an emergency that justifies deploying troops to the streets of the capital. These troops are being deployed to the areas around the national mall where they are highly visible - but there is very little violent crime and a lot of existing police presence around the monuments. They aren't trained or experienced in street-level law enforcement. Neither are the FBI agents, who are being taken away from other critical priorities like counterintelligence to patrol the national mall. Note that Trump did not deploy the national guard on January 6th, when there was a genuine threat on the national mall. This is not a genuine effort to address crime. It is an extremely cynical effort to look like they are addressing crime while they grab more and more unchecked executive power.
Poverty is the underlying driver of most crime. Poverty, in turn, is the result of wealth hoarding by the ruling class.
Authoritarian intervention can lower crime at the expense of democratic rights. (Let’s not kid ourselves, the NG will not be used to “facilitate” protest in DC.). Effectively, an authoritarian response to crime further consolidates the power of the ruling class.
Trump has steadily encroached on constitutional rights throughout his term. He is indifferent to the root causes of crime. He is really only interested in crime insofar as it allows him to identify more people he doesn’t like as criminals, and to use harsher measures against them.
Mostly the best market is intelligence agency vendors. As a US citizen, I would only be comfortable selling to US contractors. There are a bunch; if you go to conferences you probably meet the people there (look at the sponsors...).
It won't be tax-free, though; you'd probably get a 1099, but if you're smart could set it up as corp to corp and deduct a bunch of other expenses from it. Part of the sale is signing a bunch of NDAs, etc so you can't then release it to others.
The CFAA makes it illegal to exceed authorized access to any 'protected computer' (in practice, basically any computer).
The exploit developer avoids violating the CFAA by developing the exploit on their own computer... because you are authorized to access your own computer.
The government doesn't violate the CFAA when using exploits because government agencies are exempt under 18 USC § 1030 (f)
Off the cuff, I'd guess that any official documentation would be around the sale of "research" and not "an exploit". Depending how classy the buyer was about it, there might or might not be an offline wink and nudge.
Not a lawyer, do pay a lot of attention to this area for professional reasons. Answer: it doesn't, unless you (1) found the vulnerability through methods that themselves violate CFAA (for instance, by breaking into a remote computer), or (2) sold information about the vulnerability knowing that it would be used for a particular set of crimes, in which case you can get accomplice liability for those crimes.
CFAA doesn't have anything to say about vulnerability research itself. You'd be just as liable as an accomplice if you knowingly and deliberately provided free wi-fi to a hacker.
>Mostly the best market is intelligence agency vendors.
That makes me wonder - may be the original bug was really a backdoor created as a result of a deal with an intelligence agency/vendor. So, can it be that Google gets money (or more generally some kind of browny points; also interesting aspect - giving that the agencies may exploit individual engineers, it would seem to be more preferable for the company to play ball and have it organized under the company's control) for a backdoor, and once backdoor is found - pays the bug bounty. The bug bounty is thus a kind of backdoor quality control program :)
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