ultraleftist

[ultraleftist]

My job on the Commune is going to be writing the new version of the Money Stuff newsletter but all about production quotas

[ultraleftist]

I blocked them. I blocked them all. They’re blocked, every single one of them. And not just the men, but the women and the children, too. They’re like animals, and I blocked them like animals.

[ultraleftist]

I’m late to the party on “memes” here, but what do you think of when you hear the words “cuck” and “cuckservative”?

[ultraleftist]

Elon Musk just can’t catch a break

[ultraleftist]

Before moving to New York City, I drove every where. I got pulled over 3 times in 15 years; two speeding tickets and an illegal left hand turn.

The first year I was back in Michigan, I got pulled over 5 times. Each  time it was for impeding traffic and I did not get a ticket.

I drove a dark grey, 1998 Chevy Venture van that was in storage for several years. It was in good shape.

The traffic stops were unlike any I had experienced in the past. The first one was in Monroe County on Dixie Highway near Sterling State Park. I was coming home from the park with my dogs. The sun was setting and it was twilight. My Poodle, Merlin, sat in the passenger seat and Indy, a Jack Russel Terrier, was in the back. I was driving down Dixie Highway at 50 mph, which is the speed limit. Flashing lights popped up behind me. My heart raced. What did I do? I pulled over and tried to calm down; I didn’t want to look suspicious.

It was a Monroe County Sheriff. I thought one of my running lights was out. As the sheriff approached my van, he unfastened the top of the holster of his gun. I had not experienced this before. I wrote it off   as the new standard procedure on all traffic stops. Or maybe this guy was a cowboy. I said as little as possible.

I waited for the, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” This officer asked where I was going. He looked in the window and flashed his light on Merlin and his demeanor changed. The stern look on his face disappeared, but he seemed…annoyed… I guess is the best word. I thought I was going to get a ticket for Merlin being in the front seat. He didn’t ask if I’d been drinking or had any weapons. He asked to see my license, looked at it under his flashlight and handed it back. Then he explained he pulled me over because I was going 3 miles under the speed limit and was impeding traffic. There were no other cars on the road. I said I was not aware of it. He told me to keep an eye on it and that he was giving me a warning. I thanked him. He walked back to his car.

I remember being confused about it, but since I didn’t get a ticket, I didn’t think to much about it. Impeding traffic, never heard of it before.

Same thing happened in Flat Rock and Huron Township. Impeding traffic, didn’t get a ticket. On the third stop, I asked one of the officers if impeding traffic was a new law in Michigan and he got a little snappy with me. The oddest one was the second time I got stopped in Huron Township.  

Merlin was a tall dog who often sat in the passenger seat. When he was in the passenger seat or the back seat, he was tall enough to be mistaken for a person, especially at night. When the officer got to my window he asked, “Who’s in the back? I said,  “No one. Just my dogs.” He asked me two more times.  “Who’s in the back?” And I said, “It’s a dog.”  He asked me to take the dog out of the vehicle.

The back of the van only opened on the passenger side, I got out, called Merlin to the front and took him out through the driver’s side door. The officer seemed annoyed as he said, “Is that a Poodle?” I said yes and put Merlin back in the van. The officer seemed mad as he explained the impeding traffic law, like I tricked him somehow and was wasting his time.

After that, I had the speedometer on the van checked to see if it was working correctly. It was.

The scariest one was the night I was driving home from my sister’s house at around 10 pm. I was going down Middlebelt Road, again in Huron Township. There was a Huron Township police car behind me since I turned onto Middlebelt. I kept checking my speedometer and I was doing the speed limit. After about a mile, he turned on his lights. I thought, “Again?” It is frustrating to be pulled over repeatedly by the police. Your heart races every time and you are scared. There is the thought, “What if it’s not the real cops?”

This time there were two Huron Township SUV police vehicles that pulled me over. One cop walked up on the passenger side of my van. I saw him in the sideview mirror unholstering his gun as he sidled up to the window where Merlin was sitting. Merlin rarely barked at people. His fingers relaxed when he saw Merlin.

I thought, “Holy crap! Maybe my van matches the description of a vehicle used in a crime.” This is a rural area, it’s about 10 pm and it is dark out. I’m a woman alone. Thank God I had Merlin with me.

I rolled down my window and was asked to roll down the passenger window. I did. I asked the officer, “Did I do something wrong?” because I was at a loss. He asked me if I’d been drinking and if I had any weapons. I said no. He took my license and examined it with his flashlight. He handed it back and asked where I was going. I was heading home and explained where that was and the route I was taking to get there. The whole time the other cop is still standing on the passenger side with his hand on his holstered gun.

The first officer explained I was driving erratically and going 5 miles under the speed limit and went through the impeding traffic law as if I was five years old. I didn’t get a ticket.

It was puzzling and irritating. I felt I was being punished for driving an old van. But what could I do?

One day, sitting at a restaurant having breakfast with my Dad; our old neighbor came in and said, “There’s a black man stealing your van. He’s behind the wheel right now.” I paused a minute and realized he was referring to Merlin. Bells went off.

I was furious. I wanted to go home and rage at every police department that pulled me over. I wasn’t impeding traffic, it’s not my van, it’s not my driving–they thought Merlin was a black man!

That’s why I kept getting pulled over. They thought it was a black man in an old van. I was so angry I wanted to drive to Dearborn at night with Merlin in the passenger seat and create a big stink when I got pulled over. “Call the news!” I’d shout! I wanted to rage at someone. But who? I couldn’t prove any of it. If only I’d realized it as it happened.

There were plenty of times black men pulled up next to me when Merlin was in the passenger seat and said, “Hey, a brother dog.” I should have known. John Steinbeck wrote in “Travels with Charley,” Charley was also a Poodle, that he had to be careful driving in the South. He got in trouble a few times because people thought Charlie was a black man. How could I be so stupid!

[ultraleftist]

if you see the buddha's blog, block it

[ultraleftist]

psyduck is probably like. the most achievable pokemon probably. like i don’t think i could teach a cabbage to grow legs and be a bulbasaur but there’s probably a certain threshold of mental torment i could subject a duck to that would make a psyduck

[ultraleftist]

When a management problem arose – for example, a train was late – a claim would be raised by one actor on another. For example, the Department for Transport might invoke a contractual penalty because the trains were late. The train-operating company would immediately claim against the infrastructure operator, which might counterclaim. Because the train leasing company might have guaranteed a certain on-time service level under a total outsourcing arrangement with the operating company, it too would then try to claim against anyone else it could think of.

This had important consequences. First of all, the claims-management process was itself costly. This is Coase’s basic argument. Second, because the prices of services exchanged between the component firms were often determined after the event, through the claims process, they were no longer informative about the marginal costs involved, but rather about the contract-management process. As a result, costs overall rose substantially although nobody could put their finger on who was coining it. Thirdly, it simply became enormously complex. A contract, after all, is executed between parties. The number of pairwise interactions within an organisation rapidly becomes very large – in fact, it increases by the factorial of the size of the organisation.

These three phenomena will become very familiar. The first is just the administrative overhead of the contracting process. The second and third are actually much more important. It will always be very difficult to get more efficient if you don’t know what your costs really area. This is a source of long term dynamic inefficiency. A major motivation of taking track maintenance back in-house was just trying to get an idea of what it actually cost. And Coase’s logic interacts in an interesting way with the economics of knowledge. If you believe a lot of relevant knowledge in an organisation or market is implicit and tacit, well, that’s by definition the sort of thing you can’t write into a contract. Either the firm has to exist in order to be the vessel of this knowledge, or else we don’t care.

Also, as we will see, in Coasian hell it is usually impossible to finger any particular guilty party, because its problems are system-level properties, driven by the interactions between firms in the system. Reductionism just leads to finger-pointing.

[ultraleftist]

..just a *little* more JavaScript

[ultraleftist]

Enhanced Interrogation Fail (27/50)

[ultraleftist]

I could never egg someone, if only because I doubt I could carry an egg for that long without dropping or accidentally smashing it, the tension would be unbearable.

[ultraleftist]

I love the carefully intertwined urban legends in which antifa are dangerous radicals coming to shoot your livestock and trash your community but also limp wristed colorful haired gender nonconforming soyboys and girls who couldn’t possibly pose a physical threat and they’re funded by Soros in cash and drugs but he also doesn’t pay them because he’s sneaky and they’re suckers and they’re black but they’re also white and they’re poor but actually they’re spoiled rich kids and they’re hot then they’re cold they’re yes then they’re no they’re in and they’re out they’re up and they’re down

[ultraleftist]

it’s like you have various activists and hippies and the like who nobody typically listens to chanting slogans about all cops being bastards and the cops respond by putting on what feels like a heavy handed parody of fascist goons in a cheap near future Netflix series about how a plucky bunch of mixed race teens Ended Racism For Good, almost tripping over themselves in their haste to pepper spray the most innocently photogenic protesters they can find, ranks of them in their stupid riot armour marching past an unconscious old man as the blood from his cracked skull stains the concrete, like what the fuck? if a film student submitted this you’d tell them to stop jerking off and make something realistic with some moral complexity, nothing is ever that straightforward!

[ultraleftist]

One of the few bright spots over the past week was Camden, NJ where instead of beating protesters the police joined them. Protests in Camden were peaceful and orderly and there was little to no looting. As I wrote last year, Camden disbanded it’s police force in 2013, nullifying the old union contract, and rebuilt.

Jim Epstein described the situation prior to rebuilding:

“Camden’s old city-run police force abused its power and abrogated its duties. It took Camden cops one hour on average to respond to 911 calls, or more than six times the national average. They didn’t show up for work 30 percent of the time, and an inordinate number of Camden police were working desk jobs. A union contract required the city to entice officers with extra pay to get them to accept crime-fighting shifts outside regular business hours. Last year, the city paid $3.5 million in damages to 88 citizens who saw their convictions overturned because of planted evidence, fabricated reports, and other forms of police misconduct.”

In 2012, the murder rate in Camden was about five times that of neighboring Philadelphia—and about 18 times the murder rate in New York City.

In May of 2013, however, the entire police department was disbanded nullifying the union contract and an entirely new county police department was put into place.

“The old city-run force was rife with cops working desk jobs, which Cordero saw as a waste of money and manpower. He and Thomson hired civilians to replace them and put all uniformed officers on crime fighting duty. Boogaard says she didn’t see a single cop during the first year she lived in the city. “Now I see them all the time and they make friendly conversation.” Pastor Merrill says the old city-run force gave off a “disgruntled” air, and the morale of Metro police is noticeably better. “I want my police to be happy,” he says.”

Note that the police were not “defunded.” In fact, Camden put more police on the street and as Daniel Bier noted crime fell and clearance rates increased.

Camden remains a high poverty, high crime place to live but the improvement shows the importance of some fairly simple attitudinal changes–“It’s more of a protect-and-serve approach to dealing with the residents, rather than kicking down doors and locking our way out of the problem” –and reforms such as restraining the police unions, focusing on violent and property crimes and not using policing as a revenue source.

>

Dissolve the police and elect another.

[ultraleftist]

I mean it really can’t be overstated how weird it is that Australia has a large population of people who were separated from the rest of humanity for between five and fifty thousand years before we showed up approximately last week and casually demolished their society while complaining that their children have a propensity to shoplift.

as H. G. Wells was perceptive enough to notice, alien invasions happen all the time except we are the aliens.

[ultraleftist]

Here's a thing that happened to one of my friends. I was there.

Basically, we were walking down the sidewalk, talking about something meaningless. I think it had to do with a movie. Then this bus screeches up, stops next to us, and a bunch of people with "Antifa" shirts climbed out and started beating him up. I was punched and kicked a bit too, but I managed to avoid brutalization by going for their faces. After figuring out what's happening, I started attacking them back, getting them off of him. He was quite injured but I called 911 and he made a full recovery at the hospital. I was fine, with only a cut on my arm that they patched up.