Agree with the other commenter that there is no implication of mixed orchards in their comments.
It is commonplace to decide that a particular plot of land needs to be either maintained or moved to production of another crop. When those production change decisions are made, it is in response to an assessment of the market and the properties of the plot of land. (The assessment may be wrong or short sighted of course.)
The article says, "This pattern, of only those without good alternative options riding the bus, is especially pronounced in the US. But close stop spacing creates problems." But it does not address the point. The bus in the US is aimed at poor, elderly, and disabled people. Elderly and disabled people want stops closer to their homes, especially given the low overall density of bus lines.
The US has a lot of competing problems, and underinvestment in poor people and health support is one that collides with public transit.
One thing I've realized in the US is that because of our inequality, people strive hard to earn and buy their way out of misery in a way that is not necessary in large parts of Europe. So in the US we work very hard to earn money to pay for big cars to drive through the suburbs so that we don't have to see homeless people sleeping on the bus when it's cold, and once we've invested in our suburban cars & houses we have personal assets we need to defend (at the expense of communal infrastructure in some cases).
I take the bus regularly in my city, often with a child. janalsncm has legit criticisms of many US public bus systems. I take the bus with the kid so I can avoid driving/parking and go to a few spots that are convenient unencumbered by a vehicle. We tend to take a rapid line that has fewer stops -- and the speed makes it convenient. So the article isn't all wrong. The rapid transit line does earn my business. But at the same time, we don't take the bus everywhere because it is not convenient for long trips with transfers, and I likely have a higher threshold for explaining, "Honey don't stare at that guy with the foil and the lighter" than most well-off US parents. (In Europe we take transit all over.)
Some people say "he was a protestor and protestors who bring a gun to a protest deserve to be shot (FAFO)".
You say he's not a protestor, so as an observer he deserves to be shot because somehow he was interfering.
And your characterization of citizens forming "military squads" is also fascinating. What does that mean to you, in detail? Does it mean... uniforms? central coordination? simulated exercises? None of those are the case here.
Who are the out of state agitators?
Why do you think the governor is involved? I think you've been watching a lot of Cam Higby & friends. This is their rhetoric. And I know some ppl who've changed their name to Tim on Signal to troll you back.
Feel free to listen to the actual speeches of Mayors Kaohly Her and Jacob Frey. They have consistently urged staying peaceful and resisting the provocations to violence of both the agents and outside provocateurs. They know we're under the knife of the Insurrection Act and everything is under a microscope. We know it too.
The incredulity that people like you have about the level of organization points to your lack of involvement in your own communities. Have you ever organized a PTA fundraiser to raise $25,000 for school activities? Have you ever had to sign up three children across one daycare, an elementary school, and a middle school for summer camp activities, six months in advance, coordinating all the different schedules? Let me tell you -- doing these things develops a lot of skills that then carry over very easily into organizing a patrol at pick-up and drop-off at the Spanish immersion daycare. That's the "military force" you're up against. In my neighborhood an old lady organized her senior building to send people over to stand around the Spanish immersion daycare daily, because ICE/CBP keep showing up even though all the employees have work authorization and have been background checked.
You're right: it's not protesting. It's just showing up for your neighbors. Bearing witness, even in a Christian sense.
Indeed, as sibling commenter notes, it's not to prevent ICE from doing their jobs. Observers do not take physical actions to block ICE/CBP. Observers are there to
1) get the name & some other info from the person being abducted so that their family can be contacted
2) record the encounter so that ICE/CBP has some check on their behavior, or legal action can be taken in the future to prosecute them for violence and destruction of property
3) recover the belongings of the person abducted and ensure family/friends can get these things, as often wallet, cell phone, shoes, coat, and vehicle (even still running) are left behind
4) get a tow truck for any vehicle left behind, preferably from one of the tow services that is towing for free or low cost
4) connect family/friends with legal resources, if needed, or simply let them know that their lawyer needs to get to the Whipple Building ASAP
None of those things are illegal. In some of the small rural towns in Minnesota, there aren't observers there, and the phones/vehicles/wallets of people kidnapped from Walmart are just... left in the parking lot, in the snow. It adds insult to injury to have your phone & wallet gone, your car window smashed in, and a big fee from the municipal towing lot if you're a US citizen who is then released from detainment 12 hours later. And if you're not a US citizen but you have legal status, you want your family to get an attorney working ASAP to ensure you're not flown to Texas -- because if you're flown to Texas, even in error, you need to get back on your own (again without your wallet/phone/etc if those things didn't happen to stick with you).
Not to mention they keep releasing people with no phone & no jacket, even no shoes, into the zero or negative degree weather we've been having.
> Observers do not take physical actions to block ICE/CBP.
As clearly seen in multiple videos, including at least one video of almost every major incident we're supposed to get outraged about, yes, they clearly do.
> Not to mention they keep releasing people with no phone & no jacket, even no shoes, into the zero or negative degree weather we've been having.
How come the cold weather doesn't justify ICE wearing "masks" which often appear to just be face/neck warmers?
They are going door to door in the neighborhood I grew up in.
They're bringing in a lot of US citizens here in Minneapolis/St Paul, including a bunch of Native folks.
The sex offender they'd been looking for at ChongLy Thao's house had already been in jail for a year.
The Dept of Corrections is annoyed enough about the slander of their work that they now have a whole page with stats and details about their transfers to ICE, including some video of them transferring criminals into ICE custody https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/
I am pretty nervous about the possibilities for trampling peoples' Constitutional rights in ever more sophisticated ways, but the current iteration can't even merge a database and then get accurate names & addresses out to field agents. (That doesn't stop the kidnappings, it just makes it a big waste of money as adult US citizens with no criminal record do by & large get released.)
Yeah Cam Higby & friends have "infiltrated" the Signal groups. It's not that hard frankly, and most of the chats emphasize that 1) they're unvetted, 2) don't do anything illegal, anywhere, including taking a right on red if the sign is there saying not to 3) don't write anything you don't want read back to you in a court of law. Higby and friends do have "How do you do, Fellow Kids?" energy in those chats.
Here's what I'm interested in: anyone know what Penlink's tools' capabilities actually are? Tangles and WebLoc. Are they as useful as advertised?
Your phrasing "something more productive in the private sector" is taken from the DOGE emails to federal employees. Note that in this sense "productive" means "makes money for corporations". If your utility function is different, these jobs are no longer more productive.
For a very concrete illustration, I know a Veterans Administration physician who got the DOGE emails. He's been underpaid by $50k-100k per year compared to private market rates, for the last twenty years. He is happy to take that discount because the mission of caring for veterans is something he cares about, and because he feels he can practice better medicine if his goal is patient outcomes rather than billable procedures. He also values the education and research priorities of the VA.
It is absolutely true that he would make a lot more money for a private provider maximizing procedures and billing.
But is that what we should be optimizing for as a society? Is that what you personally aim for from your doctors?
It is not only about labor prices being high enough (creating consumers who can buy more). There is a significant religious component to the introduction of fixed pricing. Quakers are often credited with introducing fixed pricing in the Western world, because they felt that charging higher prices to those less able to haggle (or higher prices by age, gender, race) was immoral, dishonest in the eyes of God. They then experienced greater sales because you could send your kid to the store and trust the kid wouldn't get ripped off. It just took a layer of stress off going to the store. John Wanamaker (a Presbyterian?) I think is the one who really started a retail empire on fixed pricing. One of his main selling points was one price for anyone, and a fair return policy.
The behavioral economics here is that many people will pay a consistent (fair) price to not be surprised and not feel ripped off.
Agree that automation will engage in price discrimination whenever possible. When will we see the backlash? I have heard stories of outrage ("when I looked for airline tickets at work they were way cheaper than when I looked on my home laptop!") but we haven't seen a widespread reaction, and the moral aspect seems to be relatively overlooked at this time.
Adverse childhood experiences definitely correlate with socioeconomic status. It's possible to disentangle their separate effects on some statistical level, but very difficult on a practical level. For instance, losing your home and living with your mom in a car when you're 6 is a socioeconomic ACE.
Someone else in the discussion here made a comment that service members should be mad at this blog post, as it is essentially saying that people cause their own adverse experiences. Well, again, the US armed services tend to draw disproportionately from lower socioeconomic groups, who tend to have higher numbers of adverse experiences. It's very hard to disentangle these correlated variables when it comes to outcomes for real people. And it's a total copout to then blame servicemembers for their PTSD.
We have the language of a cycle of abuse, a cycle of poverty, a cycle of violence. People have recognized the cyclicality of this for millennia. It's good the blogpost brings that out.
The thing that disappoints me about the discussion here (and in the blog post) is that there is this relentless focus on the psychology of things. Being homeless as a child, having a parent die, having family die violently, etc all do correlate with higher rates of cardiac disease, diabetes, etc. Again, can't disentangle from the socioeconomic aspects, but you also can't blame a kid for their family member dying. The idea that "unhealthy people may be more susceptible to trauma" has some veins of validity, but is also just deeply unkind, inhuman, and inaccurate taken to an absolute. Kids in foster care, kids who experienced a school shooting, kids who had a parent die of cancer, etc -- it is immorally self-serving to say it's their own fault. You know it's not.
The blog post itself cherry-picks by focusing on PTSD and the brain, ignoring correlations between ACEs and cardiac problems and diabetes. By focusing on the brain, the author can easily imply it's made up weakness (no lab results to confront) and then move on to "just get over it", which is adjacent to "it's not my problem". I'm not a fan of over-therapizing and I don't think therapy or crystals will fix your diabetes. But don't throw the baby out with Bessel van der Kolk's bathwater.
Don't worry, it also hits birthday cards from my cousins, Christmas presents from my siblings, care packages with those favorite candies and coffees that aren't sold in the US. My sibling can't send me hand-knit items or hand-me-down kids items, items truly of de minimis monetary value.
It may be accomplishing what was intended -- but I don't think that people in the US (even those paying attention) understand what was intended. The lack of clarity in terms of regulations and collection of fees/tariffs show that it is not about efficiently collecting the $ but instead about breaking the chain of goods, from big business to small business to family ties, and cutting off flow to the USPS, supporting the privatization of the entity.
I agree that the de minimis exemption was being abused at scale.
I'm also salty that my family can't send birthday or Christmas presents, even a home-made card.
Whatever you want to say about this administration, always look one level down for the wholesale reconfiguration of supply chain and international connections that they're aiming for.
> It may be accomplishing what was intended -- but I don't think that people in the US (even those paying attention) understand what was intended.
this is what i suspect too. most of his common supporters i interact with parrot the “america first will revitalize the economy and job market” and then when that doesnt happen they do the same with “i’m willing to deal with temporary bit of pain in order to ensure american interests are protected.” these comments are almost always framed against the Obama and Biden administrations and never stand on their own merit (e.g. “unlike biden who …”).
to be perfectly fair, I’m not entirely sure what the ultimate goal is, though. My perception of the character of the person of the president has been dim for many decades so when it’s something that he champions I immediately chalk it up to something that would serve his own self interest above that of any group of other people
If all the systems were in place and working correctly then indeed there would be no effect, but the point of the article was that many countries have entirely suspended shipments because they have not got the relevant systems in place to handle the tariffs and regulations required.
It is commonplace to decide that a particular plot of land needs to be either maintained or moved to production of another crop. When those production change decisions are made, it is in response to an assessment of the market and the properties of the plot of land. (The assessment may be wrong or short sighted of course.)
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