> will straight faced insist to you that they can tell the difference between stirring the coffee grounds with a tiny metal "distribution tool"
I could probably distribute the coffee by simply shaking and tapping the portafilter on the counter, but stirring it makes it more even and I'm less likely to make a mess that way.
Halfway into the article it started reminding me of the informant networks of the USSR. Officers peeping through windows, feeding data into the system about the target's friends and family while also fining them for any unrelated arbitrary misdemeanor. This is not what crime prevention looks like in a democracy.
Pasco: “Make their lives miserable until they move or sue.”
Stasi: "The security service's goal was to use Zersetzung to 'switch off' regime opponents. After months and even years of Zersetzung a victim's domestic problems grew so large, so debilitating, and so psychologically burdensome that they would lose the will to struggle against the East German state." [1]
Except this surveillance machine is even more stupid. The USSR was at least ostensibly protecting its power structure from internal opposition.
These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals by giving them records and harassing their families until they fall unto hardship.
These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals
What if that was the point? The system is making work to justify its continued existence. The police aren't working for you, they are working for the sheriff, and these interest do not match.
Could be. The current fight around felons receiving their voting rights in Florida adds another incentive here: the justice system was/is being used to suppress votes by aggressively penalizing kids to take away their voting rights. You're basically picking who gets to vote at that point.
This is a sherrif too, so they're elected, not neccesarily by any sort of experience or merit.
Nobody likes to hear it, but I'm willing to bet this person has been in office for a while. Tough on crime is popular among "model citizen" voters even if it utilizes dystopic tactics.
Their grass might be 1/4" too long, or they might not have numbers on their mailbox (examples of justification for police harassment from the article).
That was very explicitly the point. We now have top Nixon advisors explaining that they couldn't make hippies or black people illegal, but they could do it by proxy with "the war on drugs" [1].
Exactly, it is in the interest of police to create more criminals so they can justify their work. It seems absurd when clearly stated, but that is the end result of what they do.
Manufacturing your own criminals has a variety of attractive aspects. Obviously, you know how to find them so the work is easier. But you also get to tailor the charges to whatever's best for your department/career, arrange PR for the arrests and so on.
This is why, for instance, the FBI does it so much.
How does this not protect the current power structure? It feeds people into for profit prisons and also suppresses voting rights and job opportunities for anyone who gets a record.
> These floridian police are basically grooming kids to become criminals by giving them records and harassing their families until they fall unto hardship.
This. How can you expect these kids to grow up and be productive members of society [0] when you make it all but impossible to get a decent job later!?
It strikes me this is likely to be very self-reinforcing, too. If the people they target end up in jail, you can almost guarantee that it'll be used as a metric that their junk science is working.
It's probably a very effective way to weaponise "three strikes" too.
Don’t think about the system as a whole, think about the motivation of individual parts of the system, since often individual parts can have motivations that are unique and potentially counter productive.
So rather than asking “why does the government do this”, ask “how does this help the police”, since that’s the part of the government doing that.
> The USSR was at least ostensibly protecting its power structure from internal opposition.
It was not, most of the time they were harassing outliers, not people who wanted to make a regime change. Some examples: Religious people, people who listened to western music, men who had long hair (you were assumed to be a fan of the western hippie culture), people with noble ancestry if they did not show support for the communist party,..
And it is how taxi lines work or worked in the US. App-based hailing changed this, since there is no longer a designated physical place where the line would exist. Building a virtual-line, makes plenty of sense, and in hind-sight was something overlooked.
It makes it really uncomfortable to use when you're not connected to a larger screen. If I'm buying a laptop, I want a decent screen for when I'm not sitting at my desk. If I didn't care about that, I wouldn't be buying a laptop in the first place.
I like the idea of fancy cyberpunk cash but I feel like in the real world I'd be getting the worst of both worlds if I tried to use cash thats also a cryptocurrency.