Regardless of the price and the data, I'd never subscribe to this service due to the owner.
I'm looking forward for alternatives from a more neutral vendor
I think they will have enough clients from other parts of the world to make it work. Large areas of my country can't really be covered with wired networks, it's too expensive to make it economically feasible without massive government subsidies, for which there's no money.
Starlink has already been used to connect very remote rural schools which previously only had dial-up connectivity (enough to send text email, but not much else).
And nobody here cares about American politics, we have enough of our own problems.
It's not really American politics when Elon decides to turn off your countries internet for personal gain. Having such critical infrastructure in the hands of someone unstable wouldn't be a choice I ever make for something so important.
You are probably referring to ukraine and you should know that this was entirely fake news. It was never disabled. It had never been enabled in Crimea in the first place, in accordance with US gov policy.
In 2022, Elon Musk denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink's coverage up to Russian-occupied Crimea during a counterattack on a Crimean port, from which Russia had been launching attacks against Ukrainian civilians; doing so would have violated US sanctions on Russia.[18] This event was widely reported in 2023, erroneously characterizing it as Musk "turning off" Starlink coverage in Crimea.
But you’re right of course that it might be in a sovereign country’s interest to build out their wired infrastructure instead of relying on external actors.
The vast majority of the international community, including the United Nations, the United States, and the European Union, recognizes Crimea as a sovereign part of Ukraine. :)
USAID was ironically a significant customer for Starlink. People are probably already familiar with the 5,000 Ukraine terminal scandal, but pretty much all their offices (in Colombia at least) had 1 or more terminals.
What does USAID have anything to do with this conversation? Well, DOGE was largely responsible for putting the final nail on that coffin. If you think he cares about remote rural schools having connectivity you better think again.
I actually prefer the economic system where providers don't have to care about the use cases and we're able to use the exchange of money for services to get things. I doubt Subaru cares about a yuppie couple going on a road trip to the redwoods. They just want my money. That's the sort of relationship I want with most vendors.
If Subaru started talking to me about how much they like that I take road trips with their cars I'd probably switch to a different vendor.
Subaru literally tells me they like that I take road trips with their cars, and offer me swag to share other swag with people while I travel around. “Subaru Ambassador” program.
Well, that's opt-in, right? I don't think it should be illegal for people to have relationships with vendors. I just prefer our current system where vendor relationships don't require anyone to care.
Fascism isn't just American. If you're going to be pedantic, at least be accurate.
My point: supporting an American fascist normalizes fascism everywhere
Elon replied with 100 emoji to a post that said “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive.”
Boycott noted, meanwhile, I’ll be enjoying double the roaming data while you wait for that legendary ‘neutral’ competitor to beam down from the heavens.
I live and work from a van part of the year and am perfectly fine with a 4g router almost anywhere save some mountain climbing spot, so there's really no need for me.
I pay about 30€ and get about 250GB when in France and 30GB whenever I enter a new country so I'm not lacking considering my usage, but thank you
I respect your principles, but at the same time, using Starlink for now does encourage other potential competitors to come forth, at which time you could switch.
As if Bezos is better. Elon has a much higher slope but he’s got a head start to catch up on, before they’re all hunting humans for sport on Ellison’s private island.
you're all over this thread seemingly trying to get someone to argue this point with you, or perhaps just to prove how nuts Elon is, as if people don't already know that, for example, from the time he did a nazi salute in public to a crowd
my comments were all on different topics making different points in different comment chains. the guy I was replying to here was essentially making the same point over and over in a single comment thread, daring someone to argue with him
Bezos worst offense is meeting with Trump and donating to his campaign (and if you follow the leftist ideology, being a billionaire).
But based on personal experience with some very wealthy people, I truly believe they are just out of touch with the real world to understand what they are doing politically. Imagine if your days could be spent doing all the things you ever could wish, you would most likely not even bother reading stuff like reddit or HN, and certainly won't have time to look into any snippet of news in detail.
There are two Chinese alternatives being deployed right now. I believe one is called Guowang. As a red blooded American, I would rather go with Guowang over an American Nazi.
Well maybe just Scotland then. Out of the UK, into the EU, using the Euro, in Schengen, and the neighbours to the south can continue flying their little flags and painting their roundabouts if they like.
Welcome friends ! It's been a pleasure visiting you as (distant) neighbors and it's even better to have you as partners.
That's one great piece of news to start the year on a good note !
This is a misunderstanding of what Git does. Git is a Merkle hash tree, content-addressed, immutable/append-only filesystem, with commits as objects that bind a filesystem root by its hash. The diffs that make up a commit are not really its contents -- they are computed as needed. Now most of the time it's best to think of Git as a patch quilting porcelain, but it's really more than that, and while you can get very far with the patch quilting porcelain model, at some point you need to understand that it goes deeper.
That point is not reached during packaging though.
I prefer rebasing git histories over messing with the patch quilting that debian packaging standards use(d to use).
Though last I had to use the debian packaging mechanisms, I roundtripped them into git for working on them. I lost nothing during the export.
It's worth mentioning the quilting approach likely predates the advent of git by at least a decade.. I think compatibility with git has been available for a while now and I assume there was always something more pressing than migrating the base stack to git
Yup. Took wayyy longer than I actually expected as well. But the change of top management and closer integration with the whole MS behemoth is likely to make those kind of things accelerate now
The memory of Zuckerberg blabbering about Facebook positive social impact and mission of "Making the world more open and connected" triggers strong cognitive dissonance when reading this article.
Same as when remembering the "Don't be evil" moto from Google.
I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this. What kind of moral shield can we claim from this mess ? I'm afraid it's actually very little
And AFAIK Brin & Page and Zuckerberg still maintain majority voting control over their companies. They could enforce any policy they wanted from on high, and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit. Brin & Page could give the order to make Search work again or you're all fired, and Zuck could mandate no censorship of minorities or else, but they don't. There's nobody to shift blame to; this is just what billions of dollars does to "free-spirited hackers".
The anecdote I love to give is that I didn't know that Brin went to my high school until after I'd graduated. It's a high-performing public school due to its proximity to several research institutions, but it was never exactly loaded, and certainly could have benefited from outside investment (say, to replace the 20ish "temporary" trailers with a new wing). Even just having him show up to give a talk to students would have been amazing. Not a peep from this man, though, let alone the pocket change to help out his alma mater.
This is the flip side of the "self-made man" narrative.
It allows one to disavow any sense of social reciprocity after becoming obscenely rich.
I was curious, so I looked through his Wikipedia page -- it says he donated $1m to the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 2009 (which helped his family move to USA when he was a child). Even the NYT article notes that "The gift is small, given Mr. Brin’s estimated $16 billion in personal wealth" :D
(this is like you making $1m annually and donating $62.50)
If someone becomes successful, it's common to pay it back by helping out the steps that might have led to that success.
Brin didn't go to every high school: he went to the one he did.
And maybe he had a terrible experience and thought it contributed nothing to his success... but that's kind of a dick perspective at a certain level of wealth, especially if a school has needs (and they always do).
You're describing what a well designed tax system should be doing. Philanthropy is just the rich convincing us that things are fine, and we shouldn't worry that billionaires exist.
I guess the Nordic societies have to really equal then, because I can't remember ever even hearing of anyone donating anything to a single school. Like.. there's nothing in the system for a school to even be prepared to even own a donation. A school over there doesn't manage a financial fund, it runs on an annual municipal budget. It's all tax money.
The parent commenter put it well, philanthropy is just the rich convincing [America] that things are fine.
"and the worst that would happen is the number next to their name would go down a bit."
That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
And chances are they have been buying quite a bit of lifestyle by borrowing against that number. Because selling would strip them of that voting control you pointed out. Then they can't really afford the number to go down, because the borrowing is effectively a cascade, so in reality they aren't anywhere close to free in their decisions.
(but I'd imagine that they are quite capable of deluding themselves into believing that the decisions they have to take to keep the number up are what they actually want)
While I'm sure their finances are a bit more complicated than "they have infinite money", I find it hard to believe that people who can buy and sell small countries and ruin millions of lives with a few keystrokes are as powerless as you might be implying. "If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem."
These people have all set up financial constructions that will see them and their children safely into old age with the very best of medical care, pocket money to the tune of being able to just buy off the whole evening of their favourite fancy restaurant for the night for just the two of you on a whim, and owning one or two private fucking islands in perpetuity, whatever happens to their megacorps.
They can indeed do with their toys whatever they want. They just don't want to put up with the bother of other investors trying to get rid of them, or the orange guy not sending them a Christmas card, or having a little less than infinite money.
What they don't have is financial constructions that would leave them in nominal control when they go down that path. And they absolutely do want to stay in control, or else they would have sold a long time ago.
Even if that control is only nominal, of it comes at the price of anticipating every wish institutional investors might have and obediently following them to the (unwritten) letter.
> That's the thing, you can only have that kind of number for so many years before you start really not wanting it to get down.
Why shouldn't this be classified as a mental illness? Imagine a monkey hoarding more food than they could possibly eat, to the point that it lies next to them rotting away, while members of their tribe are dying from starvation. We'd immediately say that there is something wrong with that money, but why do we feel it is normal that some humans hoard an insane amount of money?
Having a billionaire who believes they aren't rich enough and need to make more money is like an anorexia patient believing they aren't skinny enough and need to lose more weight.
The lesson, to me, is remembering company mottos like these are meaningless because corporations are fundamentally amoral. They are made of people, yes, and these people do have moral values, but the corporation as a whole doesn't. Whatever tagline, whatever "inclusivity commitment", whatever "anti-discrimination" policies, whatever "diversity makes us stronger" motto: all of those are shallow, meaningless taglines. The corporation will adopt them when it will help their business, and ditch them just as fast when it doesn't (e.g. when a powerful politician doesn't like it and can harm your business).
Next time your company makes you sit through one of these trainings, for whatever so-called value, remember: the company doesn't believe in it. It only believes in making money.
Pushing back for the sake of conversation: corporations are amoral, because they're containers for business activities. Those activities don't necessarily inherit that amorality, though. A business decision is made by a person, and so is a task undertaken or okayed by an employee; those can therefore be subject to measures of morality. Because people involved in a company have the capacity for moral or immoral action, it is in the company's best interest to monitor and correct behavior.
I don't think it's a benefit to society that corporations behave like amoral sociopaths. It should be in their interest to correct that behavior.
However, my point is this (slightly exaggerated) timeline:
1. "Diversity makes us stronger! Discrimination is bad! Power to women! Respect gender identities! Stop fake news!".
2. Go do all these trainings to improve yourself on those topics. We mandate this because we care, it's our inner moral fiber!
3. (election happens, government changes)
4. Actually, forget all of the above. The previous administration forced us, we now believe otherwise and we're decommissioning all those programs. Sorry we forced you!
So in the end, no value a corporation espouses is genuine, unless it's making money. So all those trainings? Fake. All those "values"? Fake. Individuals within the company may care, but the company as a whole doesn't (and let's face it, the CEO and board don't either, and never did).
If we're feeling charitable, we could argue any given company reflects the current (corporate) consensus about what's good/safe for business and for society, but always dressed in the language of "we genuinely believe this, it's heartfelt, and we're also trend setters because we care!". It's this last part that is 100% fake. At best they do what's safe for the current social/business climate; nothing is "heartfelt". If it was heartfelt, they would stand up to the bullies instead of saying "we never believed it, it was forced on us by the past evil administration!".
> So in the end, no value a corporation espouses is genuine, unless it's making money.
This is the ultimate rub.
There are constructions that corporations can implement in order to enforce values, but they fundamentally mean giving up control.
Because at root, control by people prioritizing making money above all else is what causes these decisions to be reevaluated. Aka when following principles has a serious financial cost.
Public benefit corp, non-profit, independent board, etc. are options.
Google, Facebook, OpenAI... at this point it shouldn't surprise anyone when 'you were saying something about best intentions' goes awry.
Hell, OpenAI's wriggling to get out of its charter (and honestly, its difficulty in doing so) and NewsCorp's attempt to forcibly assign control counter to trust planning should point out that 'Yes, you can make it harder to be evil.'
>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this
A very deep level. The level that joked about "pride month" being thrown put like Christmas decorations on July 1st.
The more positive sentiment back then is that bigotry wouldn't ever be profitable again as the world experienced more experiences and built more empathy. Of course, I can only laugh hysterically at poor 2014/2015 me.
The parallels between today's techbros and the plantation magnates who pushed us towards the Civil War are unnerving, when you know that history (which is why they don't teach it).
Julian Assange wrote an excellent book on this topic called "when Google met wikileaks" about a decade ago which i found to be eye-opening. The backdrop is the "arab spring" uprisings of the early 10s, which were widely touted by leaders in both silicon Valley and Washington as an example of the positive impacts of social media, a mere five years before this opinion was suddenly reversed when some of these positive effects came home.
The titular event is an account of when one of Google's executives came to britain to meet him in person (at this point he's fighting extradition to the United States but has not yet sequestered himself inside the Ecuadorian embassy). From the conversation Assange gets the impression that the Google exec is acting as an unofficial envoy of the US state department in hopes of convincing him to "play ball" by publishing more and more information which will advance the arab spring narrative. The rest of the book is his own personal investigation into the incestuous links between US foreign policy, social media corporations and the so-called "arab spring".
I didn't even have to go read it to immediately know that it was Eric Schmidt who was the Google executive in question.
He's a notorious fan of unbridled American imperial power and "realpolitik" and brought Kissinger in multiple times to Google for "fireside chat" sessions.
Which always went over very... poorly... with the broader set of employees who used to get seriously annoyed at this. The reception was never good.
And after that he decided to become an ally of Russian government to help them spread conspiracy theories (about Seth Rich for example):
>In the end, the most charitable interpretation of Assange’s “dissembling” as Mueller calls it, in the Seth Rich hoax is that he genuinely couldn’t rule out the possibility that Rich was his source. The Mueller report demolished that final moral refuge. Rich had been dead four days when Assange received the DNC files.
Well I'm sure bob mueller would know a thing or two about disinformation given how he participated in the worst hoax in recent US history.
>As director Tennant has pointed out, secretary Powell presented evidence last week that Baghdad has failed to disarm its weapons of mass destruction, and willfully attempting to evade and deceive the international community. Our particular concern is that Saddam Hussein may supply terrorists with biological, chemical, or radiological material
Anyways I might care more about Seth Rich "conspiracy theories" if anybody had bothered to investigate what happened to him instead of chalking it up as a "robbery gone wrong" (in which nothing of value was stolen) and calling it a day. In about six more months it will have gone unsolved for an entire decade.
>I'm wondering if at some level we always knew it would end up like this.
Everyone always knew. The criticisms get lumped in with with the unreasonable nay-sayers because it makes them easier to dismiss.
The honest people I know working for obvious evil will acknowledge it and say they're just doing it for a paycheck. But this gives most people cognitive dissonance and they'll find better rationalization. See also: every cope post on hacker news by someone defending a company they're pretending not to work for.
I don't think anyone is "mincing up unborn babies". I think you might misunderstand how abortions work in practice, but anyways.
> If you want control over your body, exercise that control to not get pregnant in the first place.
So you are of the opinion that if someone "screwed up" something, essentially made a mistake, they should have no options to correct that mistake?
What about if someone else made them pregnant without their consent? Would bodily autonomy become more important in your mind then, or same "don't get pregnant in the first place" apply, even if it's outside of their control?
> Start with the infamous account from the practitioner who boasted of her novel technique that begins with cutting the baby's vocal cords to muffle its screams
You mean the woman who lost their medical license after clearly not understanding how abortions work?
> It also says that Torres has made “public statements related to the practice of medicine which violate the high standards of honesty, diligence, prudence, and ethical integrity demanded from physicians licensed to practice in Alabama.” - https://cbn.com/news/us/abortionist-who-gloated-about-cuttin...
> I think we would be better off if people experienced the consequences of their actions
I think so too, but not everything is under your control, like pregnancy. And sometimes you try to do everything you can in terms of preventing pregnancy, yet it happens anyways, is it really compassionate to punish people who made mistakes? As a Christian (maybe you're atheist), I just cannot comprehend the lack of compassion for people and forcing them to have a unintentional pregnancy.
> Nobody is forcing anyone to have an unintentional pregnancy. What an unusual and manipulative way to frame the consequences of one's actions.
I'm not sure where you live, but most places on earth have a really shit situation wherever humans live, which is called involuntary sexual intercourse, if you haven't heard about it before, I guess consider yourself lucky. For the rest of the people who do experience that though, I feel a lot of compassion, and whatever they need and want to do to heal from that sort of trauma, should be OK, as long as they're not hurting other humans.
> Humanity was just fine for millennia
You also don't seem to grasp the long history of abortion, probably longer than even written history which is just 5000 years.
> By making abortions accessible, you make abortions necessary
Accessible or not, abortions are sometimes necessary, and sometimes the most compassionate route. If you were Christian, you might have understood, so I hope whatever degeneracy your chosen religion seems to have forced upon you, eventually lets up so you too can start to see compassion against your fellow human beings.
I hope one day you get rescued from all these deviant thoughts that seem stuck in your head, and you too find Christ in you so you can feel compassion for the other humans on the wonderful planet God created for us. Until then I'll pray for you.
Or, and this is gonna sound crazy, I know, it's not because it used to be novel and cool but because young people feel less safe to come out now that the trans panic has done its thing and the current administration has spent an inconceivable amount of money, time and attention painting this marginalised community in a bad light at every perceivable opportunity to do so?
Now do anorexia, bulimia, or any number of social contagions. The difference between being allowed to be who you are vs. being encouraged into a lifestyle is not easy to distinguish.
If another kid tells you that they're going to beat the daylights out of you to gain the acceptance of their peers, other kids get the message pretty fast and that message is to conform and to isolate the kid that is going to be the subject of the beating. It has nothing to do with adopting what's cool and rejecting what's cringe, unless you consider the current shift against human rights to be cool and supporting human rights to be cringe.
OK, this means that MAGA is grooming people to be racist?
If you're going to broaden the definition of grooming so absurdly to include normal things in culture you just don't like then it seems like you should allow people to conclude your intent is to diminish the seriousness of things that actually are grooming.
> OK, this means that MAGA is grooming people to be racist?
Irrespective of the upthread discussion, MAGA is absolutely both being racist and quite actively grooming people, particularly children, to be racist. That's fairly overt.
You are broadening this out to the point that is absurd and would excuse cracking down on almost any liberalisation, in a way that is kind of prurient.
Honestly it's rather creepy and I hope you one day consider what you are saying.
Grooming of a person in a non-abuse setting involves deliberately changing the environment around an individual who does not yet feel they could be someone's successor or confidently exhibit the qualities or experience needed.
Again: it is an active, targeted process aimed at someone who does not necessarily know they are being changed.
Grooming has never been as broad a concept as you are talking about such that it just means changes in the moral or social landscape that some find undesirable.
It has always meant a form of targeted attention (even in the literal sense of care and attention to a specific animal). Social liberalisation you do not care for is not grooming.
Yes, an active targeted process. No, it doesn't have to be aimed at "someone". It can be aimed at creating an environment conducive to one's interested in some class of people.
Yes, intentionally targeting kids with an ideology is grooming. It is preparing them to be amenable to your ideology to increase acceptance of it in the broader culture. At least that's the most innocuous reading of it.
The point is that the word grooming doesn't say enough to determine whether something is harmful. You just have to do the work to defend your claim to harm. But the grooming dynamic will always be inherently suspect when it involves other people's kids.
I can say that the data you're sharing suggests it's just as likely that the drop in numbers that your site claims started sometime between 2023 and 2024 are due to people becoming more afraid to identify as such due to Republican attempts to restrict LGBT rights and make life miserable for anyone who doesn't identify as straight
I would not, as a broad matter of policy, talk about "good faith" in any sentence involving a claim made by Matt Walsh, who is both a bad faith actor and a fucking liar.
You are entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts. And there's no reputable research to back up your claims. Your religious beliefs are not enough to make something true.
As a state tends toward either communism or capitalism, it starts dictating the economy more and more, until it hits the ceiling and becomes a totally dictated war economy, where a fundamentally fascist ideology replaces previous values. At that point, war is inevitable, because a war economy requires active warfare, and war provides ample opportunies for pilfering at multiple levels, both home and abroad.
Fascism is not to blame, it is a means to an end for the economy at large. Ultimately, the issue is uneven distribution of wealth and power.
You're saying this like it's some absolute truth, that any state naturally gravitates towards either communism or capitalism, but based on the amount of states in the world that haven't automatically turned into either communistic or capitalistic hell-holes, it seems like this only happens to a small fraction of the states in the world.
You are downvoted, but correct. Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics. A kind of panic-driven hyper-authoritarian capitalism that pretends unity can solve material contradictions.
> Fascism is one possible failure mode of capitalism. It is capitalism stripped of brakes, guardrails, and ethics.
This is not a useful definition of fascism, if that is what you mean. Fascism can exist entirely independently of capitalism, and has done.
Is it possible for fascism to thrive in a regulation-free capitalist world? Apparently yes. But they are not necessarily coupled.
It's a common misperception that fascism necessarily involves a merger of state and corporate power. Rather in a fascist regime, companies have no more choice in whether they further the state's aims and align with its goals than individual citizens have; they just have more devastating impacts.
As to whether Meta is aligning with the administration's goals, I don't know whether it is happening, consciously or unconsciously, in this case, but we know for certain there has been deliberate and conscious alignment elsewhere, because Zuckerberg made a big deal out of it.
Fascism is a reaction against capitalism-the-system in much the same way (but a different direction) than communism (it is "capitalist" in that, like most systems, including pre-capitalist ones, and including most claiming to be "Communist", it has a narrow self-perpetuating class controlling society by means including control of the means of production, but it does not feature the particular structure and features that defines capitalism as a system rather than a feature of other systems; fascist corporatism looks a lot, in practice, like the state capitalism that vanguardist "Communist" regimes tend to get stuck in.)
> but it does not feature the particular structure and features that defines capitalism as a system rather than a feature of other systems;
What do you mean? The defining feature of capitalism is private/corporate ownership of the means of production which is a core part of fascism as well.
No, the defining feature of capitalism-as-a-system (as opposed to capitalism-as-a-feature of systems including those which predate capitalism-as-system) is the set and preeminence of property rights, which are very different under fascism, because fascist corporatism subordinates all interests (not least of all property interest) to central authority.
Fascist corporatism is as radically opposed to capitalism as Leninist “democratic centralism” is (and, arguably, despite the opposing rhetorical stance, in very much the same substantive direction in practice.)
So where are your definition of capitalism and fascism from? Because seems to me you just made up your own definitions. To me your definition of fascism resembles much more a difinition of general authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
Maybe we should take the definition from the mouth of an expert on fascism, Mussolini, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power."
This attribution leads to a truly fundamentally broken reduction of what Mussolini actually thought fascism was (though his own definition of it was largely pseudointellectual drivel).
But even then, "corporatism" doesn't mean "capitalism" at all.
Companies are not helpless dames in a fascist takeover. History has proven that the people on top of the capitalist hierarchy generally actively welcome fascist elements in government.
It’s a lot easier to juice the profits of your megacorp when the power of government is vested in a single, friendly individual. Of course ten seconds of thinking exposes the fragility of such a system (they may turn on you, they may be replaced, they may destroy the entire country, etc). But Capitalism itself encourages short term, winner-takes-all all thinking. If you don’t cozy up to the wanna be autocrat and help them attain more power, you will be outcompeted by someone who does.
The path of a greedy corporate executive is practically pre-ordained in such a situation. The only question is whether the wanna be autocrat succeeds to become the real deal.
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power"
I have news: this is bullshit.
This quote is literally falsely attributed to Mussolini. There is no evidence whatsoever that he said it. It's also somewhat at odds with things he did say (though most of that was pseudointellectual gibberish) and the way he ruled.
It's central to the 21st century misunderstanding of Fascism and it is the convenient misattribution that will not die. (Also what I was referring to up thread)
And what "corporatism" means, in a Fascist context, is not what western readers think it might mean. It is a term talking about collective organisation, not capitalism.
It's part of why the word "fascist" is so completely blunted to the point of uselessness in US debate.
I posted this. Why? Because I was sitting on the shores of Lake Washington three weeks ago at my parents' house. We were talking about the fact that I was flying back to Poland, and how worried they were about the Russian army.
I thought about it for a moment, while looking out the window of their house. I said:
"The chances of me looking out the window in Poland in the next year, and seeing the military, are lower than they are sitting here, in Seattle."
I stand by that assessment. It still blows my mind given the reality of the USA, and the objectively successful and peaceful city of Seattle.
The fact that this made it to the front page suggests that I’m not alone in believing this kind of thought is not entirely disconnected from reality.
Given the real threat of the US military being deployed to Seattle for 100% political reasons, if it doesn't stay on the front page... well.. what does that say?
Accurate, but as OP, I didn't post this as "local news."
I posted this because it is objective evidence against the arguments made by the current US federal government for sending troops into Seattle ~"to quell the violence."
I believe that this threat is unprecedented since the mid 1800's, has impacts on the tech sector, how other countries behave going forward, and world history in general.
If I am off-base here, I would genuinely like to hear the counter arguments.
The article pointedly does not go into why the decrease happened, or what the trend has been. It would be consistent with the facts in the article if the City of Seattle saw Trump's actions with other cities and said, "we don't want that, maybe we should re-fund the police." Or perhaps Seattle never actually de-funded them in the first place, and has just focused efforts on reducing violent crime, because they were wanting to do that anyway and/or because they wanted to avoid giving Trump any excuse to send troops to Seattle. I am appalled at Trump, but this article does not necessarily prove him wrong.
When I first heard "de-fund the police" as a slogan, I figured that phrase must have been run by Frank Luntz, just to make sure it made progressives (this includes myself, to some extent) sound as dumb as possible. I mean, he could not have focus-grouped a better phrase. It's hilarious, if you think that dark humor is funny.
All that aside, the reality is:
> In one version of the story, yes-ish. Parking enforcement and 911 call center response were moved out of the police department. Restructuring the 911 system has become an important step in many cities' efforts to reduce armed police response to civilians. Dispatchers are the gatekeepers of the criminal justice system: They are tasked with identifying true public safety emergencies and deciding what resources—armed or unarmed—should respond. (Parking enforcement was later moved back into the police department.)
> But in another version of the story, no. While the police department lost a little over 10% of its budget between 2020 and 2021 (mostly because 911 dispatch and parking enforcement were moved), it has been closing that gap since.
> Tellingly, not a single sworn officer has lost their job or pay due to budget constraints. In fact, the department has consistently received more funding for hiring than it can spend. And yet, the myth that the police department was defunded persists, partly because budgets are convoluted and boring, and because it's an easy answer for the police departments' woes.
It's crazy how hard, under Biden, that NPR station had to dance around the simple objective fact that: No. Seattle did not "de-fund the police." Actually, SPD got more money than they could spend.
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