In many cases, the decision to install Flock cameras have been made by city councils and sheriffs' offices. So it very much depends on local candidates.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
Cynicism warning, but my honest guess is they see that the Colbert problem will be solved in June and so don't feel the need to spend any effort on him.
I was a little miffed that this blog didn't include a link to that particular study, especially with how vague the citation is, so I went and found the original publication[0].
Of note, they have a "Setting the record straight" addendum[1] that includes a couple important quotes:
"Misconception #1: Office workers should now be confused about whether they should sit or stand, and about whether sit/stand stations are a good idea. They shouldn’t be, says Smith. The study’s main finding was about workers who are required to stand for long periods (i.e. five hours or more) throughout their work shift, without opportunities to sit. Extending this to any worker who stands (e.g. an office worker using a sit-stand desk) is not correct. This is because office workers who stand at these types of workstations likely have the option to sit down when they get tired or when they feel pain in their legs and back."
and
"Misconception #2: We no longer have to worry about the negative health effects of prolonged sitting, thanks to this study. Not so fast, says Smith. There was nothing in this study to refute the research on the health consequences of a sedentary lifestyle. Much of that research is about sitting too much throughout the day—at work, while commuting and at home. This study only focused on prolonged sitting and prolonged standing at work.
"And even within the study, another finding about prolonged sitting at work got lost in the coverage. Yes, prolonged standing occupations were linked with twice the risk of heart disease as prolonged sitting jobs. However, prolonged sitting jobs were still linked, among men, with a 40 per cent higher risk of heart disease compared to jobs that involve a mix of standing, sitting and walking."
"workers who are required to stand without opportunities to sit" sounds like it's little to do with posture and everything to do with the kind of jobs that don't let people sit typically being lower paid gigs for a different demographic...
I was thinking about posture as well, including building bad habits, possibly affecting breathing too which would turn everything around on its head, raising blood pressure and inflammation, affecting sleep and then causing avalanche cascading side effects throughout the human body.
I have for about 15 years used a stool to sit on at work, rather than a desk chair that I can slump in. I have found I feel much better - the stool forces my upper body to be actively held up and balanced; also, when I do go to meetings, instead of being annoyed at sitting in some dumb conference room, I am a little happy to be able to slump like a normal slouch.
I put a zafu (kapok filled, and not too full so its soft/adjustable) on the stool, and adjust the desk height so I don't have to reach up at all to touch the keyboard.
I also do a lot of zazen on a zafu (with legs crossed) so keeping my torso upright is pretty ingrained into my body.
This is just anecdata, but my dad suffered with back pain his entire life (included multiple herniated spinal disks), knock wood, I haven't. If I skip the check on the keyboard height and find I am reaching up for a while, I will get shoulder soreness, but so far early enough to function as a warning to lower it.
Sitting upright as tho you are a world honored one does I think affect the entire mind/body system in a healthy way :)
Spot on. I used to have back pain and all sorts of discomfort throughout body, neck shoulders, etc. until I figured out how to properly sit. Luckily I haven't had any issues lately, I'm in my mid 40s and have been in a much better shape than I was in my mid 20s. I don't use a stool necessarily but I try not to use the back support too much and for me the sitting area must be rigid, any cushion can mess up with my sitting position.
Bingo. As they say, “motion is lotion.” Staying in any position for a long time (even a “good” posture) is going to cause problems. Better being active if you’re passive, resting if you’re active, moving around, taking breaks, and basically just switching it up. All more important than doing one static pose or repetitive motion for an entire day.
> As an example: a an African American janitor in our kids' school voted republican in 2024 for the first time in his life, because the park in his Brooklyn neighborhood has become a shanty town and he can't work out there.
Okay, first off, I am just very confused by this sentence. How is the "shanty town" preventing him from working? Does he work from his home in Brooklyn? Is the school located in the park? Does he want to work in the park but is force to work at the school? I know this isn't the most important part, but I haven't been able to parse the story. Edit: others explained that this is "work out" there, and not related to being a janitor. Thanks. I feel the rest still stands.
Further, I don't understand how what is happening is supposed to solve the "underlying issue". How does 3000 federal agents breaking windows and shoving people in Minneapolis help a Brooklyn community poor enough to become a shanty town? It would be like if I, in my job, had an backend outage on our website, and I went to the design team and began berating them while I fixed a couple UI issues. Sure, I might solve some real problems, and it could feel good in some cathartic way (especially if I've had unanswered complaints for years). But I wouldn't call it "fixing the underlying issues".
I believe it is most likely that the people who still support this style of enforcement have been hurt much like you, some acutely but many just slowly over time, and have bought into the idea that some "other" is at fault. And they want to see that "other" dealt with in some way, any way. Even if it means people get hurt, because they themselves have been hurt. So why not the "other"?
But I don't believe a shanty town in the most populous city what is supposed to be the richest and most prosperous country on Earth is caused by the poorest few percent of people living here. I don't think an illegal immigrant in Minneapolis is at fault, even if they have a "criminal background" (insidious phrasing that inflates numbers by lumping in people who may have paid their debt to society). I don't want to see people hurt.
> > As an example: a an African American janitor in our kids' school voted republican in 2024 for the first time in his life, because the park in his Brooklyn neighborhood has become a shanty town and he can't work out there.
> Okay, first off, I am just very confused by this sentence. How is the "shanty town" preventing him from working? Does he work from his home in Brooklyn? Is the school located in the park? Does he want to work in the park but is force to work at the school? I know this isn't the most important part, but I haven't been able to parse the story.
So just to clarify, GP said he was being prevented from _working out_, i.e. exercising.
- Did that number decline over time (as you excluded replacement stations)?
- What was your scale?
- Are you willing to share your results?
- How is this still the top comment after 30 minutes?
But your comment touches on a common misconception, which is that heat islands must be excluded to accurately measure the overall temperature. You refer to the idea as "heat-producing objects", but I would argue that a parking lot is more of a heat reflecting object. More to the point, even heat islands must be considered as part of the worldwide climate, simply because they are part of this wide world. Their heat does not simply disappear (I hope you agree that would violate physics).
Imagine we want to measure the average temperature inside a single 30-foot by 10-foot room during winter. We have two probes: one near a burning fireplace on one end of the room, and one near a window on the other. If we excluded data from one probe or the other, do you believe we would get an accurate average reading?
Of course, when scientists are calculating a global temperature, they have to handle special cases in the data (like heat islands). This has been known for some time, and you can read more about it here: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/07/no-ma...
I fear that I've spent too much time responding to this, but I wanted to take it on in earnest.
Basically every country has been conducting a massive geoengineering project in the open for the past decades by releasing billions of tonnes of CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses) into the atmosphere. We've been able to detect that, yes.
This is sometimes hard when the editors keep on reversing edits which attempt to fix those errors. It will be interesting to see how Grokipedia - a bad name, surely they can come up with something better - deals with this.
I often come across out-of-place or clearly ideologically driven content on Wikipedia and normally just leave this alone - I have better things to do with my limited time than to fight edit wars with activist editors. Having said that I did a number of experiments some 5 years ago with editing Wikipedia where I removed clearly ideologically driven sections out of articles where those sections really had no place. One of these experiments consisted of removing sections about ´queer politics and queer viewpoints' from articles about popular cartoon characters. These sections - often spanning several paragraphs - were inserted relatively recently into the articles and were nothing more than attempts to use those articles to push a 'queer' viewpoint on the subject matter and as such not relevant for a general purpose encyclopedia. I commented my edits with a reference to the NPOV rules. My edits were reversed without comment. I reversed the reversion with the remark to either explain the reversion of leave the edits in place and was reversed again, no comments. I reversed again with an invitation to discuss the edits on the Talk pages which was not accepted while my edits were reversed again. This continued for a while with different editors reversing my edits and accusations of vandalism. Looking through the 'contribs' section for the users responsible for adding the irrelevant content showed they were doing this to hundreds of articles. I just checked and noticed the same individuals are still actively adding their 'queer perspectives' to articles where such perspectives are not relevant for a general-purpose encyclopedia.
Do you happen to remember any of the articles where you performed this experiment? I ask because specifically around 5 years ago, I know there were a number of cartoons where the creators intentionally wrote characters with queer representation in mind (She-Ra is the first to come to mind). So, if the sections you were removing had been properly cited and relevant to the actual series, then the removal for being "nothing more than attempts to use those articles to push a 'queer' viewpoint on the subject matter" probably did not represent a neutral viewpoint.
Of course, this depends on you opening up your research to some peer review.
On the broader topic, I'm not sure that just voting is the way that we'll get out of this mess, but I think a large part of the problem is how our focus on wider, national issues has eroded the interest in the local. So people seem to be most disenfranchised from the level of politics where they can actually have the most influence, both by voting and direct action (protests, calls, etc).
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