> Last week, the [state] agency sent a letter to the city notifying it that its five-member police department would be closed effective Sept. 18. Law enforcement duties will be transferred to the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office until a permanent solution is found.
> The agency said its investigation found the department failed to meet minimum standards and failed to provide sufficient evidence that it provided a "public benefit to the community." The department also failed to provide resources to its officers, including bulletproof vests and an evidence room.
The US has many thousands of little law enforcement jurisdictions like this. The argument for it is local control but in practice you too often get situations like this one. Poor quality, abuses, corruption, good-old-boys network, lack of accountability, frequent unnecessary use of force, etc. Large police organizations are certainly not w/o problems but at this point there are accountability mechanisms and modern standards.
The WaPo did an excellent article a few years ago looking at the fragmented LEO landscape
"Most police departments in America are small. That’s partly why changing policing is difficult, experts say"
Given the size of the US, and the variety of local populations, I argue that local enforcement is necessary. Adherence to larger enforcement standards is also necessary. I fear that larger, “cohesive” enforcement runs the risk of bringing more political laws and regulations from other jurisdictions. No one wants to be subjected to some remote jurisdiction’s idea of “lawfulness” especially when religious ideals get mixed in.
Well, how fine grained do we need to get? A police force with 5 officers is pretty fine. In this case law enforcement is being taken over by the county (of which there are 254 in Texas) so its still pretty local.
As always: it depends. There are many municipalities throughout the US that are content with (or can only afford) county-level enforcement. If their residents want something more localized, they need to do what it takes to create that.
In this case, what’s happened is fine. Leaving it up to local residents and their local government to form a new trustworthy enforcement agency is fine. Leaving it up to them to not do that is also fine.
Wouldn't you want more data to learn if its "fine" vs "not fine"? If you learned that small departments were significantly worse than larger ones on use of force, corruption, etc wouldn't that inform a decision?
There is a pattern where elective democracy does not work, or at least gets weird at small scales like this. Small pool to elect from, only need to win over a modest number of people, etc.
I agree with this. It may be reasonable for a town to have its own PD if they can afford it and choose to have one, but certain levels of training and evidence collection and ethical standards should be set at the state level or higher.
Grok did ask its users what it thought about the right wing fever dream of genocide of white people in South Africa so its definitely relevant to one's consideration of the product.
> I'm curious if you feel the same about re-migration of Belgians from the Congo?
Can't say I've ever heard anyone implying that colonialists leaving Belgium was unjust. Colonialists is actually not the right word, more like extended occupation, only slightly better than the enslavement of the Leopold II era. The Belgian's were less than 1% of the population and all but an ancillary amount worked in exploiting the native population.
> And the problems haven’t been completely ironed out: the first launch attempt of Starship’s flight test 13 was aborted automatically by the vehicle’s flight software at T-0 (right before liftoff) this past July when several Raptor 3 engines failed to start
And several engines failed to relight on the booster for flight 13. I believe ice in feed lines is viewed as the most likely cause.
I'm pretty sure that the heat exchanger is going to end up being one part they have to put back in. Pushing CO2 and H2O (both ices at prop temp) into the tanks just seems so ill-advised to me. The amounts of contamination are small, but there are just so many different ways that can go wrong.
> The problem with Solar is once someone buys it they can continuously use it for a long time with out participating in the economy.
An odd statement. That could be considered a "problem" for an incumbent energy provider, like say Exxon. But it would be considered a solution for an energy user who would now have more money to devote to something else in the economy.
the US is an odd place and so I guess it depends on what you consider a norm there. Favouring incumbent rent extractors and profits, versus maximising consumer benefit with low costs — it’s arguable the norm in the US is the former
What is the cost of electricity per KWh where you are from?
Here in the USA it varies greatly from Hawaii and California having prices that exceed $0.30 to $0.50+ per KWh but in the midwest electricity is cheap as low as $0.12-15 per KWh for American standards. The former markets lead the USA in soalr installs and that's why. It's a financial decision and the ROI on going solar in the Midwest, USA for example is very long. Illinois is a Midwestern state and is a SREC market so that's a added incentive from the state so the ROI is less. For residential solar cash and bank financed solar projects, we lost the Federal ITC last year but PPAs in residential still exist. The Federal ITC existed though from 2006 under President Bush a Republican extended under President Obama a Democrat and ended under President Trump 2026 for just cash and bank financed residentials projects. The 30% Federal tax credits for the cost of the solar system and a reduction in your federal income taxes lasted for 20 years which is really what drove solar energy growth along with state tax incentives in USA. We had the Rural Renewable Energy Programs (REAP) grants or used to which made the cost of solar for farmers in America like a 2-3 year payback after the Federal ITC, State tax credits and REAP grants. I support solar and have worked in the industry for 10+ years. It's not going anywhere in the USA. We just have to adopt and grow but the USA is still one of the global leaders in the solar installed capacity.
There are no working SMR's ready to be deployed in the West. The company (NuScale) that was furthest along had its flagship project die after cost estimates ballooned. Its other project was a crypto scam.
Whether any of these companies work out and make it to serial production is very speculative.
NuScale is a terrible example. Their flagship project collapsed before it even started because of cost escalation and their other project was some sort of crypto scam.
Good for Anthropic for standing up for themselves but think of the masses of companies that decided not to take the risk. The tone was definitely set at Trump's inauguration with all the tech execs front and center on display. They knew that if they didn't play ball Trump would use government power against them.
Law firms blackmailed into doing pro bono work for Trump's pet causes, intelligence analysts not able to tell the truth, energy companies giving up wind leases and switching to fossil fuels. And of course the constant shakedowns for cash.
In his recent interview Emil Michael (DoW undersecretary, "AI czar") even mentions that the Anthropic case served as motivation for Google folding.
It is a shame that Google's leadership is so spineless. On the minuscule off-chance any of those VPs are reading HN - you are bad and you should feel shame for increasing x-risk for a percentage point of profit.
Don't forget OpenAI, whose CEO bragged gleefully about taking the contract Anthropic refused to sign since it granted the DoW the ability to build Skynet (autonomous weapons) and a Chinese-style mass domestic surveillance system using their models.
Google does plenty of evil. This has nothing to do with the slogan.
"Don't be evil" was never removed. But even if it was, the idea that Google just was champing at the bit to do all this evil but was held back by the pesky slogan is ridiculous.
> It is a shame that Google's leadership is so spineless.
This is wrong, just like the article you linked. Google has been a proud member of the military industrial complex for many years.
Alex Turner is naive when he thinks big psychopath corporation may have internal regulations to protect us from big psychopath government. He's somewhat deluded when he thinks this is a new problem and he personally has power against this. The only way we workers can enforce some level of ethics is via powerful unions (with strikes/sabotage), not as lonely individual "threatening" to leave the company.
I'm sorry he had to learn this the hard way. There's still plenty of time for you to realize that no or few company will grow a spine, because that's not what companies do, what they are for, or what they're directed to do (except maybe a small mom and pop shop).
> The agency said its investigation found the department failed to meet minimum standards and failed to provide sufficient evidence that it provided a "public benefit to the community." The department also failed to provide resources to its officers, including bulletproof vests and an evidence room.
The US has many thousands of little law enforcement jurisdictions like this. The argument for it is local control but in practice you too often get situations like this one. Poor quality, abuses, corruption, good-old-boys network, lack of accountability, frequent unnecessary use of force, etc. Large police organizations are certainly not w/o problems but at this point there are accountability mechanisms and modern standards.
The WaPo did an excellent article a few years ago looking at the fragmented LEO landscape
"Most police departments in America are small. That’s partly why changing policing is difficult, experts say"
https://archive.li/05zA7
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