marcusgarvey's comments

Are you following any tutorials? How are you learning it?

>SF has more homeless because it generally treats them better than the rest of the US, not worse.

Thinking of the way Giuliani criminalized homelessness in NYC, you may be right. http://mobile.nytimes.com/1999/11/20/nyregion/in-wake-of-att...

>These tidal floods are often just a foot or two deep, but they can stop traffic, swamp basements, damage cars, kill lawns and forests, and poison wells with salt.

Is the wellwater seepage the biggest problem? Guessing the other things in the list could be fixed with lots of money and infrastructure.

>There is a huge difference between the real world and a closed track.

Indeed. The unpredictable behavior of humans occupying the same environment is key. Remove this element and things get simpler (though not simple. And v2v comms might be required.)

I suspect highways are the road infrastructure most akin to a closed track. Which is why the Otto acquisition is so interesting.

> the added cost of inspection before selling them.

I wouldn't expect the supplier to bear this cost; it's the jailers who are doing the inspecting.

No, really, why are the departments picking up the tab, even in cases where the city's law prohibits this? The NYU paper has a couple illustrations.

>Only one jurisdiction in my study—El Paso, Texas—reported a practice of never indemnifying police officers.145 Yet no El Paso officer personally satisfied settlements or judgments against him during the study period. The city of El Paso did, however, pay $279,000 to settle sixteen civil rights cases against its officers between 2006 and 2011. The deputy city attorney in El Paso explained that, because the city is responsible for paying officers’ attorneys’ fees, it sometimes settles claims against officers because it would be less expensive to pay a small settlement than to continue to pay for the defense of the case. From the deputy city attorney’s perspective, paying a settlement on behalf of an officer to avoid the cost of further litigation should not be understood as equivalent to indemnifying that officer.

>California allows indemnification of punitive damages if the “governing body of that public entity” finds that “[p]ayment . . . would be in the best interests of the public entity.” [How do they figure?]

>Some jurisdictions [Las Vegas, New York, Oklahoma City, and Prince George’s County] appear to have indemnified officers in violation of governing law.

>Jurisdictions may sidestep prohibitions against indemnification of punitive damages by vacating the punitive damages verdict as part of a post-trial settlement.

>Although my study shows that officers almost never contribute to settlements and judgments, I found anecdotal evidence that some government attorneys affirmatively use the possibility that they will deny officers indemnification to gain settlement leverage, limit punitive damages verdicts, and reduce punitive damages verdicts after trial— only to indemnify their officers once the cases are ultimately resolved.

>During litigation, the threat that a city will deny indemnification may discourage plaintiffs from proceeding with claims against individual officers.

http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawRe...

>Personal insurance requires personal liability to insure.

Any insight into how this gets established by profession? Seems to be an entire industry offering and encouraging nurses to take out malpractice insurance, beyond whatever their employers' coverage is.

On the effort backfiring...maybe, but I don't see why it would play out the way that you describe. The criminal justice system lets these cops skate, but apparently the civil system is picking up the slack -- as evidenced by that NYC figure cited. Somebody is going to keep paying for these, I do not think there's anything the unions can do to change that fact. So the only question is who and if you can make the case to taxpayers that it sure as hell shouldn't be them, self-interest might rule and help fix this.

Edit: some clues here as to the question of personal liability of cops. From a study by Joanna Schwartz in the NYU law review:

>This Article empirically examines an issue central to judicial and scholarly debate about civil rights damages actions: whether law enforcement officials are financially responsible for settlements and judgments in police misconduct cases. The Supreme Court has long assumed that law enforcement officers must personally satisfy settlements and judgments, and has limited individual and government liability in civil rights damages actions—through qualified immunity doctrine, municipal liability standards, and limitations on punitive damages—based in part on this assumption.

>Scholars disagree about the prevalence of indemnification: Some believe officers almost always satisfy settlements and judgments against them, and others contend indemnification is not a certainty. In this Article, I report the findings of a national study of police indemnification. Through public records requests, interviews, and other sources, I have collected information about indemnification practices in forty-four of the largest law enforcement agencies across the country, and in thirty-seven small and mid-sized agencies.

>My study reveals that police officers are virtually always indemnified: During the study period, governments paid approximately 99.98% of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement. Law enforcement officers in my study never satisfied a punitive damages award entered against them and almost never contributed anything to settlements or judgments — even when indemnification was prohibited by law or policy, and even when officers were disciplined, terminated, or prosecuted for their conduct.

http://www.nyulawreview.org/sites/default/files/pdf/NYULawRe...

A rational taxpayer should be very upset about this.

On making cops accountable, it does all come down to the public clamor for this. We see these incidents and many are horrified and yet nothing changes. This is why I wonder about working the wallet angle, and if insurance can be part of the solution. How many New York taxpayers know that the City paid close to half a billion over 5 years to settle NYPD related lawsuits? Can we get more data on this from other cities and publicize it? Could a concerted #TaxpayersLivesMatter campaign put enough political pressure on mayors and governors (and counteract the police unions) to change the way these legal settlements work today? http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/428-million-in-...

Can insurance help solve this problem? As in, police depts. require each cop to get some liability coverage. When incidents like this lead to a payout on the cop's behalf, their premium goes up. Eventually it's too high for them to afford so they must leave the job. If it's feasible then, regardless of how they feel about BLM, convince taxpaying citizens to get behind this scheme because their tax dollars shouldn't be going to settle these well-justified lawsuits.

I personally would not roll the windows all the way down, just low enough to hand them ID and to hear and be heard clearly, and I would make sure the doors are locked. The Sandra Bland footage taught me this. https://youtu.be/jpSEemvwOn4?t=2m14s

> I've been thinking off and on about how to start a channel since it's clearly a great way to pay for kids' toys based on the one show we watched where a kid and his dad assembled a gigantic Spider-Man drivable car.

There's your self-licking ice cream clone. I wonder why it's so pleasurable to watch these kind of unboxing vids. Mirror neurons?

Over 17 million views on...this. Wow. Good on her. Thanks for clueing me in to the genre.

>Those youtube videos of people with toys are nuts

What is this referring to, exactly? Videos of (adults?) playing with toys?

I'm not talking about all the world's ills but rather 4 recent events with global, often disastrous consequences. Perhaps it is news to you, but there is a certain kind of person who makes their daily bread on the strength of their supposed expertise in politics, economics and finance. Think tankers, Davos panelists, former political appointees, the experts commonly cited in papers like the FT, NYTimes, WaPo, and the journalists and editorialists who give them ink and air time. They didn't see these events coming, despite the fact that the dynamics leading up to each one had been building for some time. They never seem to admit that they were wrong, and seemingly no one expects them to as they continue to carry on on the lecture and cited expert circuits. Worst of all, they do not seem to recognize that they are just as vulnerable to groupthink as anyone and they never seem to improve their methods of investigation which for me would mean consciously traveling out of the media capitals of New York, DC and London to visit and talk to people in other parts to get a better handle on popular sentiment; being hyper aware of when they might be trading integrity for access and status; and not being too prideful to take a look at alternative points of view from bloggers and commentators who do not trod the same carpeted halls.

Iraq, the surprising arrival of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Brexit shock, rise of Trump...the commentator classes of New York, DC, London and other "tastemaker" cities need to reckon with their failures and understand why they were so utterly wrong. Instead, in most cases, we see doubling down and demonization of the other side. It's quite extraordinary. The black swans are coming fast and thick.

Substantive issues aside, Holmes seems to be getting very bad PR advice.

>Taxpayers may well be pulled into the fray and suffer as well in these situations.

How might this happen - do you mean via the Transbay Dev.?

I'm surprised, too, but I don't think nuking it is the right answer. That's just what these folks want.

How so?

>"I feel like I'm living in the movie Brazil."

Says the Soylent salesman. Irony!