I think your assessment is accurate and realistic.
But ICE is behaving pretty sloppy. I'm not sure it could get to that point without (just due to risk multiplied by sheer number of interactions) ICE accidentally escalating something via sloppiness, crossing something that they don't value but is a hard line to their local PD security detail, refusing to stop and getting smoked that way, either by their own security or by a passer by while their security shrugs.
A fed might not care about literally doing a George Floyd, but your security force might just walk off rather than be party to that.
I'm gonna say the same thing I said the last time you trotted out this opinion (which is far more excusable now that you've outed yourself as a brit BTW). At a societal level the LARPers don't matter. They are a rounding error compared to all the people who have a single daily carry piece or purse gun or whatever. And those people affect the numbers and the risk calculations happening in offices far away.
ICE is thuggishly and sloppily prowling places like Minneapolis because statistically they can get away with it without causing too many bodies. Up the potential body number and their tactics are forced to change for the better.
If the statistical average door they kick in in Minneapolis had the same likelihood of "shit I ain't going back to prison <bang> <bang> <bang> <dives out bathroom window and hops neighbors fence>" behind it as the statistical average door in St. Louis ICE wouldn't be behaving the way they are in MN. They would have specific targets, specific places and times to pick them up, etc, etc. (i.e. operating like the local professional police do) because the risk calculation with even a tiny change you might get shot back at, even if only ineffectively, makes that (much higher) resource expenditure pencil out, with consequences in terms of how much they can get done.
Personal ability to credibly threaten lethal violence if cornered (note: I did not say "firearms") acts much like an ATGM or MANPADS for an infantry squad. You're not gonna take a squad with TOWs on the offensive against a bunch of tanks, but if attacked you've at least got a prayer. The same math holds on the individual level. Making any potential target substantially more prickly to a potentially superior force and doing so for little cost is a huge boon for the little guy. A firearm is a force multiplier same as a bomb carrying drone or a cell phone that records things the government does not like or a media platform that puts those things in front of the eyes of the masses. It forces the superior force to still be much more careful and expend far more resources when engaging. When it comes to domestic policing what this means is that ICE would be under more pressure to "be careful and professional" in every city like the DEA did during the war on drugs we wouldn't even be having this discussion because they wouldn't be employing the tactics that everyone hates.
This math is a large part of why drugs won the war on drugs. There were enough glawk fawtys wit da switch kicking around on the "wrong" side of the law that the cops needed to adopt militarized tactics, the public didn't wanna pay for that shit (monetarily or politically) over weed, and thus drugs won the war on drugs. If they could've rolled up on just about anyone "cheaply" with just a few cheaply (poorly) trained cops, minimal equipment and support, minimal planning and surveillance, etc. it would've gone on way longer (but they couldn't, because that would have yielded too many bodies and cost too much political capital).
ICE is hopefully waiting for any sign of violence against them so that they can escalate even more. They do their best to provoke.
You know where are all NRA and "have gun against govermental tyrrany" guys? In the ICE or supporting from sidelines. And they are itching for when they will finally be able to commit even more violence.
I'm convinced the whole point of pulling a phone out to film a murder is because they having a long-term strategy for slowly boiling the frog and it's gamified for agents. I'm certain that dude got a bonus, an award, and is up for promotion for walking the administration up the next rung of the tyranny ladder.
I think James O’Keeffe was the Project Veritas guy. He had a legally obtained the original of Ashley Biden’s diary. Joe Biden’s daughter. Where in it a page she wrote while in therapy said she had inappropriate showers with her father.
On what grounds? Just repeating a BS assertion doesn't make it true.
The feds have been abusing journalists like this as long as I've been alive. It's not a lot, it's a trickle of them, maybe one a year or so in recent years. But one raid on one person isn't unprecedented or abnormal in any way. Now if you want to talk about frequency or the minimum size of thorn in side they'll go after it might be a different story. But nobody is saying that.
I might think the behavior is despicable and probably also unlawful, and their "they had classified info" excuse is flimsy BS, but it is unfortunately somewhat normal.
The problem is way, way, way worse, way longer running and way more institutionally entrenched than flabbergastingly moronic "these specific people right here right now did misdeeds" surface level assessment may comfortingly imply.
>Raiding a reporter's house is very much an abnormal act to have taken place.
Only by invoking the most numerical slight of hand sort of "a DV is abnormal because we hand out a thousand traffic tickets a day and make only one or two DV arrests" logic is it abnormal.
For the past 5+yr the FBI has raided the home of about one journalist per year. Every time the allegation has been about investigating the source of some leak.
They didn't do one in 2024/2025 I don't think. Time Burke and the Kanye thing, Project Veritas in 2022 and 2023 and the ABC news guy the year before are recent ones that come to mind. I'm not gonna say they get a pass, but this is "the normal amount" for them.
Once again, that doesn't make it right and I shouldn't have to say this but this comment should not be construed as an endorsement of the FBI or any specific activities they engage in.
> Time Burke and the Kanye thing, Project Veritas in 2022 and 2023 and the ABC news guy the year before are recent ones that come to mind
Those were for computer fraud, possession of stolen property, and possession of child pornography, respectively. The first amendment allows journalists to publish classified material, it does not give them free license to commit crimes.
> It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.
It's not efficient. It's plausibly deniable.
People want to be able to meet and gauge interest in the most speculative stuff, discuss the far out future of industry, and discuss all manner of other things with other industry people, etc, etc, without a bunch of talking heads and twitter comment section screeching about "OMG the C-whatever-O of X met with the C-whatever-O of Y" and it being reported on and markets moving.
Of course there's business happening and it will be publicized in the normal ways. This is completely tangential to all the business not happening and all the other sharing of information that's not set in stone enough to be creating a paper trail over.
Like you can't just schedule a conference call with a bunch of important people at your competitors for the purpose of bitching about suppliers or something. You can do that at a conference.
>Median home sizes have gone from 1400 sqft in the 70s to 2400 sqft in recent years.
Because you literally need more square footage to amortize all the regulatory required and industry checkbox required bullshit over. Ain't no different than General Motors saying "no more small cars from us in the US".
No, it's not. Society needs to back the F off and let anyone and everyone who owns property build what they can where they can as they want.
> just need to build a house/apt but supporting infrastructure, such as water, power, waste, public transport, supermarkets, and figure out how to connect it to the city's infrastructure.
No, you don't. 40yr ago, before you people <broadly gestures at HN with a certain finger on each hand> ruined it, it was common for even small time developers to build entire streets of houses on well and septic with 100a panels and pay the utility for a transformer at the end of the street. Obviously they weren't doing this downtown and obviously this doesn't work in all climates but there's no reason it can't be done everywhere east of the Mississippi.
>than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that.
You don't need any of that. You need one more box in the electrical closet and one password protected wifi for all the crap in the building (the actual door locks and the like) to connect to.
The IT guy walks in and replaces/restarts the box instead of waiting for the gods of AWS to descent to earth and restart theirs. They have direct control vs. waiting for something magic to happen.
Have you ever actually seen these systems in person? It's usually a microcontroller which already rules out a ton of stuff you're talking about. Serious places will buy 2-3 of them at the time of installation to have some spares. The ones here are "user-replaceable" as well (unplug these three cables, replace the box, plug them back in). It's not some mysterious bunch-of-wires-on-arduino-pins magic box that nobody dares to touch.
The one at my previous office even had centralized management through an RS232 connection to a PC. No internet and related downtime at all. And I don't recall us ever being locked out because of that.
Is there a plain text version of this data set so I can search locally for my entire stack of expired junkyard plates (wouldn't wanna use a "hot" plate) without creating a record that ties them to my IP, browser fingerprint, etc.?
If no plain text version exists, maybe search for your plates plus a bunch of other random plates too. If you're interested in LMT-487 for example, maybe search for that plus and minus 100 on either end? Or go to the grocery store and search for all the plates you see there? :)
But ICE is behaving pretty sloppy. I'm not sure it could get to that point without (just due to risk multiplied by sheer number of interactions) ICE accidentally escalating something via sloppiness, crossing something that they don't value but is a hard line to their local PD security detail, refusing to stop and getting smoked that way, either by their own security or by a passer by while their security shrugs.
A fed might not care about literally doing a George Floyd, but your security force might just walk off rather than be party to that.
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