"You can decline to consent, but you'll miss your flight because we'll detain you for an hour". It's so clear that no one can meaningfully "consent" in a situation where one person has the power to deeply fuck you over like that.
These cops, like literal generations of cops before them, work in a system that financially and socially rewards and reinforces this behavior.
We need to stop thinking about cops as the good guys by default, and really start examining the systems that we've built to give them power. Especially unchecked power like this where they can train a dog to mark on a bag, use that training to get probable cause, and then steal whatever they want within the bag.
It's not just a few bad apples, it's a systemic issue that needs systemic fixes. Because if you put most humans in a position where they can get tens of thousands of dollars a year, without consequence, and be told they are heroes for doing so... it's going to be difficult to resist. We need to sharply cut back on police power, sharply cut back on police presence (do we really need DEA agents "cold checking" airline passengers because they bought a ticket late?)
This is a ridiculous reduction. It's clear that the numbers matter here, and that one family's decisions are nothing compared to the harm this CEO can create or prevent.
I absolutely adore Becky Chambers (and Murderbot, incidentally), but I also love low stakes sci-fi.
I want more stories about people just... living unremarkable lives in remarkable places. Like, I don't need to read about Batman, but reading about the guy who runs the bodega in Gotham City? Yum yum yum, that's absolutely food for me.
I describe Chambers to others as "cozy" sci-fi.
That said, I think her different works hit differently. The Monk and Robot series is a really poignant pair of novellas about what it means to be human in a solarpunk world.
The Wayfarer series (Long Way to a Small Angry Planet) is slice of life stories of people caught in awkward situations around space. It's like, "What are people on the fringes doing in Star Trek -- not Picard types, but like, construction crews or black market dealers or space communists or people who get stuck at a motel because the highway shuts down. What if Firefly was a little less high energy.
I disagree with your assessments a little, but not enough to make a fuss. I think it's absolutely fair to say, "This wasn't to my taste".
That said, I'm also queer, poly, and use neopronouns, so I think I may be primed for science fiction that takes the transhumanism language and explores those topics in ways that doesn't treat those topics are scandalous or shocking.
I always get so happy when Passage and Rohrer is mentioned, when I first played Sleep is Death my life changed, creating a story with so little but still endless possibilities. I made a js-version of it but never polished it enough, my first coding project inspired by a true vision, I learned so much.
I share your appreciation of Passage, it is a poem by another shape and a truly _different_ thing. Thank you for even mentioning it, it made my day.
I think it's pretty reasonable to assume "better working conditions", given the near infinite stories of Amazon abusing workers in fulfillment centers.
> Do you have any advice on how to paint a figurine?
One or two "Army Painter" brushes will do you fine.
Thin paints a little as you work, the paints in the bottles are a little thick.
Paint a base coat layer, wash a darker color over that layer, drybrush a lighter highlight over that layer and you'll be 90% of the way there. From that point, it's just practice and adding skills.
The giant, terrible, AI generated header image isn't doing anything to support the page. IMO, either hire an artist for a sketch or remove the image.
Seeing people standing around a classroom... hospital?... as amputees and weird shaped people in a space that's too large for them is very disquieting and distracting from the piece later on.
Was it the messed up human anatomy? The letters and numbers being misformed? The lack of faces? The weird choice of unnecessary detail and bizarre scale?
The reverse is also true though -- hearing from folks that we need to measure nothing because "trust me". Both lead to poor outcomes, ime.
A good engineering team has measurements in place that are reasonable approximations, where it is reasonable to build them, but also treats them as prompts rather than absolutes. Asking "why is this metric out of band?" is infinitely more valuable than stating "this metric is out of band, we've failed".
Out of band means communicated on different channels than ordinary information. For example a metric communicated out of band would be told to you in person instead of showing up on your universal agent smith react widget dashboard. :-)
Two different jargon phrases overlapping here, as I’m sure you know. Yours is “out of communication band” whereas GP is “out of predictive band.” Yours is a bit more common to me, but I hear both.
A band, on a metric, indicates a minimum and maximum safe value. For instance, if you alarmed when your latency is below 50ms or above 150ms, that'd be your band. Being out of band is being out of that 'safe' window.
It's a totally valid and common jargon phrase from the web services world, apologies though, I assumed that it was wider jargon than it turns out it is...
There's no language rule that a phrase can have only one meaning. You seem to be taking this too precisely, as the earlier explanations of there being two interpretations are quite entirely reasonable.
"Do your own research" is a pretty thin rebuttal to "here's a source by a well regarded NGO".
And if you are saying Amnesty International is feeding propaganda through the mainstream media, that's also going to need some credible sources. They are generally considered a fairly highly factual organization.
