This is one the reasons why a cashless society is a bad idea. Suppose the electronic systems were down for a couple of weeks.
What if water or electricity went down for weeks?
I have a water heater and stored bottled water. I have fuel and emergency generator. If the systems my cashless society relies on fail, then I have a couple weeks worth of cash on hand... err... wait, I think I see a problem.
The simple fact is that as these services become more important, they also become more resilient to failure. These days, outages are generally contained to hours rather than days, and that is an acceptable loss for the benefit they give (ie much greater accountability of transactions).
Utilities have gotten more reliable? That sure has not happened anywhere I have lived over the past decades. That is why I had to get the backup generator mentioned above.
Not exactly FINE control, just not panic. If you overshoot, just turn it back. It requires no more calmness than press and hold the start button for 3 seconds, and unlike the start button, cannot fail.
Practicing calm while the steering is locked and the vehicle is angling off of the road into a ditch or down a mountain side is not a solution to be relied on. Why not just add the instruction "do no crash car" to the instruction manual and be done for it? Or they could decouple the steering wheel lock from the ignition key... what a concept.
You do have brakes when you shut the engine off. You even have power assist for the first pump or so before the booster bleeds down.
Try driving my relatively new GMC pickup. Yes, it has power assist brakes for the first pump when the vacuum reservoir is charged. After that, literally standing on the brake pedal and pulling yourself down with the steering wheel, say 300 pounds of force minimum, is barely enough to keep the vehicle from rolling down an incline.
I have actually had the throttle stick on a car before, and it wes before cars had rev limiters. That is, put it in neutral, floor it and BOOM! I was able to get it pulled over and shut off just fine.
You really should give such situations some thought and even practice them so you won't panic if the situation actually presents itself. None of these things need to cause a panic.
Practicing is how I noticed how poor the human factors engineering in cars is.
Except it doesn't. If the wheel is hard against the lock, turn it the other way and the lock will release. But in general, if you're in a situation like the man in TFA, do whet he did to come to a stop (brake against the engine while pulling over), then switch the car off. At that point, there is no vehicle travel and steering locked is not an issue.
I have driven multiple cars where this was the case. Sure the solution is to force the wheel the other way but during an emergency? It is not easy to force oneself to turn the wheel in the direction that is already leading you off of the road although I managed it.
But the point is to have a mechanism that physically powers the car down. Old style ignition locks have that intrinsically. Cars with a start button need something. It could also be an emergency switch or link you can pull out, but it needs to be something that doesn't depend on a program deciding that the user signaled to shut off.
I agree but the only cars I have driven which support this without the steering wheel lock problem are old Ford Mustangs which have the key on the dash.
My solution to make the best of a bad situation is only to have manual transmission cars. I have read about too many incidents where automatic transmissions, whether true automatic transmissions or electronic manual transmissions, fail in unsafe ways preventing control by the operator.
At least with a manual clutch and manual shift, both have to fail to prevent disengaging the drive wheels.
There is an off position on many ignition locks that doesn't lock the steering.
Even if there isn't, nothing stops you from turning the key all the way to the Lock position (stopping the engine) and then immediately back to the On position (freeing the steering lock before it becomes an issue). That's probably faster than carefully counting the key positions, too.
That is what I thought before I crashed. Unfortunately the force on the steering from the car moving prevents the key from being turned. Now you have to force the wheel in the opposite direction before the key is released.
There is an off position on many ignition locks that doesn't lock the steering.
From locked position, one click unlocks the wheel. Next click is the on position. Turn past on to engage the starter.
There are two problems with this:
1. There may not be an off position which does not lock the wheel. 2. Even if there is an off position which does not lock the wheel, it requires fine muscle control which is one of the first things to go in an emergency.
I have been in this position before and shutting off the engine just resulted in a crash with no steering or brakes. Fuck the car makers and fuck the government; this is their collective ongoing fault for decades but hey, it is not their lives they are risking so why should they care?
The handbrake is good enough if you put your car on neutral. It isn’t great for your car but it is better then dying
Often the hand brake is not powerful enough to brake the engine especially at lower gears and of course with an automatic, the car will be fighting you the whole way. With a manual transmission, at least you can engage the clutch or manually shift to a high gear limiting torque.
A nice red plastic button that when hit, disengages all software/electronics that might take control away from you, and either kills the engine completely as well, or lets you take full-manual control of everything?
If only there was some type of manual control like a key switch.
Of course, a key switch is problematical because it activates the steering lock rendering the vehicle unmaneuverable thanks to car companies and the government. I have been in that situation and it is better to let the car run away and crash because at least you can choose where. How dumb is that?
Uhh.. You're comparing someone in a charged situation with adrenaline running high to someone who manipulates a situation into being like that coldly and with malice aforethought?
Police are trained to escalate and create exigent circumstances to justify any action they take.
That depends. Did the cop act on orders and according to procedure? Then you can't really fault him for acting the way he did. If he did violate procedures, then some punishment is definitely in order. In any case, it would be a good idea to review the applicable procedures.
That sure worked at Ruby Ridge. The punishment was promotion.
The law isn't quite clear on this because it doesn't explicitly say if it values the actions or the consequences.
The felony murder rule applies if police kill an innocent bystander as the result of the commission of a felony. The swatter and the others have been charged with various felonies of course.
Police are more likely to shoot someone wrongfully in an armed encounter than any other civilian (cops are civilians too, in spite of thinking they're army guys these days what with all their army equipment)... sorry, no citation since I'm not at my desktop.
The statistics for civilian CCW carriers and cops bear this out. Cops are convicted of more felonies also.
The situation when lethal force is used is at least partially explained by situational awareness. Cops normally respond to a situation after being called while a civilian will have been there from the start and have a greater understanding of what is actually going on. That does not explain cops wildly shooting bystanders though.
Nah. You're living in a fascist totalitarian police state. And the cops just imitate TV shows, where they are always righteous, and going "by the book" (aka not breaking the law, terrorizing, torturing and murdering) is uncool. Like Jack Bauer in 24. Or basically every other US police/TLA/military show.
Which TV shows show ubiquitous civil assets forfeiture?
I suppose if the power companies offered significant discounts or other incentives to people who agreed to join their private batteries to the public grid it would be all good, but the cynical side of me thinks that it's an attempt to get a subset of customers to help pay for grid reliability that everyone should be paying for.
If the power companies do not extract rents which should have gone to the customer, then they are doing it wrong. Investments in lobbying usually pay off by an order of magnitude more than any other investment.
The old model of granting a single cable company to provide service in a city just doesn't hold up. The what is the solution? Pulling coax/fiber costs money (just ask Google). The grant of exclusivity made sure the company would make their investment back. Maybe a model would be that a city would grant exclusivity to two or more infrastructure companies. The infrastructure companies only sell their services to ISP's. The ISP's can use the infrastructure company that works best for them and customer can choose the ISP that they like. This would be closer to what happened in the days of dialup.
Service at the customer distribution level can be fungible. Let the cities maintain the local internet infrastructure like they do water and power and provide last mile access to the ISPs.
Letting multiple ISPs of the same type or even different type if they are wired compete at the local level is a big problem. Lookup the stories about cities which mandated that multiple utility providers build competing physical networks.
The only thing you need to know is the problem is not YouTube. YouTube censored few videos, the vast majority of them are de-monetized. As in the creators no longer make money from them, and the simple reason for that is because no advertiser is willing to advertise on those channels.
The problem *is* YouTube because they deliberately setup a system where advertisers cannot distinguish those channels. What better way to enforce censorship than to assign blame to someone else and say you have no choice? They had a choice and it was to divert blame to someone else while creating the system to support the censorship they want.
Qualified immunity doesn't give the police carte blanche to just blast away without thinking about who they might be shooting at. Police action is more legally restricted than then actions civilians might take in self-defense cases, because police are bound by professional standards. When these standards are violated, prosecutors have a duty to act.
That is true however the courts have laid out exactly what police need to do to get away with it and police training takes this into account. That is why you see police videos with an officer straddling an unconscious suspect beating him to death while yelling "stop resisting me". It is why they are trained to yell unintelligible and conflicting orders at suspects to justify killing them. It is why they are trained to use the Reid Technique on simple traffic stops turning them into interrogations.
They are trained to create the exigent circumstances to justify any action they might take and why not? The courts laid out exactly what is necessary and legislators support it. Criminals are more honest; they do not expect the sanction of their victims.
Justice Scala's "increasing professionalism" is a joke. The only increasing professionalism is in violating civil rights and getting away with it. Civil rights which lack a remedy are not rights.
You think if you were behind cover with a scoped rifle and you shot an unarmed person from outside the effective range of a pistol you could just say: 'I didn't see his hand for a second, so I shot him.' and walk?
Nonsense. Not even if you suspected there was something violent going on.
But you are not a law enforcement officer with qualified immunity. That is exactly what they can do even if they create the exigent circumstances.
I think that swatter and the SWAT team itself bear equal responsibility and be indicted on the same charges. It would be a good idea for the Justice Department to investigate the politicization of local prosecutors who give police an automatic pass on malpractice.
Maybe you should investigate the courts who gave police qualified immunity. Police are not liable for killing bystanders either.
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And these issues happen very very rarely and, even when they do the impact in minimal.
Didn't Nedry or Arnold say that in Jurassic Park?
This is one the reasons why a cashless society is a bad idea. Suppose the electronic systems were down for a couple of weeks.
What if water or electricity went down for weeks?
I have a water heater and stored bottled water. I have fuel and emergency generator. If the systems my cashless society relies on fail, then I have a couple weeks worth of cash on hand ... err ... wait, I think I see a problem.
The simple fact is that as these services become more important, they also become more resilient to failure. These days, outages are generally contained to hours rather than days, and that is an acceptable loss for the benefit they give (ie much greater accountability of transactions).
Utilities have gotten more reliable? That sure has not happened anywhere I have lived over the past decades. That is why I had to get the backup generator mentioned above.
Not exactly FINE control, just not panic. If you overshoot, just turn it back. It requires no more calmness than press and hold the start button for 3 seconds, and unlike the start button, cannot fail.
Practicing calm while the steering is locked and the vehicle is angling off of the road into a ditch or down a mountain side is not a solution to be relied on. Why not just add the instruction "do no crash car" to the instruction manual and be done for it? Or they could decouple the steering wheel lock from the ignition key ... what a concept.
You do have brakes when you shut the engine off. You even have power assist for the first pump or so before the booster bleeds down.
Try driving my relatively new GMC pickup. Yes, it has power assist brakes for the first pump when the vacuum reservoir is charged. After that, literally standing on the brake pedal and pulling yourself down with the steering wheel, say 300 pounds of force minimum, is barely enough to keep the vehicle from rolling down an incline.
I have actually had the throttle stick on a car before, and it wes before cars had rev limiters. That is, put it in neutral, floor it and BOOM! I was able to get it pulled over and shut off just fine.
You really should give such situations some thought and even practice them so you won't panic if the situation actually presents itself. None of these things need to cause a panic.
Practicing is how I noticed how poor the human factors engineering in cars is.
Except it doesn't. If the wheel is hard against the lock, turn it the other way and the lock will release. But in general, if you're in a situation like the man in TFA, do whet he did to come to a stop (brake against the engine while pulling over), then switch the car off. At that point, there is no vehicle travel and steering locked is not an issue.
I have driven multiple cars where this was the case. Sure the solution is to force the wheel the other way but during an emergency? It is not easy to force oneself to turn the wheel in the direction that is already leading you off of the road although I managed it.
But the point is to have a mechanism that physically powers the car down. Old style ignition locks have that intrinsically. Cars with a start button need something. It could also be an emergency switch or link you can pull out, but it needs to be something that doesn't depend on a program deciding that the user signaled to shut off.
I agree but the only cars I have driven which support this without the steering wheel lock problem are old Ford Mustangs which have the key on the dash.
My solution to make the best of a bad situation is only to have manual transmission cars. I have read about too many incidents where automatic transmissions, whether true automatic transmissions or electronic manual transmissions, fail in unsafe ways preventing control by the operator.
At least with a manual clutch and manual shift, both have to fail to prevent disengaging the drive wheels.
There is an off position on many ignition locks that doesn't lock the steering.
Even if there isn't, nothing stops you from turning the key all the way to the Lock position (stopping the engine) and then immediately back to the On position (freeing the steering lock before it becomes an issue). That's probably faster than carefully counting the key positions, too.
That is what I thought before I crashed. Unfortunately the force on the steering from the car moving prevents the key from being turned. Now you have to force the wheel in the opposite direction before the key is released.
If that goes mental, just turn the key back to unlock or on. Since you've already killed the engine, either position will do.
Except now the vehicle travel is pushing on the steering which prevents the key from being turned.
There is an off position on many ignition locks that doesn't lock the steering.
From locked position, one click unlocks the wheel. Next click is the on position. Turn past on to engage the starter.
There are two problems with this:
1. There may not be an off position which does not lock the wheel.
2. Even if there is an off position which does not lock the wheel, it requires fine muscle control which is one of the first things to go in an emergency.
I have been in this position before and shutting off the engine just resulted in a crash with no steering or brakes. Fuck the car makers and fuck the government; this is their collective ongoing fault for decades but hey, it is not their lives they are risking so why should they care?
The handbrake is good enough if you put your car on neutral. It isn’t great for your car but it is better then dying
Often the hand brake is not powerful enough to brake the engine especially at lower gears and of course with an automatic, the car will be fighting you the whole way. With a manual transmission, at least you can engage the clutch or manually shift to a high gear limiting torque.
A nice red plastic button that when hit, disengages all software/electronics that might take control away from you, and either kills the engine completely as well, or lets you take full-manual control of everything?
If only there was some type of manual control like a key switch.
Of course, a key switch is problematical because it activates the steering lock rendering the vehicle unmaneuverable thanks to car companies and the government. I have been in that situation and it is better to let the car run away and crash because at least you can choose where. How dumb is that?
These guys did the worst thing imaginable: they made law enforcement look bad.
Only in the sense that Rosie O'Donnell makes spoons and ice cream look bad. Law enforcement does not need any help to look bad.
The swatter knew cops kill people, swatters needs to be locked up for life. Same with women that abuse the police force!
Maybe the swatter was relying on Justice Scalia's observation about law enforcement's new professionalism. Police would never manipulate a situation and create exigent circumstances to allow them to kill innocent bystanders; that would not be professional.
Not quite, it's the cops job to enforce the law. Helping citizens is a by product and they are free to choose not too in the united states.
You are confusing law enforcement and soldiers. The former enforce the law and the later enforce order. Which more closely resembles a SWAT response?
Uhh.. You're comparing someone in a charged situation with adrenaline running high to someone who manipulates a situation into being like that coldly and with malice aforethought?
Police are trained to escalate and create exigent circumstances to justify any action they take.
That depends. Did the cop act on orders and according to procedure? Then you can't really fault him for acting the way he did. If he did violate procedures, then some punishment is definitely in order. In any case, it would be a good idea to review the applicable procedures.
That sure worked at Ruby Ridge. The punishment was promotion.
The law isn't quite clear on this because it doesn't explicitly say if it values the actions or the consequences.
The felony murder rule applies if police kill an innocent bystander as the result of the commission of a felony. The swatter and the others have been charged with various felonies of course.
Police are more likely to shoot someone wrongfully in an armed encounter than any other civilian (cops are civilians too, in spite of thinking they're army guys these days what with all their army equipment) ... sorry, no citation since I'm not at my desktop.
The statistics for civilian CCW carriers and cops bear this out. Cops are convicted of more felonies also.
The situation when lethal force is used is at least partially explained by situational awareness. Cops normally respond to a situation after being called while a civilian will have been there from the start and have a greater understanding of what is actually going on. That does not explain cops wildly shooting bystanders though.
Nah. You're living in a fascist totalitarian police state. And the cops just imitate TV shows, where they are always righteous, and going "by the book" (aka not breaking the law, terrorizing, torturing and murdering) is uncool. Like Jack Bauer in 24. Or basically every other US police/TLA/military show.
Which TV shows show ubiquitous civil assets forfeiture?
I suppose if the power companies offered significant discounts or other incentives to people who agreed to join their private batteries to the public grid it would be all good, but the cynical side of me thinks that it's an attempt to get a subset of customers to help pay for grid reliability that everyone should be paying for.
If the power companies do not extract rents which should have gone to the customer, then they are doing it wrong. Investments in lobbying usually pay off by an order of magnitude more than any other investment.
Perhaps one day. Right now, fully off-grid solar is very expensive.
It is also illegal in most jurisdictions where a grid connection is required unless you want your house condemned whether you need it or not.
The old model of granting a single cable company to provide service in a city just doesn't hold up. The what is the solution? Pulling coax/fiber costs money (just ask Google). The grant of exclusivity made sure the company would make their investment back. Maybe a model would be that a city would grant exclusivity to two or more infrastructure companies. The infrastructure companies only sell their services to ISP's. The ISP's can use the infrastructure company that works best for them and customer can choose the ISP that they like. This would be closer to what happened in the days of dialup.
Service at the customer distribution level can be fungible. Let the cities maintain the local internet infrastructure like they do water and power and provide last mile access to the ISPs.
Letting multiple ISPs of the same type or even different type if they are wired compete at the local level is a big problem. Lookup the stories about cities which mandated that multiple utility providers build competing physical networks.
The only thing you need to know is the problem is not YouTube. YouTube censored few videos, the vast majority of them are de-monetized. As in the creators no longer make money from them, and the simple reason for that is because no advertiser is willing to advertise on those channels.
The problem *is* YouTube because they deliberately setup a system where advertisers cannot distinguish those channels. What better way to enforce censorship than to assign blame to someone else and say you have no choice? They had a choice and it was to divert blame to someone else while creating the system to support the censorship they want.
Qualified immunity doesn't give the police carte blanche to just blast away without thinking about who they might be shooting at. Police action is more legally restricted than then actions civilians might take in self-defense cases, because police are bound by professional standards. When these standards are violated, prosecutors have a duty to act.
That is true however the courts have laid out exactly what police need to do to get away with it and police training takes this into account. That is why you see police videos with an officer straddling an unconscious suspect beating him to death while yelling "stop resisting me". It is why they are trained to yell unintelligible and conflicting orders at suspects to justify killing them. It is why they are trained to use the Reid Technique on simple traffic stops turning them into interrogations.
They are trained to create the exigent circumstances to justify any action they might take and why not? The courts laid out exactly what is necessary and legislators support it. Criminals are more honest; they do not expect the sanction of their victims.
Justice Scala's "increasing professionalism" is a joke. The only increasing professionalism is in violating civil rights and getting away with it. Civil rights which lack a remedy are not rights.
You think if you were behind cover with a scoped rifle and you shot an unarmed person from outside the effective range of a pistol you could just say: 'I didn't see his hand for a second, so I shot him.' and walk?
Nonsense. Not even if you suspected there was something violent going on.
But you are not a law enforcement officer with qualified immunity. That is exactly what they can do even if they create the exigent circumstances.
I think that swatter and the SWAT team itself bear equal responsibility and be indicted on the same charges. It would be a good idea for the Justice Department to investigate the politicization of local prosecutors who give police an automatic pass on malpractice.
Maybe you should investigate the courts who gave police qualified immunity. Police are not liable for killing bystanders either.