I see nowhere in the article that says the clerk shut down all the pumps. Citation, please?
Well, kid, as to the time taken to notice, it was long enough to obtain an emergency kit. It's not stated if such kits are kept on-site or if it was obtained by a manufacturer. In either case, the expedient of an Out of Order sign would have bought some time.
My first job was washing dishes at a restaurant. There is no crappier, not-worth-the-pay, unskilled labor job, and it remains so to this day. Let's put a parallel situation into this:
To wash large numbers of dishes, you put them in a rack and then place them at one end of an industrial dishwasher. They come out on the other side. They have sensors (even at that time) that stopped the conveyor belt to ensure that it didn't slide off the end and destroy the dishes within.
However, these sensors sometimes break -- not surprising in an area with high humidity and corrosive detergents. When this occurs, should I:
A. Allow the racks to fall off the end of the dishwasher, thereby destroying all the dishes therein (as well as causing a significant safety hazard to the surrounding environs due to broken glass).
B. Watch the end of the dishwasher and grab the racks as they come off.
By your account, it would be (A), as I wouldn't be earning enough to do (B).
Pay is irrelevant. Common sense, attention to detail, and a desire to do a good job regardless of pay is what's relevant.
(I might also mention that one of the other dishwashers was developmentally challenged, operating on about the 10-year-old level. Even he knew to grab the racks.)
Also, I'd note that your math is off. $3.00 in 1981 is $8.71 today. However, due to the nature of the restaurant, someone doing that job today would earn at least $9.00/hour -- significantly more in some States.
Here's another thing that goes over your head, kiddo: when you make stupid mistakes that cost me some percentage of $1800 (versus your $12-$15/hour wage), you're never going to advance. Want to keep your crappy $12-$15 wage (or be fired)? Feel free to keep screwing up.
The world owes you nothing. You either do a job worthy of advancement, or you flip burgers for the rest of your life. Grandpas like me will neither promote nor hire you when you're cost us money, regardless of your pay.
Gotta remember, sonny: you don't own the joint. We do.
Then at some point an Out of Order sign should have been wrapped around the pump handle.
Low-wages don't enter into it. When I entered the workforce at age 16 (when the minimum wage was $3.00-ish), I'd've done it. Never mind that I had other things going on, I'd've said to customers, "You're going to have to hang on a sec, I need to put an Out of Order sign on a pump."
This isn't a question of wages. It's a question of intelligence. The clerk tried to turn it off at some point. When that procedure failed, they should have thought to themselves, "Frak! We're losing money right-and-left! Better go put an Out of Order sign at the pump!"
They lost $1800. That's worth a hell of a lot more than some flunky's minimum wage. Frankly, if I had been 16 and making minimum wage, I'd be scared zark-less that I'd lose my job over costing the store in the vicinity of $1800 for my failure to do something so fantastically obvious.
I'm not from the area, but given footage on YouTube by local station WDIV it would appear to be one of those big gas stations with a convenience store. It doesn't look like it's in a bad part of the city.
The reason for the pump's malfunction is irrelevant to my statements. The clerk could have posted an Out of Order sign at any time.
I have no idea what you mean by conspiracy theories. I never mentioned any. I simply said that the convenience store clerk was stupid for not putting an Out of Order sign on the pump. I further went on to state that this kind of stupidity is consistent with what I've seen of such clerks for a long time.
Additionally, given that the average gas tank of the average car contains roughly 12-15 gallons, that would mean each car had approximately five ten-gallon gas cans.
You'd think even the dimmest bulb that never thought to put an Out of Order sign on the pump would notice ten cars filling five gas cans each.
Instead of staring there open-mouthed because the cut-offs don't work, why not walk out to the pump and wrap a standard yellow Out of Order sign on it?
It doesn't sound as though there was some kind of organized operation involved. It sounds like one of the usual idiots installed the device, got gas themselves, and drove off giggling. The rest were probably just average schmoes getting gas and assumed they were getting a hell of a deal. If I got charged $.50 a gallon, I wouldn't look that particular gift horse in the mouth.
The clerk knew people were pumping gas. S/he knew it was billing at an incorrect price. Time to put an Out of Order sign on it. I've driven up to many a gas pump with one of those and have declined to attempt to use it on that basis. I've no idea why any of them were non-functional, you just don't use them because it says they're broken.
If someone uses the appropriately-marked pump, take down their license plate number (or use the security footage) and report a drive-off or theft, whichever is applicable.
Color me unsurprised, however. Having seen what passes for convenience store (and many other low-skill) employees in the last decade, I doubt many of them would have thought of the simple expedient of an Out of Order sign.
"Boss says me turn it off. It not turn off. Me not know what to do. Duh"
In over-militarizing the police and training them to be unrealistically hyper-paranoid, we have created the situation Adama describes.
You knock on the doors of the people you protect and serve. You kick down the doors and shoot anyone you think might cause trouble when fighting the enemies of the state.
We are no longer a people who are protected and served. We are the enemies of the state and are treated as such.
Police work and warfare aren't the same. When you treat them as the same, you get what we have.
Locations (all places I've lived in half a century on the planet, in order of where I lived):
Yankton, South Dakota
Lincoln, Nebraska
Omaha, Nebraska
Chicago, Illinois
Several suburbs of Chicago, Illinois
Sioux City, Iowa
Des Moines, Iowa
Several suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa
Several feeder-towns of Des Moines, Iowa
Other locations (of which I'm aware via family members or extended stays):
Denver, Colorado
Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
Sheveport, Louisiana
Little Rock, Arkansas
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Reading, Pennsylvania
Newark, New Jersey
Rapid City, South Dakota
I'm sure I could come up with more if I sat down with a map.
Also, your assertion that active-duty guard members are inadequate to handle the fantastically rare police situation requiring military hardware is inaccurate. I would point you straight to the NG and ANG bases in Des Moines, Iowa for proof. The guard that you see in natural disasters are what the regular guard call "weekend warriors." They are not the guard itself.
This is not fantasy. This is reality in most of the United States. The reason you believe otherwise is simply lack of world experience and knowledge of history.
You're describing the national guard now, not what they've been historically.
The national guard's historic role has changed for one reason:
We've over-militarized our police into paranoids who'll shoot first and ask questions later.
Get rid of the military hardware. Stop training multiple generations of police to be paranoid, thinking that every citizen could stab them in the face at any moment.
And no, I'm not kidding. Surviving Edged Weapons is a real video produced by the Milwaukee PD in the 1990s. That's how long we've been training our police to be paranoid.
They most certainly should not be able to be manipulated by a few scubag teenagers into blowing away innocents.
And so what if they have to call the Governor to get the national guard called out? You think the Police Chief doesn't have the Mayor's cell number; and that the Mayor doesn't have the Governor's? Calling the guard in an emergency situation is a pair of calls away. Done and done in 15 minutes, and the guard is on its way -- probably from a base within the city itself.
Over the last 40 years, we have simply over-militarized our police and this is a direct result.
Police don't need to be a hyper-paranoid, paramilitary group. Take away the hardware, let a patrolman knock on the door instead, and this would not have happened.
Adama was right. The people tend to become the enemies of the state.
Get rid of the military hardware and stop training them to be paranoids, and this crap simply won't happen.
I'm quite certain that the general attitude toward police would also rise. At present, I wouldn't call one unless my life absolutely depended on it. Calling a hyper-paranoid, paramilitary organization will only lead to... well, this.
(Also, you need to stop resorting to name-calling. It makes you look like an ignorami incapable of making a reasoned argument.)
Here's what would have happened in the 1970s when I was growing up. Think of Reed and Malloy from Adam 12:
1. Dispatcher gets the call.
2. Dispatcher assigns the call to a pair of uniformed patrolmen in their squad car.
3. Patrolmen arrive and knock on the door
4. Patrolman 1: "We've got a report that you're holding a hostage here."
5. Citizen (suprised): "Huh? There's nothing like that going on here."
6. Patrolman 1: "Do you mind if we come in and have a look around?"
7. Citizen: "Sure."
8. Patrolman enter the home and wander around. They find nothing.
9. Patrolman 1: "Sorry to have bothered you. Must have been a false report. Do you know of anyone who might want to file it?"
10. Citizen: "No idea."
11. Patrolman 1: "We'll turn it over to the detectives. They might come by to ask some questions. If you think of anything, give us a call. Here's my card."
12. Citizen: "No problem. Sorry you had to waste your time."
13. Patrolman 1: "Better to be safe than sorry. We'll let you get back to watching TV."
14. Patrolmen get back in their car and relay the false report to the dispatcher.
While I have no sympathy for the swatters, I also have no sympathy for the police on this one. A simple knock on the door would have sufficed.
This ultimately comes down to an over-militarized police. The solution is simple:
Take away all the hardware. Limit the average patrolman to a sidearm (I'd recommend a.45ACP M1911 rather than a 9mm Glock). Give them a shotgun in the door in case things get dangerous.
No flack vests. No M16s, except for the SWAT team that would rarely be called. If the patrolmen can't handle it, then call SWAT.
If SWAT can't cope with it, police cordon off the area for several blocks and call in the national guard. It's part of why they exist. It's just that now that we've armed police to the teeth, it never happens.
It used to. Get rid of the hardware.
Again, no sympathy for the swatters. I hope they get life. But this is what happens when you over-militarize your police.
"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
And of course the name-calling. What else would one expect on a public forum from an anonymous coward?
Please cease using your fingers until such time as you actually understand the issues. It's not QOS. Learn the TCP/IP stack and in particular the physical layer.
Lack of "neutrality" is built into the system itself, all the way down the stack to the hardware layer.
I'm hoping that by Sunday, I'll be streaming to every service. I do a live SF/genre review show Monday-Wednesday; then an anything-goes talk-show on Thursday. I'll also get on if I think I have something useful to say. I have some production values, and since I'm older, I bill myself as "The Fandi Master."
If you're curious, I did one a couple of hours ago on the Nunes memo (what a surprise). However, I'm bringing my 40 years of IT and ITSec with me rather than the 53 years of fandom. Tonight's is at The Nunes Memo: What Should Happen
However, as it's live, I'm planning to just chuck it at every streaming service in the universe. I'm not sure where I can base its front face. I suppose SDF.org, they're less likely than anyone else to kill it on someone's whim.
Just gonna be a big gorramed pain in the ass. Thanks for nothing, American providers whom I can no longer trust.
They killed me with the copyright review process. I can't even get one because my views are too low.
They killed me when they de-monitized all the small channels.
The threaten to take action against "bad actors" and people who "misbehave" without defining the terms. I mean, I was never a great actor, but I don't think I qualified as a bad one. At least I hope not.
And I do misbehave from time to time.
I'm having a really hard time wondering why I don't dump YouTube in favor of Facebook. At least there I have some chance of growing an audience. As it stands, YouTube has made it essentially impossible.
There needs to be a competitor -- and I mean a competitor, not these "Hey, look at this, they're using a distributed infrastructure and blockchain tech!"
Yeah, that's fine and all. I'm the first one to hop as soon as it takes off or shows signs of growing. I need eyes to grow an audience. The only other services that come close to the number of eyes are Dailymotion (French) and VK (Russian).
Maybe I'll just go to VK. Amazingly, there's considerably more free speech on a frakking Russian website than there is on YouTube at the moment.
There needs to be a competitor. A real one. Anybody got about $50 million so I can get it off the ground?
that I'm re-launching under my own domain starting July 4. I had previously hosted on//aNONradio// but when I sort of "found my voice," I decided to go pro.
In this case, "my voice" was a feature I developed called The Old Fan's Commentary.
You see, I'm an old man. And not a fake old man like Mr. Plinkett, but a real old man like Abe Vigoda. I make commentaries not so much about the films but about fandom of the period. On the July 4 edition, there's a Commentary on Space: 1999.
Again, not particularly trying to plug it. I just happen to be doing it. After Space: 1999 I'm doing Star Wars: The Despecialized Edition. The week after that, The Star Wars Holiday Special. I have a bunch of stuff already in the can.
"What we heard back most explicitly was that you want more control over when Windows 10 installs updates," admits John Cable, Microsoft's Windows director of program management. "We also heard that unexpected reboots are disruptive if they happen at the wrong time."
Only Microsoft would think that people don't want control of updates, or that unexpected reboots aren't disruptive.
I've been in IT 39 years. Only an idiot doesn't know those two things.
I'm fascinated by the concept of a "morale slump" after someone revealed to the world how evil the NSA is.
I've seen the cages in Facebook and Microsoft's Des Moines data centers with my own eyes. They capture any and all data -- inbound and outbound -- and (I assume) sends it to Utah for permanent storage.
Tell me this isn't utterly evil.
The NSA is evil. Its employees are not doing important work: they are evil.
The NSA should be immediately disbanded. The Oak Ridge facility apparently working on cracking PGP should be destroyed with bunker-busters and reduced to sand and ash.
The Utah data center is an entirely different matter. When you have enough estimated storage for all the pertinent information on every human being on the planet, you've descended into near-dictatorial waters.
The Utah facility needs an end that sends a message to all of humanity for all time:
Nuke it.
Then pass a Constitutional Amendment to re-nuke it every July 4 of the nation's Centennial. There needs to be a permanent, radioactive hell as a warning to all future generations everywhere that a free society never, ever builds anything that horrifically evil,
Then start rounding up any and all NSA employees who can be proved to have spied on Americans and try them for treason.
The NSA is pure, unadulterated evil. Those who work there may have convinced themselves they're patriots, but they're not. The patriotic thing would be to quit in disgust.
The NSA is evil. And you'll not that despite the fact that I know this thread is being captured; and that it can be tied to my real name if you try hard; and that I'm replying to someone who has deluded themselves about the NSA; that there is every possibility this post will be reported to or flagged by the NSA.
I don't care. The NSA is evil and the people who work there are the worst sort of scum. The sooner the NSA and its various appariti are forever destroyed, the better.
Those of us in IT know firsthand just precisely how evil the NSA has become.
All the NSA cages in various data centers, anyone? Enough estimated storage in Utah to store all the information of note on every single human being on the planet, anyone?
The NSA, CIA, FBI, and anything else filled with those who spy on Americans should be immediately and permanently disbanded; and any employees barred from any form of Government work, nor working for any company with Government contracts. Also, round up anyone you can prove spied on Americans and try them for treason.
Finally, the NSA Utah data center should be evacuated and then nuked. A Constitutional Amendment should then be ratified that specifies the site should be nuked every 100 years at the nation's Centennials -- as a radioactive warning to all future generations of what a free society never builds.
Over the last half-century of my life, the United States has become a police state. Our local police officers routinely over-step their authority (to put it mildly). This should hardly be news to anyone with a pair of eyes. If you know how to find the thousands of police abuse videos on YouTube, three can be no denying it.
We live in a police state. Consequently, there has been a very rational backlash against police in the last few years. You can see this in particular with the "Black Lives Matter" movement (though their choice of poster children leaves something to be desired, most of the time).
In any case, you can think of it this way:
When I was a young man, if you were getting hassled by the cops, there was some good chance you'd been involved in at least a misdemeanor if not a felony. Today, if you're getting hassled by the cops, it's probably over the city's taxation program.
What cities, counties, and States have done is to turn the cops into tax collectors.
This was not always the case.
When I was a young man, a cop was unlikely to cite you for a traffic violation unless they observed you driving recklessly. The fines for minor speeding, failure to signal, etc, were all very small. I was involved in a three-car accident that was my fault. I was cited for failure to yield right-of-way and had to pay some small amount (the real punishment came in the form of increased insurance premiums).
Today's fines for minor traffic violations now run into the hundreds of dollars, even for the least offense. This is simply taxation by another name.
And the police -- with their citation quotas -- are the tax collectors.
Tell me, do you not cringe if you see a flashing light in the rear-view? Do you not immediately look around, hoping you didn't do anything minor -- because the fine would be exorbitant beyond any reason?
It wasn't always like this. I know it's hard to believe, but before cops became tax collectors, people actually trusted them.
As tax collectors, they are a bane on our existence. This coupled with abuses that are now being captured by anyone with an HD video recorder in their pocket has revealed a truly disgusting side of the police. They're not just a bane on our existence, in some cases, they are actively our enemy,
So bringing all this back:
People hate cops, at least as much as they would hate any tax-collector. Sometimes more.
Disguising your cop car as a private business' car risks detection -- as in this case.
When detected, the natural assumption is that this is neither the first nor last time such deception has been undertaken.
From this point forward, it is perfectly rational to suspect a Google Street View car is, in fact, a police car.
The occupants of that then receive the same hatred as police officers.
This puts the Google Street View car occupants in danger.
If they don't stop tax-collecting, one of these days there will be a significant backlash against police. As tax-collectors, they deserve it,
There's no reason to get some poor Google Street View driver tarred, feathered, and run out of town (the traditional method of dealing with tax-collectors).
I've never worked for a company in which either Marketing or Sales (or an unholy alliance of both) didn't run everything.
I've worked for a large insurance company, for a company that makes over half the Girl Scout cookies in the world, and a host of others that ultimately went under -- usually while I was there. My resume reads as a list of failed or bought-out companies.
In every case, the blame for going under can be laid directly at the feet of those who run the business: Marketing and/or Sales.
None of them understand what we do. We're simply numbers in a ledger.
Somebody needs to generally wrest control from Marketing and Sales in every company now extent. To do otherwise is to court disaster. It won't help those of us that management cannot understand, but it will at least keep the business open.
For most corporate management, IT -- particularly infrastructure -- is simply a black hole of cash. They don't understand what we do, they don't understand the value we bring to the company, and they don't know why they're paying us. It's just money going somewhere, and they don't understand where.
There's no way to make them understand. They lack even the basic computer skills necessary to do anything beyond everyday work on a PC. They have not spent years or decades in the field, and you can't expect them to understand anything without that experience.
We're a black hole. We can be jettisoned any time a corporate bean-counter wants to save some money. I've been in the industry for over 30 years, man and boy, and it's always the same story: we're a black hole.
So we're expendable when crunch time comes. After all, what the hell are we being paid for, anyway?
I haven't worked for a company -- ever -- that displayed the same loyalty to me as I did to them. I no longer have the energy to be loyal when I know for a certain fact that I'll be canned the moment someone wants to cut expenses.
Want me to learn new skills? Fine, I'm happy to. Been doing it for over 30 years.
No company I've worked for paid for learning new skills. It was just do the work -- and then shoved out the door when crunch time came.
I don't know where this article originates, but it's nonsense. Employers don't train IT people. They don't even know why it's necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I see nowhere in the article that says the clerk shut down all the pumps. Citation, please?
Well, kid, as to the time taken to notice, it was long enough to obtain an emergency kit. It's not stated if such kits are kept on-site or if it was obtained by a manufacturer. In either case, the expedient of an Out of Order sign would have bought some time.
My first job was washing dishes at a restaurant. There is no crappier, not-worth-the-pay, unskilled labor job, and it remains so to this day. Let's put a parallel situation into this:
To wash large numbers of dishes, you put them in a rack and then place them at one end of an industrial dishwasher. They come out on the other side. They have sensors (even at that time) that stopped the conveyor belt to ensure that it didn't slide off the end and destroy the dishes within.
However, these sensors sometimes break -- not surprising in an area with high humidity and corrosive detergents. When this occurs, should I:
A. Allow the racks to fall off the end of the dishwasher, thereby destroying all the dishes therein (as well as causing a significant safety hazard to the surrounding environs due to broken glass).
B. Watch the end of the dishwasher and grab the racks as they come off.
By your account, it would be (A), as I wouldn't be earning enough to do (B).
Pay is irrelevant. Common sense, attention to detail, and a desire to do a good job regardless of pay is what's relevant.
(I might also mention that one of the other dishwashers was developmentally challenged, operating on about the 10-year-old level. Even he knew to grab the racks.)
Also, I'd note that your math is off. $3.00 in 1981 is $8.71 today. However, due to the nature of the restaurant, someone doing that job today would earn at least $9.00/hour -- significantly more in some States.
Here's another thing that goes over your head, kiddo: when you make stupid mistakes that cost me some percentage of $1800 (versus your $12-$15/hour wage), you're never going to advance. Want to keep your crappy $12-$15 wage (or be fired)? Feel free to keep screwing up.
The world owes you nothing. You either do a job worthy of advancement, or you flip burgers for the rest of your life. Grandpas like me will neither promote nor hire you when you're cost us money, regardless of your pay.
Gotta remember, sonny: you don't own the joint. We do.
Then at some point an Out of Order sign should have been wrapped around the pump handle.
Low-wages don't enter into it. When I entered the workforce at age 16 (when the minimum wage was $3.00-ish), I'd've done it. Never mind that I had other things going on, I'd've said to customers, "You're going to have to hang on a sec, I need to put an Out of Order sign on a pump."
This isn't a question of wages. It's a question of intelligence. The clerk tried to turn it off at some point. When that procedure failed, they should have thought to themselves, "Frak! We're losing money right-and-left! Better go put an Out of Order sign at the pump!"
They lost $1800. That's worth a hell of a lot more than some flunky's minimum wage. Frankly, if I had been 16 and making minimum wage, I'd be scared zark-less that I'd lose my job over costing the store in the vicinity of $1800 for my failure to do something so fantastically obvious.
I'm not from the area, but given footage on YouTube by local station WDIV it would appear to be one of those big gas stations with a convenience store. It doesn't look like it's in a bad part of the city.
Additionally, I spent a couple of minutes geolocating the convenience store in question. It appears to be in a largely residential area with well-maintained homes.
The reason for the pump's malfunction is irrelevant to my statements. The clerk could have posted an Out of Order sign at any time.
I have no idea what you mean by conspiracy theories. I never mentioned any. I simply said that the convenience store clerk was stupid for not putting an Out of Order sign on the pump. I further went on to state that this kind of stupidity is consistent with what I've seen of such clerks for a long time.
Additionally, given that the average gas tank of the average car contains roughly 12-15 gallons, that would mean each car had approximately five ten-gallon gas cans.
You'd think even the dimmest bulb that never thought to put an Out of Order sign on the pump would notice ten cars filling five gas cans each.
Given the thieves' appearance, I wouldn't assume Russian Mafia.
And no, not because they're black. Stop being all racist.
gallon (gln)
n. A unit of volume in the U.S. Customary System, used in liquid measure, equal to 4 quarts (3.785 liters).
n. A unit of volume in the British Imperial System, used in liquid and dry measure, equal to 4 quarts (4.546 liters).
n. A container with a capacity of one gallon.
Source: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
Instead of staring there open-mouthed because the cut-offs don't work, why not walk out to the pump and wrap a standard yellow Out of Order sign on it?
It doesn't sound as though there was some kind of organized operation involved. It sounds like one of the usual idiots installed the device, got gas themselves, and drove off giggling. The rest were probably just average schmoes getting gas and assumed they were getting a hell of a deal. If I got charged $.50 a gallon, I wouldn't look that particular gift horse in the mouth.
The clerk knew people were pumping gas. S/he knew it was billing at an incorrect price. Time to put an Out of Order sign on it. I've driven up to many a gas pump with one of those and have declined to attempt to use it on that basis. I've no idea why any of them were non-functional, you just don't use them because it says they're broken.
If someone uses the appropriately-marked pump, take down their license plate number (or use the security footage) and report a drive-off or theft, whichever is applicable.
Color me unsurprised, however. Having seen what passes for convenience store (and many other low-skill) employees in the last decade, I doubt many of them would have thought of the simple expedient of an Out of Order sign.
"Boss says me turn it off. It not turn off. Me not know what to do. Duh"
The quote describes our current situation.
In over-militarizing the police and training them to be unrealistically hyper-paranoid, we have created the situation Adama describes.
You knock on the doors of the people you protect and serve. You kick down the doors and shoot anyone you think might cause trouble when fighting the enemies of the state.
We are no longer a people who are protected and served. We are the enemies of the state and are treated as such.
Police work and warfare aren't the same. When you treat them as the same, you get what we have.
Planet: Earth.
Locations (all places I've lived in half a century on the planet, in order of where I lived):
Yankton, South Dakota
Lincoln, Nebraska
Omaha, Nebraska
Chicago, Illinois
Several suburbs of Chicago, Illinois
Sioux City, Iowa
Des Moines, Iowa
Several suburbs of Des Moines, Iowa Several feeder-towns of Des Moines, Iowa
Other locations (of which I'm aware via family members or extended stays):
Denver, Colorado
Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
Sheveport, Louisiana
Little Rock, Arkansas
Allentown, Pennsylvania
Reading, Pennsylvania
Newark, New Jersey
Rapid City, South Dakota
I'm sure I could come up with more if I sat down with a map.
Also, your assertion that active-duty guard members are inadequate to handle the fantastically rare police situation requiring military hardware is inaccurate. I would point you straight to the NG and ANG bases in Des Moines, Iowa for proof. The guard that you see in natural disasters are what the regular guard call "weekend warriors." They are not the guard itself.
This is not fantasy. This is reality in most of the United States. The reason you believe otherwise is simply lack of world experience and knowledge of history.
You're describing the national guard now, not what they've been historically.
The national guard's historic role has changed for one reason:
We've over-militarized our police into paranoids who'll shoot first and ask questions later.
Get rid of the military hardware. Stop training multiple generations of police to be paranoid, thinking that every citizen could stab them in the face at any moment.
And no, I'm not kidding. Surviving Edged Weapons is a real video produced by the Milwaukee PD in the 1990s. That's how long we've been training our police to be paranoid.
Police should look and act like this (forgiving the quality due to the uploader's attempts to dodge YouTube's bots). They should not look like this
They most certainly should not be able to be manipulated by a few scubag teenagers into blowing away innocents.
And so what if they have to call the Governor to get the national guard called out? You think the Police Chief doesn't have the Mayor's cell number; and that the Mayor doesn't have the Governor's? Calling the guard in an emergency situation is a pair of calls away. Done and done in 15 minutes, and the guard is on its way -- probably from a base within the city itself.
Over the last 40 years, we have simply over-militarized our police and this is a direct result.
Police don't need to be a hyper-paranoid, paramilitary group. Take away the hardware, let a patrolman knock on the door instead, and this would not have happened.
Adama was right. The people tend to become the enemies of the state.
Get rid of the military hardware and stop training them to be paranoids, and this crap simply won't happen.
I'm quite certain that the general attitude toward police would also rise. At present, I wouldn't call one unless my life absolutely depended on it. Calling a hyper-paranoid, paramilitary organization will only lead to ... well, this.
(Also, you need to stop resorting to name-calling. It makes you look like an ignorami incapable of making a reasoned argument.)
Here's what would have happened in the 1970s when I was growing up. Think of Reed and Malloy from Adam 12:
1. Dispatcher gets the call.
2. Dispatcher assigns the call to a pair of uniformed patrolmen in their squad car.
3. Patrolmen arrive and knock on the door
4. Patrolman 1: "We've got a report that you're holding a hostage here."
5. Citizen (suprised): "Huh? There's nothing like that going on here."
6. Patrolman 1: "Do you mind if we come in and have a look around?"
7. Citizen: "Sure."
8. Patrolman enter the home and wander around. They find nothing.
9. Patrolman 1: "Sorry to have bothered you. Must have been a false report. Do you know of anyone who might want to file it?"
10. Citizen: "No idea."
11. Patrolman 1: "We'll turn it over to the detectives. They might come by to ask some questions. If you think of anything, give us a call. Here's my card."
12. Citizen: "No problem. Sorry you had to waste your time."
13. Patrolman 1: "Better to be safe than sorry. We'll let you get back to watching TV."
14. Patrolmen get back in their car and relay the false report to the dispatcher.
While I have no sympathy for the swatters, I also have no sympathy for the police on this one. A simple knock on the door would have sufficed.
This ultimately comes down to an over-militarized police. The solution is simple:
Take away all the hardware. Limit the average patrolman to a sidearm (I'd recommend a .45ACP M1911 rather than a 9mm Glock). Give them a shotgun in the door in case things get dangerous.
No flack vests. No M16s, except for the SWAT team that would rarely be called. If the patrolmen can't handle it, then call SWAT.
If SWAT can't cope with it, police cordon off the area for several blocks and call in the national guard. It's part of why they exist. It's just that now that we've armed police to the teeth, it never happens.
It used to. Get rid of the hardware.
Again, no sympathy for the swatters. I hope they get life. But this is what happens when you over-militarize your police.
"There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
- Commander William Adama, Battlestar Galactica
And of course the name-calling. What else would one expect on a public forum from an anonymous coward?
Please cease using your fingers until such time as you actually understand the issues. It's not QOS. Learn the TCP/IP stack and in particular the physical layer.
Lack of "neutrality" is built into the system itself, all the way down the stack to the hardware layer.
I wish someone would tell these imbeciles that net neutrality breaks the Internet.
Now those of us on the Infrastructure and Networking side will be forced to break the law en masse in order to keep the Internet functioning.
Ah, yes. Now I remember why I almost never post to /.
Within a few moments, some troll is down-moderating my posts as trolling. In so doing, it fraks up my karma, etc.
It happens every frakking time.
Screw you guys. If /. can't fix this obviously broken system, I'm going back to lurking. Posting is a pointless exercise in futility.
Hence the request for at least $50 million.
I'm hoping that by Sunday, I'll be streaming to every service. I do a live SF/genre review show Monday-Wednesday; then an anything-goes talk-show on Thursday. I'll also get on if I think I have something useful to say. I have some production values, and since I'm older, I bill myself as "The Fandi Master."
If you're curious, I did one a couple of hours ago on the Nunes memo (what a surprise). However, I'm bringing my 40 years of IT and ITSec with me rather than the 53 years of fandom. Tonight's is at The Nunes Memo: What Should Happen
However, as it's live, I'm planning to just chuck it at every streaming service in the universe. I'm not sure where I can base its front face. I suppose SDF.org, they're less likely than anyone else to kill it on someone's whim.
Just gonna be a big gorramed pain in the ass. Thanks for nothing, American providers whom I can no longer trust.
Oh, right. Because there's no real competitor.
They killed me with the copyright review process. I can't even get one because my views are too low.
They killed me when they de-monitized all the small channels.
The threaten to take action against "bad actors" and people who "misbehave" without defining the terms. I mean, I was never a great actor, but I don't think I qualified as a bad one. At least I hope not.
And I do misbehave from time to time.
I'm having a really hard time wondering why I don't dump YouTube in favor of Facebook. At least there I have some chance of growing an audience. As it stands, YouTube has made it essentially impossible.
There needs to be a competitor -- and I mean a competitor, not these "Hey, look at this, they're using a distributed infrastructure and blockchain tech!"
Yeah, that's fine and all. I'm the first one to hop as soon as it takes off or shows signs of growing. I need eyes to grow an audience. The only other services that come close to the number of eyes are Dailymotion (French) and VK (Russian).
Maybe I'll just go to VK. Amazingly, there's considerably more free speech on a frakking Russian website than there is on YouTube at the moment.
There needs to be a competitor. A real one. Anybody got about $50 million so I can get it off the ground?
Somehow, I suspect this video got a manual review. Now if they'd only deign to do the same for mine ...
I'm not really here to plug this, but when it crossed my RSS feed, the timing made it such that I thought users might be interested.
(No, I'm serious. I wasn't going to post it. It just happens to be topical.)
I have a podcast called Tales From SYL Ranch
that I'm re-launching under my own domain starting July 4. I had previously hosted on //aNONradio// but when I sort of "found my voice," I decided to go pro.
In this case, "my voice" was a feature I developed called The Old Fan's Commentary.
You see, I'm an old man. And not a fake old man like Mr. Plinkett, but a real old man like Abe Vigoda. I make commentaries not so much about the films but about fandom of the period. On the July 4 edition, there's a Commentary on Space: 1999 .
Again, not particularly trying to plug it. I just happen to be doing it. After Space: 1999 I'm doing Star Wars: The Despecialized Edition. The week after that, The Star Wars Holiday Special. I have a bunch of stuff already in the can.
Just thought I'd mention it.
Only Microsoft would think that people don't want control of updates, or that unexpected reboots aren't disruptive.
I've been in IT 39 years. Only an idiot doesn't know those two things.
I'm fascinated by the concept of a "morale slump" after someone revealed to the world how evil the NSA is.
I've seen the cages in Facebook and Microsoft's Des Moines data centers with my own eyes. They capture any and all data -- inbound and outbound -- and (I assume) sends it to Utah for permanent storage.
Tell me this isn't utterly evil.
The NSA is evil. Its employees are not doing important work: they are evil.
The NSA should be immediately disbanded. The Oak Ridge facility apparently working on cracking PGP should be destroyed with bunker-busters and reduced to sand and ash.
The Utah data center is an entirely different matter. When you have enough estimated storage for all the pertinent information on every human being on the planet, you've descended into near-dictatorial waters.
The Utah facility needs an end that sends a message to all of humanity for all time:
Nuke it.
Then pass a Constitutional Amendment to re-nuke it every July 4 of the nation's Centennial. There needs to be a permanent, radioactive hell as a warning to all future generations everywhere that a free society never, ever builds anything that horrifically evil,
Then start rounding up any and all NSA employees who can be proved to have spied on Americans and try them for treason.
The NSA is pure, unadulterated evil. Those who work there may have convinced themselves they're patriots, but they're not. The patriotic thing would be to quit in disgust.
The NSA is evil. And you'll not that despite the fact that I know this thread is being captured; and that it can be tied to my real name if you try hard; and that I'm replying to someone who has deluded themselves about the NSA; that there is every possibility this post will be reported to or flagged by the NSA.
I don't care. The NSA is evil and the people who work there are the worst sort of scum. The sooner the NSA and its various appariti are forever destroyed, the better.
Those of us in IT know firsthand just precisely how evil the NSA has become.
All the NSA cages in various data centers, anyone? Enough estimated storage in Utah to store all the information of note on every single human being on the planet , anyone?
The NSA, CIA, FBI, and anything else filled with those who spy on Americans should be immediately and permanently disbanded; and any employees barred from any form of Government work, nor working for any company with Government contracts. Also, round up anyone you can prove spied on Americans and try them for treason.
Finally, the NSA Utah data center should be evacuated and then nuked. A Constitutional Amendment should then be ratified that specifies the site should be nuked every 100 years at the nation's Centennials -- as a radioactive warning to all future generations of what a free society never builds.
I can explain why it puts them at risk.
Over the last half-century of my life, the United States has become a police state. Our local police officers routinely over-step their authority (to put it mildly). This should hardly be news to anyone with a pair of eyes. If you know how to find the thousands of police abuse videos on YouTube, three can be no denying it.
We live in a police state. Consequently, there has been a very rational backlash against police in the last few years. You can see this in particular with the "Black Lives Matter" movement (though their choice of poster children leaves something to be desired, most of the time).
In any case, you can think of it this way:
When I was a young man, if you were getting hassled by the cops, there was some good chance you'd been involved in at least a misdemeanor if not a felony. Today, if you're getting hassled by the cops, it's probably over the city's taxation program.
What cities, counties, and States have done is to turn the cops into tax collectors.
This was not always the case.
When I was a young man, a cop was unlikely to cite you for a traffic violation unless they observed you driving recklessly. The fines for minor speeding, failure to signal, etc, were all very small. I was involved in a three-car accident that was my fault. I was cited for failure to yield right-of-way and had to pay some small amount (the real punishment came in the form of increased insurance premiums).
Today's fines for minor traffic violations now run into the hundreds of dollars, even for the least offense. This is simply taxation by another name.
And the police -- with their citation quotas -- are the tax collectors.
Tell me, do you not cringe if you see a flashing light in the rear-view? Do you not immediately look around, hoping you didn't do anything minor -- because the fine would be exorbitant beyond any reason?
It wasn't always like this. I know it's hard to believe, but before cops became tax collectors, people actually trusted them.
As tax collectors, they are a bane on our existence. This coupled with abuses that are now being captured by anyone with an HD video recorder in their pocket has revealed a truly disgusting side of the police. They're not just a bane on our existence, in some cases, they are actively our enemy,
So bringing all this back:
People hate cops, at least as much as they would hate any tax-collector. Sometimes more.
Disguising your cop car as a private business' car risks detection -- as in this case.
When detected, the natural assumption is that this is neither the first nor last time such deception has been undertaken.
From this point forward, it is perfectly rational to suspect a Google Street View car is, in fact, a police car.
The occupants of that then receive the same hatred as police officers.
This puts the Google Street View car occupants in danger.
If they don't stop tax-collecting, one of these days there will be a significant backlash against police. As tax-collectors, they deserve it,
There's no reason to get some poor Google Street View driver tarred, feathered, and run out of town (the traditional method of dealing with tax-collectors).
I've never worked for a company in which either Marketing or Sales (or an unholy alliance of both) didn't run everything.
I've worked for a large insurance company, for a company that makes over half the Girl Scout cookies in the world, and a host of others that ultimately went under -- usually while I was there. My resume reads as a list of failed or bought-out companies.
In every case, the blame for going under can be laid directly at the feet of those who run the business: Marketing and/or Sales.
None of them understand what we do. We're simply numbers in a ledger.
Somebody needs to generally wrest control from Marketing and Sales in every company now extent. To do otherwise is to court disaster. It won't help those of us that management cannot understand, but it will at least keep the business open.
Here's the basic problem:
For most corporate management, IT -- particularly infrastructure -- is simply a black hole of cash. They don't understand what we do, they don't understand the value we bring to the company, and they don't know why they're paying us. It's just money going somewhere, and they don't understand where.
There's no way to make them understand. They lack even the basic computer skills necessary to do anything beyond everyday work on a PC. They have not spent years or decades in the field, and you can't expect them to understand anything without that experience.
We're a black hole. We can be jettisoned any time a corporate bean-counter wants to save some money. I've been in the industry for over 30 years, man and boy, and it's always the same story: we're a black hole.
So we're expendable when crunch time comes. After all, what the hell are we being paid for, anyway?
I haven't worked for a company -- ever -- that displayed the same loyalty to me as I did to them. I no longer have the energy to be loyal when I know for a certain fact that I'll be canned the moment someone wants to cut expenses.
Want me to learn new skills? Fine, I'm happy to. Been doing it for over 30 years.
No company I've worked for paid for learning new skills. It was just do the work -- and then shoved out the door when crunch time came.
I don't know where this article originates, but it's nonsense. Employers don't train IT people. They don't even know why it's necessary.
We're an expendable black hole. Period.