> I know this didn’t happen. How do I know? I just know. The problem was, Rubenstein had contemporaneously told a number of people about the sandwich event, including Levine and Bari Weiss, and they started coming forward to say so.
Interesting. Why not look at credit reports, tax records, etc: are they showing more income than an employer pays? If its not extra work then you get to bounce them to the police for reward money!
Wonder why there don't seem to be startups seeking to profit from finding and eliminating employer side fraud, wage theft and the like?
Correct, the head of the VFD had his house burn down. The 2nd fire starting after they'd been out there once already the same night made me suspicious, but i never heard nobody brag about it.
I do not know if the VFD would have or did indulge in arson. That was certainly the implication I felt when they were speaking to me. Which was amusing because I'd had to go out and take the dogs off them to let them out of the truck to talk in the first place.
I puzzled and annoyed them by confessing poverty, but offering to volunteer skilled labor. Apparently the firehouse didn't need wiring or network or anything :)
I know of a local Volunteer fire Dept that went that way; started having the head guy and a couple of his big cousins go around and tell people how much the VFD needed support, and how flammable their house or business looked.
Couple months after that started, the guy's house burned down. I heard the trucks came out twice, the second time there were more people responding and the police got into the guy's barn with a major weed grow. Not sure what the whole story was but the VFD moved and became a different entity after that.
The moral is that neighbors enforce the character of the neighborhood. Not cops.
For those asking "Why now?" ... here's a couple wild takes:
The Interstellar Squid have arrived. They're hanging out around Saturn (cf "largest comet ever"). Even after a century of preparation and propaganda, there is a large fraction of humanity who refuses to conceive of intelligence other than human. This is the last gasp at preparing them.
That, or the political corruption has gotten so rank that they're scraping the bottom of the bin for "lookit the shiny!" distraction stories.
Those donations can often be arranged to be tax deductible, so instead of letting $Government spend the money you get to direct its course a little more precisely. At larger income levels they often manage to make a donation pay off as "taxes", but also obligate others of their strata socially, and wield control over the recipients ("we'll sponsor your publication for a year of you dont talk about $controversy").
After you get 100k imaginary internet points or so (it varies) you get inducted into the Global Seekrit Society that Runs Everything. The parties are amazing.
The "Driver's Ed" class I had in the 80s had simulators; controls in front of a TV screen. Not interactive but there was some "scoring system" where the teacher could see some of what you were doing with your controls and if it was inappropriate for that stage in the movie.
Why don't we give kids go karts or 4 wheeler motorcycles before they learn to drive, anymore? I already had years of experience piloting powered vehicles from motorcycle size up to large excavators when it came time to get my driver's license.
The onboard sound chips became good enough, and for those for whom they weren't good enough the noise reduction bonus of an external DAC was worth it anyway. Computers are generally bad for analog signals within a few inches of the case.
I think another factor is MP3 players and phone audio; people stopped using their computer as the (interface to) media source when other things took that function over for them.
Its up in the top left corner by the vent, and its a rocker switch. Quite easy to hit without noticing on entering or exiting the car, it got me several times too.
My wife drove a 2002 Honda Insight for 2 years. She never did understand the "window override" switch on the dashboard that disables the power windows in the doors. She taped plastic over one side for a week the first time she hit that button and the windows stopped working. She took it to the mechanic a couple times "the windows stopped working again" because the switch on the dash was easy to frob by accident.
Why was that switch there in the first place? Being familiar with the car didn't help her remember it existed, even when she encountered the "windows wont move" problem repeatedly. Assuming you want a "stop the windows working" switch, why put it up in the corner of the dashboard and in a form where it's easy to hit accidentally and hard to tell that it's not in the right position?
The problem is deeper than screens and older than "legally required backup cameras;" the ergonomics of the car interior became secondary to "but marketing says people want feature $X" checklists.
Agreed. And that will be 10,000 different things. Right now all the media fuss and discussion from it is about deciding "what do we know is right" without recognizing (intentionally?) that there's no one answer to that question.