Much of those funds come with stipulations on how they must be spent; namely, on military hardware from US Defense manufacturers. So the aid ends up back in the US ultimately and effectively acts as a subsidy to the Defense industry.
Native New Yorker here. Growing up in the 80's and 90's (when crime was at it's peak), it was common among everyone I grew up with to ride the subway/bus alone and generally explore the neighborhood alone/with friends. I remember my mother being slightly apprehensive when I started commuting to school alone in 4th grade, but it wasn't a major issue.
As many have pointed out, the culture has simply changed. Crime is way down, but ironically people are more afraid to let their children travel unsupervised than when I was a kid.
As a side note, I did get lost on the train once (while in the care of a relative. She got off the train and forgot to take me with her.) I was asleep and woke up at a stop I didn't recognize. While I remember being a little apprehensive, I simply walked over to the woman in the token booth, explained I was lost and had gotten separated from my aunt. She let me inside the booth and called my mom, who came and picked me up. All in all, it wasn't a huge affair. I think if that happened today police and CPS will probably turn it into a major incident of possible child neglect.
> Most of the greatest inventions of the past 100 years have come from large businesses that had the man-power and capital to invest in significant R&D departments.
Your narrative leaves out the huge sums of public dollars that underpinned those innovations.
Given that the original search was blatantly illegal, the original citations were not in fact reasonable.
Law Enforcement generally gets away with this behavior, in part, because the public only pays attention to the end result (in this case "no insurance") and pays no mind to the fact that a search was never justified in the first place.
Generally yes, although the cashier might be momentarily confused when the machine prompts her to get a signature since everyone else just uses their pin.
The only place it won't work at all is self-service kiosk.
> and started to mean "USA" in the heads of US citizens
You're being a little pedantic. It's usually understood to refer to US citizens by just about everyone outside the USA as well, not just US citizens themselves.
You are correct that there were many problems and no small amount of hypocrisy involved in the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. (Much more so in the latter, but that's a different discussion)
But the point I was responding to was of the parent's usage of, what I interpreted to be, sarcasm quotes around the word trial; implying that the idea of trying Bin Ladin was ludicrous on it's face. I disagree. Despite all the valid criticism one can levy against any system of criminal justice, it's an important pillar of our society that when a crime has occurred, no matter how heinous or vile, the suspected perpetrators are apprehended, and evidence must be produced against them before punishment is meted out. We don't just take them out back and shoot them in the head, no matter how obvious we imagine their guilt to be. This process has value, despite it's many flaws in the way it's actually implemented.
Why did you put trial in quotes? (Genuinely curious) I was under the impression that that's what we did as a society with people suspected of major crimes. Even Nazi war criminals, people responsible for the suffering and death of untold millions, were put on trial.
>Because while he was playing his little game, to "prove" that police profile people
I infer from your belittling description of his activities as his "little game" and putting "prove" in skeptical quotes that you don't see the value in this particular piece of journalism and aren't swayed by the evidence presented therein. So while I doubt you can swayed otherwise, I will say that I did find it to be valuable and his experience adds another anecdote on the collective pile of evidence that the cops and prosecutors treat brown and black people vastly different for comparable infractions of the law. And both as a native New Yorker, and moreover as a citizen of the United States, I think this is a very big problems worth paying attention to.
>I'm not justifying that that diabetic guy who wanted his sugar pills should be denied his pills. I'm not justifying that the police handle the lower socio-economic cases more brutally, giving them bruises and cuts that the suburban white boy somehow was spared. I'm not justifying racial profiling.
Yeah, but you kind of are; in your very next paragraph in fact.
> Yet, to walk a mile in their shoes, both the police and the criminal justice system as a whole, is to see the world a little differently from the average Atlantic Monthly reader or Hacker News reader.
We really need to get over the cops-jobs-are-so-dangerous-we-can't-question-anything-they-do mantra. The statistics show, in fact, it isn't nearly as dangerous as they'd like us to believe, and even if it were, it still wouldn't justify the kind of double standards the article was shining a spotlight on.
And for those that, quite frankly, don't really care one way of the other about racial profiling (I imagine because it won't ever affect them), I'd argue that everyone should care when the justice system clearly retaliates against a citizen for exposing problems in it's institutions. It shouldn't be okay for a judge to hand down a harsher than normal punishment because screw you for embarrassing/pissing us off.
>Because while he was playing his little game, to "prove" that police profile people
I infer from your belittling description of his activities as his "little game" and putting "prove" in skeptical quotes that you don't see the value in this particular piece of journalism and aren't swayed by the evidence presented therein. So while I doubt you can swayed otherwise, I will say that I did find it to be valuable and his experience adds another anecdote on the collective pile of evidence that the cops and prosecutors treat brown and black people vastly different for comparable infractions of the law. And both as a native New Yorker, and moreover as a citizen of the United States, I think this is a very big problems worth paying attention to.
>I'm not justifying that that diabetic guy who wanted his sugar pills should be denied his pills. I'm not justifying that the police handle the lower socio-economic cases more brutally, giving them bruises and cuts that the suburban white boy somehow was spared. I'm not justifying racial profiling.
Yeah, but you kind of are; in your very next paragraph in fact.
> Yet, to walk a mile in their shoes, both the police and the criminal justice system as a whole, is to see the world a little differently from the average Atlantic Monthly reader or Hacker News reader.
We really need to get over the cops-jobs-are-so-dangerous-we-can't-question-anything-they-do mantra. The statistics show, in fact, it isn't nearly as dangerous as they'd like us to believe, and even if it were, it still wouldn't justify the kind of double standards the article was shining a spotlight on.
And for those that, quite frankly, don't really care one way of the other about racial profiling (I imagine because it won't ever affect them), I'd argue that everyone should care when the justice system clearly retaliates against a citizen for exposing problems in it's institutions. It shouldn't be okay for a judge to hand down a harsher than normal punishment because screw you for embarrassing/pissing us off.
It's always "complex" when it's our (the US) government involved.
When it's the actions of others, especially official enemies, it's usually regarded in pretty straight forward right/wrong terms. For example, for those old to remember, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 80's was recognized for what it was, pure aggression.
Our military actions abroad? Well, it's complex, nobody's perfect, we all make mistakes, we had the best of intentions, etc, etc.
It's true that this has always been the position of the Federal government, but that argument has always seemed pretty weak to me, and I don't accept it on principle, no matter how pervasive it's become. People don't expect their email to be read by others, especially the government, period. The reality that they are in fact doing this anyway just means citizens have to push harder to affect a change in the law.
This isn't a new fight. The government literally used the same exact argument when telephones were invented. It took years to work in protections for phone calls, I see no reason why the same can't be done for new modes of communications like email.
Nixon tried this in 70's. It came surprising close to passing on the grounds that it would be far more efficient and lead to better outcomes than the patch work system of social programs we currently have.
> The economy is not a zero sum game, where if the rich make a trillion more it comes out of the pockets of the workers. This notion is childish and wrong.
I'm genuinely curious about this point. Every dollar in pay I cut from my worker's salary is a dollar more in my company's pocket, isn't it?