thebestaquaman

You do realist that "I am innocent, armed and will shoot if you try to arrest me" is possibly the worst conceivable way to avoid being unlawfully arrested, right?

There is quite literally nothing you could do to make it more certain that you will be either killed or arrested than trying to shoot your way out of being wrongly arrested.

I hope you also realise that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and has a long and proud history of arresting and/or executing the wrong people. Literally any other system than the one you're advocating for is provably superior when it comes to preventing the wrong people from being arrested.

I've done this a lot, so I'm speaking from experience. I haven't been compromising on location (closeness to where I need to be), only on comfort. It probably depends on where you're travelling to though.

If you're a low-maintenance kind of person that just wants a pull-out sofa to sleep on, a shower, and possibly a kettle+microwave to make coffee+bad food for a day or two, you can find Airbnbs at ¼ the price of a hotel.

I think we agree on the broad aspect here, but are disagreeing on minutiae: When I say it's "not inherently built into the system", what I mean is that if it was, my situation would be impossible to achieve within the system, not that the system doesn't discourage it.

The system most definitely heavily encourages exploitation, but it's still possible to build a company within the current system that doesn't rely on exploitation. That's basically what I mean by "not inherent in the system".

Sometimes they literally don’t have the ability to press 1.

Which is why I'm saying it should go through automatically after a short delay.

It's easy to say "just over staff" until you're faced with the reality that maybe once every five years, for a grand total of one hour, you're faced with call pressure 1000 times higher than the second highest spike. It's not viable to staff a response center to deal with thousands of people calling in the same bomb attack or shooting within minutes, when you normally see on the order of hundreds of calls per week.

What you need is the capacity to deal with 99.99... % of situations, and a safety mechanism to prevent the remaining situations from overloading your system more than necessary.

In a mass casualty event, you need to be able to filter out the people making redundant reports in order to effectively handle the important reports. You need to do that without blocking out the important reports, that's the hard part.

You really don't need an AI for this though. With the number of mass shootings the US sees, it's honestly shocking that they don't have a button the operator can press to activate an auto-reply along the lines of "We are already responding to , if you still want to talk to us, press 1 or wait for a reply.", which waits something like 10s before going through.

This would filter out a bunch of duplicate reporting with far less effort, and with less odds of something going wrong.

But not if they have deodorant in them.

While what you're saying is typically true, it's not inherently built into the system. I work in a company owned by two friends. They own the company because they took out loans with their houses as security in order to finance the lease of an office space, buying work stations, and hiring themselves and me. I work on the same stuff as them, for the same hours, and make the same salary as them.

If the company goes to shit, they have craploads of debt, while I don't. We have a contract ensuring that I get a fair share of whatever comes in, including options to buy myself into the company at the same rate as what they initially invested once I can afford it. Nobody here is making excess money of others work. I have no reason to believe I'm being scammed.

Again, what you're saying is true in 99+ % of cases, but it doesn't have to be that way. There's nothing preventing a company from deciding that profits are split evenly among all employees (with the owners also acting as employees).

I agree with pretty much everything you're saying here, I still want to comment on

Middle class does not exist

I do think it's a reasonable term to separate those that actually make a decent salary, are self-employed, own their own company (at which they work) together with others, etc. from the more clearly exploited workers that have far too few rights and are not compensated fairly.

I have no problem with selling my labour for money as long as I'm fairly compensated for it. Historically, the working class has not been.

I use a buff to keep warm in winter, couldn't imagine wearing one in summer!

a backwards hat to protect from the sun realistically offers dubious protection unless you are always walking directly away from the sun.

I typically flip it depending on sun direction. I've found the neck to be most critical though, I don't seem to burn as easily on the sides/front.

I was out hiking a couple years ago when I suddenly realised that I had become the guy with shades and a backwards cap. It's practical: I want to prevent a sunburn in my neck (the backwards cap) and also not have the sun in my eyes (shades). I spent some time coming to terms with it, but now that's how I'm regularly equipped in harsh sun in the mountains. It's simply the optimal solution to sun protection while hiking (I've tried wide-brimmed hats, but they get caught in the wind too easily in my experience).

Anyone who makes their living by working, either for salary or hourly rate, is working class. Let’s just be on the same page about that.

Aha! That's where you got me! I was thinking "working class" in the more classical sense, referring to typical lower-paying jobs. I work for a living, but I'm definitely closer to what is typically considered "middle-class" in the sense that I make enough money that I feel well-off, but not enough that I could buy a new sofa just because moving the old one is too much hassle.

Obligatory "Fuck the wealth-class". "Passive income through ownership" is a convoluted way of saying "parasitic".