There used to be county lines drug dealing outside my house.
County lines drug dealing is where organised gangs in London send people out to deal drugs in small towns outside London. It’s obvious because of the race of the people involved.
2 years ago the police did a massive crackdown and the county lines drug dealers disappeared. County lines drug dealers haven’t come back and now there is no obvious public drug dealing in my neighbourhood.
The police do a difficult job and they are fantastic at it.
I'm traditionally conservative and have many law enforcement in my extended family. Law enforcement is very required for society, but it's a blunt tool.
There are classes of crime that will not be reduced no matter how many people you put in jail. Mental health and addiction issues (often they go hand in hand) really should be solved differently than just jail time.
My small town has a swat team and two bear cats. They've never been used outside of training. They're very likely never going to be used outside of training. This is a ton of money that the police justified by "If we don't spend it, we lose it". That's not fiscally responsible and it's something as a conservative we do need to push back on and some of that involves defunding the police's overly excessive budgets and reducing taxes or at least reallocating it towards other social programs that will help beyond just locking people up.
> It’s obvious because of the race of the people involved.
I think I know what you're saying. You're saying that non-white people are trouble, aren't you? I mean, why wouldn't such a thing be considered a fact and why wouldn't it be obvious? You said it, so it became a fact and also it became obvious.
I know they’re drug dealers because they tried to sell me drugs.
The English countryside is over 95% white. It’s obvious when organised violent gangs consisting entirely of people of color from London take over and start selling drugs.
The police put a stop to it and we are all very grateful.
You don't know they are drug dealers, because not all of them tried to sell you drugs, did they? That's a ridiculous statement. You know that some of them tried to do that. Even so, the fact that they were not white had little to do with it, so it was not obvious by any measure.
> when organised violent gangs consisting entirely of people of color from London take over
In what respect did they take over? And how can you tell that they were all selling drugs? Maybe some were there as tourists, maybe some were visiting family etc.
You make some racist assumptions without evidence that I believe should be called out because you're hell-bent on proving something that may not actually be supported by evidence. You, my dear colleague, are fabulating.
Not only that the National Police Chiefs' Council County Lines STRA (FY Apr 2024 to Mar 2025) reports that 63.6% of recorded individuals involved are White (with 22.9% Black, 11.6% Asian, 1.8% Other)[0], but "county lines" narrative is routinely racialised and can amplify stereotypes [1], like you appear to do with your comment.
I could see them operating from my home office window. There is a corner where two roads and a footpath cross. It’s a walkable neighbourhood so there is a lot of foot traffic. A daycare center is about 50 meters away.
Every afternoon one of the men would be standing at the corner selling drugs. People would walk up to the man to buy the drugs. They worked a rotation but there were about 4 regular dealers at my crossroads.
The first few times I walked past by myself they tried to sell me drugs. Then they knew I was not a customer and ignored me or greeted me politely.
One of them was very chatty and I had to explain to my daughter that we don’t trust him even though he is friendly because he makes bad choices. County lines gangs are involved in human trafficking as well as drug dealing.
Every dealer I saw on that corner was from an ethnic minority background. Usually county lines drug dealers live in London and commute out to where they sell their drugs. This is why the ethnicity of the gang does not match the local population.
I sincerely hope that you never experience anything like this.
If it’s a drive‑through wash where the car must be inside the machine, then of course you’ll need to drive it over.
If it’s a hand wash or a place where you leave the car with staff, walking is the clear winner.
It still blows my mind that this technology can write code despite unable to pass simple logic tests.
There was an ad, how the Ring cameras can organize a "search party" for your "puppies", basically turning the whole neighborhood into a surveillance operation. Even though they wrapped the whole big brother feature into "sad little girl lost their cute puppy", it was too obvious.
With that said, I'm not sure it will have any long term effect on them... sure some people return their stuff, make a post about it, but it's like (insert people with certain political affiliation) cancelling (insert big brand) by burning their stuff. It makes a splash in social, but I'm not sure it really significantly changes user behavior.
Is this really political? While the right “Backs the Blue” (and ICE), they are just as concerned about the surveillance state as the left. Their threat model is just different as far as why. The right never trusted federal law enforcement.
At least for conservatives who still value those principles when their party is in office, true. Sedona’s successful anti-Flock effort was led by Trump voters.
Well we saw the reaction from the NRA and the guns rights group when Trump said the guy in MN wouldn’t have been shot if he hadn’t been carrying a gun. That was a bridge too far for even them.
You let Trump announce that there has to be a national gun registry or mandated vaccines. You see he even stepped away from bragging about the vaccines only happened for Covid because of “Operation Warp Speed” under his administration. That should have been something that any politician would be proud of.
BTW, the only impressive thing that happened in his entire first administration is the speed at which the vaccines were developed and his not letting the economy collapse because of the stimulus and he can’t take credit for either because of his own base
It was interesting to watch liberal progressives learn in real time that federal agents are allowed to just murder people. Right wing conspiracy theorists have known this since Ruby Ridge.
Interesting that you'd attribute this to a left/right divide. There are varying levels of skepticism and trust of police/secret police on both sides. Probably the main difference is what those people think those agencies should and do accomplish.
Really? “The left” has never trusted the police. I can tell you as a person who studied the civil rights movement, whose still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow South and who personal knew some of the secondary people who made the history books during that time (I am 51), “the left” or at least a large part of never trusted any law enforcement.
From my perspective, the American progressive left is deeply distrustful of local / state police, but are more inclined to believe the feds good at least insofar as they enforce good progressive laws against backwards locals. The feds enforcing desegregation is perhaps the root origin of this sentiment. The conservative right on the other hand is very inclined to support local police, but have hated feds with notable intensity, probably sharing the same root but really intensified in the 90s.
So I had first and second level connections to people who were involved in the civil rights movement. My mom knew someone or knew who knew someone that could get me a call with almost anyone of influence in the Black community nationally. I went to school with a lot of their children - at least the 2nd or 3rd level connections.
The civil rights movement was very aware of things like this at the time
And, you know, if it was actually mobilized to find lost puppies, I'd be all for that shit. But that's not what it's for. It's for helping cops find poor people, or ICE find Mexicans, or whatever bullshit is making the headlines in 4 weeks.
FWIW, I don't like being a tech downer/skeptic, but every fucking thing is like this now. Every social media is being turned into surveillance. Every cloud-based application, no matter how useful, is bending over so the state can shove it's hand up it's ass and turn it into yet another way for the Christofascists to shove their bullshit into my life. I'm fucking tired, y'all. I'm tired of finding something cool and interesting, and then needing to audit the entire backend to see if my friends and I are endangering ourselves by engaging with it. I'm tired of seeing something fucking useful, a goddamn video doorbell, and being like "oh that's pretty fucking nice!" and then having to box it up years on because the company that built it is going to turn my porch into a node in the nationwide Good Citizen network.
And it's asymmetric because they seemingly NEVER get tired. There's just a whole like 1/3 of the population out there that seemingly never even sleeps, they're just constantly trying to figure out how to make my life just slightly fucking worse, either for profit or to advance their weird evangelical agenda.
I'm so, so, profoundly sick of these freaks.
Edit: And please just SPARE ME the both sides horseshit. Yeah both sides have problems, but one side is fucking dragging us back to 16th century social politics, and THEY'RE the ones I'm sick more of.
I don't see Ring as a politics problem, I see it as a policy problem. Just because something is legal in the federated, ad hoc instance doesn't mean it is advisable to systematize.
Preemptively, the exact sort of "BUT BIDEN BAD" horseshit occurring elsewhere in the thread. And again, yes, Biden bad. Biden is an inept old man who was far out of his depth, who failed, completely, to hold anyone accountable for the atrocity against the Republic that was January 6th. But again, he, and to be sure, the Democrats as a whole, failed that, and whilst that is true, the other side is currently ushering in the end of American global influence and they're going to make it so no American citizen will EVER be able to own ANYTHING EVER AGAIN. So I am simply not entertaining this "both sides" horseshit anymore.
Both sides DO have problems. One has distinctly WAY more fucking problems, and also, WAY more fucking power. If pointing out this obvious fucking reality makes me partisan, or biased, whatever. Partisan I am.
If I'm to be marched into a meat grinder I at least reserve the right to tell the people doing it to me they fucking suck.
It's not a partisan issue. From leftist utopias to god-fearing Texan ranch lands, the police are abusing power and harassing innocent people. Trying to bring religion and partisanship (in one word, even) doesn't help your message.
I'm sorry I'm having a hard time remembering the role leftists are playing in the US right now what with the Executive, Congressional and Judicial branches all being stacked to the tits with Republicans, right up to the top with our dementia-addled conman of a president, sleepily signing into law the policies that will see us excised as the center of world economics.
One was much further gone and the people talking about Trump now were silent about it. Biden barely appeared for months at a time, and even then stage managed heavily, and it still went wrong, and Trump is constantly on camera often ad libbing. Not saying he's great at ad libbing, but they couldn't be more different in terms of communication performance.
are the christofascists in the room with us? you don't think marxists use this technology for nefarious means? chinese social credit must be a myth.
the both sides thing is right, you dont remember the lockdowns over a cold, mandated behavioral changes, and countries sending people to "isolation camps" and pressing digital id?
yeah tho its just the "christofascists" huh?
you people only care when illegal invaders get targeted. your outrage is performative.
This could be a useful tool for putting self hosted Bitcoin in a will.
If you self host then die no one can access your coins. Lawyers don’t want to be trusted with copies of secret phrases because of liability if the bitcoin gets stolen. If you encrypt the bitcoin recovery info across several files you can give part to the lawyer and part to different beneficiaries.
The first week of my PHD was accurately copying DNA sequences from an old paper into a computer file. 10 pages in total. I used OCR to make an initial version then text to speech to check it
The confounding variable is probably wealth. Being rich is very important for longevity. The effect size for wealth is likely bigger than the effect size for strength training. So construction workers age badly because they are poor, despite all the strength training.
Not being rich per se, but probably stress. The body has no innate knowledge of how wealthy you are, outside of some information stored in the neocortex about financial details (which has little influence on the overall functioning and regulation of the organism as a whole). But it does keep track of a very important signal, and that is neuroception, or safety, absence of threats. And being wealthy, absence of sources of stress, or ability to avoid them, brings about that state of feeling secure, safe, which affects every cell of the body and leads to a good regulation of the whole organism.
Your body does keep track of your place in the social hierarchy with hormones like Vasopressin, Oxytocin, Testosterone and Estrogen. Social hierarchies are biology not culture. You can tell it's biology because all social animals have social hierarchies.
However, this is a very complicated and poorly understood field. Current research struggles with a chicken and egg problem. Does high testosterone cause high status, or do high status men produce more testosterone? The answer seems to be both simultaneously.
Your scientific study does not support your claim (body keeps track of social status) and the other is a men's health magazine article. Hardly the cutting edge of science
Wealth per se has nothing to do with longevity, as a minute's thought will make plain. What wealth does do is enable certain things that help with longevity, such as better medical care. If you're using wealth as a measure, you need to realize that it's only a proxy, and you'll get better data by looking at the actual behaviors that it's a proxy for.
Basically a good point.
Merely never ending up in situations where it's a struggle to make ends meet has a huge impact on stress though.
You often don't even have to use the wealth in order to benefit with respect to stress.
Just my experience but I have never found the medical industry useful for health. I have found they mostly tinker with feedback loops to give the illusion of health.
Eating right, exercise, supplementation of the things I am missing from my diet, clean air, avoiding chronic stressful situations and people are the only things I have found to benefit me. But that's just my own anecdotal experience. (n=1)
At minimum medical industry is good for providing various measurements regarding the state of your health and environment. This can get quite pricey quite fast.
Thing is, better food is available to the poor as well, you just have to be willing to put in the work for it. Buy vegetables and make salads instead of spending the same amount of money at McDonald's, for example. The price of fresh vegetables at Walmart has never been out of reach even for someone working 40 hours for minimum wage. Housing might be ridiculously expensive, and medical care if you don't have insurance? Good luck. But basic vegetables? Rice and beans? (Which make for a complete set of amino acids, BTW: there's a reason rice and beans is such a popular dish in Central America). Those have stayed affordable even when the price of other things has gone up.
Now, I'll grant that there are plenty of poor people who are drinking soda and eating junk food. Not going to deny that. But I have always been able to go to Walmart and buy lettuce and tomatoes for my salads, and I've never seen the price of those basics skyrocket like the price of eggs (at one point) or meat have. So the poor people who are drinking soda instead of water, and eating chips instead of salads? They're choosing those foods, not being forced into them by poverty.
There are plenty of areas where rich people have a big advantage over poor people in terms of access to things that provide longevity. But food, at least in America (the only country whose food prices I'm familiar enough with to talk intelligently about), just isn't one of them.
Now, you could argue that poor people didn't grow up with parents who taught them how to cook healthy food on a tight budget. Yes, that's true for many (not all) of the poor (again, at least in America, I don't know enough about other countries here). But there, it's not being poor that's keeping them from eating healthy, it's not being taught. Money isn't the limiting factor there.
Starmer likely worries about endangering trade with the US, post-Brexit, and about giving political ammunition to the conservative press and to populists like Farage. I agree that having nukes isn't all that matters.
Cutting people off because you disagree politically is new. I remember having friends in different political parties when I was younger. (20 years ago)
The red scare famously effected social groups from the very wealthy to the poorest immigrant. Civil rights before it. Social-political exclusion is not new in the U.S, but how big the “I ignore politics and politics ignores me” group is, is highly variable.
In good times, when people are generally happy, political representatives have a fewer differences and the “happily apolitical” group is very large. This aligns with the Clinton-Bush JR era.
The problem is, those eras are uncommon even in the U.S in the broader view of history, and depend entirely on being the right demographic. Such as being a Muslim American in the decade following 9/11. I can assure you, they did not experience the “friends of a different political party” effect at that time.
I had the same experience, but the difference these days seems to be that so many people can't NOT talk about politics. There are certain folk who just find a way to shoehorn it into any conversation. It is really draining.
Yea, it's possible to be very politically enthusiastic and active, but also NOT bring up your favorite (or hated) politician in every damn discussion. We all have that uncle that can't let everyone else enjoy Thanksgiving dinner anymore because he has to make it about Trump or something.
County lines drug dealing is where organised gangs in London send people out to deal drugs in small towns outside London. It’s obvious because of the race of the people involved.
2 years ago the police did a massive crackdown and the county lines drug dealers disappeared. County lines drug dealers haven’t come back and now there is no obvious public drug dealing in my neighbourhood.
The police do a difficult job and they are fantastic at it.
https://news.npcc.police.uk/releases/over-1-800-arrested-wit...
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