High end estimates of people killed due to the deliberate spread of disease are dozens to hundreds. The pre-real-contact wave was obviously many orders of magnitude more deadly. Even your own link mentions one reason it was ineffective was prior exposure.
It’s important to note that fiction does not map to reality. It’s fiction. You cannot learn how the world works through fiction. It’s just the author’s ideas about the world in a narrative framework that may or may not be true.
I find it very frustrating when people confuse the two. Reading fiction doesn’t give you an interpretive lens for reality. Reading history does. Saying this is “just like when in Harry Potter / Star Wars / Star Trek x happened” is totally meaningless and not predictive of anything in the real world.
I think you probably know this because you used the US name for the car (internationally known as the Jazz), but for those who don’t, Honda discontinued the Fit in the US market due to poor sales. For every internet comment bemoaning the lack of these vehicles there’s the actual fact of revealed consumer preference in the US market.
Much of consumer preference doesn't originate from the consumers' own minds, though. It's shaped largely by marketing, and in the US car companies have been pushing bigger, boxier, more plush, and more expensive with its ad spend and incentives for decades now. It's way easier to find a dealership offering 0%-2% financing on some aircraft carrier of a vehicle than it is on a small car.
Americans' appetite for small cars seems to be linked pretty closely to the inflation-adjusted price of gasoline. Automakers always want to push more premium vehicles, because they make their margins selling to people with more money to buy more features, more space, more performance. The low end of the market is lower margin and you have to make up for it with volume.
When we hit another recession, we'll see smaller cars appear again.
Fuel coast only go up and never down. The market and politicians make it seem like it will go down but in the end it still rises slowly. This is something that most people cannot understand nor want to.
I drive a car and will never buy a truck or SUV because it allows me spend the least amount on fuel. It also allows me to see in front of the vehicle while making it easier to maneuver in tight spots.
American car culture is built on self projection not about functionality.
Great example of this are people who say they bought a truck so the can take home large items from a hardware store. Yet they only will do this less than ten times a year ... making renting a truck and owning a car more economical in the long run.
Evolution of the tuck bed being 60% and cap being 40% in the 1950s to cab being 60% and bed being 60% shows it is not even about functionality of a truck being a truck.
If I have to haul something, I will rent and not waste my time and money maintaining a large vehicle.
This is a roundabout way of saying Americans are willing to spend more money on bigger car because they like them better.
Aside from urban cores with limited parking and lots of narrow streets, it’s obvious that “bigger” means more utility regardless of marketing. You can fit more people and more stuff more comfortably (apparently people really prefer the spacious people room even above room for stuff). People are not being brainwashed by ads.
It's difficult to me to see what people thought was so great about the beatniks. All of Kerouac basically consists of "look how much fun you can have in a trusting society by tearing it down."
Obama actually pioneered non-judicial deportations. Under his administration, 75% of removals took place without the established immigration hearing process.
Many (most?) ICE deportations taking place today are after "due process" "judicial" hearings, that is, a final order of removal being issued by an immigration "judge." This is generally ignored by news reporting.
The news does not contextualize what is going on. Indeed, you can safely strike the word "unprecendented" from almost all journalism. But it's not only a problem with this story, but most stories. Selective outrage is applied based on the cause and enemy du jour. You are honestly better off not watching the news unless you are willing to do extensive deep dives on a topic, because regardless of your party affiliation or personal feelings or what outlet you subscribe to you are being fed a line of propagandistic BS.
and yes, the way the system evolved is a problem, but as that article pointed out this change started in the mid-90s. Obama actually deported half the number of people as under Clinton and Bush, see Table 1[0]
Also most of the people Obama deported were at/near the border as he prioritized that over interior arrests. You can see the big change in Figure 1[0]
Turning people around at/near the border is a completely different than arresting people who have been in the US for years, even decades.
So the "whataboutism" is a complete red herring, and that's without even getting into fixed quotas, no guardrails or accountability for ICE agents, no consequences for murder, unlimited surveillance budget, hiring unqualified agents and putting guns in their hands, and I could go on and on.
You seem to conveniently ignore the 4th amendment violations and the ignored court orders.
Obama had “fast-track” deportations but also convenient ignore that this administration is doing it under the aliens enemies act which is a wartime authorization and most importantly deporting people to “third” countries.
What fourth amendment violations do you think are unprecedented?
The Alien Enemies Act is one of our oldest laws and was passed by John Adams during peacetime to suppress perceived foreign influence from migrants.
Deportations to third countries are pretty clearly the only solution to cases where immigrants have a final order of removal that has been suspended due to problems in their home country, or where their home country refuses to accept them; the alternative of leaving them in a perpetual limbo is absurd. What else would you do?
The FBI in particular is notorious for warrantless raids and break-ins, a practice that has seemingly subsided more because of the modern ease of electronic surveillance than because of the bad publicity and court actions.
> Indeed, you can safely strike the word "unprecendented" from almost all journalism
"Border patrol murders unarmed subdued citizen in broad daylight on film and then lies about it" I think is pretty unprecedented. at least as far as I know.
> Many (most?) ICE deportations taking place today are after "due process" "judicial" hearings
There’s more than a thousand fatal US police shootings every year with various levels of justification, many impacting people totally innocent of anything, even if we accept your propagandized mischaracterization of what happened. (I don’t blame you for this. It’s being pushed hard, and the other sides propaganda is no more truthful.)
Aside from regular shootings, Obama (perhaps not so famously) killed a 16 year old US citizen overseas in a country we were not at war with, then refused to explain why. Off the record, officials said he should have had a better father (who had been killed in an earlier drone strike.) Somehow, everyone failed to turn out for this and similar abuses of power.
There’s nothing new or unusual about this.
> CITATION NEEDED.
I already provided you a citation showing that 75% of deportations in a prior administration happens without any due process, showing that even if this statement wasn’t true (obviously the weaker version is) then it’s not at all unprecedented. Yet all the rage is in the here and now.
It’s also worth noting that, as I alluded to, immigration court is administrative anyway, not judicial. “Immigration judges” are just DoJ employee, not judges.
The most concerning thing about this is how many people have been radicalized into believing committing felonies by interfering with, harassing, and assaulting LEO is not only legal but safe. Even blocking them is a crime. At this point we’re at a situation where millions of people believe the laws we passed as a representative democracy are so illegitimate violence - not just peaceful protest - is justified against the state. This is a really bad sign and it’s getting people killed.
> There’s more than a thousand fatal US police shootings every year with various levels of justification, many impacting people totally innocent of anything, even if we accept your propagandized mischaracterization of what happened. (I don’t blame you for this. It’s being pushed hard, and the other sides propaganda is no more truthful.)
What usually happens when a municipal, county, or state law enforcement officer (and until recently, federal) kills someone in the line of duty?
Most of the time there’s a brief internal investigation and then nothing happens to them, because they’re given enormous latitude and discretion, even when the victim was totally innocent. If you want a very notorious and similarly politicized example, look at what happened to the federal agent that killed Vicki Weaver: the feds refused to do anything to them, and the local case was initially shut down due to sovereign immunity for federal agents and then later abandoned.
If you want a more recent famous case, consider the shooting of Craig Robertson: the FBI says he was armed and shot him dead, agents cleared after an internal investigation and we’ll never know if he was armed or not (I’d guess yes.) That’s it.
I found this very distressing and dispiriting when I read it was mostly used books from sources like BetterWorldBook. That undoubtedly means many rare books have been permanently destroyed, even some last remaining copies. The least they could do is release the dataset.
Rare and unique books usually end up at specialty dealers, not generic websites. But it is possible that some hard-to-get items could be lost, and there's no way to know without an inventory.
Materially impeding law enforcement operations, interfering with arrests, harassing or assault officers, and so forth is not 1A protected and is illegal. There’s lots of this going on and some of it is orchestrated in these chats. They may nevertheless be civil disobedience, maybe even for a just cause, but I have no problem with people still being arrested for this. You obviously cannot have a civil society where that is legally tolerated.
It isn’t just people walking around holding signs or filming ICE. Can we please distinguish these cases?
I regularly leave my backpack with my laptops in it in the front seat of my car in the south US and nothing has ever happened in ten years of doing this.
It's crazy to me other people just live with this. Dramatic action is needed and possible.
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