> A third option would be to increase demand response at the industrial and customer level. Meaning, power isn't generally expected to be 100% available in that scenario. If there isn't enough generation capacity, those that aren't willing to pay the high prices are shut off (or something along those lines). That is generally how supply/demand is supposed to work anyway
I don’t think any of these solutions are viable to prove we can be reliant on renewables, and this one especially would not resonate with a populace.
Just at a consumer level, think of everything you use power for on a daily basis. It’s a cornerstone of modern life, and you can’t expect society to backtrack.
Seeing a high crime rate doesn't automatically call for radical reform — and in a way abolition — of the status quo of law enforcement.
Why is the crime rate high? Is it really because of police, or do they help? How will some radical restructuring reduce it?
There are many questions here.
Preventative policing, while effective in social democratic countries with low inequality like the Nordics, isn't on the table when we see violent crime that mirrors African and South American countries. Disincentivizing homicide in a country rife with inequality and materialism is a harder task than we imagine.
There are ~900,000 police officers in the United States, and 240 million 911 calls, and 50 million police-public interactions. That's an average of over 50 interactions per day for a police officer.
General crime rate will decrease as you legalize recreational drug use, but there's no reason to believe that will resolve the many issues that lead to homicide in the United States.
It will reduce the profitability of the drug trade, which may result in less crimes or an increase in other crimes. It may also increase the number of people addicted to drugs, which, in the United States, leads to an exponential increase in both violent crime and property crime [1].
There's many other forms of crime and homicide than drug-related, and plenty of people need the police for reasons that are not related to drugs.
Separately, those people would not be making their living "not outside the law," they would be out of work. Drug legalization doesn't mean we allow existing supply chains from violent cartels.
It's a good distinction, so I asked what would happen in each of the three cases. I think that's one of the trickiest parts of this concept.
In a country as armed and violent as the United States, escalation happens quickly and dangerously. We've all seen videos of officers pulling a car over for speeding and being executed the moment they look away, there's been more than a few in the past couple months alone [1] [2] [3]. Nearly any situation can become lethal for the officer and civilians [4], so I think it's fair to ask in what situations there would be an armed responder.
Total U.S. police spending is around $100 billion, which is around $285/person/year.
Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year, at a surface level this feels extremely efficient — certainly more so than other parts of our bureaucracy.
Crime occurs for social, cultural, and/or financial reasons — focusing on the financial, we have a giant bureaucratic and inefficient government, an incredibly large population, and a lot of waste. I don't think one could argue the $24/person/month we pay for police would make a substantial difference / stop a ton of crime.
U.S. civilians own nearly 400 million firearms, which is larger than the country's population. The intentional homicide rate is comparable to Kenya, Pakistan, Ecuador, or Argentina (5x higher than Western Europe). Are you sure that police will be able to operate effectively without being armed in a somewhat militaristic manner?
> redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities
What will happen if I call 911 and report someone stole from me at gunpoint? What if I report that someone violated my restraining order against them? What if I report that someone is yelling threateningly at waitstaff at a restaurant?
> not violate the public trust
While we absolutely need more oversight, there are over ~55,000,000 documented police-public encounters in a given year, and ~1,000 cases of lethal force used by police (vast majority were people attempting to harm the officers).
The rate of lethal force as a percent of interactions: 0.0000206473%.
The rate of lethal force against the total U.S. population: 0.00000343477%.
One of the most interesting points here is that people are looking at the United States, comparing it to Western Europe, and saying "we need to defund police" or "we need to disarm police."
The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime.
If you look at intentional homicide rates among large countries (>1m population), the U.S. is comparable to countries like Ecuador, Argentina, Kenya, and Pakistan [1].
The U.S. intentional homicide rate is bigger than Western European countries by a factor of 4 or 5.
Buzzfeed has been deemed left, which is a category beyond left-leaning, by an objective fact-checker [1].
As one example of why:
> In June 2016, the left-leaning media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that in 100 BuzzFeed stories about Barack Obama, 65 were positive, 34 were neutral, and one was critical.
I have, maybe naively, always believed that the U.S. operates at a level of secrecy and complexity where dozens of terrorist attacks are thwarted every year, and that this surveillance plays a hand in it (but to admit that would hinder its effectiveness).
Is it really possible we only have <5 terror plots against our country in a given year, considering the population of our country, the amount of ideological extremism domestically and internationally, and the States' interventionism?
Maybe it is possible, in which case the U.S. has been very successful at convincing my generation it's a larger issue than it really is (I was a toddler when 9/11 happened, so it's all I know).
> I wish there was some way to note books that I don’t want to read.
Minor point but there is a "Not interested" button in the screenshot shown above this paragraph. While Goodreads' initial suggestions were off-the-mark, I wonder if using that would help?
It was the founders who were supposedly acting against the Belarusian government, and the employees who are paying the price. The founders are safe in San Francisco.
My outrage is certainly directed at Lukashenko, but the commenter above us may have a point about whether it was responsible to be acting against a dictator while your employees are subject to his government. It's a tough situation.
I lost the domain of the email address a while back so I can’t even see it anymore... Will try to guess his email address to send a thank-you later today; better late than never even if very late?
One of those funny situations of “ah, yes, now with my own domain Gmail can never take my email away from me!” but then my payment failing and my domain going to auction before I notice.
> East Coast VCs are much more conservative, which is ultimately bad because it results in less moonshots succeeding.
This is really accurate, at least from my experience as someone of a similar age working on my first startup at the time.
With cold outreach to VCs in NYC I had zero responses, and only two meetings with BigCos curious about us; they seemed easier to get the attention of.
When I reached out to investors on the west coast it was entirely different. I still remember getting my first reply. It was a rejection, but a super-detailed one from Topher Conway of SV Angel that stuck with me. Despite it being a cold email, he offered up a lot of points that helped me adapt my strategy and address what investors may be concerned about.
I was a kid with anxiety and never replied back to that rejection email (pains me to this day), but I have so much appreciation for people like that, who are aplenty in the Bay Area.
I don’t think any of these solutions are viable to prove we can be reliant on renewables, and this one especially would not resonate with a populace.
Just at a consumer level, think of everything you use power for on a daily basis. It’s a cornerstone of modern life, and you can’t expect society to backtrack.