Oooh what a cool edge lord. You’ve definitely thought this through.

The public praises the police when they stand around and let an armed man be well enough alone in a group of civilians! Everyone loves it when police do that right?

Like Jesus fucking Christ, what would you do? Leave a guy with a knife getting onto a crowded train and have two dozen people stabbed? It is naiive to think that there was a good outcome possible once you start making police bust fare skipping, but it is also absurdly naiive to think that the police can let a man with a knife get onto a New York train with just a ‘hey, try not to stab anyone’.

If they had, three people would have avoided bullet wounds and one of them wouldn’t be in the ER right now.

And maybe a bunch of people would have been stabbed by the guy with a knife who just threatened to kill someone.

If you’ve ever ridden the subway in NYC, particularly during rush hour, the idea of firing a taser into a train full of people is absolutely crazy.

Again, they could be lying about the knife and the threat, but if he did have a knife and just threaten to kill someone it would be absolutely crazy to let him get on a subway train full of people.

I mean, this is arguably what them not hiding looks like.

They claim he made a threat. The article failed to print his side of the story for some curious reason. It isn’t printing any testimony from the bystanders, either.

Fair enough, supposedly they were wearing body cams so hopefully some of what actually happened can be answered objectively, I’m just pointing out what the article said. If he didn’t make a threat or have a knife, then tasering him is a wild escalation, it’s just that if he did, then the police can’t really just let him get on a train.

Cops will often lie about the danger of a suspect in order to justify elevating their use-of-force. That said, they weren’t that concerned by his unreasonableness when they deployed tasers into the crowd first. They didn’t switch to guns until they realized the tasers weren’t going to work.

Again, assuming what the article says is true, which is a big assumption, it’s not that crazy to taser a guy who just got onto a train with a knife and threatened to you. At that point you’re looking at a potential mass stabbing incident if you do nothing.

Again, who knows, maybe the cops are blowing his behaviour wildly out of proportion, I’m just saying that, based on the article, it sounds like he wasn’t just gunned down for jumping a turnstile.

I mean according to the article, technically they just tried to stop him over the $2.90 fare.

Then because of that he threatened to kill them and they realized he had a knife so they tasered him.

Then when that didn’t work and he ran at them with the knife they opened fire.

Multiple people are still dead because they brought guns into a disagreement over $2.90, but the headline implies a lot more unreasonableness on the individual cops’ parts as opposed to the overall policy.

Cleaning is a non issue, some dirt accumulates beneath them but you never notice until you lift them up again.

Maintenance wise they do fade in the sun, but it only takes like a couple hours to apply a couple of coats of new stain to a whole deck (like maybe once every two or three years depending on your tolerance for fading). Otherwise they’ve held up great for ~4 years of constant, year long exposure.

Those Ikea snap together decking tiles. We rent but have a tiny all-concrete backyard, and for like $250, we transformed it into a remarkably pleasant deck between those tiles for the ground and planters for the perimeter.

The Govee Dreamview TV lights and Philips Hue lights are also pretty high up there.

3D printer is now, but it took it several years of occasional use and occasional CAD upskilling before it got really useful.

Automatic cat feeder for dry food. It’s so nice to reduce cat feeding to just the wet food, and it makes it way easier to put them on a diet.

Dyson handheld vacuum, but only because I got it refurbished and on sale for substantially less than half the original price.

Edit: oh and the biggest one by far is my Onewheel. I hate the company and will never buy anything from them again (will be making an open sourced VESC board or buying a Floatwheel instead), but I bought the board at the start of the pandemic to have something to do during lockdown and I now have ~7000km on it. It’s way more fun and practical then I was expecting. Even compared to like an e-scooter, a Onewheel still give you both hands free and is small enough to fit on the bottom of the grocery cart, making it surprisingly more practical for hauling stuff.

My cousin’s buddies asked him to build the website for their new ride hailing app but he didn’t feel like doing some rinky dink thing, apparently Travis and them took it in stride though.

I’m not advocating for that either and I don’t necessarily they think they would these days. Ubisoft is steadfastly ignoring the dumbasses around the black male / Asian female leads for AC, no matter how loud they whine.

Games should just get rid of character creators. Just play the damn game with whoever the main character is and learn to empathise with someone other than yourself.