One cannot write without tropes, and not only because the attempt itself is such a trope.
That doesn't mean one cannot find Flanderization to be annoying, not even a decade (at least) before the character after which that TV Tropes entry was named, was created.
> This claim that the police are problematic is an entirely emotional activist response to a few incidents.
Really? Do you realize that the amount of civil asset forfeiture has exceeded burglaries? The militarization of police is absolutely a huge problem. As is mass-incarceration for non-violent crimes, over-criminalization, no-knock raids, etc.
They just raided a dudes house for a squirrel.
And no, I don't advocate for the idiocy in CA where they legalized violent crime as a petty response to having their budgets threatened.
Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Would you even have known the details for each of the 25k people? I could make a similar argument that when I worked for Apple back in the day I didn't know about anyone doing anything illegal. But Apple is a massive company and I'm sure there was probably all sorts of things going on.
seriously - what a waste of money. Guaranteed the maintenance is rife with corrupt arrangements. Also guaranteed that almost any American car manufacturer (Rivian, Tesla, Ford, etc.) would have done a far better job for far less. Did they even pretend to have a fair bidding system? Oshkosh Defense? Seriously?! What a joke.
In any case, even if the process was terribly corrupt, I'm not sure why that would have you so bothered. Last sentence from the USPS press release on Oshkosh winning: "The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations." https://about.usps.com/newsroom/national-releases/2021/0223-...
Both results are on the first page of a google search for 'usps truck bids'.
The only thing that comes to mind is maybe defense co. has experience building with indestructible materials, and the specs are for lasting 50 years, which when amortized is optimal for an entity like the government that can dump huge amounts of capital ($40B) at once that a private sector CEO can never do.
It is, to some degree, a jobs program. Whoever wins is guaranteed a lot of work for a long time. So contractors really want it.
I don't think Tesla or Rivian are used to working with government contracts. I'm not sure how much someone like Ford does either outside of mild customization. But defense contractors spend all their time working with the government, building to their specifications, handling the requirements and compliance/etc.
They're simply very very well equipped to work on such a contract.
They'd also be very used to making something for decades because that's what the government wants. Does Ford have a vehicle they make that's nearly unchanged for 30 years? I'd assume even the transit vans have changed a lot in that timeframe.
I think it’s mostly that defense contractors are specialized in selling to the government, which entails jumping through regulatory compliance hoops and placating elected officials by distributing the supply chain across as many congressional districts as possible.
How does making military vehicles make you qualified to build vehicles that drive in urban areas? These vehicles need to be safe for pedestrians, not emit excessive noise, exhaust etc. All these things are irrelevant for the military.
X and Tesla are some of if not the most pro-American values companies in the world. Sorry if freedom of speech offends you but that definitely puts you at odds with the American Founders and myself - an American.
to anyone even remotely studied in economics - this is astoundingly ignorant. And the hubris is incredibly cringey. Please provide a counter example to the soft science law of supply and demand?
All models are wrong. But the model that suggests that inflation is directly controlled a knob that policymakers can turn on a whim is incredibly useful to the people who stand to profit the most from deflationary policies.
This has already failed. The bay area is full of empty land and buildings owned by firms and a horrific housing situation. Doesn't stop the statists from proposing yet more tax for every single problem though.
California doesn't count because they have a de-facto landed gentry.
In 1978 they passed a ballot initiative[0] that locks in property tax rates until a home is sold or renovated. This was further amended[1] to allow generational transfers of those rates. The end result is an extreme disincentive to sell land and a class of homeowners with favorable tax treatment who want the state to be coated in amber. Any market intervention is useless without addressing the harms caused by the current property tax regime and the people who benefit from it.
tribalism. Probably on the democrat side and probably because Kim has been active on X. propaganda and its effects are literally that dumb and predictable (thus the NPC label).
Eh. I'm far-left and also think that the way he's been treated has been out-of-proportion to his actual crimes, and mostly predicated on his having pissed off powerful donors and not being Chinese. And I'd argue that there are plenty of people on the right who support him primarily because of his edgelord-iness, and not so much out of concern for an ever-expanding carceral state that deals out "justice" capriciously and disproportionately to whoever the oligarchs point at.
