Yeah, but in the UK it's systemic and on a national scale.It would be less obnoxious if they were really good at fighting regular crime, but they are atrocious at that.

So yes, we might not be so dreadful compared to Hicksville, US or some craphole country like India,but that's a very low bar for the police of a G5 nation.

Absolutely go ahead and make sweeping generalisations about the state of the police in the UK. It's all true (except if anyone claims they are systemically racist, or some other clickbaity nonsense).

What exactly are you saying is systemic and on a national scale? I certainly don't think the specific news story we're talking about is typical. That's why it was widely reported and why the Police had to admit their error.

Basically every week there's another story that makes it onto the news about yet another outrageous apprehension. 60,000 arrests or so over the last couple of years IIRC. What's disgraceful is that for years the police whined that they didn't have enough resources because of Tory budget cuts, something which I can personally attest, and then you get this...

100% of the time I would pick the UK police system over the US's.

Would you?

In the UK, they can't force you to speak, but not answering questions can be interpreted as evasion / "adverse interference".

They do not need a warrant to search your phone. Not providing them with a PIN can be a separate charge, with up to 2 years imprisonment.

They can hold you up to 36 hrs if the police decide so. Up to 14 days without charge under modern broad "anti terrorism" laws.

You're talking about UK laws rather than UK police.

Cool, now compare how many people die to police violence in the UK vs the US.

Also note the absence of large scale destructive anti-police riots in the UK over the past decade.

Looks like 1200 people in the last year. 1200 / 350e6 = 3.4 micromorts. By comparison, getting out of bed at age 45 is about 6 micromorts.

The UK have about 13,000 arrests per year over social media etc. Without litigating all 13,000 of them for validity, that's about 185 microliberties.

Birth control is about 1-5 micromorts.

So you're 30x more likely to be arrested for a social media post than death by getting out of bed, and 55x more than being killed by police. And it's in the same range as taking birth control.

Realistically, these are population estimates. Your actual risk of dying by police is highly correlated with the number of violent interactions you have with them. If you're a getaway driver or a bank robber vs SW developer, you probably have significantly different risk profiles.

On the other hand, edgy social media posts are potentially much more diffuse across populations.

>The UK have about 13,000 arrests per year over social media etc.

That's the figure (slightly inflated) for arrests under both the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and Communications Act 2003. That's not reasonably described as arrests for 'social media etc.' It's quite likely the the majority of those arrests have nothing to do with content that people post on social media.

There are fewer anti police riots in UK, because UK is much more effective at catching and prosecuting rioters than US. In US, rioters enjoy extreme leniency. Only a tiny fraction of 2020 rioters have faced any justice at all.

As for police killings, you are comparing an event that’s extremely unlikely to happen with an event that’s multiple orders of magnitude more likely. Speech offense prosecutions in UK are more common today than political prosecutions were in post Kruschev Soviet Union. The only reason UK has fewer political prisoners than Soviet Union had is that the sentences are shorter and typically non-custodial.

I could find one news story a week about an outrageous arrest in the US, or in many other countries. You don't give a citation for the 60k figure, but I imagine it's the same one that has to be laboriously debunked every time someone brings social media talking points about the UK to one of these threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830776

…and how to never have any large infrastructure projects like highways or just services that run at a loss while being essential like the EPA

It would be interesting to run the counter-factual on the EPA. Lawsuits around pollution were already increasing significantly prior to the EPA even company vs. company.

Would the resources have been better spent on a more efficient legal system, then leverage that?

*Disclaimer: This definition not valid in American politics, consult your doctor before self-labeling.

I know a third of HN thinks China are good guys, but this is legitimately worrying.

Su Bin stole terabytes of F-35 schematics for China 10 years ago. Given that the "sensitive part" in question is apparently a canopy, I don't know what China would necessarily glean from this.

It just seems like the Pentagon refuses to learn their lesson vis-a-vis protecting their logistics.

That's a word salad.

The first sentence is plain English. The second is clarification through example.

Someone who doesn't know what arbitrary or abstract means, or has trouble with context, I'm sure it can seem confusing.

Obviously, because then you can focus your attention to that specific group.IE, if cable theft is exclusively carried out by white people from kensington then whenever something is stolen, you can just go there and catch the criminals.

Criminals should be locked up in jail.

I think you mean Sir Francis Drake.

They’re not my words, but yes, you are correct.

Did you say COVID 19?

Happens to be the grifters are mostly pro fertility, make of that what you want.

They're pro-“fertility talking points” at least, but rarely in favor of economic and social policies that encourage child rearing.

I think so too. What strikes me most about "pro fertility" people, particularly the SV type, is that they don't seem to particularly like kids, as in spending time with them, playing with them, deriving joy from them. They seem very enamoured with the kids-as-cogs-in-the-system, with "legacy" with all sorts of other silliness except for the kids as kids.

Yup. Bring up a tax to pay for prenatal, neonatal and pediatric care, for instance, and you’ll separate the folks who care about children from the ones who found a new silly thing to argue about on Twitter.

The asylum system is being massively abused. It's turning people in the UK into single issue voters.