Every time he gets pulled over for a selfie it's an abuse of power. If he can't ignore it, they shouldn't be doing it. Wait for a random encounter in a parking lot or gas station like the rest of us.
In one of the vaguely-parallel timelines, a defendant is being asked by a judge why they didn't pull over and responds with: "I thought they were going to try to give me an ice cream cone, and I'm lactose intolerant so I didn't stop."
Finally! A nice story about cops pulling over a 23-foot banana motor vehicle for years without any consequence other than spreading joy to the people involved and years of fame!
No? You could also pull the public tax dollars spent card, or other crimes not being pursued while you're at it but it won't help sour the mood!
> For a moment, x______________ didn't know if he was being serious or not.
I'm still inclined to think that an /s is coming up in later replies. A bad story about cops and a banana motorist is that the motorist is dead, incarcerated or has a bounty on his head and is traveling around the world to ..evade.. his notoriety.
Cops on the road, who drive alone in their car, are entitled to a bit of fun.. or as Braithwaite put it, "more whimsy"!
It certainly isn’t, the police have no right to pull him over, they’re violating his 4th amendment rights. Unless he has committed a moving violation or they suspect him of committing a crime, there’s no cause to stop a motorist.
It’s a good story about a man who hasn’t let police acting illegally prevent him from driving his banana car.
Meh, you might technically be right but the world is better if everyone can have a bit of fun, even police. I’m not super sympathetic to the “I was minding my own business driving a giant banana when the police pulled me over to ask me about it” argument - this guy seems fine with it too, but it’s not like there’s any reason to drive it other than for the attention.
And the “I pulled you over because you peeled out” - I mean it’s fun. Anyway, if it’s harmless I don’t really see the problem.
> the world is better if everyone can have a bit of fun, even police
Police have plenty of ways to have fun that aren't Fourth Amendment violations.
If you wanna give out free ice cream cones, station a cruiser with a sign saying so. People can come to you just fine, without the "what the fuck, why am I getting pulled over?!" worries. The banana guy at least has an inkling of why there are flashing police lights in his rearview, but that doesn't make it OK.
Sure, I agree about the ice cream cones for random people. But the banana car guy is basically opting-in to getting lots of attention.
(And, yes, I realise that this is exactly the same shape of argument that turns into victim blaming when it's about cat calling or worse. No, I don't have a principled way to distinguish the two cases.)
Opting in to getting attention shouldn't imply anything one way or the other about how often you get pulled over. In the real world it does, because the police are a collection of humans and will misuse powers they are able to, but that has no bearing on what's supposed to be right or wrong - it's just the realistic expectation you'll have to deal with.
What the public wants is part of that picture, sure, but what the public accepts is a different thing than either right/wrong altogether. Namely "what you can realistically get away with".
I agree in the abstract. But the abstract doesn't say anything concretely about what the exact powers of (traffic) cops should be.
For example, your average cop in the UK, traffic or otherwise, doesn't carry a gun. Bobbies can get guns, but it's enough of a bureaucratic hassle that they seldom bother. The absence of guns makes a lot of the tension disappear that I read about in American encounters with low enforcement.
In Germany, police routinely carry guns, but also approximately no one is afraid they might get shot as a result of making the wrong move at a routine traffic stop. (Partially that's because every shot fired comes with lots and lots of red tape. Even warning shots. If the police officer actually hits a person, they get the police equivalent of a court martial. And that's mandatory, even when it's obvious they were doing the Right Thing. Just like a captain in the Royal Navy got a court martial, when their ship sank for any reason.
I say 'partially', because I suspect culture has a lot to do with it.)
If you mop floors and you have fun by twirling your broom and humming a tune, you're not affecting anyone.
If we give you a gun and the right to shoot people in the head and go home to sleep in your own bed, then we can ask you to lock in a little more than that and not pull over people because it's funny.
Over here in reality, when a man with a badge and a gun pulls people over for a bit of fun: Refusing to play along with whatever game it is that they have in mind is a criminal offense.
If cops want to be a positive presence in the community then they shouldn't regularly extort and abuse citizens and protect their violent and murderous coworkers.
If being a positive presence in the community isn't enough incentive to be that, you don't deserve to be police.
And if that sounds hackneyed and like a ridiculous standard, you're damn right it is: we let them have outsized influence in our existence as otherwise free people. Their standard has to be a double standard.
It is crazy to me that the banana car driver seems to like the attention from cops, but here in the comments we are rewriting the narrative because all cops must be evil people.
It's crazy to you because other people are applying critical thinking and you're not.
The cop comfortable with pulling over the funny looking car (that looks like a banana) is the same cop with unreasonable understanding of the responsibility they're given.
It wouldn't matter if the banana car man has a sign that says "I love cops free donuts in the back"
What's really crazy to me is that someone is working over time to try to police (literally) other people's negative feelings about cop misconduct.
What inadequacy leads someone to see others upset at an obvious misuse of power and think "I need to stand up for the guys misuing it!"
> What's really crazy to me is that someone is working over time to try to police (literally) other people's negative feelings about cop misconduct.
It’s crazy to me that you view it as “policing” your opinions rather than simply seeing my viewpoint as just that, and opposing viewpoint.
I’m not policing you. Just offering a different perspective.
I apologize for speaking up. So much for free speech :)
But I’ll say it once more: it’s a freaking banana car. Lighten up bro! Very confused why you’re more upset than the driver of the banana is (who seems to want the attention and is getting it, the desired effect)!
The thing is, you can be reasonably sure when you pull over a big banana car, that the driver won't be a curmudgeonly prick who invokes the fourth amendment.
I had a car that was pulled over dozens of times so the cops could take pics with it. Most of the time it was cool.
Two times pissed me off: one time a cop had just pulled me over on the highway for a pic, okay cool, I pull back onto the highway and went maybe a mile before I was pulled over a second time by his buddy.
Other time I was just rolling into LA for a comic con, it was 3am and I'd been driving for about 14 hours. I was minutes from my hotel and of course here come the cops. I had to make a big detour to find somewhere safe to stop. The next day someone said "Oh, I think my buddy stopped you last night!" so I had him call his cop friend and was able to safely cuss him out from a distance :)
On the other hand I had one awesome experience with the cops in Oxnard when we put my car on the train tracks and accidentally set off the barriers and caused an enormous tailback in each direction at the railroad crossing. I thought the cops would be mad, but they were hilarious and promised to figure out the traffic snafu for us.
Then an hour later when I was driving the car down the tracks again another cop walked up on me all mad and told me he was writing me a ticket for driving on the tracks, but when I read the ticket he'd written it out to Marty McFly and had a great laugh about it. Here's a pic of him booking Marty haha
In some purer version of the universe where laws are absolute, you might be right.
In the world as it is, with laws interpreted by humans along notions of what society generally finds acceptable: if you drive a funny car or where an especially funny hat, expect to get a lot of attention from all kinds of people, including cops.
Gay here, but I've only experienced a concerning conversation once, and that was a longer trip where sometimes you find out too much. I took an exit ramp away from that topic of conversation and it was fine. Otherwise everyone has been decent to downright pleasant.
I'd feel like I'm losing something by giving up that human interaction, such that it is.
Matter/Thread is reasonably good with Apple Home. The more adventurous can also dual-join it to Home Assistant running on the same Thread network. It surprisingly just works, though the dual-controller setup still involves a little initial suffering.
I am using Matter/Thread with Home Assistant and the new ZBT-2. No Apple Home integration! Although I will say that homekit with the Home Assistant bridge is very good! Kudos to Apple
Just bear in mind that the OSS nvidia kernel module often causes breakages there with mismatched firmware. The entirely proprietary module or nv are fine.
Tumbleweed is good for a mostly stable, clean KDE distro, but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming or codec integration. The first-class btrfs snapshots are probably my favorite feature.
The Intel video encoding pipeline alone is worth going Intel on the low end. Those low-power devices simply need better transcoding support than AMD can currently provide.
Updating this post. Found the review I was looking for!
Newest RDNA4 fixes a pretty weak encoder performance for game streaming, is competitive. Unfortunately (at release at least) av1 is still pretty weak.
https://youtu.be/kkf7q4L5xl8
One thing noted is AMD seems to have really good output at lower bandwidth (~4min mark). Would be nice to have even deeper dives into this. And also whether or not the quality changes over time with driver updates would be curious to know. One of the comments details how already a bunch of the asks in this video (split frame encoding, improved av1) landed 1mo after the video. Hopefully progress continues for rdna4!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=kkf7q4L5xl8&lc=UgzYN-iSC7N097XZi...
If you want to try well-engineered neural network use, you should be trying Adobe's products. They have integrated these features with far more tact and actual benefit than I would've expected from them. Google is embarrassing themselves by stuffing AI in places it doesn't fit, and Microsoft is worse.
You're joking right? Google is integrating photo editing features that can exist at the point of inception. It doesn't get more integrated or fit better than that.
But it shouldn't have been conceived with that design. Adobe products blend a timesaving tool into a truly productive workflow. Photoshop, a layer or a filter. Lightroom, a brush. Mystery-meat autocorrect/enhance buttons only get you so far and may alter far more than you want, which is dangerous when you want to want to present a slightly polished version of reality.
He has a shareholder duty to try for all the best-friend-forever preferential treatment he can get. We've recently learned that he's decent at diplomacy, but he's been honing it for years in China.
He isn't responsible for this oddly-personal political system as it is, but he has to take advantage of those weaknesses.
FDR? FDR did spawn many (controversial) programs/agencies but he also got (the world) through WW2. There's something to be said for that. He also picked a pretty good VP. Yes, he overstayed his welcome, but his death in office wasn't something that people were necessarily looking forward to & his funeral was a very somber affair. Can we say the same thing about the Imperial Cheeto in Chief?
