Here's the long-list from a famous -hacked-to-bits and otherwise forgotten document's grievance rider which seems a poignantly appropriate reason enough to want to shove a vote up someone's ass and rotate it:

Of King George:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Someone needs perhaps to revise the list and start hoarding ammunition and conscripting, because methinks the "vote" be fast-resembling, fuck-all. I don't vote and I am damn sure not going to be quiet any time soon...Average Joe and Jane voters have already effectively been "opted out."

Yes, let's start inventing crimes if we can't catch you breaking any actual laws. That's what the law-abiding citizens who pay your fucking salary deserve.

Good job, Officer Dipshit. You'll make sergeant in no time.

You're comparing the motive for the need to balance the budget. The analogy is with the need for balancing the budget affecting the actions of the work. In this sense, the comparison with a business is fair.

The budget decisions should lead to questions such as 'what is the most effective police work we can do within our available budget?', where as in some cases it seems to be just 'what is the most effective way to balance our budget?'.

In that case, the police work is no longer a primary consideration and the tail is wagging the dog. They may as well stop doing police work altogether and start opening hardware stores, or lemonade stands to pay their salaries and maintain their buildings.

To paraphrase Charles Goodhart: once a measurement becomes a goal, it stops being a measurement.

Man-What a bung-wipe of a paper that schools got-HB has enough material with that piece...oh man, he should've written scathing letters to that school after his gig there calling them to task on the mention of his salary-That's pretty messed-up. Another seething news-lackey in the incubator.

Property ownership makes more sense in some situations than others.

In countries where long term rental is common, there tend to be safeguards in place to protect renters. In countries where ownership is more common, not so much.

For me, buying a house made sense. Right now, I am paying as much as possible of my income on the mortgage. In a few years, the house will be paid for, and I'll have saved roughly $100k in interest payments.

My mortgage currently costs me ~ 1.5 times what renting the equivalent house would. But the mortgage payments stay the same, so they actually grow less over time (as a combination of inflation and salary increases). Rent, OTOH, goes up to match inflation, and you have to pay it until you die.

All that said, I think buying your own house for a capital gain is a stupid investment. You will always spend more than is necessary on it, because it's your home.

This may run long, so bear with me.

Law Enforcement employees tend to come from two specific groups of people. The first group is going to consist of people who actually joined up to try to protect people and make things safer for them. They are idealists who may grow jaded over time; because realistically if your only input on what being a LEO is the internet and reality TV, you are not prepared for the type of mental assault you will endure day in and day out. I'm not talking about angry people, but stuff like drawing circles around little chunks of brains on the highway from a teenage girl that went through a windshield.

As an officer at any level (except maybe a small town), you are going to see the absolute worst side of humanity on a daily basis and you aren't on a tour of duty like the military. You don't get to 'rotate' home and put it behind you. This will wear on anybody who is not a sociopath, it will grind you down to a nub. You could see professional help for this, but I will go into that later.

The second type of person who goes into law enforcement is someone who likes authority, a sense of power over someone else, a bully. This person is in the job because it gives them power over others and the law will protect them because it is vaguely worded in SO many cases. This person will shrug off the effects that cripple the first type over time, because they feel in charge of every situation. After a while, if they don't tone it down, they will get caught. Thankfully the cell camera and the internet tends to be helping clean them out due to their own incapability to see they can't ALWAYS be in charge, but it will be a long road because this group is the BULK of the ones that join LE organizations.

Now why do these two groups tend to be the ones that you are going to run into on a consistent basis? The simple, hard answer is that we pay our front line LEO's very little compared to other services that risk their life or experience the mental grind. Your average patrol officer is going to pull a median salary of about 35k with comparable benefits to someone working in a office job. A firefighter is going to pull around 45k and scales up much quicker, not to mention their benefits are beyond good. EMT's make about the same as patrol officers, but their benefits are also very good and they don't have the same stressors. I know that ranges will vary and State LEO's are very well paid on average, but we are talking about the people you are going to encounter most often.

If you have to choose between a job where you are going to be considered a 'hero' or a job where everyone is going to be biased towards you being a 'villain, and the hero jobs pay better, which would you logically choose? Assuming of course that you are not sorted into one of the two groups I described, most are going to run away from serving in LE. In fact, this is why more of the 'bullies' tend towards LE and the 'idealists' don't. So you already have created a situation where the 'stormtrooper' mindset is going to prefer this job and haven't considered options to rectify it. The people you don't run into that much are going to be the people that took college and got pushed through the ranks quickly. If you didn't take college or just took an Associates Degree, you have to beat these people out. It is extremely hard to do that, even if you do your job much better than they did.

The final factor that runs into this is the mental issues I mentioned earlier. If you seek help from your employers for mental stress, they are going to handle it differently if you are a LEO. You are going to find out quickly that you are expendable. If you seek help and get classified as PTSD, you set a chain of events in motion that is inexorable. You will be rotated to a desk. You will see a Psychiatrist who will prescribe anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication. This person will meet with you for around 15 minutes 3-4 times a week, ask you questions, and ask if the medication is helping. If you return to functional status in a month or two, you get put back on duty. If you don't, they put you on short term disability for up to one year. Your visits drop to once a week, then once a month. One year later, your employment is terminated. They hire a new recruit and start the cycle again about the same time that you start your short term disability. You get to try to salvage your career in anyway possible, hopefully you paid through the nose for long term disability, or you can try to find a smaller department that doesn't bother to dig too deep on background checks.

Other related fields like firefighters/emts comprehend PTSD and work with their people much harder. They have better benefits so you they can see outside therapists as much as needed. There is less stigma if you have a problem, because they understand. You go on the fritz as an LEO and you will overhear people who used to respect you call you weak or a pussy. Sadly this type of thing happens at all levels of LE, even as a State Trooper you are expendable.

In any case, the point to this essay is that the system is flawed and is going to drive out the good LEOs and save the bad ones to protect itself from litigation. Protect yourself at all times with video, be advised of the laws and loopholes in them that bad LEos will exploit, and don't force confrontation with a LEO if there is a loophole. If the man had stepped outside and talked calmly, the incident would not have escalated as it did. In this case he did not inform himself of the loopholes correctly and got tasered (which was improper, they didn't warn him correctly or anything), and the LEOs look like villains again.

If I am ever homeless and some dude hands me an A&F article of clothing, I'm selling that sucker to the first person who will buy it.

If he wanted to troll A&F and really help homeless people, he should have paid them to carry anti-A&F slogan signs for a day. It certainly would have done more than his money supporting Goodwill, who is worse than A&F any day of the week.

Seriously, Goodwill exploits a Great Depression minimum wage loophole for disabled people. They pay these people in the neighborhood of 1.40 an hour and yet executives can take home high 6 figure to low 7 figure salaries, not to mention special travel and other compensation benefits.

Back when I was in High School (not all that long ago, mid 90s), I had a somewhat low opinion of some of my History/Government/Social Studies type classes. A lot of that was because they were *all* hired as teacher/coach combos. I felt like they had a tendency to phone in the teaching bit because what they were really there to do was the coaching. I still think there is a big mismatch between the amount of money and energy spent on sports programs versus academics in public schools.

However, as much as I scoffed at those teachers at the time, looking back they did some of the things this kid is suggesting quite well. They talked with us, discussed and debated issues that came up for whole class periods, trying to get opinions from everyone. They got me/us thinking about things. One of them gave us a project to watch a Hollywood movie about some historical event of our choice and then write and present a report about what facts they got right or wrong. Looking back, I'd have to say that it could have been a heck of a lot worse if they were just expected to teach to some arbitrary standardized test, and their jobs or at least salary depended on yearly improvement in test scores.

So, I think that @Yogi is right and that is probably more of an institutional failing than a bad teacher, although we don't really have any evidence one way or the other from the videos. In spite of thinking that his anger is perhaps directed a bit off of the most important target, he definitely comes across as more reasonable in this interview (which makes sense, he's had time to cool down and consider things more fully). Hope the school doesn't come down on him too hard, if at all.

Love the car. Love the idea. But I must tell you the company is very bad to its normal workers. They will run you dry, burn you out and replace you with another young excited face. This cycle repeats over and over. Think salary with 6 day weeks 11 hours a day or more and this isnt just the low payed workers either, even the well educated 20 somethings get this treatment.

2 years in Finland too and no choices, every carrier has it and they are priced almost exactly the same.. Just like a bunch of guys agreeing something in the backroom and miraculously announcing their campaign in sync.. Personally, i buy the cheapest phones there is and have my 12 year old prepaid still going strong. I've estimated that i've saved over 2000€ in the last ten years and that's comparing to the cheapest contract available (around 20€ is the minimum contract price.) Of course that means that i'm the only one in my class that doesn't have a touchscreen as you can't get those without contracts on a students "salary"...

yeah, it'll trickle down, through the IV drip you'll need because you broke your health on the cheap unhealthy diet you could barely afford with the salary from your underpaid, overworked jobs (should you be lucky to have them).

No wait, you won't be able to afford the IV drip either.

The first problem I saw (from a civil rights perspective) came way earlier.

Maybe I'm off on my interpretation here, but didn't she say she earns $200 a week, has a car and some jewelry, to which he told her, she was not entitled to a public defender because she could sell her jewelry to hire a lawyer?

That seems like a travesty to me. She'll be forced to pay several months salary up front, simply as a retainer, before she even gets her day in court.

RFlagg,

I agree with what you've stated about CEO compensation and taxation of the wealthy. I've said the same thing for years. Reagan did the country a disservice by cutting taxes for the wealthy by half. Now, the wealthy are crying at the prospect of a few percent increase. The wealthy are as guilty of an entitlement mindset which was created by Republicans as the poor are guilty of an entitlement mindset which was created by Democrats. After WWII, the top tax bracket was paying more than 90% in taxes. For decades after WWII the top bracket was 70%. We need to be heading back in that direction. We also need to be reducing welfare programs by retraining and educating beneficiaries and properly educating their children.

I also believe that corporations with public shareholders should have salary caps for CEOs and upper management. Too often, shareholders lose money on their investments while CEOs receive shockingly high compensation for failed leadership. A board of directors, when voting on compensation, is not looking at the best interests of the shareholder. A board member is seeing potential for themselves in bloated CEO and leadership compensation.

You're just being facetious. "They're demons that much be purged by fire raaah raaah".

That's nice.

It doesn't have much to do with academic achievements, it's just about being able to maintain a healthy living. Having guns freely available is outdated; it's turning the US into the wild west, and civilization has moved on from there. Get with the times.

I wouldn't want to be in society where just anyone and everyone had a gun on them. Much less a high school or college - fuck those people are all retarded, I don't want them to have a gun.

I'm all for having a weapon in your home to protect yourself from intruders; it's your home, so it's outside of everyone else's "realm of protection", but in the public space minimizing weapons is a good thing. There will still be violent muggings - you have to avoid the places where these things happen, not go in brazenly with a gun - but less people on both sides will be killed outright, because the weapons that make kills easy aren't readily available.

Denmark's muslims aren't mistreated, they're coddled. We have muslim gangs and shit, that I would love to quash, but I don't want to go in there guns blazing. If I see a big group of "suspicious people", I just turn away and go some other way. And in general I just avoid the places that they roam in.

How do you mean "average as high"? Salary? Violence? I think you accidentally a word.

Yeah, there's no current legal way to cap CEO's salaries. It's a societal expectation, I suspect. Japan has plenty of public companies and their CEOs are paid a fraction of what US CEOs make. I think it's a matter of upper management deciding you're not worth it. Sports figures have the advantage of knowing how much money they generate, which is a huge sum. If the fans are willing to pay for the tickets and TV networks pay for the rights, why shouldn't they make a ton? They're not worth it, IMHO, but can't argue with their drawing power. They're gonna make someone a ton of money.