Long time lurker. Making my first HN post because of this article. Thank you.

> ... or have the budget from which his salary is paid reduced to zero.

That doesn't sound legal -- at the least, he could sue the city/state for those wages

Can do all sorts of things, but when somebody turns up with a gun there has to be some physical mechanism to stop them from seizing control of the local supermarket.

The city can defund the entire police force, but it will have to set up or allow an alternative which will end up the same as the current one if the incentives don't change. Resetting the entire system every time something goes wrong isn't really a viable strategy. It'll work every so often.

In my childhood, I was in an area with so-called community-policing (not in the US). It was a living nightmare. Our family was glad to get out of the area.

Even knowing that US police are harsh and trigger-happy, I find it deeply amusing that first world citizens protected by the world's strongest military will talk about community policing.

Pass laws to reform the police. Abolishing them will just ensure that power hungry and petty tyrants fill the void. And these folks will happily beat and murder any and all who act against them, tax/toll all economic opportunities (roads/bridges/vendors, etc), keep the local politician and bureaucrats in their pocket, assault/abuse any woman on the streets - and no-one will dare to report anything.

> an AUR helper to make that transparent is standard kit for anyone using the box as a workstation

Fwiw, I've been using arch as my daily driver continuously for 14 years and haven't ever really felt the strong need for an AUR helper.

Brazilian here. Around here, it usually means adding low quality voices to the discussion.

Although there are a few pushing for recognition of good local work, those few tends to be attacked from both sides of the discussion.

Just in case someone finds the examples in the article all acceptable censorship, here's a few more off the top of my head:

Evergreen professor forced to resign for opposing day of white absence: https://blog.usejournal.com/the-controversy-of-bret-weinstei...

UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading MLK's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail": https://freebeacon.com/issues/university-to-investigate-lect...

Data scientist fired for retweeting study showing non-violent protests are more effective: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/case-for-liberalism-...

>About a billion people are living on a dollar a day or less. The number of people living at this level is going down. That’s good... Bill Gates has an estimated worth over one hundred billion dollars. He could eliminate a category of poverty without changing the number of digits in any box on his tax forms.

I don't think giving 1 day's wages to the world can be construed as "eliminating a category of poverty".

If I lived there a long time, I still wouldn't be Japanese. Look, it's definitely an emotionally charged issue the longer someone has been in a place, but that doesn't change the basic facts. We can discuss the merits all day long but not the legitimacy of the government to decide who can and cannot stay.

For the purposes of this debate, "Americans" means citizens and those that can vote, the ones to whom the government answers.

Are you literally not looking around at all these days? Your filter bubble must be very, very small and selective indeed to somehow have missed Cancel Culture.