I heard some cordless power tools could come handy.
LOL! Freedom!!! Right? I visited Cleveland once and only once.
That’s not totally fair to Cleveland. They terminated the contract, Flock just kept right on recording. The same thing happened in many other cities. When maintenance crews service the lights, they should remove the cameras. Keep them in storage until Flock comes to get them.
They could run an add in the newspaper. “Free cameras, first come, first serve”. They would be down in 20 minutes.
Well they’re illegal right? So we’re justified in dismantling them?
Seems like they would be considered abandoned / litter.
It’s not vandalism to put a nice opaque piece of cardboard on a solar panel. And no one seems to know how the camera got like that between the time the batteries died and when the technicians found it.
How can we claim consent of the governed when the governed cannot say no?
Electoral Democracy has four required mechanism: Ranked Voting, Lottery Option, Recall Mechanism, Randomized Districting. The United States does not qualify as a democracy. Few of the states, cities, and counties within it are even on the democratic spectrum with one of those mechanisms.
Happy 250th our government is illegitimate.
Correct. Just competitive authoritarianism at this point.
I’m fond of the phrase “electoral oligarchy”.
Did you vote for an oligarch?
No, we just vote for which person the oligarchs buy and own.
So it’s more of an electoral puppet show?
The electoral college did.
Then people need to start cutting them down
Most people dont know the cameras contain about $80 worth of copper and gold.
Typical. I grew up in Cleveland (not born there, I didn’t come from that shallow, murky gene pool), and it truly sucks, and one of the very worst things are the cops. They are literally the worst cops in the nation.
This is the city where three teen girls went missing for a decade. Turned out they were kept hostage in a house directly NEXT DOOR to one of the girls’ homes. They had interviewed EVERYBODY in the neighborhood, EXCEPT the weird single guy who lived right next door. After a decade of being raped regularly, one of the girls escaped and they all got free, no thanks to the cops.
It’s also where a psychopathic serial killer operated openly in a neighborhood, killing women and burying some of them in his backyard. Others just decomposed in his house. The neighbors complained about the stench for years, and also the blood-curdling screams, and the fact that he would try to grab women off the sidewalk in front and drag them into his house. Finally, a naked bloody woman burst out of the house screaming, and the cops FINALLY checked the guy out and found bodies everywhere.
Cleveland cops (and ALL the surrounding suburbs) are as bad as cops get in this country, and it was one of the primary reasons I left, along with the fact that Clevelanders tend to be pretty dumb, since all the smart ones leave.
And the weather really sucks, too.
Not to mention the Cuyahoga river that sometimes just happens to catch on fucking fire from pollution. I seriously think that pollution fucks with everyone’s brains over there but here I am on the east coast where the East River, Charles River and the run off systems from Maine all empty into the areas some ¼ mile to a mile away from drinking water treatment facilities so… What the fuck right.
We’re all getting retarded drinking the water and then we can’t escape microplastics or cadmium, lead, mercury and chlorine forever.
To be fair the Cuyahoga river burned once since 1969 and that was in 2020 when a tanker car got derailed so spilled fuel into the river (more info: https://all-geo.org/highlyallochthonous/2020/08/the-cuyahoga-river-burned-today-for-the-first-time-in-51-years-heres-what-we-can-learn-from-it/)
Honestly the 1969 fire spurred the creation of the EPA and a lot of new regulations on pollution (thankfully, except now our current admin wants to roll stuff back and not enforce the law so … I guess that sucks…)
The 2020 incident was just a freak accident thing and before 1969 it has caught fire like 10 times already, it’s crazy what people are willing to put up with. At the end of the day though, the river has recovered some and there are a number of fish and wildlife that live in it - it goes to show we can do better but we often choose not to.
And by we I mean large corporations, the government, and the billionaires.
But… But I have it on good authority that Cleveland rocks!
I’ve quite enjoyed my time in Cleveland, but it was more recently
FYI latex paint and texture sand in balloons can do a number.
you can also use latex paint with a latex thinner to make it usable in a super soaker.
Does the thinner not fuck up the super soaker?
latex thinners for latex paint aren’t solvent based like oil or lacquer based paints. so using them on plastics should be fine.
the hard part will be ensuring the sprayer head stays clear.
keep a wet rag or paper towel around to wrap the tip in to ensure the paint stays moist and uncured.
This is America, the people serve the government.
The government wants its cameras on to monitor the inmates, who’s going to stop them?
Again, deflock shows where they are. Just start mobbing them and fucking them up, sledge hammers go a long way.
Cordless angle grinders work better. The UK has been fighting back for ages
Someone will get so angry they might shine lasers into them, reflect the sun into them.
A law should be passed, where people who blind a Palantir cannot be prosecuted.
One, well-aimed, shotgun blast.
I imagine a grinder with a cutoff blade would make short work of them? Lol
Keep your face covered.
And walk there.
And leave your phone and anything else that emits any kind of radio signal at home. Headphones, smart watch, bus pass with nfc, stuff like that.
Also keep your clothing plain and generic. They’re classifying with stickers and logos too.
Who cares about democratic decisions or the law in the US, anyway?
I mean if we are being real they voted to not pay to renew the contract, and people checked to see if they were still there when the the contract ended.
No where was it mentioned the date the cameras were required to be removed by, nor what would happen with them.
A good comparative we have seen in the U.S. would be direct tv. If you cancel the service and the contract ended on June 29th, Direct Tv doesn’t come out and remove the dish from your roof that day, they leave it there and it’s your problem.
Cleveland likely needs to start a lawsuit against the company for leaving their products on their property and if they aren’t removed by a set “reasonable” date schedule someone from the city to remove them.
Really I’m sure flock is just hoping to get them to pass a separate contract so they don’t have to move them to another city
Since they are operating illegally, does that mean we can just take them? They have RAM.
they have RAM
Wait what?
And, I believe, those models have TPUs.
And huge amounts of copper.
I don’t think they’re operating illegally. It’s just the city is no longer paying them.
And who did Flock pay for the land usage to install the cameras?
No one, and the city has not asked them too. When someone puts up a sign by the road that says “Slow Children” they don’t pay the city for it, and most people do NOT own the land between the sidewalk and the road, they just mow/maintain it out of moral obligation.
The city decided not to renew the contract, they need to make another action to ensure their removal, or construct a law about them for them to actually be “illegal”.
They don’t pay, the customer pays them.
Honestly probably more than my system has now.
Paintball markers.
Make Tippmann proud.
I once contacted their support cause I sent my “marker” in for warranty, they’re like oh yeah unfortunately your chunk of metal is um (probably in their museum) but nothing we can do for you except ship you our top of the line brand new model… Dang you guy’s really screwed me.
Tippmann really are the GOATs of just like… the ‘I like to go paintballing everyonce in a while’ demographic.
Yeah, yeah, other people make fancier pantsier shit… T98 is the goddamn AK47 of markers.
Maybe one of the actual last examples of American manufacturing one could actually be proud of.
They were definitely great when I sent them a used ProAm I had bought. Supposed to convert it over to a ProLight version, but I think they sent me a pretty much new marker, didn’t recognize any “old” parts on it. Haven’t played in years, but still have it stored away.
Lasers. You can get rather beefy ones that wreck havoc on any optical sensor.
Anyone who needs to be reminded of the damage lasers can cause shouldn’t be fucking around with lasers imo. Way too easy to hurt someone.
Idk, considering this is America and most peoples alternative would be a gun, lasers seem rather benign.
Just wear spectrum-matched eye protection, please.
Considering this is America and most people don’t actually own guns, your comment seems rather online
uh. i live in the bluest of states with the most centrist of liberal friends… and we all own guns. like. alot of them.
Your anecdote is meaningless when 2/3 of the country doesn’t own a gun. Turns out you can’t extrapolate a data point like that
the most centrist of liberal friends
Personally not something I would be bragging about but you do you I guess
So your argument is that unless a majority of Americans own guns, you’re not even allowed to correlate America with guns at all? What a dumb argument.
Nobody ever said that the majority of Americans own guns, they said that guns seemed like a more American solution than 1W+ lasers that could easily fry a camera from a distance.
Unless you have the numbers to suggest that more people have those kinds of lasers than the 100M+ people who have guns, then your point is meaningless.
At the end of the day this was an unserious suggestion to fire guns at utility poles made in jest towards a country with constitutionally enshrined gun rights and an unhealthy gun culture. Why be this uselessly pedantic about gun ownership statistics that nobody even mentioned or challenged?
You think in duality. You think in labels. Therefore you think ingroup/outgroup, and therefore you do not have developed the empathy skills to fully simulate “outgroup.” You can’t fully comprehend a person fundamentally different than you because of the möbiation of entanglement - which the Buddhists call defilement - ultimately creates dualistic dichotomy within the topological matrix of your mind, and therefore you will not notice the cognitive dissonance produced by that möbiation.
uh
Like, you can’t comprehend that there’s a person out there that doesn’t think like you at all, in both good and bad ways. It’s bizarre someone would even suggest these things to you. You scoffed at them, for you did not understand them with your underdeveloped empathy skill. Now go ahead and misinterpret what I just said so I can teach you further.
What a good way to damage your or other peoples’ eyesight
Only if you don’t know how to use them. They are safer than guns.
I mean yes, true, but:
More dangerous
More expensive
Easier to track who purchased/likely owns one
More complex to use.
… if you get caught marking up a camera with paintballs… or frying it with a laser…
Which person do you think is looking at more potential fines and jail time?
Whats less expensive and easier to dismantle and throw away or otherwise dispose of?
A fairly decently powered laser?
Or a Tippmann 98?
I’d be careful with that. Not sure how likely it is that the beam reflects and messes up ur eyes.
So there is a country with more guns than inhabitants, and they are afraid of a f-ing laser?
I would argue strong lasers are more dangerous than guns on average.
