• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Killing libraries is not about saving money, it’s about restricting knowledge. Beware the leader that doesn’t want the people to read.

    • BakerBagel@midwest.social
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      5 months ago

      If the city cares about aaving money theu would be buying useless military hardware for the NYPD. Tokyo, Seoul, Jakarta, and Osaka all do fine without blowing massive amounts if the municipal budget on military gear for their police departments. The NYPD "officially’ had a 2022 budget over $5billion with aroind 36,000 officers. That’s comparable to the entire military budget of Romania. Hell, the NYPD has field offices in 6 foreign countries.

      • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        So you’re telling me that if we just started grinding cops into a fine powder we’d not only save on their salaries and benefits, we’d also save on the amount of equipment they need and could fund things like libraries and social safety nets? And that we could sell that fine powder for uses such as food for heads, surgery, delousing, cosmetics, bomb disposal, firepower, and head transplants and fund even more things?

        I’m not saying we should be grinding cops into a fine powder. I’m saying let’s take a look at where we could save more money while helping more people.

        Torgo’s Police Powder is certainly not a thing we should turn those fucking pigs into. No sir. And if someone tries laying this at my feet I’ll deny it.

        • Zink@programming.dev
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          5 months ago

          You’ll have to spend some of those savings on industrial dehydrators though. It can be very difficult to get the texture of the powder right when you start grinding all willy nilly.

          • NABDad@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            The trick is to license private companies to produce the powder. You still get the budget savings, and you get reasonable license fees from the private companies, but you offload the risk of having to invest in the industrial dehydrators.

          • NegativeInf@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Lay em out in West Texas and they’ll be good as dust in two shakes of a fat lambs tail. Just don’t let the coyotes get to em. Or don’t. Whatever. I’m not a cop.

      • barsquid@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        If the city cared about saving money they would not spend millions of dollars to recover tens of thousands of dollars lost to turnstile hopping.

      • dezmd@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I mean, I dunno, ACAB and fuck tha police and all that jazz, but 5 bil for 36k is 138k/each, and that’s not too unreasonably bad for NYC cost of living vs the inherent danger and work regime of the job as a police officer in such a populous city.

        • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          They’ve got 55 police per 10,000 residents. That’s more than twice as many as LA per capita with a 3% decrease in violent crime per capita. That tells me we could, but definitely shouldn’t, grind up one fifth of them into a fine powder freeing up a whole bunch of money in the budget. NYC does seem to have a significantly smaller property crime rate than the national average but that number is suspect. How much of that is them just not dealing with property crime and not filing the paperwork?

          And that $5b? That’s not their whole budget, that’s their personnel budget. Total budget for FY2025 is closer to $11.9b/yr. Their salary is closer to 80k/yr/officer on average.

          • NegativeInf@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Can… can you run for governor of Texas? Grinding up 1/5 of our police force is 1000x the platform Abbott is rolling on.

            Note: no harm meant to differently abled people. I just hate Abbott, among a litany of other reasons, in that he got paralyzed by a neighbors tree limb falling on him, sued his neighbor for 10 million dollars, got elected, then helped pass legislation to make sure none of us Texan’s could ever sue for that amount again. Max is now 250k per person, up to 3 people can sue one asshole, so max 750k for non medical suits. Even fully limiting the types of suits that can be brought. The epitome of “Fuck you, I got mine!”

            • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              They won’t have me, friend. I can stand on a stage and sound like a Pentecostal preacher. I’m not inbred but I dress like I am. With exactly the right amount of alcohol I’m pretty likable (too little and I’m weird, too much and I’m over the top, and the difference is razor thin). And there’s pictures of me at a whole bunch of Pride events and taco trucks. I support the gays and the immigrants.

              It’s an uphill battle that I’m not prepared for, don’t really have time for, and have no desire to get into. But we’ve got 2 years to find someone who hasn’t said “Hell, yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47”. There are a lot of single issue firearm voters in Texas, as stupid as that is. I like Beto but pragmatically there’s no way back from that statement here at this time.

              There may be enough cop hate here to run on a platform of grinding 1/5th of them into a fine powder. Even the staunchly red area I come from hates the cops, who are at best thought of as meddling piles of shit.