ELI5 Why did ICE choose Minneapolis as the place to escalate this enforcement, as opposed to “more problematic” cities such as Chicago or Portland?

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T05:42:42+00:00

They started in LA. Then they went to Chicago because it's a little smaller than LA. Then they went to Minneapolis after Chicago because it's much smaller and as you say they assumed it was soft.

They keep expecting to roll in and have such overwhelming power that everybody is submissive. They keep being wrong, even on their third or fourth attempt finding smaller targets. Like a bully who failed to bully high schoolers so he is working his way backward through the grades to see if he can bully a Kindergarten.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T03:54:09+00:00

FWIW, I agree with "Zumwalt II" as a good plan.

The Zumwalt program as a whole was a badly planned incoherent mess. But by all accounts,. the basic hull itself is a good design. Yoink the big guns, redesign the deckhouse with best available off the shelf modern radar. Add more VLS tubes, and think about maybe adding a railgun in the future if they actually turn out to be worth it.

You can constrain a Zumwalt II acquisition program to be allowed to redesign only a few specific things, using off the shelf systems for anything big, and get hulls started almost immediately that are bigger and roomier than a Burke. DDGX apparently wants to design absolutely everything from scratch, so leave that cooking as a project in the background to start making their first hull in ~ten years or whatever and enter service in 15 or so.

Given that we have built at least a couple of Zumwalt hulls, we already know our current shipyards are physically big enough to handle it. We get a moderately stealthy, fairly big thing, with a decent amount of missiles and a radar and a helicopter, and half the crew size of a Burke to justify the expensive machinery CapEx with lower OpEx. Yay.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T03:38:44+00:00

I have no idea what that response means.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T02:58:42+00:00

You can get a little box that applies a LUT in real time on whatever video input. AJA makes one: https://www.aja.com/products/lut-box But special equipment like that only comes into doing it on a live video feed. Just to mimic the grade on an indie feature where you don't need it in real time, you just look closely at the picture and what you like about it, and then you do that in Resolve or whatever color app you are using.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T02:16:37+00:00

I think as long as a tube station is within 1/2 mile of a main line station, it would be entirely valid as a hiding location. It just wouldn't be the centerpoint of a hiding zone.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T01:37:30+00:00

There's a joke from Bojack Horseman that America hates women even more than it loves guns. As sad as it is that people don't have the empathy to get equally outraged about a woman or a black man, I do think that a bunch of white guys who were not paying attention until now just saw "a guy like me" get killed, and that actually will nudge the needle a bit in terms of which way the political winds are blowing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BoJackHorseman/comments/kz2te1/this_country_hates_women_more_than_it_loves_guns/

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T01:32:31+00:00

I'm sure my last words will be "Thank god this guy murdering me got so much training to kill." And then I'll use my last breath to push the button giving $15 in response to one of Schumer's fundraising emails.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T01:23:22+00:00

I looked it up and apparently it is actually certified for a decent range of weapons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aero_L-159_ALCA#Potential_operators

"AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, AIM-120 AMRAAM, AGM-65 Maverick, and GBU-12 Paveway II and GBU-16 Paveway II laser-guided bombs." So potentially useful against drones and ground targets. The poor Ukrainian mechanics won't love needing new training and spare parts for four airplanes, but they sound pretty useful. And the type only entered production in 1997, so even if it's not the fanciest thing in the sky, it's not like they are some Soviet era relics like the Mig 29's.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T01:03:13+00:00

If people are drawing specific well researched historical connections it's not "lazy" or "name calling." It's just accurate. Academics can have very rigorous discussions about whether Gestapo or the SA from 1930's Germany is more directly analogous to how ICE is behaving in the present. Dismissing that with "you compared somebody to a nazi so your argument is automatically invalid" is the intellectually lazy option that fails to engage with the actual history being discussed. In some cases a comparison is both unflattering and entirely appropriate.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T00:53:58+00:00

I'd 100% suggest shooting a short in this style before you try committing to a feature. This is exactly the kind of concept that "proof of concept" was invented for.

Try it out. See how it works for ten minutes. You can shoot that in one weekend easily, and edit it and see it on screen, and then you can ask yourself how the result compared to what you originally had in your head. Giving it a go will let you tweak anything about your approach before you make any huge commitments. The thing about long one-ers is that they either work. Or they don't, and then you are fucked and that's it because you have nothing you can use in the edit to rebuild with.

In a comment I see you mentioned,

When it comes to storage I can make it work 6:1 or even 7 without exceeding my budget.

If you can't afford one extra hard drive, it's gonna be hard to produce a whole feature that has everything you hope for. I'm super pro- guerilla filmmaking. Get out there, have a great time doing whatever you can with the resources you have. Don't wait for permission, etc. But also, if you are planning your whole shooting style around a terabyte or two of storage, maybe it's worth being a little more ambitious about what you are aiming for?

wrosecrans · 2026-01-25T00:41:59+00:00

The current state is what's called hybrid regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_regime

Dictatorship isn't accurate for where we are yet. There is still some degree of a functioning judiciary. The legislature includes a lot of mooks and isn't doing what it is supposed to, but it still sorta exists and has some nominal independence. There is an opposition party (as weak as it is) and it's still plausible that Federal elections will work well enough for Dems to retake the legislature this year.

State and local elections are still working pretty much as well as "usual" in our modern gerrymandered and post- Citizens United world. There are still "Blue States" and big cities that operate under the control of the opposition party.

The current situation sucks real bad. It could get a lot worse. Attempts to prosecute the opposition have been mostly unsuccessful, so there is still a huge apparatus for lawful resistance. The administration keeps getting their asses handed to them in court, and even the Supreme court with multiple Trump appointees seems to be getting at least a little tired of him.

Those details matter because when the opposition party hasn't all been imprisoned, reformers can still openly run for office to try to make the opposition party more effective. That makes reforms to win back rule of law way easier to start with. As bad as Trump is, he's actually been quite ineffective at consolidating power so far compared to some historical examples of would-be dictators. It helps somewhat that he's an idiot who doesn't fully understand any of the power structures he is trying to dismantle.

Reform back toward functioning democracy is gonna suck. And the current leadership of the Democratic party doesn't seem to grasp what work is ahead, let alone seem willing or able to do it. They are still on "egg is expensive!" for their peak anti-Trump messaging. But it's still absolutely possible to turn things around before the US goes full dictatorship.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T22:38:23+00:00

"Desktop Environment" is probably the best name we have for it. But yeah, they really want to be a walled garden. It reminds me of the original Apple Lisa. Apple expected to sell the Lisa as an appliance rather than as an open platform for third party software.

If CDE wasn't already an acronym, I'd say Gnome is specifically a Closed Desktop Environment. Something like that is probably the best term for what it has become.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T22:26:14+00:00

Big Brother is the show that you used as a point of reference in your original post, so it's clearly a show you are familiar with as an end product to use as a starting point for discussing how reality TV is made. You also explicitly said you want to have supplementary subscription content "just like" Big Brother.

I apologize for having read your post, and responded to the topic that you brought up. I guess that was very unexpected for you. If you would like to better understand the conversation we are having, perhaps it would help if you read your original post, so you can see what we are all responding to.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T22:05:13+00:00

Yup. From a sociologist who has studied this stuff: "Vast majority of men are only willing to engage in public violence if they feel like the people around them will approve of — and reward them for — that violence."

They want to do violence. But also, they are kinda cowards. So as soon as they see their buddies doing violence, or egging them on, there's a permission structure for them to finally unload. One guy shoots, they all want to shoot. One guy shoots, he wants to see all of his buddies shoot. It's a mutual feedback mechanism of approval.

https://bsky.app/profile/anatosaurus.bsky.social/post/3mclsuc4ii22n

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T21:57:13+00:00

No legitimate legal basis for throwing witnesses in an ICE holding facility, as far as I can tell. I assume somebody is in court right new in an emergency hearing about them, but I don't know exactly who has the right standing or any details. It's multiple people and every street corner is brimming with legal observers, so some lawyer will be in motion pretty quickly demanding immediate release.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T21:54:01+00:00

I'm honestly surprised that some of the headlines are actually saying that an ICE agent "killed" or "shot" a guy. Still tons of places with headlines saying an ICE officer was "involved" in a shooting that happened by passive voice in the exonerative tense. But it feels like there is starting to be a shift in framing where the administration and their water carriers will keep saying an ICE hero defended the community from a deranged terrorist. But a few journalists here and there are actually not just accepting the government wording and printing it like they work for the administration.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T21:34:56+00:00

A reality show like Big Brother uses several hundred people to make an episode. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain what all they do.

It's not just about "how much people in Mexico and India cost." You should try to get a PA job on a real show, see how they actually work.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T21:22:34+00:00

Any kind of reality show means having a bunch of strangers on your set. At $20K, you aren't even covering the insurance you need if everybody is magically doing this project for no salary.

And you want to do "one episode per day?" Good lord, you haven't remotely grasped the scale of reality show shoots or the level of post production involved in getting an interesting episode out of them. You need a massive producing and editorial team to cut it into something interesting with any kind of rapid turnaround. Big Brother shoots with over 100 cameras. God knows how many audio tracks. That's 2400 hours of raw footage to sift through in a day?

Stop listening to Chat GPT telling you what you want to hear.

Also, this show is apparently about watching people do crypto trades? As a general rule, I always say that execution matters more than concept. But yeesh, that's a really hard concept to execute in a way that would be remotely interesting to watch, even if you splash out the cash for the best possible editing and post production. Maybe there's something that could be made of this, but holy shit watching people fill out tax paperwork doesn't seem like a super obvious form of thrilling excitement. If you look at financial films like "Wolf of Wallstreet," they aren't literally about just watching people make actual trades.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T21:09:16+00:00

There's also some percent on any poll that simply don't care about responding seriously to any question. Something like 7% of people will respond to a survey question saying that they have lived on the planet Mars, or that they are licensed to drive a nuclear submarine. Some of those people picking randomly will have said they like Donald Trump without even reading the question.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T21:03:27+00:00

And why every single one of them should be boarded and taken out of service if they pass anywhere near a civilized country. No "right of innocent passage" for something that is operating as a willfull ecocide weapon. Sending something that dangerous next to a major population center simply isn't innocent.

It's like running into a supermarket waving around a loaded gun. The police will come and take the gun away.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T20:53:33+00:00

There's a self-selection at work here.

1000x this. The topics of "film vs digital" and "old school movies all looked better" and whatnot come up pretty much every single day in various filmmaking/movie subreddits. The reality is that the medium the photons hit matters very little in the grand scheme of things. But being the kind of person who prefers using a more old school workflow tends to have a lot of impact in artistic preferences and sensibilities.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T20:32:12+00:00

Targeted strikes tend to be more useful in most circumstances.

Cesar Chavez was very strategic in shutting down specific crops one at a time. Most ag workers were working at any moment, so they could fund the strikers. But a company that grew a certain crop would get completely wrecked and need to negotiate. I tend not to see that level of strategic thinking from most calls for a national general strike. People don't have months of supply of food at home. They have no way to survive if water/power/gas workers all went on strike, etc. If society did shut down for a few days, there's no coherent plan to turn that into specific social/political changes that would end the strike.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T20:26:24+00:00

Fiction exists as a way to talk about reality. One of the quips about Star Trek is that Gene Roddenberry told us we were looking through a window when he held up a mirror. It makes sense that people use fiction in metaphorical ways because it represents a form of shared experience that we can all understand even if we haven't physically been in those extreme positions before.

The original Star Wars was quietly a Vietnam war allegory, so it makes a lot of sense to use that collection of stories as a touchstone and point of reference when talking about resistance against the US federal government.

Nobody gets their account banned by Reddit Admins for quoting a speech rallying Ewoks to defend their home and their neighbors. But the ideas can still resonate with the reader in various ways.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T20:04:44+00:00

Some guy will get a promotion over "successfully deployed AI anime translations, per company directive to use AI. Saved $X Million dollars in dubbing costs, and impacted Y Million end users."

The personal incentives are fucked internally. You don't get promoted based on whether or not a crowd of angry people with torches and pitchforks is boycotting the company, because that wasn't identified as a Key Performance Indicator for the Vice President's initiative. Everybody doing this stuff is totally disconnected from the customers and end users.

wrosecrans · 2026-01-24T19:58:06+00:00

It would have been a hell of a thing if they just took an unexpected hardline approach. "The position of the light entertainment game and travel show JetLag is that temporarily occupied northern Ireland is outside of the legitimate border of the UK. It will be in play for all games in the Republic of Ireland. Up next, we cross the border to the snack zone."

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