Posted by ent101 4 days ago
> And we just want people to be safe.
We’d all be safer if we were in jail (sorry to give the clown ideas)
Get to the immigration officer, answer questions, get a cold stare a few times looking at me and my passport, unpleasantly asked why do I have two passports (I'm a dual citizen), told I don't look Swedish (of course, I'm naturalised), get told to wait, they leave to get someone else to check something, two immigration officers start shuffling my passport, wait while no one talks to me or acknowledge I'm there, passport stamped and I get told to "move".
Get my bags, and out of the terminal, on the walk through the terminal there's another 15-20 officers with rifles strutting around, get out of the terminal and there are two massive armoured cars from NYPD parked up front, more cops looking a bit tough.
It's an overwhelming presence of "security" everywhere, signs plastered with messages about how illegal stuff will be punished (littering, leaving your bags unattended, smoking, every message seems to say something about "under penalty of the law").
I think if you live with that all the time it's easy to filter out the noise but there's an eery feeling of oppression all around, like a boot is just waiting the right moment to stomp on you.
Very immigration officer I’ve ever interacted with has been chilly, it’s not some uniquely American thing.
Pretty much every rail station I went through in Europe had extremely (to my eyes) heavily armed guards standing around. I was also asked to present my passport on several occasions. At one Italian station, it happed twice within a few minutes. I’ve been on multiple trains where some flavor of police comes on, checks people’s papers, and then grab some guy and escort him off at the next stop.
It's very hard to express in text the feeling of oppression, it's not about just armed security, it's the attitude of those, it's the attitude of the people representing the State, it feels much more adversarial in the USA than anywhere I've been in Europe.
Also, it's not about being asked to present a passport but presenting a legitimate passport and being met with "you don't look Swedish".
Perhaps you are just too accustomed to the feeling of the USA, as an outsider it does feel different, and way more oppressive.
Seems normal to me.
If you think it's normal to call people "gutter trash" I guess you're too far gone in some bullshit and should do some soul-searching to come back to your humanity.
Every bad thing in the US is a caricature of what caricatures were 50 years ago.
From my PoV, it seems odd someone would value someone else’s truck more than their own life!
Can you clarify?
My point is that that is a very sensible bumper sticker, because it only applies if someone thinks they want to steal the truck, clearly valuing their life less than the truck, proving the sticker’s point.
It’s a common sticker. People who are shot in a robbery (or their kin if they don’t survive) commonly claim “why would the victim who defended themselves value their stuff more than the thief’s life” without failing to consider the thief themselves valued their own life less than the stuff they were attempting to steal.
It’s a common sentiment in free places, those who values abiding citizens more than law breaking citizens.
Most free places value human life higher than stuff.
Like this:
https://x.com/libs_ofchicago/status/2099992150532337702?s=46
Heh. Real-world occurrence of Silicon Valley "We just want to make the world a better place" (also $billions, mainly that actually)
I can't believe this is being said with a straight face. "We've been dumping chemicals in this river for a decade, why are people getting so mad about it now (when they are finally finding out more about it)?". Completely absurd.
Couple that with "we just want people to be safe", sorry but ignoring the abuses of the system (which they tacitly allow due to lack of safeguards) is not acceptable.
Sporadic vandalism, a handful of canceled contracts, some employee morale problems, all of this falls far short of the organized campaign of resistance that would be needed to roll back Flock at this point. Flock really should be the last nail in the coffin of Edward Snowden's libertarian take that mass surveillance can be fought only with individual action and technology rather than political movements.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety/jobs
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/y-combinators-police-surve...
https://techfundingnews.com/275m-at-7-5-valuation-y-combinat...
https://www.ycdb.co/company/flock-safety
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/y-combinator_flock-safety-has...
https://www.inc.com/lisa-bonos/how-flock-became-the-most-con...
I cannot believe how tone deaf this quote is. Mind boggling. Veep, torture nexus-level parody.
> “Because you go on to X or you go on to Reddit and you go, why are people so mad at us when we've been doing the same thing for nine years?” Langley said. “And why are they so mad at us for things we don't do? And we just want people to be safe.”
I find this story to be heartwarming. I hope the employees flee to companies with missions and products more worthy of their talents.