Law enforcement has never deserved the respect it got. Things like closure rates dropped sharply once police had to read Miranda rights to people and stopped being able to beat confessions out of suspects. Forensics further eroded the ability of law enforcement to close crimes, because they could no longer pin the crime on people they didn’t like. Surveillance cameras and people taking video with cell phones continues to erode confidence because the public is seeing how the police actually treat people, people that are in many cases not guilty of any crimes.

If law enforcement wants respect, people in law enforcement need to start acting in a respectable manner. That means they need to clean their own fucking house, and get the shitty cops out, rather than letting all the shitty cops push the few decent ones out.

They are playful and adventurous kittens that smell bad all the time (and will smell even worse if you try to bathe them too often), will actively try to kill themselves eating things they shouldn’t and getting into places they can’t get out of, and will shit in corners of your house rather than anything else you might set up for them to you. Unlike kittens, they bite hard when they’re playing. They’ll also pass out and sleep so hard that you’ll think they’re dead.

My wife has had a lot of ferrets, more than 20 for sure. Our home can absolutely not be made ferret-proof, which is probably the biggest reason that she hasn’t been pushing to get more.

She worked in animal rescue. And they weren’t all at the same time. But a lot of them were.

Cops, by and large, aren’t solving crimes. See https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-rate-by-type-in-the-us/.

That’s not correct; you’re taking a black and white, absolutist view to the question, and that just doesn’t work.

For instance, take economics; many traditional conservative positions square pretty well with economic theories and practices. Social conservatism also has a place, given the tension that exists between concepts of community and society. I do not agree with many conservative interpretations, but it’s not accurate to say that all conservatives are intellectually dishonest.

OTOH, modern “conservatives” aren’t conservatives in any meaningful way. It’s now more like regressive populism.

Of course I would.

Everything that makes you -you- is contained in the physicality of your brain. Even fairly small changes in your brain will create large shifts in cognition and personality. So anything that replicates your body and brain, down to the last atom, is going to be creating -you-. As far as you are concerned, nothing happened; you ceased to be in one place, and immediately sprang into existence in another.

Yeah, and there are people that refuse to fly because they’re afraid of crashes, but still ride motorcycles without wearing helmets. A character refusing to use a transporter just indicates that the person in question isn’t reacting rationally. Likewise, irregular malfunctions don’t mean that it’s not still safer than other means.

Have you seen Mad Max by any chance…?

I just use an HDMI cable from my laptop.

No offense, but where do you live? Living somewhere reasonably flat (anywhere in the midwest, for instance) makes a cargo bike much more reasonable. The town I live in is at 1500’; my home is at 3000’. That’s a 1500’ elevation difference over the 10 mile or so drive, which is not insignificant. Especially since most of the climb takes place over about a 3 mile stretch.