Just a technical point to start – the NYPD has its own Traffic division, which comprises a disproportionately high number of people of color (particularly Southasian – something of an immigrant stronghold) compared to the rest of the NYPD. Where the plainclothes cops have plenty of tatted-up Blue Lives Matter white…

As somebody who is a biker in New York City, a big fan of your articles, and by all measures the target demographic of this piece...I don’t know if this is it. The mayor’s failure to expend any energy in the direction of bike safety has been infuriating, but I don’t find it particularly useful to pretend that the…

Worth noting that delivery vehicles with a power lift-gate (generally small box trucks, but some vans too) require you to leave the engine running if the lift is going to be used, otherwise you kill the battery. This becomes force of habit for drivers, who just leave the vehicle idling regardless of use or…

As somebody who used to drive a Sprinter for a small company’s pickups and deliveries, this...checks out. My visits to the diesel pumps were incredibly infrequent, while the possibility of charging at the company’s base overnight/in-between runs would have a blessing. Not to mention that I was the only person there…

I would just love to meet the HR genius who came up with this change. ‘This’ll fix it!’

It’s not a big deal. Nobody said it was. But it’s annoying, and what is a big deal is that it’s representative of a larger cultural problem – meaningless, irrelevant window-dressing on stupid stuff like this in lieu of actual changes or progress. And when you write the snotty ‘I hope you can get over it,’ all you…

The whole thing is pathetic. We have to worry about offending *checks notes* crackheads now? What staggers me is that it used to actually be a fairly progressive notion that everybody is better than their worst action; i.e., we can all accept that smoking crack is not a good thing, but the people who do it are not…

Well said – that last point is kind of what I was trying to get at the most. There was a brief period where there was a fair amount of unification among the markets, which sort of fits with the market principles of globalism, but that really seem to have drawn to a close. And what you say is right, I think you have to…

Trying to think of the last time there was this much of a market disagreement between the US and Europe in car design. One of our most prominent companies is now without any sedans in their lineup, and the other Big Three aren’t selling too many. Now, leaving aside value judgments (mine is, this sucks, I miss cars),…

In my head, I picture the German Visa office, thick in the middle of the Covid travel ban, trying to make heads or tails of the request for ‘writer from American...online...Jalopy-nik...arrive for import...export...of Chrysler...nein, nein, ausgeschlossen’!

LOL. What?

That looks like the same person to me. This is how most of the news outlets are covering it, too. https://abc7ny.com/protester-released-after-controversial-arrest-in-manhattan/6339831/

I recognize this is what we consider a ‘biased source,’ but I don’t think the video is a deepfake. 

I’m just going off the video. I see a broom to smash the cameras and spray paint and well as a bucket of paint. Is there different video of the stickers?

Yes, it is the same woman - who is white, no? All the articles I’ve read refer to Nikki Stone, who definitely looks like the same person as in the video. Am I wrong?

I can respect somebody’s emotions and still believe that their emotions do not take total precedence over fact. As for your first point, I think there’s actually a lot of difference. People constantly confuse incompetence for conspiracy when the government is involved, and I think it’s worth delineating the two. I’m…

Read my other comments, I’m pretty consistent on this. Shouldn’t have happened the way it did, not altogether unsurprising, far from evidence of a campaign of terror. I think your Stasi example is off. This is not a professor being arrested for politically disallowed opinions. This is somebody who whacked the cameras…

You couldn’t be further from reality on this. I am so far from one of those people. I’ve been protesting in NYC a very long time. I was at Occupy Wall Street, the Trayvon protests, Mike Brown, Eric Garner. Those of us who are familiar with and part of protests know that there are ground rules, though. If you vandalize…

And again, I’m with you – uniforms and marked would have been more ethical. But I see this as laziness, not a campaign of terror and an example of the kidnapping crisis in America.

And I’m with you. A better way to conduct the arrest. But does this really fit into the legacy of kidnappings and violence in America? Some people are actually abducted, not arrested for pre-existing warrants. This looks more like the legacy of haphazard and corners-cutting policing (a real, separate problem). The…