…wherein two of my favorite commenters on the planet (Mike Rowe and Bill Whittle) talk about this issue. What amuses me is that Rowe plays a little devil’s advocate up front, and Bill of course does his usual incisive rapier job.
Get yourself a cuppa, and settle back.
And a couple of the articles below this one will make a great deal of sense.
Of course, the foundation policy of all Marxist policymakers and politicians is to punish the rich. So nobody should be surprised that Hizzoner Comrade Mamdani of NYfC has a plan to tax residences in Manhattan that are adjudged to be non-primary — i.e. the so-called pied-à-terre dwellings of those people who need a place to doss down during the week before fleeing to their houses in Lawn Guyland or Scawsdale for the weekend.
To my surprise, this little smash ‘n grab tax thievery has had its peepee severely whacked by a judge:
Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi issued a temporary restraining order effectively prohibiting any action on the luxury second home tax until an August 31 hearing on a lawsuit filed by three disgruntled homeowners.
Ozzi also hit out at Mamdani’s decision to release a list of the homeowners who could potentially be hit by the tax, many of whom were sent notices warning they would be liable unless they filed an exemption.
‘No law permitted or required the City to publish such a list of the names, addresses and property values of more than 900,000 New York City homeowners, or to publicize that list through an irregular, mid-year publication,’ Ozzi wrote in his decision.
‘[The judgment] annuls and vacates [the] city’s mailed notices, and any determination that such mailed notices constitute proper notice under tax law.’
He added that city officials should have conducted an ‘individualized statutorily-required initial determination’ before issuing the notices to homeowners, so as to not place the burden on the property owners.
The judge then barred city officials from taking any further action on the 17,000 notices sent by the Department of Finance, which warned they would face a five-figure tax bill unless they requested an exemption.
Hubba hubba. For once, a New York judge got it right.
Sadly, it’s not going to end there, because the Marxists’ ravenous appetite to punish the wealthy and successful knows no bounds — even legal ones like this one — and at some point in the future, sure as sugar, those taxes will be imposed.
While I hate Marxists with a passion, especially when they engage in theft of this nature, I have to suspect that among those 900,000 unfortunate people are an awful lot — 50%? 60%? — who can be reliably counted on to vote Democrat in their elections, because New York. So in this case, they’re getting what they voted for, good and hard.
And I’m not sympathetic.
“Modern feminism can’t agree on what a woman is. It’s defended violent male predators in women’s prisons and stayed silent on UK rape gangs to avoid being called racist.” — SOTI.
There are all sorts of social couplings [sic] that anyone with a brain could see would lead to trouble. (Note the “with a brain” stipulation; this will be important later.) Allow me to list but a few.
My point is that common sense would dictate that all the above should be recognized as being potentially troublesome, because everyday experience (not to mention history) can provide endless examples thereof. (Here’s one example of the last in the above list.)
And yet all the above silliness is not only allowed, but encouraged — and then when the S Hits The F, everyone is surprised? (Well, I’m not surprised, and nor is anyone with some vestige of common sense.)
Frankly, I’m done with all of it. Let the social experimenters continue with their endless, foolish experiments, I don’t care a fig.
If girls get raped by men in their high school- or college toilets and locker rooms, I don’t care.
If boys come back from their Scout camps with a shiny new Fellatio Badge: hang the offending Scout leaders and fine / flog / imprison the parents for their negligence; I don’t care.
If every female sailor gets pregnant and has to go on some kind of lifetime G.I. benefits, and ships sink because of a shortage of sailors; so be it.
If the incidence of rape by male warders skyrockets in women’s prisons; whatever.
If female warders get pregnant by their convict boyfriends or help said boyfriends get access to drugs, booze or guns; tell someone who cares.
I’m not interested in getting excited about foolishness and its many consequences.
Because if I do get excited about all the above, then I’m the intolerant one, the male chauvinist, the right-winger, the whatever.
I don’t care about that, either. FOAD, the lot of you.
…or, Flock Off, Part 2:
A Wisconsin woman was pulled over at gunpoint twice in one week after Milwaukee Police Department staff failed to remove a vehicle alert from the Flock license plate camera system.
Fox 6 Milwaukee reports that on Thursday, police in the Milwaukee suburb of Brookfield, Wisconsin, conducted a high-risk traffic stop on Interstate 94 after a Flock camera flagged a vehicle in connection with a Milwaukee homicide investigation. Video footage from the incident shows multiple officers with weapons drawn and a passenger extending their hands out the car window in compliance with police commands.
The vehicle’s driver, Amber Newell, and her passengers were detained during the stop. However, when Brookfield Police contacted the Milwaukee Police Department to coordinate the arrest, MPD informed them they no longer needed the vehicle or its occupants. The officers immediately released Newell and the other individuals.
And if anyone in this party of “desperadoes” had been accidentally shot, it would have resulted in an “Oops, my bad” response from the cops, no doubt.
Remember: “If you’ve done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to worry about.”
Uh huh.
Grex delenda est.
And then we have this little collection of reindeer games:
A quiet battle is happening across the US right between towns working to adopt Flock Safety systems and those trying to ban them entirely. From major cities like Los Angeles canceling its Flock contract to towns wrapping Flock AI cams in plastic bags because Flock won’t take them down, it’s a wild time for surveillance and questions about government accountability.
But what happens when you start seeing Flock’s now-recognizable solar panels and AI cameras going up in your neighborhood? What happens when they start to recognize your car or even individual people?
I don’t want to say what I really feel, at this point, because I may get into trouble. Still, being who I am, I can’t help thinking of this kind of solution:
Then, purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I’m wondering if this might work:
Curious, that’s me. But if you’re going to test the stuff, you may want to get some soon before it mysteriously starts to vanish off the shelves at Home Depot, or from Amazon’s warehouses.
It’s one thing to have to deal with the Gummint snooping on your every move — literal, and figurative (i.e. your online activities) — but it’s another thing to having GlobalMegaCorp sniffing into your business as well.
Ruter, the [Norwegian] transit authority that runs public buses across Oslo and Akershus, parked two electric buses inside an isolated facility built into a mountain, the kind of shielded space normally used to keep radio signals from leaking in or out, and let its own security engineers take them apart. One bus came from Yutong, the Chinese manufacturer that has quietly become one of Europe’s largest electric bus suppliers. The other was a three-year-old unit from VDL, a Dutch manufacturer. Ruter chose that pairing deliberately: the two buses sit at opposite ends of how connected a modern transit vehicle can be.
And the findings?
Ruter’s own published findings are blunt about the VDL [Dutch] bus: it has no capability for over-the-air software updates at all. Every change to its systems requires a technician to physically connect a cable. That makes it a hassle to service. It also makes it nearly impossible to hijack remotely, which is exactly why Ruter’s engineers moved past it quickly.
The Yutong [Chinese] bus is the opposite. It receives software and diagnostic updates automatically, the same way a phone downloads a firmware patch overnight, except this particular phone weighs roughly 30,000 pounds and carries dozens of passengers through Oslo traffic. That connection routes through a Romanian SIM card, which gives Yutong direct digital access to the bus’s battery and power management systems. Ruter’s engineers concluded that, in theory, this access could be used to stop the bus or render it inoperable, not through some elaborate hack, but simply because the manufacturer already has a standing door into those systems for legitimate diagnostic and update purposes.
Wile all this is alarming, it’s not really surprising. We’ve known for ages that the godless ChiCommies have their dirty little ears glued to just about every damn piece of electronic equipment our friends (!) in Silicon Valley have outsourced to their manufacture.
So now we get to the part that makes me start fixing a lunch bucket, scoping out high buildings and cleaning the Mauser.
None of what Ruter found is exotic. It’s the standard architecture of any modern connected vehicle, and American drivers have been living with a version of it for nearly two decades. General Motors’ OnStar system can, at the company’s discretion, send a cellular command to a stolen vehicle that blocks the ignition from restarting once it’s parked, or gradually slows a moving vehicle so police can recover it safely. That is functionally the same category of access Ruter found in the Yutong bus: a persistent, manufacturer-controlled cellular link with authority over propulsion-adjacent systems, built into the vehicle before it ever reaches a customer’s driveway.
So Big Auto are a bunch of snooping smegma-eaters. We know that, too.
The distinction that actually matters here isn’t whether a manufacturer can reach into a vehicle remotely. Almost every connected car sold today allows that, by design, for updates, diagnostics, and theft recovery. What matters is who holds the authority to use that access, under what legal process, and how many vehicles go dark at once if that access is ever misused, subpoenaed, or compromised.
A single stolen sedan getting slowed to a stop by its own manufacturer is a feature working as intended. An entire transit authority’s bus fleet answering to a remote command from a foreign supplier’s server is a different order of risk entirely, which is exactly why Ruter escalated this to Norway’s national government instead of treating it as an IT ticket.
Now comes the part that has me checking Ye Olde Ammoe Locquer for 8x57mm:
Chinese abuse of this little backdoor activity [sic] is bad, but in the bigger picture, it can be addressed with a carefully-aimed chunk or two of explosive material on the Three Gorges Dam.
What worries me more is that this little pipeline into our cars can also be — and is — at the beck and call of the auto manufacturers, who are only too ready to “share” that data with, say, the insurance industry (hello, fresh revenue stream), and if pressed just a little, with our own Gummint ghouls who infest the alphabet agencies (DHS, NSA, FBI, just to name the three biggest dicks aimed at out collective rectums).
I need to get to the range. So if you’ll excuse me…