We're heading to a water park for the day, and I don't have any good ideas for a thread.

Concerns, calamities, and whatnot?

I'm extremely worried about public opinion. That somehow Trump will land on his feet, and all these horrible things - deportations and immigration rallies, kicking people off health care, destroying the university research engine of the country - will be met with a shrug, or lack of attention. That the generic voter lacks any sense of scale, and will draw lazy equivalencies between Biden and Trump, and never connect any dots.

It's all such a galling unforced error!! As a country, we didn't have to make our own lives shittier and less healthy and worse! We didn't have to vote for mass economic precariousness and stealth poisoning! There are so many real problems that need careful, actual planning and instead we're just razing everything to the ground. We've put the worst fucking people in charge and we're stuck with this, and we're only 1/8th of the way through this term.

Sorry, I know this is not a new thought in any sense.

Flock Cameras are license plate reader cameras that police put on intersections. Then if you're looking for a green minivan, you can run a query on all the data, and find out where it's been recorded over the last 30 days. Obviously this all hinges on having a big, nationwide database, which they do, and it's creepy. Neighborhoods and private organizations can put up these cameras and then share their data with the police, too. The ACLU does not like them one bit. They cooperate with ICE and are used to track down women who go out of state to have abortions.

Anyway, Austin is ending their LPR program, and Heebieville is on track to do something similar. This is how I've come to find out how exactly the nonexistent the guard rails are, especially once you've got a revenge-based federal administration in place.

It's just kind of shocking how little coverage this network of surveillance has gotten.