As always, it's a careful balance. And specific to every bus route/stop combination, not to mention it can change over time. Routes should always be evaluated based on ridership data, where people are getting on & off, how long each stop actually delays the overall journey, and more.
Don't discount the ability of political extremists to discount even the evidence they see themselves (or reframe it massively), if it conflicts with their agenda.
If a dem wins in 2028, the big push will be one of reconciliation and acceptance. Let bygones be bygones. And it'll happen. And then for the next 4 years conservative media will absolutely pound that person's backside over made up and/or exaggerated corruption claims. Then in 2032 the GOP candidate will claim they're going to look into these claims.
Yep. Remember when people were expecting Obama to prosecute Bush for war crimes? He should have, but chickened out and decided he would instead carry on Bush's transgressions as the new status quo.
> He should have, but chickened out and decided he would instead carry on Bush's transgressions as the new status quo.
With hindsight, it's pretty hard to believe that wasn't always the plan.
It was a pretty clever plan too, because everyone calling Obama out for [mass surveillance, illegal wars, promoting the '08 crash bankers, torture, funding ICE, bombing a wedding/s, assassinating US citizens without trial, attacking whistleblowers, using his supermajority to implement a Heritage Foundation healthcare plan, etc] was dismissed as a racist.
To this day I see people talk about the tan suit and the dijon mustard thing as if those fake outrage stories were the worst things he did. 'Wasn't it nice to have a President who could talk in complete sentences'.
To be fair, it was nice to have a president that could speak in complete sentences. But yes, I agree that people go way too easy on Obama and present fake controversies as his worst. It should be possible to simultaneously recognize a president's strengths while also being critical of his flaws, but unfortunately American culture seems to have a growing personality cult problem, and it's generally just assumed that if you're not glazing a politician, you're an extremist from the other side doing false flag rhetoric or something inane like that.
Your scepticism is well warranted. That's exactly the playbook Biden chose to follow, and I agree the most likely outcome is the next admin will follow it again.
However, I am unfortunately an incurable optimist, and sometimes we Americans really do pull off amazing feats. I live in the Twin Cities and we actually defeated DHS/CBP/ICE here. It was an amazing thing to witness, and maybe there is enough outrage at this admin's looting of the US that we can build the support nationally to do that kind of thing again.
"Defeated" is an interesting way to look at it. My perception is that the administration was just using the Twin Cities as a distraction, like they do for basically everything. In the mean time, the higher ups get their business deals done while the commoners are busy wasting energy cleaning up the mess. In which case, they succeeded. Now, onto the next distraction, and then the next one, and so on and so forth.
Minnesota has a very high probability of sending 2 Democrat senators and all their electoral votes to the Democrat presidential candidate. Minnesota and the Twin Cities are of zero consequence to this administration, so why not use them as a distraction?
The primary goal of the administration, sweeping tax cuts, was already accomplished in Jul 2025, so even Congress is of limited value now until after the next presidential election.
They certainly liked the distraction, but the invasion of MN allowed them to 1) catch some illegal immigrants, 2) intimidate legal immigrants, encouraging them to "self deport", 3) flex their power and demonstrate the ability to cause pain and harm to political enemies, and 4) give agents practice and training for the next city they invade. So far they have had these "surges" in Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and Minneapolis. There are plenty more cities in blue states and plenty of money left in their budget, and almost 3 years left in this administration.
I blame Garland for much of the mess we are in. If the DOJ had done their job regarding the Jan 6 insurrection we wouldn't be here talking about stupid tarrifs that caused a year of turbulence for US businesses and contributed to inflation, for no good reason (and this might be the least of the problems caused by the Trump admin).
It seemed like the Democrats selected Garland just so they could poke the Republicans in the eye. "You blocked him from SCOTUS so now we're going to make him Attorney General, how you like them apples?" Without really considering whether he'd actually do a good job.
I agree; but different times called for different measures. There was also too much of a feeling of "whew, that was close, but now we can get back to normal" instead of "let's make sure that never happens again".
If you care to read a bit more about it [0], then the Garland pick looks a lot more sinister.
That's Sarah Kendzior, one of the few journalists who was talking about Epstein long before all that started to became well known.
'Fun' fact: The Attorney General is able to unseal court documents at will. And for four years Garland didn't do that with the Epstein files. It was beyond clear that the SC were slow rolling Ghislaine Maxwell's appeal, and still nothing even leaked.
I've dealt with postgres DBs larger than that in size though with no stored procedures and have never run into such problems. Except for a single table in a single DB at one stop, and that was a special case of people being extra stupid.
Granted, DB size isn't the best metric to be using here in terms of performance, but it's the one you used.
Have worked on many a non-toy java application. Have never used things like Lombok hiding getters/setters behind the covers. Never found this to be a real world problem.
The more modern take is to not bother with getters & setters for most things. People were cargo-cutting getters/setters on every variable without thinking about the implications.
First off, there's the question of if most things should even *allow* updates or just be immutable.
Second, what's the discernable difference between `public final int foo` and `private final foo` w/ `public int getFoo()`. Nothing really. The claim was always "but what if you want to update `foo` to be something more complex? The pain that these advocates always suggested never really wound up being much of a real world problem.
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