Is this your life? Quit.

You first

This article doesn't seem to hit or clarify any of the major points around police and official corruption or the involvement of the Mormon church, which are in my opinion the most interesting part of this.

There was a false report of heroin in a car where police identified the back seat passenger as Ben by name at the beginning of the search. They also arrested him while serving legal papers which is protected, and refused to serve the papers themselves.

> This article doesn't seem to hit or clarify any of the major points around police and official corruption or the involvement of the Mormon church

The article did mention an "extremely bizarre, 30-minute YouTube video" that was "quite possibly" made by the police department about the arrests which "must be seen to be believed" but then failed to link to it. Wikipedia lists some of the police stuff, including the "residential targeted picketing" thing which sounds like a possible first amendment issue. The article and the wikipedia page didn't say anything about the Mormons though. Can you summarize their involvement?

The people stealing legos were Mormons.

The cops defending the thieves and harassing the owners and investigators were Mormons.

The Bricks and Minifigs CEO has a degree in psychology from Brigham Young University. The American Fork police are high school graduates, members of the LDS community. In the body cam footage, note how one refers to the other as “brother”.

On the contrary, with the amount of times I went to ask for help and was failed pedagogically, plus not being able to afford tutoring like my peers had, I think access to an LLM would have genuinely boosted my grades.

I still did well, but I had gaps for which there was no help outside of the internet available.

The risk or difference is that tutoring helped people learn which they can use to do the work, whereas with only one or two different words an LLM will do the work (that proves you have learned) for you. A tutor has limits, but an LLM needs to be asked to set limits. And especially younger people are less likely to "punish themselves" like that.

You're using it to help you study and think, which is great, but the original post was about how many people are bypassing that step entirely.

There were long ancestral lines of humans who were very very keen on not redistributing power for many generations.

They were called kings. Cutting their heads off was the best thing to happen to society, ever.

Take the long view. Our particular economic and ideological moment is not worth defending.

This is ahistoric drivel.

China and Russia are simple examples of the fallout of "cutting king's heads".

So awesome in China that they went straight back to a lifetime emperor now.

The French Revolution and its fallout (communism, fascism) killed more humans than any other historic movement, triggering 2 world wars, including numerous genocides.

Blaming an event that happened in 1789 for the first and second world wars seems incredibly far fetched. Maybe we should blame the aggressors who started the wars.

Lernen Sie Geschichte! -- Fred Sinowatz

I am willing to surrender some property rights for a functional distributive society, pragmatically.

Some.

Most of us are. That's what taxes are, in fact. We have private property rights, and we have to pay taxes. The hard-core anti-tax people try to make that a contradiction; most of the rest of us don't think of it that way, so their "taxation is theft" rhetoric falls flat.

But I think it's important that we keep it at some. Major erosions of private property rights in order "to tax the rich" make me nervous, because I don't want to lose those rights myself. And taking the rights from them, but I get to keep them, seems likely to not be a stable equilibrium.

That's fine, you can be nervous.

Seems like a slippery slope argument to forestall any practical positive change which doesn't directly immediately benefit you.

What's actually going to happen though, is every principled parasite at the top will fight tooth and nail to protect every principled right they have while for example the health care, infrastructure, and institutions decline, and they will happily support a fascist demagogue rather than give up those rights (on principles of course! Not on pesky reality).

This is not the first time around. Wealth concentrating policies rely on appealing to the middle class' fear that someone, somewhere will get a benefit that I won't. So principled!

And it works.

C.f. the discussion in Australia right now over whether increasing capital gains tax is 'fair'... The right is talking on principles, conveniently ignoring the massive tax breaks and regulatory capture that have resulted in huge measurable increases in wealth concentration, and justifying those spuriously as overall productivity increases. Principles for thee, pragmatism for me.

Pretty sure he'd be down for that

Drop by his residence and ask, why not.