I don’t understand why they don’t just make the whole street permanently pedestrian-only. This isn’t that hard. You move things by cart along the street itself. Need to make a delivery? You drive it to within a couple blocks, then use a cart. Same for taking trash out.

This isn’t some radical new kind of logistics. Every shopping mall in America works like this. Shop owners don’t complain that they can’t drive a delivery truck right up to their store front in the mall. Customers manage to park and walk around just fine. Trash gets cleaned up.

This is the solution to this problem. But the people of the city or state are just too motoronormative to comprehend it.

Or just give a key to the fire department and the municipal waste department.

They should install permanent barriers that can stop the largest of trucks. Then simply close the whole area off to vehicle traffic. Within the district, the only vehicles allowed are bicycles, cargo bikes, and small golf carts. You bring in deliveries by bicycle or other small electric vehicle. People living there can park their vehicles a few block away in lots located outside the pedestrian-only zone. Trash can hauled by cart a few blocks and then transferred to regular trucks.

We have zero problem organizing logistics like these for every shopping mall in the country. Yet somehow it become impossible the moment the shopping mall no longer has a roof on it.

Ok. Here’s a crazy idea. We just…stop with the street cleaning and trash collection. First, pass a law that everything must be sold in biodegradable containers. Then, just let things lay wherever they are dropped! Over time, like archaeological sediment, all the trash dumped in the French Quarter will slowly compact, decompose, and turn into soil, thus raising the elevation of the ground. As the French Quarter is already one of the highest elevations in the city, this increased sediment will flow downhill, gradually raising the elevation of the entire city. Eventually, they won’t even need the dyke system anymore, as the whole city will be raised well above sea level! The city will be like one of those ancient Mississippian mound building cultures. Except this mound will mostly be composed of piss, vomit, and plastic beads.

I see PG&E mentioned a lot, but as an outsider, I have to ask, are they just being used as a scapegoat? If you have a tinder-dry forest, yes, the most likely spark is going to be from a faulty electrical line. But sooner or later, that forest is going to burn. If not by an electric wire, then by a lightning strike, random static discharge, sparks from a bit of metal dragging on a car, or some random idiot with a cigarette butt.

I’m honestly curious if there has been any kind of study on this. Do acres near PG&E lines statistically burn at higher rates than those not nearby these lines?

Satire is dead.

I say we’re not jumping to conclusions enough!

<tinfoil hat>

Maybe it was a false flag attack, one planned and executed by Musk himself! He contacts one of his most ardent fanboys on X. He tells him that he’s arranging a get together for some of his greatest fans in Las Vegas. He says to load your cybertruck up with as many fireworks and gas cans as you can. From there everyone will drive out to the desert, hold a huge bonfire, and set off fireworks. And they will all meet up at the front door of Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. Musk waits til the mark does this. Once the car’s GPS indicates it is in position, Musk simply activates the secret remote self destruct he’s built into every cybertruck. It turns out, every one of those is a bomb that Musk can set off at any time through a simple web interface. He just clicks a button, an overload is triggered in the batteries, and the whole thing goes up in flames. The fireworks and gasoline just serve to multiply the blast, provide an explanation for the explosion, and to kill the only witness to Musk’s plot.

It turns out he wasn’t a terrorist! He was an innocent fool who thought Musk invited to a party. Musk is basically Lex Luthor at this point. Would you really put something like this past him? It’s not like he hasn’t integrated secret features into cars before. Why not a remote self destruct that can only be activated at the sole discretion of Musk himself?

</tinfoil hat>

No no. We need to better recreate the climate of Palestine if we’re going to ask millions of Israelis to relocate. You need a warm, coastal and arid Mediterranean climate. And we need an area that’s currently largely underpopulated.

Thus, we must…REUNIFY CALIFORNIA! For too long have Baja and Alta been disunited. It is time to annex Baja California, to reunify it with its Northern neighbor! Then we will offer large stretches of land in Baja California for Israeli Jews to settle in. That way they can have a homeland without oppressing the native Muslim population.

There’s always crime! Working the night shift brings all sorts of possibilities!

There are no wealthy men in the Kingdom of Heaven. There are no billionaires in paradise. In the end, every last one of them burns.

We should make being a billionaire like trying to run the wrong way up a downward escalator, or like trying to swim up a waterfall. A wealth tax on wealth over $10 million. Starts at zero and exponentially rises to the point where at $1 billion of wealth, you need to be making a 50% rate of return on your investments to stay above $1 billion. Getting richer and richer should be like trying to swim against the current of a river, as that river flows faster and faster.

One cool feature of doing this would mean that if you saw someone who managed to stay a billionaire, it means they actually do have some pretty good business acumen. I’m not impressed by a capitalist who was born rich and simply grew their hoard. I would be impressed by someone who managed to stay a billionaire even with the state taxing 50% of their wealth on an annual basis.

Timberborn! I do love those beavers.

I’m going to laugh if it turns out that those aren’t actual IEDs planted by a terrorist, but just fireworks hid on the scene earlier by revelers. They were hoping to sneak them past the guards before the event even started.

I know. We’ll just use anti-vehicle land mines instead! That will keep the cars at bay and make everyone feel safe!

And if you get too drunk and pass out on the sidewalk, you don’t wake up in the police dunk tank. Instead you wake up in the city dump!

They would do far less damage to the roads than the normal traffic rolling over them would over the same period. Damage to the road occurs primarily through point loads. These are distributed area loads that only exert a modest pressure on the ground.

As long as they had a sample of his hand writing, which wouldn’t be too hard to get, it would be easy enough to take. Discrepancies could be blamed on his back injury. Any police officer can pull up drivers license records, and those usually have a signature in them. You could extrapolate a handwriting style just from a signature. Or maybe it’s just in block lettering so hand writing is less distinctive.

And again, we’re dealing with a department that has literally been caught on camera planting evidence on people. They’re not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Every civil right you enjoy was fought and died for. The world can change and it has changed. I don’t remember the last time I had to swear an oath of fealty to my local Lord.

Yeah I agree, I’m not even convinced it is Luigi. The killer deliberately dressed in a way that hundreds of people in NY are dressed as at any given time. I’m skeptical of the trail they’ve pieced together from video camera footage. It’s unlikely they have continuous shots of him going from one side of the city to the other.

And the thing is, I’m extremely skeptical of anything the NYPD says. They just recently had a case thrown out when they were caught on camera planting evidence. How many times do you have to plant evidence before you get caught on camera doing it?

I don’t know if Luigi did it or not. But if he didn’t do it, here’s one plausible scenario for how he didn’t do it that would still account for all the evidence we’ve seen publicly:

He’s reportedly bisexual and from a wealthy and likely conservative family. And he hadn’t talked to his family in months; they were actively looking for him. He got some severe back injury, and maybe he decides to just get away from unaccepting and overbearing family, perhaps for awhile, perhaps permanently. He wants to get away and find himself, just walk the Earth for awhile. So he’s been living out of various hostels and homeless shelters for awhile in various cities. To keep his family from tracking him down, he gets a fake ID and travels under an assumed name. He wears a hoodie and mask almost everywhere, as he doesn’t want his family to track him down. And he is genuinely worried about covid living in a hostel.

He’s staying in NYC. A few days after the shooting, to his horror, he sees his own picture on the news listed as the killer. He freaks out and flees the city. He eventually gets picked up by the cops in Pennsylvania.

Unbeknownst to him, he was struck with the combination of terrible luck and a corrupt police department. Luigi happened to be dressed like the killer, and he happened to be near the scene of the crime within a few hours of the killing. A camera catches him placing a wrapper or bottle in a trash can. And his DNA is on it. The cops falsely conclude the killer is the one that put the wrapper in the trash, and they now are certain they have the DNA of the killer. (Another possibility is that the actual killer stood by a public trash can and waited until someone dressed like him happened to drop a wrapper in the trash, and then deliberately planted it near the scene.) They do some detective work, and find that Luigi has been living in an assumed name with a fake ID in a hostel.

So the cops are 90% certain they have the guy. They have a guy that vaguely looks like the killer, is using a fake ID, and whose DNA was found near the scene. In their minds, that’s an airtight case, and they convince themselves that this makes it OK to fake further evidence to seal the deal. When they arrest Luigi, they plant the untraceable gun on him along with that manifesto, that was conveniently had written, and not published electronically like you would expect a software engineer to do.

And moreover, if the cops were going to just pick a convenient scapegoat, who better than Luigi? He’s a young kid, estranged from his family, living in hostels and homeless shelters. He was basically living as a drifter. That’s the exact kind of low social status person that cops would be tempted to foist something like this on.

I can’t prove any of this obviously. But the one thing that sticks with me is Luigi’s only public statement. He hasn’t issued any public statement. But there was that one time, before he started working with his lawyer, where he shouted to the crowd of reporters. He didn’t shout, “this was for the the innocent victims of Brian Thompson!” Or “I apologize for nothing!” Or some other statement that you would expect a proud martyr for a cause to make. Instead, he shouted, “this is an insult to the intelligence of the American people!”

That’s the kind of thing an innocent man would shout. That’s the kind of thing one would shout if you had just been framed by the NYPD. That is the cry of a young man who knows he is being framed and faces literal execution for a crime he didn’t commit. I would be enraged too.

And again, this isn’t outlandish, the NYPD has been caught faking evidence many times before. If they already had a decently strong case due to the DNA at the scene, I could absolutely see them trying to wrap it up quickly by planting the gun and manifesto on him.

People like to share these “Saint Luigi” memes. But if he actually is innocent, literally not the man who pulled the trigger? If he were to be still convicted, executed, and later the truth come to light? He would be a completely innocent martyr. That’s the kind of thing that actually could get some one canonized as literal official Saint of the Catholic Church.

I of course can’t prove any of this, and it is possible that Luigi really did do it. Cameras and lighting can make people look very different. Or maybe the cops have a lot stronger evidence that they just haven’t released yet. But this is the kind of theory of the case I could see the defense making. And ultimately, they don’t have to prove Luigi didn’t do it. They just have to show reasonable doubt. And based on the entirely circumstantial evidence we have, combined with the NYPD’s predilection for fabricating evidence, at least right now with the publicly available evidence, I think reasonable doubt absolutely exists.

Can you imagine the timeline where Luigi gets off through jury nullification, and then he does it again? That would be something to see.