As Threads "soars", Bluesky and Mastodon are adopting algorithmic feeds. (Tech Crunch) You will eat the bugs. You will live in the pod. You will read what we tell you. You will own nothing and we don't much care if you are happy.

The toughest part of the game is easily deciding which club you will use because the game gives you absolutely no clue on how long a club will take you, if you use its full potiental. Well, I calculated the distances... use this table to find which club you would use when in need. ---------------------------- | Club | Max. Distance | |----------------------------| | 1W | 260 yards | | 3W | 230 yards | | 4W | 220 yards | | 1I | 210 yards | | 3I | 190 yards | | 4I | 180 yards | | 5I | 170 yards | | 6I | 160 yards | | 7I | 150 yards | | 8I | 140 yards | | 9I | 125 yards | | PW | 100 yards | | SW | 75 yards | | PT | 30 yards

The star ratings that we dole out for Preview Guide aren't indicative of a show's overall quality, of course; we've only got one or two episodes to go on, after all. Instead, they indicate how good of a job a first episode does at convincing viewers to keep on watching in the coming weeks.

"After years of research, our engineers have created a revolution in social media technology: a Twitter clone on Instagram that offers the absolute worst of both worlds," said a VR headset-wearing Zuckerberg in an address to dozens of friends in the Metaverse. "At long last, you can read caustic hot takes written by talentless idiots, while still enjoying oppressive censorship and sepia-toned thirst traps from yoga pants models with obnoxious lip injections. You're welcome!"

How do you organize all of the things you read? My system is actually pretty simple, and it relies on organizing my regular reads, quick digesting and sorting one-off articles, and sometimes doing extensive note-taking with online apps.

Where such denial-of-service conditions occur, Cloudflare provides a bizarre “one more step” page inviting the visitor to complete a reCAPTCHA to access the site. Cloudflare claims that this is based on IP reputation, which constitutes a fallacious equivocation of IPs and users which has been found to be highly detrimental to Tor users in terms of the browseability of the web.

§ 1003.36 Record of proceeding. The Immigration Court shall create and control the Record of Proceeding.

Jokic joins Antetokounmpo, Dirk Nowitzki, Tony Parker, Tim Duncan and Hakeem Olajuwon as the only players born overseas to take home the Finals award.

I got a result, but only by emailing bwtsupport at microsoft dot com. They resolved it. I also sent a letter to their legal dept, but I think emailing their support did the trick. This is not a published email I dug it up in a forum post. Worked. Hope you get help too.

For example, the older model had a 1 GHz dual-core processor, while the new version has a 1.8 GHz quad-core chip. Since the company is tight-lipped about exactly which processors are powering these devices, it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison, but it sure sounds like the new model should be a bit more responsive.Both models have just 1GB of RAM, but the original InkPad Color had just 16GB of built-in storage, while the new model has twice as much. That said, it seems like the company might have omitted one feature when building the new model: there’s no longer a microSD card reader.

Check if your website access logs contains prod.uhrs.playmsn.com in refarrals, then your site has been manually banned, by some guy from india or south america, that system provides low-paid clickworker reviews metrics without feedbacks.Bing now looks like mafia.

Just added RSS links to many of my categories. They’ve always existed, I just figured it would be nice to include them in the category description.

(b) Motion to Advance — A request to advance a hearing date (move the hearing to an earlier date) should be made by written motion.  A motion to advance should completely articulate the reasons for the request.  The motion should be filed with a cover page labeled “MOTION TO ADVANCE” and comply with the deadlines and requirements for filing.  See Chapter 5.2 (Filing a Motion), Appendix E (Cover Pages).

Select the book, click 'Edit meta information', click the book icon with the '+' in the top right corner of the 'Edit Meta Information' dialog.

Let's say you want to tell your audience that your character is angry. You could just have them say “I'm angry.” But how often does a person in real life ever plainly announce their anger that way? Have you ever been able to tell someone was angry without them telling you? What if instead of having our character say “I'm angry,” you write them entering their house and slamming the door behind them so hard that picture frames fall off the wall and shatter on the floor. Air hisses out of their mouths as they huff and puff through gritted teeth. That's usually better writing. That's what “show, don't tell” means. But what if I told you that Kare Kano breaks this golden rule of writing, and does so with incredible results?

The game went on to be a minor hit in Japan, selling over 100,000 copies -- and was followed up by a Game Boy version which, thanks to Pokemon's popularity, sold over 300,000, launching the new franchise.

"It wasn't all that easy to apply the concept of living life in the countryside to a game design document," said Yasuhiro Wada, creator of the Harvest Moon franchise. Wada had moved to Tokyo after being brought up in the countryside. Though he had no interest in returning to that environment, he finally understood its advantages compared to the big city, and thus wanted to turn that experience into a game. The problem was that he didn't know how. "I needed to nail the player experience," said Wada, but he had a problem: "How do you express the game system of living while working?"

“It looked like we’d run out of time and would have to scrap the battling feature, but Nintendo made it clear they wanted battles in the game, so we had to make it happen”, he explained“So I just thought, ‘well no choice then, it has to be done,’ and the early battles were something you just watched. You would just see there was a battle and who won and who lost.”Morimoto revealed that when this element was first shown to Nintendo, the feedback was negative. “We showed that to Nintendo and the surveys we got back called it ‘boring’,” Morimoto said. “I guess they were right, but we were cutting it close to the deadline trying to add in battles that the player commands.“Ultimately, it’s what everyone wanted, so we got it to work with the Link Cable and made it a reality.”

Ai Ebihara is the kind of character that you expect to hate from the get-go, but her struggle surprisingly becomes one of the better links in the game. Ai is pretty and rich, and she knows it – something that makes her insufferable at the start. She is always stroking her own ego, keeping up appearances, and spends her time being generally self-centered. But it takes a form of rejection to show Ai is dealing with some heavy feelings, even suicidal thoughts. What I loved so much about Ai’s social link is that it’s unpredictable – a rollercoaster of uncertainty. Every time you think you know where you stand with the girl and make progress, you get slapped in the face with an unsettling event or revelation. The question the link poses: Is there a redeeming quality about her? Can a kind soul be all it takes to save someone? Watching it all unfold is beautiful.  

Nine states right now don’t assess personal income taxes—Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming—with Mississippi the most likely to join their ranks in 2023.

I temporarily disabled hBlock by generating a hosts file with no blocked domains. In order to do this, I opened a terminal window and, per the hBlock README, typed:hblock -S none -D none

ranslated by zalas as part of al|together 2005, io[ChristmasEve] is a novel game made in the KiriKiri engine. The game received an update a year after the release of the translation patch which caused the patched game to crash immediately after starting, so my friend at the group Re*define has made a fix for it, making the game playable from start to finish. The fix consists of removing malfunctioning lines calling for an apparently nonexistent object called options2Menu. The XP3 archive was worked on with insani's xp3tools-20060708 available at http://insani.org/tools/. The fix has been tested on Windows XP and Windows 10.

In addition to pigeon, crow, and eagle, there is also a “sexy pigeon” option which coos much more sexually than your average pigeon.

Steam emulator for GNU/Linux and Windows that emulates steam online features. Lets you play games that use the steam multiplayer apis on a LAN without steam or an internet connection.

Tanabe Meito is a psychology student in the “World of Light”, a completely ordered world were people don’t have a shadow. He’s not entirely satisfied, though; and when he meets a girl with a shadow called Shimon he ends going with her to the “World of Shadow”, a rural village where the people are shadows, and Shimon is the only one with both body and shadow. Right after that they meet two other persons with body and shadow: a girl with no memories, who they finally name Sou, and a woman also with no memories but who recalls being called Riri. Then they start living together in Shimon’s house, and have mostly slice-of-life happenings while they investigate a mysterious voice Meito heard just before going to the World of Shadow, and Meito gets used to the shadow people. And while that’s happening you have scenes of a boy who lives with his mother, who eats him, until he discover eating is love, eats her, and goes out into the outer world. Then things get real trippy, and nothing else makes any sense, until the very end, or ever.

Game & Watch games are even more “pick up and play” than your average arcade game and are generally about score. Nintendo also aggresively pursued licenses like Mickey Mouse and Snoopy, because of the higher resolution art that made possible. This was an early example of a Nintendo philosophy known as “lateral thinking with withered technology” which we see even today, where their console uses an older mobile system-on-a-chip to successfully compete with much higher-end consoles.

And Minnesota lottery officials had hoped to launch a pilot project that would have let people purchase lottery tickets through through Nintendo units in their homes.Nintendo decks, estimated to be in 32 percent of Minnesota homes, would have been equipped with special lottery cartridges and a telephone modem. But the idea was abandoned after vocal protests from several powerful state legislators.''Intruding into people`s homes and converting a game which is immensely popular with young children into a gambling tool is not only unethical, but insidiously destructive to society,'' state Senate Majority Leader Roger Moe told reporters in St. Paul when the idea was floated in September.

The fingerless gloves have padded palms.

Tug o’ War’s warning in Mario Party Superstars explicitly says “do not rotate [the stick] with the palm of your hand.” But 2000s kids remember that, in the cold, cruel world of Mario Party, where you don’t get participation trophies, you had to be willing to sacrifice a hand. Now that they’re adults, I expect them to pass this lesson along to the next generation.

As CNET reported way, way back in 2002, Spitzer’s office negotiated an agreement with Nintendo for the company to provide four (4) pairs of sports gloves to every Mario Party owner who wanted them. (This request had to be accompanied by some rather onerous proof of ownership and purchase information.) Very few parents were believed to have actually taken up Nintendo on this offer. Fewer than 100 complained directly to Nintendo.

2000 - Nintendo agrees to supply protective sports gloves to American owners of the Mario Party video game for the Nintendo 64. The Attorney General's office of New York had complained to the company after hearing many reports about children being injured playing the game.

I can’t say I’ve ever hurt myself, but I had a friend who got one nasty blister in the palm of his hand from playing the orignal Mario Party on the N64. I remember he was going around showing it to everyone at school the next day. He was so proud of himself.

Llewelyn described the gloves as "similar to weight-lifting gloves" with padded palms. The Attorney General's office estimated the cost per user could be as much as $18.

Nintendo will provide each family with up to four gloves as part of the settlement. In addition to the cost of the gloves, Nintendo has also agreed to pay for the state's legal fees, totaling about $75,000.

While no case was actually filed, the New York attorney general's office has received almost 100 complaints from consumers whose children had sustained hand wounds from playing any of five different levels of the Nintendo 64 game. The injuries ranged from friction burns and blisters to lacerations and punctures.

"This settlement is good news for the parents throughout the nation," said New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. "Nintendo has agreed to take responsibility for the effect of its games on young people."

Video game maker Nintendo of America Inc. agreed on Thursday to provide protective gloves to approximately 1.2 million children who play the game Mario Party. The agreement is part of a settlement with the New York state attorney general's office and could cost Nintendo (ntdoy) up to $80 million.

The gloves offered to players resembled that of a weight-lifting glove, similar to the Harbinger brand, with thick padding on the palms. The Attorney General’s office at the time estimated the cost per user was about $18 USD in damages (And gloves).

Beth Llewelyn, a spokeswomen for Nintendo at the time, stressed that the total cost to the company will more than likely be much less then $80 million USD. “We have had only 90 or so complaints in the year that the game has been on the market,” she said. “We don’t know how many people are going to take advantage of the offer.”

The 5 mini-games in question were Paddle Battle, Tug O’War, Pedal Power, Cast Aways, and Deep Sea Divers, and children needed to rapidly rotate the joystick to succeed at the activities. In many cases, children (And adults) developed horrible blisters on the palm of their hands.

As of December 1999, about 1.15 million copies of "Mario Party" had been sold in the United States, according to the AG's office, which estimated the offer could cost Nintendo $80 million if every consumer takes advantage of it. The actual cost is expected to be much lower, however, as fewer than 100 parents have complained directly to Nintendo since the game went on the market a year ago.

Under the settlement, Nintendo agreed to provide four sets of sports gloves to each "Mario Party" owner who sends in a request. The rather elaborate proof-of-purchase requirements are detailed at (800) 521-0900.

The recorded message on the company's "Mario Party" hotline, however, recommends that players avoid injuries simply by manipulating the joystick with their thumb and forefinger rather than the palm of the hand.

"The alarming thing was how little time some of these children spent playing the game before they were injured," Pritchard said. "One parent said their child had been playing the game for 15 to 20 minutes when they got a second-degree burn."

"One kid got a tetanus shot," said Christi Pritchard, a spokeswoman for New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Mario Party might be accused of producing the same concepts over and over again, but it has a storied and interesting history to it. Most older gamers will likely remember the “glove” incident, where the Nintendo 64 controller was so tough that it damaged player’s hands, forcing Nintendo of America to provide protective gloves and paid $75,000 in legal fees.

We write the endings so that everything wraps up tidily in the end, you see. The choices make a small impact—maybe making things a little easier, or a little harder. However, there is one really big choice to make. We did our best to make it as big as possible. (laughs) I think it will get players' chests pounding.

We had just ported DQI&II to the SFC, and for the first time in quite awhile, I got to play DQII again. I thought it was fun how many different places you have access to. That's why, for DQVI I suggested we craft a world that, while still retaining a dramatic story, allowed higher degree of player freedom and let you do things in the order you wanted.

trying to avoid contradictions with these two opposing goals was tough.

Our company tends to draw a lot of detailed, realistic characters, and it turned out that lot of the designers had privately been waiting for an opportunity to draw characters in this style, but were reluctant to say so.

The sense of wonder and discovery that made all the cruelty of the Abyss worth enduring is gone, replaced with increasingly over-the-top attempts at shock horror that crescendos with a concept so ludicrous it stops being horrifying and starts being embarrassing.

I love the first season of MiA, even more now than I did when it first aired. And on paper I should be down for more of this fascinating, macabre world of wonders and horrors. But somewhere in this second season, the graceful balancing act that made it all so compelling fell apart. Maybe it's that our main trio feel like barely relevant observers of a story largely divorced from them, loading all of Reg's character development into a flashback he doesn't even remember and relegating Nanachi to a half-season-long nap just so we can retread their goodbye to Mitty. Maybe it's the fact that the slow-burn mystery of the titular city feels as hollow as its main residents, ramping up its increasingly aimless body horror to the point that it starts to feel like an Aristocrats joke that's gone on way too long.

Mr. Sunak said in a series of tweets that Britain’s 30 Confucius Institutes, most of which are Chinese government-run facilities located on British university campuses, will be shuttered under his government’s new China policies.  cnxps.cmd.push(function () { cnxps({ playerId: '2dd9afad-0104-402b-b341-830f7d9e8ccc' }).render('52b1f7f094294ef9a64f6c534558cada'); }); “Almost all UK government spending on Mandarin language teaching at school is channeled through university-based Confucius Institutes, thereby promoting Chinese soft power,” Mr. Sunak said. Mr. Sunak also said he will seek a new alliance of free nations to counter Chinese cyber threats and to improve the security of technology, a major target of Chinese covert and overt acquisition.

Honestly, the lack of support for RSS is one of the reasons I'm disinclined to embrace the standards they promote. Maybe if I understood why this is the case I'd feel better about seeing myself as part of this group.

Over time, this overt position against RSS/Atom feeds has subsided, and (per the IndieWeb website), I would say the current focus is on the principles of (1) principles over project-centric focus, (2) publish on your site, and (3) design and UX come first, then protocols and formats are developed second. In that list, RSS and Atom become part of a “plurality of projects“, acknowledging that there can be “more than one way to do it”, as Perl devotees like to say.

In the meeting, however, I asked how the attendees expected people to keep up with site updates without some type of feed to monitor. Aaron’s response was that more people needed to adopt microformats. I said that this was a “boil the ocean” strategy and that people who use feeds to monitor sites expect to use RSS and Atom, not microformats.

What I found in looking at other Indieweb-type sites was that they did not have any RSS feed for posts. Specifically, the two co-founders, Aaron Parecki and Tantek Celik, did not have feeds available for their sites. In the next meeting I attended, I brought this up. The response was that they were using microformats to encode data within their websites, and that there were microformat parsers which could read that formatted data and present it in a feed reader application.

RSS and podcasting are a crucial part of what I call (and others have called) the “independent web” (websites and web presences that are not part of a silo like Twitter, Facebook, etc, where people own their data and control it (also an IndieWeb principle)). The two areas (IndieWeb and independent web) share some features, but in my opinion, should not be considered “the same” – there are differences.

Kid writing in: “Dear Anime Answerman, my friend tells me that Inuyasha is a more violent show than Elfen Leid, and I don’t believe them, but I can’t tell them they’re wrong because my Mom won’t let me watch Elfen Leid.” Answerman: “Dear kid, please tell your friend that no one has ever been more wrong in the entire history of time.”

Additionally, the researchers found that peoples’ attractiveness to mosquitoes remained steady over time, regardless of changes in diet or grooming habits.

A third five-year term as party leader would break an unofficial two-term limit that was instituted to try to prevent the excesses of Mao’s one-person rule, notably the tumultuous 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, under which Xi suffered as a youth.

“The congress calls on all party members to acquire a deep understanding of the decisive significance of establishing comrade Xi Jinping’s core position on the party Central Committee and in the party as a whole and establishing the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought,” said a resolution on the constitution approved at Saturday’s closing session.

Chinese Dragon was originally founded by descendants of Japanese nationals left in China after the end of World War II who eventually came to Japan. Originally forming in the late 1980s, the gang has managed to avoid being caught in many of the anti-organized crime ordinances that have reduced the size and influence of Japan’s yakuza syndicates since Chinese Dragon has not been officially classified as a boryokudan, or organized crime group, because of its looser hierarchal structure.

Twitter is the preferred platform for our elites. Journalists and media pundits

Earlier this year, Police Commissioner James O'Neill admitted that a "theft of services" arrest (the legal code name for turnstile jumping) could in fact lead to an immigrant getting deported. And earlier this month, a series of bills the City Council passed last year encouraging the use of civil summonses instead of arrests for quality of life crimes like public drinking, public urination and littering went into effect.

The change in how turnstile jumping will be prosecuted comes at a time when the city's reliance on Broken Windows policing is under fire because of its impact on New York's low-income non-white community

Vance stressed that "individuals who pose a demonstrated threat to public safety" will still face criminal prosecution if arrested for turnstile jumping, although the press release didn't clarify what the standard is for determining who poses a public safety threat. A spokesperson for Vance's office told Gothamist that the office will take things on a case-by-case basis.

Vance announced in a press release this morning that his office "will no longer prosecute the overwhelming majority of individuals charged with Theft of Services for subway-related offenses, unless there is a demonstrated public safety reason to do so," starting in September of this year.

Currently, most theft-of-service cases are handled with summonses and rarely reach prosecution, according to a spokesman for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg does not prosecute fare beaters, according to a spokesman for his office.

“We have seen over a 55% increase of assaults on officers this year,” NYPD Transit Chief Jason Wilcox said. “The majority of these assaults began as they were engaging persons who have committed fare evasion or other quality of life violations on the trains and stations.”

NYPD enforcement is also up. Police have issued 45, 667 summonses for fare beating this year, up from 36,669 in 2021, according to an NYPD spokesperson. Other transit crimes that have been a growing issue are grand larceny, robbery, and felony assault, according to Comp Stat figures.

In just the first three months of this year, the MTA has lost $62 million in revenue from turnstile jumpers and an additional $57 million from passengers taking free bus rides, according to MTA data.

A 17-year-old wanted for murder was arrested when authorities caught him trying to get through a Brooklyn subway turnstile without paying, sources said.

Another model New York could adopt is that of Portland, Oregon, where fare evaders are now granted 90 days to resolve their cases out of court. 

Fortunately, there are other ways to protect the transit system’s revenue stream and promote orderly conduct without jeopardizing the personal liberty of riders. In Washington, D.C., the city council voted to decriminalize fare evasion, overriding the mayor’s veto.

The crackdown should concern New Yorkers, because fare evasion enforcement is highly disproportionate. According to the most recent NYPD data, 92% of the 481 fare evasion arrests in the fourth quarter of 2019 were of non-white riders; 60% were black. Data like that led New York Attorney General Letitia James to announce a probe of racial disparities in fare evasion stops.

Finally, non-citizens can face potential immigration-related issues as a result of this otherwise-minor charge. Though immigration questions relating to criminal arrests and convictions are very complicated, the Immigration and Naturalization Act does plainly make a non-citizen deportable for a conviction of a crime involving moral turpitude. Moreover, theft of services (Penal Law 165.15) is probably a crime involving moral turpitude, meaning that a non-citizen could conceivably be deported or denied entry back into the United States for a conviction of this charge.

The charge for jumping a subway turnstile is Theft of Services, a violation of New York Penal Section 165.15, a Class A misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail.

Ind ividua ls a re not pe rmitted to ente r the Ne w Y ork Cit y Tr an sit subw ay sys tem or bu se s without pa yment ofthe fa re. Th is in clude s instan ce s when you r Metr o Ca rd is not fun ct ion ing pr ope rly

No person shall use or enter upon the facilities or conv eyances of the authorit y, for any purpose,without the pa yment of the fare or tender of other v a lid fa r e m ed ia u s ed i n a cc or danc e wi th an yc ond i t i ons and r e s tric t i on s im po s ed by the authori t y . Fo r the purpos es of th is sect ion, it sha ll bec onsi de r ed an ent r anc e i nto a fa cili t y o r c onv ey an c e w henev e r a pe rs on pass es th r ough a po int atwh ic h a fa re is requ ired o r co lle cted. No pe rson s ha ll, fo r pu rpo se s of ga in ing entry into a facility,p r oc eed o v e r o r unde r an y tu r n s t il e or othe rwis e p r o c eed i n any othe r unauthoriz ed m anner th r oughan e xi t gate or th r ough o r pa s t any othe r po i nt at w h ic h a fa r e is r equir ed or c o lle c ted and i t s ha ll beno defens e to a c ha r ge of a vi o l at i on of th is s ubd ivisi on that fa re med ia, a fa re med ia sa les device o ra fa r e c o ll e c t ion devic e w as m a l func t i on ing

With intent to obtain railroad, subway, bus, air, taxi or any other public transportation service without payment of the lawful charge therefor, or to avoid payment of the lawful charge for such transportation service which has been rendered to him, he obtains or attempts to obtain such service or avoids or attempts to avoid payment therefor by force, intimidation, stealth, deception or mechanical tampering, or by unjustifiable failure or refusal to pay

Meantime, Lieber says that fare-beaters cost Gotham about $180 million in the last six months. The MTA suspects that in the fourth quarter of 2021, about 7.9 percent of riders did not pay, during which time bus nonpayment was anticipated to be more than 26 percent. Both Lieber and Mayor Eric Adams have observed that a small number of evaders are stopped and even fewer are issued summonses—in no small part because the Manhattan and Brooklyn district attorneys refuse to prosecute these cases.

By the end of the day, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo weighed in with a statement urging “all parties” to find “balance” — but declining to take a side.

“The New York miracle, if you will, began with fare evasion — fare evasion enforcement on the subway 25 years ago,” Mr. Bratton said in February 2014, when he was newly appointed by Mr. de Blasio as commissioner. “We’re still at it.”

Mr. de Blasio, a champion of improving the lot of poor New Yorkers, has adamantly defended the police practice of using evasion of the $2.75 fare as a means for officers to check the names and warrants of those they stop, most of whom are black or Hispanic.He has been unpersuaded by critics on the left who believe the approach — pioneered in the 1990s by William J. Bratton, Mr. de Blasio’s first police commissioner — is a form of biased and overly aggressive policing akin to stop-and-frisk. And he does not think most are motivated by poverty.“A lot of people who commit fare evasion and the police encounter have a lot of money on them,” Mr. de Blasio said during a news conference at Police Headquarters on Tuesday. “I think I have a lot of validity on the question of income inequality and how we fight it, but you never heard me say, you know, open up the gates of the subway for free. That’s chaos.”

The firefox hypothes.is bookmarklet I use doesn’t seem to play nice with archive.org. There’s another I haven’t tested yet.

Yes! My IndieBlocks plugin is now up on WP.org. Current version offers a single “Context” block, and, optionally, (1) some custom post types, and (2) the ability to add microformats2 to block-based (!) themes.

Current IndieWeb set-ups do not support the Gutenberg editor in WordPress as blocks are not supported. Jan’s plugin is created for blocks. Will need to try this out (also because my recent presentation at WordCamp on making WP IndieWeb compatible by default played a small role). Nice timing Jan, releasing it just so it can dominate my weekend

nd another population that both our mayor and governor have spoken passionately about protecting would stand to suffer greatly as a result of a new enforcement policy: immigrants. Immigrants who have even minor contact with the criminal justice system face far more drastic consequences. Under the Trump administration, an arrest for jumping a turnstile or even a criminal summons could result in deportation, family separation, and destroyed lives.

Poor black and brown people should not take the fall for the sins of politicians who have allowed the MTA to become a laughing stock. Arrests won’t solve the MTA’s problems, but they could devastate New Yorkers.

Years of grappling with the ripple effects of Broken Windows policing have shown us that arrests are not the way to deal with minor offenses, like riding your bike on the sidewalk, having an open container of alcohol, smoking marijuana, or jumping a turnstile. An uptick in enforcement would reverse the recent positive trend of fewer fare evasion arrests. Through October, police have made 5,236 arrests for fare evasion. That is still 5,236 arrests too many, but it represents a 66 percent drop compared to the same period last year.

An analysis of New York Division of Criminal Justice Services data from the last four years by the Marshall Project shows that nearly 90 percent of people arrested for turnstile jumping were black or Hispanic. Given the NYPD’s history of targeting people of color for arrests and summonses for low-level offenses, let’s call the new proposal to crack down on fare evasion what it is: a plan that would funnel thousands more black and brown New Yorkers into the criminal justice system, and to scapegoat people of color for the decades of underfunding and mismanagement that are responsible for the MTA’s current problems.

Police resources must be spent on working with the community and identifying the types of behaviors that cause the most harm—not physically harmless fare evasion.

The MTA claims that fare evasion is robbing the agency of $215 million a year, though how it actually reached that number is lacking in clarity and validity. The transit authority appears determined to pin the blame for its precarious financial position on poor black and Latinx people who, history tells us, will suffer the most from any increase in fare evasion arrests.

The MTA and NYPD pledged last week to crack down on fare evaders. The MTA’s plan is to send agency executives and NYPD officers to subway stations and bus stops across the city. The executives will stand at subway turnstiles and on busses to create body blockades to bar anyone trying to get in without a Metrocard. More armed police officers at subway stations make an already harrowing commute for New Yorkers even more intolerable, and for many, will serve to add unnecessary fear into the way they start or end their day.

The authority’s latest excuse is that poor people who jump turnstiles are responsible for the MTA’s financial woes. The MTA and the politicians and bureaucrats who control it should take responsibility for their own actions -- and inactions -- that have led to the city’s mass transit decline. Instead, the MTA seems to want to pit New Yorkers against each other.

“Fare beating places a burden on law-abiding transit customers who do pay the fare, including low-income citizens who despite financial challenges, still respect the rule of law and their obligation to pay their way,” wrote Lhota. “Further, it seems reasonable to expect your policy will increase fare beating, not only in your jurisdiction, but elsewhere, emboldening fare beaters in subways and buses across the city.”

“If we start saying it’s alright for you to jump the turnstile, we are creating an environment where any and everything goes,” the mayor warned. “It’s a crime. Now, you could defer prosecution, you could people in programs, you could do all sorts of things, but let’s not ignore it, and that’s what’s happening to our subway system.”

At least fifty-six New Yorkers have been pushed onto subway tracks over the past two years. Subway crimes have more than doubled, so far, this year, compared with the same time last year. According to MTA board member Andrew Albert, another major issue is turnstile jumping. 99.99% of people that are committing crimes in the subways did not pay their fare. If we can stop that at the turnstiles, we've not only helped the MTA bottom line, but we've stopped crime in its tracks.

Now, though, Vance’s office is voicing its displeasure with the fact that the NYPD has continued to arrest turnstile-jumpers. But how can Vance deter people from farebeating through diversion or dropped charges, and see if this approach yields better results for everyone—particularly the public—if police never arrest fare evaders in the first place?

Deterring people from stealing from the MTA keeps mass transit safe and improves the lives of everyone who rides.

The DA’s reasoning is that this misdemeanor charge—called theft of services for transit—can carry a punishment of up to a year in jail. The misdemeanor conviction, so the argument goes, victimizes otherwise law-abiding people too poor to afford the subway fare, burdening them with a criminal record as they seek employment or housing.

Some transit advocates say a far bigger factor in the agency’s projected deficits is riders fleeing the system because of poor service.

"The problem is people are not paying,” MTA Board Member Larry Schwartz said. “And that is not fair to the people that are paying."

The NYPD also has eased enforcement, issuing civil summonses to the majority of turnstile jumpers instead of arresting them, focusing instead on more serious crimes.

They say fare-beating increased after the Manhattan District Attorney last year stopped prosecuting most cases, a response to concerns that black and Latino violators were being disproportionally singled out.

NYPD numbers show more than 10,000 fewer arrests for fare-beating since January, compared to the same period last year, a decline of more than 66 percent.

Cuomo, who effectively controls the MTA, thanked the authority for the resolution and called for the "strictest penalties possible" for such criminals.

“The difficulty is unless we characterize this extraordinarily narrowly, we’re going to end up sweeping in people and make it almost certain they’re going to return to the life of crime because they won’t have any transportation options,” Jones said. 

Feinberg also helped usher in a new resolution Monday that called for an authority-wide ban on criminal recidivists.

The MTA estimates that it lost about $225 million in potential revenue from fare evasion in 2018. But critics argue the authority’s method for tracking fare dodging — monitoring specific stations and buses and applying that data more broadly — is flawed and that the board’s focus on the crime is a distraction from more pervasive management issues.

“I would like to see us capture this behavior on camera and then posting it publicly, whether on our YouTube channel or what,” said Sarah Feinberg, a fairly recent Gov. Andrew Cuomo appointee who chairs the MTA board’s Transit Committee. “That is important to me because when people are publicly embarrassed by this kind of behavior, it helps address it.”

Perhaps realizing that harassing poor people and charging them with hundreds of thousands of misdemeanors is a suboptimal use of government resources, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced last year that his office would limit its prosecutions of fare evasion to repeat offenders. For everyone else, turnstile jumping is a civil infraction—akin to a parking ticket—that carries a $100 fine and does not otherwise involve the criminal-justice system. You wouldn't glean any of this from this bit of quasi-propaganda, though, which limits itself to the sort of gratuitous public shaming that serves only to outrage viewers at home without providing any useful information of note.

Inside Edition's treatment of the subject also calls to mind the notorious "broken windows" theory of policing, which posits that evidence of unaddressed minor criminal activity signals to would-be criminals that cops will tolerate more serious crimes, too—and therefore that cracking down on things like turnstile jumping, graffiti, and public urination will prevent such crimes from occurring in the first place. The broken-windows theory was pioneered by former New York City Transit Police commissioner Bill Bratton in the early 1990s, and became the city's dominant law-enforcement philosophy after newly elected mayor Rudy Giuliani promoted Bratton to NYPD commissioner in 1993. There is, in other words, a gross history in New York City associated with the stigmatization of fare beating; it will probably not surprise you to learn that although the efficacy of broken-windows policing is, at best, debatable, its discriminatory impact on low-income people and communities of color is not.

Generally, paying for the use of goods and services is something people should do. The problem with Inside Edition's stunt, however, is that it frames fare evasion as the root cause of the system's problems, dramatically noting that the practice cost an estimated $215 million in 2018. This narrative omits, for example, that the MTA expects to face a billion-dollar annual deficit by 2022, and that its president has warned that the system will go into a "death spiral" unless state lawmakers find $40 billion to invest in its crumbling infrastructure. It breathes no word of Governor Andrew Cuomo's staunch refusal to consider raising funds via, say, the imposition of a "millionaires tax" on the city's wealthiest residents.

The confrontations the show chose to air are laced with exactly the sort of things you'd expect from busy New Yorkers who are suddenly confronted by a giant television camera over $2.75: a mix of irritation, incredulousness, and outright scorn. After careful consideration, I have determined that the award for best response shall be shared by the woman who calmly asks, "Are you going to arrest me? Are you going to give me a ticket? So what are you going to do?" and the man who says, "You guys aren't cops, right? Okay, excuse me," and then walks away from the microphone in the middle of the reporter's sentence.

On the other end, there was The Good Phone Foundation, a not-for-profit organization founded with a mission to create an open, transparent, and secure mobile ecosystem outside of Big Tech’s reach, who just released their own Android-based mobile OS and were looking for apps to rely on. They contacted me, and after a couple of calls, we realized that partnering up on the smartphone makes a lot of sense for both of us. So, here we are, introducing you to our brand new Simple Phone. Only having control over both software and hardware ensures the ultimate privacy and security. The target audience consists of more privacy-oriented people that do not want to be tracked or rely on big corporations, Google Play, etc. It focuses on people who just want to get things done in a simple way without having to keep closing ads and wondering what does the system do in the background. Not to mention consistency again as the core apps are developed by us. Hope you will like it just like we do 🙂

In my mind, there are three prerequisites to shift the Hoverton window. First, the speaker must have sufficient intellectual gravitas. Specifically, he must be able to generate a novel idea, that departs sufficiently from conventional wisdom, but also anticipates and preempts the most likely response. He must also have a reputation which warrants his ideas being taken seriously. Second, the speaker must have secure tenure-in-office. To challenge the status quo, you need decisional independence. No one can override your position, or worse, tell you to stand down after an uproar emerges. (Tenured academics and Article III judges are among the few people who fit in this category.) Third, the speaker must have courage. You must be willing to publicly articulate your principle, knowing full well that you will be savagely attacked from all corners. (Very few academics and Article III judges fit in this category.)

Now, if involved families want to reach out to a teacher, they have to rely on the school or hope an online staff directory is updated. And if teachers want to reach out to families and let them know how their students are doing in school, they need to look up their contact information and hope its up-to-date — or find alternate messaging platforms.

Some class time has also been lost to teachers sitting down with students to manually show them their grades, a teacher at the school added.

The Department of Education has been rolling out its own free grades, attendance and messaging applications, to replace banned third-party software that was involved in a data breach of more than 800,000 students last school year.