An officer “accidentally” fired his weapon during an NYPD raid on a student-occupied building at Columbia University on Tuesday. Apparently, he mistook his gun for a flashlight. You may be wondering: how could this happen? Well, like this. From a 2014 article in the Denver Post:

Ronny Flanagan took pride in his record as a police officer in Plano, Texas. He had an incident-free career. He took safety training regularly. He was known at the range as a very good shot.

Yet he killed a man when he was simply trying to press a flashlight switch mounted beneath the trigger on his pistol.

In a deposition, Flanagan expressed his remorse and made a prediction.

“I don’t want anyone to ever sit in a chair I’m in right now,” he said. “Think about the officers that aren’t as well trained, officers that don’t take it as seriously, and you put them in a pressure situation, another accident will happen. Not if, but will.”

Jeeeeesus Christ this is the most American shit ever. First of all: guns, guns, guns!! We love ‘em! Don’t forget the complete militarization of the police (they’ve got tanks!), which happens in tinpot countries where leaders fear the citizenry. Those gun flashlights were initially developed for the Navy SEALs and now city cops wield them around students.

And then. And then! There’s the completely genius idea of PUTTING A SECOND TRIGGER ON A GUN — I wish I had letters more uppercase than uppercase for this next part — RIGHT BELOW THE FIRST TRIGGER!!!!!!! ¹
You know, the one that propels a projectile out of the weapon at deadly speeds!?

You’re familiar with those doors where the handle makes it seem like a pull but you actually have to push it? They’re called Norman doors, the canonical example of bad design. These flashlight guns are like Norman doors that kill people. W T Actual Fuck. (via @ygalanter.bsky.social)

1. I know I’m gonna get email about this so I’ll stop you right there Johnny Gmail: I am sure “not all guns” 🥴 with flashlights are designed like this. I am positive that putting yet another switch on a firearm that’s designed to be used when the gun is pointed at something or someone is a Bad Idea. And anyway, this whole thing about being an “accident” is BS anyway…there is nothing accidental about where that officer was with the gear that he had, doing what he was doing. It is all perfectly predictable that guns are fired by militarized police in Gun Land USA.↩

Tags: crime · design · Don Norman · guns · policing · politics · USA

screwing up again

simple pleasures

How much is too much to pay for a car?

A few weeks ago, a TikTok user named Blaisey Arnold posted a video about her Chevy Tahoe.

“After three years with my Tahoe, I’m finally getting rid of it,” Arnold said. It was her dream car, and she’d taken out a loan for the $84,000 — yes, you read that right, $84,000 — vehicle. Since then, she’d been paying $1,400 a month for the last three years, totaling about $50,000. But because of her high interest rate, only $10,000 of that money went toward paying off the balance of the car. “Honestly, that blows my mind,” she said.

It blew her viewers’ minds, too.

“The math isn’t mathing,” one commenter wrote. “Seriously, what is your interest rate???????” asked another. The video currently has about 2.5 million views. The situation was so untenable that Arnold joked in a follow-up video that she was considering leaving the Tahoe in a “bad part of town,” hiring the mob, or (more seriously) defaulting and letting it get repossessed.

There’s a lot we can’t know about her situation, without looking at her finances and the terms of her loans. But she’s not the only one shelling out huge amounts of cash for a fancy car: Other women have also been sharing the details of their major monthly car payments on TikTok.

Still, the online reactions seem to unite around a central theme: Arnold messed up big time by taking out a loan at a terrible rate. Defaulting and letting her car get repossessed, as she seems to be considering, will wreak havoc on her credit.

You could argue that Arnold’s decisions were irresponsible (and I really don’t recommend paying what amounts to a mortgage on a car), but it’s worth looking beyond this one wacky example at the larger structural forces that make car ownership such a necessary burden — and, at times, such an unnecessary scam.

Car ownership has gotten very expensive — but opting out can be difficult

In a society built almost entirely around the supremacy of cars as a means of transportation, most working-age adults seem to consider owning one necessary.

According to the 2021 Census, nearly 92 percent of American households had at least one vehicle, and the benefits of owning a car in a landscape built for them are so great that research suggests people will go out of their way to get one even if they can’t really afford it.

In the last few years, the costs around car ownership have soared, placing tremendous burdens on working class families and the poor.

The pandemic disrupted supply chains, manufacturers turned their attention toward expensive luxury vehicles, and interest rates soared. New cars are now unaffordable for more than 80 percent of Americans. Used car prices are up 34 percent from early 2020, too. On top of that, auto insurance rates have reached mind-boggling heights.

Owning a car is also much more than just a practical necessity: For a lot of people, it’s an outward symbol of prosperity, freedom, and even political ideology.

Car buyers are really vulnerable to exploitation — especially if they’re low-income

Cars are really expensive in America right now. But some car payments are astronomically — indeed, exploitatively — high.

To give one example: In their 2023 book, Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt and Carcerality, authors Julie Livingston and Andrew Ross spoke with men recently released from prison who found that their credit histories prevented them from getting reasonable loans at affordable interest rates.

Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

“A lot of people we were interviewing were driving pretty fancy cars. We were stroking our chins, going: ‘How did you afford that?’ It turned out that some of them were walking into dealerships and being told they couldn’t get financing for the Hondas they wanted, but could for a top-of-the-line Mercedes,” Ross told Vox last year.

“Why would a lender and dealer do that? Because they know they’re going to be able to repossess the car quickly.”

It’s not just formerly incarcerated people who are vulnerable.

A 2021 Consumer Reports investigation found that the lack of a federal interest rate limit, combined with a complicated patchwork of state laws, leaves consumers vulnerable to being preyed upon by shady lenders.

The investigation begins with an anecdote about a man who received disability payments from the Social Security Administration; he received a loan for a Jaguar with an astonishing annual percentage rate of 75 percent. “I don’t know APRs, I don’t know nothing about that,” the man told Consumer Reports. “I’m just trying to go in there and get the car.”

In another piece, the publication found that lenders and dealers often lent money to people with poor credit, sometimes at higher rates, with the aim of collecting the high interest and repossessing the vehicles when people defaulted on their loans.

There is some hope that things will get better. A few states have started to address the problem of hidden fees and predatory loans. At the end of 2023, the Federal Trade Commission announced a new rule aimed at cracking down on a slew of deceptive auto lending and sales practices. (It takes effect at the end of July 2024.)

Meanwhile, auto debt reached a record-high $1.61 trillion last year, and that debt is, of course, most onerous for the people who can least afford to pay.

Understanding how auto loans work — as Blaisey Arnold’s critics point out — is necessary, but it’s insufficient. Going after the lenders who prey on people who need cars to survive, and who often don’t realize they’re getting a bad deal, is paramount.

This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

The reminders you’ve jotted down in Google Keep will soon show up in Tasks. Google says the long-requested integration is coming over the next year, allowing you to see, edit, and complete your Keep reminders across Tasks, Calendar, and Assistant.

The change will make Tasks the central hub for all to-dos and reminders, hopefully making them far easier to manage. It’s something my colleague David Pierce suggested when talking about Google’s upgraded Keep app last year, saying, “Now, Google, make Keep reminders show up in Tasks. It’s right there!”

Image: Google

Even though Tasks doesn’t support location-based reminders like Keep does, Google states (referring to Keep) that you can still “add time or location-based reminders to any note.”

Over the past year, Google has been working to make its Tasks app more useful — or “finally kind of good,” as David put it. It started including reminders from Assistant and Calendar in March 2023, and the integration with Keep should only make it a more practical productivity app.

The Department of Transportation (DOT) finalized rules that will soon require airlines to quickly refund passengers if they cancel or delay flights or make significant changes.

Airlines must pay passengers back either in cash or in the original form of payment, no matter the reason they cancel their flight. Alternatively, passengers can choose to accept travel credit, other kinds of transportation, or another flight offered by the airline.

Airlines must also refund passengers if their flight itinerary is “significantly changed” and they don’t accept the airline’s alternative travel options. Specifically, this means that you can get your money back if your flight changes its arrival or departure time by three or more hours for domestic flights or six hours if you’re flying internationally. The policy also applies in a few other scenarios, like if your departure or arrival airport has changed.

If your paid checked bags are substantially delayed, airlines must also offer you a refund for the baggage fee. You must first file a mishandled baggage report and will get a refund if you don’t receive your bag within 12 hours of your domestic flight arriving at the gate — or 15–30 hours of your international flight. You can also get your money back if the airline doesn’t deliver on in-flight extras you paid for, like seat assignments, Wi-Fi, and entertainment.

The DOT also announced it’ll require airlines to disclose additional fees for things like checked bags and canceling reservations before passengers buy their tickets.

“Airlines should compete with one another to secure passengers’ business—not to see who can charge the most in surprise fees,” US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a statement. “DOT’s new rule will save passengers over half a billion dollars a year in unnecessary or unexpected fees by holding airlines accountable for being transparent with their customers.”

The DOT will start implementing the new rules over the next six to 12 months.