08:01 – Amazon changed its spiff a couple of weeks ago for Prime members who opt for no-rush shipping instead of Prime 2-day shipping. Until then, they were offering a $1 credit per order on ebooks and music purchases. I was just accumulating those $1 credits and using them toward buying e-books. Now, they offer a $5 credit/order on Prime Pantry orders, so I’m accumulating those. Not that it’s really much of a deal, because I can get most Prime Pantry items cheaper locally, but if I accumulate enough credits I’ll be able to get a Prime Pantry box or two for free. Of course, this provides an incentive for people to make multiple small orders instead of one larger one, but Amazon deals with this by not issuing the credit until the order actually ships. Presumably, if I put in a bunch of smaller orders, they’ll simply wait and combine those orders before shipping.
Speaking of orders, yesterday was an administrative day. I put in a bunch of orders for chemicals from different vendors and components for science kits. I was, for example, down to about a pound of rubber stoppers, so I ordered another 20 pounds from one vendor, along with a couple hundred inoculating loops and 5,000 plastic dropper pipettes. I ordered three kilos of salicylic acid from one vendor, two kilos of yeast from another, and a bunch of different chemicals from still another.
And yet another fatal shooting of a black victim by a white police officer, this one in Cincinnati. Well, a kind-of police officer. This guy was a university cop, and from the initial news reports it sounds like he was a psycho Barney Fife. If those reports are accurate, which of course is always questionable, this guy shot and killed a middle-age black man after making a traffic stop for a missing front license plate. The DA has already said publicly that this cop should never have been a cop, and apparently footage from the cop’s bodycam, which I haven’t seen, makes it pretty clear that the shooting was not justified. We’ll see if things degenerate into violent rioting and looting.
And, in a man-bites-dog local story, an on-line petition has been created to demand that Winston-Salem authorities remove a marker honoring the Black Panthers, on the basis that the Black Panthers were a violent, racist group.
10:34 – Well, I watched the video, and it doesn’t look to me as straightforward as the police brass and DA said. The cop seemed to behave politely and professionally during the first part of the encounter. I was surprised that he didn’t order the driver to get out of the car and that he allowed him to fish around in the glove box. And the driver did have an open bottle of booze in the car. At the point the cop ordered the driver to remove his seatbelt, presumably intending to order him to get out of the car, things went badly wrong in less than a second. It seemed that the driver was starting to make a run for it when the cop fired. I couldn’t tell for sure if the cop’s hand was inside the window and if he was struck by the window frame as the driver moved the car forward. At any rate, for me the video certainly doesn’t establish that this was a bad shooting.