$330 million

[thene]

That is the amount of money I am told was lost when Boston shut down for the day on Friday April 19th.

What would you do with $330 million? Is 'catching one dude who killed a number of people commensurate to a bad car wreck' top of your list? This is even without thinking about how purposeless it was to even close anything outside of Watertown; even if it had accomplished anything, it is not worth this city's money and especially not worth sending the signal out that we will fearfully screw ourselves over that hard the moment any two-bit jihadi does anything newsworthy. $330 million is a lot of power to be handing to those two-bit jihadis, and I am sure they will take account of the sum accordingly.

Comments

[stealth_noodle]

Yeahhhh, I'm really hoping that once we've all settled down, we can agree this "shutting down a major city to catch a guy who's unlikely to be able to do much further damage" should not be the new normal. :/ It's a very TSA approach.

[thene]

i also love the hilarious part where no one in charge even thought, look, being at home with the doors locked? is literally the most unsafe place in a lot of people's lives. Those people tend to be women and children though so don't matter. [eta: obviously this only becomes a zero-sum thing when we are talking about money and what exactly we should have done with our three hundred and thirty millions of shiny american dollars and who we choose to expend money to protect - which threats we consider to be normal & tolerable and which must be stamped out at all costs, for a given value of 'we'.]

[stealth_noodle]

It's been an upsetting couple of weeks in American priorities. :( We're not going to talk seriously about gun violence or workplace regulations (even when workplaces explode and take out a chunk of the town around them), but BY GOD we will talk our way into some incredibly short-sighted anti-terrorism bullshit.