No matter the outcome of next week’s NFL game at Spurs' home ground, (at least) another team will have earned a league result in North London before Tottenham Hotspur's next home match 😬
A police chief in Oshkosh, Wisconsin caught Flock lying to his city council, and killed the $8 billion surveillance company's contract less than a day after the council had approved it.
Here's how it happened.
The night before, Oshkosh's council was set to renew its deal with Flock Safety, the license plate camera company backed by a16z and Tiger Global.
One council member asked the Flock rep a plain yes-or-no question. Does this system build a heat map of everywhere a specific car travels over time?
Flock's rep said no.
The council believed him and voted 5 to 2 to renew. By the next morning, Chief Dean Smith's own officers had told him that answer was false.
So he pulled up the system himself. He watched it generate the exact heat map Flock had just sworn it couldn't make.
Then he walked into an emergency meeting and said it out loud: "Because of this misrepresentation, I can no longer recommend Flock."
Understand what a heat map is, because it's the whole trick.
Flock sells cities a tidy little story. A car drives by, we snap a photo, we read the plate, that's all it is.
But the same system can quietly average out where your car goes day after day and paint your routine onto a map.
Not one snapshot at one corner. Your pattern. Where you sleep, where you work, where you keep going back and how often.
A Flock employee later admitted on the record that the software does exactly that.
So the pitch and the product are two different things. The company wins the contract selling a plate reader, then sits on a moving map of your life.
The only reason Oshkosh caught it was one skeptical question and a police chief who bothered to check the answer.
The vote to rescind was 7 to 0. Unanimous.
Flock called the whole thing "one small misconception" from a long meeting and said it was disappointed nobody let it explain.
A surveillance company worth eight billion dollars got caught lying about whether it maps where you drive. Its defense was that the lie was small.
Oshkosh got one honest answer by accident. Congress can make it the rule.
https://t.co/DHLVhtVErs
🎩The Other 98%
Found my own “sports but art” comparison.
Also @JamesSimoneau (a CF Montreal fan) identified that Moreira or Farsi yelled in the tunnel: "Rappel toi de mon visage!” Which means “Remember my face!” This is probably the most badass thing said in a Crew uniform during Hell Is Real.
Car dealerships are the last place on Earth where haggling is mandatory and lying is considered "part of the process." I don't want to "talk numbers" for three hours. I want the actual price on the website like every other business in 2024.
I remember scientists saying 20 years ago that climate change-fueled wildfires would darken and poıson the skies hundreds of miles away. but republicans said that was a lie, so now climate change-fueled wildfires darken and poıson the skies hundreds of miles away every summer.
Trump says he understands Venezuela because Miss Venezuela did well in his pageants.
Read that again.
And some of you dip shits voted to give him the nuke codes.
Bundesliga: just 3 teams bellow €100m
La liga: 8 teams below €100m
Bundesliga: 10 teams below €200m
La liga: 13 teams below €200m
Bundesliga: 7 teams worth more than €300m
La liga: 4 teams worth more than €300m
But they want to sell to the world the narrative that their league is “harder” 🤣💀
Next time your favorite team faces 1st and goal at the 1, think about this:
Since at least 2000, no NFL team has ever been stopped on four consecutive one yard sneaks within the same set of downs.
In fact, no team has been stopped on even three consecutive sneaks within the same set of downs.
We also searched over a million college football snaps and found no confirmed example of it happening there, either.
My “sneak until you score” model projects a touchdown:
• By the second sneak: 87.8%
• By the third sneak: 96%
• By the fourth sneak: 99%
One Super Bowl-winning head coach learned of this research and asked me:
“Why would you ever do anything different?”
If every team employed this strategy, the NFL could see over 200 additional touchdowns on sneak calls in 2026.
Running backs, and their fantasy managers, would not be happy.
Every detail and nuance that makes this strategy nearly unstoppable is explained in the video below ⬇️