The reason Musk wants this might be greed, but it's very stupid if that's his reason. A huge amount of the US's global economic power comes from strong-arming the rest of the world to enforce US patents and copyright, thus funneling trillions of dollars from the rest of the world to the US. Without any patents or copyright there would be improved Chinese Tesla copies on the market within a year.
void_turtle
Sure, lab safety goggles will protect you from pepper spray in most instances. But what eye protection you're wearing won't matter. You're chained to a tree. The cops can do literally anything they want to you, including ripping your safety glasses off and emptying a can of pepper spray directly in your eyes. See: the infamous case of the Pepper Spray 8
Deputies pepper sprayed Mike McCurdy (above) and Noel Tendick directly in the eyes at close range while they were locked together through the tracks of a Pacific Lumber bulldozer on an old-growth redwood logging site. The activists endured the torture and did not unlock. Deputies then safely cut them loose with a portable grinder, as they could have done without using pepper spray, and as they had done hundreds of times in previous years.
Depends on what you mean by "effective." It might delay them for a few hours or a day. There's a long history of this kind of thing, although it's usually more effective to do a treesit rather than a lockdown for trees. You could do a lockdown on equipment like bulldozers/feller bunchers though. The Earth First! Direct Action Manual has a lot of info.
Be prepared to be literally tortured in various ways, including pepperspray placed directly in your eyes, pain compliance holds, or they just cut the chains/lockbox you're in and if you get cut with it too bad.
Personally I'm not a big fan of get-arrested-on-purpose types of direct action, but it has its uses. I strongly recommend that if you're going to do something like this you connect with a group that knows how to do it and you have a support crew, including jail/legal support.
If someone sent me a letter saying they were going to use a bathroom I would ignore it
This is rational, but the fascist pigs who passed and enforce that law are not.
Your sentence is phrased like they simply had to be there
That's a very bizarre reading of my comment, which was not phrased in that way whatsoever. The commenter I was responding to seemed to think the cops were posted there routinely for the purposes of enforcing that law. I was correcting the misunderstanding by pointing out they were only there because she sent a letter beforehand. Obviously they didn't "have" to be there, in the sense that they are individuals with free will who could have woken up that day and decided to stop being fascist pigs. But they didn't, and expecting them to is going to lead to disappointment every time because if "don't be a fascist pig" were in the cards for them, they wouldn't be cops in the first place.
Really hate the milktoast way these articles are written. "critics warning" "ignited alarm online" "backlash has ignited debate" ffs just say the Trump admin announced the end of free speech. That is literally what happened.
FFS WE'VE BEEN THERE THIS ISN'T VEERING THIS IS FOLLOWING A STRAIGHT LINE ALONG THE PATH WE'VE ALREADY BEEN ON FUCK