Byron Donalds, a black Republican Representative from Florida, said Democrats need to stop talking about Project 2025, a policy document created by hundreds of people who literally worked for Trump during his term, because it’s “dangerous.”

But he also thinks Trump calling Harris a communist dictator who literally wants to destroy America, take your guns, force everyone’s children to undergo surgical sex reassignment surgery against their will, flood the country with millions of noncitizens so they can vote, among hundreds of other extreme and completely false accusations, are all perfectly fine and fair game.

They all know it’s not consistent. They all know Trump’s rhetoric is worse, but they see a cynical opportunity to gain a political advantage and they take it. Assholes.

The pardon power is explicitly given to the president by the Constitution. Therefore it’s a core power with absolute immunity.

The president is also given the clear authority to direct his subordinates in the executive branch as the “chief Executive.” The SCOTUS has ruled that the president has almost unfettered power to hire/fire/order anyone in the federal government to do just about anything he wants with no restrictions.

So logically:

1. The president can order an agency head to issue a new rule that’s probably unconstitutional.
2. Someone sues in a district court to block it.
3. A court issues an injunction preventing its enforcement.
4. The agency head ignores the court order and enforces it anyway.
5. The court finds the agency head and/or other employees of the agency in contempt for violating the injunction.
6. The president pardons anyone subject to the injunction (and this pardon power is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution or investigation).
7. The rule goes into effect and gets enforced despite being enjoined by a federal court.
8. We now have a constitutional crisis because courts no longer have any way to check on the Executive because the president can simply neutralize any criminal penalties with a pardon even if that pardon is clearly issued as part of a conspiracy to violate a court order.

I guarantee this is not what the Framers envisioned or wanted, but this is what “conservative” judicial extremists on the SCOTUS have given us. Although I would be entirely unsurprised if they decided to roll this power back somehow if ever a Democratic president were to wield it.

They also like to complain about the “crime in blue cities,” but somehow never seem to acknowledge that if it’s a problem that’s so easy to solve, why do red states with red legislatures and red governors not just fix the issue in their blue cities?

5 of the top 10 cities with the highest violent crime rates are in red states with Republican legislatures and Republican governors. They sure as hell act like they know the simple solution to violent crime in cities, but for some reason they don’t seem to implement those obvious solutions in their own states. Instead, they blame the Democratic mayors.

It’s almost like it’s a lot harder of a problem to solve than Republicans let on and they’re being disingenuous about knowing how to fix it…

The vast majority of elected Republicans are opportunists willing to use any opportunity to advance their narrative even if it’s clearly blatant lies or bullshit.

Vance pushes the “eating pets” crap to anyone who will listen, and when he gets hard enough pushback from someone and can’t bullshit his way out of it, he falls back to the “okay, maybe it’s not true, but it represents real concerns people have so it’s valid for me to talk about it.”

Which is exactly what happened with the election results in 2020. They pushed the stolen election crap until it was pretty much irrefutably disproven, then went around saying they had to make it harder to vote because their voters, for some strange reason, thought the election wasn’t fair.

DeWine is one of the very few Republican politicians left that has any sense of principle and isn’t a cynical opportunist, even if most of those principles are pretty shitty.

True, it wouldn’t be ethical to conduct an experiment, but we can (and probably do) collect lots of observational data that can provide meaningful insight. People are arrested at all stages of CSAM related offenses from just possession, distribution, solicitation, and active abuse.

While observation and correlations are inherently weaker than experimental data, they can at least provide some insight. For example, “what percentage of those only in possession of artificially generated CSAM for at least one year go on to solicit minors” vs. “real” CSAM.

If it seems that artificial CSAM is associated with a lower rate of solicitation, or if it ends up decreasing overall demand for “real” CSAM, then keeping it legal might provide a real net benefit to society and its most vulnerable even if it’s pretty icky.

That said, I have a nagging suspicion that the thing many abusers like most about CSAM is that it’s a real person and that the artificial stuff won’t do it for them at all. There’s also the risk that artificial CSAM reduces the taboo of CSAM and can be an on-ramp to more harmful materials for those with pedophilic tendencies that they otherwise are able to suppress. But it’s still way too early to know either way.

I mostly agree with you, but a counterpoint:

Downloading and possession of CSAM seems to be a common first step in a person initiating communication with a minor with the intent to meet up and abuse them. I’ve read many articles over the years about men getting arrested for trying to meet up with minors, and one thing that shows up pretty often in these articles is the perpetrator admitting to downloading CSAM for years until deciding the fantasy wasn’t enough anymore. They become comfortable enough with it that it loses its taboo and they feel emboldened to take the next step.

CSAM possession is illegal because possession directly supports creation, and creation is inherently abusive and exploitative of real people, and generating it from a model that was trained on non-abusive content probably isn’t exploitative, but there’s a legitimate question as to whether we as a society decide it’s associated closely enough with real world harms that it should be banned.

Not an easy question for sure, and it’s one that deserves to be answered using empirical data, but I imagine the vast majority of Americans would flatly reject a nuanced view on this issue.

You should look into the Income Driven Repayment plan: https://studentaid.gov/idr/

It’s one of the new major programs from the Department of Education and can help a lot with reducing repayments while eventually being eligible for full forgiveness.

I’ve tried to make this argument on the more extreme political communities and the arguments supporting a strike ranged from “everyone would blame the rail companies” to “the damage to unions is worse” to “all those people without jobs would rise up in protest to support the unions” to “it wouldn’t be that bad, it’s being exaggerated by the corporate media.”

It shows just how privileged those people are to actually think that when people who are already living paycheck to paycheck, rationing insulin to survive, and barely managing to feed their families suddenly lose their income, can’t get insulin, see food prices double, and can’t even drink the tap water anymore because of a “rail strike”, they’re going to understand the nuance of the situation and blame rail companies for not giving the workers sick days.

The railway strike would’ve caused shortages of chlorine for city water supplies, shortages of essential medicines like insulin and antibiotics, severe food insecurity and inflation, and would’ve led to millions of people losing their jobs. Railway freight accounts for 40% of freight transport in the US. Imagine 40% of everything that’s made every day suddenly not getting to where it needs to go. There’s a reason Congress has never refused to block a railway strike every time it’s been threatened over the last 150 years.

The contract was good for the workers but didn’t include paid sick days. Congress imposed the contract on the rail workers when a couple of unions didn’t ratify it (although most of the unions did).

Biden kept working behind the scenes after signing the law Congress passed to block the strike and got the rail workers their sick days without the suffering a rail strike would’ve had on the millions of Americans who were already struggling with high inflation on essentials. The IBEW union explicitly thanked him for it: https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid

Just to reinforce your point, the difference between a cheap running shoe and an expensive running shoe is incredible. When I first started running a few years ago, I was using a very old pair of running shoes I’ve had for a long time. I’ve since been sticking with the New Balance Fresh Foam X 880s (because I have very wide feet and NB seems like the only brand that actually makes their best running shoes in 4E) and it’s like running on a cloud.

And then there’s also the Garmin watch that cost $300 (that I’m now stupidly considering upgrading to the new $600 Forerunner 965), the $120 HRM Pro chest strap, the $3000 Nordic Track x22i for indoor runs I got lightly used on Craigslist for a steal at $900, etc.

And then there’s the races where you’re spending $40, $50, $100+ depending on whether it’s a 5K or 10K or half-marathon. And good running clothes are pricey too.

That’s not really a solid argument. Blocking is likely implemented as a very tiny piece of what is already very likely a massive table join operation. Computationally, it’s likely to have as much an impact on their compute costs as the floor mats in your car have on fuel efficiency.

Everyone already sees different content. It’s an inherent part of Twitter. It’s not a static site where everyone sees the same thing. You see the tweets of who you’re following, and don’t see tweets of those you’ve muted. All that filtering is happening at the server level. Any new tweets or edited tweets or deleted tweets change that content too, which is happening potentially hundreds of times a second for some users.

Anyway, caching would be implemented after a query for what tweets the user sees is performed to reduce network traffic between a browser and the Twitter servers. There’s some memoization that can be done at the server level, but the blocking feature is likely to have almost no impact on that given the fundamental functionality of Twitter.

I had the Samsung Note 2 back in the day. I installed a custom bootloader and OS that worked fantastically. I had GPS issues, and all the guides I read said I have to reinstall Samsung’s OS, get a GPS fix, then reinstall my custom OS.

I made the mistake of installing a newer version of the Samsung OS which installed Knox and locked down my bootloader. I was now locked into an old, insecure Android version with no possibility of ever upgrading because Samsung abandoned it.

From that day on, I vowed never to buy another Samsung product again. Screw them and their anti-choice bullshit.

I can see it now:

A beautiful woman in a skimpy bikini posts a selfie from a sparkling beach in the Bahamas.

“I was able to fulfill my lifelong dream of taking a month-long trip to the Bahamas after winning the $35,000 jackpot at Chumba™ Casino! DM me for a code for $50 in free spins! 😘”

They will get an insane number of thirsty dudes addicted to online gambling.

That’s what I said though.

Your ISP can’t see what you’re downloading if you encrypt, but the IP (intellectual property) enforcers still can if they’re participating in the torrent. Then they find out which ISP that IP (address) belongs to and sends them a letter saying “we caught your subscriber downloading XYZ illegally.”

However, at least one US district court has ruled that just catching an IP address downloading a torrent illegally isn’t proof that any particular person illegally downloaded the IP (intellectual property). As a result, some ISPs simply ignore the letters the IP enforcers send, while some of the bigger ones count “strikes” against the subscriber with that IP address.

If you use encryption (I always change the settings from “prefer” to “require” encryption on every install), the ISPs literally can’t identify what you’re downloading.

So the IP enforcement companies send the ISP a letter saying “this IP was illegally downloading our stuff. We don’t actually have proof, but trust us and punish them.”

Big surprise, a ton of ISPs just ignore them.

Edit: to be clear, I’m only saying encryption prevents your ISP from seeing what you’re downloading. IP (intellectual property) enforcers who participate in the torrent are the ones who inform your ISP, but their letters to the ISPs have no teeth. Some ISPs care, but a lot just ignore the letters. You still definitely want to use a VPN for all public trackers.

During computer learning in a computer lab 15 years ago, I figured out that the student passwords were sequential, so I could easily guess other students’ passwords. If I logged in to their account while they were logged in, they would get booted and I’d hear the inevitable “Mrs Teacher! It says my session expired!”

I did that 2 or 3 times over the course of a few minutes before I got caught. The vice principal rambled on and on about how I was “disrupting learning” and how I “should be suspended for this” before finally telling me, “my mentor taught me a really important lesson. If your students don’t hate you, you aren’t doing your job.”

What a horrible piece of shit.