Possibly “Making History” by Stephen Fry - although at 380 pages it doesn’t quite match as a short story, and the protagonist doesn’t stop himself so much as do something else to reverse the effects of his actions to save Hitler.

Apparently the xitter tweet was a eulogy for Yahya Sinwar.

Now Yahya Sinwar was a war criminal, so they kind of have a point.

However, if that is the standard they set, saying anything positive about Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Ron Dermer, Aryeh Deri, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisonkot, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, who are all also leaders who have supported war crimes should also be grounds for having awards rescinded. But what are the chances that there is a double standard?

Perhaps a good approach is to check other recipients who are pro-Zionist‡ and see if they have anything praising war criminals, and complain - if there is no similar response, it is clear there is a double standard.

‡: And before anyone tries to twist my words as a smear, I define a modern Zionist in the usual way as someone who wants to expand the state of Israel beyond the 1967 boundaries, other than as a one-state solution with the consent of the people of the lands.

I think the whole case seems super suss.

The photos of someone in the area look nothing like him.

But supposedly they found him days later, based on someone recognising him (from what? he doesn’t even look like the publicly shared suspect photos), and despite him supposedly having travelled a great distance - enough to scatter any evidence over large distances where it would never be recovered, he happened to have a complete set of evidence on him, including a paper “manifesto” and the weapon. That seems like a rather unlikely story. And then they try to seek the death penalty, and double up federal and state.

I think what happened is the authorities decided they probably would never find the real killer, but it was also unacceptable not to have someone to blame - they’d rather kill an innocent to send a message than let crime against the rich go without a response. So they picked some random they didn’t like and set him up.

In Australia, there is a strong presumption towards keeping left as a pedestrian (and overtaking on the right - e.g. etiquette on escalators is to keep left, but if you are walking up the escalator, overtake to the right).

In some particularly busy places (especially on shared footpath / bike lane zones) there are even arrows on the pavement to ensure tourists know what side to keep to.

There are always a few people (probably tourists) who don’t follow the local etiquette.

Or at least the other way around. Reddit is banned from me.

to lose 100% of the court cases where they try this defense

I don’t think the litigants actually know this. The shady characters they are paying for the information probably know that, but represent that it will just work if they do it right.

Imagine you have some kind of legal problem, and you go to your lawyer, and your lawyer tells you they know what to do that will let you win. You’ll probably do it. Now for the litigants, it is the same thing, except instead of a lawyer, it is some person with an Internet and/or in real life following, who dazzles you with lots of fake formality that aligns to your preconceptions of the legal system based on TV. Of course, it is all just pseudolegal and a scam, but you don’t know that.

Now you might except that some critical thinking and/or research of authoritative sources like case law, or consulting a real lawyer might let the litigant see that it is a scam, but critical thinking skills are not as common as you might hope, and secondary education in many places doesn’t cover much about the law or how to do legal research.

Consider that 49.8% of voters in the 2024 US Presidential election voted for Trump, even after seeing the first term. Many people are easily hoodwinked into acting against their own best interests, especially if they are convinced there is a community of other people like them acting the same way (SovCit like groups do have some numbers), that people who endorse those theories get a lot of recognition / are influential (the leaders of the groups can create that impression), and that their theories have a long traditional backing (usually they make up a historical backstory).

That catholics should practice confession is a religious belief. But the confidentiality part is from canon law - i.e. in terminology of most other organisations, it is a policy. It is a long-standing policy to punish priests for breaking it, dating back to at least the 12th century, but nonetheless the confidentiality is only a policy within a religious organisation, and not a religious belief.

Many organisations punish individuals who break their policy. But if an organisation has a policy, and insist that it be followed even when following it is contrary to the law, and would do immense harm to vulnerable individuals, then I think it is fair to call that organisation evil - and to hold them culpable for harm resulting from that policy.

Even if the confidentiality itself was a core part of the religious belief itself, religious freedom does not generally extend to violating the rights of others, even if the religion demands it. Engaging in violent jihad, for example, is not a protected right even in places where religious freedom cannot be limited, even if the person adheres to a sect that requires it.

“Except for Claims (i) in which a party is attempting to protect its intellectual property rights (such as its patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, anti-circumvention, or moral rights, but not including its privacy or publicity rights) …”

So in other words, the types of matters Nintendo thinks it might have a dispute against users, court and class actions are okay, but for everything that they think users might file against Nintendo, they think arbitration is best.

Easy! Why do you think it happened? Inadequate food regulation? Underfunded healthcare? Insufficient regulation of pollutants that can impact health and cause chronic disease?

I don’t know your individual circumstances, but given the state of the world right now, I’d bet it’s a combination of all three.

IANAL, but it is an interesting question to consider whether it would be illegal in Australia (if anything, as a test to see if the right laws are on the books to block this kind of thing). The laws are likely different in the US, and it might vary from state to state.

The Fair Work Act 2009 (Commonwealth), s325 provides that:

An employer must not directly or indirectly require an employee to spend, or pay to the employer or another person, an amount of the employee’s money or the whole or any part of an amount payable to the employee in relation to the performance of work, if:

(a) the requirement is unreasonable in the circumstances; and

(b) for a payment—the payment is directly or indirectly for the benefit of the employer or a party related to the employer.

I think you could imagine the employer arguing a few lines:

• The employee is not required to spend, it is only a factor in promotions and not retaining the same role. OP said you can “get in trouble for not using this” - countering this defence perhaps depends on proving what kind of trouble to show it is a requirement. In addition, under s340, employers are not allowed to take an adverse action against an employee for exercising or proposing to exercise a workplace right, and adverse action includes discriminating between and employee and other employees of the employer.
• That the employee is not required to pay any particular person, they can choose what to buy as long as the select from a prescribed list. However, I think that could be countered by saying this is an indirect requirement to spend, and the “or another person” attaches to the “pay” part, so I don’t think that argument would fly.
• The the requirement is reasonable - however, that could be countered by arguing the privacy angle, and the fact that this is for personal shopping, far outside the reasonable scope of an employment relationship.
• That the payment isn’t for the benefit of the employer. I think that could be countered firstly by arguing this is a requirement to spend not pay, and event if it was to pay, it is indirectly for the employer’s benefit since it allows them to attract and retain clients. The way they are pushing it could further prove this.

So I think it would probably be contrary to s325 of the Fair Work Act in Australia.

Another angle could be the right to disconnect under s333M of the Fair Work Act:

An employee may refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact, or attempted contact, from an employer outside of the employee’s working hours unless the refusal is unreasonable.

If someone has a work and a personal phone, and has the app on the work phone, but refuses to use take the work phone or install an app on their personal phone so they can respond to tracking requests from the employer, then maybe this also fits.

I also wonder if in Australia this could also be a form of cartel conduct - it is an arrangement of where purchases (other than those the company should legitimately control) are directed centrally under an arrangement by an organisation.

Under s45AD of the Competition and Consumer Act 2010,

(1) For the purposes of this Act, a provision of a contract, arrangement or understanding is a cartel provision if: (a) either of the following conditions is satisfied in relation to the provision: (i) the purpose/effect condition set out in subsection (2); (ii) the purpose condition set out in subsection (3); and (b) the competition condition set out in subsection (4) is satisfied in relation to the provision.

So the purpose condition has several alternatives separated by ‘or’, one of which is:

(3) The purpose condition is satisfied if the provision has the purpose of directly or indirectly: … (b) allocating between any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (ii) the persons or classes of persons who have supplied, or who are likely to supply, goods or services to any or all of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding; or

It sounds like there is a solid argument the purpose condition is met - they are allocating where people who are part of the arrangement (employees) shop.

They’d also need to meet the competition condition for it to be cartel conduct. For this to be met, the arrangement might need to include the clients of the company:

(4) The competition condition is satisfied if at least 2 of the parties to the contract, arrangement or understanding: (a) are or are likely to be; or (b) but for any contract, arrangement or understanding, would be or would be likely to be; in competition with each other in relation to: … © if paragraph (2)© or (3)(b) applies in relation to a supply, or likely supply, of goods or services—the supply of those goods or services in trade or commerce; or

So it could be argued that this is a cartel arrangement between the company, its clients, and its employees, and so attract penalties for cartel conduct.

bootloader unlocking

I used to buy Xiaomi products because of the bootloader unlocking, but in practice it is a dystopian nightmare - they have built it so to unlock the bootloader you need a cryptographic signature from them, and they don’t give that out all that easily.

You have to sign up for an account with them, use a Windows-only tool to request unlocking, and they have a long wait period (deliberately imposed) to unlock, which sometimes randomly restarts. The wait period is different for different models, and can be weeks.

Their support are unwilling to help unlock immediately even for replacement devices where you want to get up and going quickly - if your device breaks (they are not the most durable phones IMO, as you note) and you get a replacement, you’ll have to wait the time again before you can restore a backup of a phone using a custom ROM.

It’s possible they have improved, but because of their attitude around what I can do with my own hardware, I’ve stopped buying Xiaomi gear.

It is possible for all of the following to be simultaneously true:

• The Israeli War Cabinet are war criminals and terrible people for slaughtering civilians in Palestine and Lebanon.
• The Houthis are war criminals and terrible people for targeting civilians in Israel.
• The US Trump Administration are war criminals and terrible people for killing civilians in Houthi-controlled areas.
• Hamas are war criminals and terrible people for targeting civilians.

While all of the above crimes are of roughly the same type (albeit for different reasons), they do differ in extent - the Israeli War Cabinet is responsible for the most suffering by a wide margin.

I think it is a morally consistent position to condemn all of the war crimes above, although perhaps to prioritise efforts condemning the bigger ones.

The resulting waste from a thorium reactor is radioactive for dozens or hundreds of years not tens of thousands of years so you don’t need a giant Yucca Mountain style disposal site

That is assuming they don’t make significant amounts of Fe-60 (2.6 My half-life) by exposing steel pipes to neutron flux. While the fuel itself might have a shorter half-life, other waste still needs to be dealt with.

To save on costs, QAs could be paid in exposure.

As an experiment / as a bit of a gag, I tried using Claude 3.7 Sonnet with Cline to write some simple cryptography code in Rust - use ECDHE to establish an ephemeral symmetric key, and then use AES256-GCM (with a counter in the nonce) to encrypt packets from client->server and server->client, using off-the-shelf RustCrypto libraries.

It got the interface right, but it got some details really wrong:

• It stored way more information than it needed in the structure tracking state, some of it very sensitive.
• It repeatedly converted back and forth between byte arrays and the proper types unnecessarily - reducing type safety and making things slower.
• Instead of using type safe enums it defined integer constants for no good reason.
• It logged information about failures as variable length strings, creating a possible timing side channel attack.
• Despite having a 96 bit nonce to work with (-1 bit to identify client->server and server->client), it used a 32 bit integer to represent the sequence number.
• And it “helpfully” used wrapping_add to increment the 32 sequence number! For those who don’t know much Rust and/or much cryptography: the golden rule of using ciphers like GCM is that you must never ever re-use the same nonce for the same key (otherwise you leak the XOR of the two messages). wrapping_add explicitly means when you get up to the maximum number (and remember, it’s only 32 bits, so there’s only about 4.3 billion numbers) it silently wraps back to 0. The secure implementation would be to explicitly fail if you go past the maximum size for the integer before attempting to encrypt / decrypt - and the smart choice would be to use at least 64 bits.
• It also rolled its own bespoke hash-based key extension function instead of using HKDF (which was available right there in the library, and callable with far less code than it generated).

To be fair, I didn’t really expect it to work well. Some kind of security auditor agent that does a pass over all the output might be able to find some of the issues, and pass it back to another agent to correct - which could make vibe coding more secure (to be proven).

But right now, I’d not put “vibe coded” output into production without someone going over it manually with a fine-toothed comb looking for security and stability issues.

• Measles estimated case-fatality rate: 1.3%
• Estimated US population: 346,715,067
• Measles deaths if everyone in the US got measles: 4,507,295
• Upper limit on estimated MMR vaccine caused anaphylaxis: 0.000066%
• Anaphylaxis case-fatality rate: 0.3%
• Estimated vaccine-caused fatality rate: 1.98 * 10^-7 %
• Estimate vaccine-caused fatalities avoided by not vaccinating US population: 0.69
• Net increase in fatalities from switching to measles natural immunity for everyone in the US: 4,507,294

So it would only be better if he wants an extra 4.5 million Americans to die.

Legally, he’s not even allowed to drive.

I think more like the SS advises the president not to drive for their own safety, and to leave it to experts.

Or as Trump probably sees it: The deep state is being insufficiently loyal and trying to tell him - the president - of all people - what to do. So he totally shouldn’t listen, and should drive if he wants to, and they should fall in line or be fired.

Years of carefully curated anti-intellectualism in every bit of media they consume, because facts didn’t suit the wealthy (smoking is bad for you, fossil fuels are destroying the planet, private prisons drive more recidivism are facts that get in the way of someone making lots of money). Those fighting facts that aren’t on their side have embraced a number of other groups with anti-intellectual elements (white supremecists / neo-nazis / anti-woke, religious, anti-vaxxers, natural health advocates) to create alliances of anti-intellectual thought.

This has driven increasing polarisation in the US; 49% of republicans approved of JFK as president, and 49% of democrats approved of Eisenhower. It went down over time - other party approval was 30% of Carter, 31% of Reagan. There was a break in the pattern (44% for Bush Senior), but back on track to 27% for Clinton, 23% for Bush, 13% for Obama, 7% for Trump (first round), and 6% for Biden. So in other words, Americans are so polarised that they’ll vote for whoever their side puts up, and for one side, being anti-intellectual is actually seen as a strength.

I think many of the people who started the anti-intellectualism ball rolling on purpose are wealthy neoliberals who believe in laissez-faire free trade as a fundamental value, and so there is a certain aspect of ‘leopards ate my face’ to this leading to the anti-intellectualism extending back to rejection of mainstream economics (even though the neoliberals’ preferred theory is notoriously flawed, Trump’s approach to pulling economic levers is wholesale rejection of all theory rather than replacing it with something less flawed).

Traditionally legal tender means that a person / entity has to accept it for the payment of a debt - i.e. they can’t refuse cash and say you didn’t pay them because you didn’t use some other method.

However, in many retail scenarios there is no debt - there is an exchange of payment for goods, and so the traditional common law legal tender rules do not prevent retailers from refusing that exchange (i.e. customer doesn’t get the goods, retailer doesn’t get the money, the transaction just never happens) on the grounds of payment methods.

Some places have additional laws on top of legal tender that might require retailers to accept cash.

The awkwardness here actually works in favour of abolishing tips and replacing them with the pay being factored into higher prices.

No one wants to be the sucker - human nature is that people are generous if they think everyone else is generous, but if they feel that others are not ‘pulling their weight’ on generosity and are instead taking advantage, that’s the fastest way to dry up other people’s generosity. Right-wing media use this fact to undermine support for social welfare - e.g. if 0.001% of welfare payments are fraudulently taken, they set editorial policy that makes it seem like beneficiaries are rorting the system instead of being truly needy.

But when it comes to tipping, the dynamic actually works the other way - people feel generous by tipping, even though it is harmful long term. If a few people ahead of someone in the line don’t tip, should they be the sucker who does tip? And for the employee, you want them to be the advocate on the inside for forcing people to pay their share instead of taking advantage - by having the displayed price be the total upfront price that includes the compensation for employees, instead of an optional tip.