It’s easy to forget all the shit Ashcroft said he was going to do, like misinterpret existing laws to go after porn producers, harrass gay folks, all kinds of other Christofascist shit. Then 9/11 happened, and this is a pretty good summary of what happened:

he sought to sweep away any meaningful restrictions on his power and use the fact of September 11th to do so.

But this is an attorney general who treated dissent and criticism as if it was treason, who launched the largest campaign of ethnic profiling we’ve seen in this country since World War II, who sought… who treated judicial review and congressional oversight as inconvenient obstacles to getting the job done.

And I think ultimately he’ll be seen as a disaster, both from a civil liberties perspective and also from a national security perspective.

You’re an optimist. This decline is gonna be way more than a generation.

He said “which bank”, which could be determined by the sniffing DNS requests, or seeing which IPs his computer is connecting to.

Not a breach of his personal information (assuming the bank that he’s using and the client he’s using after putting everything in TLS properly).

I took a flyer on some GME back during the excitement. Got in at about $35, set a limit order at $420.69 (nice) for the lolz, and was pleasantly amused when that order got filled.

Source: trust me, bro

That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.

Having watched drivers in a traffic backup on the Autobahn neatly organize themselves to leave a lane empty for emergency vehicles even though there were no emergency vehicles in the vicinity, my conclusion is that there’s no fucking way that American drivers have the discipline or sense of social responsibility necessary to handle Autobhan-style driving.

Yes, let’s spend money on a system that only helps people in a specific set of buildings only during specific parts of the day and year when the buildings are occupied, rather than doing anything that would help society at large, at all times and anywhere in the country.

Like I said, it’s impossible to know what the right thing to do here, much less actually do it.

Hmmm, one involves fleecing school district funding in a grift, the other reduces profits to armaments manufacturers.

I really can’t figure this out! How is it possible to know?

That’s basically what Netflix did in the beginning. The challenge for Netflix is that the media companies they were licensing content from weren’t dumb, so the licensing agreements were time limited. The media companies caught up and built their own streaming platforms and now Netflix is at the receiving end of disintermediation.

Locking dog doors are available that are opened by a tag on the collar or by your dogs microchip if your dog is chipped. Racoons won’t get in unless they steal your dogs’ collar.

A hit piece on Nazis?

I don’t want to pay for the full goose right now, I just want to pay for the right to buy the goose later, at a price that’s fixed now. I’ll decide later if I actually want to buy the goose or not.

Alternatively, I’m not sure how much my goose will continue to lay in the future, I’d like to pay for insurance to guarantee me a fixed price to sell the goose later if I want to.

Well you should subtract out the kids. I’m not going to get irritated about someone under the age of 18 not voting. That’s why it should be eligible voters, not Americans.

Drive through seems like a great proving ground. Record every drive through customer / cashier interaction. Match each recording up with the transaction entered into the register. Train a model by having the model “listen” to the recording to predict what the order should look like, then match it to the items on the transaction receipt.

Then, phase 1 of implementation is to use the model in real time by listening to the live conversation at the drive through, predicting what it thinks the order should be, then prompting the cashier to double-check the order to see if the human made a mistake entering the order if the prediction doesn’t match.

Phase 2 is human-supervised, where the order taking system interacts directly with the customer to take the order, the human checks the result, and is able to step in / take over if there’s a mistake or a special case the order system can’t handle.

Phase 3 is “fuck your entry level employment” and no human is monitoring the system.

All 3 phases seem completely doable to me at this point, depending on how much backlash MCD is willing to deal with.

Yes, and conscription for defense is not the same thing as conscription for invasion and occupation.

He is a first-time offender, and the crime he has been found guilty of is a non-violent paper crime.

Right, first time non-violent felon, like Michael Cohen.

Amazon and several other companies hired like crazy during pandemic. Now they’re trying to shrink the workforce via a combination of outright layoffs and tight policies to make anyone on the verge of quitting go ahead and do it so they don’t have to pay severance.

Bonus points for shedding older, more experienced, more expensive employees vs. cheaper early in career employees.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1324557/quarterly-number-of-amazon-employees/

The investment firms are a big part of the problem, coupled with the fact that anyone who locked in a 30 year mortgage at rates between 2.5-3.0% really, really don’t want to sell and give up that rate.

In this scenario, you’ve got water and electricity readily available, seems like it would be straightforward to have small pumps and sprinklers. When the output from the panels drops below expected levels, automatically turn on the sprinklers for a bit to rinse them off.

My neighborhood has roundabouts. A couple of times when there’s not any traffic around, I’ve let autopilot attempt to navigate them. It works, mostly, but it’s quite unnerving. AP wants to go through them ready faster than I would drive through them myself.