TheCoelacanth

Judges in the US have gone completely off the rails.

The constitution puts no limits on the power of a jury to acquit someone and it's absolutely despicable that judges have tried to usurp that authority under that pretext of following the rule of law.

If we want to make it harder for juries to acquit someone, then that should be written in the law; not invented by judges. Jury instructions must follow what the law says; not what judges want it to say.

Can we stop pretending the filibuster is a real constraint? It's nowhere in the constitution and only exists if the majority of senators want it to exist.

It's not a real rule. Just an excuse for inaction.

The legal bar for a criminal trial is significantly higher than "credible".

Look at the trend lines. Solar and batteries are getting cheaper on an exponential curve; nuclear and fossil fuels aren't. Those trends won't continue forever, but they're pretty much locked in for the next few years because the engineering work is already done and often contracts are already in place.

Short-term we're waiting for mass production and distribution of the new designs (relatively easy to predict), not R&D which is less predictable.

That's not new rules. It's just a basic application of existing rules.

We already have definitions of what realized and unrealized capital gains are and we already have the rule about how much capital gains on a primary residence are exempt from taxation.

Every non-trivial organization everywhere has some level of law breaking. We should try to avoid it, but we will never get to zero.

Secret courts on the other hand undermine the entire concept of rule of law and we should have absolutely zero tolerance for them.

Nonsense. It's going to be the cheapest no matter what.

If you are borrowing against unrealized appreciation of more than the $250k that is exempt for a primary residence, you should be.

If you are borrowing to buy the house in the first place, then all of the capital gains have already been taxed, so it's not analogous to this scenario.

Anthropic has ample resources to fight this law if it is unjust. They should get vigorous, to-the-letter enforcement of the law to stress-test it for people who don't have the same level of resources.

Selective application of the law in favor of the rich and powerful is a perversion of justice, even if it does sometimes result in more just outcomes in individual cases.

And the current US administration is on the wrong side of almost all of them.

Seasonal will be handled with wind-power (tends to produce more power when solar is producing less), building extra (power being too cheap in the summer is a great problem to have) and long-distance power transmission (plenty of sun in the southern US or southern Spain even in the winter).

Secret courts are anathema to democracy and need to be abolished.

With the way prices are trending, soon solar power is going to be the cheapest power source even in the winter. No one is going to complain that electricity is too cheap during the summer.

There's still sun during the winter; you just need more solar panels for the same amount of energy. Also, there tends to be more wind during the winter, so wind power makes a good complement to solar.

Good riddance. If they would rather lose access to one of the most lucrative markets ever to have existed than pay a small share of their dragon's horde, then we won't miss them.

Efficiency is often directly opposed to resiliency. Governments and militaries should prioritize resiliency over efficiency.

Dual class share structures like this need to be abolished from public companies. If you want the benefits of being a public company, then you shouldn't be able to keep absolute control of the company.

Cookie banners aren't really about cookies. They're about tracking, which can be done with or without cookies.

Yeah, it's going to be hard for someone to pick an arbitrary target and get into a position to exploit it, but there are an enormous number of people who are in the position to exploit someone.

One rogue employee at Cloudflare could MITM half the Internet if they are able to get around whatever internal safeguards exist.

There's basically no difference between Saudi oligarchs and western oligarchs. They're all just the same assholes who think they should get to dictate how other people live their lives.

Not directly, but ultimately its funding is non-voluntary and is backed by the state's monopoly on violence.

This is the #1 problem facing the US. Consistent application of the law is only available to those who can pay for it and far too slow even when you can pay.

No, I don't that a cooperatively run streaming service needs to have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in a given territory. There could easily be multiple competing cooperatives.

Which instances do you think aren't misleading? Other than the explicitly electronic ones, it seems like nearly all of the awards are either from the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award or have some caveat like only being suspected of using AI or only using it for part of the work.

Someone producing the 10,000th illustrated edition of Frankenstein or winning an award with a book with an AI-generated cover or winning an award with an anthology with one AI generated segment or one award jury having bad taste is not very strong evidence of quality to me.

Yeah, or the one where only the cover was generated or the anthology where one page was AI-generated or the many cases where the only evidence of AI use was a Pangram score or the one that's just an illustrated edition of Frankenstein.

Because there are a million literary awards and some of them are awarded by people who are bad at recognizing quality.

Additionally, many of these cases were only partially created using AI or aren't proven to have actually used AI or used AI in a creative and non-conventional way and that's what they won for.

Probably too busy sending anti-trans tweets from her private jet to say anything about piracy.

Yeah, you have a lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful jobs in the world and it pays >$300k with a great pension. You should not be allowed any other sources of income full stop. Same for the president. No outside income, no investments other than target date retirement funds.

If your neighbor offers you $50 to mow their lawn, turn it down. President and Supreme Court justice aren't side-jobs.

Yeah, they are splitting hairs. She's in prison for investor fraud instead of patient fraud for because investor fraud is drastically easier to prove (the same reason Al Capone when to jail for tax evasion and not something else).

She told well-documented lies to investors that made it a much more attractive investment. They invested and lost money. It's basically public information who the victims are. Clear-cut fraud and very easy to prove.

For patient fraud, you probably need to track down the people who were actually harmed in a material way (attempted fraud isn't a crime). That's going to be a small subset of the people who got tests and it's going to be hidden away in private medical records. Doable if they really had to, but why bother when you have a slam-dunk case for something else.

I'm thoroughly baffled by this story. Digger was non-stop laughs when I saw it. The End of Oak Street I don't remember as well, but I'm pretty sure there were some moments that got big laughs.