My impression is it's less about pushing Trump and more about causing conflict within the US. There were Internet Research Agency(commonly called a troll farm) linked accounts pushing both sides of the COVID stuff, both sides during the BLM protests, etc.
Dems blaming things on Russian disinformation plays right into that goal, too. If you want to rile up the US populace, make people feel like everyone they disagree with is brainwashed by evil outside forces. Republicans did the same shit with TikTok, blaming China for young leftists, trans people, etc.
Throwing paper towels to people after a hurricane:
Maybe not the best moment, but very on brand for Trump.
Also the sharpie thing:
Seems unlikely for either to succeed, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't try, I suppose.
The problem is Tesla's stock price needs to remain sky high for it to work. That means keeping the market thinking there's a massive innovation coming soon, something huge that Tesla will have a monopoly over. Originally it was electric cars, Elon needed to convince investors they were so far ahead that competition wouldn't catch up. Then it was a fully automated factory, then humanoid robots. Now it's full self driving.
A move to ICE cars, a much more competitive market with lower margins, will be a signal that Tesla is a normal company that should be valued as such. ICE cars are also more complicated and absolutely need a dealer network for repairs. Those dealers have tremendous power over the manufacturers, too. Doesn't seem like something Elon would sign up for.
Did any union support Trump? I know Teamsters didn't endorse, but that's not the same as supporting Trump.
Obviously cop unions are always supporting Republicans, but nobody serious considers that union support.
Yeah, whatever facility you believe you were committed to
Probably the easiest is asking for the medical records for that period from the hospital. You can usually get them for free if it's a limited request, but you'll probably have to go in person.
The second option is going to the clerk at the courthouse that serves that hospital and have them search for a committal record. They might charge you for a copy of the record, but it's usually cheap.
From the ER they can put you on a short hold without court approval, and they don't need to start it until you're medically stable.
The kind that disqualifies you is something you'd remember. You're given a chance to testify.
The boox readers appear to be the best because they have a full android rom, but they're expensive. My experience with Kobo has been bad, I've had 3 devices fail for various reasons even though they're quite a bit more expensive than Kindle.
I've since switched to a refurbished Kindle Oasis, which is a great piece of hardware for the money. Top notch screen, light, great form factor, real buttons that are well placed. It's got the stupid Amazon ecosystem, but I don't pay for books, so it doesn't bother me, I just don't use it. They still give you an email address so you can easily send books from calibre without needing to plug it in.
She has diabetes, but that's not a death sentence, especially when you're wealthy.
Kamala didn't even have the decency to lie and say she's do something serious about price gouging, housing prices, etc. Nothing that could potentially slow the donations, now or in the future.
They saw that some voters were open to populist economic policies, but against progressive social policies and made the decision to be more reactionary. It's such a dumb strategy to think you'll outdo Republicans in an "I hate minorities" contest. They made a deliberate choice to take that long-shot strategy over doing something for the working class. They couldn't even lie about doing it.
There is a political strategist industrial complex that is beholden to donations, their wealth is tied to keeping the money rolling in over everything else, including winning elections. They can't even pretend to threaten the ruling class for fear of those donations slowing, now or in the future.
As cringe as it is, making a public display of kissing Trump's ass will probably pay dividends and costs him nothing(besides dignity). He'll pay no price from Dem politicians for as long as he's willing to send his citizens into the meatgrinder on behalf of Raytheon.
When I waited tables like 20 years ago, credit card tips were already around half of my tips. The places I worked, it was all tied into the computer, so when you cash out and it asks you how much you made in tips, the credit card tips were already filled in. I bet it's more like 95% cards now.
Anyone know of an actual source for this fact? Wikipedia removed it, and the only other references are sketchy websites that seem to have picked it up from wikipedia and reddit threads with no sourcing. Seems like it should be something easily verifiable.
You have to be a pretty big psycho to volunteer for war for free. It's not even patriotism, it's just war tourism.
Rest in piss bozo
Pictured: Google trends showing a lot of people just today discovering Joe Biden isn't on the ballot
I read all of the written opinions from my home state's Supreme Court(it's a weird hobby, I know), which includes any appeals of state bar disciplinary actions. It takes a lot to actually get disbarred, and it's almost always for repeatedly doing things that are cut and dried no-no's, like misappropriating client funds. The bar disciplinary board and the judges who hear the appeals are all lawyers and they cut an incredible amount of slack for this kind of stuff. This argument, while dumb, wouldn't even merit a reprimand.
Good idea. I was thinking of much less humane solutions
I fucking hate hate hate giant pickup trucks. They're a huge percentage of the vehicles on the road here and they almost never get used for pickup truck things. It's so rare that I see one with anything in the bed that it's a notable event.
They're just mega sized luxury SUVs with oversized engines that are towing around what is essentially a trailer, all the time. Except they kill a bunch of kids because they have flat grilles that create a giant blind spot in front.
Even worse is the payload capacity competition. It's not enough to have a big ass truck, it's gotta be one of the 7.2 liter powerstroke, super duty, lariat, king ranch, xlt, Laredo sport power wagons. It also has to have dual tires and a giant class 5 trailer hitch with 3 balls. If it doesn't have a lift kit and knobby mud tires, well, you just aren't a manly man anymore.
The people that own them are the worst drivers, too. Always tailgating, taking wide turns into the oncoming lane, never fitting it into a parking spot. They gotta rev the engine big at traffic lights, because it's really impressive that you can angle your foot 25 degrees.
You can apply as a separate household living within the same living space. As long as you don't pool resources(meaning buy and prepare food together), your household is one person. Of course they have no way to tell what you're doing.
The only tricky bit is you need to fill out a shared housing form that details the relationship between you and whoever lives there with you if you're not on the lease.
That corner with the bricks is very likely sinking because of that gutter discharging too close to the house. It's actually worse than not having a gutter at all because it's directing the water from the whole roof section to one point. It's a cheap fix to stop future damage(a long piece of gutter extension), but you do want to hire someone to inspect that.
A structural engineer probably or a good home inspector. Have them make sure the grade around the house is directing water away from the foundation, it's the number one reason for foundation damage. Figure out what it'll cost to fix before you buy.
At the core of Microsoft, a three-trillion-dollar hardware and software company, lies a kind of social poison — an ill-defined, cult-like pseudo-scientific concept called 'The Growth Mindset" that drives company decision-making in everything from how products are sold, to how your on-the-job perform...
Another great Ed Zitron essay about the tech industry. Some quotes:
>The "growth mindset" is Microsoft's cult — a vaguely-defined, scientifically-questionable, abusively-wielded workplace culture monstrosity, peddled by a Chief Executive obsessed with framing himself as a messianic figure with divine knowledge of how businesses should work. Nadella even launched his own Bible — Hit Refresh — in 2017, which he claims has "recommendations presented as algorithms from a principled, deliberative leader searching for improvement."
>There are many, many reasons this is problematic, but the biggest is that the growth mindset is directly used to judge your performance at Microsoft. Twice a year, Microsoft employees have a "Connect" with managers where they must answer a number of different questions about their current and future work at Microsoft, with sections titled things like "share how you applied a growth mindset," with prompts to "consider when you could have done something different," and how you might have applied what you learned to make a greater impact. Once filled-out, your manager responds with comments, and then the document is finalized and published internally, though it's unclear who is able to see them.
>One employee related to me that managers occasionally add that they "did not display a growth mindset" after meetings, with little explanation as to what that meant or why it was said. Another said that "[the growth mindset] can be an excuse for anything, like people would complain about obvious engineering issues, that the code is shit and needs reworking, or that our tooling was terrible to work with, and the response would be to ‘apply Growth Mindset’ and continue churning out features."
>In essence, the growth mindset means whatever it has to mean at any given time, as evidenced by internal training materials that that suggest that individual contributions are subordinate to "your contributions to the success of others," the kind of abusive management technique that exists to suppress worker wages and, for the most part, deprive them of credit or compensation.
>One post from Blind, an anonymous social network where you're required to have a company email to post, noted in 2016 that "[the Growth Mindset] is a way for leadership to frame up shitty things that everybody hates in a way that encourages us to be happy and just shut the fuck up," with another adding it was "KoolAid of the month."
>There are many, many reasons this is problematic, but the biggest is that the growth mindset is directly used to judge your performance at Microsoft. Twice a year, Microsoft employees have a "Connect" with managers where they must answer a number of different questions about their current and future work at Microsoft, with sections titled things like "share how you applied a growth mindset," with prompts to "consider when you could have done something different," and how you might have applied what you learned to make a greater impact. Once filled-out, your manager responds with comments, and then the document is finalized and published internally, though it's unclear who is able to see them.
>The problem, it seems, is that Microsoft doesn't really care about the Growth Mindset at all, and is more concerned with stripping employees of their dignity and personality in favor of boosting their managers' goals. Some of Microsoft's "Connect" questions veer dangerously close to "attack therapy," where you are prompted to "share how you demonstrated a growth mindset by taking personal accountability for setbacks, asking for feedback, and applying learnings to have a greater impact."
>This all feels so distinctly cult-y. Think about it. You have a High Prophet (Satya Nadella) with a holy book (Hit Refresh). You have an original sin (a fixed mindset) and a path to redemption (embracing the growth mindset). You have confessions. You have a statement of faith (or close enough) for new members to the church. You have a priestly class (managers) with the power to expel the insufficiently-devout (those with a sinful fixed mindset). Members of the cult are urged to apply its teachings to all facets of their working life, and to proselytize to outsiders.
>As with any scripture, its textural meanings are open to interpretation, and can be read in ways that advantage or disadvantage a person.
>And, like any cult, it encourages the person to internalize their failures and externalize their successes. If your team didn’t hit a deadline, it isn’t because you’re over-worked and under-resourced. You did something wrong. Maybe you didn’t collaborate enough. Perhaps your communication wasn’t up to scratch. Even if those things are true, or if it was some other external factor that you have no control over, you can’t make that argument because that would demonstrate a fixed mindset. And that would make you a sinner.
>Yet there's another dirty little secret behind Microsoft's Connects.
>Microsoft is actively training its employees to generate their responses to Connects using Copilot, its generative AI. When I say "actively training," I mean that there is an entire document — "Copilot for Microsoft 365 Performance and Development Guidance" — that explains, in detail, how an employee (or manager) can use Copilot to generate the responses for their Connects. While there are guidelines about how managers can't use Copilot to "infer impact" or "make an impact determination" for direct reports, they are allowed to "reference the role library and understand the expectations for a direct report based on their role profile."
>To be extremely blunt: Microsoft is asking its employees to draft their performance reviews based on the outputs of generative AI models — the same ones underpinning ChatGPT — that are prone to hallucination.
>Microsoft's culture isn't simply repugnant, it's actively dystopian and deeply abusive. Workers are evaluated based on their adherence to pseudo-science, their "achievements" — which may be written by generative AI — potentially evaluated by managers using generative AI. While they ostensibly do a "job" that they're "evaluated for" at Microsoft, their world is ultimately beholden to a series of essays about how well they are able to express their working lives through the lens of pseudoscience, and said expressions can be both generated by and read by machines.
>I find this whole situation utterly disgusting. The Growth Mindset is a poorly-defined and unscientific concept that Microsoft has adopted as gospel, sold through Satya Nadella's book and reams of internal training material, and it's a disgraceful thing to build an entire company upon, let alone one as important as Microsoft.
Should we bring back a traditionally racist and homophobic form of punishment? Do I need to even answer that?
If the thing you're proposing is something the Louisiana government is trying to do, it's a clue you're on the wrong track.
Despite a federal jury acquitting Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne for the murder of a Virginia police officer nearly 25 years ago, the two men remain in prison for the crime. But with new evidence and a new lawyer, they're hoping to reverse the fraught, state-level guilty pleas that a feder...
It's a long article, so I put the most relevant excerpts below, but the whole article is interesting and infuriating. There is a lot more details about the case and lack of evidence.
>Richardson and Claiborne's plight is as unique as it is complex. Since they were accused in April 1998 of shooting and killing Officer Allen Gibson, they've faced charges in both the state and federal court systems, and seen their cases go up and down on appeal while seeming to skirt some of the judicial system's most basic rules regarding double jeopardy and the disclosure of exculpatory evidence.
>Despite state prosecutors initially charging them with capital murder, the charges were drastically reduced thanks to what court records say was a lack of physical evidence. The two men ultimately pled guilty in 1999 to manslaughter and accessory after the fact, and served little to no time in prison.
>Federal prosecutors, however, went on to try them again for the same killing under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in 2001. In the federal trial, jurors found Richardson and Claiborne not guilty of the murder, but did convict them on drug possession and distribution charges.
>Even though they were cleared of the murder, the federal judge overseeing the case sentenced both men to life in prison under U.S. Supreme Court precedent that allows judges to consider conduct for which a defendant has been acquitted to impose a longer sentence. And in making the call to put both men behind bars for life, the judge pointed to their guilty pleas in state court.
>"The court is just leaning on the guilty plea instead of trying to find out what happened that day," Adams said. "And the reason, I believe, is they are not looking to find out what happened, because they already know. And what they know is that it ain't Terence and Ferrone."
>The Guilty Plea
>Nearly a year after the killing, prosecutors reduced the charges against the two defendants from capital murder to involuntary manslaughter in exchange for their guilty pleas. According to the report that attorney general Herring prepared years later in response to Richardson's innocence petition, a state prosecutor had admitted to the press that the case was weak and that "the risks in going to trial with a jury were just astronomical."
>"My family ran out of money," Claiborne said. "They were talking about giving us the death penalty. When our attorney came to us and said that this was the best deal, what else was I supposed to do in order to stay alive?"
>Richardson said his lawyer told him that, "even though they know that it may not have been y'all that did it, they're going to make somebody wear this case. And it's going to be y'all. You're going to get the death penalty."
>"I said, 'Man that's crazy. You're trying to tell me I got to go to prison for something I didn't do?" Richardson said.
>The Federal Case
>Richardson and Claiborne took the plea deal in December 1999, with Richardson admitting to involuntary manslaughter and Claiborne agreeing he had served as an accessory after the fact.
>Richardson was sentenced to 10 years with five suspended based on good behavior, while Claiborne was sentenced to time served.
>Adams said there was public outrage at the outcome.
>"If you're in D.C. and you're reading that, out of Waverly, Virginia, a cop was killed by two Black guys and they plead guilty, but [one is] given time served, you're going to be like, 'What the hell man?'" Adams said. "You've never seen such concessions made for Black men accused of killing a white guy. It just doesn't happen."
>So in December 2000, amid pressure from Gibson's family and others, federal prosecutors indicted Richardson and Claiborne under the RICO Act for one count of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, one count of use of a firearm to commit murder during drug trafficking, and one count of murder of a law enforcement officer during drug trafficking.
>"These drug charges came out of nowhere. It was a loophole," Adams said. "They couldn't just say, 'We're trying to get to the murder of this officer.' There would have been some sovereignty issues with that. But this way they could do it and say, 'I'm charging you with a RICO case where your drug dealing resulted in the death of an officer.'"
>As with the state case, the federal case included no physical evidence in support of the charges.
Guy unloads a truly impressive string of verbal abuse on a cop. Predictably cops don't let that go unpunished
Excellent video about the real reason ADHD drugs are in short supply. Spoiler: it's about profits
Group also challenged right of Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley to appear on Republican primary ballots
>The National Federation of Republican Assemblies (NFRA) has cited the infamous 1857 Dred Scott Supreme Court decision, which stated that enslaved people weren’t citizens, to argue that Vice President Kamala Harris is ineligible to run for president according to the Constitution.
>The group also challenged the right of Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley to appear on Republican primary ballots.
>The Republican group’s platform and policy document noted that “The Constitutional qualifications of Presidential eligibility” states that “No person except a natural born Citizen, shall be eligible, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President
>“An originalist and strict constructionist understanding of the Constitution in the Scalia and Thomas tradition, as well as precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court cases ... have found that a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ is defined as a person born on American soil of parents who are both citizens of the United States at the time of the child’s birth,” the document states.
>The group then cites six cases including Dred Scott v Sandford. The 1857 ruling came a few years before the 1861 outbreak of the US Civil War over the issue of slavery, stating that enslaved people could not be citizens, meaning that they couldn’t expect to receive any protection from the courts or the federal government. The ruling also said that Congress did not have the power to ban slavery from a federal territory.
I thought this was some kind of op, like someone making a fake Republican org and putting out an unhinged policy paper. Citing Dred Scott is crazy, especially since it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the argument that she's not a citizen.
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/save/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Famericas%2Fus-politics%2Fkamala-harris-president-supreme-court-b2601364.html
New Hampshire's school funding system is the worst that exists in the US.
This image is pretty self-explanatory, but I want to add that this is not a cherry-picked example. There are other communities that could be compared that would show significantly larger disparities, but this example was chosen because they are 30 miles apart.
This disparity exists because most of the school funding comes from local property taxes. Property rich towns have plenty to spend on schools, while property poor communities must raise their tax rates. This causes businesses to leave, which lowers tax revenues, which forces them to raise tax rates even more. This also eliminates local jobs, which causes people to leave, which drives down property values, which drives down tax revenue. It's a vicious cycle that destroys communities.
One of the aspects of this that enrages me the most is that the NH constitution requires the state to fully fund an adequate education. There was a series of lawsuits starting in 1998, where the NH Supreme Court ruled that the state must fund a study to determine the costs and fund that amount. As a result, the state legislature created SWEPT, a statewide education property tax. The funds would be passed to the state, and the state would be required to divide it out based on an equalization formula. This satisfied the court, despite the fact that the amount would not satisfy the cost of an adequate education established at trial.
Just 2 years later, the legislature passed a law allowing communities to retain the SWEPT funds, as long as they spent them on education. Property rich towns reduced their local property taxes to 0% and tried to spend as much as possible even though their schools were already well funded. Despite their best efforts, equalization funds still flowed to the poor communities, they just couldn't spend it all. Then the rich towns discovered they could set a negative local property tax rate. Most of the richest towns did it, bringing their contributions to the SWEPT fund to 0.
Over the years since there have been other lawsuits, most targeted at aid for students with disabilities. Some of those resulted in some targeted funding and adequacy aid, but today the funding looks like this(SWEPT in this chart is the amount kept locally, so it's a local tax as well):
This whole situation also makes the entire NH tax system regressive, meaning poor folks a larger share of their income in taxes than the rich. There's no personal income or sales tax and the interest and dividend tax was recently eliminated:
This is a system designed to keep poor people poor. Give them a terrible education, eliminate any chance of jobs in their communities, and tax them more than everyone that has a higher income.
There is currently another lawsuit going that the state has lost, but judgement is delayed until after the next legislative cycle. Despite the fact that the state lost, and didn't even contest that they aren't properly funding an adequate education, I'm not hopeful. The current chief justice is a big proponent of private education and represented the state in a previous school funding lawsuit. They also have the roadmap of how to allow the state to continue to violate the constitution. Let them delay, pass small reforms and then undo them, forcing another 5 years of funding studies and litigation.
People talk about social media algorithms as if they're something disconnected from the decisions of the companies that make and control them. "The Algorithm" is not making YT push shitty content on your home page, YouTube is making that happen. It's a combination of ignoring certain trends and actively promoting others.
For starters, these companies made the algorithms, they tweak them constantly. When Elsagate happened, YT made changes the reduced the amount of that very specific type of garbage that was shown. When advertisers stop advertising, they suddenly have great influence over the recommendations. That to me proves they have to ability to control with pretty fine detail what is recommended by their sites.
It's been revealed that TikTok has a manual "heater" function that allows them to force certain videos to appear in recommendations. They use this to set the tone of the site, lure influencers, and make brand deals. That exposure causes heated channels to gain subscribers, further amplifying the effects.
YT trending is manually chosen as well, 10 main videos, 10 gaming videos and 10 shorts, updated every 15 minutes. When videos end up on the trending page, they get more views, which makes them get recommended even more. This gives them a constant source of influence over the recommendations.
One mistake I see people make is to assume that recommendation algorithms are simply a reflection of the audience; "The algorithm is bad because we are bad". My counterpoint to that is that when the recommendations hurt the bottom line of the business, these companies change them. At the very least it's social media companies choosing not to fix bad recommendations and at worst intentional manipulation. Sure, people choose to watch a lot of gross stuff, but let's not act like YouTube couldn't get rid of, for example, misogyny for children content(Andrew Tate etc) quickly if they wanted to.
The other is to treat it as a sentient creation that nobody has control over, "We're just chasing what the algorithm wants". It's one of the things tech bros dream of with regard to AI. They want to be able to put an algorithm in charge of the orphan crushing machine and say, "Sorry, I don't know why the algorithm keeps choosing to crush the orphans".
Tldr: The purpose of a system is what it does.
Joshua Bowles, 29, repeatedly stabbed the United States NSA officer who was working at British intelligence agency GCHQ.
>Joshua Bowles, 29, repeatedly stabbed the unnamed woman, who was working at British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), in March near its base at Cheltenham, England.
>Following his arrest, Bowles told the police, “The target was selected for employment at the NSA.”
>“Due to the size and resourcing, American intelligence represents the largest contributor within the intelligence community, so made sense as the symbolic target. I consider GCHQ just as guilty.”
>Judge Bobbie Cheema-Grubb said on Monday that Bowles had carried out a “politically motivated attack” that was driven by “anger and resentment” towards GCHQ and women.
>He had researched the attack online beforehand, including studying the American “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who mounted an anonymous bombing campaign from 1978 to 1995.
>Bowles also looked up attacks on women and white supremacy.
>In one of his police interviews, Bowles said: “The system is rigged. I believe the intelligence community helps ensure this rigging, this view has been reinforced by my time working at GCHQ.”
>Penny also said Bowles described himself as a “terrorist” after the attack, saying to one witness: “I make a pretty s*** terrorist, don’t I?”
I'm watching Telemarketers and it's reminding me of shady jobs I've had in the past.
I worked for Rent-a-Center doing collections. It's a place that preys on the poorest people in America, getting them to pay extortionate interest on rent to own furniture, appliances and electronics. We had customers who would end up paying thousands of dollars on a couch that wasn't even new when they got it. Even worse was people who would hit hard times and get their stuff repoed and end up with nothing to show for thousands of dollars in payments.
My job was to learn when these customers got paid, or when they got their disability or welfare check and hound them over the phone or in person. If they didn't pay, I'd be sent out to knock on their doors. If that failed I'd be sent to repo it.
It was a soul crushing job. I've had shit jobs, but I'd never had a job that made me feel like I was doing harm to people before. Some of my coworkers would deal with this by demonizing the customers, acting like they were all deadbeats who deserved to get fleeced. Others would blame the customers, saying shit like, 'Anyone stupid enough to buy here was going to get ripped off by someone, and it might as well be us'.
I couldn't do that, so I started getting fucked up at work like Pat Pespis. I started pretending to do my job, dialing the number and then hitting the flash button and faking the calls. I'd get sent on a repo and my coworker and I would go out to eat or to the mall and pretend they wouldn't answer the door. I expected my collection stats would fall low enough that I'd eventually be fired, but they barely moved at all. It turned out that hounding people to pay a bill wasn't actually doing much.
LanyrdSkynrd [comrade/them, any] @hexbear.net I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.