I don’t want to befriend someone who thinks my other friends are child molesters and should actually die. I get the impulse to say we should seek friendship and common ground, and I do where possible, but I just can’t with people who don’t see people I care about as even being people.
And that’s not a hypothetical, that’s actual “I have talked with these people” decisions.
If one is being objective and not paying attention to his former job or publicity, he’s a first time offender convicted of non-violent offenses with a business footprint that makes him low risk for probation violation.
He would also place a burden on the penal system if incarcerated, and his current state of having round the clock law enforcement presence further lowers the likelihood that he goes to prison.
On the flip side, he has done a lot to actively antagonize the person who will be mostly in charge of his fate, and he’s got a good month to build a body of evidence that says he’ll immediately disrespect probation.
So almost certainly not, but it’s not as close to zero as you would expect for a former president.
Something to keep in mind is that as of right now, he is guilty. If sentencing decides he goes to jail (very unlikely), they do not have to let him go free while the appeal takes place.
More likely though, is that he’ll be bound by the terms of probation. Which is potentially hilarious, since it means the probation officer can enter his home at will, send him to jail if he knowingly communicates with a felon, and can deny his requests to leave the jurisdiction he was convicted in essentially at will. He needs to be available to be interviewed by the probation at their discretion anywhere he is, and the probation officer can deny his living arrangements if they believe it creates a risk of a prohibited behavior.
It’s unlikely, but a particularly vindictive parole officer could make a very legitimate argument that attending the convention where they vote on making Trump the Republican candidate must be denied due to the likelihood of associating with known felons or former criminal associates related to his conviction.
If would be petty, but it’s not like anyone has put much care into abuse in the probation and parole system before, so…
He can appeal, but he is still a convicted felon. He will be sentenced before any appeal can happen. He will most likely get probation, which isn’t a lot but also comes with a lot more indignity then he is likely used to, and can carry a significant amount of bad optics during an election cycle.
As in, probation officer can enter his house without warning any time of day, deny his ability to travel out of state, random drug tests and unannounced workplace visits. Even just stipulating that he must report to their office every week would have a very visible impact on his campaign.
Honestly? I think a probation officer is likely to be picked for seniority in his case, for the purposes of making the new York justice system appear more, frankly, funded than it really is. I don’t think the political pressure on that officer is likely to be the same as the political pressure on someone like a judge. Their pressure will be to make the department look good.
That will inevitably be interpreted as professional, courteous and unbiased.
I don’t think he’ll be drug tested, but I do think he’ll have at least one off hours home visit that is coincidentally picked up by the media, and they’ll find a reason to deny some request until additional concessions are made.
At some point someone will say that as far as they’re concerned, the former president is just another individual under their supervision who’s being treated just like any other. It’s not true, but it requires some indignity to happen to be plausible, just because everyone is watching.
Enough so that no one says they’re obviously just weak, since that makes them look bad, but nothing so much as to make people say “wow, they’re actually awful, we need to fix the system”.
Alternatively the system assigns someone at random who more than likely power tips a little and takes advantage of the opportunity to abuse a rich person just because they can. Probably not though, since that requires a different level of institutional incompetence.
Yes. The system is designed to allow the probation officer a lot of leeway in how they enforce things.
Usually the system is petty and difficult to work with, but it’s not obligated to be.
They could say something like a biweekly phone call and a call before traveling out of state is all that’s required.
Unlikely though, since blatant deference makes them look bad, and opens up whichever political appointee or elected official that sits above the probation system to an easily justifiable replacement.
I would entirely agree. But, the world is what it is, and it might be untenable for the justice system or the judge might decide it creates too many opportunities for everything to go wrong on appeal.
Time will tell though, and July is just around the corner.
I mean, probation is the “slap on the wrist” punishment.
There’s an actual possibility of him going to prison. That’s not a hypothetical, or even unrealistic. Cohen served prison time for this same act, and he pled guilty and agreed to testify.
Trump is unlikely to go to prison due to the politics of the situation, but it’s not impossible. If he doesn’t go to prison, the only other punishment is probation, which carries with it things like travel restrictions. Those aren’t negotiable. They’re unlikely to deny his requests, but he would actually have to make the request, and check in with his court appointed probation officer at least by phone on a regular basis, or that officer can just send him to jail for non-compliance. A home inspection is standard procedure, and the officer doesn’t need anyone’s permission to do it.
If the judge that Trump has continuously attacked decides that Trump, who has shown zero signs of remorse or contrition for his crimes, deserves leniency then I see no reason to expect that the terms of his leniency would be exceptionally lenient, to say nothing of “in open defiance of the minimums of what’s required of probation”.
“we’ve built a platform that at least give piracy a run for its money, and used it to develop a massive user base so conditioned to buying from us that they happily joke about how 50% off a game they won’t play is cause for them to buy four times as many. Please, join us all in the baffling orgy of commerce, all we ask is 30% of the treasure.”.
“We will, but we’re gonna try to get the users to come to our platform with less content and maybe a $500 buy-in so we can have a bigger portion of a smaller pie”.
“Lol, go for it”.
“…”.
“…”.
“Why are you being anticompetitive?”
Shit, I assumed that valve somehow got a cut of games from keys as well, but looking it up (briefly), it looks like you’re entirely right and they don’t.
That makes it even more bonkers that companies keep trying to siphon off the market share, since you could just take your market proceeds as bonus revenue as long as valve got their share of what they sell.
I’m assuming that’s a big chunk of how things like humble bundle make their money?
Problem is the price of ingredients for cooking at home have gone up too, and with the value of labor for more workers falling in comparison, the cost of cooking at home is at best keeping pace.
I mean, the idea wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t executed well.
It was supposed to provide a non-threatening way to help users access functionality of their device or software that they may have been unaware of that would be relevant to their current task. This would assist users in accomplishing their task more efficiently, and help Microsoft by increasing consumers perception of the value their software provides, which reduces their likelihood to want to use something else in the future.
A modern, potentially useful clippy would ideally be able to tell…
what you were actually doing
if you appeared to be struggling or doing something repetitively
if it has the ability to help …Before it tries to interact with you.
Beyond that, it should be able to link to the tool in question in a way that automatically sets it up to do what you’re trying to do so using it doesn’t set you back from where you were, or just offer to do it for you in a way that doesn’t trash your work if you hate the output.
It’s still probably gonna suck ass and not be helpful, but at least it wouldn’t by vaguely mystifying why it even existed.
The best “digital assistants” I’ve seen recently are ones that actually acknowledge that these are language tools, not “knowledge” or “reasoning” tools.
They can legitimately do a good job figuring out a good response to what you ask it, ignoring the accuracy question. So if you set it up to know how to format data and what data you have available, you can get it to respond to questions like “are there trends in the monthly sales statistics for the past three years?” with a graph of those statistics broken down by product, rather than trying to let a language tool try to do reasoning on numerical data.
Talking good can sound like reasoning because right now things that talk good are usually humans that have basic reasoning skills. It’s why it so confusing when they just happily spout irrational nonsense: we’re used to rationality being a given in things that are confident and articulate.
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
It will confidently report inaccurate information. It’s usually not so hilariously wrong, but it’s still wrong.
For example, I was talking with someone about what constituents a “fruit” botanically, and I searched “are beans fruit”, and it confidently told me that beans are not a fruit, botanically speaking, because they’re a legume. It seems to have adapted, but that’s a good example of a “small wrong” that’s not uncommon at all.
For a brief moment in the beta for all this, it basically just summarized the top two or three reputable results, and attached a link to where it got the data.
They should have just left it at that, and not started mixing in random blogs and social media sites.
The ability to summarize the Wikipedia article and a random university professors page where they list every fact known to man about pine trees or something was actually helpful.
If I want the AIs best guess about how to fuck up a pizza, I just go to the site where I can ask it. Bad advice when searching is just shit.
A tldr for “what is turpentine” is actually helpful.
Your’s is a “featured snippet”, which is where it highlights a relevant portion from a top result.
The AI results have the AI synthesize a new sentence or set of paragraphs answering the question using data from multiple sources.
They’re different results because you didn’t seem to get the AI search results. After making it available to everyone they’ve been hit with a bunch of weird results and have started scrambling to manually remove the particularly strange ones as they crop up.
Scientists have warned that a court decision to block the growing of the genetically modified (GM) crop Golden Rice in the Philippines could have catastrophic consequences. Tens of thousands of children could die in the wake of the ruling, they argue....
Indeed, “eating more food” is generally agreed to be the best way to remedy childhood malnutrition and food insufficiency. It’s hands down agreed upon to be the best possible approach.
Unfortunately, children who suffer from these maladies often lack additional food to eat, which is why there are several lines of inquiry for solving this problem:
can we make it so more food?
can we make the food better?
can we make the food faster?
Inevitably, that means things like “vegetables that tolerate bad soil”, “vitamin fortified rice”, or “fast growing wheat”, or “crazy fertilizer strategies”.
It’s a sad reality that most places that can’t grow enough food to properly feed children typically lack the ability to just grow more, to say nothing of diversifying into more resource intensive crops. otherwise they would probably do that.
But Roundup doesn’t have anything to do with GMOs? They made genes that let some plants tolerate a pesticide. The effects of that pesticide have nothing to do with the gene.
The only biologically meaningful difference between GR2E and control rice was in levels of β-carotene and other provitamin A carotenoids in the grain. Except for β-carotene and related carotenoids, the compositional parameters of GR2E rice were within the range of natural variability of those components in conventional rice varieties with a history of safe consumption.
How exactly do you propose that the genetic makeup of the rice is going to impact the person eating it, if chemical analysis shows it’s not meaningfully different from any other rice?
You can’t demand that people prove something beyond unreasonable doubt. At some point you have to be able to articulate a concern to justify further scrutiny.
I believe that’s what they’re saying, yes. Concern of the trait spreading to other strains of rice are exaggerated because there’s nothing that would make this trait an advantage outside of the domestic food context, whereas Roundup resistance provides value to plants that want to grow near Roundup.
At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator....
Unfortunately, there has been precedent for the argument that the right to remain silent is one that needs to be continuously and positively invoked.
So if they keep interrogating you and you choose to start talking, that can be interpreted as you waiving your right to remain silent.
Remaining silent is not enough, you have to articulate that you want to invoke your right to remain silent, unambiguously request a lawyer (no “I think I should have a lawyer for this”), and request a lawyer generally (no “I want a lawyer before I answer any questions about where I was”).
“I am invoking my right to remain silent and I want a lawyer” is basically all you should say.
The ACLU remains an excellent resource for being aware of your rights.
A lot of it’s not intentionally for that purpose, but a side effect of hundreds of years of arguing over wording and what exactly the law means in different situations.
The cases that caused the “disagreeable” (most polite phrases I can think of) changes to Miranda protections happened only in the past few decades.
It’s still preposterous that the system, which is constitutionally pretty obviously slanted against the government, is so eager to find loopholes in protections for people to the advantage of the government.
I have seen a lot of stories online of people getting things stuck in there and doctors having to remove it, even items like cucumbers. I get that an item with a highly irregular shape could get stuck. But if it’s something long and rounded, why can people not just poop it out? Is it because the item isn’t soft enough?
Picture each of those little segments contracting and relaxing in sequence to slowly move things along, until it gets dumped in the rectum, where it sits until you and it come to an understanding.
Bunch of muscles then move things around to get things lined up, since normally things rest in a way that helps keep things from just falling out. Anal sphincter also does this, but it’s the difference between folding the chip bag closed, using a chip clip or both.
Once it’s all lined up, it does that rolling squeeze again, takes off the chip clip and things proceed in a routine fashion.
So if instead of what it’s used to, it’s dealing with something like a cucumber, it can end up with the end up around that curve at the top of the rectum.
The tapered inside near the anal sphincter means that when your vegetable goes in, the muscle can squeeze against the end and make the situation more of a commitment than people had planned for.
Once there, it can run into a few more hurdles. The muscles near the top can’t really do anything but squeeze the sides. If it’s not squishy and there’s no angle, it’s not going to be able to do anything because it just doesn’t have the angle. Even if there is an angle, like your cucumber didn’t go all the way, it’s going to be squeezing at an awkward angle to try to push something inflexible through the opening in the stronger anal sphincter.
Usually the softness lets things find a way with some mutual give and take, but even normally things can get a bit firm and get some resistance that can be uncomfortable to work through.
Turns out I think I remember more of my anatomy and physiology classes than I thought.
“values” in this context was being used in the ethical or cultural sense not the economic sense.
“Equality” and “justice” are American Values, and “clear shipping routes” are something with utility. “Ideals” would have also worked for “American values”.
Oh, totally. Don’t disagree with anything you said. 😊
To be clear, I was just trying to illustrate “how nations choose to act” and a bit of the context of “why Ukraine and not Palestine?”.
Location and advertising reliability as an ally are just the easiest to convey, but there are of course so many different things that go into everything a nation as big as the US does.
The state department has tens of thousands of workers, before you even get to the “boring” parts of what the CIA does to get them the data (analyzing public shipping records mostly) they need to make those policies and agreements. Any attempt to summarize the considerations of those people will have to cut some content.
Trump campaign donation page crashes after guilty verdict (www.thehill.com)
TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL 34 COUNTS (www.bbc.com)
PlayStation's CEO drastically underestimates the Steam crowd's patience, thinks PC gamers will buy a PS5 for exclusive sequels (www.gamesradar.com)
McDonald's: $18 Big Mac was 'exception' (www.newsnationnow.com)
McDonald’s is fighting back against viral tweets and media reports that it says have exaggerated its price increases....
Amongst all this AI hype of the past few years, nobody talks about that it's finally feasible to create an MS Clippy that works.
CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)
You know how Google’s new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won’t slide off (pssst…please don’t do this.)...
Last one, i've been farming Ai for memes but last one with lore (lemmy.ca)
‘A catastrophe’: Greenpeace blocks planting of ‘lifesaving’ Golden Rice (www.theguardian.com)
Scientists have warned that a court decision to block the growing of the genetically modified (GM) crop Golden Rice in the Philippines could have catastrophic consequences. Tens of thousands of children could die in the wake of the ruling, they argue....
Victim reports his father missing. Police instead interrogated him for 17 hours, said they killed his dog, and withheld his meds from the victim. Victim tried to commit suicide in the room. (lemmy.world)
At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator....
18+ How do things get stuck in the anus?
I have seen a lot of stories online of people getting things stuck in there and doctors having to remove it, even items like cucumbers. I get that an item with a highly irregular shape could get stuck. But if it’s something long and rounded, why can people not just poop it out? Is it because the item isn’t soft enough?
The US is thinking about letting Ukraine use its weapons to strike Russia, even if it enrages Putin: report (www.businessinsider.com)
US officials are considering letting Ukraine strike Russia with US weapons, The New York Times reports....