Trump's attorney Alina Habba contended that Carroll “had failed to show she is entitled to any damages at all” because she "actively sought the comments and the attention" she received.

Wow. They actually used the “she was asking for it” argument against a victim of sexual assault.

Also, he’s still not going to shut up about it and will land back in court under additional defamation charges.

Evolutionary biologist here.

I know this is a recurring meme, and it does have a basis in truth. However, in my opinion, it vastly overemphasizes a single aspect of early humans at the expense of other and more important distinct human qualities (and I’m using this term to also refer to our closely related species and ancestors).

First, the real distinction is sociality. Humans are the most cooperative species of hominid. As someone once said, you will never see two chimpanzees carrying a log together. This translates into being able to coordinate efficient hunting practices in a variety of ecosystems.

Second, and very related, is social learning. Other species can also exhibit social learning, but never to the degree humans do. Most species figure out things in evolutionary time - what counts as food, what counts as danger, the best way to do X, etc. Humans do it daily and pass it on to each other. We learn to kill prey by setting fires in grasslands. We develop tools and teach each other how to make and use them. These are all interlocking effects. The bigger our brains get, the more helpless our babies are, so the more we need societies, which creates increasingly complex social dynamics, which rewards more complex brains, and so on.

In short, it’s intelligence and social learning replacing learning in evolutionary time that made humans successful, possibly to the point of self destruction.

Biologist here. The main problem with this argument is that Rowling is trying to win her argument through scientizing, and is not only doing it in an inept way, but in a way that’s completely ironic.

She’s invoking biology, but infortunately she’s adopting an approach that incorporates a high school level of biology. When we start teaching science, we start with highly simplified presentations of the major topics, then build both in breadth and depth from there. If you really want to get down the rabbit hole of sex determination (and multiple definitions of genetic and phenotypical “sex”), you really need to get into molecular biology, genetics, and developmental biology. She’s been advised of this multiple times by multiple experts, so at this point it’s willful ignorance.

The painfully ironic part is that she’s relying on an area where she has no expertise in order to make her point, while ignoring the fact that, as a world-known literary figure, she should know that the applicable part of the definition of “woman” is linguistic and semiotic - which is to say it’s cultural. The definition of “woman” was different in the 1940s South, among the 17th century pilgrims, the Algonquin tribes, cultures throughout sub-equatorial Africa, and so on.

Next, he’s going to say that he did repeat the oath, but he had his fingers crossed so it doesn’t count.

Biden could order the military to kill all Republican members of Congress as well as any democrats who would support his impeachment for doing so. He could order the execution of all of their replacements as well. He could even order the execution of governors who appoint congresspeople who don’t support his agenda, and the voters who voted for them.

I’m sure this is exactly what the authors of the constitution intended.

I was involved in discussions 20-some years ago when we were first exploring the idea of autonomous and semiautonomous weapons systems. The question that really brought it home to me was “When an autonomous weapon targets a school and kills 50 kids, who gets charged with the war crime? The soldier who sent the weapon in, the commander who was responsible for the op, the company who wrote the software, or the programmer who actually coded it up?” That really felt like a grounding question.

As we now know, the actual answer is “Nobody.”

“Every customer should be greeted when they walk into the store.”

The singular “they” is traditional in English - it is very much proper English and has been around (iirc) since the 17th century. It’s only a big deal now because conservatives want to make gender a factor in elections.

Iran does not pose a credible military threat to Israel. They only have a couple of options - terrorist attacks from their proxies, maybe a cross-border incursion from Lebanon that would be a slaughter and change the balance of power there, or an air strike. Israel is so amped up right now that they’d respond with airstrikes inside Iran, and US carrier groups are in the area with no misunderstanding as to what they signify.

This is saber-rattling for theatrics.

Yes. These should be made illegal, or restricted from on-road use. As trucks increase in size and height, there are studies that they become more and more dangerous. They should be banned for safety reasons.

Most of the people I know who are looking to move back to the Bay Area or Portland/Seattle are doing to because of the political climate, not the weather. A lot of people were pushed to move by their jobs, or elected to move because they saw a cost of living benefit. They figured they could do the blue city in a red state thing. With people like Abbott in charge, that’s no longer going to be a viable option.

They need to be investigated as a criminal organization.

I think I remember reading he was basically released awaiting trial. I had honestly given up on seeing any justice in this case, so this is a positive development.

Smalltalk would probably make more sense than C++.

In our view, Hungary fulfills all the qualities of the rule of law

We self-certify our compliance and reject any review. Just give us money please.

I remember when the hole in the ozone was something we were all worried about. I remember the news segments and the magazine covers and the protests.

I don’t remember the massive coordinated media campaigns running into the tens of billions of dollars. I don’t remember an entire political party simultaneously saying there’s no ozone hole and that the ozone hole is actually good for us. I don’t remember rednecks standing in rows on Texas highways shooting AquaNet into the air to own the libs.

We used to be able to do it. Nixon founded the EPA. There was a general consensus that had a role in reducing pollution and disease. The republicans fought against establishing social security, saying that old people should support themselves and anything else would turn the US literally communist.

We’ve lost even that much.

Return it as it was shipped with a hardware bug.

1. Chainmail provides little to no protection against impact damage. As we saw in Fellowship, evil beings who attack heroes in bed use slashing attacks with broadswords or similar weapons. While it might prevent cuts, it’s basically like being beaten with an iron rod that will break bones and rupture organs. It is unsuitable as armor. That’s leaving aside weapons like maces, hammers, and clubs, or a Seal Team Six scenario.
2. It’s aluminum. Or aluminium, if you’re that kind of person. This is basically a blanket designed by Jony Ive. It doesn’t warm. It doesn’t protect. But it’s thin and lightweight. Which is the opposite of what you want in a weighted blanket.
3. You can buy weighted blankets that come in a variety of weights and warmth characteristics for a fraction of the time investment used to make this. The money you save could be used to buy a home security system that includes a minefield or electric fence. If you’re impressed by what a claymore sword can do to an orc, wait until you see what a claymore mine can do.

It’s a tough life in the salami mines.

How’s the Chinese election looking? Who are the major candidates and who is in the lead?

Hamas never posed an existential threat to Israel.

“Who has a better story than Bran the Broken? Let’s make him king!”

Okay, not happy in the moment, but it was supposed to be. I’m still mad about it. Of all the shows I’ve re-marathoned, I’ve never even been tempted to redo GoT. It was like S8 was so bad it went back in time and ruined the entire rest of the show. I can’t even entertain watching any spinoffs.

I may buy the rest of the series as novels (ha) but even then it will be with trepidation.

It is true. It came out a while ago. It was just entered into testimony. I didn’t actually read her statements and answers, so I don’t know what level of detail she went into, but it was in her book and she talked about it at the time.

“I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down,” he said. “While this was a collective recommendation by some members of our leadership team, I approved it and take full responsibility for it.”

These statements always seem so facile when “taking responsibility” means no consequences apart from issuing an apology.

From their q&a:

gitspamdum is a bot, I just created a fake account and bid for 999 trillions, no verification were requested in the whole process and 1 nanosecond later gitspamdum bid after me, I tried this twice, my only purpose was to expose the absurdity of the whole thing, if Proton really take this thing seriously please just cancel all auctions and place them in a serious website

Bye, Felicia.

Sisters, brothers, and others - I give you the Republican Party’s chief representative of all things they consider good and holy.

The US Greens are largely subsidized by Republican funders, and Green presidential candidates have been dinner guests of Putin. The US Greens aren’t an independent environmentalist party but are a GOP stalking horse.

Okay, I love the guardian and donate to it, but this is some NY Post/The Sun level clickbait.

This article is factually incorrect and possibly written and posted in bad faith. The president has the authority to apply military force when presented with an attack against US forces as long as they notify Congress within 48 hours after the attack. There then follows a 60 day window of approval for the authorization of the use of military force, followed by an additional 30 days for disengagement if the employment of force is denied by Congress. There are other treaties and agreements permitting the use of force to defend against unprovoked attacks against civilian targets, which the Houthis are doing, but as soon as a single drone or missile targeted a US Navy vessel, the US has both constitutional and international legal authority to respond.

You don’t have to support the operations going on in Gaza - I do not - but it’s absolutely legal for the US and other countries to respond to unprovoked attacks on their vessels. And just to be clear, unprovoked in this sense means the attacks by the Houthi forces were not in response to them being targeted by those vessels. It doesn’t mean they believe they’re justified because of Israel. I’m honestly a bit surprised that the US hasn’t responded more forcefully against Houthi targets.

“No stupid questions” is intended to be a topic, not a challenge.

I think the time of American political debates, and to an extent American democracy, is over.

Arguably, political debates are meaningless today. When they were hosted by the League of Women Voters and the candidates had to actually answer questions, it was interesting and potentially informative. Now, it’s scripted to the point of being useless. Candidates will refuse to answer questions and simply repeat talking points prepared ahead of time and which have already been aired in countless political ads. Candidates like Trump won’t even go that far, but treat it like a campaign rally where they’re playing a professional wrestling character.

Trump decided there was no need to debate in the primaries. He’s the chosen one. I don’t see why the democrats should bother to debate either. Biden’s not going to win or lose based on the debate. It’s going to come down to turnout. I can’t imagine that there’s anyone on the fence other than whether they’re going to bother to vote or not.

1. All kings must be placed in checkmate. This is in recognition of multiple redundancy with failover.
2. Knights cannot be captured by pawns. It’s ridiculous. You’re talking about a guy in armor riding a horse with both lance and sword versus a peasant wearing a shirt at best armed with a pointy stick. Literally the entire point of armor was that you could walk around mowing down peasants until your arms got tired.
3. Queens slay, and can only be slayed by queens. See RuPaul’s Drag Race.
4. I’m not even going to get into the Howl’s Moving Castle pieces except to note that if the enemy didn’t bring siege equipment, they’re pretty fucked.

The article addresses this - they’re admitting gay troop leaders and scouts, as well as girls. The article doesn’t mention anything on the atheist front, but as a member of team rainbow who went through scouting in the 70s and 80s, these are massive changes and I’d honestly be surprised if the org went to court over atheism.

I left Reddit, deleting all of my content, because I disagreed with the elimination of third party apps and because of Reddit’s response to the community. Full stop. I wasn’t a heavy Twitter user - I tend to enjoy more drawn out discussions and topically focused communities - but I stopped using it entirely because of Elon’s moves, including his rejection of corporate censorship.

I have no problem with a service establishing a ToS that includes trust and safety policies that will remove posts and ban users over hate speech. I have no problem with forced demonetization and deplatforming of hate accounts. I would have no problem if federal and state governments enacted more anti-hate laws to bring us in line with other democracies around the world.

That’s because I do not think that permitting a group of American brown shirts to fly Nazi flags and shout racist slurs at passersby increases freedom. I think it decreases it, because it causes a large part of the population to live in fear. I think hate speech rules by private companies serve the same purpose.

I’m just spitballing here, but I’ve done this kind of thing.

1. Establish a program where any defecting Russian soldier will receive a bonus of $20k USD and a work visa in one of a list of countries.
2. Defecting with military equipment increases the bonus based on the combat and the intelligence value of the equipment. 30-some years ago, I believe we were offering $1M to anyone defecting with one of the new MIGs. I think we got a couple out of that program.
3. Defection bonus can also scale with rank and intelligence value of the soldier. Defecting general? $1M. Defecting colonel? $250k. More money for info, and you can land a job as a “consultant” with western intelligence. Maybe throw in a condo.
4. The Russians are quite famous for punishing or executing innocent family members in revenge for such actions. They will have difficulty doing so if the number of defectors are in the thousands to tens of thousands, but the initial people will likely be those who have less of a concern there.
5. Expend funding for in-country intelligence assets to construct an Underground Railroad for defectors. Assign an initial $5B USD to develop networks in major cities to smuggle the families of defectors out of the country with arrangements made for visas etc.

If you were to sit down with a spreadsheet right now, you could come up with a rough estimate for the cost of eliminating one Russian asset - soldier, tank, air defense system, whatever. A program like the above would reassign those costs, with the additional benefit of saving the lives of Ukrainian troops and civilians (because it’s non-combat attrition) and having a potentially cascading effect (the more people that quit, the more others are likely to quit since it reduces both manpower and morale).

I don’t think it’s a big deal yet (although morale is a big deal), but it possibly could be.

I’d like to offer a different perspective. I’m a grey beard who remembers the AI Winter, when the term had so over promised and under delivered (think expert systems and some of the work of Minsky) that using the term was a guarantee your project would not be funded. That’s when the terms like “machine learning” and “intelligent systems” started to come into fashion.

The best quote I can recall on AI ran along the lines of “AI is no more artificial intelligence than airplanes are doing artificial flight.” We do not have a general AI yet, and if Commander Data is your minimum bar for what constitutes AI, you’re absolutely right, and you can define it however you please.

What we do have are complex adaptive systems capable of learning and problem solving in complex problem spaces. Some are motivated by biological models, some are purely mathematical, and some are a mishmash of both. Some of them are complex enough that we’re still trying to figure out how they work.

And, yes, we have reached another peak in the AI hype - you’re certainly not wrong there. But what do you call a robot that teaches itself how to walk, like they were doing 20 years ago at MIT? That’s intelligence, in my book.

My point is that intelligence - biological or artificial - exists on a continuum. It’s not a Boolean property a system either has or doesn’t have. We wouldn’t call a dog unintelligent because it can’t play chess, or a human unintelligent because they never learned calculus. Are viruses intelligent? That’s kind of a grey area that I could argue from either side. But I believe that Daniel Dennett argued that we could consider a paramecium intelligent. Iirc, he even used it to illustrate “free will,” although I completely reject that interpretation. But it does have behaviors that it learned over evolutionary time, and so in that sense we could say it exhibits intelligence. On the other hand, if you’re going to use Richard Feynman as your definition of intelligence, then most of us are going to be in trouble.

This was an “I drink your milkshake” moment for DeSantis. Ron lost. He was always going to lose. He can’t punch back against Trump, or he will lose Trump voters, and he will lose. He can’t fold like an umbrella and allow Trump to dog walk him, because he will also lose. As soon as Trump announced - as soon as it was clear Trump was going to again bald-face lie about everything and that the gop voters were still down with him - it was over. The gop politicians, again, fall into line.

The gop is the party of Trump more than it was ever the party of Reagan. I remember reading that Putin almost pulled his support from Trump when Trump attacked the family of a veteran killed in the Iraq war. Even Putin thought the republican party, with all of its blathering about national security and supporting the military, would side with the dead soldier and his family. They sided with Trump. They sided with Trump when he not only insulted the service of John McCain - a veteran and once considered an icon of the republican party as exemplifying the highest levels of patriotism - but also all other POWs. They went from flying POW flags to backing the guy who says he prefers heroes who don’t get captured. They backed the bone-spurs draft dodger. Hell, he even opposed vets marching in military parades because he hates the way the old and disabled look. He thinks it’s not manly to have been injured in the service. He said that serving in the military is for suckers and losers.

Putin, of all people, thought too highly of republican honesty. Putin took seriously the idea that the gop’s definition of patriotism meant supporting the military, because that’s the way he set it up in Russia. It turns out that gop voters literally don’t care. When they criticized Kerry for speaking out against the Vietnam War, it wasn’t because Kerry was “unpatriotic.” Trump boasts about dodging the draft and saying his biggest risk during Vietnam was avoiding VD.

It is about power to the republican politicians, and it is about hate to the republican voters. Republicans have finally found the person who embodies all republican virtues in donald trump.

You can just immediately resell it to Elon for $44B.

I haven’t yet seen an article where a reporter totals up the numbers and associated dollar amounts associated with Musk’s mismanagement. In terms of general classes - and I’m just going off the top of my head here - we’re looking at (including only the twitter related ones):

1. Failure to pay agreed upon payouts for fired employees
2. Age discriminatory termination lawsuits
3. Violation of employment contracts re: return to work and other conditions
4. Failure to pay rents and infrastructure fees
5. Failure to moderate content according to legally required regulations
6. Allocation of TSLA employees to work at Twitter, a different company with different shareholders, thus robbing Peter to pay Paul on investors’ dimes

There were also potential suits over mass terminations contrary to state and national laws, but I haven’t heard as much about those recently.

At one point, lawmakers compared the tech companies to cigarette makers.

Ironically, the republicans did everything in their power to protect cigarette makers, alcohol companies, soda companies, and the gun industry, and want to bring back child labor.