admiralteal

@admiralteal@kbin.social

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admiralteal,

The political reality in ND is that having the (D) is the end of the road for you. Since neither party actually represents a specific policy platform, I guess it's 6 of 1 in an environment like that.

After all, what are modern Republicans even about? Obviously they want to deny global warming, police uteruses, kill queer people, theocratize the government... but what policies do they actually care about that aren't equally present in the Democratic caucus?

admiralteal,

Being queer doesn't make you worse at law. Preexisting discrimination and discriminatory forces in law world is causing that number to be so much lower than the wider population and the best way to forcefully address that is to increase representation and visibility in that population.

These are elite positions. Everyone on the short lists, queer or not, is qualified for the job. The choices made at that point are not for picking the "best" candidate because there is no "best" candidate. There's different choices. Different viewpoints. Different backgrounds. Different politics.

And I think the Biden administration is making good choices as far as appointments go. Intentional choices. Choices meant to make a culture shift that needs to happen.

admiralteal,

To be clear, I object to both comparisons-- both to the population-wide demographics and the law-wide one -- though I do clearly think it's a conversation worth having.

Because it fundamentally misunderstands what the purpose of representation is. Representation is not an ends on itself, so "matching" population demographics is useless for anything other than identifying likely discrimination. It's not a numbers game. There's no "but hey, look how close we truly are to achieving good representation!" It's not that, because it's still remarkable that this many queer people have been put into power. They're the exception to prove the rule that the field is still inherently hostile to them.

The goal isn't "equal" or "proportional" representation or anything like that. The goal is elimination of the systemic discrimination. The goal is ensuring that brilliant new minds aren't being filtered out for being different from the social norms. This is back to the old RGB quote.

admiralteal, (edited )

Literally everyone censors speech, and is fine with it. Everyone, with exceptions so scant that may as well not exist at all.

Laws that prohibit workplace harassment. Defamation. Laws that punish incitements to violence. Laws that punish fraud and confidence scams. Laws against insider trading. Even things like RICO. These are ALL, in varying forms, limits on speech that are basically uncontentious to most normal, well-balanced people. These are limits on speech so ubiquitous and accepted that people have actually somehow convinced themselves that somehow "free" speech is clearly categorically different than these other things even when it plainly isn't.

The only people sincerely for (edit: total) free speech are honest-to-god anarchists. True "free speech absolutists" basically do not exist, and when someone claims to be one it really just means they want to be able to get away with using racial slurs in public.

admiralteal,

That's libertarianism in a nutshell, though. A political ideology founded from liberalism which claims to reject all of liberalism while also being just the same as liberalism embraced by people who actually kind of hate liberalism. It's a lot of very confused voters registered to that party.

admiralteal,

In modern history, it's typically the right wing dictators that got voted in through "legal" means, and it's the right wing dictators that achieve power by slowly controlling what can and cannot be said by the media. The leftist dictatorships, if you want to call the soviet-style ones as such, do so through violence and the military. You have it exactly backwards which sins here come from which wing. It doesn't pass a common sense test, so I think you may need to go back to school.

And let's not get bogged down in utter bullshit. We're talking about "progressive" censorship here, which almost certainly means hate speech laws. There have been exactly zero dictatorships that flowed out of political movements of intentional inclusivity. Neither the Nazis nor Soviets were concerned with "hate speech". They both were all about it.

admiralteal,

But literally all modern states have media censorship. Literally all of them. For example, prohibitions on libel or fraud. That's censorship. Confidentiality of national secrets is a form of censorship. Hell, even copyright laws can be interpreted as a form of censorship.

admiralteal,

You aren't answering me. You're deflecting.

Are we legalizing fraud or not?

admiralteal,

What does "protected by 'free speech'" even mean? Who is this free speech and how are they protecting or not protecting anything?

Fraud is a form of speech. It's putting ideas out into the world -- ideas that induce a false understanding in another, typically to reap some material benefit to the fraudster... but lots of the protected forms of speech do that.

The state punishes this speech by outlining a procedure for a harmed party to punish the fraudster, backed by the authority of the state (i.e., lawsuits).

Just because speech is part of a contract doesn't magically transmogrify it into non-speech. Besides, what even constitutes a "contract" isn't something we can say is fully and perfectly defined...

So here we have speech and punishment for it. That sums up to censorship. And how do we decide what is and isn't "fraud" and so does or doesn't qualify as protected speech? It's complicated. Very complicated. We have a huge statutory framework. Legal tests. We're still trying to specify the line. The target shifts through all of history. Cases get overturned and updated and our frameworks and tests evolve. Sometimes we go too far. Sometimes not far enough. Sometimes the shifting reality of how our society operates changes the balancing point. Sometimes we have simply been wrong and regretted it.

Now I think I know what you actually are trying to say. That political speech needs to be highly protected from government meddling. That's hardly a radical idea. I don't know any credible person who disagrees with it.

But there's also a significant legal grey area between which, for example, it becomes hard to identify where political speech ends and direct calls to violence start. Surely it isn't protected for a political leader standing in front of a riled mob to point across the street to his political enemy and shout "go kill him, now!" But where's the exact point where the rhetoric shifted from "proper" political speech to a call to violence, exactly? How much subtext and implication are we going to accept? How riled does the crowd have to be? Either way, by outlining a point where speech can end you up punished, we've censored that speech. And censorship through civil action is still censorship, don't be confused.

In its best form, the state exists to help balance rights in tension. When one person's speech rights are out of balance with the harms that speech inflicts on another (such as in fraud or an incitement to violent), the state exists to mediate that. And we should want it to be just and fair when it does, and balance that tension in a way that creates the best possible environment. Join the reasonable people and discuss where you think things fall on that balance. Don't pretend there's some magical and inviolable difference between this censorship and other kinds that are acceptable, though. Have a reason.

admiralteal,

I don't think he's being sincere.

admiralteal,

Plenty of protected political speech involves deception with gain (especially gain of political office). Inciting violence is already against the law... and that law is a form of censorship.

I’m concerned about the repercussions of allowing SCOTUS to set the precedent of what can and cannot be said or written by citizens or media to protect the feelings of others.

And I am saying they already can do and did and you need to engage with that and not pretend there's some magical line that cannot be crossed. Defining what is and isn't protected speech is a complex and ever-ongoing negotiation. The links you provided are evidence of this -- are evidence that I am right. There isn't a clear categorical definition that separates the protected from unprotected -- what is protected and isn't protected is defined only by where the censorship starts.

You should be highly concerned with the repercussions of the SCOTUS's decisions. They're a corrupt institution that historically nearly always act as a brake on expanding civil rights. Good news for you on this subject, this SCOTUS would never let a hate speech law stand -- they quite like to see vulnerable people persecuted. More good news: there basically are no hate speech laws. The only government agencies censoring political speech right now are far right conservative ones like Florida, doing the exact thing you fear. It aint progressives and it aint happening with support of progressives.

But you can't pretend that speech isn't speech and censorship isn't censorship just to make your own political ideology easier to reckon. That's just embracing censorship in a different way.

Again, many forms of censorship are uncontentious. Here we have links to two forms of censorship that are such. If there's some new kind of censorship you find objectionable, identify it and make the case for why it is worse than its counterfactual.

admiralteal,

Look, there's definitely some people who lean "libertarian" on paper who have valuable and interesting insights. Chuck Mahron/Strong Towns, for example. They're A+ in political ideas and messaging and you can definitely see NAP center stage if you read between the lines of what they are saying. Except I've never heard him use the word "libertarian". I suspect because he knows it is a poisoned brand and just generally doesn't like labels, though that's just supposition.

But apply some Bayesian theory here and don't engage in any No True Scotsmanship. If someone tells you they are a "libertarian", that information on its own should give you HIGH confidence the person is somewhere between "Republican who has a gay daughter he doesn't want to see lynched" and "total crank sovereign citizen type". There's 1,000 false positives for every true one.

If I were you, holding the sincere beliefs I have no reason to question you having, I would not want to be identified by that word.

admiralteal,

Putting Dijon on a hotdog or wearing a tan suit was considered a major political blunder in recent history.

admiralteal,

It's also not just voting against Trump.

Biden on climate is an A student. The inflation reduction act, according to basically every climate wonk, gives us a real chance at achieving necessary goals both under its regime and thanks to further future legislation it certainly unlocks. Things are looking less bad right now than they have for a long time in spite of all the worsening indicators. And it's written with intense virtuous cycles built-in that will make it VERY sticky policy once it builds up a couple of years worth of inertia. The fact that he got it past an overtly hostile senate that had at least 51 anti-science, anti-climate, fossil fuel shills turning up to vote is nothing short of a policy miracle.

Trump, on the other hand, has vowed to reverse everything that could still be reversed about the IRA (a frustratingly large amount, unfortunately, could still be undone by executive fiat thanks to its still-developing political base). He's vowed to double down on every kind of fossil fuel subsidy. He's vowed to restore coal power even though it's horrible for everyone involved and the most expensive kind of energy production. He's vowed to fight windmills just because he doesn't like their aesthetics -- literal quixotic shit.

I won't defend Biden on Israel for even one millisecond. His position is heinous. It's evil. And if he loses in November, it will almost certainly be the reason why and he'll deserve it. But it will probably also spell actual global war and apocalypse fueled by climate within all of our lifetimes. It may sound dramatic, but a Trump win will bring us from feast to famine and may spell the actual end of our civilization.

admiralteal,

You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.

admiralteal,

This very article has already been updated to say the story is not true.

admiralteal,

I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He's a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.

Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires -- pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.

admiralteal,

Google loves to have entirely ai-driven moderation which makes decisions that are impossible to appeal. They are certain that one AI team lead is more valuable than 20 customer service agents. Meanwhile, YouTube shorts is still a pipeline to Nazidom and death by electrical fire.

Might be the worst customer service in the tech industry, though that's a highly competitive title.

They also don't offer replacement parts (even major parts like the charging case) for their headphones. So I guess they're intended to be a disposable product. Evil shit.

If you've ever had an entirely positive interaction with Google customer service... you'd probably be the first.

admiralteal,

The guy's talking about concentration clamps for migrants as part of his final solution.

Be scared. Vote.

admiralteal,

On the one hand, Project 2025 is deeply terrifying. It's a recipe book for full-blown authoritarian fascism in the US. And its stance towards climate may actually herald in an ending of this phase of human civilization because of how monumentally, mindblowingly stupid and evil its contributors are.

On the other hand, Trump would never do what he was told. He would never be organized or deliberate enough to carry it out. He'd just keep tweeting all day and being completely, psychotically capricious. So at least I know that particular cake is unlikely to be baked.

The really obnoxious thing about all this stuff is that Biden's record on climate is excellent. It stands on its own, even before comparisons to the pure anti-science madness of Trump. Which progressives mostly don't even know about, and even the ones who have a vague idea he's done something often hand wave it all as insufficient or misguided without bothering to know even the most basics of basics about the policies.

Climate is an existential threat and it would be hard to come up with any more effective policy for addressing it within the American system than the IRA and other actions Biden has somehow managed to get through a majority climate-hostile Senate. It's been excellent. Get out and vote for more of it or else we may all be doomed.

admiralteal,

Though to be clear, policies that disenfranchise violate equal protections and the moral foundations of democracy from the start. Even if she had been 100% certain it was then illegal for her to vote, she did nothing wrong. Maybe did something illegal, but the law is what's wrong. If we had a legitimate court system, her case would be an easy opportunity to toss the bad law.

admiralteal,

The user above is just one of those guys who looks at anything the dems do and thinks, look at this bitch eating crackers.

Nothing good can ever be celebrated or praised. It has to always be bad.

Legitimate interest? (lemmy.world)

I never consent to give my data away or being tracked, but how do you deal with so called legitimate interest? I tried several times to untick them but it is a long list (in fact at the bottom there is a “vendors” link with even longer, much longer list. It took me 10 minutes to get to the bottom of it once)....

admiralteal,

This is the exception to prove the rule that the other interests are definitely illegitimate. This is the website telling you that they give away your data for illegitimate purposes.

It's not a surprise. We knew this was true. But seeing it's spelled out like this is a little galling.

Illegitimate: not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules

The website is basically admitting that they're using your data maliciously, intentionally, by having this distinction.

admiralteal,

I think a lot of people might be sympathetic to the idea that in wartime, you need to be stricter because of the incredibly high stakes. That Ukraine is at war, so they need to find and deal with these sources of disinformation.

I think those same people need to realize that the policies never get rolled back to a more liberal state when the war is over.

It sucks that this is a systemic advantage for authoritarians. It really sucks. It feels bad. But it's the handicap you have to accept to resist authoritarianism.

admiralteal,

Android phones, if you either reboot the phone or longpress power then click "lockdown", will disable fingerprint unlock and demand PIN/password instead. You can even do it from the lockscreen, almost as fast as putting your fingerprint on the device.

I assume iPhones are much the same.

admiralteal,

Absent an idiotic carrier/mfg skin that disables the feature, you just long-press power then click "lockdown".

Or reboot the device. Rebooting the device will also leave it encrypted if your device has encryption (the PIN/password is needed to decrypt, essentially).

admiralteal,

Preventing the collection of data by the state may be impossible, but they should be accountable for who has it, who it's given to, and they should need to go through proper due process to use it against you in any kind of official proceeding.

It might be impossible to get everyone out of the databases, but we can at least force warrant requirements and the like.

admiralteal,

Oh look, a "we found some people on the internet tweeting their opinions" story.

The membership of Trump's personality cult flip out at everything, all the time. It's not really news worthy of report when it happens. Not even when their gary stu power fantasy icon's actor makes them feel bad.

admiralteal,

Oh, he's getting downvotes for being a bothsider.

The dems have changed profoundly between Obama and Biden. Doesn't even take any kind of deep political knowledge to see that. No, they haven't become a revolutionary socialist party, but sorry, democracy doesn't mean getting exactly what you want all the time. The party is vastly different. Maybe not as different as the Republicans from Bush to Trump, where they abandoned all pretense of Liberalism and switched to being a fascist cult of personality, but different nevertheless.

The bothsiders like you and he pretend political parties never change and aren't influenced by their voter at all, contrary to evidence that anyone who had even PRETENDED to follow news and politics during their life would have seen. Then use that complete nonsense premise to justify the argument that it doesn't matter who you vote for, it's all the same, you shouldn't bother.

It's just a brain-dead political take. One that actively and constantly suppresses political turnout, hands elections to the far right, and prevents the exact progress you claim you want.

admiralteal,

You jumped into this comment tree defending someone claiming elections are meaningless team sports.

New York Criminal Defendant Already Being Real Pain In Ass (www.wonkette.com)

(Trump lawyer Alina Habba — the one who fakes smart — argued on Fox News last night that this is a denial of Trump’s “due process” rights. Needless to say, LOL no. Habba also bellyached that Trump’s lawyers won’t get Passover off, because “Observant Jews have a right to go and pray to who they want and observe...

admiralteal,

Such excuses being allowed would also be inherently discriminatory against young people.

Seniors have way more antecedents to generate excuses for them. Especially wealthier ones who are more likely to normally be able to take time off/travel for these events.

admiralteal,

It goes without saying that this absolutely will not pass constitutional muster.

You can categorically try to ban pornography but the second you try to ban it based on its content and not based on it being pornography you no longer have a leg to stand on.

I wish there were some way to have criminal consequences for deliberately passing unconstitutional laws. It definitely feels like it's some kind of sedition, violating your implicit or explicit oath of office so profoundly.

admiralteal,

Especially if it's against anyone that can be interpreted as Arab.

admiralteal,

Also, how can we be assured the privacy practices of their subscription/payment platform are at least better than the (likely blockable) trackers?

Forming a financial relationship with a website is, theoretically, infinitely more traceable to your personal identity than all the cookies in the world.

admiralteal,

Or any of the nearly-unavoidable-because-it's-a-monopoly evil big corpos like Amazon. Chase handles their credit card and definitely significant other financial parts for them.

admiralteal,

And THIS time there will be serious consequences when he ignores it and does what everyone knows he will do.

Unlike all those other times.

admiralteal,

There are so many migrant rights organizations who will be happy to get them lawyers and pursue these cases. It has the potential to ensure this never happens again (through the back door of making it far too high a liability for the transportation companies).

Hell, this could even end up affecting the routine bus trips. At minimum, create very clear disclosure and consent requirements for the migrants, which would be a huge win.

admiralteal,

Medical providers backdate pregnancies to the date of suspected conception -- which is less precise than many realize.

This is a standard practice in how it's done. Theoretically, a medical provider could fudge the date a bit. That's high risk for them, though.

admiralteal,

With such a short window, I don't really understand why have a window at all. It betrays the capricious and intentional cruelty of the antichoice movement.

Of course I don't understand the mindset of these people to begin with. Any exceptions being permissible -- even one which is designed to save a life from a pregnancy complication -- undermines the premise that the fetus has an inviolable right to life. If you permit any exceptions at all, it means you do believe that right to life is contingent on external factors... and if that's the case, what are we even talking about? If decisions can be made about the fetus's life that it has no say or stake in, then it clearly has no intrinsic right to that life.

These people (mostly) don't believe in inviolable right to life. They clearly do not believe in the right to autonomy over one's own body. Apparently there's no right to privacy or self-determination in your medical care, either. What the fuck do they believe in? Just some arbitrary interpretation of an ancient, committee-written book that condones slavery, rape, and murder.

admiralteal,

The conception date is based on the date of last period. That's the actual medical practice, generally, so in practice these are the same official date. I'm not sure if this excludes times the couple asserts an exact date of conception, though clearly it does in the case of this law.

Yes, you likely could lie/feign ignorance about that date. Hopefully everyone with a uterus will be wise enough to do so. But if you claim your last period was yesterday, it does make your claim suspect. Again, hopefully any doctor will pretend nothing is amiss in these cases.

admiralteal,

Fetal development is not really that consistent, to guess it down to a week or two based on physical appearance. Anything from 37 to 42 weeks is considered a "normal" pregnancy length. That means someone oversimplifying things could say any milestone might be +/- a couple of weeks. Edge cases might move the length of an otherwise-healthy pregnancy down or up an entire month.

Even implantation isn't that consistent. I've heard that sperm can linger for something like 5 days before implantation occurs. The whole middle-school health class version where the sperm swim up and race to the egg is kind of total nonsense.

admiralteal,

Meanwhile Republicans are going on every news channel to declare that this administration's policies are guaranteed to make China the dominant world power.

The reality is, China is not really that concerned with what the US does beyond whether those actions benefit China. They'll complain publicly any time they aren't being treated "fairly" -- which in their doublespeak means favorably -- and then turn around and treat everyone else with explicit unfairness in a fairly public and obvious manner. Don't subscribe to their reaction videos.

The only question that matters is whether the policies are effectively delivering on their professed goals.

The IRA mostly such a brilliant piece of legislation that it is hard to even understand that it made it through the legislature nearly unscathed. Ignore the leftists so far up their own assholes that they'll pretend Joe Manchin taking a small shit in the corner means we should permanently condemn the whole pool. The chips bill is pretty reasonable, albeit quite protectionist. The bipartisan infrastructure bill has its priorities all over the place, but still manages a fair amount of impressive progress (though god help me the amount we are STILL spending on highway expansion is simply incomprehensible. We KNOW it doesn't work).

Whether or not China likes or hates these policies... no one should care who isn't Chinese. It's not our problem. They have an authoritarian government and can change their domestic rules to get on friendlier terms with the rest of the world any time they please, and if they aren't doing so that is their choice to make. They have a right to complain to the WTO. They know better than anyone that the WTO has no real power to change domestic policies, though.

admiralteal,

All of those headings are single words.

Taste is subjective, but mine says either color the whole heading or don't color it at all.

admiralteal,

They are very useful for outlining and similar "where do I start" writing projects. They help break the dam and just get some damn words on the screen, at which point it's often easy to continue and flesh things out to a complete thought.

admiralteal,

Everyone who deals with Trump has two choices.

They either can become an anti-Trumper or fully insert their tongues into his asshole. If you don't do the latter, Trump will identify you as the former -- and send his brown shirts after you.

admiralteal,

Gotta account for a null hypothesis.

The null would be that it is a fair die (average roll 10.5). Your test is whether the true result is significantly less than 10.5 based on a sample of 100 with a mu of 8.8. Let's call it an alpha of 0.05

So we have to run a left tail one-sample t-test.

Unfortunately, this data set doesn't tell me the standard deviation -- but that could be determined in future trials. For now, we'll have to just make an assumption that the D20 is fair. For a fair D20, the standard deviation should be be sqrt( ([20-1+1]^2 -1)/12) or roughly sqrt(33.25)

We can run that t-test in a simply python script:

import numpy as np
from scipy import stats as st

h0 = 10.5

sample = np.random.normal(loc=8.88, scale=(np.sqrt(33.25)), size=100)

t_stat, p_val = st.ttest_1samp(sample, h0)


print(f"T-statistic: {t_stat:.4f}")
print(f"P-value: {p_val:.4f}")

Of course, I had to randomize this a bit since I don't have access to the full data from the true sample. That would make for a better bit of analysis. But at least assuming I didn't make a serious dumb here, 100 rolls averaging 8.88 would seem to suggest that the you can reject your null hypothesis of this being a fair die at a typical alpha of 0.05.

Then again, the way I wrote this script is GUARANTEED to be an unfavorable result since the way I randomized it REQUIRES the average end up 8.88, which is, of course, less than 10.5. Your real world testing would not have this constraint.

admiralteal,

Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.

They don't get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren't doing it. But control matters more to them than support.

I really don't think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.

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