BillyClark

There is no check for presidential pardons. Perhaps the pardon itself is supposed to be a check, but there is nothing to stop a president from pardoning criminals who were already serving completely justified sentences.

In Australia, for example, which has mandatory voting, the only requirement is that you participate. So, you can do the equivalent of submitting a completely empty ballot if you want to protest.

it’s unlikely to win many supporters

If I could just somehow get permission to amend the constitution for one day, I’d fucking shove democracy down people’s throats so hard, totally against their will.

forcing people to perform an act to legitimize an unjust system

I assume this means that you don’t believe votes are properly counted and that all of our elections are “rigged.”

If you have that belief, then what reforms do you think are possible? Most people who I’ve heard express those opinions are far right wing people who want to discard democracy.

Taylor Rehmet, a Democrat and local union leader, won a runoff for a state Senate seat that’s been held by Republicans since 1992. What’s more, he bested the Republican Leigh Wambsganss despite having one-tenth as much money. Much of Wambsganss’s funding came from Dunn and the Wilks brothers.

Republicans blamed low turnout for Rehmet’s victory, while pundits opined that the Trump administration’s unpopularity was to blame.

In America today, these are the same thing. The way you win is by encouraging certain people to vote and discouraging other people from voting. Trump has been taking care of discouraging Republicans and MAGA from voting all by himself.

I really think America needs mandatory voting to stop this behavior, but it’s much easier to encourage or discourage people to vote than it is to actually carry out the will of the people.

Even if it’s not entirely faked, you can instruct an AI to give you wrong answers to your questions. So unless you can see the entire conversation history, you can’t make any conclusions about a single response.

I imagine if somebody started a thread here that asked the same question, but said, “Wrong answers only,” people would find a lot of evidence that humans aren’t capable of figuring this out, either.

According to the article:

A grand total of zero — zero — grand jurors agreed to return the proposed indictment. As a former federal prosecutor, I have never heard of this actually happening before.

Pirro also personally appointed the two prosecutors who worked on the case: One of them is a lawyer and dance photographerwho had never worked in the Justice Department before last year, and the other is a former staffer for House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), who is not exactly famous for conducting competent and nonpartisan investigations.

“The average person doesn’t appreciate how stunning” it is for a grand jury to outright reject an indictment, as a former prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C. put it to me. “The rules are skewed so heavily in favor of the prosecutor that it’s almost comical. But the public is essentially saying, ‘We do not trust you. We are skeptical of you.’”

In a statement, Pirro touted the office’s prosecutorial work, including efforts to curb homicides, and said she was focused on law, not politics.

You were using the phrase correctly. “They can’t compete with it,” is the standard way of saying what you intended to say.

I was playing off of the normal meaning of your statement to make a turn of phrase. In other words, I am intentionally using weird phrasing, and placing it next to your normal phrasing for humor and impact.

It says that xAI lost their second cofounder, but then it turns out that he just left the company.

I never worked for Google, so I can’t say for sure, but I have this weird suspicion that they use a shitload of open source software, and I’m not just talking about their Android OS or Chromebooks, but for their most core businesses.

It wouldn’t be odd to think that Google might not exist except for their being able to use the open-source software that people had made before they founded their company.

The alternative is that they were complete idiots who paid for all sorts of retail software.

Of course Google hates open-source. They can’t compete with it.

Again, it’s just my supposition, but I’d bet that they can’t compete without it, either.

For any major tech company, apart from ones that are absolutely dedicated to proprietary software starting from firmware up through the OS and on to applications, like Microsoft and Apple, it’s going to be deeply hypocritical to hate open-source.

I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.

However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don’t do a side by side comparison.

And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I’m watching the thing, I get into the story and I don’t care anyways.

Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don’t actually care about.

Women members of Congress are more likely to have a high-earning spouse. As the authors put it, they’re part of a “power couple.”

I don’t think you can find the statistical answer you’re asking about because it is hard to find data for events where people don’t call the police.

Like, police may keep records of how many street fights they break up, but if police are not called, then there is no organization to make the record of the street fight.

I wouldn’t cry about pedophiles specifically, but I am against the death penalty in general.

I believe there is a limited supply of practicing lawyers who will ruin their own lives and careers to support Trump, a man who will not ever return the favor.

To make a Pam Bondi, you need to find someone who is a completely incompetent moron who can also pass a bar exam.

I think another Bill Barr is more likely. A person who initially thinks it’s a good idea to support Trump, but later defies him.

Jamie Raskin berated Bondi’s earlier Senate performance before the questioning began, saying that she brought… What did he call it? A “burn book” or something?

Basically, instead of preparing for the actual questions she’d be asked, she prepared a book of insults and ad hominem for the people asking the questions.

And I couldn’t help but notice that in her testimony yesterday, every time she flipped through the huge binder next to her, rather than answering the question, she’d just start attacking the person who asked the question.

So, she did the same thing again. A one trick pony who couldn’t imagine that they’d prepare countermeasures for her embarrassing previous performance.

And she was caught lying under oath immediately after she did so.

Only a complete idiot would allow themselves to be put in such a situation.

She should have resigned long ago. She should have done a lot of things, but what can you expect of a complete idiot? If she’s remembered at all in the future, it will be for her unparalleled stupidity.

Like I said, ICE has many fundamental problems.

I don’t disagree with your assessment, but experience is not the same as training, and there is also a continuing need for training, even for experienced people.

One of the many fundamental problems with ICE is that they seem to have little to no training.

Police with no training should not be allowed to perform traffic stops or to arrest people. Or really to interact with the public at all.

One of the ICE failings we’ve seen over and over is how they needlessly escalate situations. If you pull someone over and they flee, if you pursue them, you have to consider the danger to others. Sometimes you just have to let them go and figure out how to pick them up at a later time when it is less dangerous.

Yes, it makes policing more complicated, but if police are escalating situations and making things more dangerous, that’s an even larger problem.

ICE has such a bad reputation now that I think people will flee at a much higher rate. Their lack of training is part of the reason they’re causing this mess, and if they want to keep pulling people over, they’re going to need massive amounts of training to learn to do it correctly. Even more than normal police because the situation today is what it is.

I have wondered the same about scammers. Like, if their mother knew they were going to do that with their life, she’d probably regret all of that wasted effort raising them.

Note that grand juries typically only hear the prosecution’s arguments. The prosecution has immense power in grand juries as a result. That’s why there’s a famous saying that a grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.

The fact that so many grand juries have declined to indict major cases brought by the DOJ is a major embarrassment. It means that even an average person off the street can immediately see through their bullshit.