The pardon power is explicitly given to the president by the Constitution. Therefore it’s a core power with absolute immunity.

The president is also given the clear authority to direct his subordinates in the executive branch as the “chief Executive.” The SCOTUS has ruled that the president has almost unfettered power to hire/fire/order anyone in the federal government to do just about anything he wants with no restrictions.

So logically:

1. The president can order an agency head to issue a new rule that’s probably unconstitutional.
2. Someone sues in a district court to block it.
3. A court issues an injunction preventing its enforcement.
4. The agency head ignores the court order and enforces it anyway.
5. The court finds the agency head and/or other employees of the agency in contempt for violating the injunction.
6. The president pardons anyone subject to the injunction (and this pardon power is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution or investigation).
7. The rule goes into effect and gets enforced despite being enjoined by a federal court.
8. We now have a constitutional crisis because courts no longer have any way to check on the Executive because the president can simply neutralize any criminal penalties with a pardon even if that pardon is clearly issued as part of a conspiracy to violate a court order.

I guarantee this is not what the Framers envisioned or wanted, but this is what “conservative” judicial extremists on the SCOTUS have given us. Although I would be entirely unsurprised if they decided to roll this power back somehow if ever a Democratic president were to wield it.

They also like to complain about the “crime in blue cities,” but somehow never seem to acknowledge that if it’s a problem that’s so easy to solve, why do red states with red legislatures and red governors not just fix the issue in their blue cities?

5 of the top 10 cities with the highest violent crime rates are in red states with Republican legislatures and Republican governors. They sure as hell act like they know the simple solution to violent crime in cities, but for some reason they don’t seem to implement those obvious solutions in their own states. Instead, they blame the Democratic mayors.

It’s almost like it’s a lot harder of a problem to solve than Republicans let on and they’re being disingenuous about knowing how to fix it…

The vast majority of elected Republicans are opportunists willing to use any opportunity to advance their narrative even if it’s clearly blatant lies or bullshit.

Vance pushes the “eating pets” crap to anyone who will listen, and when he gets hard enough pushback from someone and can’t bullshit his way out of it, he falls back to the “okay, maybe it’s not true, but it represents real concerns people have so it’s valid for me to talk about it.”

Which is exactly what happened with the election results in 2020. They pushed the stolen election crap until it was pretty much irrefutably disproven, then went around saying they had to make it harder to vote because their voters, for some strange reason, thought the election wasn’t fair.

DeWine is one of the very few Republican politicians left that has any sense of principle and isn’t a cynical opportunist, even if most of those principles are pretty shitty.

Stephen Miller is an advisor to Trump and is probably a psychopath. I don’t use that label lightly either.

When a normal person gets genuinely angry, their facial expressions and body language convey the anger too. It’s a natural reaction humans have when experiencing emotions and it’s tough to hide or fake.

Stephen Miller raises his voice, he uses an indignant tone, he makes aggressive motions with his body, but his face shows no change in expression at all. It’s not just this clip either, he’s like this all the time. He’s generally good at lying and changing topics during normal interviews, but he was cornered here and fell back to “pretend to be angry and change the topic.” Clearly this reporter was having none of it.

True, it wouldn’t be ethical to conduct an experiment, but we can (and probably do) collect lots of observational data that can provide meaningful insight. People are arrested at all stages of CSAM related offenses from just possession, distribution, solicitation, and active abuse.

While observation and correlations are inherently weaker than experimental data, they can at least provide some insight. For example, “what percentage of those only in possession of artificially generated CSAM for at least one year go on to solicit minors” vs. “real” CSAM.

If it seems that artificial CSAM is associated with a lower rate of solicitation, or if it ends up decreasing overall demand for “real” CSAM, then keeping it legal might provide a real net benefit to society and its most vulnerable even if it’s pretty icky.

That said, I have a nagging suspicion that the thing many abusers like most about CSAM is that it’s a real person and that the artificial stuff won’t do it for them at all. There’s also the risk that artificial CSAM reduces the taboo of CSAM and can be an on-ramp to more harmful materials for those with pedophilic tendencies that they otherwise are able to suppress. But it’s still way too early to know either way.

I mostly agree with you, but a counterpoint:

Downloading and possession of CSAM seems to be a common first step in a person initiating communication with a minor with the intent to meet up and abuse them. I’ve read many articles over the years about men getting arrested for trying to meet up with minors, and one thing that shows up pretty often in these articles is the perpetrator admitting to downloading CSAM for years until deciding the fantasy wasn’t enough anymore. They become comfortable enough with it that it loses its taboo and they feel emboldened to take the next step.

CSAM possession is illegal because possession directly supports creation, and creation is inherently abusive and exploitative of real people, and generating it from a model that was trained on non-abusive content probably isn’t exploitative, but there’s a legitimate question as to whether we as a society decide it’s associated closely enough with real world harms that it should be banned.

Not an easy question for sure, and it’s one that deserves to be answered using empirical data, but I imagine the vast majority of Americans would flatly reject a nuanced view on this issue.

I don’t know about firstest, but he was definitely firster. That’s why they call him a founding father, not a founding fathest.

It’s a definition from a well-respected global standards organization. Can you name a source that would provide a more authoritative definition than the ISO?

There’s no universally correct definition for what the ≈ symbol means, and if you write a paper or a proof or whatever, you’re welcome to define it to mean whatever you want in that context, but citing a professional standards organization seems like a pretty reliable way to find a commonly-accepted and understood definition.

Sure! See ISO-80000-2

Here’s a link: https://cdn.standards.iteh.ai/samples/64973/329519100abd447ea0d49747258d1094/ISO-80000-2-2019.pdf

“Approximately equal” is just a superset of “equal” that also includes values “acceptably close” (using whatever definition you set for acceptable).

Unless you say something like:

a ≈ b ∧ a ≠ b

which implies a is close to b but not exactly equal to b, it’s safe to presume that a ≈ b includes the possibility that a = b.

I have a pact with the spiders in my house. If I spot them running across the floor or on the ceiling or tucked away in a corner, they’re not bothering me, so I won’t bother them. If I see one in an inconvenient place like the dinner table or hanging from the ceiling in the middle of the room, I gently relocate them outdoors.

But…if I’m lying in bed trying to go to sleep and I feel one crawling up my arm, it’s broken the pact, and it can’t be trusted to leave me alone anymore, so it gets a quick and painless death.

I was once very eagerly awaiting a FedEx package that required a signature. I basically looked out the window every 30 seconds to make sure I didn’t miss him.

5 or 6 o’clock rolls around and I get a notification that the package could not be delivered because “the business was closed”. I lived in a rural area with no businesses for several miles, and I’m certainly not a business. The driver clearly just decided he didn’t want to deliver any more packages that day and just made up bullshit excuses for the remaining packages.

I contacted FedEx support and it was exactly as everyone knows it to be. “I’m so sorry that was your experience! Now go away.”

It was delivered the next day.

The role of a district court judge is to do two things:

1. Apply existing precedent to individual cases to the greatest extent possible.
2. Set new precedent only when absolutely necessary because the facts of the case don’t align well to existing precedent.

Cannon has basically decided to do the exact opposite of these two rules by pretending that the facts of this case are so incredibly unprecedented that she has to throw out the rulebook and set new precedents on everything.

Literally the only unusual thing about this case is that the defendant, a private citizen who currently gets free government security protection for the rest of his life, used to be a president. That’s it. Everything else about this case is straightforward obstruction of justice and willful retention of national security information.

“Nah, your fingernails don’t need a trim. If she can’t handle your adult man’s untrimmed fingernails inside her, she does not deserve to have sex with you.”

Hair that’s long and overgrown can cause problems just like long fingernails can cause problems. Keeping them trimmed so they don’t is just being considerate of your partner.

If you want to understand how incredible NYC’s water system is, watch this Wendover video. It blew my mind.

Of course, shitty landlords with old pipes ruins it for a lot of people, but the hard part is done.

https://youtu.be/IDLkOWW0_xg

Basically, the writers always envisioned Riker and Troi would marry at the end of the series, but Rick Berman overrode them and forced the Worf romance because he wanted to mix things up.

Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes both hated the Worf romance because they felt their characters were basically destined to end up together from the very beginning.

It was never actually explained canonically, but basically everyone hated it except Rick Berman and Michael Dorn and if they married Deanna and Worf in Generations Nemesis (mixed up which movie they got married in), I guarantee it would’ve led to a lot of very angry fans.

https://screenrant.com/star-trek-next-generation-worf-troi-couple-dating-bad/

https://www.axios.com/2024/01/17/americans-are-actually-pretty-happy-with-their-finances

I get a lot of people are struggling, but you can’t claim that the average person isn’t doing well when 63% of Americans rate their financial situation as “good” or “very good.”

It definitely is.

If a recipe calls for 3 and 3/4 cups flour, I know right away I need three 1 cup scoops of flour and one 3/4 cup scoop.

If it calls for 15/4 cups, now I need to calculate how many one cup scoops it is and also what the additional remaining fraction is in addition to how much I’ve actually measured out so far.

The more numbers you need to keep in your head when following a recipe, the more likely you are to make a mistake.

Right wing pundits and politicians:

“How can I frame this as a bad thing?”

the other is still made of people who deserve to live their own lives.

But those “people” (i.e., the clones of Tuvok and Neelix) never existed in the first place.

The main issue in this episode is that two sentient beings were effectively destroyed against their will to create a new sentient being. To rectify the issue of two sentient beings being destroyed to create one new sentient being, the one was destroyed against his will.

But a clone of Tuvix would not come into existence at the expense of any sentient beings besides the original Neelix and Tuvok. It doesn’t solve the original “we’re killing a sentient being to bring back our friends” problem the original Tuvix caused, but it doesn’t create new problems either.

We could just transporter-clone and combine Tuvok and Neelix into Tuvix in one shot. The net effect is one new being, Tuvix, at the expense of nobody. Doing it by cloning Tuvix is just an added intermediate step.