Short answer: the Supreme Court

Longer answer: National emergencies are perfectly reasonable to the SCOTUS when declared by a Republican but ridiculous overreach when done by a Democrat and the SCOTUS will use any opportunity to neuter the power of the federal government where a Democrat is in charge.

“So why don’t they just try anyway?” you might ask. And the answer there is that the SCOTUS can do more than just say “you can’t do that one thing anymore.” They can use it as an excuse to block 100 other things that were either flying under the radar or were being challenged one-by-one previously and tied up in appeals.

Biden tried to regulate CO2 through the EPA. The Supreme Court not only said he couldn’t do that, but they concocted a brand new standard called the “Major Questions Doctrine” that basically says government agencies aren’t allowed to implement any significant new regulations unless Congress explicitly authorizes them. And now all those under-the-radar regulations are falling like dominoes in the district courts with no path for appeal.

Every family gathering with my conservative relatives starting on 1/20, I’m going to complain about prices and ask why Trump hasn’t brought them down yet like he said he would on day 1.

Any time gas prices go up, I’ll be sure to point it out. Airplane tickets, same thing. Any item that fluctuates in price, I’ll be sure to let them know it’s clearly Trump’s fault it’s gotten more expensive. It must be his policies.

When they inevitably bend over backwards to try to explain that it’s more complicated than that, I’m going to remind them just how often they complained about Biden being singlehandedly responsible as President for high prices and how easily they said he could bring them down if he just “changed his policies.”

I’m sure they’ll see no issue with their past positions, but it’ll be cathartic for me nonetheless having to listen to them for the last 4 years.

Not me, I am using a clean session in Firefox Focus on a VPN specifically to avoid results tailored to me. I’m very careful about what I search for on Google while logged in.

I’m using Firefox Focus on a VPN, so it’s not customized to me.

The top autocomplete for “can my wife” is “can my wife carry my gun” in case you were interested.

“Can my husband” is, in fact, the voting question.

If Trump wins, all these idiots that voted for him because “thuh conomee was better” are going to act all shocked when he actually does all the really insane stuff he’s promising to do and tried to do in his first term but the handful of rational Republicans around him stopped him from doing.

I saw interviews with voters recently that basically showed people don’t believe he’ll do all the crazy stuff he’s promising, that it’s just a negotiation tactic or to “keep the base onboard” or to “generate attention.”

When things really go to shit, I guarantee the people that voted for him will take no responsibility for it.

Other way around.

An acronym is a type of initialism, which is itself a type of abbreviation.

So acronyms are initialisms where you pronounce the letters like a word (e.g., RAM), initialisms are abbreviations made by taking the initial letters of multiple words and concatenating them regardless of how it’s spoken (e.g. FBI for Federal Bureau of Investigation), and an abbreviation is any shortening of a word or phrase into something shorter (e.g., “abbrev.” for abbreviation or “US” for United States).

Right now, it’s 50 R and 46 D with the 4 Independents (Sanders, King, Sinema, Manchin) caucusing with the Democrats to give it a 50/50 tie.

The Senate is currently 51-49. The Democratic Caucus has 51 members.

Byron Donalds, a black Republican Representative from Florida, said Democrats need to stop talking about Project 2025, a policy document created by hundreds of people who literally worked for Trump during his term, because it’s “dangerous.”

But he also thinks Trump calling Harris a communist dictator who literally wants to destroy America, take your guns, force everyone’s children to undergo surgical sex reassignment surgery against their will, flood the country with millions of noncitizens so they can vote, among hundreds of other extreme and completely false accusations, are all perfectly fine and fair game.

They all know it’s not consistent. They all know Trump’s rhetoric is worse, but they see a cynical opportunity to gain a political advantage and they take it. Assholes.

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 also slang for a prostitute.

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.