ignirtoq

That would only be true if what people had to spend their money on stayed the same, and the author goes through great detail showing that the individual components of what people have to spend their money on to “exist” (i.e. a minimum cost of economic participation) have changed drastically in 60 years. Not only that, some of those pieces (child care, health care, higher education) have increased in cost breathtakingly faster than inflation. Sure, you could reduce that to a statement that “therefore the inflation metric is wrong,” but the author goes on to show what a better, more representative metric would look like and tell us about the economy, and that’s a good discussion mostly orthogonal to whether the inflation calculation is correct.

This is an amazing breakdown of how catastrophically bad the definition of the federal poverty line is in the modern economy. They use sound logic and data to calculate that the value should not be around $31,000, but in fact closer to $140,000.

With this foundation, they revisit common graphs that economists trot out to “prove” life has objectively improved for the majority of Americans in the last 60 years, and show that they actually show the opposite. Those graphs are built on top of the poverty line, and that calculation is bunk, so the whole argument crumbles.

The obvious next step would be to calculate the improved poverty line at key points in America’s last 6 decades and generate corrected graphs, but that seems like a monumental effort. I feel like someone could make that into a dissertation.

It always bothered me in class that they said the magnetic field of light was just too weak to have any significant effect compared to the electric field, but I just accepted it because I was still learning. Good to know my intuition wasn’t too far off.

Well the snake oil salesmen have taken over the health department. It was only a matter of time.

Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

How much you want to bet SCOTUS blocks California’s redistricting but greenlights Missouri and North Carolina maps, each through tortured logic?

TL;DR: While governments are putting out assurances AI won’t make the final decision to launch nuclear weapons, they are tight-lipped about whether they are putting AI in the information gathering and processing components that advise world leaders making the decision to launch nuclear weapons. In risk assessment, there’s little difference between wrong AI making the launch decision and a human informed by wrong AI making the launch decision.

One catch is that they are only forced to release “unclassified” files. Guess who decides what files are classified?

And they’re being redeployed to Charlotte, NC, and New Orleans, LA. They’re continuing the tactic of blitzing whatever they want to do somewhere, and when the courts start to catch up, they pull out and start to do something else somewhere else. They can do whatever they want, legality be damned, if they accomplish their goals before the courts wake up. This is guerrilla warfare applied to the legal checks and balances between the branches of government.

If this Supreme Court were considering the issue for the very first time today, it would almost certainly hold that the Constitution does not protect same-sex marriage by a 6–3 vote. But now that Obergefell is entrenched as precedent, and widely supported by Americans, they’ve shown no appetite for spending down their political capital to issue an unpopular ruling that could only hurt the Republican Party.

This seems like a really naive thing to say about this court. They have shown no qualms about striking down much older cases with a stronger history of precedent than Obergefell on the most specious of reasoning. They struck down Chevron Deference last year, which was in place since 1984 and had come to form the backbone of judicial handling about highly technical aspects of government regulation of virtually every industry.

And they have no hesitation about making unpopular rulings. Several justices have a habit of lecturing the public in a way that’s essentially talking down to the people they are supposed to serve and say they simply know what’s better for the people than… the people. Their egos couldn’t care less about their public image; Chief Justice John Roberts has spoken out multiple times that people need to basically shut up and respect the court’s decisions no matter if they like them or not.

It’s a higher level of infuriating that the court is so obviously corrupt, and then the most corrupt among them present themselves as fundamentally more deserving of respect and deference than the common rabble.

The problem is that some small but non-zero fraction of these bugs may be exploitable security flaws with the software, and these bug reports are on the open internet. So if they just ignore them all, they risk overlooking a genuine vulnerability that a bad actor can then more easily find and use. Then the FOSS project gets the blame, because the bug report was there, they should have fixed it!