arquebus_x

NPR is not free; it’s paid for by taxes, which means that every U.S. citizen is in fact paying for news whether they like it or not. And “not for profit” is not the same as “no cost to the consumer.” In addition, most of the outlets for NPR are local public radio stations that are - you guessed it - funded by taxes (as well as fund drives).

It doesn’t help that wage growth has largely been in the “unskilled” sectors (I hate that term, every job is skilled), but inflation reduction has largely been in non-essential goods. Which means that upper-middle to upper income people have been noticing their wages not increasing with inflation despite inflation overall being lower, and lower to low-middle income people have been noticing inflation impacting their budgets despite their wage increases.

But in aggregate, “everyone” is being paid more and “inflation” is down. So at a macro level everyone “should” be happy with how things are going. But human beings don’t live at the macro level.

Economists don’t call something a recession until rich people start feeling the squeeze. The definition of a recession, while vague, is really designed around that fact. So even if they’re not doing it on purpose, their analytical blinders prevent them from recognizing other conditions that are at least as meaningful to many more people.

Yes but also no. The U.S. isn’t a party to the ICC. It’s not under ICC jurisdiction regardless of the ASMPA. The function of the ASMPA is mostly to serve as political theater.

The U.S. should be a party to the ICC, but it’s not and it likely never will be.

Except the U.S. is not a party to the ICC and therefore not subject to its jurisdiction. It should be, but it’s not. This is bullshit fear-mongering over something that literally cannot happen, in order to distract people from the thing that will and should be happening.

I would bet that every single person commenting here thinks of him- or herself as being deeply invested in privacy, ranting against things like ad tracking, etc. But as soon as someone (or some ones) you don’t like, or have no affinity with, wants to have the same privacy afforded to every single person who drives a car, all bets are off.

Or are you suggesting that people (including the police!) should be allowed to have real time, constant information about where you drive to every day?

Just because it’s a plane, and just because it’s a rich person, doesn’t make it any less of a privacy violation.

I was going to get this game. Now I’m not.

Before we get out the flaming pitchforks, let us not forget that pretty much no one reads or cares about the New York Times. Their readership (print and web) is minuscule compared to entities like CNN, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, MSNBC (and Fox, OANN, Breitbart, Joe Rogan…).

Sure, it sucks that the NYT is sucking Trump cock, but in the end, that won’t move the needle.

This is how we ended up with Q and anti-vaxxers.

It also has a 1v1 mode (player vs computer or PvP) that is just fantastic. I actually spent most of my time playing the 1v1 mode way back in the day.

If I’m not mistaken, a “militia” was understood to be an ad hoc, non-standing armed group, supplied by the resources of its members. The amendment was added so that if a militia were ever needed (again), it could be formed, because the pool of potential militia members had their own firearms. Laws limiting citizen access to firearms would hobble any new militia.

Given that armies at the time were only recently becoming “standing” (permanent) armies, and the U.S. didn’t really have one, their best option for making war was militias. They were acutely aware that the revolution began that way, and only later developed an actual (organized, separately supplied, long-term) army.

But very quickly, the U.S. developed permanent armed forces and never had to rely on militias again. At that point the 2nd amendment really should have been obsolete.

Or free Black people.

They weren’t quite the sharpest tacks in the box.

It doesn’t help that the sentence makes no sense. The second clause requires that the first be the subject of the sentence, but then the third clause starts with a new subject, and lastly there’s that weird “German” comma after “Arms.”

There’s more than one way to interpret the meaning, but strictly speaking the only syntactically accurate rendering comes out roughly as:

[The right to] a well regulated Militia shall not be infringed, as it’s necessary to the security of a free State (security meaning the right of the people to keep and bear arms).

…which is also meaningless.

It’s a stupid amendment for lots of reasons, but the big one is that it’s just shitty English.

“I lost a brother once. I was lucky. I got him back.”

“I thought you said men like us don’t have families.”

“I was wrong.”

Wow, right up front, they’re being disingenuous:

“The effect of this would be to force an independent browser like Firefox to build and maintain two separate browser implementations — a burden Apple themselves will not have to bear.”

…No? Apple won’t bear that burden because they’re going to keep using WebKit. Firefox can keep using WebKit. Not using WebKit is a choice, with pros and cons.

I’ve been an Apple fanboy for years, too, and I still am. The alternatives aren’t exactly better. And anyone who is surprised that Apple is dragging its heels and trying to do the bare minimum to comply, well, get back to me when you’re no longer twelve. Companies aren’t your friends, even when they look like they are. Hell, Google’s sudden about-face regarding Right to Repair is 100% intended to fuck over Apple. It’s not about the consumer, it’s about the money. Always, with every company, every time.

“We’re just not wired to save,” said Brad Klontz

Asshole. Like THAT’s the problem.

This deal solves the problem you’re encountering, because it allows game companies to use real voices to generate dialogue. It will sound a hell of a lot better than the 100% AI generated voices you dislike.

And it will protect voice actors’ jobs because the deal effectively requires new contracts for each use out of scope of the previous contract (i.e., the “opt out” language), and it encourages game companies to continue to rely on voice actors rather than switch to 100% AI generated.

Without this deal, game devs will just go 100% AI (and the tech will improve dramatically), and within a year or two, game voice actors will have no jobs to contract.

This is especially important in light of the trend toward dynamically generated dialogue in RPGs, etc. Without allowing an AI to train on real voice actors, dynamically generated dialogue will have to be 100% AI generated (no human voice involvement).

Voice acting in all fields is already a diminishing market because of AI generated voices. One of my coworkers had to get a job where I work because his VA jobs basically dried up. This agreement stanches the bleeding by permitting the use of AI trained on VAs (but only allowing use on a per-contract basis). Without that permission, AI would just be trained on open source / freely available voice samples, and there would be no contracts, and VAs would just … not exist anymore.

I just want a Babylon 5 reboot! Goddamnit!

Under many sane readings of the constitution, this isn’t a power congress has.

The constitution only explicitly articulates the process for establishing treaties, not ending them. So it’s a bit of a gray area as to whether the president can end them by himself, since he can’t establish them by himself.

To my mind, it would seem exceedingly weird if establishing a treaty required the consent of the Senate but breaking one didn’t. What’s the argument to be made that the two aspects (establish/break) are so fundamentally different that the rules for the first aren’t also the rules for the second? Why does the president need consent to say yes but does not need consent to say no?

It’s definitely been done before, but also never directly contested. (In previous cases SCOTUS has avoided answering the question by saying they didn’t have jurisdiction.)