Yeah, I wish the legal system didn’t have this deference to “the voters will decide” when it reaches the level of actual criminal activity. Like the fact that you are running for or currently hold some office should have no impact at all on whether we are all equal before the law or how the law treats us. Yet every court and law enforcement agency seems terrified of the appearance of influencing the outcome of an election to the point that as long as you are running for something you are essentially legally bulletproof if the election is coming up soon.

I wonder if they understand what they’re encouraging by making the punishment for protests harsher than the punishments for direct action…not that that’s any of my business…

Where I live we get lots of local candidates who are some combination of democrat-green-progressive-working family alliances. Building coalitions from the bottom up like that, and showing that people with “green” in their bio can really be elected, is the way to move things forward. At the national level, the two-party system is far too entrenched to have a third party be anything but a defacto spoiler that turns off their own supporters more that anything else.

So they slapped some reinforcement learning on top of their LLM and are claiming that gives it “reasoning capabilities”? Or am I missing something?

Just the way this is going to go I guess. Ukraine has to fight with one hand tied behind their back, because the US says so, because appeasement like that always works when autocrats invade sovereign nations…

The old Chevy Sparks are basically golf carts with 4 doors and permission to drive in the roads. They are the least “techy” EVs I’ve seen in person as they are really just a battery swap with the minimally-appointed ICE version of the car, which is very sparse on the electronic doodads.

Andrew Tate himself is absolutely a problem, that doesn’t preclude there from also being other, related, broader, problems. Usually, when you see an argument in the form of “X thing (small, defined, addressable) isn’t the problem, Y thing (large, nebulous, intractable) is the problem!” Then what is happening is someone is re-framing the debate from a cognizable issue to an unsolvable issue, to defuse any actual action. It’s a great tactic!

No appeals based on incompetent/ineffective counsel for a civil case. In a criminal case, a convicted defendant may appeal on the grounds of ineffectiveness of counsel at trial. This principal arises because of the constitutional right to be represented by counsel. Such a right would be meaningless unless it implies a right to effective counsel. There is no such constitutional right to counsel in a civil case, and therefore no such ground for appeal in a civil case.

They aren’t “airtight”, that would awful. They are well-insulated and designed to take advantage of passive solar heating and air exchange cooling. The way roofs and windows and orientation on the land is usually done for western homes is just terribly inefficient for capturing and releasing heat in the right ways. Just some thick walls, a bank of windows facing the sunrise ,and some proper roof vents that can be opened when it’s hot is all most passive houses really are.