Yes, I really think a major reason that the US is failing is the lack of an equivalent to Australia’s ABC, Britain’s BBC, Canada’s CBC, all the way to (I wish this were true) New Zealand’s ZBC.

Those public broadcasters anchor the news reporting space. Many people think they’re biased, and it’s probably true that they aren’t 100% neutral, and definitely have an institutional bias. But, the kinds of people who work for those public broadcasters really believe in their mission to tell the truth. Normal news consumers still end up in filter bubbles, but it’s really easy to pop out of those filter bubbles for a second and check out the public broadcaster. In the US, even the supposedly centrist for-profit broadcasters are heavily biased because they need to make money. The bias isn’t necessarily left or right, but it’s in favor of whatever’s sensationalist and will keep people glued to their TVs.

I agree, but I wish there were some way to ensure that voters were making an informed choice.

In the case of Bobby Sands, I assume they were. That was a high profile case. It’s even vaguely possible to make the case that he was a political prisoner.

But, almost daily I see interviews with Trump voters who seem to have lost their connection with reality. And, it’s not even a wrong but consistent worldview. It’s just a bunch of incoherent conspiracy theories that fall apart under the most gentle questioning. Unfortunately, there’s probably no way to restrict voting to only sane and well informed voters, because any restriction you put in place could be abused.

Probably not.

The army wouldn’t go along with it. Even in countries with dictators, they need to purge the army before they try anything too radical. And, often, the generals retain a lot of power.

Especially given that prosecutions are often racially biased, and sometimes politically biased.

If an opponent with a criminal record can’t run, you incentivize an immoral president to have their political opponents charged with anything they can think of.

OTOH, the American electorate is filled with idiots. You would hope that people would see through a purely political conviction and not let that stop them. But, the reality is probably the opposite, a serial killer who ate his victims could run, and if the party got behind that candidate, half the electorate would not know he was a serial killer, or they’d vote for him anyhow, or they’d think his conviction was just a psy-op and his victims were crisis actors.

Immunity from prosecution doesn’t mean he can pass laws.

Theoretically he could murder members of the other branches of government until the remaining ones did what he wanted, but it doesn’t let him pass new laws or unilaterally change the constitution.

Especially when the alternative is a glass of poison. A warm, flat beer is not going to kill you, even though it might taste disgusting.

The worst thing is that you don’t get to choose whether you’re drinking the warm, flat beer or the poison. Depending on where you live your vote might not even matter. A bunch of uninformed and misinformed idiots in a few random states will decide for you which you’re drinking.

Make it so felons cannot run for president

How does immunity let him do that?

Doing that would require changing the constitution. Legally, this would let him go and scribble new words on the paper version of the constitution. He would be immune from the charge of vandalism. But, that wouldn’t actually change the constitution.

1. Those aren’t things that would otherwise be crimes. He doesn’t have immunity from procedure, he has immunity for crimes. He kill the justices, or kidnap them and lock them up in some undisclosed location. He has immunity in those cases. But expanding the court would require passing a law. Passing a law is not an action that the President takes, regardless of any presidential immunity. As for felons not being able to become presidents, any law congress passed to say that would be unconstitutional, because the constitution lays out the only requirements to become a US president. The constitution also limits the ways in which the constitution could be changed, and none of that is within the powers of a president. He could kill Trump, but he can’t change the rules about who’s allowed to be president.

2. He still believes that the system works. He thinks the checks and balances work. He believes that, regardless of the recent Supreme Court ruling, that he’s not immune, so he won’t commit crimes like that. The result might be that the final president of the Republic thought it was more important to follow tradition and live the values that he thought the president should hold, than to do what was necessary to prevent the Republic from becoming a dictatorship.

Changing the electoral system means passing laws.

The people who pass laws are elected representatives.

The current electoral system works well for the current elected representatives (kinda by definition, because it’s what got them elected).

So, the laws won’t get changed because the people who have the power to pass the new law aren’t going to pass a law that disadvantages them.

Case in point, the Liberal Party of Canada promised that if elected they’d reform the electoral system and get rid of first past the post. But, of course, FPTP is a massive advantage for the two main parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives. So, when they won the election, they quickly backed out of that promise. The only parties still promising to get rid of FPTP are the smaller parties who would have a big advantage if FPTP went away – but, of course, these small parties can’t win elections because of FPTP, so their promises to get rid of it are empty because they will never be in a position to make that change.

However many the AI decides to give me.

Everyone capable of thought should have opinions.

The full scene if anyone’s interested.

Carl Weathers is an interesting contrast to Arnold. Arnold got his muscles by focusing on how he looked, on bodybuilding. Weathers developed his physique training for professional gridiron football. He played college football, then in the NFL (coached by John Madden) and CFL. Arnold used his unique physique as a way to get into movies without ever training as an actor. Weathers was studying theatre arts while playing college football, and finally finished the degree in 1974 just after retiring from pro football. He went on to get a master of theatre arts later.

Both of them pivoted extremely successfully to comedy later in their careers, with Weathers doing Happy Gilmore and Arrested Development, and Arnold doing his whole variety of comedy movies.

Also, good to know that Weathers loved this scene:

“Predator, the handshake. That’s iconic,” says Weathers, grinning from ear to ear. “The director shot that scene beautifully. And it’s a great movie. You put that movie in the theater today and it works just as well as it did back in 1987.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/baby-carl-weathers-has-a-stew-going

On one hand, Assange is a shitty person. One woman woke up to him sticking his dick in her without her consent and without a condom. On the same trip he’d had sex with a different woman who had also insisted on his using a condom, which he reluctantly did… but then the condom mysteriously broke. While a guest of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was hiding out to duck the Swedish charges, he smeared shit on the walls and refused to bathe. He also helped the Russian GRU interfere in the 2016 Presidential Election, either as a useful idiot or a willing collaborator.

On the other hand, as shitty as he is, he was effectively a journalist. With Wikileaks he released leaked footage of a US helicopter firing on civilians in Iraq. He released reports on corruption by Kenyan leaders. He released internal scientology documents. The world needs journalists who will publish stories about things that powerful people, governments and churches don’t want people to know.

On the other, other hand, at times he hung his sources out to dry, like he did with Bradley / Chelsea Manning.

The plea deal he agreed to is bullshit. The charge of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” was basically encouraging a source to leak information to him. That’s journalism. “Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information” was again, journalism. He was encouraging whistleblowers to report on wrongdoing by the government.

Even the plea deal is bullshit. He pled to violating the espionage act for… what? He didn’t break into anything himself. He wasn’t given a security clearance which he then violated. He wasn’t even American, in America, or working for the government. He was acting as a journalist receiving information from a whistleblower.

So, IMO, there’s nothing much to celebrate here. A shitty person pled to a bullshit charge, setting a bad precedent for journalism, and is now free. Lose, lose.

How do you define “earsay”?

Another similar “shortcut” I’ve heard about was that a system that analyzed job performance determined that the two key factors were being named “Jared” and playing lacrosse in high school.

And, these are the easy-to-figure-out ones we know about.

If the bias is more complicated, it might never be spotted.

Yes, “Bias Automation” is always an issue with the training data, and it’s always harder to resolve than anyone thinks.

That’s virtua, not virtual.

Yep. Because stealing is a crime that goes back thousands of years. It was an old crime by the time the 10 commandments were written down. Meanwhile, copyright infringement is a new thing that’s maybe a few centuries old at most, and it’s a lot more morally ambiguous. Is it wrong to infringe on a monopoly that the government has given a corporation over the sharing of a tangible expression of an idea? Maybe sometimes? Maybe not other times?

One woman can deliver a baby in an hour, if she’s a doctor or a midwife.