The article lost me at “[Trump’s] no-nonsense New Jersey crowd at a rally”.
Am I supposed to assume that the folks showing up at a Trump rally are no-nonsense? I beg your forgiveness, but I’m struggling with that one. Maybe I’m misunderstanding.
As for “draws yawns” and “raises eyebrows”, cool stuff if some of these folks are feeling fatigue from the hate machine or are newly perplexed by their political leader. Better late than never, I suppose.
Frankly a no-nonsense crowd implies existence of a nonsense crowd for Trump and frankly I miss the fun crazy. The genocidal crazy is getting to be too much these days.
The “fun crazy” was just a distraction while he raped the nation and the planet. The one place you won’t see the scam is where the street hustler tells you to look.
Nothing like a good old fashioned quid pro quo resulting in the permanent destruction of the environment for an elderly sociopath who won’t be around to see the world burn, but hey…at least he won’t serve his final days on earth in jail.
I think it’s pretty clear the ban will be overturned. Congress just attached it to Ukraine aid because it was popular enough and they could ram Ukraine and Israel aid thru. The Supreme Court ruled in 1965 that Chinese propaganda is protected speech 8-0, in the middle of the red scare. …m.wikipedia.org/…/Lamont_v._Postmaster_General
If they want to truly go after tiktok we’re gonna need data privacy bills and oversight that affects ALL social media platforms. Congress isn’t serious about fixing issues. This isn’t a serious ban. They just want sound bytes to play back home.
The speech is protected, but foreign influence is not.
The US has a very long history of preventing and restricting foreign control of national media. That said, this has traditionally been applied to television and radio, not new media.
The thought being, people can say whatever they want, but if a foreign adversary has control over the flow of key information channels, that is a national security risk.
For about 2 hours I thought the TikTok ban would bring a similar thing to GDPR to the US. Then I stopped, thought about it and realized it was bullshit. I just want digital rights
Lamont v Postmaster General was decided the way it was because it required Dr. Lamont to make a positive and OFFICIAL act in order to receive something through a U.S. Government service.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act requires no official (meaning related to Government) act on the part of the user. A secondary, but still important, consideration for SCOTUS in that case was that the U.S. Mail was an official Government body, that also doesn’t apply.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act may still be struck down but Lamont v Postmaster General is IMO a poor case to use for comparison.
We’ll see what happens. I don’t think the ban has anything to do with Chinese propaganda and everything to do with the US government wanting a backdoor to read everyone’s private communications. Maybe they’ll force this into a FISA court under the guise of “national security” in order to get a win after a secret trial.
It was a unanimous vote (50-0) in the House Commerce Committee, approved independent of other bills. They very likely attached it to the aid package to shield Congress from constituent blowback. They won’t be walking this back.
The correct answer to this problem is not “we can’t correct it”; it is “this class of task is completely out of scope for ChatGPT, and we will do everything we can to make sure users understand that”. Unfortunately, OpenAI knows damn well this is how the public perceives and uses its product and seems happy to let this misconception persist.
We do need laws to curb this, but it’s really more a marketing issue than a technological issue. The underlying technology is amazing; the applications built around it are mostly garbage. What we have here is a hype trainwreck.
Yet, LLMs are trained on data - an information repository. They are capable of accessing and recalling the contents of that information repository, and relaying information from that repository to an end user. It may not be an information repository functionally, but it legally seems to have the capabilities to be classified as one. (I am neither a lawyer nor a programmer, and I am not in the EU.)
The software breaks the law, and the people who built it knew that this was likely the case. It was developed as a research project, which has very different legal requirements from a consumer product. They might not outright ban the software, but they might issue some hefty fines, etc. Banning a product is not the only recourse of the courts.
They are capable of accessing and recalling the contents of that information repository, and relaying information from that repository to an end user.
This is not correct based on my understanding of LLMs, but I am certainly not an expert. As I understand it, it’s basically a statistics exercise in how they determine what order to put words into. They don’t ‘look stuff up’ in their training data. They probably don’t even have access to their training data once the model is complete. These models are trained on terabytes of data but are small enough to fit in memory, so it’s impossible for them to still have access to all that. But it wouldn’t matter if they did, because that’s not how they work.
To me that sounds like a distinction without a difference. A jpeg is not an image, but a set of data that can be algorithmically processed and rendered as an image - which is why it can fit in a smaller space than a bmp. Despite the technical differences, a jpg and a bmp are legally equivalent. If something is illegal in a bmp, it’s also illegal in a jpg. The same laws apply to EVs and gas vehicles. The same laws apply to vinyl records and cassette tapes. The law does not care about the mechanism.*
You’re illustrating the issue so many people have with this technology. Without a fundamental understanding of how it works, people will attempt to use it in ways it shouldn’t be used, and won’t understand why it isn’t giving them correct information. It simply doesn’t have the ability to do anything but put words in an order that statistically will resemble how a human might answer the question.
LLMs don’t know anything. They can’t tell fact from fiction (and are incapable of even trying), and don’t understand concepts such as verifying info when requested. That’s the problem, they don’t ‘understand’ anything, including what they are telling you. But they do spit out words in a statistically probable order, even if the result is complete bullshit. They do it so well that they can fool most people into thinking the computer actually knows what it’s telling you.
Jpg is a lossy compression algorithm. Statistical probability of words occuring in sequence is not compression. That’s like saying generative images are compression, they aren’t. It’s not producing blurry matches of images, it’s producing something “novel”. Otherwise, that would be considered over fitting the data.
Here’s a better metaphor because yours completely misses the mark when it comes to the difference between an LLM and an actual encyclopedia.
A painter will spend years honing his craft by studying other paintings as well as photos and real life. If you ask him to paint you a house from memory and try to build it with what he gives you, that just makes you an idiot, it doesn’t make him a bad architect.
Chatgpt is not an encyclopedia and any thing it says that is remotely important to your personal or work life should be verified. They explicitly tell you it can and will give false responses.
LLMs do not look stuff up (except when they have an API that allows them to), but I think OP’s point still stands. The statistical next token predictor metaphor is useful , but in many regards that’s what text and language are. If you can understand that certain words are linked to certain other words, then you should be able to appreciate that certain groups of words can be associated in a way that is functionally the same as data.
I have not memorized the pytorch documentation, but I can use what I understand about pytorch and other libraries to infer specific aspects of the library that I am not familiar with. Functionally, this is no different than if I accessed the documentation directly. If I communicate this information to others I have functioned as a data repository. The repository works on a more abstract and error-prone level, but it works nonetheless.
Here is another very concrete example: LLMs know George Washington’s birthday. Not because they look up that information, but because of the learned associations between George Washington, birthday, and his actual date of birth.
I can use what I understand about pytorch and other libraries to infer specific aspects of the library that I am not familiar with.
This is what LLM’s can’t do though. They can’t use what they understand because they don’t understand anything. They can’t infer, they can’t reason, they can’t evaluate or compare. They can spit out words that make it look like they did those things, but they didn’t.
Here I think you are behind on the literature. LLMs can infer and reason, and there are whole series of papers that evaluate LLMs for these properties the exact same way we evaluate humans. So if you can’t trust the metrics, then you cannot even assert that humans can reason and infer and understand.
Good read from a group of computer scientists at Arizona State. Their conclusions are the same as mine but they illustrate the problems better than I ever could.
You linked a paper on planning in LLMs. Planning is largely in the domain of reinforcement learning. The paper you linked conflates reasoning with planning, alongside the obviously biased prose, so the author really doesn’t seem credible. I prefer nuanced and careful evaluations such as: www.sciencedirect.com/…/S2949719123000298
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To clarify, I mean to say that users should not consider it an information repository, because it does not function as one, by design. Whether it should be classified as such under the law is another matter, one on which I do not have enough knowledge to comment. I do think OpenAI is presenting ChatGPT inappropriately, and I hope they will be held accountable for that.
I’m sure in the future we will see true databases built on the same technology (and they will be awesome, if implemented properly). But that’s not what ChatGPT is (or, as far as I know, any other existing LLM-based application). Any information it is able to “recall” is almost a coincidence of how it was trained. You can sort of think of it like lossy compression. The LLM gets all of its information from its training set, but it is not designed to retain any specific information from the training set in full. In cases where it does, that usually means one of two things:
The information appeared many times in the training set, enough prevent it from being washed out.
The model is far bigger than it should be, and is overfitted to its training data.
They don’t recall information from a repository, the repository is translated into a set of topic based weighted probabilities of what words come next.
Those probabilities are then used to reconstruct a best-guess at what words are next when generating strings of language.
It’s not recall, it’s a form of “free” association, which is quite tightly bounded to the context, topic, and weightings of the training data.
This is not precise and is more likely to create average answers and sentences, rather than precise ones.
It’s not recall, it’s really convincing lies.
“He seems to know what he’s talking about, and speaks with a certain kind of authority which makes sense and sounds knowledgeable”.
It must be amazing to have that much money and influence.
Coincidentally the podcast I’m listening to as I type this is talking about a man sitting on death row who was convicted solely on the testimony of one “bite mark analyst” who was later shown to be an absolute fraud in a field that is already highly dubious at best. The appeals court in his case feels that just because the “expert” was wrong in all his other cases doesn’t necessarily mean he was wrong in his. So that’s cool.
A huge amount of so-called forensic “science” is dubious. Blood splatter analysis, bite mark analysis, voice print analysis, handwriting analysis, all bullshit. Even more ‘respected’ forms of forensic analysis are not slam-dunks like people, including people on juries, are convinced they are. Fingerprints can be misidentified, especially if it’s a partial print (and it’s a myth that no two are alike anyway). DNA samples can be tainted.
Basically, the entire field of forensics is built on a lot of very shaky ground and, unfortunately, has resulted in a lot of wrongful convictions. It needs to be overhauled by actual scientists.
We have no idea if there have never been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead. I would say that puts that claim squarely in myth territory until there can be some way to show that it’s true beyond “we haven’t found two matching sets out of the small subset of people we’ve fingerprinted.”
Anyway…
The real problem, Cole notes, is that fingerprinting experts have never agreed on “a way of measuring the rarity of an arrangement of friction ridge features in the human population.” How many points of similarity should two prints have before the expert analyst declares they’re the same? Eight? Ten? Twenty? Depending on what city you were tried in, the standards could vary dramatically. And to make matters more complex, when police lift prints from a crime scene, they are often incomplete and unclear, giving authorities scant material to make a match.
So even as fingerprints were viewed as unmistakable, plenty of people were mistakenly sent to jail. Simon Cole notes that at least 23 people in the United States have been wrongly connected to crime-scene prints.* In North Carolina in 1985, Bruce Basden was arrested for murder and spent 13 months in jail before the print analyst realized he’d made a blunder.
Imo, something isn’t a myth just because it’s hard to prove definitely due to a near infinite amount of samples. By the same argument you could pretty much discredit most knowledge. Dna being unique or the speed of light because we haven’t tested all individual photons.
Its healthy to always acknowledge the possibility but if there’s a mountain of evidence pointing one way, you kind of go with what you have.
Obviously though, it’s insane we don’t have better standards. It sounds like most times, it boils down to a judgment call from an expert and that is clearly not okay.
Its healthy to always acknowledge the possibility but if there’s a mountain of evidence pointing one way
You’re assuming the fingerprint is perfect. It might not be. In enough cases they do not have the full fingerprint. Then if there’s a match, was it actually a match or not?
For above, this caused problems though times. Especially with huge fingerprint databases.
Disagree with your statement that there’s loads of evidence pointing that fingerprint are unique. That’s not how they’re used. And there’s enough cases where it went wrong.
That’s not how they’re used. And there’s enough cases where it went wrong.
Yes and it has nothing to do with two people having the same fingerprint. We need to be much more precise on how we measure differences and what samples we allow (like no partials) but there isn’t an inherent fault in fingerprint evidence because there are multiples of the same one floating around.
I’m arguing against the notion that it’s individuals can have the same exact fingerprint and not talking about how we process them.
That’s not how science works at all. You don’t need to test individual photons to know the speed of light. That involves mass and energy. There’s a famous equation that allows you to calculate it if you re-order the variables, E=mc².
You do not present a hypothesis that has no evidence to back it up and pretend it’s true. That is not fact, that is folklore. Mythology.
You don’t ignore all the evidence just because every single bit of possible data hasn’t been parsed.
There has never been two individuals with the same fingerprint, out of all the fingerprints we have collected, they are all unique. This kind of points to all of them being unique and this will be true until we find one that isn’t.
You really do not understand how science works. You are arguing that the test for uniqueness is the same as the test for uniformity.
If someone were to claim that every drop of water is unique, you would have a point. No one is claiming that. That is the claim about fingerprints and it is a claim which has never been tested to the satisfaction of anyone working in that field of science.
I’m not saying it’s proven beyond a doubt, my point is that something that has turned out true the millions of times we have checked can’t possibly be a myth.
You can say there’s a possibility of it being wrong but shouldn’t lump it in with antiquity gods just for the sake of your argument.
There’s a whole range between fantasy and certain beyond a doubt, you should stop assuming I’m an idiot and ask yourself why you are so adamant about defending the extreme in such an abrasive manner.
my point is that something that has turned out true the millions of times we have checked can’t possibly be a myth.
Can’t possibly be a myth? So you know for a fact that, based on the supposed millions of times that we have checked (have we checked millions of times? do you know?) no two of the estimated 100 billion people that have lived over the course of the past 200,000 years had the same fingerprints, yes? And you can present empirical evidence to support that claim? Because I’m really not sure how you can claim that with any sort of certainty based on a sample size of what is likely less than 1% of that number over the course of less than two centuries.
People believe it’s “probably true” that the world was created in 7 days. And they have only a little less credible evidence at their disposal than you do.
In our current discussion, I’m assuming based on the millions of times it has been true while you are assuming and declaring as truth based on one mystical scenario that has never been found. For all your talk about science, I don’t think your reasoning is very thorough.
The above scenario would only apply to me if said people had also found millions of world’s that were also created in seven days. It applies to you as is because your double finger print scenario is currently completely imaginary.
I’m going to leave it at that but if one of us is a zealot running on blind faith, I don’t think it’s me.
You started by claiming no two fingerprints are unique based on the fact that there is beyond a doubt a set of two identical pairs out there somewhere even though no such pairs have ever been found, a god pair if you will.
We have no idea if there have never been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead.
So I don’t know why you’re telling such a ridiculous lie.
I am acknowledging I made a false claim and I’m asking you to correct me by asking this question. What’s your position? All you have told me is what your position isn’t.
I’m not sure why you need to ask this because I made it very clear. It is a myth because it is not a provable claim and assuming something you can’t show to be valid is true is the antithesis of the scientific method. The burden of proof is on the claimant and so far, no one who has made that claim has been able to back it up. Until they can, it’s a myth.
How unlikely? Do you actually know? Can you show me the odds from someone other than the 19th century eugenecist’s estimation which I’ve already been shown that would suggest there has actually been at least been one matching set if he’s right (he’s not right).
You’re confusing religious mythology with something being a myth.
It’s a myth that you regularly swallow spiders in your sleep. Is it a myth because they’ve watched lots of people at home while they sleep every night to make sure they aren’t swallowing spiders? No, it’s a myth because no one who has ever made that claim has been able to back it up.
Nobody that has claimed to have found two seperate identical fingerprints has been able to back that up either. I’m pretty sure most myths are associated with the unlikeliest scenario and not the opposite like you are doing. By their very nature they are usually outlandish, religiously outlandish or old wives tales that turned out to be false.
You’re basically saying “it’s a myth that spiders don’t crawl into our mouths as we sleep”. It kind of makes the opposite sound like a regular occurrence and saying “we haven’t watched every person sleep throughout history to know if it’s 100% always the case” is not a valid reason to say it
Where is your proof that two fingerprints can be the same?
And before it comes about, the absence of proof isn’t proof. “Could ofs” and “maybe exists” don’t really cut it. I hope you understand this is why appeals to ignorance don’t work and you can’t use the fact that we haven’t gathered all data especially when all the current data point squarely point one way.
This is why labeling something as false, a myth or a fantasy needs more than just a slight possibility.
We could label physics as a myth by arguing we just haven’t found the cases in which it doesn’t work yet. These things have happened before and there’s always a slight possibility but to bungle about saying it’s a myth is a bit silly imo.
This is what you wrote. Is “Fingerprints aren’t all unique” a provable claim? This is why your logic isn’t sound, it can be applied to all of it and makes things that clearly aren’t myths into myths. And practically nothing is provable beyond a doubt especially when you need all data in all of space and time as you imply.
You basically explained it to yourself with the spider example.
I also wrote this, which I have said in reply to you twice now. I will bold the relevant parts to help you comprehend what you’re reading.
We have no idea if there have never been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead.
And since you have decided to lie about it again, this will be my last reply to you. Go ahead and lie about me a third time if you like. Or a fourth time, I suppose, depending on how you count these last two replies.
We have no idea if there has ever been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead.
Do you understand that your logic applies to both and is meaningless. I changed three letters and it still makes perfect sense. You can’t label things as myths because edge cases might exist somewhere in the known universe.
But please, if you don’t want to interact with me, I invite you to not reply.
We have no idea if there have never been two people with the same fingerprints. It’s never been tested and there’s no way to test it since the majority of people who have existed are now dead.
This is true. Similarly, we haven’t tested and have no means to test if two well-shuffled decks have ever matched. But we do understand the mechanisms that underlie these phenomena, and (specific or ballpark) likelihood of an exact match occurring, and from those odds can make a reasonable assertion that a match has (in all likelihood) never occurred.
That being said, the approximate impossibility of an exact match does not make up for the other issues of fingerprinting as you quoted. The chances of finding someone’s fingerprint whole and readable to compare to a control may be far more likely than two distinct people matching exactly, but far more often the prints being used are nowhere near “whole and readable”
So some random person made a calculation according to another random person on fucking Quora and you think those are actual odds?
That’s so amazingly dishonest that I don’t know what else to say.
But let’s say he’s right. Let’s say it’s 1 in 64 billion. There have been over 100 billion people. That means at least 2 people have the same fingerprints based on the odds you have given me without checking their accuracy.
So some random person made a calculation according to another random person on fucking Quora and you think those are actual odds?
Another two second Google search, it was Francis Galton who calculated those odds.
That means at least 2 people have the same fingerprints based on the odds you have given me without checking their accuracy.
I don’t think 1 or 2 pairs of people having had fingerprints that matched from the dawn of humanity to today is sufficient to say it’s a myth that “no two people have the same fingerprint”. The likelihood that two living people, or even two people who lived at the same time ever, shared fingerprints, is still effectively 0. I’m not trying to say fingerprints are magic, just that they are relatively unique. That’s not a myth.
It’s clear you have strong feelings on this, and I really don’t, so I don’t expect I’ll be engaging further. I’m sorry for any distress.
Oh, Fancis Galton. Then it must be true. Could a 19th century racist who didn’t even understand the concept of genetics possibly be wrong?
I don’t think 1 or 2 pairs of people having had fingerprints that matched from the dawn of humanity to today is sufficient to say it’s a myth that “no two people have the same fingerprint”.
That literally makes that statement false. i.e. a myth.
Seriously, dude… you used the work of a 19th century racist, the literal founder of the racist “science” of eugenics, who couldn’t possibly calculate odds accurately, to show, based on that work, the statement about fingerprints was false and you’re now saying, “well just because that statement is false, you can’t really say that it isn’t true.”
But please, do show me what Dr. Mengele thought on the subject next.
Thing is, as with DNA, the whole fingerprint is not examined, just certain reference points. The chances of 10 points in a particular print matching another random person’s are much much greater than the whole fingerprint.
I and the other user are talking about the actual fingerprint on the finger which looking at it now might not be the right term.
I’m mainly saying I don’t believe something is automatically false just because we haven’t verified all 8 billion datapoints, even more so when we’ve already sampled quite a bit. I don’t get why it’s fantasy or a myth like the other user is saying.
You can run a better match test than that on GIMP just by using the difference blend mode and some rotation. It’s absurd that this is what they rely on instead.
Charles McCrory is spending his 38th year behind bars, convicted of killing his wife. The bite mark expert in his case recanted his testimony, saying he now knows he cannot say whether a bite mark on the victim matched McCrory’s teeth. Yet the Alabama courts have declined to free McCrory.
Alabama’s Court of Criminal Appeals ruled earlier this year that the jury was capable of deciding on its own whether the bite marks matched, a finding that ignores science suggesting such perceived visual matches cannot be valid. The court also cited other evidence in the case, including a witness who said he saw McCrory’s truck at the house during the time of the murder. No physical or forensic evidence links him to the crime.
Three years ago, after the bite mark evidence in his case collapsed, McCrory was offered a deal: Plead guilty and walk free. He refused.
“I refused to take it because I didn’t kill her,” McCrory told NBC News from his prison facility. “I did not kill my wife.”
The Innocence Project is now pursuing appeals through the federal courts.
“Prison is hard — a lot of the stories that you see on the news about prisons, particularly Alabama prisons, are true,” McCrory said. “It is a nasty place, and it’s not a place I would wish on anyone.”
“I don’t give up hope,” he said. “And certainly there’s days of disappointment and days when you’re down and out … but I just believe that somewhere there’s a truth in this that will come out, and you can’t give up. That’s just not an option.”
That’s disgusting that the courts just can’t admit when they are wrong. Even after the testimony fell through, they still wanted to get a guilty plea out of the guy. I’m not surprised this is in the south. smh
Three years ago, after the bite mark evidence in his case collapsed, McCrory was offered a deal: Plead guilty and walk free. He refused.
That, right there, is the most disgusting part of the American justice legal system: nobody from the judge on down to the beat cop gives the slightest flying fuck about catching the correct perp; they only care about securing convictions so their records look good. They wanted him to absolve them of having fucked up and imprisoned the wrong person, and his continued imprisonment is nothing but an attempt to force that absolution from him.
Not just the court. The prosecutor’s office as well. Their position is “we are ok with letting you go; as long as we can do it without admitting that we made a mistake”.
And this is an institutional problem. The conviction happened 38 years ago. Everyone involved in prosecuting the case is gone. The office of the prosecutor is simply unable to admit that the office made a mistake.
Of course, how could the public ever trust them again if they made mistakes? /s
We live in such a bizzare time where facts won’t meet up with other facts. Where science rules our daily lives but is distrusted on every level. Where we keep making the same mistakes because some one 100 years ago didn’t really care.
Fun fact. The organization of holocaust survivors, bund of anti fascists in Germany, whose members are mainly Jewish holocaust survivors and their descendants has been targeted by the German government for being “far left extremism.” Because actual holocaust survivors are clearly suspicious for demanding antifascism.
Yes they froze the bank account of the Jewish voice for peace in Germany, demanding a full members list including addresses to “identify” the organization. It is a registered organization and as such it is legally represented by its board. Demanding a full member list has no legal reason, but of course the German government loves to make lists of Jews it doesn’t like.
One has tanks, drones, spy planes, literal roadblocks builtin into all the streets around the courthouse, and regularly boasts about their anti-aircraft abilities. The other protects people who aren’t even in their office buildings half the time. Not even close to the same.
One has tanks, drones, spy planes, literal roadblocks builtin into all the streets around the courthouse, and regularly boasts about their anti-aircraft abilities.
NYCLU article about some of NYPD’s capabilities. Keyword some of their tech, some of their kit is directly from military contractors and can not be discussed at all. IIRC the last major National Guard deployments in NYC have all been for food deployment, including hand delivering lunches during COVID in the suburbs.
I’m convinced it’s the same “fuck you get mine” mentality that it always has been. turnip just is showing them how to play the game. these clownshoes all think they can be the next one to cheat their way to the top. new american dream everyone.
As a publicly traded stock, I wonder if any journalist is working on tracking ownership of the stock. Certainly it will be time-consuming - a Russian plan to launder donations would use local-registered shell companies, I’d guess - but probably doable.
The gag generally prohibits Trump from publicly commenting on potential witnesses, jurors and other people involved in the case. […] The prosecutors want Trump fined $1,000 per violation.
He violated The gag order over ten times. Why the fuck won’t the judge hold him in contempt of court and arrest him?
I’m always in favor of exponential fines. You can start at a very small sum at first offense and if you double at every new offense you’re quickly in the billions.
Just make all fines proportional to net worth. I don’t want poors to be fucked for life for the same behavior that an affluenza sufferer would just pay $100k and be done with. Make contempt like 1% of net worth, everyone can choose how much it is worth to act a fool in court.
This is what exponential fines solve. It can start at $100 and it’ll eventually stop when the unrepentant behavior raises it to the point of crippling the offender economically.
Yes but that point comes sooner for the poor person than the wealthy person. We should remove inequality in the justice system, not just work around it.
Just don’t repeat the offense, bub. A fine is a deterrent. If it doesn’t deter, it’s not working. Imagine having to assess someone’s net worth every time a fine is to be applied.
2 tier justice system. Although I can imagine a judge rationalizing being so endlessly patient with Trump out of fear of what might happen if they aren't.
Not that I would agree with the judge coming to such a decision in that way, but if Trump actually got arrested there's no telling what his base will do. Could be anything from local unrest to full blown civil war
I imagine there’s a level of over-cautiousness, as one misstep (or even a perceived one) and one friendly appellant judge can overturn the whole thing.
This, to me, is the absolute key of it all. They have to do everything possible in the world to avoid providing even the smallest mote that the defense can use on appeal.
Appeasement always works. The unrest is going to happen one way or another, one way just ends you stuck with the same problem longer until you have to kick its ass globally and it runs to its bunker.
Sadly, we have to accept that a former president is not a normal citizen and that this entire event is completely without precedent. I suspect that a lot of this behavior will be used against him when it comes to sentencing time. Until then, judges have to do whatever they can to not provide fodder to the hateful right and to preserve security in and around the court, its staff, and their families. They also have to do everything possible to avoid any suggestion of bias, which Trump lawyers will take to appeal.
It’s all fun and games until the republicans get a democratic president in a sham trial, holds them in contempt for some obnoxious reason and sends them to jail based on precedent set with Trump…
This could be why they are walking a very very fine line with Trump. For good or bad.
No of course not. But why make it easier for them to justify? Let them be seen as the ones breaking precedent. Again it’s a very careful line. I’m not saying it’s the right course, but I understand it.
For example, people like to shit on Portland for being a war-torn leftist hellscape, but they’re just hateful bigoted liars. Portland actually cares <3 (our cops don’t tho… fuck 'em)
a new system of first responders – teams of medics and peer support specialists with training in de-escalation who can respond with compassion to 911 calls about people struggling with homelessness and behavioral health crises.
Don’t even give the pigs a chance to shoot an innocent! Call Portland Street Response!
Posted on April 26, 2022: A report on the first year of Portland Street Response was presented to City Council today. Here are a few random tidbits from the report:
<span style="color:#323232;">89% of calls to PSR required no further help from Police or Fire.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">65% of calls to PSR involved someone experiencing homelessness.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">None of the calls to PSR resulted in any arrests.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">PSR staff followed up with 44 clients, making a total of 437 visits, helping them with housing applications, benefits referrals, and shelter referrals.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Nine clients found permanent housing thanks to PSR.
</span>
here was the initial plan: portlandstreetresponse.org/…/Portland-Street-Resp…Since it’s initial pilots in 2019, it expanded to city-wide coverage in 2022. These things are possible within our communities we just need to push for the change!
I’ve been hoping more cities take Portland’s path, and it looks like that is finally happening!
Oh, for sure, she should have had a better strategy. I don’t disagree that she ran a terrible campaign. But OP said “more people voted for her” despite her bad strategy, which is true and frankly should have been a national point of months of protests. But instead, the person I responded to implied it doesn’t matter because she’s [insert stereotypical Clinton hate vomit].
It does matter. She did get more votes. That is in fact a fairer and more just way of representing a national vote for a national/Federal position. We all know there’s an electoral college. But there absolutely shouldn’t be because it inherently counts some votes as more valuable than others, which is frankly incompatible with democracy. So yes, that definitely matters.
I agree with you, i just meant it in a plain cause and effect sort of way. It doesn’t matter in the sense that it is not a metric that matters for determining the outcome in the election, just an indicator of popularity.
Also, makhno said that she didn’t campaign in key states because of her elitism, and that attitude makes her less qualified. They didn’t say that it didn’t matter because of it.
Democracy, in the American sense, is a scam, and at the presidential level it’s the same mechanism from the ground up, full of antidemocratic mechanisms.
Hence the impeachment witch hunt. Find Biden getting money from foreign governments, then scream “see your guy does it to, so us doing it is totally justified”
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