Dmb is trying to make a slap on the wrist sound significant. One officer got six months (actually four and a half) for obstruction of justice (in a mass homicide case, mind you) for destroying the evidence and another plead guilty to obstruction and got no actual criminal punishment. The other crew members had their charges dropped. Basically, they got the merest of slaps on the wrist.

These were pilots who were flying low under the cable car cables for the thrill and to prove themselves. Basically toddlers with testosterone. They caused a mass homicide event, lied and covered their way out of it, and got protected by the military.

This is the simple reality of these morons that buzz beaches, etc. There are actual safety rules and regulations for a reason, but they know that they can ignore those and safely much lower, much closer, etc. And they're not wrong... like 95% of the time. The problem is that the actual rules and regulations exist because people who aren't morons can look at that 5% and realize that it's an unacceptable risk.

The laws in question should just straight up be the transitive property. Any paid agent of government should be restrained by all of the restraints on government, plain and simple.

Low pay? Median US salary is $51K. Median US police officer salary is $77K. There might be high burnout and turnover, but the pay is generally pretty good all things considered.

Be very careful with 4 and how it's worded. You'll end up with a lot of police officers shoving suspects up onto the hood of their car all the way to the windshield to block the camera, then arresting them for "obstructing" the camera.

I think you're forgetting that, if that search leads to the car being pulled over, then to a search of the car, and they find a dead body in the trunk, the way the concept of the fruit of the poison tree is supposed to work someone could get away with murder for that "haha", etc. The dead body in their trunk and all additional evidence gathered as a result of that too could potentially become inadmissible leaving the prosecution with an obvious murder, but no evidence. The police are supposed to take their work - including the paperwork part of it - seriously.

Yeah, I'm sure those Genovese cable car passengers loved their flyover (under) experience.

Regarding b. They get 21% of their revenue from government. However, they get 61% of their revenue from Starlink. Now, I could pay myself 100% of my salary and thereby earn double what I am earning now... except that's preposterous. So, if we don't count SpaceX paying itself, it's still getting more than 50% of its revenue from government contracts. (because if we take out that 61%, then you have 21% from government contracts and 18% from other so, out of that remaining revenue the majority is still government contracts).

Stephen Miller is the grandson of Pogrom survivors, and yet...

I think you're conflating Elon Musk with Tom Mueller. Where are these supposed whitepapers that Musk himself authored?

I'm just going to quote that here. I could write out a history of electric cars to scrutinize it, but what's the point really?

They did say a biology researcher. Whether that's corporate or university, they probably do have the computing resources available and probably shared among many researchers. Of course, you do run into the issues that, these days, those resources are probably running on cloud servers. So still quite possibly not actually local.

Yeah. Even just doing casual research you run into troublesome censorship of information issues with these LLMs. For example, I was interested in the whole process of production of pennicillin and I had a long discussion going over all the principles from scratch: how to find, isolate, assay, and force evolve the most productive strains of pennicillin looking at how things were done historically, how to grow in aerated flasks with continuous feed nutrient systems (with discussion about corn steep liquor being a traditionally ideal feedstock because it both feeds it, but also keeps it under stress so it ramps up production), carefully decontaminating all inputs and isolating the output through a drip system through an oil barrier, using amyl alchohol, and sufuric acid for extraction along with how to actually produce those, etc. Basically it was a very interesting and enlightening session. However, then I tried to more or less restart the conversation on another occaision to clarify some points and I started off with questions incorporating essentially a summary of the first session. The LLM basically refused to because I was asking so directly and it was worried that I was actually trying to set up an at-home penicillin production lab.

So, basically, while you can get information bit by bit from these things, a whole web of probably mostly liability-based safeguards get in your way. That is one of the real concerns (to add to hallucinations, etc.) with AIs taking over as the interface to human knowledge: they will censor it. Not necessarily for sinister reasons (though I have caught LLMs directly presenting corporate press releases to certain questions rather than generated answers, which I consider pretty sinister), but just for the same reason people who frequent certain heavily corporate forums have started to say "Yahtzee" and "unalived", etc. rather than the real terms even outside those forums. Basically, we have to worry about access to information becoming a compartmentalized, dumbed down, lowest common denominator situation.

The actual two main factors that cause oil prices to be high are the war with Iran, and the simple fact that we're nearing the end of oil as the dominant power source. Technically, we're already past traditional "peak oil" as it was originally defined. Because of advancing technology the peak oil target has moved, of course, so there's plenty of accessible oil, but the actual average difficulty of both extracting the oil and processing it to be useful has increased. We're at the point where new wells in the US need a price point of close to $70 per barrel to be economically viable, and that's just going to go up. There are places in the world where the price point for new wells to be profitable is lower, but a good portion of those are in the Middle East. Of course, the cheap cost to extract and process Middle Eastern oil is a bit of an illusion since those states actually absolutely rely on a much higher price point to actually fund their governments since they are critically dependent on oil. If we look at Venezualan oil, which Trump has pointed to as some sort of economic savior of oil prices, then it gets even worse with new Venezuelan wells requiring a breakeven oil price of something like $80+ per barrel. Meanwhile there's a demand crunch coming as we get more and more cheap renewables displacing oil in the energy market. Since Oil is a high capex industry, it can't scale down easily. So a demand reduction really, really hurts the industry. Basically, the industry knows this, but it's in denial, but it still means that interruptions like the Iran war can cause the industry (and therefore oil prices) even more damage.

I'm just curious if you would support the statement that the Trump administration are outrageous liars, including about whether this is a war or not? I also note that you completely avoided responding to the two points I mentioned: A. the fact that a brief spike is different than a sustained plateau, and B. the fact that the high prices during Trump's administration are directly attributable to a war Trump started, whereas the spike during Biden's administration had much less, if anything, to do with the actions of the Biden administration.

No it didn't. If you're talking about the dog tags thing. It started with Musk and ""You have said the actual truth." in response to an anti-Semitic repost he made, which lead to advertisers leaving Twitter. Two weeks later, he was in Israel getting the dog tags, shaking hands, etc. Then a couple of days later he was telling advertisers who left because of his anti-semitism to "go fuck yourself!". Later on, as a result, he also took a trip to Auschwitz.

So clearly not before his image needed it, especially since there were previous events. The Soros attacks and Protocols of the Elders of Zion style conspiracy theories about Jews supposedly flooding Europe with immigrants to destroy it. Various Hitler memes, his threats against the ADL and involvement in #BantheADL, his "general amnesty" for Nazis, Holocaust deniers, etc. and so on.

There has also been plenty in his image that needs sanitization since then. Not that dumb PR stunts ever have, or will actually do the job.