Everyone wants roads near their house. If you don't have a road going to your house then your house is worthless. Once the government has a right of way for a road, expanding the road might be expensive, but it doesn't get the whole community involved in a series of lawsuits.

The only people that want to live near the train tracks, on the other hand, are the people out in the middle of the California desert that would love to have a way to easily get to the parts of California that aren't a wasteland. In the nice parts of California, every home owner within visual distance of the proposed route has hired a lawyer and vowed to fight the tracks to the death.

This means that California has built a tiny bit of tracks out in the middle of nowhere (near Bakersfield but not in Bakersfield). It also means that every single foot from this point on is likely to get even more astronomically expensive. The homeowners involved know that houses that are far enough away from the tracks so that their home value doesn't plummet are going to get a windfall as their prime real estate will become even more valuable with decent public transit. The rail system is going to be a serious amenity eventually. The homeowners near the tracks, on the other hand, are going to see a serious drop to their net worth. Everyone in California wants more light rail, but only if it doesn't go through their neighborhood.

It could easily be that California real estate is simply too expensive in this day and age for something like this to be built.

Context would make this more clear to the average reader. These were not cases where e.g. seeds blew in from another field and the farmer was held liable. These were the cases where the farmers were buying or using second generation seeds (prohibited under the purchase contract with Monsanto) and treating them with Roundup.

Come on. US educational spending is VERY high on both an absolute and per capita basis, as has already been pointed out to you, and US education has been in decline since at least the 1960s. Arch-conservative (/s) Richard Feynman wrote in his autobiography about how shit our textbooks were when he was on the Arch-conservative (/s) California commission to help choose them. FWIW, I recommend reading this bit regardless of your political persuasion. I do have one quibble with it (personally, I think being able to move between at least base 2, 10, and 16 is actually quite useful, but Feynman was a physicist and not a sysadmin so her gets a pass) but it's illustrative of just how terrible our educational system is, and it is NOT a problem of money.

As far as PBS goes, if you want to know why it was defunded, start here. One of NPR's editors (yes, I know NPR and PBS are separate things), Uri Berliner, claimed that in the quarter century he worked there that it had completely lost diversity of thought, and that was a bad thing. The result is he resigned due to overwhelming hostility from his colleagues. When your Sarah Lawrence/Columbia educated editor, son of the woman who was the founding chair of Sarah Lawrence's Women's Studies department, grandson of jews murdered in Auschwitz, is ringing alarm bells and the response is to force him out... maybe you should be wondering if maybe he had a good point.

Note: I am not at all happy that CPB was defunded. As you noted, they do (or, I guess, did) a lot of great work. But the people steering the ship invited this outcome.

It's even worse than that. The doctrine flies in the face of the wording of 42 USC 1983, which provides:

The court that created qualified immunity decided that the plain wording "the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws" really meant "rights, privileges, or immunities" that some court had clearly and specifically established in case law.

While this example is ridiculous, let's say the court had previously found "anally raping a prisoner with a nightstick while high on cocaine" to be a deprivation, "anally raping a prisoner with a nigthstick while sober" might not be so clearly established and cause the case to be dismissed. This is further compounded by the dismissals that make establishing that in case law a near impossibility.

The "good" news here, such as it is, is qualified immunity only applies to civil suits against the officers specifically. It does not protect them from criminal liability (that's the prosecutor's job *rimshot*) and it does not protect their employer from being sued for the actions of its employee.

It's been difficult to not look at the last half decade and not let my inner conspiracy theorist run wild. The massive supply shortages that persisted through Covid (and now the AI bubble) would make wonderful cover for some kind of EOTWAWKI scenario where governments build arks or whatever.

Vonnegut had a fun take on what going for "equality of outcome" vs "equality of opportunity" could end up looking like (though his was, of course, not simply "economic" in nature).

They're currently a bit shy of a light day out. Exactly how much energy do you think half century old solar panels would be generating if they had them?

How the hell can this article start with the premise that this is a "Neo killer" and contain the sentence, "We still don't know what Intel will charge for the chip, nor do we know what you'll be able to buy a Core Series 3 laptop for."

"Intel releases chip to compete with $599 Neo, but who the fuck knows what it will cost" is not serious journalism.

I agree with the whole bit about "power users" being... let's go with "misguided" here, but this:

...Okay? You realize you can do that on Windows, too, right? Or Linux, or BSD, or...

And this bit:

GTFO of here with that BS, what could possess you to make such a bullshit claim... oh.

You're just one of those people that thinks your particular slice is the center of the universe. My dude, there are a shit ton more engineers out there in a ton more disciplines than just "software engineer" and the user population you're talking about is a small percentage of the whole.

This was a default judgement as no one was present to defend Anna's Archive. As such, since no one objected, the remedy is the one proposed by the plaintiffs. This is how the legal system works, there is nothing unusual going on here.

The "worldwide injunction" is, however, an issue the judge should have stepped in on. The USSC ruled on the subject last year that universal injunctions are beyond the power of a district court to grant.

Based on my experiences as a teenager, I would say that "typing and mousing" did indeed affect my reproductive success... but not in a positive manner.

It's better to organize a mass arbitration campaign. One class action lawsuit is likely going to be far cheaper to defend that 50,000 arbitration claims that the company is on the hook to pay for the arbitrator (not to mention the cost of representation at these hearings) even if the case is ultimately found in their favor.

I think the Archive can reasonably get away with this one. Unlike their "we can give away all the books because copyright is no longer a thing because covid" initiative, this effort is clearly and unambiguously archival in nature. Now, if they go and implement some kind of Pandora or Spotify type service for listening to these recordings, they're going to have trouble, but if the recordings are made available in some kind of academic setting they should be fine.

If states cannot regulate commodities markets, New York is pretty fucked since it leverages the fact that various exchanges are located in the state to its advantage.

This. I am amazed at the number of posts I see that are along the lines of "Broadcom are really going to regret how they've mismanaged this" because they have flat out SAID that this is their plan, to drive away everyone but the most valuable customers and extract the maximum amount of revenue possible. This is and has always been a short term play, and anyone with a brain saw it coming even before Hock Tan flat out said it.

The only place they're still playing remotely nice is the EU because the regulators there actually have teeth and will take a bite out of their ass for the tactics they are using, which are blatantly unlawful even in the US (but the regulators even under Biden didn't seem to give a fuck about).