Obvious possibilities:

• he was suspected of espionage and arrested (we don’t know whether he did anything), for some reason it hasn’t been disclosed (it should be disclosed)
• he disappeared on his own, officials are trying to understand what he knew or accomplished

The university de-listing him seems particularly interesting. Clearly they were told something that the public wasn’t told.

It wouldn’t help. The thing that gives you lift is the mass of displaced air. Difference from the (lack of) mass of the lifting gas is minimal.

A note about dating apps: most of them aren’t better than this. Their interest is keeping the user clicking, paying for services and coming back. If you find the right person for yourself, you will do none of that. So they:

• build awful card stack systems with no search function
• build superficial profile systems with no metadata about personality, habits or world views

…and of course, with such systems, people fail to find suitable partners. They come back and pay, but society suffers, because someone needs to make money.

I would vote for a politician who would promise that the ministry of health and social security will order a publicly funded dating site that’s built by scientists, with data privacy managed by the leading university in the country.

It would be great if the number was 30%, but 20% is enough to wedge a company out of its position on the market. If they persist, this will work.

I’m not from the US, but I straight out recommend quickly educating oneself about military stuff at this point - about fiber guided drones (here in Eastern Europe we like them) and remote weapons stations (we like those too). Because the US is heading somewhere at a rapid pace. Let’s hope it won’t get there (the simplest and most civil obstacle would be lots of court cases and Trumpists losing midterm elections), but if it does, then strongly worded letters will not suffice.

Trump’s administration:

“Agency,” unless otherwise indicated, means any authority of the United States that is an “agency” under 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), and shall also include the Federal Election Commission.

Vance, in his old interviews:

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Also Vance:

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Googling “how to remove a dictator?” when you already have one is doing it too late. On the day the self-admitted wannabe Caesar crosses his Rubicon, it better be so that some people already know what to aim at him.

Tesla dealerships… nah. I would not advise spending energy on them. But people, being only people, get emotional and do that kind of things.

As an exception to most regulations that we hear about from China, this approach actually seems well considered - something that might benefit people and work.

Similar regulations should be considered by other countries. Labeling generated content at the source, hopefully without the metadata being too extensive (this is where China might go off the handle) would help avoid at least two things:

• casual deception
• training AI with material generated by another AI, leading to degradation of ability to generate realistic content

It is interesting that Reddit took it upon themselves to remove it. They are government employees, those aren’t their private addresses, but end with “.gov”. This seems to be public data.

In my experience, the API has iteratively made it ever harder for applications to automatically perform previously easy jobs, and jobs which are trivial under ordinary Linux (e.g. become an access point, set the SSID, set the IP address, set the PSK, start a VPN connection, go into monitor / inject mode, access an USB device, write files to a directory of your choice, install an APK). Now there’s a literal thicket of API calls and declarations to make, before you can do some of these things (and some are forever gone).

The obvious reason is that Google tries to protect a billion inexperienced people from scammers and malware.

But it kills the ability to do non-standard things, and the concept of your device being your own.

And a big problem is that so many apps rely on advertising for its income stream. Spying a little has been legitimized and turned into a business under Android. To maintain control, the operating system then has to be restrictive of apps. Which pisses off developers who have a trusting relationship with their customer and want their apps to have freedom to operate.

The countdown to Android’s slow and painful death is already ticking for a while.

It has become over-engineered and no longer appealing from a developer’s viewpoint.

I still write code for Android because my customers need it - will be needing for a while - but I’ve stopped writng code for Apple’s i-things and I research alternatives for Android. Rolling my own environment with FOSS components on top of Raspbian looks feasible already. On robots and automation, I already use it.

This is the interesting bit - he might try that. As far as I know, something changed in 1969 about the structure of the federal marshals, and the courts no longer hire their own marshals. A comment from an American well versed in law would help clear things up.

The ordinary response:

• find the defendant in contempt
• send US marshals to carry out the court order
• alternatively, send them to jail the person who held the court in contempt

you have to get a new one issued

This is the part that’s mistaken: you don’t need a passport if you don’t travel to foreign lands. As far as I know, Americans usually prove their identity using a driver’s license, rarely using a passport.

Scanning the article, the practical threat (besides crazy ideological stunts) seems to be stealth disenfranchisement of this type:

House Republicans passed a bill (which stalled in the Senate) this session to require citizens to have a passport or birth certificate matching their name to vote. This would be a back-door ban on voting for any woman who took her husband’s last name and doesn’t have a passport, an estimated 69 million women. It would also disproportionately affect Republican women, who are more likely to be married, more likely to have changed their name and less likely to have a passport.

One absolutely doesn’t prepare such a large operation at such a short notice.

For an intelligence analyst, signs of an invasion are typically detectable 3 months ahead. If one performs a maritime invasion at a notice of weeks, failure is likely. (For reference, the D-Day needed years of planning and months of moving resources to work.)

Also, I trust that Taiwan has infiltrated China just as deeply as China has infiltrated Taiwan - they likely cannot keep massive secrets from each other.

Increasingly surreal stuff just seems to happen.

But I note that some high-profile Republicans have a spine - despite Elon Musk’s promise to beat anyone who diobeys Trump with his wallet (in primaries).

Subsequently, Trump was requested to be more truthful by: Mike Pence, Don Bacon, Lindsey Graham, Mike Rounds, John Kennedy, Thom Tillis, John Thune - and probably others who I haven’t even heard of, who didn’t make the news.

Tox is nice. My favourite flavour is qTox.

The typical pattern over here: if someone uses Signal, you guess they’re some military type (wants things to be secure, doesn’t care much about anonymity, wants things to work one way and simply).

If someone uses Tox, you guess they’re some hacker / anarchist type (wants things to be secure, but also anonymizable, wants things to be flexible, even if it can backfire).

To my understanding, you cannot pardon someone whom a court fines or detains to force their compliance with their ruling in another case.

(It would be better if a lawyer answered that.)

If everyone is fine, it’s fine to mind one’s own business only.

But if my neigbour’s house is burning and I he has a big bottle of propane waiting to go thermobaric, then his problem is my problem.

If my neigbour’s neighbour is aiming a multiple rocket launcher at my neighbour, or has other ideas for wiping out the block, then a shared problem with high priority does kind of exist.

A president has immunity, but people implementing everyday life tend to follow court orders if they contradict presidential decrees.

If they consult a lawyer, nearly every lawyer will advise to follow court orders. If they don’t, a court can order other authorities to enforce its decision with force, fines or jail time. Lay people don’t have diplomatic immunity.

Now if cops won’t enforce court orders, then yes… then I hope you’re all stocked up on batteries, brushless motors and flight controller stacks. But I hope that won’t happen.

An common explanation for swinging voters is superficial contact with politics. People are too busy with other things in their life to put two and two together. As a result, they make superficial decisions based on current feelings.

I would think that schools also frequently fail, by not providing any tools for political analysis.