I replied to your post of the satellite photo in another thread. See my reply here. In short, the strange spill and material has been present in the yard of that building for at least a month. If it’s permanent, it could indicate a washing facility or slaughterhouse. Jumping to conclusions is not a good way to proceed when you don’t check the context of a satellite photo.

Regarding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, see this post on Twitter, a US senator was able to meet him:

https://x.com/ChrisVanHollen/status/1913034619710034094

New court order: this power belongs to the legislative branch, order invalid. :)

Trump can issue an excecutive order and have them executed.

An “insane” ex-employee of a three letter agency can fire a wire-guided missile at his helicopter too, or someone may leave a drop of nerve agent on his door knob. I mean to say: possibilities for violence are endless. They’re an entirely different dish than legal possibilities, which are limited. With violence, imagination is the limit.

The supreme court however - I think they’re not bound by their previous rulings. If the court sees a justification, they can rule differently next time.

The week after that: the same or another person is again found in contempt, because the ruling of the court has’t been enforced.

Some legal interpretations say that contempt of court is not a pardonable offense. I don’t know if those are prevailing in the US.

State employees aren’t specifically beholden to the agency who hires and fires them.

The state has an executive, legislative and judicial branch.

If they follow an executive order but contravene a law, or contravene a court order that they know about (since only the courts make final interpretations of law) - my understanding is that they have no immunity.

Not only that, but the table itself tells a lie.

• first column heading: “tariffs charged to the USA”
• first column content: trade deficit expressed as percentage

They needed numbers to look like other countries are mistreating the US. They made up some numbers. He went on the big screen to tell yet another lie.

For example, the average tariff on US goods in Europe until now is around 4% (probably less). He’s representing it as 39%.

Wow, interesting. :)

Not unexpectedly, the LLM failed to explain its own thought process correctly.

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.