PrinceWith999Enemies @ PrinceWith999Enemies @lemmy.world

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606

Joined

2 yr. ago

Honestly, I’d be happy either way. My guess is that Schiff and Porter will make it into the election, and I’ll end up deciding at that point. As of now, I could see supporting any of the major democratic candidates.

This one can have legal ramifications. Generally speaking, you can explicitly state that you are not willing to follow the law regarding the duty of jury members to make judgements of fact based on the facts presented. You should be able to defend your position, and you may be asked to do so privately.

If you were to potentially taint the jury pool by going on about nullification, that might open you up to contempt charges. I’m not saying that it should, but people interested in the subject should know that it’s a risk they run if they take that approach. Talking about nullification outside the context of a court falls under free speech, but I do think people have been cited for handing out nullification flyers outside of a court building.

I have a similar problem in that I do not believe free will exists, which shifts the idea of “guilt” from a moral to a medical dimension. I could not find anyone guilty of the crime of murder, for example, because there are a whole range of cause and effect cascades that brought the particular action about that had nothing to do with free will or choice. I do think it’s ethical to remove someone who has committed murder from society for as long as that tendency persists, but that’s a very different thing than finding someone guilty of the crime of murder, which requires mens rea - a state of mind that renders an individual as culpable for their actions. I would not find that the defendant had willfully carried out the act, any more than I’d find someone who had an epileptic seizure while driving and killed a pedestrian as guilty of murder. In order to do so, I’d require the prosecution to demonstrate a conclusive neurological argument proving the existence of free will.

Whether you’re talking about landmines or cluster munitions, or any other kind of weapon that can lead to unexploded ordnance left in the area, you always have to weigh the future negative impacts against what you’re trying to prevent.

I really understand and agree with the concerns about cluster munitions. However, I feel like there’s a difference between a nation choosing to use such weapons on their own territory to blunt a brutal military invasion, and an invading force using them against the nation they’re invading. The latter would involve more moral culpability.

There are often mechanisms to prevent unexploded ordnance, such as what you’re talking about, but like everything else that gets engineered and manufactured they have failure rates. Those rates matter when you’re talking about the numbers of weapons that get deployed.

There’s actually a fair amount of discord between the Vatican and some of the nuns. There’s a strong social justice component in some subunits of the Catholic Church where they part ways with the Vatican (although I suspect less so with Francis than with Ratzinger, whose resemblance to Palpatine was not a mere coincidence).

Arizona iced tea in a state without sales tax?

This is what externalizing costs looks like. Neither the industries driving climate change nor the economies benefitting from those industries are forced to bear the costs of their decisions. Exxon profits are driven by their not having to account for the harms they cause.

Yet we’re still driving headlines about the “surge” in shoplifting.

I’m responding as a hiring manager for a big tech company.

I am not allowed, by law as well as very strict company policy, to ask any questions relating to the candidate’s health. I can’t know whether they’ve had four heart attacks, plan to get pregnant in the next six months, had a history of psychological issues, or anything like that. I think that most people would generally agree that’s a very good thing.

There are certainly roles where physical performance is key to the job, and so they’re able to take that kind of thing into account.

I guess what I’m saying is that, while your concern is of course valid, it feels different because we tend to see the president as someone with more of a job than, say, a senior software engineer. Okay, that’s fair in a very real sense. But I think that it’s different between the president and a prime minister, and that’s where it gets interesting. I think there’s an idealization of the role of president. And, bizarrely, that’s one reason Trump was so wrong but so beloved by so many.

This is a subject I know a bit about.

It is commonly felt that menthol makes cigarettes more comfortable to smoke. This was particularly important for cigarettes that used cheaper (and harsher) tobacco. However, it also allowed menthol cigarettes to be sold for less money. This lead to a popularity of menthol cigarettes in the black communities in the US in the 40s and 50s, when extreme racism drove much of US politics and economics, and thus a perpetually underemployed and underpaid underclass.

So then the civil rights war was started, and saw the emergence of a self-concept in some of the black communities of being an accepted part of American middle class culture. You remember the Jefferson’s theme song Movin’ On Up? That was the sentiment and the phrase used at the time. Kool cigarettes came out with ads in the black communities with phrases like “Move up to the cool taste of Kool” and crap like that. One company actually tried to launch a menthol brand called Uptown. Menthols are (or were) also popular in low income white communities, but there they had to compete with brands like Marlboro and Camel, and could carry a trashy image, as it were.

Anyway, it’s the tobacco companies making the argument about infantilizing the community. Black social and political leaders stand pretty uniformly behind the legislation, because of the toll the industry takes on the black communities.

And in any case, it’s legally no different than the government banning candy flavored cigarettes (which it can do). Menthol just had a carve out for a bit.

No. This kind of thing is being worked on by legitimate academic neuroscientists at places like Stanford. They abide by a code of medical and scientific ethics. That’s where this kind of thing is going to come from.

They’re not going to come from some guy who killed a $44B company by making the stupidest move possible at every decision branch.

Oh, they’re going to get so sued if they actually do this. I’m picturing the window-shatter demo of the cybertruck, but with brains.

Fun fact - talking about overthrowing the government is legal

However, if you actually try to do it - like calling out people to do so - then that talking retroactively becomes a crime of conspiracy to commit (eg treason). That was a Supreme Court decision from early in US history.

Well, minimum age requirements are constitutional because they’re literally in the constitution. I’m about as far from a constitutional literalist as you can possibly get (I think it’s a deeply flawed and outdated document), but at least as of right now it’s literally the foundation of the US legal system.

There are a number of reasons to be concerned about adding additional requirements on top of the current set of requirements. The whole Trump thing highlighted the degree to which the entire system is built around an assumption of good faith, and I’m more concerned about that than the fact that DiFi has no business being in the senate at her age. The problem, as I see it, isn’t all of the old people. It’s systemic issues that go to the heart of this particular form of government. I mean, Reagan didn’t know where he was for most of his second term, but the real damage he did to the country has nothing to do with his cognitive decline.

You don’t have to be faster than the bullet, you just have to be faster than your friends.

So don’t hang out with the track team. Hang out with the AV Club.

I completely agree with you on term limits.

But if you’re the kind of person who argues against term limits by asking the person you’re talking to to visualize lobbyists’ influence as a three dimensional metric space, you’re also the kind of person who knows that age based term limits are absolutely a violation of human rights and an example of ageism.

So even if we set aside the fact that it would take a constitutional amendment to do just because the constitution is what legally defines the roles and requirements of federal office, it’d have to be a constitutional amendment because agism violates the 14th.

I’m not against the idea in principle, of course. Democracy itself often feels like one of those late night “There’s gotta be a better way“ commercials. The problem is that their central assumption derived from the enlightenment that man was a rational actor who could both be trusted to work in his own interest and (at least amongst the noble and wealthy) self-sacrifice for the good of all.

Absolutely amazing! You have given me a playlist for this Christmas that’s going to blow everyone away.

This is the car that a sixth grader draws in his notebook between a Cool S and a barbarian sword.

I absolutely agree, and thank you for explaining it better than I did.

There’s several factors involved. One is weather. Another is population density. Others, of course include vaccination rates and efficacy, public use of PPE, and how contagious the particular viral strains circulating in that area at that time actually are.

Basically, every viral transmission is a function of physics and biology. If you take the covid virus, for example, you have a dose dependent relationship. I like to think of it as the 3 D’s: Dosage = Droplets + Duration. We’d say that the probability that a given person would get infected on the basis of a given interaction with an infected person would be a function of virus containing droplet density (ie how many tiny, virus containing spit particles are floating around you, which would decrease as a cubic function of (another D) Distance from that person. Any given virus like that would have a dosage threshold - a number of viruses necessary to cause an infection), which will itself depend on the individual strain and the target’s immunity level vs that variant. The duration part is just to make sure we write it as a function of time - so the cumulative number of viruses you inhale, for instance.

So conditions that tend to increase duration and decrease distance would tend to push infection rates up, but that’s in turn going to be bounded by things like PPE, which work by reducing droplets. And the number of droplets necessary to cause an infection will increase based on the target’s immunity profile.

All of which is to say it’s going to shift around, and the areas with higher (recent) vaccination rates and higher PPE usage will have lower values than they otherwise would have, but because things like population density vary so much between states, it’s going to throw off your analysis if you don’t account for that.

I’m only being pedantic for the sake of fun, but load any image (or stream data) into a hex editor and bam! you have text.

Also, the musical Avenue Q has an entire song about what the internet is for, and I believe it’s inclusive of both pics and streaming video.