ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The natural conclusion of this is that Trump was a victim of the Russian government's actions. Just like how when Pelosi's driver turned out to be a Chinese spy, she was a victim of the Chinese government's actions.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
in the broad class of "very questionable concerning whether it could be considered a campaign expense"
Nevermind that she used her husband's business, not her own, either. This case really doesn't hit the mark.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
trump reimbursing his lawyer
I bolded it and everything. That part is absolutely novel. Prosecution for using your own money to pay for this sort of thing is absolutely novel. In fact, can you find an example of criminal culpability for any politician using his own money to pay for any sort of thing (not restricted to the case of hush money) that is in the broad class of "very questionable concerning whether it could be considered a campaign expense"?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
pretty immaterial
Negative. Your confusion comes from your explicit refusal to engage with the history of campaign finance laws, and the court cases that shape it. Most obvious in this setting is Citizens United, which narrowed the scope of the reasons which can ground regulation of these types of expenditures, to the extent that they can be considered expenditures (leaving aside this question for the moment and whether the FEC's current interpretation of the statute was actually informed by the failure to secure a conviction of Edwards), to only quid pro quo situations. Given this precedent, it is absolutely material whether there is a quid pro quo situation, and thus, a huge material difference between a candidate using his own money versus a candidate using someone else's money. It does not make sense to say that Donald Trump was entering in a quid pro quo relationship with Donald Trump by using his own money, whereas it is entirely plausible that the Edwards situation could be argued to constitute a quid pro quo.
We can reserve the question of whether it could count as a campaign expenditure in various hypos, as we discussed elsewhere. Suffice to say, the FEC of today disagrees with you, perhaps as I mentioned, in response to the Edwards debacle. The FEC might have agreed with you in the past, back then, but lots of developments have happened in the law since then, and at this point, they disagree with you.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The idea that trump reimbursing his lawyer for paying stormy Daniels to sign an NDA constitutes a misreported campaign expense is, however, totally a novel legal theory.
No it's not. The John Edwards case ran on the exact same theory.
I bolded the operative part that is completely different. Edwards did not pay for the expense out of his own pocket. Which is why when you later say:
Edwards' mistress was paid off in the same way that Daniels was paid off - Edwards got someone else to give her money.
...you're completely, 180 degrees, backwards. Edwards used somebody else's money. Trump used Trump's money, via an intermediary.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Would you like to put in some reasoning for why this magic is actually reality? Or just boo anything you disagree with? (I stand by that it's positing magic to make ridiculous claims that violate the basic laws of supply and demand in economics.)
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I was thinking recently that this type of reasoning leads to some pretty hilarious conclusions. The splashy one is that every single pro-legalization advocate should be bowing down to the Sackler family and protesting against the cruel use of law against them, which, after all, only hurts drug users. Rather than being in any way related to increased drug usage (that's magically impossible), all they were doing was producing a perfectly safe pharmaceutical product which, as a matter of pure logic, necessarily saves lives. Will you join in erecting a statue in their honor? Maybe we can place it next to St. George Floyd's statue.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
lifelong appointments
Right, so it's not even, "I'm gonna go in for a few years, make the maximum I can out of my time there, even if I'm hated, because at least after I'm done and gone, they might still remember hating me, but they won't care to try to make my life miserable anymore." With life tenure, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.
with security details
I don't know what the current state is of SCOTUS security details. I recall reading sometime in the not too distant past that most of the time, they went about their lives without any security. That it was more of a "special circumstances" or specific threat driven thing. I saw some articles around the time of Dobbs which said that they had round-the-clock security, but this was specifically a departure from the normal state of affairs. The delta between the security team protecting the president and the security team protecting John Roberts is gigantic. He's not being whisked around in motorcades, accompanied by tens of agents, following a forward team who already scoped out the destination. My sense is that if he goes out to a restaurant or just wants to take a walk around town or whatever, then if there is any security (which honestly, there might not be in the absence of a specific credible threat or a significant event like a polarizing opinion dropping or a hack journalist releasing a secretly-recorded trap conversation), it's more in the ballpark of, "Dude's got like one bodyguard to walk around with him and keep an eye on stuff."
both Thomas and Alito are tradcaths whose wives are unlikely to care very much what non-co-religionists think about them.
I mean, I'm not sure why this really matters? They can still have to fear all manner of general harassment and threat. In any event, from the recent brouhaha, it appears that at least Alito's wife very much cared about what their random neighbor thought.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The flippant answer is stochastic terrorism. They want the conservative justices to know that they can ratchet up faux outrage on literally anything imaginable and to fear that the next Nicholas Roske won't be so timid. They don't actually need something that serious to happen; it's the fear that matters. It's not even just the fear of physical death, it's that every time you get up in the morning, there are protesters outside your house; no matter where you move to, your neighbor will be very unneighborly; every time you go out somewhere, you have to be wary of anyone nearby carrying either concealed weapons... or milkshakes; every time you talk to literally anyone, you have to think, "Imagine this is being recorded; how could that recording be twisted on Twitter to make all of the above even worse?"
Your choices are that life... or maybe have a miraculous come to Sagan moment and start making lefty rulings. Then you'll get to, like, hang out with Beyonce and stuff.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
For progressives here the answer is that their moral precepts that they should not be enforcing solutions on black communities (that they don't think black communities have asked for) means that is not an acceptable approach to black on black violence.
And part of the problem with that is that black communities are deeply divided themselves, on this. There is wariness about how their communities have been treated in the past, degraded trust levels, and much much more.
Where in this chain of reasoning do you think the progressives who are championing particular solutions, at a national level, get off this train? Do they think that it's okay for them to enforce their national-scale idea on black communities? Do they just not realize that black communities are deeply divided? (Do they just not care?)
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
When dealing with wolves (or when wolves deal with you), there is no 'right' in the moral sense; that only applies when you are dealing with moral actors interacting with each other.
I sense some ambiguity here as to what entails a "moral actor". Likely, it's not just "an actor that always chooses morally right acts", for that would be a bit weird. Most theories I've encountered have some lower bar for an actor to qualify as a "moral actor", one that allows them to choose morally wrong acts, yet be considered blameworthy for such a choice and possibly subject to morally acceptable punishment. Perhaps this punishment would involve large amounts of armed men and possibly helicopters, but the actors, themselves, are usually still considered to be "moral actors".
Of course, this is all very much complicated if you take what is either a strong minority opinion or possibly a majority opinion in this place, exemplified by @self_made_human and @SSCReader, that this whole morality thing is totally relative, anyway. Who's to say whether the wolves are moral actors? Maybe they're just actors with their own morality, which is I guess just as good as anyone else's. I don't know what else to say here, other than I think that this entire subthread kind of fails to get off the ground back a few steps if this type of thing is adopted.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
the wolf is absolutely right
Might may not make right
I think there are multiple meanings of "right" in here, and that we have to be pretty careful with the concepts we're using for this topic.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
In the Marxist view, after all, ownership of private property was theoretically illegitimate in the first place -- and so the police's role in preventing Bolsheviks and their constituents from stealing money and other valuables that they wanted to steal (or "expropriate", as they put it) was, in their view, a form of oppression.
Sometimes, I forget how core and radical this is. Then, I see things like this guy's most recent comic. It really kind of baffles me to imagine how they think that's actually supposed to work. What do they really think their life would be like if civilization reverted to essentially the state of nature and nobody was around to care every time a slightly larger hairless ape showed up and decided to take something from them by violence. I know the old joke about pro-capitalist people being 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires', but what are they actually envisioning? Are they 'temporarily embarrassed gang leaders/warlords'?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
TIL that while we don't have access to the reporting numbers, we can sort all comments ever by controversial, with the most controversial comment of all time being about communication styles.
I was not surprised in confirming that it's easy to sort all posts by controversial... or really in seeing that the most controversial post of all time was about philosophy of science.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I don't think the intelligence part is the bottleneck. It's power for mobility.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Sure, but that doesn't really speak much to how difficult the human engineering problem is... or which aspect of the human engineering problem is the most difficult bottleneck.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I'm pretty sure they're not looking at fission reactors that are small enough to fit on a mosquito-sized drone.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Try to learn to enjoy the feeling of emptiness in your stomach.
Man, my wife 'taught' me that this is not necessary. She jams soooooo many vegetables into my stomach; I feel soooooo full on basically negligible calories.
I'm more interested in the questions that aren't worded in a tricky way that most humans would screw up. The ones where they corrupt a riddle to make it stupidly easy. For example, I saw one recently where they took the classic riddle, "Two mothers and two daughters order three drinks and each get one; how is this possible" riddle (where you're supposed to realize that if you have a chain of grandmother/mother/daughter, the one in the middle is both a mother and a daughter), and turned it into, "There are four women (sometimes with various emphases to really drive home that they are four distinct people), two are mothers and two daughters.... order four drinks...." At least some of the LLMs (I haven't followed differential outcomes from different LLMs) can't reason their way into saying, "This is a bullshit, trivial question." They parrot a 'reasoning' step that is, "One is both a mother and a daughter!" and somehow still bring it back to saying, "This is how two mothers and two daughters can have four drinks."
This is related to my interest in having an LLM with a "bullshit detector". The ability to actually think conceptually and tell me that some bullshit is afoot; that there's something conceptually weird about what it's seeing; that if we think properly about a thing, then it turns out to be kind of trivial. This is personally a capability that, without which, makes one of my major possible use cases worthless, but with it, would become incredible. That is, I have to read and digest a large number of academic papers. Frankly, due to all the screwed up academic incentives, I don't know if I'd say most, but at the very least many of them are essentially bullshit. Once I figure out what they're actually doing, what the core idea is, given my contextual knowledge of the rest of the field, I can conclude, "This is completely trivial if you already know about these other works," or sometimes even, "This is just wrong if you know about these problems." I can have that conversation with other humans who are reading the papers, too. "Do you think they're doing anything other than X?" "Nah; I think that's all it is." I need LLMs to be able to do this, but they can't even figure out that four women getting four drinks is a trivial problem, likely due to the fact that they're fitting a data set rather than doing conceptual reasoning. Similarly, we're not going to have a dataset that includes, "Here are the conceptual reasons why these various academic papers are trivial or bullshit." We're just going to have a dataset that includes all these papers parading how wonderful and novel and interesting these new developments are. (EDIT: Note that @confuciuscorndog says that if they anticipated corrupted riddles, then they could just create a dataset with a bunch of them and train on it. Maybe so, but again, I just can't see where we're going to get a dataset that can appropriately represent calling out bullshit in a bunch of papers.)
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
"millions or billions of mosquito-sized drones"
The primary problem that needs to be solved here is the power problem, not an intelligence problem. Of course, perhaps there will be an AlphaBattery program along the lines of AlphaFold that focuses on trying to come up with new battery designs, but my kinda-looking-in-from-the-outside view is that the battery folks don't really have a shortage of ideas for new designs; it's the empirical testing work (and things like not having the device explode) that is really the long pole in the tent.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I don't have any research cites on hand.... but then again, who needs research when you have Yes, Minister?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Without having thought about it super long, like letting myself gradually pick up examples over weeks/months, I can only think of a couple areas that have been able to resist a collapsing of disparate treatment and disparate impact. Credit scores and, currently hanging by a 6-3 thread, gerrymandering.
For gerrymandering, sigh. Honestly, it might just be that the Court is tired of these cases. They get stuck dealing with them over and over again, unlike most of the areas where the disparate treatment/impact distinction is collapsed.
For credit scoring, I think it's that there is soooo much money on the line from politically-powerful interests, plus a little historical "we've been using this for so long" factor. Would credit scoring have to fall under a strict interpretation of how these concepts work according to a radical (or even the otherwise dominant party line)? I think absolutely. Is the reason why it's been able to persist that you can get a human on the stand and ask about intent, animus, whatever? Not at all. Credit scores are an algorithm. An impersonal, just simple math, algorithm, with data in that may be subject to all the complaints people want to have about, "But if your data in is biased by a white supremacist patriarchy, then of course your algorithm is going to have racist and sexist disparate impact." Note that this Colorado law calls out that they're interested in:
THE DATA GOVERNANCE MEASURES USED TO COVER THE TRAINING DATASETS AND THE MEASURES USED TO EXAMINE THE SUITABILITY OF DATA SOURCES, POSSIBLE BIASES, AND APPROPRIATE MITIGATION
No, the reason credit scores are still allowed is because too many connected people would stand to lose too much money if we let the collapse of disparate treatment/impact culminate entirely in the way that it seems to be going in nearly every other domain.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Was this meant to be a reply to this comment instead?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Ok, so not amending. Got it.
And ..sigh. Let me try again. If Trump uses personal funds to buy a "Blue Lives Matter" sign, do you have any citation from any statute, FEC interpretation, or DOJ manual, that "these types of expenditures" (I.e., Blue Lives Matter signs) actually meet the definition of "expenditure", as limited by the Supreme Court, and that they then trigger a reporting requirement (where it is a criminal offense to fail to report)? We'll get to NDAs in a bit.
Could he have used a credit card?
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