Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
Every trans person has lost the privilege to drive if their documents are immediately invalidated. Driving without a valid license is a crime in Kansas. Any trans person driving around with their old license would be risking arrest and prosecution until they could secure an updated license.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4d ago
As a software engineer at a company pushing AI use pretty heavily this whole thing is crazy making. If nothing else AI has some of the people that are the best at branding on its side. At least on the implementation side that I've done with copilot an "agent" and a "skill" are just markdown files. Their documentation is very clear about this.
The idea with a "skill" is there's some repeatable task you might want an AI to do and you hit on a particularly effective prompt that gets it to do the thing. You codify that prompt in a markdown file in a special directory. Then when you ask your more general session to do a thing it can look in that directory for applicable skills and if it thinks one is relevant it will inject its contents ss context.
"Agents" are similar. I thinks it's been known for a long time that if you prompt the AI a specific way ("You are a software engineer proficient in ...") they can perform better at certain tasks. Agents work on this principle. As best I can tell the use of an agent can either be selected by the user or your general AI might select one based on criteria similar to a skill. It then starts a sub-session where the contents of the agent markdown are injected as a kind of pre-prompt before your actual prompt.
So when you hear Anthropic has created a skill or agent or whatever that can do X you should mentally replace that with "wrote a markdown file." "Anthropic published a new skill that makes AI good at COBOL" == "Anthropic published a markdown file that, when injected in a session, makes an AI good at COBOL." Of course, things start sounding more insane. "Tech security stocks dropped on news Anthropic wrote a markdown file." "IBM dropped on news Anthropic wrote a markdown file."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
11d ago
The Court also opened an entirely different set of worms, as it did not adjudicate if the tariff revenue that had been collected has to be refunded, or even who a refund would go to. I predict great long !lawyer bills~ debates over how, if tariffs are taxes on Americans, which Americans are owed the tax refunds.
I feel like the only practicable way to do this is to pay refunds to the people who paid the tariffs to the government. In some sense increased costs to consumers were caused by the tariffs but good luck proving that to a court (absent some kind of contractual provision for the scenario).
While I will defer to others for the legalese analysis, I am also interested in what sorts of quid-pro-quos the internal court politics might have had for Roberts to have led the majority here. There are a host of cases on the docket this term, with politically-relevant issues ranging from mail-in ballots to redistricting. While I think the tariffs case was outside any typical 'we accept this case in exchange for accepting that case' deal over which cases get heard, I will be interested if the administration gets any 'surprise' wins.
In terms of decision authorship the general process is that:
1. If the Chief Justice is in the majority, they decide who authors the opinion of the court.
2. If the Chief Justice is not in the majority, the most senior justice in the majority decides.
I think the justices try to maintain roughly even ratios of opinion authorship so maybe Roberts authoring this one meant foregoing authoring some other one but ultimately he's the one in control over who authors an opinion he's in the majority of. I am skeptical there was any horse trading involved to get to 6 votes either. Gorsuch's concurrence has a length section where he disagrees with the dissent's analysis, which would be enough for 5.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
11d ago
New SCOTUS opinion day and today we have the long awaited Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. This is the case about Trump's sweeping tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, for those unfamiliar.
In a 6-3 decision the court rules that the IEEPA grants the President no authority to impose tariffs. I think crucially it's not just that they find these specific tariffs are not authorized by the statute, but that no tariffs are. That the phrasing of "regulate ... importation" in the statute is not inclusive of tariffs, as the administration argued.I think the breakdown of opinions is itself interesting.
Among the majority there is consensus that (1) the IEEPA does not grant the power to impose tariffs and (2) the administrations arguments otherwise fail but there is also a 3-3 split about why (1) is the case. The three conservatives in the majority (Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch) invoke the major questions doctrine. Finding that the phrase "regulate ... importation" is not clear enough for the sweeping powers the administration claims it conveys. In other statutes where Congress has delegated the power to tariff they have done so clearly and if they want to give the President almost unilateral power to tariff, they need to be equally clear about that. The three liberals in the majority (Kagan, Sotomayor, Jackson), meanwhile, thing that ordinarily principles of statutory interpretation are sufficient to arrive at this result. Jackson also writes a concurrence that goes into the legislative history to argue that Congress didn't intend to grant the power to tariff.
On the dissent side, Kavanaugh writes the main dissent (with Alito and Thomas joining) arguing that the phrase "regulate ... importation", as a matter of history and tradition, clearly includes the power to impose tariffs. Thomas also writes a separate dissent discussing the non-delegation doctrine. The majority didn't rely on the doctrine at all but Plaintiffs did raise it below and it did come up in the District Court's opinion.
Apart from the merits of the case Gorsuch wrote a concurrence where he calls out a perceived hypocrisy on both sides of the decision. On the liberal side, there are many cases where they have argued in support of sweeping executive power and expansive interpretation, which is the opposite of the side they take here. On the conservative side, those same justices have often argued for narrow or limited meanings of statutory authorization but here take an expansive view of what powers are delegated.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
13d ago
I don't think there is any set of necessary or sufficient political beliefs such that everyone who uses the term "conservative" would agree that an individual with such beliefs is properly classified as such. Especially if you intend this definition to stretch backwards into the past and possibly forwards into the future.
I think a prudent beginning to this line of inquiry is to ask: why care what "conservative" means? Did X call Y a conservative and one is unsure what X intended to convey thereby? Does one imagine one's self as possibly positioned in an intellectual tradition described as "conservative" (by whom?) but are unsure what that entails?
Once we understand what use we intend to put the term "conservative" the path to a meaning becomes clearer.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
18d ago
I'm looking at the linked court listener docket and I think your description is a little misleading. What you linked to is a motion by the United States as to why the documents shouldn't be covered by attorney client privilege but I don't actually see a ruling by the judge granting or rejecting the motion. So there has not yet been a decision in this case as to whether the documents are privileged, just an argument by the prosecution that they shouldn't be. Missed the minute order on 2/10.
That said, I think the prosecution is basically correct. Imagine rather than an AI you email a friend asking their non-attorney legal advice. Maybe you discuss statutes and case law or possible defenses. Would those emails be privileged? What if you fire up your search engine and start searching for statutes you may have violated. Relevant case law. Defenses. Is the existence or content of those searches privileged? My intuition is that they would not be. I don't see what is different about AI such that its use generates attorney-client privilege but the use of other legal research tools or avenues does not.
I suppose I think the obvious way to get AI input and also remain privileged would be to use a lawyer as a kind of middle-tier. User query -> lawyer -> AI. AI response -> lawyer -> user.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
18d ago
IME, the angle here is less about the content of the AI's responses than the user's questions. You sometimes see indictments that include, say, search terms a defendant entered around the time they committed their crimes as evidence for consciousness of guilt. They knew they were doing something that was (or could be) illegal.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
20d ago
I had a similar path. I was a 4channer (mostly /b/ and /pol/) in my late high school/early college years. I was already pretty libertarian (although, even then, more of the Matt Zwolinski/bleeding heart kind) and probably got pushed a bit further rightward. It was a gateway into a lot of MRA/MGTOW spaces. I was never too deep into redpill stuff (probably because I was in a relationship) and I never really fell down the youtube rabbit hole in this space. There were a few people whose early videos I enjoyed. Karen Straughan comes to mind (that's a name I haven't thought about in a long time!)
I suppose I find it a little funny I ended up a woke-liberal-type today. There's definitely a kind of "there but for the grace of god go I" when I see people who were clearly radicalized in similar spaces.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
23d ago
This is the Grossman-Stiglitz paradox if people want more detail.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
26d ago
In general I think people can be aware that actions can have consequences without intending those consequences. To take one example, people who gamble are surely aware that they can lose money while gambling but I think it would be hard to argue they intend to lose money.
Or, to take a more violent example, punching someone can kill them, especially if it causes them to fall over, but how often do people who punch another person intend to kill that person?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
27d ago
Love me some specific vs general intent. Did Corner intend to hit the police sergeant with the sledgehammer (general)? Almost certainly. Did he intend to do grevious bodily harm or resist or prevent a lawful apprehension or detainer (specific)? The jury couldn't agree one way or the other apparently. I'm not that familiar with UK law but the link for GBH seems to indicate a variety of lesser offenses I suspect Corner would have been convicted of.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
29d ago
I think the geographic arbitrage you mention is pretty common. My mother and step-father were, at one point, considering moving to a pretty rural area of Kentucky since they could get a lot of land quite cheap. Additionally there's a size/quality arbitrage that occurs. When you're younger, have kids and a growing family, you probably want a larger house than when you're older and retired. So even if you stay in the same geographic area there's an arbitrage to a relatively less desirable house that may be better suited to your needs.
My impression is many homeowners also perceive their house and its equity as a retirement investment. In many (most?) places around the country your home is likely to be the most valuable asset you own. Even if one doesn't intend to cash out that asset themselves, it is something very valuable to leave to one's progeny. Either in the form of cash from a sale or as a place to live.
I don't have the text of the law to hand so maybe, but the article at least doesn't describe any. It does mention that Kansas' law differs from other states with similar requirements by invalidating existing licenses.
I get the impression those other states required new/renewed licenses to have the new sex marker, but Kansas' law makes that requirement retroactive, which is what invalidates the existing licenses.
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