Rov_Scam
8d ago
The skyrocketing price may infuriate China, but the Chinese won't do anything about it. More importantly, it will cause the price to skyrocket in the US, which give the Iranians leverage. Not much leverage, but the narrative could become that Trump made an unnecessary strike on Iran that he acted like was a one-off but that caused gas prices to soar and necessitated US naval intervention, escalating the war.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
The unemployment rate for blacks with a bachelor's degree is a few points higher than the overall rate for similarly situated people. This cohort also only makes about 80% of the income. These numbers hold at every education level. So yes.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
Why don't you link to an article where the New York Times editorial board defends violent rioting. Just one.
Rov_Scam
9d ago
I guess that explains why straight white males have such low incomes and high unemployment compared to minority populations.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
You're assuming that if there was only one victim, or one act, he would have been convicted of the same crime. It's possible that, had that been the case, he would have plead to a lesser offense.
Rov_Scam
10d ago
The sentence imposed was pursuant to a plea deal, so one can't make any judgments about whether it's the same as if there were only two rapes.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Iran isn't just going to sit there and take being bombed. They may not have air defenses, but they have missiles, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're going to use those missiles to take out Saudi oil infrastructure. Or they might just block off the Straits of Hormuz, which we could clear, but it would require more than just bombing stationary targets. Or they could decide to protect their own oil assets, which are close to the border, by invading Iraq, starting another war that Iran might actually win, taking more oil offline. The bottom line is that you'd better be prepared for a sharp spike in gas prices, and one that won't subside until the war ends. If, as you say, you're going to go after every possible military installation in a country that covers over 600,000 square miles and has 90 million people, you'd better be prepared to pony up at the pump for a long time.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
If you read Tribe's comments in context it's clear that he's referring to her having a certain arrogance where she thinks she'll be able to persuade conservatives where she's more likely to put them off. It was more a comment about her personality than her intelligence, and why Kagan would be better in the role of Kennedy-influencer. In any event, Tribe later said that he was proven wrong. As for Jackson, she didn't ask that question, she gave a non-answer to a gotcha posed by Marsha Blackburn, who appeared less interested in determining Jackson's qualifications or judicial philosophy than in going on a rant about Lia Thomas and talking about how progressive education led to mind rot. Seriously, how was she supposed to answer? What could she have possibly said that would have satisfied Ms. Blackburn and earned her vote? From Lindsey Graham's questions about her faith to the softballs Democrats were lobbing, the whole thing was a dog and pony show, everyone knew this going in, and she was given specific preparation to not answer any questions if she could help it. Yeah, she gave an idiotic answer, but it was an idiotic question.
Anyway, the reason for my comment wasn't to specifically say that you were engaging in boo-outgroup, just that it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity. I've been here since 2017 and I have yet to be modded once. I rarely report comments, though I also get pissed off when troublemakers decide to argue with the mods. Whenever I see someone people tying themselves in knots trying to explain and/or justify Trump's latest Outrage of the Week, I'm tempted to respond by simply saying that Trump is obviously too stupid to engage in anything approaching coherence and that his supporters, almost without exception, are too stupid to notice that he's incoherent, and that if you want to bemoan the decline of conservatives in academia then maybe it's time to consider that it isn't so much persecution as it is proof that conservative ideas are simply unappealing to anyone with half a brain.
Of course, I don't do this, and if I did I'd probably be reported on a bunch, and I'd probably be given some leeway at first because of my history here, but eventually patience would run thin and I'd have to start eating bans. And whoever reported me and the mods would be correct to smack me for it, because, despite the fact that I can point to all kinds of evidence supporting the idea that Trump and Trump supporters are generally all morons, that isn't really productive and isn't the kind of discourse I expect here. So when I see it coming from a mod it's disappointing, and when I see it trying to be justified on the grounds that Larry Tribe once said this and "Did you hear what she said to the Senate Judiciary Committee?" it makes me wonder if I should just say "Fuck It" and see what I can get away with. Unless, of course, you're telling me that I'm perfectly within the rules to do that, in which case I won't do it all the time, but you can count on me referring to Alito and Thomas as the "low IW wing" in the future.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
It's a 2-step analysis. First, you have to determine whether or not the law itself makes a distinction based on sex. This is a legal question, not a biological one. If you determine that it does, only then do you get to consider biology, since step two then asks if the distinction is "substantially related to an important government interest". The Tennessee law doesn't even pretend that this isn't a sex-based distinction. Hell, the law finds it necessary to define "sex" to eliminate all ambiguity. Yet the majority puzzlingly finds that it doesn't to avoid having to get to step 2.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
You obviously have no personal experience with the average white male county judge.
Rov_Scam
11d ago
Did you read the dissent? Heightened scrutiny applies when the state makes legal distinctions based on sex. Any reasonable reading of the Tennessee law does this. If a 13-year-old girl starts developing unwanted facial hair, a doctor can prescribe certain medications that he would be prohibited from prescribing if a 13-year-old boy had the same complaint. You can argue semantics and say that this technically wouldn't be a prescription to treat gender dysphoria, but I don't think the legislature's goal was to make sure doctors coded such prescriptions differently. You don't have to agree with this interpretation, but saying that it's so completely devoid of reasoning so as to question the intelligence of the person who expressed it doesn't make sense.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
There are no legal tricks to protect your assets, unless you put everything in a trust that you have absolutely no control over several years ahead of the conduct that led to the lawsuit. And there better not be any evidence that you actually control the money. Aside from that, there is no reason to default on a lawsuit. Even in credit card collection cases where you'd think there would be zero case I tell people to file the necessary paperwork and show up for the court date to avoid a default. Why? Because there's a 50/50 chance the creditor's attorney doesn't show up. When I was doing bankruptcy a few years ago I'd get calls from people who were getting sued but had no other debts, and I'd represent them for fun. One credit card company was using a small law firm in Harrisburg to essentially collect default judgments. I knew they weren't going to pay for someone to come to Pittsburgh for a $4,000 debt. Even if the firm is local, the attorney is often unprepared. I've gotten out of a few cases because the Plaintiff couldn't produce the original signed credit agreement. This can be a serious problem when the plaintiff is a collection agency that doesn't actually have the original agreement and would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it. And then there's the fact that a bank representative needs to appear as a witness, again a serious problem if the plaintiff is a collection agency who can't testify to any relevant facts about the agreement or about the bank's recordkeeping procedures. And then there was the case where the lady from the credit union had everything and showed up without a lawyer, not realizing that companies can't appear pro se. The point is that even in hopeless cases, there are defenses that can be made and can be successful.
In this case, he filed an answer shortly after the default judgment was entered, and courts will usually give you a little leeway.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
It's worth noting that Kagan, though she agreed on heightened scrutiny, declined to join the Court's low-IQ wing to assert that also the law failed under heightened scrutiny. Once again she shows herself to be, by a wide margin, the most competent jurist on the Court's left wing.
Is this really necessary? Presumably the reason they're low-IQ is because you disagree with their reasoning, and not because you have access to information that hasn't been made public. As much as I'd like to, there's a reason I don't refer to Trump as the moron-in-chief or whatever.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
Forbidding one thing necessarily means requiring something else. One can just say that parents should have the ability to forbid their children from having their own children.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
That's a pretty misleading description of what's going on. Most of the outrage seems focused on the attempt to prosecute the doctor, which requires that New York extradite her to Louisiana. The rest of it centers around the hypocrisy that Louisiana had a pre-Dobbs parental consent law, which would suggest that parents have the authority to determine whether their children carry a child to term. If a parent can veto the decision to abort, they would presumable also be able to veto the decision to have the baby. I haven't seen any commentary suggesting that the mother was right to surrepetitiously abort the fetus.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
This is the kind of thing that AI should theoretically be good at, since members of congress and their dates of birth aren't too hard to find. Actual AI, however, seems to have a hard time with this. Gemini is evidently only capable of repeating what was already published as an article, so if there isn't some website that specifically says what the average was in, say, 1995, then it can't figure it out. Deepseek is slightly better in that it actually gives the answer, though it gives contradictory results within the same prompt. Based on the crappy results I did get, it seems like the Democratic average age has consistently been a couple years higher than the Republican average age for some time.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
Amusingly, black people saved NYC by electing Adams who arrested the Floyd crime wave by allowing the NYPD to do their jobs.
I wouldn't give Adams too much credit here. Pittsburgh crime statistics are as follows:
2018: 58 homicides, 103 non-fatal shootings 2019: 38 homicides, 113 non-fatal shootings 2020: 50 homicides, 147 non-fatal shootings 2021: 56 homicides, 170 non-fatal shootings 2022: 71 homicides, 137 non-fatal shootings 2023: 52 homicides, 118 non-fatal shootings 2024: 42 homicides, 83 non-fatal shootings
So far in 2025, as of May 31 there were 11 homicides and 33 non-fatal shootings. I don't want to project that out since crime usually goes up during the summer, but so far it looks like the downward trend is continuing. Of note is that Ed Gainey became mayor in 2022, and was elected largely as a response to perceived heavy-handed police tactics by Bill Peduto during the 2020 protests. He was supported by all the lefties, though his record from his time in the state house suggests he's more of a mainstream Democrat.
In the meantime, the police department has been in complete disarray. One of Gainey's first moves in office was to replace the retiring police chief with a veteran of the Pittsburgh force who had since moved to Florida, chasing a promotion. This lasted exactly 18 months, at which point the chief retired because he wanted to ref NCAA basketball. Compounding the problem was that it came to light that he had made a deal with Gainey upon being hired that he'd be allowed to ref basketball 18 months on the job. As critics pointed out, it would be ridiculous for a full-time police chief to be on the road 100 days a year, and the mayor should have known that. Worse, the 18 months was calculated because that was the point at which he could retire with a chief's pension. Basically, Gainey got played. A new chief from out of town was soon named, but he withdrew his name from consideration shortly thereafter, presumably because he found out how dysfunctional the administration was. There's zero chance a permanent chief will be named before the new administration takes over next year.
Even before the chief left, things weren't exactly going swimmingly. Officer shortages have led to dramatic reductions in service. Police stopped responding to alarms, and reduced their response time to "within 24 hours" for anything that wasn't an active emergency. Precincts are no longer manned overnight. Foot patrols have been increased Downtown and on the South Side, but this is due more to political pressure than any initiative on Gainey's part (crime aside, Gainey's entire modus operandi was to not do anything until a bad news story or complaints from the politically connected forced his hand). His response to criticism has been to publicly call out local journalists he doesn't like for only focusing on the bad things, citing overall crime reductions, and ham-fisted cheerleading. "Who here doesn't think our police are doing a good job? Don't we have a beautiful city! Why don't you guys ever report on how much Downtown has come back since the pandemic?" In other words, stuff that takes about three minutes and zero effort, all of it in the same MLK tone of voice that he uses ad nauseam, wherein he acts like the new road paving schedule is a monumental achievement in civic governance.
I'm not going to blame Gainey for all of the police department's woes, since most of them are downstream of a nationwide officer shortage over which he has no control. But I'm also not going to give him credit for reducing the crime rate, which seem to have also gone down as part of a nationwide trend over which he has no control. To my knowledge, no one has ever done an analysis on whether "tough on crime" mayors have any statistical advantage over "defund the police" mayors when it comes to lowering the crime rate, and it seems like the biggest argument against the defund mayors is that the crime rate didn't go down as much as in other places. So I'm not giving Adams any credit here, and I wouldn't expect a sharp rise in the crime rate if some lefty gets elected.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
That's pretty much how I feel about all of Adobe's so-called Neural Filters. The only one that really adds anything is the one that colorizes black and white photos, but even that's kind of pointless, because other than as a cool gimmick there's really no need to colorize old photos. People still shoot black and white! This is why some of the AI seriously fails to impress me; it has no imagination. For instance, if I see a low-resolution image of a person's face, I can't make out a lot of details, but I have enough experience with faces to imagine what those details might look like. It might not be accurate to life, but at least I can do it. All AI "upscaling" does is smooth out defects. It doesn't have the imagination to add plausible detail. I'm not going to be able to zoom in enough to get a realistic image that shows the texture of hair or skin, just smoothed-out AI slop that isn't much better, if any than simply resizing the image. It also doesn't do dust and scratch removal any better than the existing tools, which are mostly useless and nowhere near manual removal.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Where are the 30-something conservatives? If you look at the US House members in their 30s, there are 21 Democrats and 14 Republicans. There are only two people under 40 in the Senate, one Democrat and one Republican. Considering that of the 435 members of the House, 400 of them are 40 or older, I think the correct answer is that there just aren't that many people in their 30s involved in politics.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
Theologically serious Catholics, nowadays, have to vote Republican because, of the two parties, it is the only one that isn't openly hostile to all of the bedrock elements of the faith.
Only if you selectively define "bedrock elements" to include only what's politically convenient. Is JD Vance actually Catholic? He repeated rumors about Haitian immigrants he knew to be untrue for the specific purpose of demonizing them for political gain. He has, to my knowledge, never once apologized for this or walked back his statements, instead doubling down on them and insisting on calling them "illegals" not because they arrived here illegally, but because he disagreed with the political mechanism by which they were allowed to come. Again, he didn't do this because he was mistaken but because either he personally doesn't like them due to his own racism or because he cynically believes that other people are racist enough that he can exploit them for his own political ends. While the church's position on immigration doesn't contain any bright lines, you'd have to squint really hard to claim that productive, law-abiding people are causing such a burden to the United States that we are justified in deporting them to a country steeped in as much violence, poverty, and political instability as Haiti.
Or if you'd prefer bright lines, let's just point to capital punishment, an issue on which the church has taken an unequivocal stance for 50 years. This isn't merely something where Republicans want to maintain the status quo; they actually advocate expanding the death penalty. At least when Democrats want to expand abortion access it isn't based on the idea that more abortions is a good thing.
I say this as a Catholic who went to a small, Catholic, liberal arts college largely populated by serious Catholics. Some of my friends were liberals, some conservatives, and I don't believe for a second that abortion or anything else is the defining thing that's keeping them from voting Democrat. I'm still in contact with a lot of these people, and the ones that didn't switch to Democrat in the wake of Trump are all aboard the Trump Train, defending every policy of his without question. They spent college defending the Iraq War as totally justified, and I can't tell you how many times I heard the traditional conservative caricature about how poor people just didn't work hard enough and taxes should be lower to avoid penalizing the most talented people in society. I don't think that these people "aren't true Catholics", I just wish conservative Catholics would stop blowing smoke up my ass because of the abortion issue, or gay marriage, or whatever. The Democratic Party could reverse course on these issues tomorrow and I'd still have to hear the same bullshit about immigrants, poor people, urban blacks, and anyone else they think is ruining America.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
- 1984 — within 2 years, according to Jane's Defence Weekly
- 1984 — 7 years, per West German intelligence
- 1992 — 3 years, per Netanyahu
- 1995 — less than 5 years, per Netanyahu
- 1996 — 4 years, per Shimon Peres
- 1998 — within 5 years, per Donald Rumsfeld
- 1999 — within 5 years, per the Israeli military
- 2001 — less than 4 years, per the Israeli Minister of Defence
- 2002 — capability on par with North Korea, per the CIA
- 2003 — by 2005, per Israeli military
- 2006 — 16 days, per US State Department
- 2009 — 6–18 months, per Ehud Barak
- 2010 — 1–3 years, per Israeli government
- 2011 — within months, per IAEA
- 2013 — by 2016, per Israeli intelligence
- 2013 — 1.9–2.2 months, per Institute for Science and International Security
- 2014 — 6 months, per Arms Control
- 2015 — 1.7 months, per Iran Watch
- 2015 — 45–87 days, per Bipartisan Policy Center
- 2015 — 3 months, per Washington Institute
Then the nuclear deal was put in place, and estimates seemed to be in agreement that the breakout time would be weeks to months with out the deal, a year with the deal. Then COVID happened and nobody cared.
- 2021 — a matter of weeks, per Antony Blinken
At this point I'm too lazy to keep checking for additional estimates, but you get the idea.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
Do you remember the 2006 and 2008 elections? Republicans lost 14 senate seats and 52 house seats, plus the presidency. While there were certainly other issues bogging down the Republicans, their steadfastness in a losing war was the big issue.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
Presumably game theory should keep that from happening. If one assumes that the cop is going to pull over the last person in line, then no one should want to be the last person in line, and the line shouldn't form to begin with. The correct way to do this is to wait until the speeder gets a couple hundred yards ahead. That way, if there's a cop he's just going to pull out as soon as the guy passes him and you'll be safely behind. You still need to keep him within sight though, in case he makes a turn.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
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If nobody is around it doesn't matter, though I do anyway out of force of habit. People learning to drive should always do it to develop the habit.
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Depends on your definition of a full stop. If you're technically still rolling but practically stopped, I'd say that counts if you're in an area with little to no traffic. To me a "full stop" would be to the point that you feel a slight jolt unless you know how to do a proper chauffeur stop.
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I don't have a problem with taking an extra five or ten, but I don't think you have a right to complain if you get stuck behind someone who is doing the limit.
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No. The left lane is for passing. It's also for letting people onto the road from a merge or from making a right from a side road. It's okay to ride the left if you're consistently going above the speed of traffic in the right-hand lane, as it's safer than constantly merging back and forth, though if someone wants to go faster than you you should move over and let them by.
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It depends on the situation. In urban freeway driving, it's not a 100% guarantee that someone is going to let you in, and you have to be ready to just move. Assuming it's safe to do so, cutting off one person is better than blocking the lane while you wait to be let in.
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No, the Categorical Imperative and all that.
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Per @gattsuru, you should turn your headlights on earlier than you think you need to, and if you have automatic headlights, set them to their most sensitive setting. I've been pulled over at dusk for not having headlights on when there was more than enough light for good visibility. Keep in mind that it's as much about being seen as it is seeing, and any time headlights would be noticeable above the normal glare of the sun helps with that.
Because disparate impact suits don't have the magic powers people on this board think they do.
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