can't really detect any reasoning at all in decisions like this? How could the law possibly fail under heightened scrutiny[?]
Because falling under heightened scrutiny would produce the desired result. That's it.
Jackson can play the game. I find her unimpressive as well but she seems at least aware that her arguments should have, well, arguments. She knows the law ok and will go through with the ritual of tortured interpretations and equivocations to forward the Cause. The conservatives do this too; don't be blinded by agreeing with them. Although I would argue the current group are much better at it. Sotomayor doesn't care at all, nor does she put more than a token effort to try to hide it. Her writings look superficially like a considered legal decision, but even to a non-lawyer if you apply any scrutiny at all many of them completely fall apart into the absurd.
charlesf
2mo ago
As much as I support the norms here about charity and civility in communication, I have to agree as well. Just read some of Sotomayor's writing. I wasn't really following the issue at the time when the opening was being debated in the first Obama admin. Everyone knew that he was going to appoint a woman, and probably a minority, and I assumed that all the eligible judges were interchangeable. Then some time later I found myself reading one of her dissents entirely unprepared for the experience. I was appalled. This was obviously someone who had gone though life without ever having anyone correct her or challenge her on anything serious. She has a reputation as a bully which I 1000% believe. I wouldn't call her stupid in absolute terms; she's probably a bit above average for the nation as a whole. She was certainly very good at school and skilled at navigating bureaucracies. She probably would make an ok, or at least not totally disappointing local politician. A lot of people have accused a lot of justices of being concerned primarily with the results of their decisions, cleverly twisting the laws to produce the desired political victory for their side. She doesn't even both with the pretense of respect for the law.
By the standards of supreme court justices, she is stupid.
charlesf
2mo ago
Try Yandex, I use it more and more lately. It has a different set of problems than Google et al, Russian language results and worse at removing scam/fraud links, but it great at image/video search. Their political censors are entirely uninterested in the sorts of US culture war and IP issues that Google heavily restricts, and they don't have the main focus of the results on selling things.
charlesf
2mo ago
Its our in-house AI tool. I understand that microsoft has build something similar into Outlook, but our IT sec teams have blocked it on our work accounts.
charlesf
2mo ago
I've never used it for anything personal, so I've never made accounts like described above. I do work for a large corporate tech company though who has its own AI offerings. I use this one for work a modest amount and its been helpful but not game changing. I review a number of very large speadsheets on a regular basis. 95%+ of the data in these sheets doesn't really concern my immediate duties. AI has been great in digesting these and presenting me with just the information I need to see. Its also good at reading my many, many emails and flagging ones where people are asking me to do something specific, or touch on a number of topics I've flagged at important. Its also really good at reviewing the recordings of long meetings, converting them into text transcripts, and extracting the valuable information (if there is any), finally turning the meeting into the email it should have always been.
charlesf
2mo ago
This happens to me sometimes too. I've taken to reading a bit about the local history of an area before the trips and use my free time to visit historically interesting, but tourist uninteresting, locations. Some great experiences in the past include visiting very old churches/shrines, the oldest restaurants/bars in the area, harbors/docks and other industrial areas, train and bus stations. There are often very small specialist museums that have been pretty good too. I visited a devastated Rust Belt town that in 2020 was at something like 15% of its all time high population from 1950. The town had converted an old train station into a local history museum full of photos and artifacts related to what people used to do there when it was an economically viable, vibrant location, a whole post mortem shrine of remembrance to a place that doesn't really exist anymore. There are a lot of little spots like this around the US, but they take a bit of digging to find them. I often just use Google maps to virtually explore, then visit spots that look interesting.
charlesf
3mo ago
I live in a community like this in the rural midwest. The volunteer FD is pretty popular and they have no trouble getting people to sign up. That being said, there is a...certain type of person very attracted to the VFD that make up a good % of the volunteers. They are people that are really, really into first-responders and the military but couldn't actually make it in the professional PD/FD/Military for various reasons, either washed out of the academy/training/boot camp, can't meet the physical requirements, or have medical issues. The VFD gives these, often very patriotic and civic minded, people an outlet for their desire to serve the community. They get really into it with a CB radio in their personal vehicle and often a little red hazard light too. They wear their VFD clothing/uniform all the time too.
Yes, I have memorized several poems. I'm gifted with an extremely good memory. I'm a formally trained musician and have, over the last 35 or so years, memorized hundreds of songs as well. I can't always immediately recall all of them 100%, but I can brush up 15-20 or so of them in a week to performance level by reviewing the sheets and playing them a couple times. I also enjoy memorizing quotes, passages from books, religious verses etc. I can do pi out to 72 digits w/o brushing up, 144 if I refresh (this is as a song btw, each number is a distinct note). I find the memorization of all these superficially different things to be very similar in practice. In my case I can't really help it. Even brief contact with writing or music can trigger fairly solid, if partial, memories which compel me to put in the work of fully memorizing whatever it was. Its like an itch. I feel like the main sources of this skill are both the naturally very good memory and the formal music training since childhood. Memorizing musical notation feels like memorizing words. I can also "replay" songs in my head with all the instruments differentiated, accurately, beginning to end.
I don't think photographic or eidetic memory are real. Or, at least my own internal experience feels nothing like the descriptions from people that claim to have photographic/eidetic memory. To me it feels like the inability to forget, and I'm pretty sure its a form of, or related to, mental illness, like a weak form of hyperthymesia, but it doesn't really feel like the descriptions of that either. It's not an entirely positive ability. I remember every humiliating thing I've ever done, or awful thing that has been done to me, in vivid detail. I can tell, at the moment I hear or read something, that I'm going to remember it forever. I can also tell when I'm going to struggle to ever remember it; some things just slip right off my brain. Sometimes those things are important. Most stuff falls somewhere in the middle and I can memorize it with a small amount of effort and practice. The worst aspect is if I learn something incorrectly and have the "remember it forever" reaction. When my brain locks onto something inaccurately I will struggle with that for the rest of my life. As a toddler I got east and west reversed in my head. I now have to remember an additional memory that my first recall of these concepts are flipped, like a brain patch. This has caused me to read/study new things very carefully.
I'm completely hopeless with the people's names. There is nothing to grab ahold of, mentally. The sounds that represent that person feel entirely arbitrary. My work requires me to meet and remember a lot of different points of contact for different issues, as well as a rotating roster of my own team of employees. I have to make flashcards and devote time to using them. I also find most people, especially women, largely uninteresting and interchangeable. Unless they aren't, but rare people are rare. The exception to this is if the person's name is in a song. I can reliably make the song start playing in my head when I see them. This was very helpful with my wife when we met 30 years ago; her name is Amy. The song by Pure Prairie League still plays to this day when I look at her.
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