wemptronics
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User ID: 95
wemptronics
2d ago
In Nice Facebook Group people may be more genuinely unsettled by factual explanations in a that's our preferred style of bot way. On reddit, bot or AI accusations are regularly and routinely used to derail discussion. A portion of it is bots, trolls, or propagandists of intent, but then a greater number are people who have observed this and get the same use out of the technique-- a handy way to route around any type of discussion. "Echo chamber" is an accurate description of this phenomena despite being so popular to be meaningless. Bots are bad>bots say bad>you say bad>you're a bad bot.
The blue area in my state never committed to any real sanctuary policies. The state has also made some decisions for them with regards to certain mandated cooperation which made it easier for blue politicians to ignore.
According to news reports, ICE stepped up operations in my state the first half of last year. That seems supported by a substantial increase of reported ICE arrests from 2024 to 2025.* According to social media ICE stepped up operations around the blue area in the last 6 weeks. I can't say by how much that is a real increase, because ICE watch styled posts aren't a reliable indicator. My state reports thousands of more deportation arrests in 2025 than the likely upper bound of 3000 that DHS claims for the surge in Minneapolis. I haven't diligently gone through that data, but I'd enjoy looking at man hours spent per arrest to compare. Mr. Vice President, do your thing.
Neither the task force styled Afghanistan metro surge or the sustained, but heightened enforcement efforts puts up the kinds of numbers that the hardliners say they really want. We're talking thousands to tens of thousands, not millions. With that taken into account the headline grabbing surge juice doesn't appear worth the squeeze. Whistle resistance isn't going to endure 3 years.
- Bonus uninformed speculation: based on the timing and sequence of the stories that do exist, it seems like increased efforts started on one side of the state and are sweeping to the other. Could just be me though.
I just looked and it wasn't hard to find dissenting voices from 2A advocates if that counts as right wing. James Reeves has a bunch of skeptical tweets, and he is one of the most famous industry personalities, a lawyer, and shitposter. He quotes Kostas Moros in a few of his shared posts who is a fierce 2A advocate. It's still all speculative, admittedly.
I'm not watching each and every video to inform my speculation. It doesn't look like an "execution" to me, but it does look like a bad shoot. What it looks like to me: police attempted to arrest a man and successfully disarmed him during his arrest. The presence of a weapon heightened alert of agents who, despite the number of men in arm's reach, did not coordinate well enough to restrain the individual. That failure allowed the man to squirm and contort enough to the moment where a cop blasts him. That cop will probably claim he saw him reach into his pants or whatever and he will probably be correct. Doesn't make it a good shoot.
Posting the Trumpian Letter to the Norwegian PM by itself doesn't qualify for a top-level alone. That would be no different than a Twitter repost which means you have to attach something to it. There may be other interesting things about the letter -- brevity, audacity, grammar -- but the wider context of threatening to invade Greenland does seem the most obvious place to go with a discussion.
I don't think you're expected to take anything as a given, but frequent contributors likely work through permutations and move on. Trump is one of the following: expert negotiator deal-maker, intentionally trolls for attention, or he candidly finds himself writing impromptu letters with no self-awareness of what they mean. Possibly one or all of these apply to the Trumpian antics on offer any given day. A Trumpian Letter to the Norwegian PM that opens with a mention of the Nobel prize in the midst of a peak Trump cycle is barely unexpected. I can only throw up my hands, yet again humbled by my own mundanity, and accept this force of nature for what it is. Just as I would accept a failed harvest, a bird pooping on my head, or any other act of God. The context of his actions is almost aways more novel and interesting than the routine.
You probably already know the one and only solution. More people should present their perspectives on stuff they are interested in. I sometimes notice the lack of perspectives or a topic and, if it looks like a slow week, I might do something about it. Top-levels have to meet a threshold, they do not need to beat the next guy or be long-winded. Consider this an endorsement from the common man.
A cop fires his weapon a few yards away and our camerawoman doesn't skip a beat. She barely steps away as shots are being fired, then chases down the moment to continue filming. That's experience and preparedness. Rather than hysterics it does feel measured. She's camerawoman protestor, she has a strong grasp on what that role entails, and she plays (non-derogatory) the role well. Her self eventually catches up, processes the experience, and the performance breaks.
A dramaturg is like a meta-director for theater productions. They don't direct a play from moment to moment nor are they in charge of part of the production like lights. The dramaturg fills a senior editorial role that considers the entire production. That includes the performance, a given audience and stage, and any thematic changes that come from those considerations.
Of course a social psychologist in the 50's learned about dramaturgs and decided this job was perfect for an explanatory framework of human behavior. As far as 20th century soft science goes it's not an unhelpful way to think about performance in our age. We film things in anticipation of an audience. This camerawoman, like most women under the age of 30, is closer to a professional than most 18thc. performers that came before her. She may have considered her audience and their expectations a thousand times in the last few years. You can find other ways to think about self and performance that include in dishonest or tactical terms. I don't think you'd be wrong in doing so, but it do be like that now. With the possible exception of turbo autists.
There is some footage of the immediate aftermath filmed by a local resident with the wife sitting on his front stoop. He fills a different kind of role as a cameraman-performer. He documents the overwhelming grief and pain seen minutes after the tragedy. There is no excessive gore or anything, but I wouldn't recommend anyone watch it. On the other hand you seem like the right kind of turbo autist so I'll share. This is "ICE shoots white lady in front of his house wtf" performance. Is it any more authentic? What about the wisecrack at 2:07? He's less dramatic and it drags a little, but he gets his lines in. I'm a believer.
That's the problem with having masked federal agents roaming the country shoving random people into the back of a van.
The nation could have functional normalized deportation enforcement. Cities could assist with ICE warrants just as they assist with other federal law enforcement. Cities might negotiate federal presence in specific areas or even coordinate arrests. If not oversight or assistance local police could bear witness as third parties more interested in the well-being of residents. Politicians could endorse organized protests while explicitly condemning vigilante efforts to interfere with federal law enforcement. These things could be done and relationships built while maintaining a meaningful opposition to Trump and ICE. There seem to be enough lawyers to obstruct 3 Trumps worth of deportation.
Alas, this is not the world we have built. Instead, we have sanctuary cities that have police forces forbidden from participating in this manner. We have politicians whose safest electoral option is to do nothing and order everyone else to do nothing. Except for the citizens who receive a fiery speech about invaders and the virtue of obstruction. All with a wink and a nod. The electorate responds, the inevitable occurs, and the winks and nods pays dividends in the form of a most exciting news story.
The more I see this play out the more I think this is the only way this was ever going to happen.
Yeah, I watched the conference. Arrest head of state, speak with his immediate successor, and stage a press conference to talk about the possibility of revitalizing its oil industry. This may be the extent of Trump running Venezuela. We'll see.
wemptronics
24d ago
You and I both know Rep. Massie is furiously typing speeches as we speak.
Oil is mentioned a lot, but if I had to piece together a take it doesn't appear likely the US is currently "running" Venezuela and is not planning to run Venezuela. Not much mentioned is about politics at all, and if you're interested in building out industry you'd be interested in politics. "Democracy" didn't get a mention which might be a record for POTUS press conferences on foreign policy.
Trump directly answered one reporter who asked if he was working with opposition leader Machado. He called Machado a nice lady, but said he had not spoken to her and that she doesn't have the respect of the country to run it. That could be a calculated distance for coming political battles, but we don't do 4D chess, do we? Apparently he has spoken with now President Rodriguez.
Right now it looks the extent of running the country is getting the former and also current ruling party to say they'll be nicer. I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years whatever US Oil project -- if there is actual follow through -- falls by the wayside. Based on what was said here I expect Venezuela to continue to be Chavistas-without-Maduro who maybe are more friendly to the US and probably still have a dilapidated oil industry. Opposition in Venezuela may take advantage of or otherwise earn more US interest and public support in coming weeks. Good luck to them.
There’s a burgeoning scene of AI NPC chat in Skyrim: speech to text or free-entry type your dialogue, it goes to an LLM with some prompt engineering to answer as the NPCs, then a text to speech model have them respond back.
Ah-ha! I rambled on about something like this in a recent thread. In hindsight it was foolish of me to not consider the Skyrim modding scene was doing something, because of course they were. Thank you kind former lurker.
Link for me for later SkyrimNet does it all with an in-process DLL. Impressive.
wemptronics
28d ago
It is not as simple as "hello, yes, we have 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each at $30 per hour, this is our bank account number, kthxbai". We get inspected by a couple of different bodies. We get surprise inspected/mini-audited and we damn well better have all our ducks in a row. If it turned out "why no, there aren't 200 kids attending 5 days a week for 5 hours each", we'd be slapped down in a hot minute, the excess funding would be clawed back, and we might get shut down for good measure.
I was wondering about this, thanks. I only found one license that didn't have a record of a violation. There also appears to be an increase in recorded violations the past two years compared to 2022-2023, although that's a glancing judgment. The licenses suggest they receive regular inspections if one doesn't think they are fraudlent. MN DHS claims it has categories of violations with different severity, and one could infer this from the descriptions of the violations on the licenses. It does appear like inspectors are liberal in documenting violations, but individual remedies are possibly unverified and consequences lax.
The public part of these inspections look like they are as well documented or better than food safety inspections. That doesn't mean they are taken seriously. It would make sense to me that the inspectors are cover your ass on the documentation, but lax on enforcement until a problem becomes a risk. I did not see a "center is registered for 90 kids and only 3 are present" violation.
As @hydroacetylene says this is the normalized, machine politics type of fraud. Yeah, if you really really want to you can technically call this fraud, but this is the cost of doing business. There might be more licensed daycare slots in Somali run childcare businesses than there are small Somali children in the Twin Cities* area. Maybe that could be improved, but mostly it is perceived as a good thing.
A silly mod score doesn't memory hole an X times reported AAQC post or hide it from the editorial review process, I hope. Every time I've participated it hasn't been very difficult to tell what's in there for AAQC review. I've downgraded "High Quality" posts to "Good" in the janitor queue because of that. There are more than a few posts I'd like to see more of that are not at AAQC threshold, because it is its own special gold sticker.
Now that I know the volunteer janny institution has been captured via a Long March, I'll have to escalate my
Affirmative Actioncharity upvotes to more subversive acts.More options
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