I guess Oregon just doesn’t get to vote, then? They’ve been mail-only for years

Those 2 independants caucus with Democrats and would vote for their candidate for Leader, so the current margin once Mitch departs is 52/47 (or, 2 1/2 seats).

The real problem for Fetterman “flipping” is after the election. While there’s every possibility the Democrats will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, if they claw back a few Senate seats then the balance may end up 50/50 (or even 51D/49R). That’s when Republicans will put on a huge pre$$ure campaign to get someone to defect and promise them all sorts of shit to bail them out of election consequences.

How does the judge plan to enforce it? Because the Administration will not listen.

U.S. District Judge Sunshine Sykes

Oh yeah, not only will they ignore it, but we are about to get all sorts of vile memes making fun of that judge and her name, aren’t we?

If you press a US “second amendment enthusiast” about gun reform, at one point they will inevitably reply angrily with something like “What part of ‘shall not be infringed’ do you not understand?”

There are other parts of the Bill of Rights that, while written in an absolute manner, have been found to have some limits. The First Amendment is rather demonstrative that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech”. Yet, we recognize limits on speech, the most famous one being yelling “fire” in a theater (when there is none) Yes, you have the right to speech, but if your speech unnecessarily created panic the government can punish you on that basis.

It seems quite clear to me that gun ownership here, even with the 2nd amendment, should come with responsibilities too. Gun owners still have a moral duty to be responsible about it, and not just carelessly put others in danger. Yet, the 2nd Amendment is presented as an absolute, with no strings attached, as if God sent them Himself on stone tablets. It’s like the 2nd Amendment is the only one that matters…

Lol, I just heard about people calling it “MAHA Blast”

https://bsky.app/profile/crobertcargill.bsky.social/post/3mqs653ozb22q

When your diaper’s getting packed and your hair is kinda wack - Trumporrhea!

I’m waiting for this Administration to argue that only US citizens are guaranteed “human rights”…

My link may have been a bit misleading. We have never had an entity named “civil defense force” but pre-9/11 the same function was filled by a hodgepodge of agencies, which that Wikipedia article discussed. After that they were all folded into the “DHS” trench coat.

A few things to talk about first in regards to the US:

• We have the concept of the National Guard, which is a military reserve force under the control of the States but with the ability for the President to call it to active duty. While still a military force, state governors will mobilize them for things where the local police force needs help, like natural disasters, so it is possible to deploy them on missions that are closer to Civil Defense actions.

• We also do have a bunch of agencies that collectively make up something like a Civil Defense Force, but since the Bush administration those agencies have largely been sucked into the Department of Homeland Security, and even the concept of “civil defense” has been eaten by the idea of “Homeland Security” (which is a bit different, don’t you think?) The one exception is emergency preparedness/ FEMA, which is still a priority in most people’s minds despite our President treating everything he touches like his own personal piggy bank.

Now, in relation to your idea about a “draft” for civil defense purposes, we call the idea National Service and we have many such agencies, like Americorps. However, the idea of mandatory national service will never happen until Americans as a whole become less selfish. And even if it does, I am confident those who are well-off will find a way to buy out of it, which will defeat the whole purpose, won’t it?

He seems to be obsessed with the purity of bodily fluids, just like Jack D. Ripper. Even looks a little like him.

Most of the “New York” area datacenters are in New Jersey, anyway…

I bet there are congressional staffers whose only job is to come up with clever, marketable acronyms for bills

We need datacenters to enable all the Internet stuff. If you buy stuff online, binge TV shows, or rot your brain on social media, your phone is communicating with some back-end server in “the cloud”. And the cloud is all in datacenters now, because they are all connected to the Internet, and each other. So if you want to host an Internet service where everyone can get to it, even if it’s just a virtual server on a cloud platform, that virtual server lives in a datacenter.

The reason it is all hitting the news now is that AI hardware takes much more power than a standard Linux server. So new hyperscalar /AI datacenters require a lot more power than older ones. And in areas without sane regulations, datacenters can go up much more quickly than new power plants can go up. So, if local governments and regulators aren’t looking that closely, new datacenters can quickly drive demand that the local utility can’t service without buying more power on the open market. And unless the datacenter is required by local regulations to pay the the higher price for that extra load, the cost is divided across all consumers.

Also, this increased power consumption inside each rack comes with additional cooling requirements. Old datacenters can make do with air cooling, but these new ones all use liquid cooling. And the cheapest way to do that is evaporative cooling, which “uses up” all the water we’ve been reading about. (There are closed-loop methods that don’t “use up” water, but they are more expensive so the datacenters don’t use it).

So, really, it’s all a scaling problem. One datacenter doesn’t cause that much of a problem. But they grow in clumps, like a fungus. Dozens of datacenters in a small area can cause environmental havoc.

If I am reading the article correctly, the point of the lawsuit is not that they used AI to make their staffing decisions. It’s that the criteria they asked the AI to use to make those decisions directly disadvantaged people who were on approved leave for medical reasons, and whose jobs were supposed to be protected by law.

It’s an important distinction. These decision makers delegated their staffing decisions to a bot. But bots are not people. If the instructions given to those bots resulted in actions that violated the law, the decision makers need to be held accountable, I the same manner they would if they made those decisions without AI assistance.

Actually, all “standard” time means is that the time is somewhat related to the sun being directly overhead at noon. I say “somewhat” because once you carve the world up into zones like that, the sun will never be directly overhead at noon except maybe in the middle of the zone.

Did you know China has only one time zone? The entire huge country runs on Beijing time. The far west of the country sometimes doesn’t see a sunrise until 10 AM.

So, there is really nothing “standard” about Standard Time at all.

If we see Donald Trump give that big speech on Thursday in a sweater I will think we fell into the time vortex

In the weeks following a series of Democratic primary victories by progressive and democratic socialist candidates in New York, Colorado, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere, Trump and his allies in the GOP have relentlessly hammered on the idea that the nation was under siege by “godless Communists” who want to “completely destroy the traditional American way of life,” rhetoric that echoed McCarthy era red-baiting to many critics.

These “Godless Communists” who are looking to “destroy the traditional American way of life” are doing it by winning elections. So, what Trump and Johnson are saying is that we should send the military after these office holders because he doesn’t like their politics.

I’m old enough to remember when everyone agreed you needed 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate

You never needed 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate. What you need 60 votes for is to decide to stop arguing and hold the actual vote, which has only ever needed a majority. Voting for cloture doesn’t necessarily mean you intend to vote for whatever is being discussed.

Edit: it turns out this was a cloture vote to begin with. So it needed 60 votes anyway.

https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1192/vote_119_2_00195.htm

As I understand it, the way the IRS is structured, if you take in money from any source (documented or not, legal or not), that counts as “income” unless there is an explicit rule saying it does not, and they want their cut.

But, like anything else they do, they only care about significant amounts. If you find a $1 bill (or even a $100 bill) on the ground, nobody is going to audit you over it. But, if $10k drops out of the back of a truck into your lap, and they find out about it, you might expect some uncomfortable questions.

How would they find out? Well, banks are required to report large cash deposits and withdrawals. So if you show up with an extra $40k one day and put it into the bank all at once, the teller may ask you why, and report whatever your answer is to the government. (And if you space it out over 40 deposits of $1k, that is also suspicious and may be illegal if the authorities determine you were doing it specifically to avoid reporting).

Historically, this has been a way to get at organized crime syndicates. Al Capone was a famous mobster who ultimately went to jail bit because of his illegal activities, but because of evading taxes owed on them.