“How Viktor Orbán Got Rolled by His Own Gerrymander”.
“When people consent to have sex with each other, they also generally agree, implicitly or explicitly, to a specific risk level: birth control methods, sexually transmitted infection (STI) status, whether someone is on PrEP to prevent HIV. Going back on that agreement is a form of violence and, in the case of stealthing, can be sexual assault.”
“Can Dumb Phones Save Us From Our Phone Addictions?”
“What The Pitt Gets Right (and Wrong) About ‘Pittsburghese’“.
“The central question is not whether states can, in principle, authorize lawsuits against law-breaking federal agents: For most of American history, that is exactly how victims of federal misconduct collected damages, and it remains permissible under the Constitution. The issue is that, in 1988, Congress enacted a law known as the Westfall Act that curtailed such suits. Its goal was to limit state tort claims, like assault and trespass, against federal officials acting under federal authority. But it included an exception for suits “brought for a violation of the Constitution.” Under a straightforward reading of the act, then, a plaintiff like Carvajal-Muñoz cannot sue ICE agents for assault, battery, or false imprisonment under Maine law. But he can sue these agents for violating the Constitution by committing these wrongful acts.”
Back in the 90s I had a coworker whose voice mail greeting said that while he wasn’t available to take your call, a virtual version of himself was standing by and ready to talk to you. It was funny and in character, and apparently way ahead of its time. For the record, I will not be making any AI clones of myself, and I do not use AI to write this blog. The interview transcripts that Greg Wythe has been generating for me do use AI, but that’s it, and those tools are just improved versions of already-existing voice-to-text technology.
An AI agent opened a store in San Francisco. So far, not so good.
You don’t have bixonimania, because it doesn’t exist. But an AI chatbot may tell you that you do.
“Part of me is glad he’s wasting his time on bullshit, because it’s less dangerous for rule of law, for the American public, but it also means we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.”
“John Becker and Maureen Magarity are believed to be the first married Division I men’s and women’s basketball coaches to coach at the same school simultaneously.”
“As such, we now must contend with a bunch of absolute freaks who are somehow upset about the teen birth rate going down.”
“Is Trump Taking Taxpayer Dollars for Contraception and Spending it on Erectile Dysfunction, Porn Addiction, and Faster Sperm?”
Two Marcias Brady are better than one.
“No one knew it at the time, but 2014 — more precisely, Ellen DeGeneres’ star-studded selfie moment — marked the peak of a monoculture that no longer exists. The numbers show a long decay ever since.”
“Meet the new boss. Worse than the old boss.”
“What these systems can’t currently do, and arguably may never be able to do, is to decide what problems to attack and what to prioritize. These generative models make it easier to do a wide range of things by automating various technical processes— dividing up data sets, extracting fit values, etc.— but deciding which of the nearly infinite number of possible analyses are worth doing and what actions to take based on the results are questions of a different sort. These are ultimately decided not by technical factors, but by individual and societal priorities and values.”
RIP, Alan Osmond, musician and oldest member of The Osmonds.
“As we see from that Times article, in addition to creating a kind of electoral strongman rule it also created an engine perfectly suited to corruption. Obviously there’s a ton of money sloshing around Washington and there always has been. But the old model was persuasion. Or there was at least a significant role for it. But why bother persuading Donald Trump? Or, really, what would that even mean? Why not just cut him a check? Or cut him in on a real estate deal. It’s more direct. It’s more reliable. It may even be cheaper. And we see it happening everywhere across the federal government today.”
My kids don’t ask me for advice very often – they don’t need to, for one thing. But when they do, I promise I will not outsource my thinking to some dumb chatbot. I will not disrespect them like that.
“The people who tell us that AI will dominate our future and take our jobs are the people who are hoping that will be true. They may be hoping this because it makes them feel important, or because they want to be billionaires, or because they simply do not understand other people. I think that final point is underestimated. If you are going to provide me with a robot servant, I have a very clear bar: It’s gotta be at least as much bang for my buck as my dishwasher.”
“But in John Roberts’s worldview, no statute or executive action is really “solid” until he, John Roberts, has had the opportunity to pass judgment on it. He has spent his entire career demonstrating that if he agrees with the policy, he will find a reason to conclude that, as a matter of law, he has a solemn obligation to preserve it. If he doesn’t, he will find a reason to conclude that, as a matter of law, he has no choice but to stuff it in the garbage.”
Bakrupt them. See here for more.
”For years, [Alex Jones] has not controlled Infowars, has not controlled personnel decisions, hasn’t had access to Infowars cash, and has had his personal belongings and one, or maybe two, houses have to be sold. He’s now on the verge of losing all the IP that he spent 20 years building up. That’s not just the Infowars logo: that’s the video inventory, all of his customer data. All of that has been under the control of the bankruptcy trustee, and now the receiver, for years.”
“But here’s the bigger issue for the country, as the Iran episode indicates: Kash Patel is simply bad at his job.”
“A day after FBI Director Kash Patel filed a $250 million lawsuit against The Atlantic, he has lost a different defamation claim, against news analyst and pundit Frank Figliuzzi.”
RIP, Dave Mason, guitarist, songwriter, co-founder of the band Traffic.
RIP, Riccie Johnson, longtime makeup artist who worked for over 50 years with 60 Minutes and worked with The Beatles on their Ed Sullivan Show appearance.
“Haven’t they read Isaiah chapter one? Yes. Yes they have read that. They read through the entire book of Isaiah right after they read through the entire book of Song of Solomon and right before they read through the entire book of Jeremiah. They got through it all, cover to cover. But all they remember is what they expected to find.”
RIP, Dean Tavoularis, Oscar-winning production designer on the Godfather movies, Apocalypse Now, and more.
A brief history of the Ed Sullivan Theater, soon to be looking for a new tenant, post-Colbert.