I think she’s partly right, but also, if she was the one who ultimately succeeded in getting Biden to drop out when he did, then isn’t it reasonable to expect that he would have dropped out earlier if she had pushed him out earlier? Which would make it her fault. Fuck, I don’t even know anymore. I don’t have a lot of confidence that the Democratic party will learn the right lessons from this loss.

For me it’s because Newsweek has been terrible for quite some time, and AI crap is exhausting, so Newsweek + meaningless AI drivel = downvote.

I appreciate the question, and like many Jews I love questions like this. It is never hateful to be curious.

Like many/most identities, being Jewish doesn’t mean just one thing to everyone. First and foremost, Judaism is a religion that is passed down through the matriarchal side of the family. So if your mother is Jewish, you’re Jewish. You’re Jewish particularly to other Jews in this instance, even if you don’t necessarily consider yourself Jewish.

Judaism is not a race, full stop. Just like Christianity is not a race. There are white Jews, black Jews, Latino Jews, South Asian Jews, East Asian Jews etc. There aren’t a lot of us as a whole, but we do exist in most racial groups. But Judaism is often correctly linked to ethnicity, which is a set of shared traditions, culture, language, and norms.

There is a huuuuge range of ‘orthodoxy’ under the umbrella of Judaism. Different ‘sects’ holds fundamentally similar values (for example: you won’t find very many anti-abortion Jews), but people inside these different groups will observe their traditions at differently levels/extremes or not at all. Most Jews in America don’t keep Kosher, for example, but most Orthodox Jews do.

Judaism also has a rich tradition of questioning everything (which is why we usually love these kinds of questions). It is not considered heresy to question beliefs or authority, in fact it’s usually encouraged. You’ll find many Jews who openly identify as atheists, and yet most still fully consider themselves to be Jewish. This usually doesn’t bother anyone, Rabbis included. Atheists even hold a place of honor in some Jewish communities, because atheists get their morality from their own values or other people, not from a fear of god or some external force. This is part of why it is pretty common to find Jews (observant or not) who consider themselves atheist.

All of that is to say you don’t necessarily need to believe in god to be considered Jewish.

Atheist Jew here. They really hate me.

Having a device that can be used for surveillance is not the same thing as someone actively choosing to report their neighbor.

Been having similar thoughts. We’ll very soon be back in the age of internment camps, reporting on neighbors’ behavior, and minorities looking over their shoulders even more than usual. I am ashamed of us.

I actually don’t think there’s any uncertainty. He’s been quite clear about what he’ll do. He’ll kill all federal cases and ongoing federal investigations, pardon himself for everything he can pardon himself for, and all of the state proceedings will be paused until after his term. In the meantime he’ll “investigate,” threaten, and bully anyone involved in the various state cases, and given his age it is incredibly unlikely that legal proceedings will ever result in justice for his myriad crimes.

Terry Pratchett was one of a kind.

lol ain’t the justice system grand?

I know you’re being cute, but for those who don’t know the whole story: after the jury found him civilly liable, the judge made a point of publicly clarifying that yes, he was found to have raped Carroll.

One source

Another source

Not only that, but Trump was found by a jury to have raped E Jean Carrol. Reminder: we already know Trump is a rapist.

This. They’re surprisingly energy efficient, and while they take a bit to heat up, once they get going they really radiate. I have a small one, and it gets me through the coldest days of winter without needing to turn on the built-in heaters in my apartment.

Bonus is that my cat loooves it. He posts up right next to it and is in cozy heaven.

In my experience, it’s less about the job and more about the personal preferences of the agent running the background investigation. I’ve seen contractors for low-level non-sensitive positions have entire job offers rescinded because they were honest about past weed use earlier in their life (not current). I’ve seen contractors breeze through the same process while flat out lying about their past weed use, and I’ve been told that lying is typically the best option, because the agents don’t have the time or resources to follow up. But if you’re caught lying on a form you’re fucked, so it’s a mix of damned if you do damned if you don’t, but also you might be totally fine depending on how the agent feels that day. On top of that, many of the agents are contractors themselves, so there’s very little incentive for consistency.

I’m not sure if communicating with felons would/should revoke whatever clearances they have, but you’ve still hit on a really important point: these men run companies that have billions of dollars worth of federal contracts, and if they were anybody else they never would have passed the required background investigation in the first place. For those who don’t know, federal contractors work on behalf of the US Government, and every single one of them has to pass a thorough background investigation in order to be cleared to work on a federal contract. Yes, even the cafeteria workers who run the food court in a federal building. Musk has smoked weed in public on camera, and while I couldn’t care less about that, anyone completing the federal background investigation form in good faith would have to report that, and it would automatically disqualify them from any kind of security clearance. If they didn’t report it, then that means they lied on an official form, which at the very least would disqualify them, and at worst is another felony.

There are two sets of rules, one for the billionaires and one for the rest of us. They can happily break all the laws that would get the rest of us thrown in prison, and what’s more, they can further enrich themselves through that unlawful behavior.

Wow, this is some serious chutzpah:

“Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials,” Bezos wrote. “You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other.”

Firstly, Trump is not a government official. He’s a private citizen, who is also a convicted felon and adjudicated rapist.

Secondly, don’t tell us that your principles are the only thing standing in the way of your corrupt conflicting business interests, without telling us what your principles are. Oh right, we can plainly see that you have no principles from your actions over decades of running an exploitative monopoly, and from the fact that you hijacked your own newspaper’s editorial page to tell us that ‘no no it’s still a legit newspaper I swear’ as you undermine its credibility with your own words.

What a disgrace.

Well that’s crappy timing, would have been nice if his sentence kept him in prison for just a few more days. Releasing him right before Election Day seems like an unnecessary risk given this guy’s violent rhetoric…

Sweet! I only learned about real-world Sabacc after how much enjoyment I got out of the Kessel Sabacc minigame in Outlaws. Looks like there are a few cantina tables in my area, might check them out.

This is a good analogy, and is one big reason I won’t trust any AI until the ‘answers’ are guaranteed and verifiable. I’ve worked with people who needed to have every single thing they worked on double-checked for accuracy/quality, and my takeaway is that it’s usually faster to just do it myself. Doing a properly thorough review of someone else’s work, knowing that they historically produce crap, takes just about as long as doing the work myself from scratch. This has been true in every field I’ve worked in, from academia to tech.

I will not be using any of Apple’s impending AI features, they all seem like a dangerous joke to me.

This kind of direct home visit has been happening for years in Muslim regions of China, for different reasons. At least these pregnancy visits (ugh feels gross to even talk about) don’t involve home stays, but any time the state shows up at your door to surveil your family, your human rights have been violated. It’s incredibly invasive and dystopian.

“Muslim families across Xinjiang are now literally eating and sleeping under the watchful eye of the state in their own homes,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

In early 2018, Xinjiang authorities extended this “home stay” program. Cadres spend at least five days every two months in the families’ homes. There is no evidence to suggest that families can refuse such visits.

Source

I loved this game! I got like 6 solid months of fun out of it. It took a really long time for the card combat loop to get old for me. I had never played an x-com style game before this (though I loved their meta callouts to x-com), so the mechanics were brand new to me, but it all just made intuitive sense. The card design and animations are top notch, and some of the fights can be super-challenging, but there’s always a way, and there’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of finally finishing a fight after 5 different tries.

Agree on the story and voice acting, it’s all excellent. There are a couple very recognizable voices in there too.

Edit: Magik, Doctor Strange, and Captain Marvel are pretty much an unstoppable combo…