France on Sunday took a step closer to delivering what was once seen as an unthinkable nightmare: a far-right government taking power in Paris for the first time.

Well… the first time in a while. And just as the last time was exiting living memory.

They need a format that breaks the debate up into sections and actually includes fact checking, and a cross examination after each section. Have a team scrambling to find the records, studies, video clips and other evidence that they can bring up. Someone who is mostly honest gets lay ups and affirmation. Someone who lies constantly gets called out and put on the defensive.

Wouldn’t happen of course. Even if the hosts were down to have someone take on a more adversarial role, Trump would never agree to something that actually holds him accountable for spewing nothing but bullshit. It’s his entire strategy, if he can’t sell snake oil he has nothing to sell at all.

This means that anyone who doesn’t like a particular rule or regulation can pick a venue with a friendly judge, challenge it in court, and likely get the outcome they want. Even if judge shopping wasn’t a major problem right now, this would still be a bad idea. The reason Chevron told judges to defer to agencies in matters where the interpretation is ambiguous is because those agencies have the experience and and expertise to understand the issues involved far better than a judge who has to try to master the subject from inside the courtroom.

This is all the more crazy in light of the recent racial gerrymandering decision, where Alito not only ignored the deference that appeals courts are supposed to show to trial courts (where the case is actually experienced and not just summed up in a brief) but then says that the judicial branch must defer to the legislators when they claim that they are being fair. So judges can just override the executive branch in subjects that they likely do not understand, but they can’t actually contradict the legislature over something like whether a policy is violating someone’s constitutional rights, despite that being one of their core functions for the past couple of centuries.

Precedents get overturned from time to time, and the way that generally happens is when a new case comes along challenging that precedent.

Maybe this goes nowhere. Maybe a conviction gets overturned on appeal. But maybe we could see a new precedent set. Might as well try, you’re probably not going to find a better case to do it any time soon.

Trump was the keynote speaker at the Faith & Freedom Coalition in Washington DC, a gathering of politically influential conservative Christian activists who advocate for strict abortion restrictions and a tougher stance on the southern border.

Yes, I often reflect upon Jesus’s teachings regarding the border. And all those times he talked about how we should crack down on immigrants. He was so famously against things like, the poor, foreigners, and your neighbors. Clearly these people are doing God’s work.

At this point I’m almost surprised that Trump’s lawyers haven’t tried filing motions going through all the classic sovereign citizen arguments. Think of how long they could delay by spending a week arguing about tassels on the flag, and another week on whether the charges apply to Trump or if they only apply to TRUMP.

Seems like the first step should be taxing those personal loans that are being used as income. That seems like a simple fix (simple by tax code standards, I’d still expect such a law to be ridiculously complex).

I do worry about the unintended side effects a of a wealth tax targeting stock ownership directly. That just gives the rich an incentive to squeeze more value out of their investments in order to cover their tax bill. And it seems like it would likely push private companies into selling out more as they grow since the money has to come from somewhere, thus giving even more incentive to cave in to investors who just want to make a quick buck and don’t care about the long term survival of the company.

On the one hand, yes, these movies are products being churned out for profit by a corporate machine that cares more about marketability than creativity or quality. Anyone signing up for a big studio blockbuster production (superhero movie or not) should know exactly what they are getting into.

On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with actors in flopped movies pointing out that they flopped in no small part because they are the product of a system that seems focused on everything but the quality of movie being made.

And it absolutely can be life changing when it works. Just look at the early MCU movies and tell me that they didn’t have a huge impact on careers. Of course younger actors who take these roles are hoping they will be life-changing. You don’t become a superstar by doing nothing but small independent arthouse films that kill at festivals and award shows and are never seen by the general public.

And finally, I gotta call bullshit on the assumption that you can’t have artistry or depth in movies based on “some fucking universe for cartoon characters.” There’s no reason why a superhero movie (or any other genre film) can’t be more than just a two hour trailer for itself, or a soulless vehicle for merchandise. It’s not the medium that the IP came from that determines the artistic value of the movie adaptation, it’s the people making the movie (and the suits controlling them) that determine whether it will be a cinematic masterpiece or further proof that AI generated movies are inevitable.

Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.

I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.

Sounds to me like a way of backing down from their saber-rattling and threats of invasion while trying to not look like they are backing down from anything.

[Realizes he’s talked up a war that would be disastrous, win or lose] “We’re not going to do that, it’s exactly what they want us to do”

Of course, that could also just be Xi being full of shit for diplomatic reasons. It’s not like he’d be bound by this in any way. “We’re not going to be tricked by their provocations” can always be followed by a “but now they’ve forced our hand.”

What’s really clobbered Firefox has been the rise of smartphones, where Firefox has very limited uptake.

That’s fucking crazy, because Firefox has been far better than the default options for as long as I’ve had a smartphone. I only recently dumped chrome on desktop for Firefox, but I took one look at Chrome when I got an android and immediately dumped that shit.

They also usually have two months of transition planning, which didn’t happen since Trump wasn’t planning on leaving. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of Trump era shit continued a while into the Biden administration simply because it took time to get caught up on it all and shut it down.

Ah, so they do remember what standing is. Surprising, given their selective amnesia on the topic during the student loan forgiveness case.

I find it interesting that guys like this who want to start a race war always think that this is the thing that’s going to do it. Like we’ve made it through all the other hate crimes, injustices and large scale protests without erupting into a race war, but one more incident will do the trick.

Also interesting is how closely his plan is tied to the election. He isn’t just trying to send a message before the election, he specifically thinks that his side needs a specific outcome in the election for his plan to succeed. This plan seems to be a direct consequence of current political environment and the messages coming from his preferred candidate and his supporters.

Now the article doesn’t actually say which candidate needs to win in order to embolden violent white supremacists. But if you need 2 guesses, you should probably consider going back into the coma you’ve been in for the past decade, you’re not going to like the future.

It’s a small town in a swing state that doesn’t lean heavily to either side of the political spectrum. It’s nothing special. Given how many small towns exist, it would be weirder to not have any that voted with the majority in the last several elections.

Cease and desist or he will “consider his legal options” which is about the emptiest threat possible.

Oh no! He’s going to think about how he has no case because everything they’re reporting is factual and he’s a public figure.

Not in a million fucking years Sony. I would have gladly given you my money, but apparently that’s not good enough for you.

I guess Sony didn’t want my money after all.

Nearly three decades ago, I remember my grandpa being pissed about proposed changes to social security which were supposed prevent it from going bankrupt. When I asked what his solution was, he said that he paid into the system his whole life, and they owe him the full benefits he was promised. He got a lot more pissed when I asked if he was fine with me paying into the system my whole life and getting nothing, but he didn’t really have an answer. And somehow, I’m sure he thought he won that argument.

To be clear, I was just pointing out that the savings aren’t coming from eliminating the death penalty, they are coming from reducing the number of appeals, and therefore increasing the likelihood that an innocent person will spend the rest of their life in prison, which is a bad thing. I’m not advocating for or against the death penalty, but I do think that a life sentence should come with just as many safeguards as a death sentence. The fact that you could release someone who was wrongfully convicted only matters if you actually allow those mistakes to be corrected.

We could use improvements at every part of the process. The appeals process however can be particularly awful, and is full of arbitrary restrictions and limitations that have little effect other than making it harder to correct mistakes and injustices. Some of them were put in place for no reason other than because politicians wanted to look tough on crime, and apparently overturning convictions looks bad for the justice system’s track record. But really I was only bringing it up because it’s relevant to the cost argument.