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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Well, one potential psychological flaw in her $50k small business tax credit is that it’s only for new small businesses to go towards startup costs.

    Existing small businesses that may be struggling can look at that and only see her making it easier for their future competition to get rolling. It’s a net negative for them.

    Just about the only people that are going to look at that tax credit and see how it benefits them are people that are already looking into starting a small business and the main thing holding them back is the startup costs. That’s probably not a lot of voters.






  • I’d like to remind everyone that 8 years ago, the polls showed Hillary was going to trounce Trump pretty handedly. There was tons of discussion after the election about how the polls could be so wrong.

    I think Fivethityeight’s explanation went something like…

    If a candidate is only polling 40% to their opponents’s 60%, and you were to run the election 10 times with a different sampling of voters each time, it doesn’t mean that the candidate will lose by 60% every time. It means they’re going to win four times out of ten.

    Don’t let polls lull you into either complacency or despair. The only thing polls are really good for is giving pundits something to talk about in the 24 hour news cycle. Polls don’t decide the election. Only actual votes on actual ballots that are actually submitted in time decide the election.



  • Some context that you left out…

    MPD says several officers from Columbus Ohio observed a man, armed with a knife in each hand, and was engaged in an ‘altercation’ with another man they say was unarmed.

    They say officers identified themselves as police officers and made several commands for the 43-year-old to drop the knife.

    Police say the man refused and charged at the unarmed man with the knives. That’s when several officers discharged their firearms, killing the 43-year-old man.

    Surveillance video appears to show the shooting in the middle of Vliet St.

    TMJ4 acquired the bodycam video of the Columbus officers from MPD.

    Two knives were recovered from the scene, according to MPD.






  • Don’t get too excited.

    Although the UK government has said that it now won’t force unproven technology on tech companies, and that it essentially won’t use the powers under the bill, the controversial clauses remain within the legislation, which is still likely to pass into law. “It’s not gone away, but it’s a step in the right direction,” Woodward says.

    James Baker, campaign manager for the Open Rights Group, a nonprofit that has campaigned against the law’s passage, says that the continued existence of the powers within the law means encryption-breaking surveillance could still be introduced in the future. “It would be better if these powers were completely removed from the bill,” he adds.

    But some are less positive about the apparent volte-face. “Nothing has changed,” says Matthew Hodgson, CEO of UK-based Element, which supplies end-to-end encrypted messaging to militaries and governments. “It’s only what’s actually written in the bill that matters. Scanning is fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encrypted messaging apps. Scanning bypasses the encryption in order to scan, exposing your messages to attackers. So all ‘until it’s technically feasible’ means is opening the door to scanning in future rather than scanning today. It’s not a change, it’s kicking the can down the road.”