tal

So, first, that text is from the Declaration of Independence, not the US Constitution, which defines legal rights.

But, secondly, the right to “pursuit of happiness” needs to be understood in the (somewhat euphemistic) language of the time. It is generally understood as referring to a right to property; this right was a core dispute in the American Revolution, and mirrors a nearly-identical “life, liberty” phrase from John Locke where the term used is explicitly “property”. That is, the right is not to never feel unhappy or depressed, but rather to not have one’s property taken away by non-elected parties.

https://www.crf-usa.org/foundations-of-our-constitution/natural-rights.html

The Tea Act, which imposed taxes on American colonists, was a critical dispute in the American Revolution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Act

The Tea Act 1773 (13 Geo. 3. c. 44) was an Act of the Parliament of Great Britain. The principal objective was to reduce the massive amount of tea held by the financially troubled British East India Company in its London warehouses and to help the struggling company survive.[1] A related objective was to undercut the price of illegal tea, smuggled into Britain’s North American colonies. This was supposed to convince the colonists to purchase Company tea on which the Townshend duties were paid, thus implicitly agreeing to accept Parliament’s right of taxation. Smuggled tea was a large issue for Britain and the East India Company, since approximately 86% of all the tea in America at the time was smuggled Dutch tea.

At the time, it was generally accepted that in England, only elected officials had the power to tax; this is one of the rights of Englishmen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_Englishmen

The “rights of Englishmen” are the traditional rights of English subjects and later English-speaking subjects of the British Crown. In the 18th century, some of the colonists who objected to British rule in the thirteen British North American colonies that would become the first United States argued that their traditional[1] rights as Englishmen were being violated. The colonists wanted and expected the rights that they (or their forebears) had previously enjoyed in England: a local, representative government, with regards to judicial matters (some colonists were being sent back to England for trials) and particularly with regards to taxation.[2] Belief in these rights subsequently became a widely accepted justification for the American Revolution.[3][4]

However, American colonists had no elected MPs in Parliament. Parliament was willing neither to grant them elected MPs, nor to refrain from taxation and have locally-elected legislatures perform taxation. Parliament’s counterargument was that Americans had “virtual representation”, in that MPs elected by people in the UK – though not elected by American colonists – had their best interests at heart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_representation

Virtual representation was the idea that the members of Parliament, including the Lords and the Crown-in-Parliament, reserved the right to speak for the interests of all British subjects, rather than for the interests of only the district that elected them or for the regions in which they held peerages and spiritual sway.[1] Virtual representation was the British response to the First Continental Congress in the American colonies. The Second Continental Congress asked for representation in Parliament in the Suffolk Resolves, also known as the first Olive Branch Petition. Parliament claimed that their members had the well being of the colonists in mind. The Colonies rejected this premise.

My assumption is that that’s gonna get thrown out because they don’t have standing. Probably some kind of case law along those lines already, since I figure someone’s probably tried that before.

googles

Looks like it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliana_v._United_States

Juliana, et al. v. United States of America, et al. is a climate-related lawsuit filed in 2015 by 21 youth plaintiffs against the United States and several executive branch officials. Filing their case in the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, the plaintiffs, represented by the non-profit organization Our Children’s Trust, include Xiuhtezcatl Martinez, the members of Martinez’s organization Earth Guardians, and climatologist James Hansen as a “guardian for future generations”.

They call for the government to offer “both declaratory and injunctive relief for their claim—specifically, a declaration of the federal government’s fiduciary role in preserving the atmosphere and an injunction of its actions which contravene that role.”

In January 2020, a Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue for an injunction.

Legal actions to affect climate change by federal and state-level governments have been attempted since the 1990s; one of the first known cases was led by Antonio Oposa, a Philippine lawyer that represented a class-action suit of 43 students against the Philippine government to protect a forest surrounding their village.

Since 2011, Our Children’s Trust has been filing various state and federal lawsuits on behalf of youth, though most of these have been dismissed by courts, as courts generally have not ruled that access to a clean environment is a right that can be litigated against.[8][5][6] Such cases are also generally dismissed as lawsuits cannot be initiated by “generalized grievances”, and require plaintiffs with standing to sue and can demonstrate concrete harm that the government has done, and that the courts can at least partially redress the harm by order of the court.[9] Further, cases cannot be brought to court if they deal with a “political question” which cannot be resolved by actions of Congress and the President.[9]

The “political question” bit should be inapplicable, since this is a company, but the lack of standing to sue for climate change probably does apply.

I assume that this is a crowd-pleaser by the California executive, that they expect it to get tossed out but want the political points.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Pistols

The Pink Pistols are an LGBTQ gun rights organization in the United States and Canada. Their motto is “Pick on someone your own caliber”.[1]

Pink Pistols enrollment up.

Yeah, sorry, but no. That’s not slavery. If you’re present in the country illegally and working illegally and could be returned home at any time, you may not be making as much as you would if you were present legally, but you are not compelled to work. You can always terminate working and return to the country where you are legally supposed to be. If you choose to be in Country A illegally and working there rather than in Country B legally and working (for less) there, that is your choice, and you are not being compelled to work.

Slavery entails someone being compelled to work.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/bf/92/b1/bf92b1629618d2bb2fe193c46db17478.png

Max wants to push alerts on viewers when there is breaking news on CNN.

I could maybe see there being a market for this if the default is not to show them, and there’s an option to receive notification of developments on a specific topic. It’s better than rabidly refreshing a particular topic that you are specially interested in.

Like, say you live in an area with an approaching hurricane, and you wanted to be alerted if there are any new developments on that particular topic.

However, I have a hard time believing that, in the general case, people want alerts popping up.

the world would be an infinitely better place if Twitter died

I think that Twitter is good for footage of emergency-type situations.

All sorts of people who don’t know each other put images or video up, and the community is pretty good at associating it.

Maybe if they make enough money on this, they can expand and develop The Elder Scrolls and the Fallout series in parallel, as well as whatever else they have cooking, instead of working on only one title at a time.

I used to think the Bethesda glitches were cute too until 76 came out.

I enjoyed Fallout 76, but I also ignored it until something like three years after release, at which point it was in a decent state.

It wasn’t Fallout 5, which is what I really wanted, but I got my money’s worth out of it.

Only bug I hit that was kind of obnoxious was the occasional inability to pick up an item from a corpse, where one would have to look away from the corpse and then back. While being a bit immersion-breaking, it was also pretty easy to work around.

Honestly, the whole Fallout series has been pretty buggy, starting with Fallout 1, but still, a good series. Some of it just comes from the complexity of having a bunch of scripts running that can interact in odd ways in a relatively free-form world.

One of my bigger wants for Fallout 5 is easier diagnosing of problems with mods and trying to be more-robust against such problems. Maybe produce more-foolproof API functionality for common script tasks or something.

Bring back Twitter

I’ve never had an account on the service before or after the rebrand, and for the three or so people who I occasionally glance at the accounts of, I normally use nitter.net.

However…was there actually any significant functional difference associated with “X” rebrand?

The most-significant technical shift that I was aware of was many years back, when they increased the tweet character limit.

It sounds like it’s just trusting whatever people plonk in in searches, so you can presumably poison their database with whatever GPA and SAT score you want.

The kind where America is expected to go solve everyone’s problems

Well, the current government in Mali is the result of a military coup. The previous, elected government was friendly with France, and the new, military coup crowd is friendly with Russia.

Then when the coup guys decided that they didn’t need to hold elections when they said they would, they got condemned by the US.

https://www.france24.com/en/africa/20220112-un-security-council-falls-short-of-imposing-new-sanctions-on-mali-after-elections-delay

Russia, China block UN Security Council from supporting new sanctions on Mali

Russia and China blocked the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday from supporting new sanctions on Mali for its military leaders’ decision to delay next month’s elections until 2026, a blow to the restoration of democracy in the troubled West African nation.

So I vaguely imagine that said government probably isn’t asking the US to become involved, because the US’s position is that they should have held elections.

The existence of the Liberian flag registry!

I’d bet that there’s a spoof website out there somewhere, and that’s where it got it from.

EDIT: Also:

poisoning the results

Heh.

It got trained on the Internet, I imagine.

Ehhhh. This isn’t as exciting as you might think for, say, graphics. It’s predicated on the fact that in the case, there’s no human involvement.

Howell found that “courts have uniformly declined to recognize copyright in works created absent any human involvement,” citing cases where copyright protection was denied for celestial beings, a cultivated garden, and a monkey who took a selfie.

“Undoubtedly, we are approaching new frontiers in copyright as artists put AI in their toolbox to be used in the generation of new visual and other artistic works,” the judge wrote.

The rise of generative AI will “prompt challenging questions” about how much human input into an AI program is necessary to qualify for copyright protection, Howell said, as well as how to assess the originality of AI-generated art that comes from systems trained on existing copyrighted works.

But this case “is not nearly so complex” because Thaler admitted in his application that he played no role in creating the work, Howell said.

They’re just gonna nail down the line judicially on how much human involvement is required and then they’ll have a human do that much.

I mean, AI tools are gonna be just increasingly incorporated into tools for humans to use.

It might be significant for something like chatbot output, though.

I don’t see why critical controls like that – if you even want to make them automatic – can’t have manual and automatic modes coupled.

If you lose power steering, you can still steer a vehicle, though you’re going to have to use a lot more muscle.

Yeah, true, but I wasn’t trying so much to find whether there was a lot of alcohol being consumed. My aim was more to see whether Russia was a net importer or exporter, since the claim was that alcohol producers [outside Russia] would be upset with the Russian sanctions, that it would cut the producers off from the Russian market.

However, if Russia were a net exporter and you are an alcohol producer, then it’d be removing more competition than it would be closing off markets; producers would likely benefit.

Ehhh…I dunno. Russia also produces grain, and I bet that means that they produce alcohol.

goes looking

https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=186&queryLevel=location&product=837&year=2021&productClass=HS&target=Product&partner=undefined&startYear=undefined

https://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=186&queryLevel=location&product=837&year=2021&tradeDirection=import&productClass=HS&target=Product&partner=undefined&startYear=undefined

Okay, so based on liquors, in 2021, $212 million in exports, $832 million in imports.

Beer is $141 million in exports, $361 million in imports.

Wine is $11.5 million in exports, $842 million in imports.

So, yeah, you’re right, I guess – unless I’ve missed some sort of category of drink – that Russia’s definitely a net importer of alcoholic beverages.

I imagine that in Sherri Threepenny’s claimed world, it’d be kind of like magnet fishing – you’d wind up covered in metal shavings and little pieces of metal picked up as you traveled through your daily environment.