When Jean-Marine Le Pen (founder of French far-right political party) died, French people went out into the public squares dancing, waving French flags, popping champagne, and loudly cheering “the racist is dead!”.

I have already procured a bottle of what here can legally only be called sparkling wine, and I’m ready to pop it any day now.

Students view doing that as basically the same amount of work as writing the paper yourself

Aye that’s exactly the same thing that I said

Just another 1.21 jigawatts of electricity, bro. If we get this new coal plant up and running, it’ll be enough.

This is why invisible watermarking of AI-generated content is likely to be so effective. Even primitive watermarks like file metadata. It’s not hard for anyone with technical knowledge to remove, but the thing with AI-generated content is that anyone who dishonestly uses it when they are not supposed to is probably also too lazy to go through the motions of removing the watermarking.

There are eight genders: null, undefined, false, NaN, 0, “0”, {}, and “”.

I think most people already know that flags at half staff is worthless virtue-signalling

Kirk was a complete scumbag, but flags definitely flew at half-staff for school shootings in the past.

Trump ordered flags at half-staff for Minneapolis

Biden ordered flags at half-staff for Allen, Texas

Also, since this took place at a university, this technically counts as a school shooting. A feverent right-wing agitator dies at a school shooting. Ironic.

Isn’t it just strange that a right-wing agitator meets his end… by being shot in a school shooting??

Unrelated quote:

I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

—Clarence Darrow, civil rights lawyer

Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.

Prior to Discord, there was IRC.

There are already lots of viable strategies for getting rid of brine, they are just more expensive than the naïve approach of having a big pipe on the shore spewing it into the ocean. Diluting it with seawater seems to be the most viable right now.

I wonder if something like a 10 km underwater pipe with small holes in it that only let out a little bit of brine at a time would work. Might be a hassle to lay, at least to start, but I think that once it is in place it could operate without maintenance for decades. And piping is not really that expensive. Perhaps there are already researchers studying it, or it has been proven to not work. It seems like such an obvious idea.

I’m going to make a prediction if they are going to release a list of some sort with names on it:

1. They will redact names by using black highlight using computer software and then destroying the underlying text information by printing it out and scanning it, or something similar. This would prevent the most obvious form of getting around the redaction (which is extracting text information from underneath the highlight).
2. They will make the rookie mistake of using a proportional font like Times New Roman for the names, which is a font wherein each letter has a different length, instead of a monospace font like this one where all characters are the same width.
3. An investigative journalist will notice that one of the redacted names is exactly the same length as “DONALD JOHN TRUMP” typed in the document’s font, and then applied black highlight over it.

And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, [writing] will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

—a story told by Socrates, according to his student Plato

The tariffs will go away, but the companies have realised that you’re okay with paying $10 for something that used to cost $8 anyway so you’ll be paying $10 from now on

I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think there needs to be an enhancement of some sort that recognises an offence, even if minor, was motivated by hate.

Right now, I associate the words “hate crime” with serious criminal behaviour that results in bodily harm or threats to personal safety or destruction of large amounts of property. I think it might need to stay that way to avoid watering down the term.

Rather, there should probably be a new category called something like “hateful anti-social behaviour” to refer to minor transgressions like stealing the LGBTQ books or things like calling all the LGBTQ people you encounter slurs and other forms of harassment.

I’m not sure why you took them literally. They’re making a tongue-in-cheek statement about how Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is able to manipulate the American president seemingly with ease and impunity.

tl;dr “hate crime” has a legal definition and these actions don’t meet that definition. The definition should probably be updated to include this kind of antisocial behaviour.

Pasting an excerpt from my earlier comment:

“Hate crime” is a specific legal term. While unfortunate, the parent commenter is right; stealing books even when motivated by hate is not legally considered a hate crime.

Under federal law, only actions leading to bodily injury or attempts thereof can qualify as hate crimes.

Under Kentucky law (KRS 532.031), criminal mischief is only considered a hate crime if the amount of damage exceeds $500. While the total cost might exceed that, this is counted on a per-offender basis.

“Hate crime” is a specific legal term. While unfortunate, the parent commenter is right; stealing books even when motivated by hate is not legally considered a hate crime.

Under federal law, only actions leading to bodily injury or attempts thereof can qualify as hate crimes.

Under Kentucky law (KRS 532.031), criminal mischief is only considered a hate crime if the amount of damage exceeds $500. While the total cost might exceed that, this is counted on a per-offender basis.

Don’t get me wrong, it definitely should be considered a hate crime and the legislature should change the law to define this action as a hate crime (even if it is a relatively minor one), but under the current law, it isn’t. It’s merely criminal mischief in the second degree.

If I were a prosecutor I would be trying to throw the book at these morons though.

It gives the average person more purchasing power but it also opens up new supply by opening the foreclosure auctions to the average person. The increased demand I argue is partially or wholly counteracted by pushing out the house flippers from the foreclosure markets; those people are generally only interested in buying properties at severely under market prices at foreclosure auctions or similar sales. Essentially, I am saying that the entire “flipper” business model should be destroyed as it does not provide sufficient value to the taxpayer to offset its negative effect on the market and this policy could do severe damage to that sector.

Quadratic property tax is a combination of the “quadratic” nature of quadratic voting and, of course, taxation. I made this term up hoping people would know what I was talking about but it turned out to not be as obvious as I initially thought.

Essentially, the taxation scheme takes into account the number of lots owned by a person in addition to the value per lot. Consider the following sample scheme:

The amount of tax due on any given property is calculated according to the following formula: r×(1 + Np)²×V, where N is the number of lots owned by the taxpayer beyond the first and V is the value of the lot. The variables r and p are determined by the local taxing authority which correspond to tax rate (higher = more tax per unit of money) and the penalty for owning excessive numbers of lots (higher = greater penalty for owning multiple lots).

If a local taxing authority selects values r = 0.002 and p = 0.05, the tax due for a lot worth 100 units of money would be as follows:

• An individual or family who owns only that lot pays 0.002 × (1+0×0.05)²×100 = 0.2 units of money per year.
• A small individual landlord who owns this property and 2 others would pay 0.002 × (1+2×0.05)²×100 = 0.242 units of money per year.
• A corporation who owns this property and 10 others would pay 0.002 × (1+10×0.05)²×100 = 0.45 units of money per year, which is more than double the individual family
• A huge real estate conglomerate who owns this property and 100 others would pay 0.002 × (1+100×0.05)²×100 = 7.2 units, which is so high that it probably would not be profitable to even own this property.

It is “quadratic” because the tax rate scales with the square of the number of previous lots owned.

Coupled with counting rules that ignore subsidiary corporate entities for the purpose of determining ownership, finely-tuning values of r and p will discourage corporate ownership of housing without punishing individual homeowners or small-time landlords.

While this strategy has not been tried in real life to my knowledge, interestingly, some Minecraft servers have implemented a similar scheme to prevent hoarding of desirable lots in the overworld to varying degrees of success, mostly depending on whether those in charge admit any loopholes for privileged players to exploit.