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evilweasel posted:The key issue I see here is, how easy is it to put roadblocks in front of people trying to pay their court fees to keep people disenfranchised? It does seem to be the sort of thing that might get delegated to some understaffed backwater office where the staff somehow is on vacation for six out of twelve months, paper keeps getting lost, and the backlogs are measured in years. But it is so new that it will have to shake out first.
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Nov 11, 2018 22:11
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Hellblazer187 posted:https://twitter.com/voxdotcom/status/1061997096113463301 Yes and no, one of the stronger indicators for Democratic support (after race, gender, and age) is education level:  So this was a fairly friendly election turnout by that metric.
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Nov 12, 2018 22:55
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Corsi being indicted, not Stone, right? The attempt to redefine "perjury trap" into "asked me something and I lied" is pretty amusing.
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Nov 12, 2018 23:01
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If I had to guess I would wager it is Corsi flat out having claimed to not know someone or not to have talked about something and there being a huge series of emails and documents showing that he was at the center of it. Was he in on the WikiLeaks poo poo too? Seems like he would be someone Stone would call when he wanted to get poo poo spread around.
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Nov 12, 2018 23:31
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friendbot2000 posted:This. I think a primer on how to get involved in state and local politics would be exceptionally valuable for those of us looking to do more. Just as a starting point I would say go into your local government's webpage and look for places to sign up for alerts or news about upcoming public forums and council meetings. Just showing up to some of those is one of the biggest bang for your buck things you can do because usually a dozen or so people (at most) end up representing the view of thousands and the results usually are apparent within anywhere between a month to a year. As an example I learned that our neighborhood association (read - turbo NIMBYs) was going to be visited by a city representative looking into installation of a set of protected walk/bike lane down a rod through the neighborhood. Me and another random person were able to re-pitch the idea in terms that we knew the other members would go for (Slower traffic! Dog walking area! Safe place for parents to teach their kids to ride!) and that pushed it from the NA folks being suspicious of the idea to them committing neighborhood funds for upkeep. The lanes went in a few months later and everyone loves them. Anyway in news news: Bolton is claiming that the recording from the Saudi consulate doesn't directly link to MBS. Of course we have no idea what he would consider as implicating MBS short of MBS's voice being heard on speakerphone directing the operation.
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Nov 13, 2018 14:20
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Chilichimp posted:The OSC doesn't leak so... I'm thinking that's just more bullshit. The OSC doesn't leak but my understanding is that when there isn't a flight risk the person being indicted is generally given a bit of a heads up so that they can get their affairs in order (arrange for bills to be paid and whatnot), get money where it could be used for bail, and have their attorney readily available for when they turn themselves in.
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Nov 13, 2018 15:16
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EwokEntourage posted:Writing absurdly lopsided contract clauses and then watching them actually get adopted is super fun as an attorney I feel like as long as there are strong clawback provisions that termination bit could be okay as it would essentially be "Amazon must give Arlington five days notice to get their bank accounts ready for the piles of money that Amazon will be repaying". The real question I have is if there are absolute guarantees for jobs created and how much they pay. Also there is a question of whether there is the will in Arlington to enforce the guarantees. Here in Austin there wasn't for a long while until suddenly a few years ago the city finally got enough backbone to crack down on downtown construction projects violating the "living wage" terms of the incentive packages. They were either smart or lucky enough to mainly hit the companies after the projects hit the point of no return so it was win-win for the city. Apparently the penalties involved were large enough that one project exited the incentives deal entirely despite the loss of property tax exemptions (iirc repaying and exiting the deal also let them out of their commitment to fund affordable housing). The whole relocation, construction, and incentives industry probably could support its own thread now that I think about it.
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Nov 14, 2018 14:18
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evilweasel posted:At the end of the day the Supreme Court can always do whatever it wants, but assuming this guy is right this is massively embarrassing for the OLC attorney who wrote this, and they'd need to find a new argument about why it was legal instead of a time-warp argument. What makes it extra embarrassing is they already were pulling examples from the loving 1700s and 1800s so the question of "hey which laws were in place at this time?"should have been at the forefront of their minds. Just out of curiosity do they teach attorneys to sketch out a timeline when drafting arguments? We were taught to do so when handling cases with more than two dates because it is very easy to get mixed up. Or did the time split that put us down this alternate hell-universe make that unreliable in this case?
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Nov 14, 2018 18:02
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Captain Invictus posted:Don't forgive and forget after all the horrible things he said about you and all the outright tedcruzian skullduggery. Dammit beto. Here's the news story that resulted. Beto saw Cruz, went over to shake his hand since it was the first time they had seen each other in person since the election, and had some sort of small talk about "moving forward together". Seems to be pretty much the minimum amount of going through the motions and I find it amusing that Beto is as far away from Cruz as possible in that picture and he hasn't retweeted the story (Cruz retweeted it last night). He could have ignored him but someone surely would have noticed they both were there and then the story would be "Beto is a sore loser!" Hell I wouldn't put it past Cruz to try and organize that sort of thing himself to get a last punch in at Beto's reputation.
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Nov 15, 2018 16:16
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The Republicans in Congress repeatedly saying in September and October that we need to look into cutting Medicare and Social Security due to the massive budget deficit was also a pretty huge help in exposing the con. Them saying those things made just as little sense as Bredesen releasing that he would have voted for Kavanaugh. It was like they just couldn't help themselves.
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Nov 15, 2018 19:15
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luxury handset posted:this is one of the most significant obstacles that escalates the problem from "extremely complicated but doable" to "holy poo poo" but it's not like the system is magically going to upgrade itself or get better over time The same issue is present in a lot of other systems across the government too. I believe the systems used to manage federal employee retirement and calculate pension benefits is also absurdly archaic and overburdened to the point that people looking into retiring are encouraged to have several months of living expenses in cash equivalent accounts to ride out the delay. In many cases commercial software solutions just aren't anywhere close to what is needed and the government ends up paying out the rear end for custom stuff. In my opinion we really need a Federal IT Bureau or something that would handle upgrades, judging which commercial solutions are appropriate to adopt, and writing specialized software when needed for various other departments.
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Nov 15, 2018 20:50
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luxury handset posted:it's not that they don't want to change, but that they have to maintain backwards compatibility for increasingly aged systems. the entire process of bureaucracy and consistent record keeping is almost the complete antithesis of startup culture and starting fresh and new with the most current technology/practice every few years. this is a big issue in healthcare too - i used to work for a software company which had to maintain backwards compatibility with IE8 in the year 2016 because a large chunk of our client base were large government/healthcare institutions which straight up told us that if they couldn't use our software in IE8 then they wouldn't use our software. and it's not because doctors love old browsers (they do, but that's another story) but because the need to deal with the complexity of medical records means it's much harder to move fast and adopt new technology I think a lot of it also comes from a tendency to either attempt to immediately eliminate the old systems OR to bolt something else onto the old systems, but almost never to switch over on a rolling basis were the new system is used for new poo poo while keeping the old system up and running in parallel but not interconnected (with the plan to gradually move things over). Part of the reason that I feel that a dedicated agency would be ideal is that we direly need someone who is able to organize decades-long transitions between systems. That someone also needs the power to say "we missed the cutoff for this deployment but that will be considered for the next upgrade" and be able to deliver on that promise to cut down on people seeing every upgrade project as a once-in-a-lifetime now-or-never chance to get some favorite feature which results in every single upgrade from turning into the F-35 disaster.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:21
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ReidRansom posted:There's good money in COBOL since hardly anyone can maintain those old things anymore. There isn't good money in being a COBOL dev directly for the government though because federal GS scale salaries are capped at $164k and it will take you decades to get there, if you can at all in a particular position. That's what, the base + vested stock a few years in at any major SV tech firm? Lord knows what the Fintech firms would be paying. Frabba posted:It took surprisingly long for this to get national coverage. I had to help one of my buddies out with rent when their payment was late last month. I think the article hit a bit on the truth when it quoted someone saying "A lot of veterans are hesitant to raise their hand and ask for help", which has allowed the problem to slip under the media's attention.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:36
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luxury handset posted:https://taskandpurpose.com/152-years-later-va-still-paying-pension-civil-war/ The proper response to all these edge cases is to just have some "office of weird poo poo" in the countryside where GS-5s with paper records and calculators every month adjust the inherited civil war pension for inflation, look up the price of three cows in current USD for the Filipino beneficiaries, and fire off checks to the appropriate parties. Instead it gets tacked into the requirements for the software solution and adds several million dollars per edge case. Of course the problem with such an office is that within twenty seconds of it opening you'd have some GOP rear end in a top hat standing on a soapbox out front screaming at Fox News cameras about government waste. Edit: Of note that we aren't the only country will crazy old benefits we have to manage. England is still paying out an inheritable pension granted in the 1600s and I want to say France has a similar situation. Shifty Pony fucked around with this message at 23:19 on Nov 15, 2018 |
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Nov 15, 2018 23:11
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Xae posted:If you want a good look at the crushing amount of legacy in the DoD or VA read this. What consistently surprises me about the myriad systems in the government is just how incredibly poorly documented they are. Like I get how it happens but it is just so at odds with the documentation fetish that the government usually operates under. The military has a 26 page brownie recipe/specification document. The guide for how my job works is over 2000 pages. Yet there's absolutely nothing known about the format many of these systems use to store data and pass it along to the next system. The whole shebang needs a ground up redesign because we have no loving clue what is even there. To take the strained metaphor at the end of that article further the people in charge of things are busy looking for some talented conductor to make everything play in tune, but we don't even know what instruments the orchestra has, much less their condition, so all that anyone can manage is a long drawn out fart noise.
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Nov 16, 2018 04:30
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Theoretically with this "he sanctioned the extrajudicial killing" finding the US could invoke the Global Magnitsky Act, seize every penny of MBS's assets in the US, and ban all US companies and subsidiaries from doing business with him or his associates (which in effect would cover pretty much the KSA). I mean we won't, but drat that's a serious conclusion for the CIA to reach.
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Nov 17, 2018 02:00
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Discendo Vox posted:Wapo: Ivanka Trump used a personal email account to send hundreds of emails about government business last year I know that the reason I want it is mostly revenge for the butter-emails dog and pony show, but I so hope that the Democratic house committees find the time to drag her rear end in for a full day of under-oath testimony.
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Nov 20, 2018 13:29
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tetrapyloctomy posted:Especially if they pull as many questions as possible verbatim for maximum gently caress-you-ism. Oh definitely. As a bit of extra schadenfreude consider that in response to the unending parade of Judicial Watch style lawsuits and records requests connected to the Hillary email server rules/regulations were implemented that removed every ounce of ambiguity and room for avoidance around email retention. If Ivanka gets in meaningful trouble for this it will be as a near-direct result of the GOP emails obsession.
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Nov 20, 2018 14:52
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Hunt11 posted:So we go after his precious little daughter to make it quite clear that the democrats aren't loving around anymore. Also the nepotism Trump has shown is one of the more egregious offenses and something that has the potential to do extreme damage to the country if allowed to take root. We know this because it has happened before, both in the US and in countless other countries. Everything about Ivanka, Kushner, Eric, and Jr's interactions with the White House needs to be scrutinized.
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Nov 20, 2018 15:41
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Prooooobably not a good thing to have a judge speculating on your filing being sanctionable: https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/status/1064995103666814977 Seems like the judge is completely through with the Gov's attempt to delay poo poo in the hopes that they can drag it out past the point of no return when all the forms are finalized and printed.
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Nov 20, 2018 22:42
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axeil posted:https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1065006131364405248 I wouldn't bet against it at least. He apparently has a habit of lying (either directly or by omission) to his attorneys which means thy might not have been able to properly fact check his responses.
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Nov 20, 2018 23:26
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Just a reminder that NY is weird and a "Supreme Court" is basically a county-level court and there are two state court levels above them for this case to be appealed to. Not that they will be likely to have any luck there.
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Nov 23, 2018 19:20
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quote:Facebook, which has lost more than $100bn in value since March when the Observer exposed how Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from 87m US users, faces another potential PR crisis. It is believed the documents will lay out how user data decisions were made in the years before the Cambridge Analytica breach, including what Zuckerberg and senior executives knew. Amicus brief filed in US v. Microsoft on Jan 18th 2018, joined by Facebook, Inc quote:Every nation founded on democratic principles has a strong and legitimate interest in ensuring that the security and privacy of the people it is charged with protecting are not improperly or unduly invaded. Failure to accommodate that legitimate sovereign interest threatens to provoke dangerous reciprocation by foreign governments—at great potential cost to U.S. citizens and service providers. 
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Nov 25, 2018 01:51
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UCS Hellmaker posted:can you give a bit more context? I get the first quote a bit but the second is way over my head Facebook joined a brief in a case where the US government was trying to force Microsoft to hand over data held in an overseas server farm because. In that brief there is a lot of stuff about the law in question but the section I quoted from can be summarized as "don't flippantly gently caress with the privacy rights of the citizens of other countries because their governments take that poo poo extremely seriously, are justified in doing so, and will retaliate hard". I just found it amusing that Facebook signed onto something that rightfully identified messing with the privacy of foreign citizens as a dangerous rake on the ground only to stomp on that rake a few months later.
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Nov 25, 2018 05:46
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CmdrRiker posted:I’m unsure if the strictly simplistic color scheme is communicating partisanship or the anticipation of forthcoming blood soaked trees of their economic and political enemies. It’s definitely not Christmas. It reminds me of a fashion or magazine photography set to be honest. Something that will look generically Christmas-y when out of focus in the background of a photo and which won't have enough complicated color to clash with and draw the attention from whatever is being photographed. I can easily envision those rooms as the setting for "attractive woman gasps at jewelry box hanging on tree as man leans back in his chair with his steaming beverage and a knowing smirk". Which might be the goal - there are a lot of photos taken of people talking with each other in the White House so stuff should be kept photograph friendly.
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Nov 26, 2018 22:52
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evilweasel posted:That’s what they are trying to do but appeals courts will not give them the stay they’re asking for to do it, at least not before the trial court renders a verdict. Or maybe the 17th time will be the charm. I have to imagine that the courts would be extraordinarily hostile to the argument that "welp we can't re-print the forms!" considering that the judge has accused the DoC of trying to get the case delayed to the point that they could make such a claim and the DoC has claimed that they are in no way trying to do that.
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Nov 27, 2018 15:03
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axeil posted:Government-owned social media companies freak me out even more than privately-owned ones. Imagine what Trump could do if he had access to everything Facebook has. Oddly enough a publicity owned Facebook would probably annoy the surveillance state to no end because our absurd laws let them buy data from commercial providers that they would need a warrant to get from the IRS or USPS. The government is also required to treat personally identifiable information with much more care than the private sector (where the rules are basically "lol whatever!" unless the industry has screwed up in the past to the point that other regulations are in place). It would still be an absolute dystopian disaster though.
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Nov 27, 2018 21:27
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:We're getting deeper into the Narcissist's Prayer, I see. Now we need to bow and scrape and thank Little Donny Jesus for running for President and "saving" us. The "you deserved it" part will be him ranting about how if the US wasn't so hostile to business (with its rules against money laundering) he wouldn't have needed to look to Russia to get deals done. That tweet is basically an admission, I'd love to know who actually composed it.
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Nov 30, 2018 14:10
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I don't care how he arrived at that decision (which I suspect involved a lot of yelling), all I care about is that he arrived at it. I'm a bit shocked that Stormy has kept with him after the billing poo poo and him apparently going with that defamation filing without her explicit ok.
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Dec 4, 2018 18:13
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Chilichimp posted:a week or so old, but Totally Unrelated Russian banks have also recently been warning other banks to develop alternative payment settlement routes in case they get disconnected from the SWIFT network. It could be completely unrelated, but they also might be worried that something like Butina or the Brexit Leave investigation exposing the use of those banks to conduct political money laundering.
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Dec 11, 2018 16:11
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Roll Fizzlebeef posted:I am not an expert but I would expect that robo cars will be better at detecting all varieties of pedestrians than human drivers despite this issue because they have additional sensors like lidar and don't depend solely on vision like we do. They lack the human ability to make inferences though. The stereotypical example is a person can see a ball bounce across the street or a parent scrambling to get up while yelling and preemptively slow down because they know a kid is probably about to do something really dumb. The car won't know until the kid actually jumps out from behind a parked car. These systems are best used as supplements to a human driver, where they perform fantastically. The human uses their judgement to slow the car a bit when they see the ball and when the kid jumps out the car systems brake faster and harder than any human ever could. Neither works as well as the combination.
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Mar 6, 2019 16:18
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I have definitely noticed an increase in chicken breasts which have white striping between muscle fibers, have areas which fall apart when you do anything to them, or which are disgustingly textured while a breast cooked immediately next to it with same internal temperature is fine. I figured the first was just an appearance thing and the second was due to rough handling in the supply line, but the toughness has straight up ruined several meals I've made and led me to switch to overpriced "organic" breasts which didn't have the problem. I'm sure they will figure out a solution quickly.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:29
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Herstory Begins Now posted:There's generally an awareness among people who do illegal things of what things are actually enforced (and who they are normally enforced upon), this appears to be the FBI deciding to enforce some stuff that normally is completely, 100% unenforced. Apparently the FBI wasn't even looking for this sort of thing but stumbled across it in the course of another investigation. I imagine the entire field office got into a fight over who got to take the easy case.
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Mar 12, 2019 22:12
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Charlz Guybon posted:Boeing is going to be hammered by lawsuits The real mystery is why the gently caress the FAA hasn't grounded the drat thing yet. Even Ted Cruz is calling for an investigation. boeing practically bribed Trump and an ex executive is running the FAA
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Mar 13, 2019 04:23
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