NOPE: Are Brand-New Tesla Cybertrucks Rusting in the Rain? “It’s the sort of twist that makes for a compelling schadenfreude read. And yet, the culprit may not be suspect Tesla steel at all. Instead, maybe we can blame trains.”
This is what comedy looks like in 2024, people. It's angry, it's bitter, and it's loaded with hate for conservatives. People actually laugh at these "jokes" even though they're just angry rants about how bad conservatives are.
Reddit will let “an unnamed large AI company” have access to its user-generated content platform in a new licensing deal, according to Bloomberg yesterday. The deal, “worth about $60 million on an annualized basis,” the outlet writes, could still change as the company’s plans to go public are still in the works.
Until recently, most AI companies trained their data on the open web without seeking permission. But that’s proven to be legally questionable, leading companies to try to get data on firmer footing. It’s not known what company Reddit made the deal with, but it’s quite a bit more than the $5 million annual deal OpenAI has reportedly been offering news publishers for their data. Apple has also been seeking multi-year deals with...
At this point, many of us who follow these numbers have become accustomed to the routine: the BLS reports "blowout" jobs numbers each month, and the legacy media dutifully reports that the jobs growth is astoundingly good, proving all is well in the economy.
The media rarely reports on any other economic indicators with nearly as much enthusiasm. The monthly jobs report—well, one specific statistic within it—has become something of a proxy for the state of the economy overall.
There are a couple of problems with this approach, of course. The first is that the jobs numbers—a trailing indicator of economic growth (or decline) are repeatedly contradicted by at least half a dozen other economic indicators. Many of these other indicators are, unlike jobs numbers, leading indicators, and are more useful if we're actually looking for some hints at what is in store.
But, there's also the problem that the jobs report itself isn't so impressive once we look beyond the headline establishment survey jobs data.
The first fly in the ointment of this "shockingly good jobs report" is the results we see from the household survey. The household survey is a survey of actual people who are asked if they are employed. The establishment survey, on the other hand, is a survey only of large employers and the total number of jobs—i.e., not job holders.
So, if we look at the household survey, we find that there were actually job losses in January. While the establishment survey showed an increase of a whopping 353,000 jobs, the household survey showed a loss of 31,000 employed persons. Moreover, January was the second month in a row for job losses in the household survey. In December, the report showed a loss of 683,000 employed persons. That was the biggest loss since the covid collapse.
How does this square with the huge jobs blowouts in the establishment survey? Part of it can be explained by the fact that the establishment survey does not distinguish between full-time and part-time workers or jobs. It's entirely possible that there are more jobs being added in the economy—it's just that many of them are going to people holding multiple jobs, and many of those jobs are part time. So, if the economy is filling up with fewer people holding two or more part time jobs, that registers as "blowout" jobs growth. The reality, however, is that fewer people are employed.
Moreover, the household survey also tells us that job growth among the employed was mostly driven by part-time jobs in January. According to the survey, growth in part-time jobs totaled 96,000 while full-time job growth went negative, with a loss of 63,000.
Meanwhile, government jobs in January totaled more than 20 percent of all new year-over-year job growth. Outside of covid, we haven't seen those sorts of numbers since late 2007 as the economy was nearing recession.
And then there is the growth rate of temp jobs. That remained in negative territory last month for the fifteenth month in a row. As the graph shows, drops in temp jobs over the past thirty years has been a clear indicator of an approaching recession.
Finally, we can look at real wage growth. Legacy media sources were careful to crow about how January showed real growth in average earnings. Specifically, average earnings (adjusted to the CPI) increased 1.7 percent, year over year. In a vacuum, that might be a great number. However, workers are still recovering from a 25-month period of falling real average earnings. That meant earnings on average in 2022 were below 2019 earnings, and working only started to come out of that hole in 2023. Indeed, if we look at real earnings growth since February 2020—the last month before the covid lockdowns—we find that earning increased a mere 1.53 percent—or 51 cents—over that 47-month period. During that same time, home prices increased 46 percent (according to Fannie and Freddie). It's easy to see why housing affordable is now at some of the worst levels we've seen in decades.
In spite of all this, however, American consumers of television news are fed a steady diet of good news about the economy in which each month brings a new "shockingly good" or "robust" jobs report. Even more questionable is the practice of treating the jobs report as if it's an index for the overall economy. However, the jobs report is only something to brag about if one's definition of a strong jobs economy is one in which fewer people have jobs, full-time jobs are disappearing, and government jobs are a growing component of overall job growth.
When we view these numbers in light of declining manufacturing, more bankruptcies, recessionary leading indicators, and negative net savings, we might suspect that the economy is headed for some turbulence ahead.
The Federal Reserve, however, has encouraged the laser-like focus on current jobs data because the FOMC has claimed to be basing much of its economic planning on jobs growth. Approximately every month, for example, Jerome Powell addresses the press with a prepared statement about the Fed's policy being this or that while using jobs numbers to justify its current policy. At least, that is the public face the Fed puts on. The Fed wants the public to believe the Fed is "data driven" and is fine-tuning—another term for centrally planning—the economy based on fine detective work from Fed economists. That's the story they tell. The reality is something different, and the Fed is making its decisions based on political expediency. Polls have shown, however, that the average voter tends to base his opinion of the economy on the jobs situation "right now." So, lo and behold, the Fed says it is doing the same.
The economy doesn't work that way, though, and if we want to understand what direction the economy is heading in, we have to rely on sound theory rather than what some Federal bean counters say happened last month.
2020 popped our cherry. I doubt its new. Men lie cheat steal to get what they want measured against the chance of getting caught. That said, what us election people want is VISIBILITY, not paper systems.....
At least six major technology companies are planning to sign an agreement this week that would guide how they try to put a stop to the use of artificial intelligence tools to disrupt democratic elections.
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Using Google has started to feel worse over the last few years, as results are seemingly taken over by SEO'd content, AI-generated results, and websites with tons of affiliate links and ads. As a response to this state of affairs, a single coder has launched a new, open-source search engine in part as a response to internet’s overwhelmingly corporatized and homogenous search ecosystem. The new search engine, called Stract, is running on a server in the basement of its developer’s office, is highly customizable and, based on feedback from users in the project’s Discord, is rapidly improving.
The project grew out of founder Mikkel Denker’s master’s thesis at the Technical University of Denmark, which was focused on helping people search their own files and documents, he told me in an online chat. He is set to finish that master's next week and will then pivot his attention to Stract fulltime.
“Most of our searches go through the same handful of entities (Google, Bing, Yandex),” Denker told me. “Even other search engines such as DuckDuckGo use Bing for their results. I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build.”
i am convinced 12 year old gender changing is just tom-boy period of women. Just give it a few years and it will sort itself out.
CORRECTION, Feb. 13, 2024: Genesse Ivonne Moreno, who was shot to death during her attack at the Lakewood Church in Houston on Sunday, was a woman who previously used a […]
ed sheeran says there are no new-cords, aka everything sounds like everything else.
Kanye West seems to make enemies as easily as flipping on a light switch these days, and now it appears that we can mark “Crazy Train” singer Ozzy Osbourne as […]
Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that President Joe Biden does not deserve pop star Taylor Swift’s endorsement. Last month, a report in The New York Times suggested that Biden […]
On a Friday night in July 2018, Des Moines police officers Ryan Steinkamp and Brian Minnehan saw Domeco Fugenschuh, a 22-year-old black man, driving west on Hickman Road. Steinkamp and Minnehan, both white, were assigned to a "special enforcement team" focused on illegal guns, drugs, and gang activity. They had no reason to believe Fugenschuh was involved with any of that, but they decided to follow him anyway because he "sat up slightly" and "turned his head to stare at the officers" as he passed them.
After the cops followed Fugenschuh for several blocks, he expressed his irritation at the unjustified attention by giving them the finger. Steinkamp and Minnehan did not like that, so they continued following Fugenschuh and pulled him over for an invented traffic violation. During the stop, the officers handcuffed Fugenschuh, roughed him up, searched his car, and arrested him for the alleged traffic infraction. They also charged him with marijuana possession after the car search turned up a bit of pot and a portable phone charger that they mistakenly thought was a digital scale.
When Fugenschuh sued Steinkamp and Minnehan for a litany of constitutional violations, they argued that they were shielded by qualified immunity, which bars federal civil rights claims against government officials unless their alleged misconduct violated "clearly established" law. Last Saturday, U.S. Chief Magistrate Judge Helen C. Adams rejected that defense, ruling that a jury should hear Fugenschuh's allegations because it might reasonably conclude that Steinkamp and Minnehan ignored constraints that should be familiar to every police officer in the country.
The decision was a small victory for civil liberties, and the abuses that Fugenschuh suffered pale beside the sort of outrageouspoliceconduct that tends to attract national attention. But this run-of-the-mill case nicely illustrates the wide discretion that the Supreme Court has given police officers to harass motorists for no good reason—leeway that cops nevertheless manage to exceed on a regular basis.
The facts of the traffic stop are mostly undisputed, conceded by the officers and/or verified by dash and body camera footage. Steinkamp and Minnehan pulled Fugenschuh over after he stopped at a red light, signaled a right turn, and turned onto 30th Street. When Steinkamp approached Fugenschuh's car, he initially refused to explain the justification for the stop. Instead he ordered Fugenschuh out of the car and handcuffed him.
After Fugenschuh "asked numerous times why he was stopped," Steinkamp claimed Fugenschuh had "cut off" a car that was moving north on 30th Street, as evidenced by the fact that the driver had applied his brakes. Fugenschuh disputed that account, which apparently irked Steinkamp, who "proceeded to bend Fugenschuh over the hood of the patrol car," "pull his handcuffed arms up above his body," and push his face into the hood of the car.
While frisking Fugenschuh, Steinkamp asked if he had insurance, at which point Fugenschuh began cursing at the cops. "You're going to jail now," Steinkamp responded.
Steinkamp "pulled Fugenschuh off the hood of the patrol car and walked him to the door of the patrol car as Fugenschuh continued to curse at the officers," Adams notes. "Minnehan opened the patrol car door and told Fugenschuh to 'have a seat.' Less than one second after Minnehan told Fugenschuh to have a seat, Steinkamp shoved Fugenschuh into the back of the patrol car, telling him to 'get in the car.' Fugenschuh fell, hitting his head on the patrol car and landing on his handcuffed wrists. Steinkamp's body-worn camera footage shows Fugenschuh complaining of pain and the officers ordering Fugenschuh to 'get up' and 'sit in the car' repeatedly to which Fugenschuh responded, 'give me a second' and 'I can't.' Fugenschuh continued to make noises of discomfort while sitting in the patrol car with his legs out of the vehicle. The officers continued to ask Fugenschuh to 'get in the car' until Fugenschuh pulled his feet into the patrol car."
Inside the patrol car, Steinkamp told Fugenschuh, "We don't care about this petty crap. We don't deal with that crap, but when you act the way you acted from the get-go, when we were sitting there and you looked at us, like, real hard and start[ed] flipping us off…" Steinkamp evidently did not finish the thought, perhaps because he realized that flipping cops off, arguing with them, and speaking harshly to them are not crimes. Perhaps he also realized (although this might be giving him too much credit) that admitting he acted out of personal pique would support a claim that he retaliated against Fugenschuh for constitutionally protected speech.
At this point, Minnehan searched Fugenschuh's car. According to Fugenschuh's original complaint, which he filed in state court before the case was transferred to federal court in July 2020, the cops "falsely alleged that they smelled marijuana to justify the search."
Although the officers' misidentification of Fugenschuh's phone charger as a digital scale suggests they initially thought they had nabbed a pot dealer, he was charged only with possession. According to Fugenschuh's complaint, Minnehan "specifically noted that he doesn't usually take people to jail for marijuana possession." Prosecutors dropped that charge in October 2018.
As for the purported traffic offense, the cops initially charged Fugenschuh with violating Section 321.311 of the Iowa Code, which says "the approach for a right turn and right turn shall be made as close as practical to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway." During Fugenschuh's trial, the prosecutor, after realizing that provision did not fit the conduct that Steinkamp and Minnehan supposedly observed, "amended the initial charge." The prosecutor changed the charge to a violation of Section 321.322(1), which says a driver making a turn "shall yield the right-of-way to any vehicle on the intersecting roadway which has entered the intersection or which is approaching so closely as to constitute an immediate hazard during the time the driver is moving across or within the intersection."
Fugenschuh, who was representing himself, wanted to present video of the stop, which he said would show he was not guilty of that charge. But he "was informed that because the prosecution had not presented the video as evidence, the video was unavailable." After Fugenschuh was convicted, he got access to the video, which he used to challenge his conviction.
During the post-conviction trial, Minnehan "testified he was unaware what the initial charge under Iowa Code § 321.311 criminalized." Steinkamp conceded that "Fugenschuh had not violated" that provision. And after viewing the video, a judge concluded that Fugenschuh was not guilty of the substitute charge either.
"The video demonstrates there was no actual danger or near collision or immediate hazard," the judge said. "Fugenschuh was out of the intersection before the Second Car entered it and the cars were never very close to each other, demonstrating the Second Car was not 'approaching so closely as to constitute an immediate hazard during the time [Fugenschuh] was moving across or within the intersection.'"
To sum up, the evidence suggests that Steinkamp and Minnehan followed Fugenschuh for no good reason, decided to pull him over because they got the finger, and manufactured an excuse to do that based on a claim that was contradicted by the video footage. They immediately ordered him out of the car and handcuffed him, which is not standard procedure for a routine traffic violation (even a real one), and had already decided to arrest him because of his attitude before they found the pot that led to the possession charge. And that search was based on an unverifiable claim about what the officers' noses supposedly detected.
According to Fugenschuh, Minnehan admitted that he would not typically take someone into custody for low-level marijuana possession, let alone a minor traffic violation. Steinkamp's recorded comments and his rough treatment of Fugenschuh, who was handcuffed and not offering any physical resistance or posing any plausible threat, reinforce the impression that the officer lost his temper because he perceived Fugenschuh as disrespecting his authority.
This evidence, Adams concluded, made several of Fugenschuh's claims plausible. He will be allowed to argue that Steinkamp and Minnehan violated his Fourth Amendment rights when they "unreasonably seized him by detaining him for a non-existent turning violation"; that Steinkamp used excessive force, another Fourth Amendment violation, when he "shoved Fugenschuh onto the hood of the car and pushed Fugenschuh after Minnehan had commanded Fugenschuh to get into the patrol car"; and that the same actions qualified as assault and battery under Iowa law. Adams also allowed Fugenschuh to pursue a First Amendment claim: that Steinkamp and Minnehan punished him for constitutionally protected speech.
Fugenschuh is by no means guaranteed victory on any of these claims. Adams found that they hinge on "disputed questions of material fact" and noted evidence that the officers might cite to rebut them. But based on the existing record, it certainly looks like Steinkamp and Minnehan crossed several legal lines.
Although the Supreme Court drew those lines, its decisions also have encouraged the sort of behavior described in Fugenschuh's lawsuit. His complaint alleges that Des Moines police officers "pretextually stop motorists on a regular basis." According to the Supreme Court's 1996 ruling in Whren v. United States, there is nothing unconstitutional about that: Police may stop a driver whenever they "have probable cause to believe that a traffic violation has occurred," even when the true motive is finding evidence of an unrelated crime.
Because state traffic codes include myriad rules governing the maintenance and operation of motor vehicles, many of which are picayune, arbitrary, obscure, or ambiguous, that rule allows cops to stop pretty much any car they want. And they have a strong motive to use that power. Pretextual traffic stops not only allow cops to seize contraband and make arrests; they present an opportunity to commit roadside robbery by seizing money under civil forfeiture laws. Since that money is used to pad police budgets, cops have a financial incentive to stop first and ask questions later.
Police officers, of course, are not supposed to invent traffic violations out of whole cloth. But when a cop claims someone committed a traffic violation, his word will generally prevail unless there is independent evidence that contradicts it. That is what happened in this case, until Fugenschuh managed to obtain the video that persuaded a judge he had not done what Steinkamp and Minnehan claimed.
Even when a driver actually commits a minor traffic violation (which, again, is hard to avoid, given how many rules there are to break), why would a cop order him out of his car and handcuff him? In this case, it's pretty clear why: Steinkamp and Minnehan were mad because Fugenschuh "started flipping us off," even though courts have held that such gestures are constitutionally protected. But Steinkamp and Minnehan did not need any particular reason. In the 1977 case Pennsylvania v. Mimms, the Supreme Court said cops may order legally detained motorists out of their cars at will, based on general concerns about officer safety. Two decades later, the Court extended that rule from drivers to passengers in Maryland v. Wilson. Once Steinkamp and Minnehan had taken Fugenschuh into custody, frisking him also was legally authorized based on the same general concerns.
Why was Fugenschuh arrested? Again, we know why, based on Steinkamp's own words. But Steinkamp had the power to punish Fugenschuh for his disrespect because the Supreme Court has approved custodial arrests for minor traffic offenses, even when they are not punishable by jail.
What about the car search? Since 1925, the Supreme Court has recognized a "vehicle exception" to the Fourth Amendment's general search warrant requirement. The rationale in that case, Carroll v. United States, was that police who suspect a vehicle contains contraband cannot reasonably be expected to obtain a warrant, given that the vehicle could easily be moved during the time that would take. Although the availability of electronic warrants undermines that rationale, we are stuck with a rule that was inspired by the challenges of enforcing alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.
Officially, police still need probable cause to search a vehicle. But probable cause is easily manufactured in this context. As this case illustrates, the purported odor of marijuana, whether real, imagined, or invented, suffices—at least in jurisdictions where that drug remains illegal. A purported "alert" by a drug-sniffing dog, whether real, imagined, or invented, likewise will do the trick. So in practice, police not only have the power to stop any car they want; they also have the power to search it.
None of this means that what Steinkamp and Minnehan did in this particular situation was legal. To the contrary, Adams found credible evidence that it was not. But the existing rules invite fudging, which in many cases won't be officially recognized because the arrestee does not file a lawsuit or successfully challenge a conviction. When the Supreme Court gives cops a mile, they are bound to take an extra inch.
sad to say, but i get all my news from rss. No twitter, no facebook, no insta, nada.
Social networks and RSS. We really should be on the case for all social media networks to support RSS feeds outbound at least (inbound nice too). And also add features to make interop really useful. I've enumerated them here. I am making software that builds on this feature in social networks. And yes we do have some examples of that, thinking of WordPress and competitors. I think they are perfectly good bases for social networks.
nvr liked stephanopolis after/during clinton. Tried to retool himself to the middle. Never fooled me. Cant stand the guy
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos has made a career out of proving conservatives are right about the establishment media. The former Clinton White House adviser has spent almost three decades as […]
Companies that mandate a return to office (RTO) for their workers fare no better than companies that do not — and, in fact, forcing people to give up remote work hurts employee well-being and retention, new studies found.
A Gartner survey of 2,080 knowledge worker employees released today measured the impact of mandated requirements on employee outcomes among various employee categories. The result: On average, when companies force workers back to the office, their intent to stay with the organization declined by 8%.
Among high-performing employees, their desire to stay dropped by 16%. And among millennials and women, plans to stay in their current role declined by 10% and 11%, respectively.
‘Allowing all of them at the same time is an existential threat to our system of self-government,’ Hemingway cautioned.
