Enlarge / Oclean's X Ultra, released in July, has optional Wi-Fi connectivity. (credit: Oclean)
One of the most unlikely passengers on the AI gadgets hype train is the toothbrush. With claims of using advanced algorithms and companion apps to help you brush your teeth better, toothbrushes have become a tech product for some brands.
So-called "AI toothbrushes" have become more common since debuting in 2017. Numerous brands now market AI capabilities for toothbrushes with three-figure price tags. But there's limited scientific evidence that AI algorithms help oral health, and companies are becoming more interested in using tech-laden toothbrushes to source user data.
AI toothbrushes
Kolibree was the first company to announce a "toothbrush with artificial intelligence." The French company debuted its Ara brush at CES 2017, with founder and CEO Thomas Serval saying, "Patented deep learning algorithms are embedded directly inside the toothbrush on a low-power processor. Raw data from the sensors runs through the processor, enabling the system to learn your habits and refine accuracy the more it’s used."
Good luck, but it may take someone this big to start chipping away at those "we have no liability" clauses in business-essential SAAS contracts.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Delta Air Lines has hired prominent attorney David Boies to seek damages from CrowdStrike and Microsoft following an outage this month that caused millions of computers to crash, leading to thousands of flight cancellations. CrowdStrike shares fell as much as 5% in extended trading on Monday after CNBC's Phil Lebeau reported on Delta's hiring of Boies, chairman of Boies Schiller Flexner. Microsoft was little changed. [...] While no suit has been filed, Delta plans to seek compensation from Microsoft and CrowdStrike, Lebeau reported. The outages cost Delta an estimated $350 million to $500 million. Delta is dealing with over 176,000 refund or reimbursement requests after almost 7,000 flights were canceled.
Boies is known for representing the U.S. government in its landmark antitrust case against Microsoft and for helping win a decision that overturned California's ban on gay marriage. He also worked with Harvey Weinstein, the imprisoned former Hollywood mogul, and Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who is currently serving a prison sentence for defrauding investors. Insurance startup Parametrix estimated that the CrowdStrike incident resulted in a total loss of $5.4 billion for Fortune 500 companies, not including Microsoft.
And Trump going full Klan at the NABJ convention can't help his chances
ATLANTA — When Joe Biden last left this city after his abysmal debate performance, Democrats felt hopeless about their chances in Georgia — and just about everywhere else.
Kamala Harris’s Tuesday rally at the Georgia State Convocation Center — a boisterous affair that included line dancing, a “hotties for Harris” banner and a performance by rapper Megan Thee Stallion — left them optimistic, but still far from certain about both.
The vice president’s appeal to voters of color and younger voters, combined with a recent pivotto the center that could persuade suburbanites and a general new-candidate shine, has created an opening in Georgia and other Sun Belt states that seemed unlikely for Biden, whose electoral hopes had narrowed north to Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Harris, struggling to speak over the applause of a crowd her campaign pegged at 10,000, made clear she sees Georgia as key to November victory. And she for the first time mapped out some of her policy priorities — on immigration, voting rights and gun control — that Atlantans in interviews this week said they had been eagerly awaiting.
“I am very clear: The path to the White House runs right through this state,” Harris said. “You all helped us win in 2020, and we’re going to do it again in 2024.”
She also challenged former President Donald Trump to “meet me on the debate stage” after he said in an interview with Fox News Channel that ran Monday night that he would “probably” debate her — but “can also make a case for not doing it.”
“As the saying goes: If you got something to say, say it to my face,” she said to a round of applause from the crowd, which was gathered less than two miles from the TV studio where last month’s Biden-Trump debate was held.
Harris’ late entry comes after Trump, who lost Georgia by only 11,779 votes in 2020, has made inroads among Black voters, especially younger Black men. But strategists from both parties see a potential for the new Democratic nominee to halt or reverse those trends.
“It feels like Georgia’s re-entered the chat,” said Stephen Lawson, a veteran GOP strategist here. “Georgia was not in play for Joe Biden. Georgia is in play for Kamala Harris.”
“President Trump has the slight edge, but I think the vice president has quickly cut into that,” he added.
Interviews with more than a dozen voters in downtown Atlanta ahead of Harris’ Tuesday rally revealed excitement — but also doses of uncertainty — about her candidacy and what she would do if elected president. They suggest that coconut tree memes, brat summer, and the goodwill of Democrats eager for a candidate under the age of 80 — while helpful in buoying the nascent campaign’s fundraising efforts — will only go so far, and that voters are interested in seeing her policy roadmap and her vice presidential pick before fully committing to her.
“I want to see what she has to say,” said ShaDonna Bell, 27, sitting on a park bench in downtown Atlanta. She added that she likes Harris, but the vice president “still has to earn the vote.”
Trump has made a significant play for Black voters — and specifically Black men — this cycle, with a recent national poll from The New York Times/Siena College showing that while Harris is doing better with voters of color than Biden has all year, Trump continues to outperform his 2020 numbers with them. Trump is set to attend the National Association of Black Journalists’ convention in Chicago on Wednesday, and Trump and Vance will be in Georgia on Saturday at the same venue Harris hosted her Tuesday rally.
Still, strategists from both parties questioned whether Trump’s support with Black voters is as durable as suggested by polling, which shows him climbing into the upper teens or low 20s after earning only single-digit support in his two previous elections.
“That’s been hard to believe, if I’m being honest. But I wouldn’t completely discount it,” said Howard Franklin, a prominent Black Democratic strategist in Atlanta. “I think there is an appeal.”
In interviews here, some Black voters expressed skepticism about what the Democratic Party has done to support them.
“What has she done?” said Kwai Johnson, 56, who voiced concerns about Harris’ background as San Francisco district attorney and California state attorney general and said he doesn’t feel like she has helped the Black community. “Really no one has, so I’m not going to hold that against her. I’m just going to hold what she does, and what she did, not what she might do.”
Kwai, who is an assistant engineer at an electronics company, said he’s undecided in the election but is leaning toward not voting in the presidential race or voting for a third-party candidate. As a Clinton voter in 2016 and a Biden voter in 2020, he’s just the kind of person the Harris campaign thinks it can win back with her at the top of the ticket.
In a memo last week, campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon said that the Biden-Harris swap “opens up additional persuadable voters who our campaign can work to win the support of,” like the undecided segment, which are “disproportionately Black, Latino and under 30” and “are more likely to have supported the Biden-Harris ticket in 2020.”
Democrats here argue Biden always had a shot in Georgia, pointing to the significant investment the campaign has made as proof of its seriousness. The campaign Harris has now inherited has 24 field offices and more than 170 coordinated staff, with 2,500 volunteers participating in more than 174 events across the state last weekend.
“The groundwork was laid early on this year, and the Democrats treated this like a state that they wanted to compete in,” said Dave Hoffman, spokesperson for the state Democratic Party. “Georgia’s in play. I believed that Georgia was in play prior to all of this.”
But her supporters acknowledge the investment Harris has personally made in Georgia, visiting the state now 15 times as vice president.
“My friends who are not political … are also super engaged at this point,” said Franklin, the Democratic strategist in Atlanta. “Some of that credit belongs to the vice president for having built those inroads or having hosted those house parties or having cultivated relationships. There’s definitely a broader phalanx, or constellation, of people who are interested in the outcome.”
And Harris’ emergence is energizing younger voters. Ari Adams, 24, said that her Gen-Z friends are now registering to vote and planning to support Harris in November — and Adams, who had already planned to vote for Biden and has now switched to Harris, said she’s thinking about volunteering for Harris’ campaign.
“I’ve seen a lot of Gen Zs on TikTok saying they registered to vote and are excited to vote. A lot of people my age that weren’t going to vote at first are ready to vote,” Adams said. “Now with Kamala I’m like, ‘Yes, y’all, you got to get out and vote.’ I’m so excited to see all the women rallying behind her in all the different Zoom calls — even the men doing the different Zoom calls and raising money.”
Republican strategists admit that Harris’ entrance has shaken up the race in Georgia in a way they hadn’t thought possible two weeks ago. Shortly after Biden dropped out of the race, Brian Robinson, a longtime GOP strategist in the state, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that swapping in Harris “will not change the dynamic,” saying her “approval numbers are as bad as Biden’s.”
But in an interview with POLITICO this week, Robinson admitted he was “somewhat wrong.” He said she was “fantastic” at her first campaign rally in Milwaukee last week, she was “serious and statesman-like” in her meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that she has “obviously energized and united the party in a way that is fairly remarkable.”
“Fourteen days ago, Trump had just been shot, and this thing was over,” Robinson said.
Now, he said, “this is winnable for Kamala Harris.”
Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Meta's machine-learning model for detecting prompt injection attacks -- special prompts to make neural networks behave inappropriately -- is itself vulnerable to, you guessed it, prompt injection attacks. Prompt-Guard-86M, introduced by Meta last week in conjunction with its Llama 3.1 generative model, is intended "to help developers detect and respond to prompt injection and jailbreak inputs," the social network giant said. Large language models (LLMs) are trained with massive amounts of text and other data, and may parrot it on demand, which isn't ideal if the material is dangerous, dubious, or includes personal info. So makers of AI models build filtering mechanisms called "guardrails" to catch queries and responses that may cause harm, such as those revealing sensitive training data on demand, for example. Those using AI models have made it a sport to circumvent guardrails using prompt injection -- inputs designed to make an LLM ignore its internal system prompts that guide its output -- or jailbreaks -- input designed to make a model ignore safeguards. [...]
It turns out Meta's Prompt-Guard-86M classifier model can be asked to "Ignore previous instructions" if you just add spaces between the letters and omit punctuation. Aman Priyanshu, a bug hunter with enterprise AI application security shop Robust Intelligence, recently found the safety bypass when analyzing the embedding weight differences between Meta's Prompt-Guard-86M model and Redmond's base model, microsoft/mdeberta-v3-base. "The bypass involves inserting character-wise spaces between all English alphabet characters in a given prompt," explained Priyanshu in a GitHub Issues post submitted to the Prompt-Guard repo on Thursday. "This simple transformation effectively renders the classifier unable to detect potentially harmful content." "Whatever nasty question you'd like to ask right, all you have to do is remove punctuation and add spaces between every letter," Hyrum Anderson, CTO at Robust Intelligence, told The Register. "It's very simple and it works. And not just a little bit. It went from something like less than 3 percent to nearly a 100 percent attack success rate."
AmiMoJo writes: Wind turbines and solar panels have overtaken fossil fuels to generate 30% of the European Union's electricity in the first half of the year, a report has found. Power generation from burning coal, oil and gas fell 17% in the first six months of 2024 compared with the same period the year before, according to climate thinktank Ember. It found the continued shift away from polluting fuels has led to a one-third drop in the sector's emissions since the first half of 2022.
Chris Rosslowe, an analyst at Ember, said the rise of wind and solar was narrowing the role of fossil fuels. "We are witnessing a historic shift in the power sector, and it is happening rapidly." The report found EU power plants burned 24% less coal and 14% less gas from the first half of 2023 to the first half of 2024. The shift comes despite a small uptick in electricity demand that has followed two years of decline linked to the pandemic and Ukraine war.
Logitech, the Swiss-American computer peripherals manufacturer, is considering the development of a long-lasting mouse that could potentially serve customers "forever," according to CEO Hanneke Faber. In a recent interview, Faber revealed that the company's innovation center has presented her with a prototype of such a device. The concept mouse, described as slightly heavier than standard models, would rely on software updates and services to maintain its functionality over time. Faber likened it to a quality watch that doesn't require frequent replacement.
apcyberax shares a report: Microsoft is investigating an ongoing and widespread outage blocking access to some Microsoft 365 and Azure services. "We're currently investigating access issues and degraded performance with multiple Microsoft 365 services and features. More information can be found under MO842351 in the admin center," Redmond said.
However, many users report having issues connecting to the Microsoft 365 admin center and opening the Service Health Status page, which should provide real-time information on issues impacting Microsoft Azure and the Microsoft 365/Power Platform admin centers. For the moment, the company says this incident is only affecting users in Europe and only a subset of its services.
Good characters (and their players) should feel the lure of temptation sometimes. There's litle point declaring yourself morally "good" if you don't face some challenges to that stance. Moral dilemmas are good fodder for stories and adventures - there are plenty of examples in fiction and real life to draw from. Just look up a list of moral dilemmas, pick one, and adapt an encounter or background event around it.
aurilee writes:
Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)
Ohhh, I think I know what Pete's campaign was now. And how it was twisted from the usual way we'd see it. Pete really should have seen this coming.
And wow. I don't think I've been quite set up for a multi-layer joke that got me like that in a long while. This is just as bad a pun as finally understanding the joke of how Twoflower described earning money in The Colour of Magic. And that was completely in my native language!
The death of the US government's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is starting to result in disconnection of Internet service for Americans with low incomes. On Friday, Charter Communications reported a net loss of 154,000 Internet subscribers that it said was mostly driven by customers canceling after losing the federal discount. About 100,000 of those subscribers were reportedly getting the discount, which in some cases made Internet service free to the consumer.
The $30 monthly broadband discounts provided by the ACP ended in May after Congress failed to allocate more funding. The Biden administration requested $6 billion to fund the ACP through December 2024, but Republicans called the program "wasteful."
Republican lawmakers' main complaint was that most of the ACP money went to households that already had broadband before the subsidy was created. FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel warned that killing the discounts would reduce Internet access, saying an FCC survey found that 77 percent of participating households would change their plan or drop Internet service entirely once the discounts expired.
Only two weeks ago, Donald Trump was riding high. An attempted assassination had left him with only a nick on the ear, pundits were predicting that his upcoming speech would drop calls for revenge in exchange for national unity. The Republican National Convention was just about to get underway with a program that was wall-to-wall Trump worship. Trump was planning to skate to a landslide victory.
Meanwhile, what attention Democrats were getting was all about divisions and tension inside the party. Trump felt so confident in the way the polls were going, and so comforted by the pundits that he picked a running mate without even giving a thought to expanding his base or showing any moderation in his extremist positions. Trump seemed to have everything going his way.
And then Kamala Harris simply kicked Trump off the national stage—and he’s having a real problem climbing back up.
Two weeks after he was on top of the world, Trump and the Republicans can’t find a consistent way to attack Harris. They can’t figure out what to do about their JD Vance-shaped boat anchor. They’re starting to realize that Trump may need to run a real campaign, with an actual platform and policies, and he’s completely unprepared.
In short, they’re giving Harris something close to the level of attention they have lavished on Trump for years. Only Harris didn’t generate that attention through bullying or saying something outrageous; She just offered the nation relief.
In trying to push back, Republican leaders have already had to caution candidates and members of Congress about using overt sexism and racism in attacking Harris, because they have been doing exactly that.
When they aren’t dragging out attacks on Harris’ race or gender, Republicans seem to be chasing a conspiracy theory that Biden voluntarily passing the torch to Harris represents a “coup.” Trump has been pushing that same term in both social media and rallies. However, Americans don’t seem to be expressing anything but relief in Harris’ joining the campaign.
Trump tried to attack Harris over her exuberant, inviting laugh. But “Laughing Kamala” turns out to only be a concern to people who are intrinsically afraid of women who seem happy. Trump’s search for a better playground moniker remains underway.
The failure of Republican attacks on the vice president can be measured in how Harris’ approval ratings are rising sharply. Meanwhile, less than two weeks after he delivered a speech to close the Republican convention—the point when most candidates are enjoying a boost in their ratings—Trump has seen his approval rating decline by four points.
On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Harris had pulled even with Trump in their polling.
By Sunday, Trump was reportedly having a fit over new polling from Fox that showed Harris leading in favorable ratings among critical swing state voters. That includes a commanding 8% lead in Minnesota and an overwhelming 10% edge in Michigan.
Even a weekend visit to a cryptocurrency conference, where Trump completely reversed his previous disdain for Bitcoin to tell attendees that he would make America the “crypto capital of the planet” didn’t work out as planned. Attendees to the event failed to cheer Trump’s every statement and give him the well-trained love of his rally fans. Instead, they found Trump’s obvious lack of knowledge about cryptocurrency insulting and his evident confusion “embarrassing.” At least one person at the event said they fell asleep during Trump’s droning speech.
Trump had a bad week last week, but it may be more than that. The momentum has shifted. The season has turned.
This should have been Trump’s biggest week of the campaign. Instead, he’s fighting for relevance. Because both Harris and Biden completely outplayed him.
Americans are in the mood for something new and Trump … isn’t.
More reminders that the GOP is the mouthpiece of white supremacy
Vice President Kamala Harris attends an NCAA championship teams celebration on the South Lawn of the White House on July 22, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
“The media propped up this president, lied to the American people for three years, and then dumped him for our DEI vice president,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) said in a post on X. (Burchett has since said he wishes he hadn’t said this, while adding that it’s the “truth.”)
There is a common thread in all these attacks: They take aim at Harris’s identity, rather than her agenda or experience.
And they come despite the fact that last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson implored his party to focus their criticisms on policy and politics. “This is not personal with regard to Kamala Harris, and her ethnicity or her gender have nothing to do with this whatsoever,” Johnson said.
Many of these remarks are simply hateful and examples of misogynoir, a compounded form of sexism and racism directed at Harris, a Black and South Asian woman.
But there’s a sinister political calculus to them as well. Collectively, they aim to undercut Harris’s legitimacy as a candidate and are one prong of sweeping critiques Republicans have made about her eligibility. Plus, they strive to leverage existing racism and sexism against Harris, activating voters who share those biases.
“They hope to taint her with the suspicion of not having earned the positions she has achieved and harness the fears of those who resent seeing women and people of color in elite spaces,” says Juliet Hooker, a Brown University political scientist and author of Black Grief/White Grievance, a book on race and politics.
The MAGA attacks try to question Harris’s legitimacy
The throughline across the attacks against Harris is that they utilize aspects of her identity to argue that she isn’t suited for the job.
In a thread on X, Nina Janckowicz, an expert on disinformation who’s published the book How to Be a Woman Online and who ran the short-lived Biden administration initiative on this issue, noted that there are consistent threads that have emerged in past statements, which she evaluated as part of a 2020 study.Other experts, like Melanie Smith, director of research for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, have noted, too, that women of color bear the brunt of this type of abuse.
These statements include implications that Harris is promiscuous and that she’s weaponized her sexuality to get to where she is — a misogynistic claim that’s often used against successful women to question whether they deserve the position that they’re in. Such attacks have manifested in conservative references to her past relationship with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and repeated offensive taglines like “Joe and the Ho.”
That’s often paired with questions about why Harris hasn’t had any biological children, and how that discredits her from being a leader due to claims that she’s not sufficiently invested in the country’s future. Beyond the fact that this line of attack is incredibly dismissive of the role of stepparents in America (Harris is the stepmother to a son and daughter), these sexist statements both superimpose traditional expectations on women and seek to undermine the VP by arguing that she doesn’t conform to those standards.
Racist narratives, including “birtherism” style attacks that question Harris’s citizenship status, similarly seek to cast doubt on whether she’s eligible for office. It’s part of a long tradition of conservatives portraying nonwhite politicians as short of “real Americans” and therefore not fit to hold these positions.
And statements referring to Harris as a “DEI candidate” also intend to poke at her qualifications and ignore the significant experience she’d bring as a nominee.
Those remarks stem from Biden’s statement committing to selecting a woman as his number two when he ran for office in 2020. He then narrowed his final list of contenders to include four Black women. Those choices were intended to improve representation and diversity at the highest levels of the party, which had never previously had a Black woman as president or vice president. Republicans, however, have seized on his decision to suggest that Harris was picked only for this reason, and not because she also brought significant qualifications including decades of experience as a legislator and prosecutor. Such monikers are so demeaning because they suggest that people of color are undeserving of the roles they get, and “implies that [they] can only succeed when we are needed to fill quotas, and not because of merit, hard work or talent,” writes Variety’s Clayton Davis.
The recent MAGA onslaught, in particular, however, points to how focused Republicans have been on activating white, male grievances — and exploiting fears of women and people of color obtaining more power.
“White supremacy is above all a powerful organizing construct,” Grant told Vox. “The GOP repeatedly makes these claims that we can’t succeed together in a society, that one group absolutely has to be failing, and that one group is absolutely stealing from another.”
If only the media weren't asleep at the wheel and still buying the "don't take him literally or seriously" bullshit.
Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, speaks during a campaign rally at the Van Andel Arena on July 20, 2024 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Donald Trump went on national TV last week and proposed bombing Mexico.
Asked by Fox News’s Jesse Watters if he’d consider strikes against drug cartels operating in the country, Trump said yes — and framed his answer as a threat against the Mexican government. “Mexico’s gonna have to straighten it out really fast, or the answer is absolutely,” the former president said.
There is every reason to take Trump’s proposal seriously. Presidents tend to at least try to deliver on campaign promises, and they have nearly unlimited war-making power nowadays. As unthinkable as it may sound, there is a reasonable chance the United States will be at war on its southern border in the coming years if Donald Trump returns to office.
So how come nobody is talking about it?
The Fox interview has barely gotten any pickup in other media. The prior years of Trump musings about war with Mexico have been mostly ignored. A major party candidate is proposing the first North American war in over a century and, somehow, it’s not even on the radar in Washington.
This is part of a bigger pattern. If you actually look at Trump’s policy agenda, he’s called for some wild stuff: policies so extreme that, had they been proposed prior to 2016, would have defined the entire course of the campaign. Today, a few get some coverage, but mostly feel like sideshows — with policy as a category taking a backseat to personality and polling.
Recently, the lack of policy focus is partly due to a remarkably chaotic stretch of American political life. One candidate, the incumbent president, bungled his debate performance so badly that his party replaced him with his vice president. The other almost got killed on national television by a would-be assassin.
But even in more normal times this is a general problem with the media: Policy is technical and boring, while horse-race reporting is exciting and easier for audiences to grasp.
Elements of Trump’s persona also make policy reporting a lot tougher. The combination of habitual lying, flip-flopping, and personal disinterest in detail can make it tough to know what’s an actual proposal and what’s something he said just for the hell of it.
But there are some times when it’s really clear that Trump means what he says. And in those areas where he clearly does — like trade and the southern border — a second Trump administration would have extraordinary consequences.
Trump’s biggest policies are deeply radical
Before I started writing this story, I asked my colleagues at Vox what stood out as Trump’s signature policy proposals in this election — the equivalent of “Build the Wall” in 2016. We came up with two big answers: Trump’s proposal for a general 10 percent tariff and his plan for “the largest deportation in American history.”
Each of these policies is genuinely extreme.
A 10 percent blanket tariff isn’t just putting a tax on specific imports to protect a particular industry, or to retaliate against a country like China engaging in unfair trade practices. It’s a blanket attempt to make all imports from every country, including from neighbors like Canada and allies like the European Union, 10 percent more expensive.
This is a radical shift from the way that trade policy typically works in the United States — one with huge and predictably negative implications for US consumers and the economy.
The tariffs mean that people will either buy American-made goods that cost more than their current foreign competitors, or they will keep buying foreign-made goods at a 10 percent markup. That’s inflation basically by definition: an odd proposal for a candidate running against inflation as his central issue.
The center-right Tax Foundation estimates that the tariffs would shave nearly 1 percent off of US GDP growth annually, costing roughly 684,000 jobs. This estimate did not take into account retaliation from other countries, who almost certainly would impose their own tariffs on American goods in response. A second estimate, from the centrist Peterson Institute, finds that every group of Americans — from the poorest to the wealthiest — would see drops in their annual income.
Neither of these estimates takes into account the all-but-certain retaliation from the affected countries, especially China (who Trump wants to hit with a special 60 percent across-the-board tariff). Typically during trade wars, countries respond to tariffs with in-kind measures. In this case, that would mean a flat tariff on all US-made goods. Both the American and world economy would suffer immensely from everything becoming more expensive everywhere.
The point is not just that the Trump trade policy is bad, though it is. It’s that it is shocking: such a radical break with the way that trade policy works that it would have massive ripple effects throughout the global economy.
Similarly, people don’t appreciate just how radical Trump’s proposals for mass deportations are.
No one is exactly sure how many people are going to be targeted for deportations: Trump never sets a specific target, but often implies he’s going to deport every undocumented immigrant in the United States (there are currently around 11 million). A group of four NBC reporters tried to figure out how deporting so many people was supposed to work, and ended up concluding that it was such a break with the way immigration enforcement typically works that it was near-impossible to grasp the scope of the effort.
Typically, police don’t go out looking for undocumented migrants currently residing in the United States. They find them by accident, during a traffic stop or criminal arrest, and then discover that they are undocumented and notify ICE to begin deportation. Targeted enforcement raids happen, but they’re comparatively rare and make up only a fraction of annual deportations.
For Trump’s “mass deportation” policy to work, he would need to devote extraordinary resources — state, federal, and local — to finding and apprehending undocumented immigrants. Once found, they still pose a massive logistical challenge: current law does not allow ICE to deport longstanding US residents without a hearing (or the migrant’s consent), posing a huge burden on the legal system. The government would also need to figure out the travel logistics for deportation, including negotiating with home countries that might not be very happy to receive large numbers of functional refugees.
During all of this, the US government would need to house millions of people — which ICE currently lacks the capacity to do. Hence the now-infamous Trump proposals for keeping detained immigrants in camps: there’s literally nowhere else to put them while they await deportation.
All of this is not only a human rights disaster, but an economic and law enforcement one. The cost of devoting police and judicial resources to this task, in terms of trade-offs with addressing actual crime, would be significant. So too would be the financial cost of building immigrant camps and providing them with food and medical care.
Removing so many people from the workforce would also be inflationary, far outweighing any (questionable) increase in wages for native-born workers. One estimate suggests that, all told, mass deportations would cost the American economy $4.7 trillion over a 10-year period.
The point, in short, is that Trump is proposing sweeping changes to the way the US economy and legal system operates — ones with consequences for every American — and we’re barely even talking about what they would mean.
How Trump gets away with his radicalism
Part of the problem with Trump’s radical policies, from war in Mexico on down, is that they’re so outlandish that most people can’t believe they could happen.
When the New York Times interviewed David Autor, a leading trade economist at MIT, about Trump’s 10 percent tariff, he said, “I don’t think they’ll do it.” The reason, Autor added, was that the impact would be catastrophic: it would have “a very large effect on prices almost immediately” and “easily cause a recession.”
Similarly, when NBC interviewed Ammon Blair — a former Customs and Border Protection agent who is currently a fellow at the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation — he said mass deportations were unlikely because they’d be disastrous.
“I honestly just don’t see it happening,” Blair said. “One, because I think it’s political suicide, and two, I think we need to focus on national security issues.”
Of course, this is exactly the kind of thing people said before Trump’s first term about policies like the Muslim ban or overturning Roe v. Wade. Those things happened, and so too could a 10 percent tariff or a war with Mexico — especially since trade, immigration, and war are three policy areas where presidents enjoy broad discretionary authority.
Moreover, it’s fairly normal for politicians to try and implement their campaign promises. Again and again, political scientists have found that elected leaders take such promises seriously and try to fulfill them. In this respect, Trump’s first term is not an aberration but in line with the historical norm.
But I suspect some of the incredulity about Trump’s policies is that it’s hard to tell what actually counts as a promise.
Trump is a habitual liar who has a habit of saying whatever comes to mind. Oftentimes, an interviewer will ask him a policy question and he’ll leave the door open to whatever idea they’re suggesting should be on the table.
Moreover, it’s not obvious who speaks for Trump on policy. His campaign doesn’t focus very much on developing detailed policy plans, leaving a vacuum for others to fill. The issue page on his website, for example, does not contain any original information — it simply links out to the 2024 RNC platform. Journalists often have to cobble together his policy ideas by looking at documents like the platform Project 2025 and white papers by various former Trump White House officials scattered around conservative think tanks.
Yet there’s a difference between Trump’s random utterances, or what he might do about some obscure policy issue, and his consistent instincts on the issues central to his political identity — like trade and the southern border. And there, he could not be clearer: across-the-board tariff, mass deportation, and waging war on the drug cartels.
Even if we set aside everything else we know (or think we know) about what Trump would do, these three items alone would have the potential to transform life in America as we know it. It’s time to start covering Trump like he means what he says.
"Deepfake scams are becoming more prolific and their quality will only improve over time," writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. "However, one question can stop them dead in their tracks. Such was the case with Ferrari earlier this month when a suspicious executive saved the company from being the latest victim." From a report: It all began with a series of WhatsApp messages from someone posing as Ferrari's CEO [Benedetto Vigna]. The messages, seeking urgent help with a supposed classified acquisition, came from a different number but featured a profile picture of Vigna standing in front of the Ferrari emblem. As reported by Bloomberg, one of the messages read: "Hey, did you hear about the big acquisition we're planning? I could need your help." The scammer continued, "Be ready to sign the Non-Disclosure Agreement our lawyer will send you ASAP." The message concluded with a sense of urgency: "Italy's market regulator and Milan stock exchange have already been informed. Maintain utmost discretion."
Following the text messages, the executive received a phone call featuring a convincing impersonation of Vigna's voice, complete with the CEO's signature southern Italian accent. The caller claimed to be using a different number due to the sensitive nature of the matter and then requested the executive execute an "unspecified currency hedge transaction." The oddball money request, coupled with some "slight mechanical intonations" during the call, raised red flags for the Ferrari executive. He retorted, "Sorry, Benedetto, but I need to verify your identity," and quizzed the CEO on a book he had recommended days earlier. Unsurprisingly, the impersonator flubbed the answer and ended the call in a hurry.
Fucking get over it. You don't get to wrap yourself in the flag now while you continue to consolidate wealth.
In a Washington Post op-ed last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized the urgent need for the U.S. and its allies to lead the development of "democratic AI" to counter the rise of "authoritarian AI" models (source paywalled; alternative source). He outlined four key steps for this effort: enhancing security measures, expanding AI infrastructure, creating commercial diplomacy policies, and establishing global norms for AI development and deployment. Fortune reports: He noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the winner of the AI race will "become the ruler of the world" and that China plans to lead the world in AI by 2030. Not only will such regimes use AI to perpetuate their own hold on power, but they can also use the technology to threaten others, Altman warned. If authoritarians grab the lead in AI, they could force companies in the U.S. and elsewhere to share user data and use the technology to develop next-generation cyberweapons, he said. [...]
"While identifying the right decision-making body is important, the bottom line is that democratic AI has a lead over authoritarian AI because our political system has empowered U.S. companies, entrepreneurs and academics to research, innovate and build," Altman said. Unless the democratic vision prevails, the world won't be cause to maximize the technology's benefits and minimize its risks, he added. "If we want a more democratic world, history tells us our only choice is to develop an AI strategy that will help create it, and that the nations and technologists who have a lead have a responsibility to make that choice -- now."
Enlarge / Robert Downey Jr. will play Doctor Doom in two new Avengers movies from the Russo brothers. (credit: Marvel Studios)
The Marvel Cinematic Universe received a much-needed boost this weekend with the box office dominance of Deadpool and Wolverine, which raked in a record-breaking $438.3 million worldwide and $205 million domestically. And the Marvel panel at this weekend's San Diego Comic-Con kept up the momentum, delighting attendees with sneak peeks of what's to come—most notably the return of Robert Downey Jr. to the MCU. The twist: RDJ won't be donning his usual Iron Man suit. Instead, he'll be playing Doctor Doom for Avengers: Doomsday (2026), with the Russo brothers returning to direct. This will be followed by the Russo-directed Avengers: Secret Wars (2027).
Comic-Con attendees were also treated to exclusive new footage from Captain America: Brave New World, and updates on Thunderbolts and The Fantastic Four reboot, titled First Steps, as well as a surprise screening of Deadpool and Wolverine.
It's no secret that Marvel Studios originally planned to build its Phase Six Avengers arc (The Kang Dynasty) around Jonathan Majors' Kang the Conqueror (and associated Variants), introduced in Loki and last year's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. But then Majors was convicted of "reckless assault and harassment" (domestic violence), and Marvel fired the actor soon after. That meant the studio needed to retool its Phase Six plans, culminating in the announced return of the Russo brothers, who directed four of the MCU's most successful films, which brought in more than $6 billion at the global box office.
I don't remember the last time I laughed that much in a theater. Definitely recommend
No R-rated film has ever earned as much in its opening weekend, reports the Hollywood Reporter — a whopping $205 million. (The previous record was $133.7 million, set in 2016 by the original film Deadpool...)
It's also the very first R-rated film ever released by Disney...
[Deadpool actor Ryan] Reynolds has his own theory about its success. "Disney probably doesn't want me to frame it this way, but I've always thought of Deadpool & Wolverine as the first four-quadrant, R-rated film," Reynolds tells the Hollywood Reporter. "Yes, it's rated R, but we set out to make a movie with enough laughs, action and heart to appeal to everyone, whether you're a comic book movie fan or not."
There's reason Disney and others may bristle at labeling it a four-quadrant film, which generally is reserved for movies that work equally for males and females over and under 25. Afterall, it is perhaps the most violent and bloody Deadpool movie yet. Still, here's evidence to back up Reynolds' theory that it's playing to a far more broad audience than the usual Marvel Cinematic Univerese movie, even if it's skewing male by anywhere from 60 to 63 percent. So far, 13.6 million people have bought tickets to see it, on par with last year's Barbie, which was rated PG-13, according to Steve Buck's leading research firm EntTelligence. That's the most foot traffic ever for an R-rated movie....
"Once thought of as a sure-fire way to limit potential box office, the R rating, when properly applied, can be the key to unlocking massive box office, and this has proven to be the secret sauce for the Deadpool franchise," says chief Comscore box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian. "The creative freedom afforded by the less restrictive rating has enabled filmmakers to push the envelope and, particularly in the case of Deadpool & Wolverine, can deliver the kind of edgy, intense, profanity-filled comedy action that modern audiences are fired up to see on the big screen...."
It's also the biggest July opening of all time, the biggest opening of 2024 so far and Marvel Studios' biggest launch since Spider-Man: No Way Home in December 2021.
ScreenRant notes that Deadpool & Wolverine has already surpassed the entire global box office for The Marvels in just three days. It's the biggest debut for a film since James Cameron's Avatar: The Way of the Water in December of 2022 (according to the Hollywood Reporter). And they add that though the figures haven't been adjusted for inflation — it's still the eighth-biggest box office opening of all time.
But at the end of the day, it's just people enjoying a movie together. "Well, I'm not saying that other people should do this, but my 9-year-old watched the movie with me and my mom, who's in her late 70s," Reynolds reportedly told the New York Times, "and it was just was one of the best moments of this whole experience for me. Both of them were laughing their guts out, were feeling the emotion where I most desperately hoped people would be."
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Yesterday, former President Donald Trump told a group of supporters that they won’t have to vote again if they elect him to the presidency. “You won’t have to do it anymore,” Trump said at the Turning Point Believers’ Summit in Florida. “It’ll be fixed; it’ll be fine; you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”
Trump’s remarks represent an extraordinary departure from democratic norms in the United States—rarely, if ever, has a major party’s presidential candidate directly stated his aim to make elections meaningless, a notorious hallmark of autocracy.
There are at least two ways of interpreting this statement. First, Trump could be implying that there won’t be any future elections if he comes to power. He may imagine himself as an American Xi Jinping, the Chinese dictator he routinely praises, a leader who’s declared himself “president for life.” As he often does, however, Trump left just enough room in what he said for plausible deniability. A second and slightly more charitable interpretation of his remarks is that Trump believes his presidency will entrench so many pro-Christian policies into the United States government that no future election could realistically undo his transformation of the country. Both interpretations lead to the same conclusion: that Trump is telegraphing his authoritarian intentions in plain sight, hoping to sever the link between voters and government policy.
Trump’s remarks last night are just the latest in his long record of expressing authoritarian ideas and admiration for strongmen in several undemocratic regimes—including Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Throughout his first term, Trump engaged in despot-style nepotism and cronyism, hiring his unqualified daughter and son-in-law to oversee crucial briefs in government while elevating his son’s wedding planner to a top role in federal housing. He abused his power to offer pardons as an enticement or a reward to witnesses who could testify against him, including Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, and even the ex-husband of one of the Trumpiest cheerleaders on Fox News, Jeanine Pirro. And, like all authoritarians, he saw himself as the sole embodiment of the state—which is why he referred to the military brass as “my generals,” used his office to personally enrich himself, and attempted to orchestrate an egregious quid pro quo, trying to trade missiles for political dirt on his former opponent.
It was in the dying days of his presidency, though, that Trump’s authoritarian instincts were most clearly unmasked. Continuing on his long history of inciting political violence, Trump inspired a mob to attack the United States Capitol in the hope of overturning the election that he lost. With a fake-elector scheme, a phone call pressuring Georgia’s top election official to “find” additional votes, and his continuing refusal to accept election results, the former president has made it obvious that he cares about unrestrained power and self-interest, not democracy and national interest.
Since being ousted from the presidency by voters, Trump has pledged to be a dictator “on day one,” backing a series of formal policy proposals that could make that closer to reality. He’s floated the idea of executing America’s top general. He’s proposed executing shoplifters without a trial, a violation of due process seen only in the most brutal authoritarian regimes. And now Trump says voting will become obsolete if he wins. How many more ways can he tell us that he’s an existential threat to American democracy?
It would perhaps be more comforting if Trump’s anti-democracy machinations were hidden, covert, subtle. Then we might chalk up his ongoing political popularity to an unfortunate by-product of voter ignorance and wishful thinking. Instead, because he’s conveying his authoritarian intent in blunt language in front of rolling TV cameras, it’s impossible not to conclude that at least some of his base is formed by what political scientists call “authoritarian voters”—citizens who care about getting their way even if it means destroying democracy in the process.
More dystopian still, Trump’s acolytes are co-opting the language of autocracy and are using it to describe fully democratic processes while ignoring or excusing Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. Republicans have begun talking about the “coup” against President Joe Biden, even though his decision to not seek reelection according to the formal rules of his own political party is a typical—and relatively common—way that unpopular incumbents behave in democratic states. Meanwhile, many Republicans insist that the insurrection on January 6 was a “normal tourist visit” and balk at the notion that a president launching a coordinated conspiracy, pressuring election officials to find additional votes, and inciting a violent mob to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power are textbook attempts at a so-called auto-coup.
This funhouse-mirror inversion risks creating the false impression that both sides are a threat to American democracy. In fact, Trump is a unique threat to the core institutions that constrain power in the United States and make self-governance possible. We must not make the mistake of, yet again, giving Trump an undeserved benefit of the doubt. He has told Americans who he is and what he intends to do. All that voters need to do is believe him—and care enough to vote for democracy. After all, Trump said it himself: If you don’t, you may never need to again.
Rep. Ronny Jackson, the former White House doctor for Donald Trump, is spitting mad about what FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress on Wednesday about the July 13 attempt on Donald Trump’s life. Wray said that it’s not clear yet “whether or not it's a bullet or shrapnel that … hit [Trump’s] ear.”
That’s blasphemy in Trump world. So Jackson is out to refute it. In a letter posted on Trump’s Truth Social site, Jackson insisted, “There is absolutely no evidence that it was anything other than a bullet. Congress should correct the record as confirmed by both the hospital and myself. Director Wray is wrong and inappropriate to suggest anything else.”
In fact, the hospital has not confirmed any such thing.
The hospital has released very little information about the injury, the treatment, or Trump’s condition. That’s led commentators like Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon and the chief medical correspondent for CNN, to call for a “full public assessment of Trump’s injuries,” saying it “is necessary, for both the former president’s own health and the clarity it can provide for voters about the recovery of the man who could become president of the United States once again.”
The only medical information the Trump campaign has released comes from the disgraced Jackson, who was demoted by the Navy after a Defense Department report found he drank on the job, among other misbehavior. Jackson was not Trump’s attending physician immediately following the shooting. Furthermore, he reportedly no longer has a valid medical license and is certified only to provide emergency treatment or to practice on military bases.
The lack of information around Trump’s injury is troubling. In what universe is a presidential candidate shot and the hospital doesn't make a statement about the treatment? More information should be public knowledge by now.
It also shouldn’t matter if Trump was injured by glass or shrapnel. It doesn’t change the fact that he survived an assassination attempt—and should be cooperating with the investigation to find out all the answers.
Instead, he’s lashing out against Wray. “No, it was, unfortunately, a bullet that hit my ear, and hit it hard. There was no glass, there was no shrapnel,” Trump posted Thursday on Truth Social. “The hospital called it a ‘bullet wound to the ear,’ and that is what it was. No wonder the once storied FBI has lost the confidence of America!”
Trump needs to bolster the mythology that he, in his words, “took a bullet for democracy.” It wasn’t enough to have survived a horrendous assassination attempt. The MAGA hagiography demands more drama, that he be “shot”—a whole convention was centered on that.
An anonymous reader shares a report: On Monday, it initially seemed like the beginning of the end for Intel's desktop CPU instability woes -- the company confirmed a patch is coming in mid-August that should address the "root cause" of exposure to elevated voltage. But if your 13th or 14th Gen Intel Core processor is already crashing, that patch apparently won't fix it.
Citing unnamed sources, Tom's Hardware reports that any degradation of the processor is irreversible, and an Intel spokesperson did not deny that when we asked. Intel is "confident" the patch will keep it from happening in the first place. But if your defective CPU has been damaged, your best option is to replace it instead of tweaking BIOS settings to try and alleviate the problems.
And, Intel confirms, too-high voltages aren't the only reason some of these chips are failing. Intel spokesperson Thomas Hannaford confirms it's a primary cause, but the company is still investigating. Intel community manager Lex Hoyos also revealed some instability reports can be traced back to an oxidization manufacturing issue that was fixed at an unspecified date last year.
Internet service providers are eager to get money from a $42.45 billion government fund, but are trying to convince the Biden administration to drop demands that Internet service providers offer broadband service for as little as $30 a month to people with low incomes.
The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program was created by a US law that requires Internet providers receiving federal funds to offer at least one "low-cost broadband service option for eligible subscribers." The Biden administration says it is merely enforcing that legal requirement, but a July 23 letter sent by over 30 broadband industry trade groups claims that the administration is illegally regulating broadband prices.
The fund is administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The NTIA is distributing money to states, which will then distribute it to ISPs. Before obtaining money from the NTIA, each state must get approval for a plan that includes a low-cost option. Nearly half of US states have already gotten approvals.
Yeah this could get ugly, and never count on the honesty of Roberts or Gorsuch
Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Elena Kagan at a White House ceremony in 2018.
Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) was one of the few pleasant surprises for liberals to come out of the Supreme Court during the Trump administration.
Authored by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch and joined by Republican Chief Justice John Roberts, Bostock held that a decades-old federal civil rights law prohibits workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s also written using such expansive language that it leaves little doubt that discrimination against LGBTQ people is forbidden in many other contexts, including health care and education.
Nevertheless, two separate appeals court panels — both of them dominated by Republican judges — recently suggested that Bostock has nothing to say about discrimination by educational institutions like public schools and universities.
One opinion, by the far-right United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, simply ignored Bostock altogether, as though it didn’t exist. Another opinion, joined by two Republicans on the Sixth Circuit, spent just two paragraphs trying to explain why the plain language of Bostock does not apply to schools.
Now, both of these cases — known as US Department of Education v. Louisiana and Cardona v. Tennessee — are before the Supreme Court on its “shadow docket, a mix of emergency motions and other matters that are often decided on a very tight timeframe. The stakes are enormous, as these two cases could determine whether the justices intend to enforce the one significant pro-LGBTQ rights decision they’ve handed down since former President Donald Trump started to remake the Supreme Court in the Federalist Society’s image.
Most of the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations have nothing to do with transgender rights. Among other things, they lay out certain rights for pregnant students and school employees. They establish that parents and legal guardians may act on behalf of students whose Title IX rights are violated. And the new regulations define terms, such as “complainant,” “disciplinary sanctions,” or “postsecondary education,” which frequently arise in Title IX disputes.
That said, the regulations do include three provisions that impact trans students, including one that, according to the Justice Department, requires schools to allow these students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. The regulations also adopt Bostock’s definition of “sex” discrimination, which includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The red-state plaintiffs in Louisiana and Tennessee do not challenge any of the new rules that do not touch on transgender rights. And yet the lower courts struck down the Title IX regulations in their entirety. That alone is an error warranting intervention by the Supreme Court. As the Court held in Gill v. Whitford (2018), when a court finds a legal violation, the “remedy must of course be limited to the inadequacy that produced the injury in fact that the plaintiff has established.”
But even setting aside the overbreadth of the lower court’s orders, the lower courts also committed another egregious error. They struck down a trans-rights provision of the new regulations that isn’t just consistent with the Court’s decision in Bostock, it is compelled by Bostock. The lower courts faulted the Biden administration for doing the only thing it is allowed to do after Bostock was decided.
What do the new regulations’ trans rights provisions actually do?
The new regulations include three provisions touching on transgender rights in education, all of which are challenged by the plaintiffs in Louisiana and Tennessee.
Title IX provides that no one shall face discrimination “on the basis of sex” in “any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The first challenged provision of the new regulations defines the phrase “on the basis of sex” to include “discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex characteristics, pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity.”
Though the plaintiffs challenge the inclusion of gender identity in this definition, this challenge should be frivolous under Bostock. Bostock held that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” There’s really no way to read that language other than the way the Biden administration read it.
The other two challenged provisions stand on somewhat less firm legal ground. One provision establishes, in the Justice Department’s words, that “a school discriminates on the basis of sex if it requires a student to use a restroom or locker room that is inconsistent with the student’s gender identity.” As I’ll explain in more detail below, Bostock does not guarantee a student’s right to use a bathroom that aligns with their gender identity.
The remaining challenged provision prohibits schools from engaging in “unwelcome sex-based conduct” that “is so severe or pervasive that it limits or denies a person’s ability to participate in or benefit from” a school’s educational program. This provision is similar to many longstanding laws and legal precedents prohibiting sexual harassment. But the plaintiffs object to it on the theory that it might prohibit students and teachers from misgendering a student or from referring to them using the wrong pronouns.
Notably, however, the Justice Department does not ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on these later two provisions — that is, the Biden administration is willing to leave the lower court order blocking the bathrooms and anti-harassment provisions in place for now while those issues are litigated in the courts below. It is likely, however, that they will ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on these two other provisions at a later date.
For now, the Justice Department only asks the justices to block the two parts of the lower courts’ orders that are unambiguously wrong: the lower court’s decisions to strike down provisions of the new regulations that weren’t even challenged, and the decision to strike down a definition of the term “on the basis of sex” that is identical to Bostock’s definition.
So what does Bostock have to say about this case?
To understand why the Justice Department decided only to challenge part of the lower courts’ orders, at least at this early stage in this litigation, it’s helpful to dig into Bostock’s reasoning.
Bostock involved Title VII, a federal law that prohibits workplace discrimination “because of … sex.” Significantly, Bostock assumed that the term “sex” refers “only to biological distinctions between male and female.” So a child born with a penis is considered male, for purposes of Bostock, regardless of their gender identity.
Yet, even with this restriction in place, Bostock still reached its conclusion that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” The Court reasoned that, if a male employee is allowed to date women, to dress in traditionally masculine clothing, and to otherwise present as a man, then a female employee must be allowed to do the same. Otherwise, the employer would be treating men differently than women, and that is discrimination based on sex.
Moreover, while Bostock itself involved an employment dispute, the case uses sweeping language that clearly encompasses other anti-discrimination laws such as Title IX. Again, Title IX forbids discrimination “on the basis of sex” and Bostock held that it is impossible to discriminate against someone for being transgender “without discriminating against that individual based on sex.”
Bostock does have some limits. For one thing, the Court explicitly refused to “address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.” So the Biden administration cannot rely on Bostock to uphold its rule permitting transgender students to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity. Similarly, Bostock has little to say about whether schools can exclude transgender women from women’s sports teams because the law has historically permitted sex segregation in sports.
So the Justice Department’s decision to ask the Supreme Court to reinstate most, but not all, of the struck-down regulations is consistent with what the Court said in Bostock. After Bostock, the question of whether schools may exclude transgender students from the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity is still an open question. And the Biden administration probably realized that it was unlikely to persuade this very conservative Supreme Court to extend Bostock — especially in a case asking the justices to intervene while litigation is still ongoing in the lower courts.
But the question of whether the term “on the basis of sex” includes discrimination against transgender people is not difficult. The Supreme Court answered that question in the affirmative in Bostock, and it did so clearly and directly. The lower court decisions refusing to apply Bostock to Title IX fail a very basic reading comprehension test.
Louisiana and Tennessee, in other words, will reveal whether Roberts and Gorsuch were being honest in the Bostock case.
There is no plausible way to read Bostock other than the way the Biden administration read it. The only question is whether two of the Court’s Republicans will reach that same conclusion.
Vice president and likely Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has been goading Donald Trump to debate her for the last several days and told reporters as recently as Thursday that she is “ready to debate Donald Trump,” even as she accused him of “backpedaling” on the original agreement for a second president debate on Sept. 10.
On Thursday night, Trump made it official: He’s too afraid to debate Harris.
The Trump campaign posted this on their campaign website:
Given the continued political chaos surrounding Crooked Joe Biden and the Democrat Party, general election debate details cannot be finalized until Democrats formally decide on their nominee. There is a strong sense by many in the Democrat Party - namely Barack Hussein Obama - that Kamala Harris is a Marxist fraud who cannot beat President Trump, and they are still holding out for someone “better.” Therefore, it would be inappropriate to schedule things with Harris because Democrats very well could still change their minds.
The debate is on the schedule. He could simply say, “I’ll debate whoever Democrats nominate on Aug. 1.” But this isn’t about confusion over the Democratic nominee. There’s no drama, as the party quickly coalesced around Harris.
The statement does leave Trump wiggle room to change his mind down the road, but he doesn't want to debate Harris, and he’s reneged on the original deal for that second presidential debate.
Their app has always been shit, so it's no surprise that they fucked this up too
Enlarge / I don't know how Sonos' app might have developed during the groovy era their marketing images aim to summon, but it feels like it might not have wanted to rush head-long into disappointing users quite so quickly. (credit: Sonos)
Sonos issued a redesigned app in May, and what lots of customers noticed about it wasn't the refreshed look, but the things from the previous design entirely missing. Not small things, but things that Sonos enthusiasts would really notice: sleep timers, local music library access and management, playlist and song queue editing, plus accessibility downgrades.
In May, a Sonos executive told The Verge that it "takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future." You might ask if bravery could have been mustered to not release an app before it was feature-complete.
Now, nearly three months after shipping, Sonos leadership has pivoted from excitement about future innovations to humility, apology, and a detailed roadmap of fixes. CEO Patrick Spence starts his "Update on the Sonos app from Patrick" with a personal apology, a note that "there isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down," and a pledge that fixing the app is the No. 1 priority.
With the plunging price of photovoltaics, the construction of solar plants has boomed in the US. Last year, for example, the US's Energy Information Agency expected that over half of the new generating capacity would be solar, with a lot of it coming online at the very end of the year for tax reasons. Yesterday, the EIA released electricity generation numbers for the first five months of 2024, and that construction boom has seemingly made itself felt: generation by solar power has shot up by 25 percent compared to just one year earlier.
The EIA breaks down solar production according to the size of the plant. Large grid-scale facilities have their production tracked, giving the EIA hard numbers. For smaller installations, like rooftop solar on residential and commercial buildings, the agency has to estimate the amount produced, since the hardware often resides behind the metering equipment, so only shows up via lower-than-expected consumption.
In terms of utility-scale production, the first five months of 2024 saw it rise by 29 percent compared to the same period in the year prior. Small-scale solar was "only" up by 18 percent, with the combined number rising by 25.3 percent.
Malachi Hill Massey, center, speaks at a news conference on July 23, 2024, at the NAACP headquarters in Springfield, Illinois, about his mother, Sonya Massey, who was shot to death by a Sangamon County Sheriff’s deputy. | John O’Connor/AP
Body camera footage released this week offered a harrowing look at the police killing of Sonya Massey, a 36-year-old Black woman in Springfield, Illinois, and renewed scrutiny of the disproportionate violence Black Americans face at the hands of law enforcement.
On July 6, Massey was shot by a sheriff’s deputy in her own home, after officers responded to her call about a potential prowler. Following checks of her backyard and surrounding area, at least two officers entered her home as part of their visit. Inside, one of them asks her to turn off her stove. While doing so, she picks up a pot of boiling water and the officers back away, noting that they want to distance themselves from it. She makes a comment about rebuking them “in the name of Jesus,” at which point one of them, Sean Grayson, shoots at her three times, including once fatally in the head.
A grand jury has since indicted Grayson on three counts of first-degree murder, with some law enforcement experts questioning why he’d shoot Massey rather than pursue other alternative responses like adding more distance between them or using a taser.
The shooting also adds to a long history of police violence against Black Americans — and underscores how enduring the problem continues to be. In 2020, mass protests erupted across the US following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, after an officer knelt on his neck for over nine minutes. Those followed extensive demonstrations in 2014 after Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager, was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. Massey is also among a number of Black Americans who’ve been shot by police in their own homes, including Roger Fortson in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and Atatiana Jefferson in Fort Worth, Texas.
What we know about the incident
Police arrived at Massey’s home after she called 911 around 12:50 am on July 6, and proceeded to do a sweep around the house. They eventually tell her that they didn’t find anyone in the area and appear prepared to leave, when video shows them entering her home. While speaking with Massey, they also ask her if she’s doing okay mentally and she responds by saying, “Yes, I took my medicine.” Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney for Massey’s family, has said she dealt with mental health struggles.
It’s not immediately apparent why the officers then go into Massey’s house, but video shows her looking for her ID. While they’re inside, the officers realize the stove is on and urge Massey to turn it off. As she goes to do so, she moves the pot of boiling water that’s on it, prompting the officers to back away.
“Where are you going?” says Massey.
“Away from your hot, steaming water,” says Grayson.
“Away from my hot, steaming water?,” Massey asks, while holding the pot. “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.”
“You better f****** not or I swear to God I’ll f****** shoot you in your f****** face,” says Grayson as he draws his gun.
Massey then says “I’m sorry,” and ducks while raising the pot over her head, as Grayson shoots multiple times and fatally wounds her.
As his colleague moves to get a medical kit from their vehicle, Grayson comments, “Nah, she’s done. You can go get it but that’s a headshot.” He also states later, “Yeah I’m good, this f******* b**** is crazy.”
Last week, a grand jury indicted Grayson on charges of first-degree murder, as well as aggravated battery with a firearm and misconduct, all of which he pleaded not guilty to. He’s also been fired from the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Department, which noted that “it is clear that the deputy did not act as trained or in accordance with our standards.”
A state’s attorney review of the incident similarly concluded that its analysis “does not support a finding that … Grayson was justified in his use of deadly force.” State prosecutors also cited an expert who described the act as comparable to “an officer intentionally and unnecessarily putting himself in front of a moving vehicle and then justifying use of force because of fear of being struck.”
Her family has said that Massey — a mother of two — was a “ball of energy,” and a “loving person” who was known for helping those around her. They also noted that they weren’t initially told that the shooting had been committed by an officer and that there were early implications it was done by someone else.
Massey’s family are now calling for an investigation into the Sheriff’s Department’s hiring of Grayson, who has worked in six different law enforcement agencies in the last four years, and been charged twice with driving under the influence. According to an Intercept report, Grayson had also been discharged from the military due to misconduct.
In the wake of the indictment, prosecutors will continue to pursue the charges against Grayson in a case that could head to trial. He has been denied pretrial release.
It’s the latest incident to raise concerns about police violence
Massey’s shooting highlights how pervasive police violence toward Black Americans still is, and the dearth of effective policies that have been passed to combat it.
In 2023, police killed more than 1,300 people, which was a new record, according to the organization Mapping Police Violence. That same data set found that Black people were almost three times more likely to be killed by police than white people.
But any federal compromise on police reform — including attempts after Floyd’s shooting in 2020 to end officers’ protections from legal liability — has thus far faltered.
Vance gave the speech to the secretive Teneo Network. The GOP vice presidential nominee has been a member of the Leonard Leo-backed group, which seeks to cultivate conservative influence in business and culture.
by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Sen. JD Vance, whom Donald Trump named as his vice presidential running mate Monday, told a group of influential young conservatives in a closed-door speech in 2021 that they should stand up for “nonconventional people” who speak truth, such as Infowars founder Alex Jones.
“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”
Vance went on, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”
He said that every person in attendance for his speech believed “something that’s a little crazy.” In his case, he said, “I believe the devil is real and that he works terrible things in our society. That’s a crazy conspiracy theory to a lot of very well-educated people in this country right now.”
Vance made these remarks at a September 2021 gathering of the Teneo Network, an invitation-only group of young conservatives that counts elected officials, pro athletes, financial executives, and media figures among its members. Vance joined Teneo six years ago. ProPublica and Documented obtained a video recording of his 30-minute speech and question-and-answer session, which has not been previously reported.
Vance’s remarks at the conference—which you can read a transcript of or watch in full below—give a rare unvarnished look at his thinking and illustrate how aligned he is with various factions within the conservative and MAGA movements. “I’ll throw out the standard campaign speech,” he began his Teneo talk. “[I’ll] actually just try to level with you guys about what I do see is the big—a few big problems that are in our country right now.”
According to internal Teneo documents, Vance joined Teneo in 2018, several years before he ran for Senate in his home state of Ohio. His book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” had already become a bestseller, and Vance was a commentator for CNN while running his own nonprofit and investment fund backing startup companies outside of Silicon Valley.
“JD Vance has been part of the organization for at least five years and his appearance at the 2021 Teneo Retreat was well received by many young professional leaders in attendance,” Leo said. A spokesperson for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
By the time Vance spoke at Teneo’s 2021 conference, he had joined the race to fill outgoing Sen. Rob Portman’s seat. Despite his past criticisms of Trump, which included calling the former president an “idiot” and comparing him to Adolf Hitler, Vance won Trump’s endorsement in 2022 and cruised to a comfortable victory.
Vance’s connection to Teneo could form a bridge between different factions of the Republican Party that seem to be at odds. Previous news stories have reported that Trump and Leo, who advised the former president on judicial nominees during his administration, are no longer as close as they once were. Russ Vought, a Trump ally, publicly denigrated the Federalist Society, the legal networking group Leo and others built into a juggernaut.
Adding Vance to the ticket bolsters the connections between Leo’s network and the Trump 2024 campaign. It also strengthens ties between Trump’s reelection bid and the Project 2025 blueprint, which outlines plans for a second Trump administration, including firing thousands of career civil servants, shuttering the Department of Education, and replacing ambitious goals to combat climate change with ramped-up fossil fuel production. In a recent TV interview, Vance said the document contained “some good ideas” but claimed that “most Americans couldn’t care less about Project 2025” and that the Trump campaign wasn’t affiliated with it.
In his Teneo remarks, he bemoaned that decades ago, major corporate CEOs reliably donated money to Republicans but now they give heavily to Democrats. He lamented that conservatives had “very few oligarchs on our side,” had “lost every institution in American society,” and needed to make corporations “taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain.”
“So we’ve not just lost the academy,” meaning universities, “which we’ve lost for a long time; we haven’t just lost the media, which has been on the side of the left for a long time; we now find ourselves in a situation where our biggest multinational corporations are active participants in the culture war on the other side,” he said. “It’s really been a few of us over the past few years who have recognized that the big corporations have really turned against conservatives in a very big and powerful way.”
He argued that conservatives needed to take action against corporations that, say, defended abortion rights or punished employees who spoke out against abortion access. “If we’re unwilling to make companies that are taking the side of the left in the culture wars feel real economic pain, then we’re not serious about winning the culture war,” he said.
He said that Americans were “terrified to tell the truth” and “point out the obvious,” including that “there are real biological, cultural, religious, spiritual distinctions between men and women.” He added, “I think that’s what the whole transgender thing is about, is like fundamentally denying basic reality.”
Shortly before he spoke at the Teneo conference, Vance drew criticism when he tweeted that “Alex Jones is a far more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow.” Jones, founder of the online show “Infowars,” gained a following with his promotion of conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. More recently, judges in several states ordered him to pay $1.5 billion to the families of the victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones had called a hoax.
Vance told Teneo members that he was “just trolling” with his defense of Jones, but added “that doesn’t mean what I said is in any way untrue.”
“Look, I think there’s a not-terrible chance that one of you is going to be sharing cellblock 12A in Premier Harris’ prison detention camp in a few years,” he explained, seemingly referring to Vice President Kamala Harris. “If we’re going to all end up in that place, we might as well have a little fun while we get there. It’s OK to troll when you make and speak fundamental truths. But, look, I do think what I said was correct.”
If the conservative movement was going to survive, he continued, its members needed to “speak for truth.” He mentioned donors in Ohio who had asked him if he would condemn inflammatory remarks made by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“And I say, ‘Why? Why do you want me to denounce this person?’” Vance said. “‘Well, she believes these crazy things.’ Who cares?”
He went on, “Believing crazy things is not the mark of whether somebody should be rejected. Believing important truths should be the mark of whether we accept somebody, and if they believe some crazy things on the side, that’s fine. We need to be OK with nonconventional people.”
Update, July 16, 2024: This story has been updated to include comment from Leonard Leo.
