Another good article about this.

It’s just a bunch of “tacticool” accessories, not anything rare or particularly high-tech. IMO it makes the agents look like try-hard dorks - no number of laser scopes is going to turn them into commandos.

(With that said, the house does say “We don’t dial 911” and so it makes sense for the agents to be particularly careful.)

Idealists are letting perfect be the enemy of the good but I don’t think that’s why Democrats underperformed. Neither Clinton nor Biden/Harris were idealists of this sort (despite some stuff Harris said but didn’t mean back in the 2020 primaries) and they didn’t lose elections because of a lack of support from the idealists. So IMO while the idealists aren’t helping, the very much non-idealistic institutions of the Democratic party which prioritize seniority within the party over electability are to blame.

That’s not the right way to interpret these polls. Many people aren’t answering the question literally. They’re interpreting it to mean “Do you still approve of Trump’s deportation policy, despite everything?” and they’re saying yes to that. (It’s a reasonable interpretation.) People who really are happy about the killing do exist and they’re disproportionately loud online but they’re not 28% of the population.

I used to work at a company involved in breast cancer screening, and one of the skills I learned on that job was how to say the word “breast” without ever giggling. It was a small startup so we had some interesting people, including a woman who, when discussing how the machine worked, would just grab one of her own breasts through her shirt and start poking it.

I’m glad that at least one government is stepping in to protect the helpless public from the menace of, uh, ads over five seconds long. Disaster averted.

Some hound breeds are pretty creepy.

Really? I wonder what model year will have cars available without it. I was thinking of buying a new car but I can wait.

I’m used to driving a car from 2008, but I borrowed a friend’s 2021 Subaru Forester and there the engine just shuts off after the car is stopped for a few seconds, even without any sort of cruise control. The engine turns back on when I let go of the brake, but I find the noise, the vibration, and the delay of the startups irritating. There’s no way to get the feature to stay off - it defaults to on every time the car starts and it will eventually turn back on while you’re driving even after you’ve pressed the button to turn it off temporarily. I find that especially irritating. (IMO it’s simply not OK for a car to do something after I’ve pressed the button telling it not to do that.)

If they’re undoing changes that customers hate, maybe they’ll get rid of automatic stop-start too?

Are you arguing that it isn’t a scam?

Generally a scam is something done in secret, and if the government finds out exactly what the scammer is doing then the scammer can get in legal trouble. Here Uber is acting entirely out in the open, the government clearly wants to stop Uber, but writing a law that restricts Uber in the intended way appears to be difficult. (Maybe a law written strictly enough that Uber couldn’t work around it would also impact others that the government doesn’t want to target?) So I would argue that this is against the spirit of the law but it isn’t a scam.

I suppose I don’t give “loophole” the same moral weight that you do. Even if this was not intended to be legal, if the law as written permits it then the blame is on the government for passing a law other than the one intended to pass, not on Uber for taking action in accordance with the law.

(Moral obligations can exist without being legally required, but taxes are a legal construct and there is no such moral obligation to pay them which extends beyond the legal one.)

I’m not saying that taxes are bad. I’m saying that if the government says “there’s a new tax you have to pay if you do that” and you say “ok, then I won’t do that,” you have done nothing wrong. You have a duty to obey the law, but no duty to maximize government revenue.

Do you just voluntarily give the government money that you aren’t legally required to pay?

Windows is transitioning from being software you run to being an experience that Microsoft provides to you. The pattern of pushing new features to users unpredictably and without the option to refuse is clearly inappropriate in the first model but natural in the second. As a power user I strongly prefer the first model, but I recognize that most people these days might be ok with having their computer work like a website they access or an app they run on their phone - something they have no control over the state of.

Price is what people are willing to pay, so I’m not sympathetic to your idea that the higher price that people are willing to pay to avoid needing a loyalty card is in any sense illegitimate. It might be a different matter if there was simply no option to buy groceries without a loyalty card, but many stores don’t have cards and even the ones with cards often have close substitutes for products that are on sale, so that if you want to you can limit yourself to buying only those products for which the price without a card is not higher.

My more general opinion is that people who want to legally prohibit things that they can freely choose not to participate in, so that their own behavior won’t have to change but no one else will be allowed to do the thing they don’t like, are displaying an authoritarian impulse.

You want to give the FBI a lot more power to choose, unilaterally and without oversight, which parts of the Epstein files to keep from the public than I do.

It’s not an authentic video of Epstein, but it is an authentic part of their file on Epstein. You seem to be saying that they should not have posted it but my understanding of the law is that they should have posted it and not removed it.

How is it a big deal? We know that it’s not real, that it wasn’t claimed to be real by its creators, and that the FBI has it because it was emailed to them by someone with an innocent question about it. I can see either including it in the release because it’s technically in the FBI’s Epstein file, or omitting it from the release because it actually isn’t relevant information. It looks like the FBI chose the latter policy once they became aware that they had released the video (presumably as part of a bulk upload) and they Streisand-Effected themselves by removing it. I’m not familiar with the specific text of the law so I don’t know which option is more in accordance with it, but either way I don’t see any substantive issue at all.

I can imagine how someone who is still a good person overall might commit certain serious crimes. But the petty stuff like this or littering immediately places whoever does it in the “person I detest” category in a way that, say, robbing a bank would not. The thought of having all that money is a genuine temptation, and maybe the robber needs it for something important. Meanwhile playing audio in a subway car is just completely unjustifiable.