at least for this specific wording change: we can get around to this eventually, but it's on the backburner for now

there is a comment on the article to this effect, for what that's worth:

Angel

Hello Kris,

A lovely idea, but I won’t be visiting any public bathhouse any time soon. For many of us, the pandemic isn’t over. It’s contagious, airborne, and still killing and disabling people (including healthy people who have previously been infected and been ok) every day. Some ways to address the transmission of covid in bath houses can include rigorous HEPA filtration; required testing (using LAMP tests, for example, which are €10/test once you have the machine to read the results (another few hundred euro), and you can pool several people in one test); and maybe masks (I’ve read that they don’t work if they get wet, but I also read an article where someone tested several and went swimming with them. From memory, a regular Aura (~€1) worked nearly as long as an intentionally waterproof model). None of these are cheap by my standards. Not sure what you do about warts, foot fungus, and many other common bath house diseases.

Thanks, Angel

Despite receiving racist emails and comments and suffering a swatting attack — a false report of an ongoing serious crime in order to elicit a response from law enforcement — journalists at The Haitian Times have kept reporting on what is happening in their community, including compiling a list of ways to help.

A nonprofit group in Springfield, the Haitian Community Help and Support Center, which has been inundated with requests for support from Haitians worried for their safety, has given voice to community members by speaking to media outlets on their behalf.

Multiple Haitian groups, such as Ayisyen pou Harris — Creole for “Haitians for Harris” — are harnessing that spirit of fighting back and channeling that frustration and outrage into political action. They are rallying behind Harris’ presidential bid and encouraging others to do likewise.

yeah, chiming in to say i think this is an acceptable case of US news in the World News section. obviously don't go overboard with edge cases, but there's really no dilution of World News from stories like this which do have some multinational significance.

this thread is a disaster from front to back, so it's being locked.

If you’re feeling that announced regret while reading this tame banter, then I apologize - but I would loved to have seen you in some of the larger forums I’ve moderated in the past - and they weren’t even about politics. The users there would have eaten you alive on the first day.

i'm... sorry that we generally like to treat our userbase as adults capable of basic introspection when they do something wrong or sanctionable, instead of immediately telling them to fuck off? but again this is way besides the point--which is, don't relitigate this, and stop going into every thread even remotely adjacent to Israel/Palestine and causing problems. your opinions are simply not important enough (or, in my opinion, well reasoned enough) to hear them out for an additional ten months beyond the ten months you've already been an issue.

i'm very uninterested in relitigating your temporary silencing for getting into aimless slapfights with people on here on this subject. don't bother bringing it up again. strictly speaking the silencing should probably also apply to this thread and just result in me deleting your comments without even responding to them like i am now--but i'm being generous in not doing that here and just calling them a cringe opinion you have the right to express. please do not make me regret that and start enforcing your temporary silencing elsewhere too.

one that very much isn’t as unambiguous as you’re trying to portray it as or have been led to believe through your little filter bubble (at least according to my little filter bubble - opinions, opinions, opinions).

no, it's pretty unambiguous both internationally (where Israel has been rebuked time and time again for its apartheid system and systemic discrimination and abuse against Palestinians) and morally (Israel's current conduct toward people in the West Bank in Gaza is almost one-to-one analogous to Jim Crow and apartheid, even ignoring Zionism and its contribution to the subject)--most people just don't care that much about a foreign conflict that doesn't affect them and a foreign ethnic group they can't directly do much to alleviate the plight of.

fundamentally, though, this is an "i can see discrimination with my own eyes, and settlers from Israel will literally admit to doing the discrimination in casual interviews" and an "i don't think 40,000 Palestinians[^1] are all Hamas militants who should be annihilated with indiscriminate bombing that has leveled the vast majority of Gaza's already crippled infrastructure, i think that is very obviously morally wrong" thing.

[^1]: or many more. some of the more extreme estimates now have the death toll potentially as high as 300,000

It would have been much wiser of him to support his cause elsewhere instead of at and against the institution that he relies on for his degree and visa.

personally i think people should be allowed to exercise basic freedom of speech (especially for unambiguously morally correct causes) without being violently deported over it, but you have what i would consider consistently bad takes on this subject so i'm not surprised you've taken another bad line here.

this appears to be the first time anything like this has happened or been tried; unsurprisingly, students have been mobilizing against it and it's been condemned by dozens of student groups. it's also probably union busting, as Taal is a member of the Cornell Graduate Student Union and they have a memorandum with Cornell that any suspensions like this have to be mediated with the union--which of course was not done here.

basically, put it this way: if a cop stops you and asks you for your phone--what are you realistically going to do in that situation the moment they don't respect your "no" and begin to pressure you, threaten you, and decide to throw the legal book at you (however dubious) for saying no? for most people, the answer is going to be "just give up the phone and start complying with the cop" even though that is not something the cop should be able to do. because at the end of the day they have a gun, and can put you in jail (or at least make your day hellish) more-or-less unilaterally, with very little recourse for you unless you want to do expensive litigation.

But if we’re talking about a law that actually says the cop cannot take your phone no matter what, and they do, then any public defender would be able to point it out and the judge would certainly have to enforce it. I can’t think of a way the cop would abuse their power because, in this case they don’t have it.

they can abuse their power because they're a cop, with a badge and gun, and the right to maim or literally kill you with it (and probably get away with it even if it's not strictly legal) if you don't comply with their demands in the moment. again: cops consistently do not care about or follow legal procedures they're supposed to, frequently fuck up those procedures even when they do, and most cops probably don't even think of it as their job to secure some airtight case that stands up to legal scrutiny. it's not a profession that lend itself to the kind of charitability that's being given here, and the record of the profession makes it even less deserving of that charitability.

The MyColorado FAQ explicitly states that an officer cannot take your phone, even if they think your digital ID is fraudulent. This whole article is a ton of fear mongering.

no offense but: even if you were to grant the notion that this is an exaggerated problem--cops are not well known for their rigorous adherence to the law or proper legal procedure. they routinely fuck up and violate civil liberties, up to and including murdering people for arbitrary reasons. and unless police are held accountable (which they almost never are for a variety of systemic reasons), what a state says they cannot do is effectively meaningless. it's just words on a screen, really.

In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court unanimously held that police need a warrant to search through cell phones, even during otherwise lawful arrests. But if you hand over your unlocked phone to a police officer and offer to show them something, “it becomes this complicated factual question about what consent you’ve granted for a search and what the limits of that are,” Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, told The Verge. “There have been cases where people give consent to do one thing, the cops then take the whole phone, copy the whole phone, find other evidence on the phone, and the legal question that comes up in court is: did that violate the scope of consent?”

If police do have a warrant to search your phone, numerous courts have said they can require you to provide biometric login access via your face or finger. (It’s still an unsettled legal question since other courts have ruled they can’t.) The Fifth Amendment typically protects giving up passcodes as a form of self-incrimination, but logging in with biometrics often isn’t considered protected “testimonial” evidence. In the words of one federal appeals court decision, it requires “no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking.”

it's unbelievable that there is a distinction in US caselaw between giving up your biometrics and giving up your password, and your essentially unchangeable biometrics are somehow the one you're probably obliged to give to the cops if they ask. just an incredibly goofy system

something worth remembering: even limited examinations of who is responsible for complaints about books show that the vast majority of them are made by a handful of people. while there is often a "broad" base of passive support for this stuff in the Republican Party due to partisanship, the actual crusaders are few and far between because most people don't actually want to be that person.

These first serious restrictions on men have come as a surprise to many in Afghanistan, according to a range of Afghans, including Taliban opponents, wavering supporters and even members of the Taliban regime, who spoke in phone interviews over the past two weeks. In a society where a man's voice is often perceived as far more powerful than a woman's, some men now wonder whether they should have spoken up sooner to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

"If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now," said a male resident of the capital, Kabul, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used due to fears of drawing unwanted scrutiny from the regime. "Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don't want to be questioned, humiliated," he said.

A 36-year old male driver in Kabul said the new restrictions feel "enormous" and pose a growing hardship for his work. His revenue has declined by 70 percent since late August, he said, partly because the Taliban has begun enforcing a rule that bans women from traveling alone in taxis.

Even in some government offices, a new sense of dread has set in. A former Taliban supporter recalled how a friend, who still works for the regime, recently had his salary withheld because his beard wasn't sufficiently long.

"We are hearing that some of the civil servants, whose beards were shorter than the required length, were barred from entering their departments," said a government employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.

you're constantly getting into fights with people on threads like this and it's neither good for you, nor the people around you, nor the community. i'm giving you a 30 day cool-off from this section accordingly

Lukas Müller, the Würenlos school director, attributes the success of the ban to several factors. For one, the school board agreed way back in 2007 to keep phones out of classrooms. “But it led to students using them incessantly in the breaks or taking bathroom breaks to look at their phones,” remembers Müller, who has been at the school since 2004. “That was just at the start of the iPhone boom.” Studies show that requests to turn off their phones while students are allowed to keep the devices with them during class are rarely successful, and up to 97 percent of students can’t resist the temptation to check their emails or apps. So the board decided the following year to ban phone use in the entire school area. “The students are indeed less distracted,” Müller has observed. And because his K-12 school starts at kindergarten and teaches students all the way through senior year, students get used to being phoneless in school long before they become attached to Instagram or TikTok.

But the solution isn’t as simple as banning all digital devices. The problem isn’t the use of these devices per se, but excessive use and the kind of content students access. Students who spend one to five hours per day on digital devices for learning at school score significantly higher in their mathematics lessons than those who spend no time on such devices, the OECD concludes: “In contrast, students spending over one hour on digital devices for leisure at school score more than nine points lower in mathematics and report a lower sense of belonging at school than students who spend no time on leisure digital activities.”

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.

“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.

three paragraphs saying you're wrong and that the empirical evidence supports nothing you're saying is not a "long-winded rant" lmao--this uncritical "trust me bro it's actually fine, you just don't get it" stuff is the exact reason i consider autonomous vehicle stuff to 98% worthless techbro hype and autofellatio. cite your sources if you want people to listen--i have, and you've refuted none of it!

The whole point of induced demand in highways is that when you add capacity in the form of lanes it induces demand. So if our highways are already full and if that capacity isn’t coming from increased EV efficiency then where is it coming from? If there’s no increase in road capacity then what is inducing demand?

just for example: "freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move"--every single one of these posited improvements would induce demand unless you literally demolish the infrastructure (which, if you're just switching people one-to-one from regular cars to automated cars is not going to happen, because the number of cars will remain a constant). the existence of unused parking begets driving and is a predictor for more driving.[^1] the existence of more space to move obviously begets more driving because the "highways" aren't "full" anymore; and again, if it didn't that would actually be worse because it incentivizes less safe driving practices.

You are describing how humans drive, not AVs. AVs always obey the speed limit and traffic calming signs.

if by AVs you mean "fully autonomous" ones that literally do not exist currently then sure--they better! but at that point nothing you say is meaningful, because the technology literally doesn't exist. we might as well be talking about mass-adopted hydrogen cars or whatever.

but, if we mean semi-autonomous ones—the ones that clearly exist, and which companies advertise as autonomous, and which people actually use—no. absolutely not. these things routinely violate even the most obvious traffic laws and necessitate humans to intervene in their ordinary function. Waymo hits pedestrians even now, and it's ostensibly one of the most advanced semi-autonomous programs in the world. Uber literally killed a pedestrian and got into legal trouble over it. Tesla's problems are omnipresent to the point where the NHTSA has said their feature is unsafe in practice and people make it a punchline. you can't no-true-Scotsman this technology. even in the best and least ambiguous traffic circumstances it has obvious problems!

[^1]: > In 2015, a group of researchers led by Chris McCahill looked at historical trends in parking supply and commuter behavior for nine cities: Albany, New York; Berkeley, California; the Washington, DC, suburbs of Arlington, Virginia, and Silver Spring, Maryland; Cambridge, Lowell, and Somerville, Massachusetts; and Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut. Using historical aerial photography from three dates to identify and approximate the parking supply, McCahill found that parking growth between 1960 and 1980 was a “powerful predictor” of car use in the following two decades. Every ten spaces added per one hundred residents before 1980 were linked to an 8 percent increase in the share of residents driving to work after 1980. Increase in the parking supply in the study’s first two decades was directly correlated with increases in car use in the following two decades. More parking appeared to cause more driving, not the other way around.