I’m not from the US, but I straight out recommend quickly educating oneself about military stuff at this point - about fiber guided drones (here in Eastern Europe we like them) and remote weapons stations (we like those too). Because the US is heading somewhere at a rapid pace. Let’s hope it won’t get there (the simplest and most civil obstacle would be lots of court cases and Trumpists losing midterm elections), but if it does, then strongly worded letters will not suffice.

Trump’s administration:

“Agency,” unless otherwise indicated, means any authority of the United States that is an “agency” under 44 U.S.C. 3502(1), and shall also include the Federal Election Commission.

Vance, in his old interviews:

“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

Also Vance:

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

Googling “how to remove a dictator?” when you already have one is doing it too late. On the day the self-admitted wannabe Caesar crosses his Rubicon, it better be so that some people already know what to aim at him.

Tesla dealerships… nah. I would not advise spending energy on them. But people, being only people, get emotional and do that kind of things.

As an exception to most regulations that we hear about from China, this approach actually seems well considered - something that might benefit people and work.

Similar regulations should be considered by other countries. Labeling generated content at the source, hopefully without the metadata being too extensive (this is where China might go off the handle) would help avoid at least two things:

• casual deception
• training AI with material generated by another AI, leading to degradation of ability to generate realistic content

In my experience, the API has iteratively made it ever harder for applications to automatically perform previously easy jobs, and jobs which are trivial under ordinary Linux (e.g. become an access point, set the SSID, set the IP address, set the PSK, start a VPN connection, go into monitor / inject mode, access an USB device, write files to a directory of your choice, install an APK). Now there’s a literal thicket of API calls and declarations to make, before you can do some of these things (and some are forever gone).

The obvious reason is that Google tries to protect a billion inexperienced people from scammers and malware.

But it kills the ability to do non-standard things, and the concept of your device being your own.

And a big problem is that so many apps rely on advertising for its income stream. Spying a little has been legitimized and turned into a business under Android. To maintain control, the operating system then has to be restrictive of apps. Which pisses off developers who have a trusting relationship with their customer and want their apps to have freedom to operate.

The countdown to Android’s slow and painful death is already ticking for a while.

It has become over-engineered and no longer appealing from a developer’s viewpoint.

I still write code for Android because my customers need it - will be needing for a while - but I’ve stopped writng code for Apple’s i-things and I research alternatives for Android. Rolling my own environment with FOSS components on top of Raspbian looks feasible already. On robots and automation, I already use it.

This is the interesting bit - he might try that. As far as I know, something changed in 1969 about the structure of the federal marshals, and the courts no longer hire their own marshals. A comment from an American well versed in law would help clear things up.

The ordinary response:

• find the defendant in contempt
• send US marshals to carry out the court order
• alternatively, send them to jail the person who held the court in contempt

you have to get a new one issued

This is the part that’s mistaken: you don’t need a passport if you don’t travel to foreign lands. As far as I know, Americans usually prove their identity using a driver’s license, rarely using a passport.

Scanning the article, the practical threat (besides crazy ideological stunts) seems to be stealth disenfranchisement of this type:

House Republicans passed a bill (which stalled in the Senate) this session to require citizens to have a passport or birth certificate matching their name to vote. This would be a back-door ban on voting for any woman who took her husband’s last name and doesn’t have a passport, an estimated 69 million women. It would also disproportionately affect Republican women, who are more likely to be married, more likely to have changed their name and less likely to have a passport.

One absolutely doesn’t prepare such a large operation at such a short notice.

For an intelligence analyst, signs of an invasion are typically detectable 3 months ahead. If one performs a maritime invasion at a notice of weeks, failure is likely. (For reference, the D-Day needed years of planning and months of moving resources to work.)

Also, I trust that Taiwan has infiltrated China just as deeply as China has infiltrated Taiwan - they likely cannot keep massive secrets from each other.

Increasingly surreal stuff just seems to happen.

But I note that some high-profile Republicans have a spine - despite Elon Musk’s promise to beat anyone who diobeys Trump with his wallet (in primaries).

Subsequently, Trump was requested to be more truthful by: Mike Pence, Don Bacon, Lindsey Graham, Mike Rounds, John Kennedy, Thom Tillis, John Thune - and probably others who I haven’t even heard of, who didn’t make the news.

Tox is nice. My favourite flavour is qTox.

The typical pattern over here: if someone uses Signal, you guess they’re some military type (wants things to be secure, doesn’t care much about anonymity, wants things to work one way and simply).

If someone uses Tox, you guess they’re some hacker / anarchist type (wants things to be secure, but also anonymizable, wants things to be flexible, even if it can backfire).

To my understanding, you cannot pardon someone whom a court fines or detains to force their compliance with their ruling in another case.

(It would be better if a lawyer answered that.)

If everyone is fine, it’s fine to mind one’s own business only.

But if my neigbour’s house is burning and I he has a big bottle of propane waiting to go thermobaric, then his problem is my problem.

If my neigbour’s neighbour is aiming a multiple rocket launcher at my neighbour, or has other ideas for wiping out the block, then a shared problem with high priority does kind of exist.

A president has immunity, but people implementing everyday life tend to follow court orders if they contradict presidential decrees.

If they consult a lawyer, nearly every lawyer will advise to follow court orders. If they don’t, a court can order other authorities to enforce its decision with force, fines or jail time. Lay people don’t have diplomatic immunity.

Now if cops won’t enforce court orders, then yes… then I hope you’re all stocked up on batteries, brushless motors and flight controller stacks. But I hope that won’t happen.

An common explanation for swinging voters is superficial contact with politics. People are too busy with other things in their life to put two and two together. As a result, they make superficial decisions based on current feelings.

I would think that schools also frequently fail, by not providing any tools for political analysis.

Came here to post the Reuters article “US prosecutors formally ask judge to drop case against NY mayor Eric Adams”, but saw that it’s already posted.

I’ll just quote a part from the other article and add some comments about it:

“The pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to … illegal immigration and violent crime,” Bove, Trump’s former personal lawyer and a political appointee, wrote in the memo seen by Reuters.

Essentially, they are sending a letter to a court of law saying “we’re playing politics, don’t distract us with your laws”. I think that should be named “political corruption” and “obstruction of justice”.

Fortunately not everyone was spineless:

“I am confident that Adams has committed the crimes with which he is charged,” Sassoon wrote on Wednesday in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi seen by Reuters. “I cannot agree to seek a dismissal driven by improper considerations.”

My viewpoint:

• resignation is not the best way to deal with a fascist takeover, resistance would be better (and every political firing of a resisting prosecutor should come with a court case attached)
• letting politicians directly influence prosecutors (to stop cases before they go to court) presents massive opportunities for political corruption
• fortunately this case has already gone to court, so next they will be putting pressure on the judge, who is better protected against influence
• if corruption trials should become unfeasible, or feasible only for unimportant or opposition-minded persons, there’s not much point in having a legal system

Possible consequences (copied from Russia, 1993):

• tanks fire at parliament, speaker of parliament urges air force to bomb the Kremlin (they didn’t)
• subsequently, the president gets powers resembling a monarch, and installs the next president, who evolves into a president-for-life

How to avoid -> most likely, refusal of all agencies to follow an order that a court has struck down. But for this to work, mass replacement of public officials with loyalists must be prevented.

A right-wing MAGA influencer called the “direct file” tax program a "far left /…/

Here in Estonia, the castle of “far left” in Europe (shh, don’t spoil the joke, comrades, we want them to think we’re dark red here ;) )…

…for something like 15 years already, you file your taxes like this:

• some day in February, your internet bank reminds you to send a report to the tax office
• you click “send”
• some day in February, you read in a newspaper that “you can file your taxes now”
• you open up emta.ee, log in with your ID card, and see a pre-filled declaration
• if you’re lucky (99% are), it’s been filled correctly and you click “confirm”, otherwise you click “edit”
• you get to see if you have returns or need to pay extra
• if you have returns, you can choose if you want the money (typically if it’s big, you do) or want to donate the small change to a non-profit

It typically takes about 15 minutes.

If it’s a bad year and the automatically filled declaration was incorrect, things will differ of course - then you wait until next winter for a court to resolve the dispute. If you can write a complaint in legalese, it costs about 20 €, but if you need a lawyer, you shell out real money. I’ve had a bad year once. Most people never have one.

Maybe I’m misreading because one poster above deleted their comment, but I can’t understand: how exactly has TSMC shown “disrespect”? Or was the poster showing disrespect?

Putting corporations aside and speaking of states: the US and Taiwan have respectful and friendly relations. They depend on each other.

Now, a tariff of 25-100% on a partner’s primary export and one’s own vitally important import is more like putting a shotgun to one’s leg out of spite. It would be hurting oneself and hurting the other side - and not a little bit.

The US is a store that Taiwan frequently shops in - a very big defense equipment store, I should say. Some of the toys cost money, but if you buy enough, you get kickbacks - the US gives Taiwan some security assistance for free. It also says it will assist Taiwan if anyone (we can imagine who that might be) attacks it.

Meanwhile, Taiwan is a store the world frequently shops in - a very big microprocessor, memory and microcontroller store. Frequent customers can tell TSMC “it would be nice if you brought some of your business here, we have a vacant spot suitable for your plans”. And it works: one factory will be built in the US, one factory in the EU. Maybe elsewhere too. Getting that to happen didn’t need Trump or insane levels of customs tariffs.

To achieve that, people just negotiated like normal people do. TMSC know they operate in a country prone to violent earthquakes and close to an agressive neighbour, they are quite OK with placing some of their business abroad.

Same here. Forums (about science fiction, aeromodelism, electric vehicles) have been important to me, and continue to be important in some fields.