Schadrach

This is in no way new. 20 years ago I used to refer to some job postings as H1Bait because they’d have requirements that were physically impossible (like having 5 years experience with a piece of software <2 years old) specifically so they could claim they couldn’t find anyone qualified (because anyone claiming to be qualified was definitely lying) to justify an H1B for which they would be suddenly way less thorough about checking qualifications.

I say #2, specifically because it can be done mathematically, as opposed to trying to agree on some definition of “fairness” that isn’t completely different for every office and doesn’t have to be wholly redistricted every election as a consequence.

Say, something like least split line. Basically, if you have an even number of seats for a region, draw the shortest length line that splits the region into two regions of equal population. If you have an odd number of seats > 1, then draw the shortest line that splits the region based on number per seat given one side gets the “extra” seat (for example, for 5 seats you’d split so that one side is 2/3 of the other side and give 3 seats to one side and 2 to the other). Repeat the process for each region created by these lines until each region represents one seat. If there are multiple shortest lines, you the one closest to a NS axis. The extra seat always goes to the west side of the line.

You only asked about rape/SA, so it was the only topic I responded to. According to FBI stats, the 8-10% is actually pretty typical for many other crimes too, but falsely accusing someone of most other crimes aside from something like murder is going to have consequences that are either shorter term or less severe (reputational consequences of being falsely accused of beating someone up are smaller than being falsely accused of rape, for example). Also, rape/SA often has the accusation itself as the primary or occasionally only evidence against the accused, and sometimes that is enough especially in older cases where any physical evidence would be long gone.

inconvenienced

“Inconvenienced” to several months in jail, or 5 years in prison and five of probation and registered as a sex offender until they were exonerated, and several of the ones in the Innocence Project archives are worse than that.

The 2006 Duke Lacrosse kids were “inconvenienced”, and even that involved threats, harassment and vandalism for a case where every piece of evidence except her claims worked against her claims - she also finally admitted to making it up, in 2024.

false accusations are a tiny fraction of accusations

In the 8-10% range by most studies, with some outliers going as low as 2% or as high as 40%.

The distinction between rape and sex is consent. Whether a given sex act is consensual or not exists only in the minds of those involved in it (consent is a mental state, not something directly observable from outside), unless communicated and when communicated only the communication exists which is likely not in any fixed form.

How bad does the damage from the false accusation need to be?

One I’m fond of pointing to as evidence that they happen is Tracy West accusing her ex Louis Gonzales. He spent three months in jail while it was being investigated, and only got out because he happened to have a very heavily corroborated alibi for the day that left only a 6 minute window during which he would have had to travel a total of 2 miles, obtain a duffel bag full of forensic countermeasures, subdue and rape the victim, dispose of said duffel bag in a manner it would never be recovered and return. And that 6 minute window was not when she originally said it happened, until they allowed her to revise her statement which became much fuzzier about when it happened. Also there was evidence that she was researching the way she was tied up in the days leading up to her being tied up exactly that way. By all appearances this case was about a custody dispute over their kid, and despite the case being dropped because it was physically impossible for him to have done it she still got to use it against him because fucking family courts. He eventually got a finding of factual innocence from CA courts and had the entire thing expunged from his record - to be clear, this essentially requires proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you could not have committed the crime. When he was interviewed by an LA paper about the case, he’d developed an obsession with being as publicly visible with as much paper trail as possible at all time, just in case because of how lucky he was with his alibi from this case (if he’d eaten before he left to get the kid, his alibi wouldn’t exist and that alibi is the reason he only spent 3 months in jail).

How about Brian Banks? Kid with a real chance of going into professional football, Falsely accused, threatened with 41 years, plead to 5 years + 5 probation + registering as a sex offender on advice of his lawyer. The accuser sues the school and wins $1.5M. 9 years later, his accuser contacts him on Facebook and they speak. He secretly records the conversation, in which she admits to having lied but refuses to tell authorities that because she was afraid that they might make her pay back the money. The video gets released publicly and the Innocence Project gets involved. He goes on to briefly join the UFL and then NFL after not having meaningfully played for 11 years (time that would have been the prime of his career if not for the accusation).

Speaking of the Innocence Project, what’s your opinion of them? It tends to vary for left leaning folks - either they like it because a lot of the people exonerated are POC or they hate it because a significant majority of people exonerated by it were imprisoned for some flavor of sexual assault. Go look at their list of cases: https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/ According to the site when filtered for sex crimes 184 of the “more than 250” people were imprisoned wrongly for a sex crime. 124/184 of those exonerated by the Innocence Project that were imprisoned for a sex crime were misidentified by an eyewitness. For sex crimes, that eyewitness is very often the alleged victim.

SA is hard to get a conviction in.

Yeah. It turns out that something that usually has no witnesses beyond the accused and accuser, often has little or no evidence other than the accusation itself and the sole difference between it and an otherwise common and legal act exists solely in the mind of the accuser is difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

I don’t know, I wouldn’t mind also being able to tell it to start to preheat while I’m on my way home. Would save a chunk of time if I could literally walk in the door and throw the food in the oven without the extra wait for it to preheat which is usually long enough to be annoying but not long enough to do anything else.

I mean, it’s being a mail carrier in a world that is maximum Kojima.

Half of the ways people were getting around guardrails in the early chatgpt models was berating the AI into doing what they wanted

I thought the process of getting around guardrails was an increasingly complicated series of ways of getting it to pretend to be someone else that doesn’t have guardrails and then answering as though it’s that character.

Qrpff says hello. Or, rather, decrypts DVD movies in 472 bytes of code, 531 if you want the fast version that can do it in real time. The Wikipedia article on it includes the full source code of both.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Qrpff

To quote LazyTown: Yar har, fiddle de dee…

You may have nothing to fear right now, but you never know who’s going to be in office soon.

The way I always explain it to people - take any additional government power or access to information you either don’t care about or actively support. Now imagine whoever you oppose/hate the most taking office and trying to use that against your interests. Are you still OK with them having that power? Same principle applies regardless of what power or who’s pushing for it.

It’s like due process - you don’t want any category of alleged violation not to be subject to due process, and if you don’t understand why then it’s time to wrongfully accuse you of doing that so you understand the problem.

Fuck it, align=‘center’. That’ll center it horizontally relative to some context and if that’s not good enough then you should have been more precise in your request.

Headline was inaccurate - they didn’t bomb a place for a gender reveal. Instead they bombed a place that produced blue smoke for some other reason and joked about how it resembling a gender reveal. That’s…not better but it’s an important distinction - one is blowing shit up to announce it’s a boy and the other is blowing shit up to blow shit up and then joking about the color of the smoke.

You’d have to be an asshole not oppose country based on settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing

…and yet, being anti-Israel was considered a far-right neo-Nazi position not that long ago. It became acceptable again from the start of the current flare up (the current fighting isn’t something new, it’s been going on and off for decades). Before that, anti-Israel meant anti-Jew meant obviously Nazi. It’s wild how when things change so many people will just quietly drop the old narrative and pretend it never existed. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia and all that.

The reality is that the US supports Israel, has for a long time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It’s not because of being pro-Jew or wanting to ethnically cleanse Arabs, it’s because they’re our only real ally in the Middle East and thus we’ll remain safely on their good side unless and until we get a strategically more useful ally in the Middle East. Then keeping them happy becomes less important.

Compared to the US, they don’t. 1A protections are extremely broad, to be outside protected speech it practically has to be either CSAM or inciting immediate lawless action.

As in “SLUR should be hanged from trees” is protected under 1A, “Guys, grab that SLUR over there and string him up” is not. CSAM is primarily illegal because production, distribution and even possession further harms the victim of the CSA performed to create it.

Honestly, we need to reform our economic system and not continually rely on fertility to solve all of our problems.

Fertility and demographic collapse aren’t about supporting an economic system. Even if we were a post-scarcity communist utopia women would need to average 2.1 children/woman to maintain the existing population (2.1 isn’t growth, it’s maintenance - if you wonder why it’s slightly higher than the number of people involved with making new people it’s because you also have to cover for infertility and mortality among those children) or the same population-level result would occur. The nasty thing about demographic collapse is that it’s subtle until it isn’t and by that point it’s really hard to fix. There is no economic system where people don’t need to make more people to have a stable population, at least not unless/until we achieve some kind of immortality.

Ultimately you have three options when it comes to the topic, and they all have downsides:

1. Get your people to make more people. Downsides: Those new people aren’t really contributing to society for a couple of decades, which means it’s a long term fix for a problem that might be a big problem in a shorter term than that depending on where we’re talking about. Also, there aren’t a lot of ethical ways to do this, and the ones that are ethical aren’t extremely effective.

2. Import people from elsewhere. Downside: If you do this too quickly and/or without pushing for assimilation you will irrevocably change if not destroy your culture. This is why places like Japan and South Korea aren’t allowing unlimited mass immigration from anywhere people are willing to come from despite being on the cusp of the “until it isn’t” part of “subtle until it isn’t.”

3. Do nothing, and hope it just fixes itself. Downside: This is essentially a death spiral for your people.

Any random 9-digit number can be a valid SSN.

Not true - there are whole ranges that specifically aren’t in use (mostly specific values for the first three digits that are intentionally not used). Outside those ranges though, yeah, basically any 9 digit number. Add one to the last digit of your SSN and if you were born before 2014 you likely get someone born in the same hospital on the same day.

I don’t think this is the kind of neuroplasticity we’re supposed to be aiming for.