> As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen.
Unless the court shrinks down to three seats (or four, if the Circuits cooperate) Alito and Thomas alone can’t dictate the way the Court treats the issue.
Possibly because a lot of “AI-company scraping” isn't traditional scraping (e.g., to build a dataset of the state at a particular point in time), its referencing the current content of the page as grounding for the response to a user request.
ICE was not “created from the criminal investigation arm of CBP and related agencies”, it was created at the same time, by the same law, as CBP and DHS, from some of the investigation and enforcement arms of INS and the Customs Service, with much of the rest of those agencies (including the Border Patrol, which had been one of the enforcement arm of INS) becoming CBP, and the routine "happy path" immigration functions of INS moving to USCIS under the Department of State.
> They are related but not the same. Under the current US regime, all the stops are being pulled out and all the lines blurred.
A large part of that is that notional function of the “immigration crackdown” falls logically in ICE's domain, and this was the justification for massively increasing ICE funding, but CBP (and particularly the Border Patrol) having much more of the no-rules culture that was sought for the operation, leading to CBP and Border Patrol personnel taking key roles in the operation (which is why, until he became something of a political scapegoat for the Administration policy, a Border Patrol area commander got redesignated a "commander at large" and then given operational command not just of Border Patrol involvement but the notionally ICE-led operation.)
Fox News first reported that the airborne object was intercepted after raising concerns of a potential drone operating near the southern border. Officials later concluded the object was not an unmanned aircraft but a party balloon, a U.S. official told the outlet.
Just think about the terrorist potential here. Buy a $10 party balloon, let it go near a major airport and they'll panic and shut down the airport. That's a lot of havoc for a couple of bucks.
And imagine the mayhem with 20 balloons, or 100. Very easy in trigger happy situation, a child is all you need.
But what do we know, maybe it was an evil terrorist party balloon. You see, the wall just needs to be a little higher to protect that beautiful country from all southern evils.
I have wondered if this would help Ukraine. Let a thousand balloons float serenely into Russian airspace. Some of them may have drones on them waiting to be cut loose and drop a payload on something important. Or they may be carrying a weighted 3d printed shell of a drone that does nothing, Russia can't afford to take that chance. And likewise in the other direction.
Which way are the prevailing winds at altitude over the Ukrainian-Russian border region, anyway?
> And imagine the mayhem with 20 balloons, or 100. Very easy in trigger happy situation, a child is all you need.
Sounds like a great way for a drug-runner to proceed - release 1000 balloons across a very large area, and have only one of them carry their payload of drugs (or whatever).
My guess would be that an actual catapult and an RC car would be enough. It may be necessary to be airborne to cross the land border, but only just enough for the physical barrier, the rest can be on land.
That said, I doubt they even bother with such small-scale trade. The narco-submarines are much higher capacity and now apparently well-built enough to be trans-pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narco-submarine
Yep. It seems like for this application you'd want a larger one, a few feet across, with a nice shiny metal foil coating for the radar to bounce off. So, not a $1 balloon.
Schiphol Airport has large No Balloons signs when you go down to the train station. Aluminum balloons can create havoc on the overhead power lines. It recently shut down the train service for the morning.
We do on a regular basis, it's just that most of the accidents are relatively small-scale, like one person being mistaken for an explosive-vest wearing terrorist chased onto a subway train and shot, or just one of many reactors being made to go Chernobyl, or just the occasional huge dam here and there failing and damaging a few million homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure
Most people aren't sadistically malicious, and most security is professional, so random little failures like metalled balloons or reflections off clouds (or the moon) scaring a security system will only blow up to something important (even on the scale of previous paragraph) every decade or so.
>Just think about the terrorist potential here. Buy a $10 party balloon, let it go near a major airport and they'll panic and shut down the airport. That's a lot of havoc for a couple of bucks.
And rather than see the government have egg on face people (probably a majority here) will vote for politicians who promise all sorts of licenses and regulations on balloons because of it and then in 20yr when I complain and remind them that once upon a time every store used to sell balloons with no KYC BS they'll act like I'm some sort of barbarian, screech, wring their hands, clutch their pearls, etc.
The lyrics of the original German version tell a story: 99 balloons are mistaken for UFOs, causing a military general to send pilots to investigate. Finding nothing but balloons, the pilots put on a large show of firepower. The display of force worries the nations along the borders and the defence ministers on each side encourage conflict to grab power for themselves.
In the end, a cataclysmic war results from the otherwise harmless flight of balloons and causes devastation on all sides without a victor, as indicated in the denouement of the song: "99 Jahre Krieg ließen keinen Platz für Sieger," which means "99 years of war left no room for victors." The anti-war song finishes with the singer walking through the devastated ruins of the world and finding a single balloon. The description of what happens in the final line of the piece is the same in German and English: "'Denk' an dich und lass' ihn fliegen," or "Think of you and let it go."
She does that 'Captain Kirk' rhyme in the English version too though.
The real treat for German listeners is the first verse: ich, mich, dich, and neun-und-neunZIG (zig is pronounced like ich in the main German dialect).
With all of the 'neunundneunzig' (aka 99) repeated throughout the song, the ich/dich/mich/vielleicht rhymes is really a superior start over the English version.
It's a rhyming scheme that cannot be replicated in English at all.
For me, singing the words myself forces me to understand them.
So just sing along. Every word, and understand as much as you can.
------
Once you know all the words, then the next step is to learn the grammar and learn how the words work together. If you give it a few months, full understanding will come!
Most people in California don’t have PG&E. Most of the land area in the northern 2/3 of the State or so is covered by PG&E, but people and land area aren't the same thing. Southern California Edison alone serves almost as many people as PG&E, and other smaller utilities, including public utilities like LADWP, SMUD, Silicon Valley Power, etc., serve another big chunk of the population.
SCE will screw you nearly as hard. We are on a tiered usage which is the cheapest they offer and it's $0.32/kWh and even at that rate the EV isn't much cheaper than the non-hybrid I replaced. I'd need to switch to a ToU plan which would increase my other electricity costs.
Also for depreciation:
2020 Mazda 3 - sold $18k at dealer, originally $28k, 64% retained
2022 Kia EV6 - bought $25k, originally $55k-$7.5k federal, 53% retained
$30 / hr + federal payroll taxes is 5,700 / month ($30 / hr x 40 hrs/week x 4.33 weeks in month x 1.1 for federal payroll taxes). Who has this kind of money on top of mortgage, car payments, food, utilities, etc...? In my circle of friends only one family affords this (the dad is a Director at Meta)
The trick is that au pairs are nowhere close to that expensive. (Though the US becoming radically less attractive of a place for foreigners to live and work may be changing the availability of that option.)
> ICE should never have been created (more of the fallout of the Americans surrendering so much of their civil liberties while panicked about 9/11)
ICE was created by stripping some non-enforcement functions out of INS (those became functions of Citizenship and Immigration Services), all of the lack of civil liberties that was found in ICE when it got that name and was put under DHS were already present when it was INS.
The idea that the name change was the point of origin of the problem is a story created in the last couple years by peopel who never paid attention to immigration policy before Trump's first term looking for a convenient excuse that is both systemic (rather than tied to a particular recent administration) and old enough to provide an excuse to make it unnecessary to discuss why certain problems persisted during the Biden Administration between the two Trump terms, but also recent enough to support a narrative that despite being systemic, it is a fairly new systemic change and reverting returns to a known good state that is recent enough that it is not out of touch with modern needs.
The problem is that, if you've paid any attention to immigration policy prior to Trump's first term (especially if it was both before and after the creation of ICE), its pretty hard to either consider the creation of ICE a significant sea change or the prior state a known good state.
The real sea change in the style of enforcement was Trump 1, and it was only partially unwound under Biden as a political decision that preserving a tough border image would avoid an electoral cost by appealing to swing voters with whom Trump's demagoguery on immigration had resonance but who were skeptical of some of his other policies, not because of some inherent structural change created when INS was reorganized into ICE that made ICE inherently and uniquely and incurably bad. But though the sea change was later than the "ICE is only 23 years old, and we can just go back" narrative suggests, the state before the sea change, much further back than the creation of ICE, also wasn't great.
Note that I support disbanding ICE and radically restructuring immigration enforcement alongside restructuring the immigration laws; but not because ICE was only created in 2003 and we had something workable before that, but because the system was broken well before 2003, and only avoided becoming a total shitshow up until Trump 1 because of how prior Administrations used (and in some cases exceeded) the broad discretion given them within the system to prevent that, not because the system was well-designed, well-structured, or resilient. And even then, it worked pretty badly, but in ways that the people not intended to be subject to it could (and did!) mostly ignore.
> Which ratified treaty did the US's operation in Venezuela violate?
Even if it hadn't violated a ratified treaty (it did violate several, starting with the UN Charter and OAS Charter), it would still violate international law; the US has recognized (among other places, in the London Charter of 1945 establishing the International Military Tribunal) that the crime of aggressive war exists independently of the crime of waging war in violation of international treaties.
E.g. at least 2 children were executed by Maduro for protesting against him, along with at least hundreds of adults. Mass political arrests by masked men have been common since Chavez came to power, there have been executions of entire families. Torture of prisoners. It goes on and on and on and on, and all of it violates the core of international law: the Geneva convention.
Maduro's violations of international treaties include attacks on neighboring states (Maduro's "war on terror" (yes, really) included raids on Columbian territory, plus his promise to attack Guyana). Maduro's violations of international treaties includes, ironically, abducting foreign nationals.
And before you say "but ICE". First, this started more than a decade before ICE, it is actually about far more people than ICE, and with ICE there is at least the allegation that those people violated US law (immigration law). So no, it is not the same. ICE comes disturbingly close, true, but this is still a LOT worse.
So what is your point? Obviously Venezuela since more than a decade did not respect international law. Is your point that since international law exists, Venezuela should have been attacked way sooner, in fact as soon as it became clear what Chavez was doing? Or do you argue that US/Trump's attack is fine since international law can be ignored anyway?
Including Maduro's abduction I think it's very easy to argue that the US behavior is much more in line with international law than Venezuela's. So what is your point?
I mean, what reasoning, exactly, leads to your conclusion that Venezuela/Maduro is the victim here? Or should I put it differently and state the obvious: that your reasoning only makes sense if it defends the idea that Maduro's regime is allowed to kill and attack, and the US is not.
I would hazard to say that most people are upset because a single person decided the fate of our country, and in a manner contrary to the outlines defined in the constitution. And your description of the events there really do clarify just how awful things here are as well - executions in broad daylight, masked men kidnapping people extrajudicially, allegations of laws being violated as a pretext to detail lawful citizens.
It's all horrible and shocking to say the least. And it makes people question whether our actions are justified or the outright thuggery of a wanna-be dictator.
> Next time Putin will kidnap Zelenskyy with the exact same reasoning.
Putin DID do that. He ordered him kidnapped. And it wasn't international law stopping him, it was the Ukrainian army and apparently some regular Ukrainians.
Putin has tried to kidnap him at least twice, and sent out murder squads for him probably several dozen times now.
Putin did not face consequences for this, in fact a number of countries that profess to respect international law protected him against International law: South Africa, China, Mongolia, Belarus, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Azerbeidjan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and India.
Also, as I pointed out, "international law" didn't stop Maduro from committing warcrimes, he also sent out murder squads that even killed children, it didn't stop Putin from doing the same. Nothing at all changed for international law at all.
The only thing victimized is people's illusions about international law. Maduro is himself a war criminal! So using international law grounded arguments to protect him ... fuck that, even if you're technically right.
How does any of this make sense? Other than your first sentence (sorry about that, of course you're right, he tried) every claim is bogus.
> The point of international law isn’t protection but to distinguish wrong from right.
It is actually explicitly stated in almost all international law (mostly except human rights/Geneva convention, which would be the one Maduro violated and Trump didn't) that the ONLY point of international law is international cooperation. International law is completely voluntary for states and consists of individual treaties you can join ... or not join. Don't join or decide to leave? That bit of international law doesn't apply to you anymore.
> What do you think why even Putin made some bogus claims why his actions are justified?
Because Putin always does that. Even decades back, when he was backing gangsters, he did that. I'm sure at one point it was necessary, and now the guy is 73. His habits won't change anymore. Besides, his idol, the Soviet Union, also did that.
> In which war did Maduro commit war crimes?
No war required for that. Besides what even is a war? One of the older "international law" treaties which nobody remembers that a war is only a war when declared by at least one state. Very few declared wars in the last decades. Israel-Palestine? Not declared (according to hamas that's just how things are forever and Israel just defended I guess). Sudan? Not declared. The 123818th conflict between India and Pakistan? Not declared. Iran-Israel? Iran-Syria? Iran-Lebanon? (more like Iran-everyone) Turkey-Kurdistan? You get the picture. The only war that was declared was Russia attacking Ukraine.
> Law protects also criminals to a certain degree because the alternative is anarchy, chaos and global wars.
Unless you mean an extremely minimal degree law does not protect criminals against the state. And any amount of force that is required to get a criminal to stop is legally justified essentially everywhere. In fact, in the countries most humans alive live in, no law protects you against the state, criminal or innocent.
> International war was a lesson learned from the world wars.
Actually the history goes back quite a bit further than that. And if you consider international law is just treaties between countries/factions then ... The most famous bit of international law, the convention of Geneva, was a lesson learned in the holocaust.
> Seems like we need to learn again the hard way.
Why? "We"? Venezuela was not respecting international law before this happened. Neither was Russia. Neither was ...
> Tue right way of doing those things is rarely the glorious, it’s bureaucratic
I doubt Ukraine, or any other actual victims of war crimes will agree on that one. For instance, international law is clear that hamas must surrender to Israel, and obviously they should deliver anyone that had anything to do with taking hostages to the ICC (since both hamas and the PA signed the Rome treaty). The ICC doesn't even want that to happen. Could you explain how this can be achieved in a bureaucratic way?
Putin doesn't need the US providing precedent to do that (and even if he was, there was plenty of that before Maduro), killing or capturing Zelenskyy in a decapitation strike was attempted more than once near the beginning of the 2022 escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war. He wasn’t stopped by international law.
That's not the best solution for image or video (or audio, or 3D) any more than it is for LLMs (which it also supports.)
OTOH, its the most flexible and likely to have some support for what you are doing for a lot of those, and especially if yoj are combining multiple of them in the same process.
Yes, "best" is subjective and that’s why I put it in quotes. But in the community it’s definitely seen as something users should and do "upgrade" to from less intimidating but less flexible tools if they want the most power, and most importantly, support for bleeding-edge models. I rarely use Comfy myself, FWIW.
Unless the court shrinks down to three seats (or four, if the Circuits cooperate) Alito and Thomas alone can’t dictate the way the Court treats the issue.
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