Are there currently any government contracts put at risk by this? I didn’t think that the feds were major spenders on AI. And is Trump aware that Musk is currently the one man trying to provide the sort of AI that Trump wants?

the 20th century

Yes, that’s why I quoted the part where he also says it’s the worst in the last 50 years.

This is simply objectively false. For example, ten times as many people died in the Syrian civil war.

“There is no prior experience in my five decades of humanitarian experience that can come close to comparison to the horror we are all seeing in Gaza.”

This year is the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cambodian genocide. The Rawandan genocide was 31 years ago. This guy is either deliberately lying or an idiot.

It’s not unreasonable to simply dismiss what Trump says entirely, but it’s a different matter to assign it a meaning other than the meaning that can be inferred from context. You’re just putting words in his mouth at that point.

There’s a general concept in civil law that the plaintiff has an obligation to minimize damages, and therefore that he can’t sue for costs incurred due to his failure to minimize damages.

For example, consider a tenant who signs an agreement to rent a house for a year, but moves out (and stops paying rent) after only one month. The landlord may be able to sue the tenant for breach of contract: however, the landlord must mitigate damages by making a reasonable attempt to find a replacement tenant for the remainder of the year. The landlord may not simply let the house lie empty for eleven months and then sue the tenant for eleven months’ rent.

I’m far from a legal expert, so I don’t know if that principle doesn’t apply in cases like this or if the borrowers simply don’t have the resources to defend themselves in court.

I wish this wasn’t relevant as often as it is. It’s bizarre how so many Americans want to destroy America, meaning the present-day USA as opposed to some fantasy with the same name. They think they’ll be able to replace it with something more to their liking but they’re going to see that what they had was actually pretty good (amazingly good!) and that fixing things is a lot harder than breaking them was.

I think even China would prefer to see the USA not making climate change worse for everyone.

Maybe they intend to discourage it via red tape?

Apparently it’s supposed to be refundable when you leave, but also the government is not expecting to issue many refunds?

I’m surprised that such a tourism-crushing policy was not in the news (or at least not in the news that I saw) before the bill passed.

I still don’t understand how this is supposed to work even in principle. Clearly the sort of people who voted in the primary prefer Mamdani by a wide margin. Is Cuomo expecting to be elected by people who didn’t care enough to vote in the primary but do care enough to vote for him despite the fact that he’s not the Democratic candidate? Does he think that there are more people like that than there are people who voted for him in the primary but will vote for Mamdani in the general election?

I don’t understand the long-term purpose of a cease-fire. Is it an admission that Ukraine will not be able to retake occupied territory and an attempt to limit further losses?

The Hobbit trilogy. It’s hard to understand how Peter Jackson could mess up movie after movie after movie like that.

But if there are no bisexuals, there are no unicorns…

I do generally lean towards lowercase-L libertarianism (I don’t support the Libertarian party) but running a huge deficit isn’t libertarian. Taxes shouldn’t be lower than spending in the long term.

I didn’t mean to imply that Trump’s overall budget is a good one - maybe the cuts could be justified as part of a serious effort to reduce the deficit, but I don’t support them when they’re accompanied by even bigger tax cuts and the deficit grows.

So far, Milei has been right and his critics have been wrong. I assume he’ll veto this again.

The thing about government spending (and I’m seeing it come up a lot in the context of Trump’s budget cuts too) is that pretty much all of it is important to someone sympathetic who will experience hardship without it. Reducing spending means taking money away from people who need it, but reducing spending is still sometimes necessary for long-term national prosperity.

I agree that the notion that Hamas can be defeated by denying it food, and furthermore that doing so justifies starving the civilian population, is indeed something I consider well outside the boundary of civilized warfare. The fact that Israel is doing that makes it hard to believe that it is seriously attempting to minimize civilian casualties in other ways. With that said, my point is that Dershowitz is still in principle correct.

That’s the only viable strategy - if there was some number of Palestinian civilians that Hamas could operate among with impunity, it would do. I don’t think Israel is currently fulfilling its obligation to protect civilians as much as is practically possible while still fighting a war effectively, but civilian casualties would be high even if it was simply due to the nature of urban warfare against an enemy operating among civilians who have nowhere to evacuate.

I’m glad that the majority of working-class voters are getting what they voted for.

AI would be a good matchmaker between people who were honest, but I think that doesn’t address the main problem with online dating. That problem (at least for heterosexuals) is that there are a lot more men than women participating. I think women don’t like online dating because they get harassed by creeps and they’re worried that even someone who seems nice will turn out to be a creep in real life. Creeps will be willing to lie to a matchmaking AI because they don’t actually care about compatibility and just want the “one weird trick” that gets women to have sex with them.