https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1919

This bill prohibits a Federal Reserve bank from offering products or services directly to an individual, maintaining an account on behalf of an individual, or issuing a central bank digital currency (i.e., a digital dollar). Further, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System is prohibited from using a central bank digital currency to implement monetary policy or from testing, studying, creating, or implementing a central bank digital currency, with exceptions as provided by the bill.

Oh come the fuck on what. So the plan is to hand stable dollar digital payments entirely to private entities. Super Cool.

I’m curious if this means that certain cities or states will become citizenship havens because their local courts decided to provide injunctions for their jurisdiction.

The problem is and has always been “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof”

People have been twisting that to mean that anyone that isn’t born to American citizen parents means that you are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.

You need minimum B1 language in most European countries for both immigration and businesses to consider you for long term employment and or settlement, so that’s a start.

The United States is tied with Vietnam for fewest number of minimum National holidays on Earth.

Wasn’t the National Guard the people who shot those kids at Kent State?

It’s not just helicopters. Commercial satellite imaging is good enough to detect mold and askew shingles (usually more through running the image over multiple angles and finding reflectance differences)

I worked for a company that does large scale construction updates based on SAR and Maxtor reflectance data, it’s pretty terrifying how accurate it is.

Yea I think “8-12 launches” is the ideal with the launches being at a steady pace (not taking into account weather, launch problems requiring delays etc.)

beating SLS in just tests

Technically the booster/starship combo has yet to lift the tonnage that SLS already lifted with Artemis I.

It’s obvious that it’ll be cheaper per ton than SLS but It’s still a little early to say what level of cost savings it has until we know how many tons super heavy and starship can actually lift. (The estimate SpaceX has been giving goes down by 50 tons every year)

There’s that Smarter Every Day video that says something like 8-12 (joke is that with schedule slippage it’s more like 20)

Best part of this is that they just won the contract for launch services even though they still haven’t proven the thing can fly without blowing up yet.

They still haven’t tested it under the Artemis payload weights, either. They’re testing with 17 ton payload and last year at the starship launch celebration Musk said starship is supposed to be capable of 50 ton payloads to LEO. For comparison SLS block 2 can lift will be able to lift 100 tons to LEO.

The Artemis HLS is supposed to be 110 tons to the lunar surface, but supposedly loaded up in like 12 launches.

I assume they’re still a few years away from Starship being usable.

SpaceX is still hitting the milestones on their NASA contracts

SpaceX has missed every single HLS milestone and is the primary reason the Artemis program is delayed:

By definition, this is not a bailout or waste of taxpayer money, as it was fairly competed on the open market, and approved by the congresspeople who were voted in by the public.

SpaceX famously hired William Gerstenmaier and Kathy Luedens right after they awarded them billions for the falcon and crew capsule. They barely skated by the government’s “revolving door” conflict of interest regulations because SpaceX put them on “unrelated” projects.

The contract awarded to SpaceX and Starlink under the Trump FCC was rescinded after Biden’s FCC decided that they weren’t meeting the requirements of the contract.

Now SpaceX is awash in newly minted federal contracts from Trump’s new federal agencies and Musk’s “special employee” status.

SpaceX’s funding has never been “approved by congress” outside of some confirmed cabinet positions, nor has it ever been what one could call completely “fair.”

It’s kind of crazy the variety of opinions people have on Andor and Rogue One

I can understand the opinion that bringing kids into the world is causing them harm because the world sucks. But the number of people who seemed to bring that opinion into the real world on that sub was kind of scary.

Not an insignificant number of people who had stories like “my stupid natalist coworker wanted to take off to attend their kids’ graduation, I told them I wouldn’t help and they shoulda thought about that before they had their little shitstains” were there.

Like having kids already sucks enough, making parents’ lives harder seems to be actively adding to the harm you’re trying to reduce…

Nah you can’t even use cash in a lot of post offices now.

Agreed, Scylla and Charybdis, as it is.

It’s not quite cut and dry as there’s also the recent decisions by the supreme court:

Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith (2023) - “At issue was the Prince Series created by Andy Warhol based on a photograph of the musician Prince by Lynn Goldsmith. It held Warhol’s changes were insufficiently transformative to fall within fair use for commercial purposes, resolving an issue arising from a split between the Second and Ninth circuits among others.”

Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc. v. VIP Products LLC (also 2023) - “The case deals with a dog toy shaped similar to a Jack Daniel’s whiskey bottle and label, but with parody elements, which Jack Daniel’s asserts violates their trademark. The Court unambiguously ruled in favor of Jack Daniel’s as the toy company used its parody as its trademark, and leaving the Rogers test on parody intact.”

The aforementioned Rogers test was quoted in both decisions but with pretty different interpretations of the coverage of “parody.”

One thing seems to be the key: intent As long as AI isn’t purposefully trained to mimic a style to then it’s probably safe, but things like style LoRAs and style CLIP encodings are likely gonna be decided on whether the supreme court decided to have lunch that day.

Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. (1994) - This case established that the fact that money is made by a work does not make it impossible for fair use to apply; it is merely one of the components of a fair use analysis

This isn’t quite correct either.

The reality is that there’s a bunch of court cases and laws still up in the air about what AI training counts as, and until those are resolved the most we can make is conjecture and vague moral posturing.

Closest we have is likely the court decisions on music sampling and so far those haven’t been consistent, and have mostly hinged on “intent” and “affect on original copy sales”. So based on that logic whether or not AI training counts as copyright infringement is likely going to come down to whether or not shit like “ghibli filters” actually provably (at least as far as a judge is concerned) fuck with Ghibli’s sales.