Setting aside efficiency, I really don’t get this whole “pay criminals to engage in sabotage” campaign in Europe that Russian intelligence has going.

The actual acts don’t cause that much damage. It’s not hamstringing countries.

If it can’t be linked to Russia, then it seems unlikely that it has much deterrent power. Russia can’t say “do things I don’t like, and we’ll do more of this”.

If it can be traced to Russia, then the elaborate string of subterfuge doesn’t seem to have a point.

And stuff that can be attributed to Russia is an escalation that the other country knows about. Escalating with NATO, even in limited ways, seems to me like a losing game for Russia. Russia’s best hope from NATO is disinterest, not winning a “who inflicts more pain” game.

Maybe the idea is to artificially create the impression of unrest or disagreement with the government, but that seems questionable at this scale. I mean, would some of these even have made news had they not been traced back to Russian intelligence? If they could instigate widespread riots or something like that, okay, that might be different, but…

EDIT: It might be trying to find a form of asymmetric warfare, which the article mentions. I can easily believe that Estonian intelligence and law enforcement expended more then 10k EUR in resources investigating your window-kicking incident that cost Russia 10k EUR. But…Russia trying to drain resources in NATO seems impractical too. It’s too-large a pool to reasonably drain, and even more so with the scale of this campaign.

In the sense of corruption? No, certainly not, but that’s also a very low bar; it would be extremely unlikely for “all” people in any profession to do anything.

the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more.

Add a “watch on YouTube” link above or below your embedded videos?

I don’t really like having clock shifts, but I will say that it’s less obnoxious in 2024 when most of my clocks update automatically.

In, say, 1990, it was an ongoing headache to have to manually fiddle all the timekeeping devices twice a year. Invariably, there’d be a timepiece or two that I’d forget about and not update until months later. Now I typically don’t even notice, just have one slightly-groggy day a year and one day a year when I wake up early.

On one hand, I chuckled watchng it.

On the other hand, it seems kinda off-topic for the [email protected] community. Did you, possibly, choose the wrong community when posting, this, OP?

Depends upon how you measure “well”.

The Kim dynasty is still going strong, three generations in. Odds are that the Kims and probably a number of people at the top would be worse-off if things changed. From their perspective, things probably are going pretty well in North Korea.

Of course, the standard of living of the North Korean public is pretty horrendous, the economy is undeveloped, and North Korea doesn’t have a lot of international clout. If your metric is whether the typical person in society is living well or whether the country is powerful, wealthy, or secure, then things aren’t going very well.

Normally yes, but it depends on what one gets a degree in. I recall reading some analysis some years back that found that a theological degree was normally a net financial loss.

kagis

This isn’t the one I was thinking of, but it basically makes the same point.

https://freopp.org/whitepapers/is-college-worth-it-a-comprehensive-return-on-investment-analysis/

Is College Worth It? A Comprehensive Return on Investment Analysis

Some degrees are worth millions, while others have no net financial value. The biggest factor is your major.

According to their findings, getting an engineering degree is a very large win, for example. However, the majority of degrees in visual arts and music are a net negative.

It also says that going to a more-expensive school has a positive return on average, but the impact of that is much smaller than the degree which one chooses to study for:

Major is the most important factor. College rankings like the U.S. News and World Report emphasize choice of institution. But from a financial perspective, choice of major is the more important consideration. Major alone explains nearly half the variation in ROI. Students will have a much greater chance of financial success if they study engineering, computer science, nursing, or economics, rather than art, music, religion, psychology, or education.

This isn’t to say that lower-earning majors are worthless. Society needs artists and musicians. But low incomes for these majors signal a supply-demand mismatch. Universities are producing too many art majors and too few engineering majors relative to the number of jobs available in each of these fields. As a result, employers bid up the wages of engineers while surplus artists flood the labor market. The answer is not to eliminate low-earning majors nationwide, but to reduce their scale.

It’ll take your breath away!

If you put two spaces at the end of each line you want a line break after, it’ll make a new line in the output.

I think that the larger message there is more that he feels that recreational drug use isn’t a great idea.

build up US companies to make solar panels.

One would expect it to have that effect. If X is more expensive to obtain abroad, then you’ll tend to have more domestic capacity being developed – as long as it’s believed that the tariffs aren’t going to go away in the near future, since otherwise, anyone investing in solar manufacturing capacity stands to lose their investment.

So, this isn’t quite the issue being raised by the article – that’s bug reports generated on bug trackers by apparently a bot that they aren’t running.

However, I do feel that there’s more potential with existing LLMs in checking and flagging potential errors than in outright writing code. Like, I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself and hopes that I will adequately review it.

I think the only area where machine learning has made actual accomplishments is in research.

If you use speech recognition or optical character recognition, to grab two examples, you’re using software that generally has involved machine learning. Those are both fields that I’d call successful for quite some years and are applied to areas outside of research.

Are you in support of UBI?

I don’t think that it’s a terribly interesting question as a yes-or-no question for all UBI policies.

The thing about UBI is that the devil is in the details: UBI covers a broad range of policies. You really need to know the specifics of a proposal to know what it entails; UBI policies may be very different.

For example, there are a number of left-wing groups who like the idea of UBI, because they see it as a way to redistribute wealth. Normally, they tend to want something like keeping spending policy more-or-less where it is, adding UBI, and increasing taxes on some groups that they’d like to shift wealth from.

There are also a number of small-government right-wing groups who like the idea of UBI, because they see it as a way to reduce the role of government in setting purchasing decisions. Normally, they tend to want something more like a revenue-neutral form of UBI; there, one does something like cutting spending policy (on various forms of subsidy, say, like for food or housing) by $N and then shifting that $N to UBI so people can choose how to spend it. Here’s a right-libertarian take on UBI:

https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-case-basic-income

Of course, as with any policy proposal, the details matter a lot. And the Swiss proposal is problematic in a number of ways. For starters, 2,800 USD a month means that a married couple could get $67,200 per year for doing nothing. And while it’s true that Switzerland is one of the richest countries in the world in terms of per capita income, that’s still an awful lot of money. Furthermore, the Swiss proposal seems to involve implementing a basic income in addition to their currently existing welfare system. Few libertarians would be willing to sign up for that deal. But as a replacement for traditional welfare programs, there is a lot for libertarians to like about a basic income.

So, okay, both our wealth-redistribution guys on the left and our small-government guys on the right are talking about UBI policies…but they are talking about policies with very different implications due to the specifics of the policy. The left-wing guy probably isn’t especially excited about the form of UBI that the right-wing guy wants, and the right-wing guy probably doesn’t like the form of UBI that the left-wing guy wants. So I’d really need to know the specifics of a given UBI policy before I could say whether I think it’s a good idea; I wouldn’t just be across-the-board in favor of or against any UBI implementation, but would need to see a specific UBI proposal and consider it individually.

I don’t know about the UAE, but in the US, most states have some lower age of consent to sex for married people, and I assume that normally marriages from abroad would recognized. So I’d guess that as long as you were having sex with someone you were married to and it met that lower bar for age, you could still have sex with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_in_the_United_States

So, for example, for Illinois’s age of consent, the age is lower if the people involved are married:

The law allows the actor a defense to prosecution if the victim is currently or was previously married (the absolute minimum marriageable age in Indiana is 16[170]), although this defense does not apply in the case of violence, threats or drugs.

Whereas normally, the age doesn’t go below 18.

I’d expect that Illinois would still potentially charge people who were legally married abroad to, say, a 14-year-old and then have sex with them in Illinois.

Specifically for immigration – not just visiting the US --it looks like US immigration considers whether marriage would be legal at the age in question in the intended state of residence.

https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-strengthens-guidance-for-spousal-petitions-involving-minors

Interviewing earlier at the I-130 petition stage provides USCIS with an additional opportunity to verify information contained in the petition and assess the bona fides of the claimed spousal relationship. USCIS officers will now conduct interviews for the following I-130 spousal petitions as part of the adjudication of any I-130 spousal petition where:

• The petitioner or the beneficiary is less than 16 years old; or
• The petitioner or the beneficiary is 16 or 17 years old and there are 10 years or more difference between the ages of the spouses.

While there are no statutory age requirements to petition for a spouse or be sponsored as a spousal beneficiary, USCIS published guidance earlier this year detailing factors that officers should consider when evaluating I-130 spousal petitions involving a minor. USCIS considers whether the age of the beneficiary or petitioner at the time the marriage was celebrated violates the law of the place of celebration. Officers also consider whether the marriage is recognized as valid in the U.S. state where the couple currently resides or will presumably reside and does not violate the state’s public policy. In some U.S. states and in some foreign countries, marriage involving a minor might be permitted under certain circumstances, including where there is parental consent, a judicial order, emancipation of the minor, or pregnancy of the minor.

A related topic where legalities differ between countries: polygamy. I’m pretty sure that I recall reading that if you immigrate – not just the same thing as traveling to – the US, and are in a polygamous relationship, you are required to only choose one spouse to be your wife under US law.

kagis

Yeah:

https://www.quora.com/Does-the-US-recognize-polygamous-marriages-from-other-countries

For example, a refugee who was practicing polygamy before he immigrated will be required by U.S. immigration law to designate one wife as his legal wife to accompany him to the United States. Years later, after becoming a U.S. citizen, he might divorce that wife, and marry the woman who was formerly his second wife, in order to petition for her (on Form I-130) to immigrate to the United States.

If the petition is approved, the new/formerly second wife immigrates, and then USCIS learns that the husband is still continuing to live with the first wife (even if only some of the time), all three could be accused of practicing polygamy. This is the case because all three come from a country where polygamy is practiced. Therefore, if the man lives with both women at the same time, whether the women live separately or apart, their joint behavior meets the USCIS definition of polygamy.

Similarly, if an immigrant from a country where polygamy is practiced culturally but not legally goes through a ceremony of customary ‘marriage’ with someone in her country of origin who has other customary wives, USCIS will see her as a practicing polygamist. This will be the case even though there is no legal marriage between the couple, and even though she is living in the U.S. and he and his wives are living outside the United States.

Islam is the most common religious tradition recognizing the custom of polygamy today. Nevertheless, as a result of the biblical practice of polygamy, there exist practicing polygamists in both the Hebrew and Christian traditions. In addition, many African and some South-East Asian nations have sociocultural traditions of polygamy.

If you belong to any of these traditions (or certain sects within them), therefore, USCIS will pay close attention to indications that your household situation fits the definition of polygamy.

Because many immigrants and U.S. citizens come from religious traditions that have practiced polygamy, it is not against U.S. law to believe in polygamy, so long as you are not actually practicing it.

If you practiced polygamy before immigrating to the United States, but neither you nor your spouse(s) have practiced it since becoming a legal permanent resident, your prior history of polygamy should not cause your naturalization application to be denied.

If you have personally practiced polygamy since immigrating to the United States, (even if it was many years ago) you should not apply to naturalize without first consulting with an immigration attorney. Practicing polygamy as a legal resident of the United States will not only likely result in denial of your naturalization application, but grounds for deportation.

If you have not personally had multiple spousal relationships at the same time, but you have had a relationship with someone you considered a spouse (whether that relationship was legally recognized or not) and that person had other spousal type relationships at the same time, USCIS may determine that you are a polygamist. This is true regardless of whether your partner was living in the U.S. or abroad. It is especially true if you or your partner come from a country where polygamy is practiced, whether legally or culturally. You should definitely not apply for naturalization without first terminating that relationship (or making certain that your partner has terminated all other relationships). You should also wait to apply for naturalization until five years (or other applicable good moral character period) after the end of the relationship, unless you have a good explanation for why you got involved in the relationship; an explanation that makes it clear you did not intend to practice polygamy.

If you knew your partner was a practicing polygamist, or if you want to apply without waiting, you should definitely consult with an immigration attorney first.

Remember, USCIS examining officers are trained to spot polygamous behavior in applicants for naturalization who come from countries where polygamy is part of the culture. If you were knowingly involved with polygamy or polygamists, your application for naturalization is at risk of denial no matter who you were in the web of relationships.

EDIT: Under certain specific situations, some states have no minimum age for marriage in the US – one could, hypothetically, become legally married to a four-year-old in California. Under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, all states are required to honor marriages performed in other US states, so someone can become married in State A and then move residence to State B. Thus, I’m pretty sure that it’s possible to be legally married to someone in a state where one could not actually become married to that person, and still be legally prohibited from having sex with them while in the territory of that state.

Criminals can be monogamous and sober.

Sure.

However, if police policy on undercover officers has some publicly-known constraint that doesn’t apply to the people that they are aiming to impersonate, one has an easy litmus test for whether someone is a police officer or not.

It’s not like gangs are like “commit sexual assault or we’re going to shoot you for being a cop.”

Doesn’t mean that the officer is going to be shot, but they might not be trusted by whoever they’re trying to investigate.

All that being said, this is just in the abstract. I don’t have any idea of whether it’s warranted in this situation. But it’s going to be something to keep in mind when designing policy for undercover officers – one cannot permit for that easy litmus test to exist.

On one hand, yeah, that sucks.

On the other hand, you go to a foreign country, you’re subject to their laws, and it’s on you to be aware of them.

There are weapons that I could happily lug around in the US that the UK would take issue with if I were to be doing so in the UK. Do I personally feel that British law is going the right way on this? No. However, it’s British territory, and so British law has jurisdiction. Saying “but I’m from the US and that would be perfectly legal back home” isn’t going to carry a lot of water with British courts, or, I expect, with British public opinion.

Similarly, a Brit can’t exactly go to the UAE and just do as one does in the UK and expect the UAE to accept it because something’s legal in the UK. International travel is a lot cheaper and easier than it ever has been historically, but once you walk across the line of a sovereign territory, it’s got real consequences, and if you choose to travel internationally, it’s on you to be aware of them. That country isn’t just a tourism spot for people from Country X, but a home for people who live there. They’ve got their own rules and concerns.

The chief executive of campaign group Detained in Dubai said Mr Fakana felt abandoned by the British government. He’s expected to appeal against his sentence.

I don’t really see a reasonable complaint against the British government here, at least from the article text.

I agree that that’s likely something like the underlying factor – they have two services, they named them in such a way that lower cost normally maps to the slower service, and in this unusual case that relationship doesn’t hold.

However, OP’s got a legit point that from a consumer standpoint, where someone only cares about time/money tradeoff, not internal FedEx operations, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’d probably make sense for the “low end” option to just automatically map to the faster service in this case.

has been coined the “Franklin Fire”.

“Dubbed” or “named” or “termed” or such.

To “coin” X is to create a new word X rather than to name a thing; it’s not a synonym for the above words.

He coined the word “spork”.

It’s what the Hubble found, but not what our model predicted.