OP is referring to them as brown shirts because they’re being used for intimidation, amassing in blue cities like Minneapolis instead of red states that actually need and want immigration enforcement. They also break laws, violate the constitution and kill people, then lie afterward to cover it up.
The issue for most people isn’t immigration enforcement, but how it’s being done.
No, the press did cover it. I remember it distinctly, including complaints from the left wing of the Democratic party.
The difference was that the Obama administration did it in an orderly manner and followed due process rather than sending a bunch of masked clowns into a city he didn’t like and start rounding up anybody with an accent. There was no media circus because ICE was behaving like normal police and wasn’t killing people in the process.
This was also the time when Republicans were pretending that they would agree to comprehensive immigration reform if given sufficient border security. You had politicians like Ted Cruz sign onto bills that had a path to citizenship for the undocumented. The thought was that if we could aggressively deport the actual criminal migrants, then maybe we could get agreement to let others stay. The problem was that calls for “border security” before compressive reform were never in good faith. Despite their insistence otherwise, it’s clear under the Trump administration that Republicans never supported “legal immigration” or any immigration at all (well, unless the immigrants have $5 million to drop on a “gold card”).
The brown shirts were at least man enough to show their faces. I guarantee all these masked gang members were screaming about not being able to breathe when Target asked them to wear a mask while shopping.
Yes, people did give a shit when Democrats were in office, and in fact protested about it. However, one HUGE difference is that the Obama administration had no policy of family separation. 5-year-olds were not rounded up alone or used as bait for their parents. Family detention was used when families came as groups to the border- the Obama administration wasn’t snatching kids off the streets of American cities.
Windows 10 users must enroll in Microsoft’s paid Extended Security Updates program to get the new certificates.
Microsoft should be required to provide a certificate without any restriction. How many tens of millions of computers still run W10? Forcing people to enroll in something just to get a required update should be an automatic penalty.
The hundreds of prize payouts were mostly just a few bucks each, part of a promotional campaign by a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange. The total reward pot: 620,000 Korean won, or about $425. Then came a colossal mistake. A staffer for Bithumb, South Korea’s No. 2 crypto exchange, didn’t distribute 620,000 Korean won. Rather, the prizes, due to an input error, emerged in a different currency: 620,000 bitcoins, valued at more than $40 billion.
That meant a winner who should have received a sum of 2,000 won — enough to buy a cheap cup of coffee — reaped, at least momentarily, more than $120 million in bitcoins. Enough recipients sought to sell or withdraw bitcoin that the market sank 17%, before Bithumb halted transactions after roughly 30 minutes. Those affected included investors who had held bitcoin before the botched giveaway. The losses totaled about $685,000, Bithumb says.
The company has since said it has reversed the transactions or had recipients voluntarily return more than 99% of the misdistributed bitcoins. But Bithumb is still trying to convince users who during the brief window of trading managed to offload more than 100 bitcoins, valued at roughly $9 million, to give back the equivalent funds.
it is entirely traceable and at least in the US and UK and it consider theft if you knowingly keep a deposit paid to you in error. My ‘guess’ would that courts would consider that applies to crypto currency ledgers as well.
Now when this crypto stuff was new I suspect prosecutors would have said ‘wtf is a bitcoin, I am to busy for this computer nerd nonsense’ and let you skate, but we not there anymore.
Sure maybe this no financial institution that can undo your transaction but property law broadly exists outside of banking and finance, and the notion that if someone over pays you a few million dollars worth of bitcoin and your going to say ‘sorry Charlie, mine now’ is just plain stupid. Some guy in a black robe is going to say return the money and I am going to jail you for contempt if you don’t until you do’ at least if you are ripping off any of the sorts of people governments tend to protect. If you are ripping off the other sorts of people with millions worth of bitcoin to over pay you in the first place well better look over your shoulder…
It’s getting exponentially worse.
Facts bear out that immigrants bump our GDP, and contribute more than they take.
If you are concerned about housing prices, and want a real fix, look at how the very wealthy own large percentages of housing, and keep jacking up the rent on working people.
It’s a tactic that owners of capital have been using for a very long time going all the way back to the slave plantation owners.
The vast majority of people in the American south could not afford slaves (let alone a plantation!). In order to cover for the fact that a tiny minority (maybe 1% of the population) controlled 99% of the wealth, they institute a system where whites were considered superior so that the working class could be convinced they weren’t being screwed and would participate in the continuation of free labor for the plantation owners. After the civil war, they used Jim Crow to perpetuate the same system, albeit with slave wages rather than literal slavery from the designated underclass.
Once the Civil Rights era came about, it became no longer tenable to use African Americans as the designated underclass to keep the working class in line. It’s no accident that immigration became a hot button political issue right around the time the civil rights era ebbed. Immigrants from Latin American became a convenient replacement. It was more socially acceptable to ostracize outsiders who spoke a different language and because of immigration laws, you could legally discriminate against them the way people used to discriminate against African Americans. The ginned-up outrage over “crime” and “sending rapists” mirrors how society used to talk about African Americans before that ceased to be acceptable.
The group that is the designated underclass has changed, but the result is the same: owners of capital get cheap labor. The underclass does the worst least-paid jobs with no real protections while the working class is distracted from the fact they only getting the crumbs from the capital owners. They are trained to blame those under them in the social order rather than the ones who have created the system. Note: having “illegal” immigrants is a feature, not a bug in this system. Undocumented immigrants still work, but only off the books. This means they will work for sub-minimum wage and the true employer can officially disclaim ever employing them (by hiring via a contractor). You also don’t have to pay them social security or Medicare benefits down the line, but they often do pay into these systems.
Inflation is stubbornly high in the USA, the ridiculous tariffs are hugely damaging, housing costs have soared, it’s hard to find a decent job, and consumer confidence has soured. The federal government is malicious and untethered.
Nonetheless, if you’ve had money invested in the stock market over the past couple of years you’ve made out like a bandit. My portfolio is up 8% just since the beginning of the year and its all just index funds. VYMI (international value category) is up 40% since this time last year, I should have been all in.
It seems completely uncoupled to the underlying economy, defying gravity. But that’s where the obscenely wealthy keep much of their money, and if you have some surplus income you get to come along for the ride. If you don’t, like so many people today, all you can do is watch from the sidelines.
Raising corporate profit taxes, income taxes, and inheritance taxes is the way to go. Much of the distribution problem is a result of tax changes that benefit the wealthy which have been the policies of every Republican administration since Reagan.
Spence School, Dalton School and Nightingale-Bamford School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side are among at least seven schools where the fees now exceed that threshold, according to school disclosures and Bloomberg reporting
Fees among 15 private schools across the city rose a median of 4.7%, outpacing inflation. Sending a kid to New York private school has always been expensive, but the cost now is so high that even those with well-above-average salaries are feeling squeezed. Prices have risen dramatically in the past decade, up from a median of $39,900 in 2014.
Time to decide who is going to be the lawyer or surgeon, who is going to be a nurse or paralegal, and who is going to support the other two with an OnlyFans account.
Every once in a while you see a story about a ‘poor’ man making $200k+ and not saving anything.
There are two main reasons for their fiscal incompetence (plus a bonus one):
1) They look at their neighbors - the guy to the right has a boat, the guy across the street has a ski house, and the guy to the left has a beach house. They buy one of each. Or they pick one and pay twice as much for it.
2) They do something similar with kids. Often they will buy a great house in a good neighborhood/suburb ‘for the kids’ and then send them to private school. The entire point of the house in the right location is that it has a good SCHOOL. If you are sending your kids to private school you should be living in a much cheaper house. Just because you have kids does not mean you should spend all your money on them.
Bonus reason: Total and complete fiscal stupidity buying worthless crap. Prime example is Time Shares. [ Even if one makes sense now, ten years later your financial situation will change. Either it will be too expensive or too cheap - and you will not use it. Even point systems are just later regrets]
They comprise $597 billion and $681 billion of the speculative-grade credit universe, or about 14% and 16% respectively, analysts led by Steve Caprio wrote in a Monday note. Speculative debt spans high-yield debt, leveraged loans and US private credit.
That’s “a meaningful chunk of debt outstanding that risks souring broader sentiment, if software defaults increase,” the analysts wrote, with “a potential impact that would rival that of the Energy sector in 2016.” Unlike in 2016, pressures would likely first emerge in private credit, business development companies and leveraged loans, with the high-yield market weakening later, the analysts added.
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence tools risks further weighing down multiples and revenues for software-as-a-service firms, while the US Federal Reserve’s hawkish stance since 2022 has pressured cash flows, the analysts wrote. For instance, software payment-in-kind loan usage has risen to 11.3% in BDC portfolios, over 2.5 percentage points higher than the already elevated index average of 8.7%, according to Deutsche. PIK deals typically allow borrowers to pay interest in more debt rather than cash.
Reminds me of the economist I was listening to on the radio in 2006 who claimed we were in a new economic era where people would simply use the never ending increase in their home equity to finance their entire lives. Then 2007 arrived. That didn’t end well.
I dunno if it new crops of the gullible coming online, or short memories of huge numbers of people, but we simply refuse to learn from our failures, just repeat them.
They have NO IDEA.
This is a conservative, attributable list of Deutsche Bank costs tied directly to risk, controls, compliance, and governance failures over roughly the last 25 years.
These are not trading losses from bad bets, but money burned because risk assessment and control failed.
1999–2004, dot-com and analyst conflict scandals, settlements and compliance costs about 1.4 billion USD.
2008–2017, US mortgage crisis and RMBS mis-selling, DOJ settlement 7.2 billion USD.
2015, LIBOR and interest-rate manipulation, global fines about 2.5 billion USD.
2015–2017, FX manipulation, fines and settlements about 2.0 billion USD.
2017, Russian mirror-trading and AML failures, US and UK penalties about 630 million USD.
2018–2020, Postbank IT integration and control failures, write-downs and remediation about 3.1 billion EUR.
2019, Panama Papers and AML supervisory action, BaFin special monitor and remediation costs estimated 300–500 million EUR.
2019–2022, US AML enforcement and independent monitor, remediation and compliance overhaul about 1.3 billion USD.
Ongoing 2005–2023, litigation reserves tied to risk/control issues, cumulatively over 15 billion EUR set aside across years.
Very conservative total directly tied to risk assessment and control failure, comfortably north of 30 billion USD equivalent.
That’s not “a few bad apples”. That’s systemic mispricing of risk for two decades. Any bank can lose money trading. Only a bank with deep cultural problems loses this much money proving, repeatedly, that it didn’t understand its own risks.
A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea — if it’s caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea daily.
People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years. “This is a very large, rigorous study conducted long term among men and women that shows that drinking two or three cups of coffee per day is associated with reduced risk of dementia,” said Aladdin Shadyab, an associate professor of public health and medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn’t involved in the study.
The findings, published Monday in JAMA, don’t prove caffeine causes these beneficial effects, and it’s possible other attributes protected caffeine drinkers’ brain health. But independent experts said the study adjusted for many other factors, including health conditions, medication, diet, education, socioeconomic status, family history of dementia, body mass index, smoking and mental illness.
Just a reminder that this is a correlation study. It does not mean that ingesting caffeine will reduce your chance of dementia in the same way that the reduction of pirates has not caused climate change.
It could simply be that people who can afford to spend money on niceties like coffee can afford food and avoid homelessness. Homelessness is highly correlated with death and dementia but that doesn’t mean the house itself is preventing dementia.
Additionally, it’s explicitly mentioned:
But independent experts said the study adjusted for many other factors, including health conditions, medication, diet, education, socioeconomic status, family history of dementia, body mass index, smoking and mental illness.
Try this:
Everything in moderation.
Coffee isn’t going to hurt you, and can be beneficial. So long as you’re not drinking it several times a day, every day, for the entirety of your adult life.
Same for alcohol. It does actually have some benefits. But in small doses. Not all day, every day, to excess.
Same for… almost literally anything. Salt. Sugar. Fat. All the stuff that’s “bad” according to cheap headline-grabbing press. You need it all in some amount. Just not to excess.
Same, even, for things like vitamins. No vitamins = you’re dead. Enough vitamins = you’re fine. More vitamins = you’re going to see no benefit and/or have problems (Vit D can be overdosed on, for example).
Everything in moderation. Eat red meat. It’s fine. Just don’t eat it every single day for every meal for decades on end.
And then you realise - that’s why you get different answers from these studies, based on who’s running them, who’s reporting them, what they’re testing, and who they are trying to target with the messaging.
Caffeine has benefits.
Drinking caffeine to excess outweighs those benefits with downsides.
The beneficial effect is rather small.
The counter-effect is rather large.
Your body consumes more than just caffeine alone.
Which explains ALL those results you gave, without having any untruths in there. Now replace “caffeine” with pretty much anything - all those things I listed above. Even drinking too much water will kill you (and it’s not as much as you might think).
Everything in moderation, and then you won’t have a problem.
Same for things like cigarettes, even. If you only have a few, it’s not going to kill you. But if you’re smoking 20 a day for decades on end? Well, hello lung cancer. It’s why the most dangerous drugs are often the ADDICTIVE ones. Caffeine included. People have died from drinking too many caffeine-based energy drinks in too short a period of time.
I drink two cups of caffeinated coffee every morning. My working assumption, based on this post, is that this will have saved me from my lost decade of hedonistic alcohol and drug abuse. Maybe I’ll up it to three cups.
Same for alcohol.
Actually, that’s mostly just wine, and it isn’t the alcohol providing any of the supposed health benefits, but the other compounds in the fermented grape juice.
Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams — leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus — are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database.
It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of “impersonation for profit,” including a deepfake video of Western Australia’s premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams. These examples are part of a trend in which scammers are using widely available AI tools to perpetuate increasingly targeted heists. Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with company leadership. UK consumers are estimated to have lost $12.86bn to fraud in the nine months to November 2025.
“Capabilities have suddenly reached that level where fake content can be produced by pretty much anybody,” said Simon Mylius, an MIT researcher who works on a project linked to the AI Incident Database. He calculates that “frauds, scams and targeted manipulation” have made up the largest proportion of incidents reported to the database in 11 of the past 12 months. He said: “It’s become very accessible to a point where there is really effectively no barrier to entry.”
Nah, its ruining chess too. Sites like chess.com its getting harder and harder to find a decent game where your playing a similar ranked human and not getting your shit kicked in by some cheater using stockfish.
There is a very important reason why in history, fraud was aggressively hunted down and destroyed. There comes a time when people will just stop trusting the system. Social media goes back to more decentralized items, perhaps just direct messaging or servers like Discord, or IRC channels. People stop using auction sites, and go back to word of mouth, or trusted supply lines with buyer guarantees. When finding a deal online becomes a gamble, we may even see a swing back to physical purchases, where a successor of Sears that may be a bit more expensive, but has a solid warranty, with some type of assurance that everything bought in the store will be useful and not junk.
If banks start becoming untrustworthy, people will take their cash and use their mattresses as ATMs. Same thing will happen with mail order, or other scamming vectors. For example, fewer and fewer people sell stuff on auction sites because someone will take the item, replace it with a lesser one, and then say they were cheated. Even if the sending of the package was filmed and signed, this rampant fraud can easily make it unprofitable for someone to work with auction sites. Maybe it might be good to use those old malls and start having flea markets again.
There is sufficient information in that data for a platform like Facebook, or YouTube to at least red flag accounts and get some humans to look at it. If that’s too much effort for a platform, then make it easier for users to report scams. Even a toggle flag close to the ad which allows people to say “I think this may be a scam” instead of making them fill in a frigging form.
Except platforms earn a significant part of their revenue from scams (for FB, over 10%). So the incentive to curb scamming is not there…
> Prove it wasn’t rigged a fucking decade ago.
I can’t prove there are no unicorns on Pluto, that’s not the way it works. Donny’s team filed about 60 election fraud lawsuits, and lost 59 (snagged one legal technicality), half of them under GOP judges. MAGAs are bigly LOSERS in Court, where catchy but wrong lies don’t work.
It turns out that when fewer cars spew exhaust as they drive along, air quality improves. That’s the conclusion of a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health that looked at the effect of increased numbers of both EVs and plug-in hybrids on air pollution in California. The Golden State has by far the largest number of plug-in vehicles in the United States, and they’ve now reached significant numbers to have a positive impact on air quality.
Between 2019 and 2023, for every 200 EVs or plug-in hybrids added, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels dropped 1.1%, according to the study, which used satellite data to track those levels through the unique way NO2 absorbs and reflects sunlight. NO2 can trigger asthma attacks, cause bronchitis, and increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Per TFA, the 1.1% decrease in NO2 levels for each 200 zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) introduced was within a zip-code tabulation area or ZCTA. Not an introduction of 200 ZEVs for the whole state of California.
EVs are heavier and generate a lot lot lot more tire particulate.
Because electric cars don’t eliminate or even reduce smog. Most of that smog you see is tire particulate.
Two statements which are both incorrect. Yes, EVs are about 20% heavier and generate about 20% more tire particulate matter (PM), but the difference changes based on urban vs rural vs highway driving. Also engine torque, brake pad composition, braking styles, and road dust change the equation. And when you add in the small amount of engine particulate matter (even the best tuned ICE engines still emit some PM) the final conclusion was EVs are better in most cases.
If you want to see the different conditions, Emission Factors (EF), and road conditions, read this study.
Electric vehicles (EVs) are regarded as zero emission vehicles due to the absence of exhaust emissions. However, they still contribute non-exhaust particulate matter (PM) emissions, generated by brake wear, tire wear, road wear, and resuspended road dust. In fact, because EVs are heavier than internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs), their non-exhaust emissions are likely to be even higher.
In this study, exhaust and non-exhaust emissions generated from a gasoline ICEV, diesel ICEV, and EV were experimentally investigated. The results showed that the EFs for the total PM emissions of ICEVs and EV were dependent on the inclusion of secondary exhaust PM, the brake pad type, and the regenerative braking intensity of the EV. https://www.sciencedirect.com/…
TL;DR When all emission factors are considered, EVs typically produce less particulate matter
I agree. Tire composition will change the particulate matter for the study and general drivability and price for the average consumer.
The study used tires with a 500 treadwear grade, which is a high-longevity, durable tire designed to last five times longer than a baseline reference tire (rated at 100) under government-controlled testing conditions. This generally translates to a long-lasting, reliable tire, often yielding 50,000 to 75,000+ miles depending on driving habits, vehicle type, and maintenance.
This tire may or may not be similar to what the average driver has on their vehicle, but it was the baseline for this study, as described in the abstract. Drivers in Michigan, California, and Texas might prefer different tire compositions, but something was needed for the baseline. As more studies are completed, a more detailed picture might emerge.
I live not too far from a big bus station here in the UK (Golders Green). About 70% of the bus lines operating from here are now EVs, and the remainder are all hybrid and tend to run on battery when in and around the station. The cab rank outside now mainly has LEVC EREVs which run on battery the vast majority of the time. And increasing amounts of the passing traffic are EVs too. It’s substantially less smelly and the air is cleaner than five years ago, and it’s also much quieter. Hampstead, St John’s Wood and Marylebone are rife with Taycans and other pricey EVs, and again, the air is very obviously cleaner and less stinky, and the roads are much quieter, at least until some tit in a Lambo decides to rev their engines on a high street to impress themselves and their long-suffering partner.
All the above anecdote, of course, but it matters to me because I am personally experiencing the benefits, as is my family. And its backed up by the air quality monitoring carried out by London’s local government. ULEZ has helped massively too.
Since brakes are used less, some EVs have even gone back to using drum brakes on rear axle and only have disc on front. Anyone driving an ID platform car (VW, Audi, Skoda, Cupra, EU Ford etc.) has such a set up. Drum brakes are enclosed systems so they don’t even release dust except when being serviced and since the brakes aren’t used so much that may not happen in the entire lifetime of the car.
So basically, an EV puts out WAY less brake dust than ICE.
The New York Fed’s Survey of Market Expectations and Bloomberg consensus are surveys filled out 1-2 weeks before the rate announcement. It’s not a surprise for a daily Kalshi guess to be more accurate the day before the announcement. It would be more impressive if the Kalshi market were as accurate 1-2 weeks before the rate announcement, as that would be a more apples-to-apples comparison.
The second a measuring method becomes officially used, it drops in accuracy.
When something is not official, no one tries to game the system. You get more honest answers and nobody is spending millions/billions of dollars to get the ‘right’ answer.
Yes, we’ve heard of the amazing returns on investment of the us Congress people, a truly insightful bunch there.
Linus Torvalds has confirmed the next major kernel series as Linux 7.0, reports Linux news website 9to5Linux.com: “So there you have it, the Linux 6.x era has ended with today’s Linux 6.19 kernel release, and a new one will begin with Linux 7.0, which is expected in mid-April 2026. The merge window for Linux 7.0 will open tomorrow, February 9th, and the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone is expected on February 22nd, 2026.”
Another popular way is date based numbering. So the kernel just released could have been 2026.02, the next prolly 2026.05, the last 2025.11. It doesn’t really matter.
It’s just a numbering scheme. Linus thinks .19 is already big enough number to increment the major release number, even without any new feature introduction. So 6.19 is the last 6.x version, as had happened with 3.19, 4.20, 5.19.
Pick up the loadable module part and then I think Character devices are essentially the same. Network and block devices are a little more involved. Cgroups, name spaces, I/O memory allocators, device tree. Those things are new and need a little work to learn them if you need to support them.
Fuck you.
Fuck you.
And especially fuck you, openAI.
I hate you all.
What happens if it hallucinates ads that are not there?
From TFA:
When all 16 agents got stuck trying to fix the same Linux kernel bug simultaneously, he used GCC as a reference oracle, randomly compiling most kernel files with GCC and only a subset with Claude’s compiler, so each agent could work on different bugs in different files.
Not only was Claude trained on a lot of different C compilers, including the entirety of GCC, it still needed a golden model in order to finish.
If I claimed I had written my own C compiler from scratch and then this came out in an interview, I don’t think I would be hired.
Because it has sick drumming, dude!
“That’s pathetic.”
Don’t you think an AI building a working compiler at all is quite impressive?
When it comes to AI, it seems that people accept nothing under perfection instead of thinking about how impressive it is that a computer can now do such tasks. Most humans I know can’t code a C compiler on their own, no matter how unoptimized the results are allowed to be.
Agents do not have the capacity to understand how one part of the code interacts with another.
Of course they do.
How else would 16 of them work on a common code base?
Cell Biologists will be amazed to learn that individual phospholipids which work on the common task of forming cellular membranes, have been thinking beings this entire time.
Does every cell in your body, and every molecule in every cell in your body, and every embryonic stem cell, coordinate and collaborate to produce the extraordinarily complex body of a mammal? Does that mean they have cognition? Does that mean your cardio-electric tissues understand electrolytes and nephrology?
Re: No Shit!
And somehow he managed to achieve that without all the drama.