Danielle Caputo of the Campaign Legal Center said federal officials should not be "tipping the scales, behind the scenes" by pushing candidates to withdraw, though she noted proving a Hatch Act violation could be difficult. Stanley Brand, a Penn State law fellow, said Kennedy could face exposure under separate criminal statutes barring officials from using their authority to interfere with elections or offering benefits in exchange for political activity.

Who is going to prosecute Kennedy for a Hatch Act violation? The DOJ is an executive branch organization. That's the fundamental flaw with most laws passed by prior sessions of Congress that try to check the power of the Executive branch: there's no functional mechanism of enforcement when the entire branch is hostile to the law. That's the worst case scenario, and the one we're in, and it's the one none of these laws can handle.

How is this not fraud?

After briefly pushing SpaceX’s market value close to $3 trillion, investors have begun reassessing whether the stock’s rapid advance can be justified by fundamentals.

Nothing in the stock market has been about fundamentals for a very long time. Especially regarding Musk companies.

We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.

Except we are talking about that, and the tech bro response is "in 10 years we'll have AGI and it will do all these things all the time permanently." In their roadmap, there won't be a next generation of software developers, product managers, or mid-level leaders, because AGI will do all those things faster and better than humans. There will just be CEOs, the capital they control, and AI.

What's most absurd is that, if that were all true, that would lead to a crisis much larger than just a generational knowledge problem in a specific industry. It would cut regular workers entirely out of the economy, and regular workers form the foundation of the economy, so the entire economy would collapse.

"Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders."

For enthusiasts, AI promises to usher in something that socialists have long dreamed of: a world without scarcity in which human beings can move finally from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom.

Like many problems techbros try to solve, this is a problem of politics and social organization, not technology. We have had the technology to free the entire human population from several fundamental scarcities for decades (food and housing most prominently, but also many diseases), but the groups with the resources to do so actively choose not to solve those problems. Mostly because they are antisocial psychopathic billionaires.

"I believed we were cutting waste in Washington,” Mitchell said in an interview with local news. “I didn’t think they’d fire the people actually fighting fires and maintaining trails. That’s not waste—that’s the actual work.”

It's all actual work. The relentless assault on all federal institutions for the last half century had the initial effect of making the vast majority of them the most efficient systems in existence. Both political parties initially agreed they should not be wasteful, and through several rounds of reform they became more efficient than private organizations doing the same job can even theoretically be. But it's never actually been about "waste," and they stated cutting bone by the early 2000s. The only federal jobs left do actual work, and better, more important work than the vast majority of private sector jobs.

The waste is in private contracts that don't fund public sector jobs. But DOGE didn't go for those.

There's not really a "taking over" the FBI can (legally) do here. The murder happened in Minnesota, so the state of Minnesota can bring a state criminal case against the ICE agent for violating state law while acting within the state. If the FBI also wants to open a federal criminal case against the agent for violating a federal law while in the country, they can open a parallel investigation using the same evidence. But the FBI can't (legally) "take over" a state criminal case. That's not how our legal system works.

I keep putting "legally" parenthetically because this administration does whatever it wants and uses contorted readings of the law for creating after-the-fact justifications, but here there are few options available to them even to contort.

Featherstone testified that he has been involved in hundreds of arrests, about 30%-40% of them involving backpacks or bags, and that "every one of them resulted in a search."

When prosecutor Zachary Kaplan asked how many of those searches involved a warrant, Featherstone said none that he recalled.

The defense has argued the officers violated Mangione's constitutional rights against illegal search and seizure because they lacked a warrant when they searched his backpack.

"It must be legal, I do it all the time." This is not the compelling argument they think it is. Or at least, it wouldn't be if we actually had the rule of law.

Edit: Also the fourth amendment is protection against unreasonable searches and seizure, not unusual searches and seizure. Just because they do it all the time doesn't make it actually reasonable.

Of course it's not about immigration. If it were about immigration, they'd be in Texas and Florida. You know, states with large numbers of immigrants. Minnesota has a tiny fraction of the number of immigrants as those states, and it's physically large. Very inefficient use of person-power for actually doing their stated job.

Oh good, then the federal government can turn over any evidence the Minnesota state investigators ask for since they don't need it, right? Right?

It's projection. He believes because he's President of the US, he can make any American organization, public or private, do what he wants, and he's had moderate success with that. So now he believes all countries operate like that, and any claim otherwise is a lie meant to protect that power.

It's a classic characteristic of narcissists. They are physically incapable of understanding that people can think differently from then, and that things can work differently than they believe.

In the ruling, Judge Kyle Duncan, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, agreed with the state of Louisiana’s contention that allowing the drug to be mailed there makes moot the state’s ban on abortion at all stages of pregnancy.

“Every abortion facilitated by FDA’s action cancels Louisiana’s ban on medical abortions and undermines its policy that ‘every unborn child is human being from the moment of conception and is, therefore, a legal person,’” the ruling states.

Yeah, it's called the Supremacy Clause. You know, the one the federal government is using right now in multiple cases to remove other rights citizens are getting through state laws and constitutions? I guess it can only be used to take rights, not grant them?

Meanwhile, revenue is up 38%. Over 10 million paying users. The shareholders are happy. The venture capitalists at General Atlantic and Drive Capital are thrilled.

The users? Deleting the app in protest.

How is revenue up if users are leaving en masse? I would understand if they said profits are up. Are they shoving more ads and raising prices faster than users are leaving? Because Netflix has shown that is unfortunately a viable strategy for a rather long time. Sure, it might eventually kill the product, but they'll get years out of it.

U.S. ‌antitrust agencies ⁠had cleared Nvidia’s investment in Intel, according to a notice ‍posted by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission earlier in December.

Are they even giving reasons anymore? Or is the "antitrust agency" just a guy napping in a corner they periodically wake up just to give a thumbs up?

How does the age inference model work?

We leverage an advanced machine learning model developed at Discord to predict whether a user falls into a particular age group based on patterns of user behavior and several other signals associated with their account on Discord. We only use these signals to assign users to an age group when our confidence level is high; when it isn't, users go through our standard age assurance flow to confirm their age. We do not use your message content in the age estimation model.

Completely opaque explanation of how they use AI to guess your age with a claim that message content is not used. With no independent way to actually verify that claim, I don't trust them at all.

“Iran now knows without doubt it needs a nuclear weapon to survive, and will probably threaten the Strait of Hormuz in perpetuity,” the Nato source added.

This is Trump's legacy. There's no way to undo this. No amount of diplomacy or military action will ever be able to change their minds after what the US has done. It doesn't matter who gets voted into office for the next 30 years. The Iranians won't forget this.

FYI the enforcement arms of CBP and ICE do not shut down. Just the departments in DHS that would perform oversight over ICE and CBP. So don't expect boots on the ground to reduce in any way because of this.

Republicans drew the state’s new map to give the GOP five additional seats, and Missouri and North Carolina followed with new maps adding an additional Republican seat each. To counter those moves, California voters approved a ballot initiative to give Democrats an additional five seats there.

The redrawn maps are facing court challenges in California, Missouri and North Carolina.

How much you want to bet SCOTUS blocks California's redistricting but greenlights Missouri and North Carolina maps, each through tortured logic?

Change the problem from 3 doors to a million. Kids pick a door, and the host opens 999,998 doors, leaving theirs and one other door closed. One of the closed doors is the winner. Do they want to switch now?

Two weeks ago, we wrote about Palantir going mask-off for fascism, specifically about CEO Alex Karp’s company posting a 22-point manifesto that included some genuinely ugly stuff about how “certain cultures” are “regressive and harmful” and how pluralism is a “shallow temptation.” I argued that this kind of public ideological positioning was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal. The moral bankruptcy part should be obvious (if it’s not, go do some soul-searching). But doing so at a time when American-style fascism is historically unpopular basically everywhere, including within the US, just seems like you’ve bet on the losing team at a time when it’s clear they have no chance of coming back to win.

I keep seeing this logic that:

1. If a movement is unpopular it will fail in short order
2. In the US, the current fascist movement is unpopular
3. Therefore it will fail soon

That may be true of a lot of movements, but fascism doesn't work like that. They don't need popularity, they just need control over the levers of power. The Heritage Foundation and many, many other conservative groups have been working for decades, some since the 1950s, to seize control of those levers of power.

Palantir aligning with this fascism is not nearly the clearly failing strategy the author believes it to be. There's a very real chance they are successful for years or even decades aligning with the current fascist regime. It has a lot of momentum, and I haven't seen good evidence that that momentum is reliably ebbing. It's seeing speed bumps, but I haven't seen any kind of turning point. I really hope the midterm elections are that turning point. Either conservatives lose Congress or the public realizes they can't stop it by working within the system anymore.