The UK is a small country that doesn’t have nearly the geopolitical sway that the US does. If the UK withdraws to itself, that sucks for Britons but the rest of the world will carry on. If the US withdraws to itself, it will suck for the rest of the world but the Americans will carry on.
I’m pretty sure Cuba is a bad choice for… other reasons
The passport card is valid for sea travel as well.
This is a proceeding in federal court, but the president’s pardon power doesn’t extend to civil cases anyway. Or at least until the Supreme Court rules that it does.
There is currently no exit border control in the US and the border with Canada is thousands of kilometres long, most of it unpatrolled. There are lots of tiny towns which are split in twain by the border. It is just not feasible from a manpower perspective to guard the entire border like the Iron Curtain.
Even if Trump says he’s unilaterally abrogating the treaty on the validity of passport cards with Canada, who gives a shit when you need to flee because it’s only a question of whether Canadian authorities will recognise the validity of a passport card.
Home countries cancelling refugees’ travel documents has never been a successful strategy to prevent them from going to other countries. Other countries know what physical attributes an otherwise-valid travel document would have and it’s not like they can physically take the card away from everyone.
What incentive would they have to tamper with passport cards? They’re pretty popular in the border regions as an inexpensive way to get an international travel document.
They are also mentioned in several international treaties, particularly with Canada and Mexico. The president doesn’t have the power to unilaterally abrogate those treaties.
Another tip: A passport card is considered as valid as a passport book within the US, but it is much cheaper to obtain. It is conclusive proof of citizenship and an authoritative RealID-compliant identity card, just like a passport book. Passport cards are valid for land and sea travel within North America and the Caribbean. They’re not valid for international air travel (but they can be used for domestic flights).
Edit: Upgrading from a passport card to a passport book is considered a renewal rather than a new application. You can still keep the card if you later want to “renew” it for a book.
I have to agree with you there. I think the Democratic Party was scared of inviting infighting with a primary contest which Harris would probably win anyway, but you’re right—Harris had no mandate from the party membership and even a lightning-round primary conducted online would have been better.
I think I phrased my comment wrong on this. It doesn’t ban the act of gerrymandering, it bans the results of gerrymandering. Gerrymandered maps would need to be redrawn had the bill been enacted.
This bill was no slouch. It directly abridged several states’ voter suppression laws. Had the bill passed, the next phase would have been people being able to use the federal courts to strike back against these incompatible laws.
That being said, if you were the leader of the Democratic Party, what would you have done? Not intended as rhetorical snark, I’m just curious as to what other ideas there are.
The first bill filed in the House of Representatives and Senate after the 2020 election which resulted in the Democratic Party gaining nominal control of Congress and the White House was a bill to ban partisan gerrymandering, require independent redistricting committees, forbid states from imposing onerous voter registration or identification regulations, limit the influence of rich donors and wealthy PACs in federal elections, and generally just make the process of voting better for Americans.
This bill was called the Freedom to Vote Bill and was numbered H.R. 1 and S. 1 for the House and Senate versions, respectively. It passed the House of Representatives in 3 March 2021 and received unanimous support among the 50 Democratic senators when the Senate held its vote on 22 June 2021. The bill was blocked from advancing due to a Republican filibuster.
On 3 January 2022, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York announced plans to abolish the filibuster for legislation in order to allow this bill to advance. President Joe Biden had previously indicated he would sign the bill. Schumer made his move on 19 January 2022, moving to change the filibuster rule to require continuous talking, i.e. in order to filibuster a bill, someone must make a speech and keep talking for the duration of the filibuster, with the filibuster ending when they finish talking. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, members of the Democratic Party representing Arizona and West Virginia, respectively, got squeamish and voted against the change. All Republican senators voted against the change. This doomed the bill’s passage through Congress as the filibuster could be maintained indefinitely by the Republicans.
The bill died when Congress was dissolved pending the November 2022 general election, in which Republicans won a narrow majority in the House of Representatives.
Manchin and Sinema’s terms with both expire when the new Congress is convened on 3 January 2025 following the November 2024 general election. Manchin did not seek re-election in yesterday’s election and will retire at the expiration of his term. Sinema was forced out of the Democratic Party and originally planned to stand as an independent before deciding against it. She will retire at the end of her term.
Due to the innate malapportionment of the Senate, it is exceedingly unlikely that the Democratic Party will ever regain majority control of the Senate.
So I point my finger at these two idiots for sinking American democracy as we know it.
In the event of a tie, the winner will be determined by whomever can bake the best spinach quiche in 2 hours or less.
I know you’re just joking but I think it’s better to stick to openly confirmed LGBTQ people.
I don’t know. I said “one of the few” and not “the only” because I didn’t want to be wrong in case there was another LGBTQ person on a banknote I wasn’t aware of.
Did any distro give concrete reasons for why they have actively chosen not to package it, or perhaps they just haven’t given it much thought yet?
Turing is one of the few LGBTQ people in the world who have ever been featured on a banknote!
This is not what I would consider a “political reason”. A political reason would be something like refusing to package it because of what political party Howard supports.
There is plenty of software you’ll find in these repositories that aren’t under the GPL. CMake uses BSD, the Apache web server uses the eponymous Apache license, LibreOffice and Firefox use MPL, Godot and Bitcoin Core use the MIT license, and I’m sure there are plenty of other software licenses that I haven’t thought of yet.
So obviously I ended up in the middle of this bell curve. How would that cause the perception of the ball’s acceleration to differ?
An LLM (large language model, a.k.a. an AI whose output is natural language text based on a natural language text prompt) is useful for the tasks when you’re okay with 90% accuracy generated at 10% of the cost and 1,000% faster. And where the output will solely be used in-house by yourself and not served to other people. For example, if your goal is to generate an abstract for a paper you’ve written, AI might be the way to go since it turns a writing problem into a proofreading problem.
The Google Search LLM which summarises search results is good enough for most purposes. I wouldn’t rely on it for in-depth research but like I said, it’s 90% accurate and 1,000% faster. You just have to be mindful of this limitation.
I don’t personally like interacting with customer service LLMs because they can only serve up help articles from the company’s help pages, but they are still remarkably good at that task. I don’t need help pages because the reason I’m contacting customer service to begin with is because I couldn’t find the solution using the help pages. It doesn’t help me, but it will no doubt help plenty of other people whose first instinct is not to read the f***ing manual. Of course, I’m not going to pretend customer service LLMs are perfect. In fact, the most common problem with them seems to be that they go “off the script” and hallucinate solutions that obviously don’t work, or pretend that they’ve scheduled a callback with a human when you request it, but they actually haven’t. This is a really common problem with any sort of LLM.
At the same time, if you try to serve content generated by an LLM and then present it as anything of higher quality than it actually is, customers immediately detest it. Most LLM writing is of pretty low quality anyway and sounds formulaic, because to an extent, it was generated by a formula.
Consumers don’t like being tricked, and especially when it comes to creative content, I think that most people appreciate the human effort that goes into creating it. In that sense, serving AI content is synonymous with a lack of effort and laziness on the part of whoever decided to put that AI there.
But yeah, for a specific subset of limited use cases, LLMs can indeed be a good tool. They aren’t good enough to replace humans, but they can certainly help humans and reduce the amount of human workload needed.
Economic murder-suicide pact
Get a passport card. It is legally the same as a passport book within the US (it can also be used for international land and sea travel within North America). It’s only $30 to apply and a $35 issuance fee. $65 in total for a piece of RealID-compliant identification valid worldwide for ten years.