Though a superhero, Bruce Schneier disdains the use of a mask or secret identity as ‘security through obscurity’.

source

Yes but they only performed the training on the posts and images set to be globally publicly accessible by anyone. In a sense, they took the public permissions as an indicator that they could use that data for more than just providing the bare social media service.

Isn’t the opt-out option to just not make the photos/posts globally public?

Why they went into this election season without even attempting to run anybody aside from Biden I’ll never know.

When has either party ever run a credible candidate against their own incumbent?

It’s not just about pledged delegates

The leadership of the DNC, DCCC, DSCC, etc., are chosen by election, by members of each committee. State parties send their delegates to participate in these things.

despite not being an incumbent

Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. These are processes that longtime party members participate in, and run on, about the structural rules and procedures to follow, and they’re open to everyone. Elections often pit “establishment”/“insider” candidates against “insurgent”/“outsider” candidates, and there are examples of each kind (or hybrid candidates) winning the nomination in the modern primary system.

It’s more of a spurious correlation: incumbency doesn’t buy the advantage in the nomination race, but reflects that a candidate has the network and resources to have the popular support of their own party. That’s why incumbents always win the nomination, and tend to win reelection in the general.

Tell me, during an incumbent primary, who controls the DNC?

Same as during a non-incumbent primary. The person who won the most recent nomination tends to have an outsized voice in the selection of party officials (because it’s their pledged delegates who vote on all the other stuff). Yes, that means Biden-affiliated insiders had an inside track in 2020, but that’s also true of Clinton allies in 2016, Obama allies in 2012, Obama allies in 2008, and Kerry allies in 2004.

More than a year ago, the DNC adopted new rules—including a primary calendar that ignored state law in Iowa and New Hampshire and eliminated any primary debates—designed to ensure that Biden’s coronation would proceed untroubled by opposition from any credible Democrat.

Which of those changes in the rules do you think were designed to benefit Biden specifically? De-emphasizing the role of Iowa and New Hampshire? There’s been people clamoring for that for decades, within the party.

There’s basically no set of rules that will ever create a credible challenge to an incumbent who wants to run for reelection. It’s a popularity problem, not a structural problem.

No one deserves to be a president any more than anyone else, and treating an incumbent as though they do, without having to go through an open, democratic primary process, is to treat them as more deserving of future authority than other citizens.

There was a primary, and Biden got the most votes/delegates under the rules. Nobody is saying that incumbents should automatically get renomination. Or even that the incumbent should get some sort of rules advantage (like say, the way the defending world champ in chess gets an auto-bid to defend his title against a challenger who has to win a tournament to get there).

The rules are already set up to where any challenger has an equal structural change of winning the primary. They just won’t have the actual popular support. You know, the core principles of democratic elections.

My 4-person household has one car, one electric cargo bike with two kid seats, a regular bicycle, accounts with bikeshare/scooter options around our city, plus mass transit passes, plus the option of Uber/Lyft.

Bikes might not work as a replacement for a first car, but they can work pretty well as a replacement for a second car, and a tool for reducing total mileage on the car you own.

Everything depends on where you live, of course, but a substantial number of people live in a place where a bike can reduce the number of miles you drive, even if you never actually give up the car.

Singular “they” is older than singular “you.” And note, of course, that the pronoun “you” is conjugated as a plural, and we deal with it just fine.

This shifts balance from unelected officials who can be fired by the president (administrative officials) towards unelected officials who can’t be (judges). It doesn’t actually reduce regulatory power, just puts that regulatory power under the supervision and review of even less accountable officials.

Rage isn’t sustainable. Enthusiasm is down across the board, and the question will be whether enthusiasm among left-leaning voters has wanted waned to the same degree as among Trump’s base.

Your description of a drink that takes the world by storm, increasing in market share but dropping in quality may be roughly accurate analogy for a lot of consumer goods, but even in this telling the market is improving if that drink is displacing even lower-quality competition.

In terms of non-alcoholic drinks sold in coolers in convenience stores and grocery stores, we’ve seen the steady march of improving products as an average across the shelves, even if the same product name might be getting worse. In the 80’s, the dominant market share for orange juice in grocery stores was frozen cans to be mixed with water at home. But Tropicana and Florida Natural and a few other brands made a splash with not-from-concentrate orange juice. Old brands like Minute Maid got in on the action, and new brands like Simply rose up, too.

Now, it might be that these brands have gotten cheap with stuff since dominating market share. But if you look at who they took that market share from, it’s unquestionably a lower quality product they’ve displaced.

Across the beverage industry as a whole, you’ve got a whole bunch of newer higher priced drinks, where the unfathomably expensive for 2000 Red Bull is basically the middle of the pack for energy drinks, and where there are so many beverages that cost several times as much as Coca Cola.

So that’s a story of a forward march in higher prices for qualitatively preferred items, over that amount of time. This story I do think applies to processed food and drink, as well as electronics, prepared food, home furnishings, and cars. We expect a lot higher quality every year, as the things get more expensive, and we feel annoyed that any particular brand or model seems to be slipping in quality while we as a consumer market tend to move up the chain.

We’re angry that streaming seems to be slipping back to cable-like quality, when streaming as of 2024 is still a much better value proposition than cable in 2014. The displacement is happening in two directions, for a net benefit to the consumer in a way that doesn’t feel like a benefit. Same with music, video games, etc.

The real story is that housing, education, healthcare, and dependent care (both childcare and elder care) have gone up so much faster than inflation that these things are finally squeezing normal people out of their comfort zones right when the other stuff stopped dropping in price as much as before.

The non-cynical answer is that they’re counting contractor/vendor time in this full time equivalent answer. Which would probably be a good thing, because I imagine that the best people in cybersecurity aren’t actually employees of Microsoft.

Your comment missed the mark entirely.

Not sure why you’re saying that. I wasn’t disagreeing with any of your points, but adding to them another angle that answered the parent comment’s concerns about whether leaving wifi on for airplane mode drains battery. You addressed the cellular radio side, and I was adding a separate point about the WiFi radio that complements what you were saying.

No, the Florida law prohibits voting by felons convicted in other states, when that other state prohibits voting. So Florida would follow New York’s lead. And the New York law prohibits felons from voting only until they’ve served their full prison sentence.

So if Trump doesn’t get sentenced to any prison time, then he’ll be eligible to vote in New York (and therefore Florida).

Great article. It’s long, though, so to summarize the main points for those of us who don’t have a ton of time:

• State constitutions protect individual rights, just as the federal constitution does. Many of these rights are the same rights listed in the federal constitution, but state supreme courts can interpret them in a manner that is more strongly protective of those individual rights. (They can’t meaningfully interpret their state constitutions as less protective than the federal constitution, though, because if something is protected by the federal constitution, a state constitution can’t un-protect that.)
• And State constititons can protect rights that have no federal analogue, while also being relatively easy to amend. Once abortion rights got de-constitutionalized at the federal level, a lot of states have gone on to explicitly protect a right to abortion in their own state constitutions.
• This is a critical time for this strategy, as we now have a US Supreme Court that is interested in dialing back individual rights protected by the constitution. So state courts need to step up, using this “judicial federalism” idea that traces back to when the 1970’s Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Burger, started its conservative turn against the 1960’s Supreme Court decisions under Chief Justice Warren.
• Of course, this history of the movement attracts criticism that it is inherently a progressive/liberal doctrine, which has some kernels of truth, but many conservative legal scholars believe it to be important, too.
• Specific examples of legal issues that can be constitutionalized at the state level have been LGBT rights, election/voting rights, conditions of incarceration, and a rising movement to use state constitutions to mandate policies fighting climate change.
• But there are challenges to litigating these issues in states rather than the federal level. One issue, obviously, is that the impact is limited to a single state at a time. Other issues include the difficulty of funding that kind of litigation, as the federal rules for civil rights litigation actually can get the cases funded by the losers (which also makes it easier for nonprofits and donors to put up the up-front cost of litigation), which is an arrangement that basically doesn’t exist in state courts. Plus, state courts are much more clearly partisan and political than the federal courts (often with judges elected to fixed terms in partisan elections), staffed up with judges with life tenure appointed by past administrations, so there have been several examples of state supreme courts reversing themselves just a few years after an earlier decision.
• Still, it’s better than nothing, and successes at the state level can build momentum for national movements.

Also, phones don’t use a lot of power to purely listen for Wifi beacons. They’re not transmitting until they actually try to join, so leaving wifi on doesn’t cost significant power unless you just happen to be near a remembered network.

Your scenario 1 is the actual danger. It’s not that AI will outsmart us and kill us. It’s that AI will trick us into trusting them with more responsibility than the AI can responsibly handle, to disastrous results.

It could be small scale, low stakes stuff, like an AI designing a menu that humans blindly cook. Or it could be higher stakes stuff that actually does things like affect election results, crashes financial markets, causes a military to target the wrong house, etc. The danger has always been that humans will act on the information provided by a malfunctioning AI, not that AI and technology will be a closed loop with no humans involved.

to my knowledge, Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode

The radio regulations were amended about 10 years ago to allow both Bluetooth and Wifi frequencies to be used on airplanes in flight. And so cell phone manufacturers have shifted what airplane mode actually means, even to the point of some phones not even turning off Wi-Fi when airplane mode is turned on. And regardless of defaults, both wireless protocols can be activated and deactivated independently of airplane mode on most phones now.

an airplane full of 100 people all on Bluetooth might create some noise issues that would hurt the performance

I don’t think so. Bluetooth is such a low bandwidth use that it can handle many simultaneous users. It’s supposed to be a low power transmission method, in which it bursts a signal only a tiny percentage of the time, so the odds of a collision for any given signal are low, plus the protocol is designed to be robust where it handles a decent amount of interference before encountering degraded performance.

It makes them look weak and pitiful

To whom? Are we even the intended audience here?

Reporting over the last 10 years has shown that Xi Jinping has been obsessed with the idea of “color revolutions,” whereby popular movements from within a nation’s population overthrow the ruling apparatus. Rightly or wrongly, the current CCP sees revolution from within being the most dangerous threat on their power, so much of what they do is best understood as being aimed at stifling that kind of movement.