This is the result of free petition in Massachusetts. If you like the 1st Amendment, then I would expect you also like that citizens in Massachusetts have the right to propose arbitrary laws (and the legislature is not required to enact them).
On the other hand, politicians have been trying to manipulate voters for centuries - it seems like a new danger that foreign governments are now trying to manipulate voters.
>it seems like a new danger that foreign governments are now trying to manipulate voters
This is not a new thing. Take for example, Poland historically used to elect a monarch. Various European powers would try to influence who was elected. In 1733, this famously culminated in the War of the Polish Succession.
It isn’t new at all. Foreign countries have been doing it since the invention of democracy.
You can see this very vividly demonstrated in any classical histories, like Thucydides, all the way up through history, with all types of elections, from actual every-single-citizen democracies to the just-the-Electors HRE.
This is also true in American history from the very beginning, when French interests, for example, worked against Adams. Or more famously, when the British strongly intervened to ensure the re-election of FDR.
Simply put, there’s no foreign country in world history that wasn’t or isn’t interfering in domestic elections they have any kind of interest in. It would be very foolish not to. It’s a game that has gone on since the invention of democracy and will always go on, because every incentive is aligned with it and there are no norms against it.
In general, you have to be very careful when people claim something is new and unprecedented. Sometimes they just don’t know and lack the necessary context, but often they’re constructing a narrative that relies on historical innocence/ignorance of relatively mundane detail. This has been a major problem with our news media that has been getting worse for decades: they don’t do the very important job of putting things into historical or even a current cultural context. Instead, they create narratives that are easy, get people fired up and consuming more news, and often inadvertently (or sometimes advertently) serve a partisan purpose.
Sure, some playgrounds may be mind-numbingly dull, but those are a well-intentioned response to older playgrounds that posed serious physical dangers. You can argue that getting a little bit scraped up once in a while isn't bad for children; it may teach them lessons about how to avoid such future mistakes - but plenty of children have sustained more serious injuries on playgrounds that allowed them to climb much higher than they could on, say, a tree in nature (speaking from my life experience). I think the article conflates the issue of modern over parenting with safer playground design - which if done right, can only be a good thing.
Ditto, I grew up in the woods so climbing on trees was an everyday activity for me, more frequent than playing on playgrounds. I used to climb trees as far as the tree would support, then climb it further until it collapsed. I fell out of more trees doing that than I can count.
Thankfully, helicopter parents cannot hope to regulate trees.
Ok and I know ine guy (kid) who spent weeks in hospital due to fall from tree and two other people who broke limb (adults). That is on top of head incidents close to me.
I don't prevent my kids to climb trees, but accidents do happen.
A big part of the complaint is that injury rates & severity has stayed about the same. It seems the safer we make the playground, the more risks the kids take. It's called risk compensation.
>> As usual when preparing Tor Browser releases, we verified that the build is bit-for-bit reproducible. While we managed to get two matching builds, we found that in some occasions the builds differ (we found this happening on the Linux i686 and macOS bundles). We are still investigating the cause of this issue to fix it.
I find this quite fascinating. Does anyone have any ideas for how this could happen? My understanding was that if you run the same compiler on the same code, you get the same executables. What could be going on?
There are many, many reasons why a build process may not produce reproducible output. Timestamps and unordered maps are two of the more trivial examples.
Another reason I've heard is that when you have a multithreaded compiler, the order the threads execute could change, and that could cause the output code to be different.
But I think there is actually a good point behind a possibly tasteless joke. If you are overly litigious in life, or take up certain aggressive business practices, maybe the thought of death is humbling and can teach us all to relax and be kinder. I think we all know our share of living people who could use this advice.
I have found the below quote to be helpful in this regard.
“When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if we must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.”
>> Usually they keep questioning you for a while, but it's not hard to respond in a way that doesn't give them probable cause.
You should try exercising your fifth amendment right to remain silent. The police explicitly remind people who are arrested that anything they say "can and will" be used against them in a court of law.
Most people want to talk there way out of a bad situation. Like the police will Mirandize them and they still won't shut up! Dude! shut up, weight for your lawyer, and under no circumstance waive your right to a speedy trial until you have counsel.
This generic advice isn't always the best one. Only do this if you're actually guilty and they can't come up with PC. You have to play it by ear, I've talked my way out of more than a few tickets by just getting a sympathetic police officer, if I had annoyed him by doing the 5th I'm sure he would've just written a ticket etc.
A ticket is a vastly different situation than one in which you could be subject to criminal prosecution. If I say something dumb which causes me to not be able to get a ticket dismissed, I'm out a hundred and fifty bucks. If I say something stupid that causes me to get convicted of a felony...
Not really - they're surveilling a hell of a lot more than just the border, which is a 1-dimensional object. They're surveilling a Native American community that's in the USA, not on the border. They're basically building surveillance towers on the border and pointing many of the cameras towards the American side, where Americans live.
IANAL but "Indian Law" is very complicated also as to what parts of federal law apply to reservations and which don't, and what sovereign rights the Tohono O'odham Nation has.
As someone living in Tucson, and having to go through these Border Patrol checkpoints, it does feel like they've gotten more aggressive over time. The last time I went through a checkpoint, they didn't even ask about citizenship, just wanted to run their dog over the car sniffing for drugs, which I feel is a 4th amendment violation, even though the supreme court probably disagrees.
I'm not sure if they have any legal recourse, but I'd love to hear a lawyer chime in. IANAL.
People cross the border into the reservation, it’s not a game of red-rover. It’s not surveillance the reservation per-she, but the people and objects crossing.
I think the shenanigans referred to are on the part of the merchant (not reporting income, stealing from the till or enabling bribes) rather than the consumer (card fraud, etc.)
> "The estimated amount of money laundered globally in one year is 2 - 5% of global GDP, or $800 billion - $2 trillion in current US dollars. Though the margin between those figures is huge, even the lower estimate underlines the seriousness of the problem governments have pledged to address."
I meant source for "a lot of this happens through shops that use anonymous cash transactions".
$2 trillion in $10 bodega transactions is 200 billion bodega transactions. Something tells me it's not the silver in the till that's the main problem. Or even the notes.
