NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
Xi appears to be trying to address the latter, but if he wants to give his army some practice he may intervene in the Burmese Civil War as a fairly low-risk enterprise (who's going to stop them, Thailand?) with a reasonable casus belli (instability and criminal activity on their borders threatening national security).
My wife was telling me about the kidnapping problem there and I remarked that we would probably go to war with a neighbor state whose gangs were holding thousands of Americans as slaves and the government there was doing nothing about it. Apparently if someone makes a scam phone call and speaks native mandarin there's a good chance they're human trafficking victims in a Burmese call center.
China's already erected thousands of kilometers of border fence to mitigate the issue.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
China's relative advantages must be reaching their zenith, given demographics and the resurgence of neo-industrial policy.
My understanding is the opposite, that rates of change favor the mainland. Taiwan and America are already highly developed without much room to grow, and also with far smaller absolute numbers of talented human capital. The longer time goes on, the easier it would be to wage war.
That fits with all sabre-rattling and state visits that started about ten years ago. In 2010 China and Taiwan were signing trade pacts. By 2014 there was a likely attempted color revolution in Hong Kong. In Taiwan there was the Sunflower Movement.
It's not in the mainland's interest for such things to happen. They wanted the trade pact that the Sunflower Movement occupied the legislature to block.
There sure were a lot of opposition movements furthering American interests in 2014. We also saw them in Ukraine and Venezuela.
I'll also add another scenario in case of war that's more akin to the Sudetanland. The RoC is more than just Taiwan, and some of their territory is closer to mainland China than Martha's Vineyard is to Massachusetts. The Kinmen islands are a bridgable distance from Fujian province, just a couple of miles. The PLA shelled these islands with ground-based artillery in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis.
You'd take those first just to see how the enemy reacts, no?
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
Give it a week and we'll have new polling that shows if this event moved opinions at all. Hopefully they ask specifically about whether the verdict changed their opinion and in what direction so we don't miss one direction of movement being netted out by another.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
They're red and they really don't like Biden after he bought into the dumb "border patrol agents on horseback whipping refugees at the border" media narrative, and then promised to hold people accountable.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
Had they paid for the story and then published it would it have been a contribution for Trump's opponent?
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
I was curious how the prosecutor even came to get those private books. He convened a grand jury that subpoenaed Trump's accountants for tax and business records, Trump sought to quash the subpoena with assertions of Presidential immunity, and it was adjudicated by the Supreme Court and not squashed. Aside: the decision here has some interesting history I'd never heard of before, with President Jefferson apparently engaging in a bit of lawfare against Aaron Burr.
Not being a lawyer, I was surprised that apparently the bar is very low for what a grand jury can subpoena, just about anything short of a "fishing expedition" is allowed. Do they even need to call their shots like in billiards, or can they start with the idea that there's one specific crime, and end up charging something completely different? Or do they even need a specific crime to investigate?
I've tried to find the reason that this grand jury was convened and can't find anything official. I found one report on a Manhattan grand jury that said "It is unclear what assets Manhattan District Attorney’s office will be investigating specifically," but I don't know if that's even the same grand jury that led to the falsifying business records charge. The indictment itself doesn't have any identifier like date the grand jury was convened.
So, how is one to judge whether the subpoena was a fishing expedition or not?
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
The emails weren't merely deleted, her staffers destroyed electronics with hammers.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
Curious if that’s actually a large constituency and not just a handful of columnists.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
There’s no prescription on where the oath be taken. It could hypothetically be the Chief Justice answering a collect call from prison.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
I think people aren't worried about cat burglars, they're worried about vagrancy and the associated crimes that come with it. With nonexistent fare enforcement vagrants can ride just for fun, or to get out of the elements, instead of being constrained to a relatively small area.
This was a concern in my area, but the local government gave us a huge confound by opening a big no-barrier shelter in our wealthy enclave a year before the light rail was due to be completed.
Sacks is a VC, not an academic.
Never mind, the positions and the last name had me thinking of David Sacks.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
Adding member states with a real axe to grind against Russia seems to increase the odds of conflict, no?
There's a good chance that Polish leaders would actually want to inflict some damage on Russia to settle old scores, or that they'd be maximally uncharitable in a way that increases the odds of military solutions.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
Russia had a lease on the Sebastopol Navy base that Ukraine was threatening to undo in the aftermath of the Revolution of Dignity.
What do you think America would do if Cuba moved on Guantamo Bay? Gitmo isn't even of that much strategic interest for us.
NewCharlesInCharge
5mo ago
The Washington State Supreme Court did this with education funding in the McCleary case. They found that the legislature was failing in fulfilling the constitutional mandate to fund public education as the state’s “paramount duty” and so imposed fines on the legislature until they “fixed the bug.”
The court wouldn’t actually say what they wanted, just that the status quo was unacceptable. This resulted in many rounds of funding changes and court rejections until the last attempt, which largely removed local school funding, instead putting almost all of the funding into one statewide pot to be redistributed with equal funding per student.
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
Even as Facebook was hiring lots of folks, it was still painful to find enough people to grow teams to actually manage all the work that needed doing. I had positions go unfilled for up to nine months.
When you need to hire the 99th percentile it helps to grow the pool by throwing in a couple of billion Indian and Chinese engineers.
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
If she converts to Christianity she can claim to follow the example of all the reformed prostitutes turned saints.
I don’t think Islam has such a thing. When I asked ChatGPT for a parallel it gave me a male mystic who was never a prostitute.
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
SBF also affirmed that he would take the hypothetical bet that had something like a 51% chance of doubling world happiness and a 49% chance of destroying the earth.
He would sacrifice all of us on the altar of expected value.
https://bestinterest.blog/sbfs-stupid-bet/
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
At my job it's enough to point to the potential for things to go wrong to be able to guard against them.
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
There was a guy on 90 Day Fiancée who explicitly said to his very religious fiancée that he doesn’t believe in God, but that he does believe in aliens.
Apologies for the Facebook link, couldn’t find it elsewhere: https://facebook.com/90DayFiance/videos/children-to-aliens-90-day-fiance-season-8/414612926588272/
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
With this context, I think I'm actually wrong, and some of the media were right, but perhaps on accident.
Interesting to note that this section of the law, passed in 1953, appears to be designed to attack the KKK. The section is titled "Prohibited Secret Societies and Activities": https://www.ncleg.net/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/ByChapter/Chapter_14.html
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
That'll teach me not to refresh in a separate tab before hitting post!
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
Remember the "don't say gay" bill? If you were being very charitable, you could say that the so-called "don't say gay" bill in Florida did prohibit "saying gay" in certain contexts, so I suppose the reporting on it comported with Scott's ideas on bounded distrust, that the media rarely concts outright lies.
But the reporting on North Carolina's HB 237 looks to consist of outright lies. Background: the state already has a law on the books that prohibits concealing your identity when committing a crime, with a consequence that the class of misdemeanor or felony commited gets bumped up by one. During the pandemic they added an extemption to the law for thsoe wearing a mask for health reasons. HB 237 removes that exemption.
News media are reporting that North Carolina is banning mask wearing in public. Some examples of those spreading the idea that this is a general ban on public masking:
- Winston-Salem Journal: Bill to end masking in north Carolina clears Senate. Health advocates say completely barring masks could hurt people who are immunocompromised
- US News and World Report: North Carolina Lawmakers Push Bill to Ban Most Public Mask Wearing, Citing Crime
- Charlotte Observer: The party of ‘freedom’ wants to ban mask-wearing for health reasons in NC
WaPo adds some more context, and describes the law as a prohibition on masking during a crime, but still lies in their headline by saying that the bill bans mask wearing at protests generally:
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
Or else someone sues and gets found to have no standing.
NewCharlesInCharge
6mo ago
And had the bill passed they'd be telling immigrants to claim they were waterboarded, since it is a form of torture that leave no physical evidence on the victim, for which they'd qualify to remain in country.
Better than Gaza, I'm sure, but Taiwan is still a net importer of food, with most of that food coming from the mainland. It's a common refrain by pro-mainland folks that Taiwan is dependent on them for food.
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