Well that certainly gives nullification teeth. Interesting. Thank you.

I am not a lawyer.

Nullification is when the jury hands in a verdict of “not guilty”, even though there’s a preponderance of evidence that the law was indeed broken by the defendant. They basically ignore the Judge’s instructions to weigh the evidence and do something else instead. This would trigger an appeal by the prosecution on the basis of mistrial, since the optics on that situation look like something procedural is way off.

I’m not well-versed in these matters, but I am intrigued by what would happen if this went to appeal. If it went all the way to SCOTUS, or even some appeals court with a crooked judge, that might not go so well for the defendant.

We’re going back

Awesome. Another high-quality graphical Rogue spinoff? I’m there.

In the meantime, check out Torchlight 1&2 if you need something to tide you over. They’re on the old side, but IMO scratch that itch.

Not to come off as a raging cynic, but I for one am not.

All one needs to do is work retail or food service on Sundays. Moral licensing is absolutely a thing, and it’s awful. Such interactions can leave one with the impression that there’s a huge mob of people out there that are more concerned with narrowly avoiding hell than ensuring their place in heaven. Nevermind trying to be good people.

They can also refuse to register the car,

Virginia has a model for this that can be a tad regressive; not sure about CA. On the one hand, there’s regular safety and emissions tests that must be passed or you cannot (re)register your car for the coming year or two. This more or less keeps deathtraps and oil-burning-smog-machines off the road. On the other hand, it has absolutely crippled plenty of households just scraping by where that old car is needed to just break even every month. Depending on where one stands on car-dependent culture and if owning/operating a vehicle is a necessity, it can be quite the contentious issue.

Point being, I can easily see how a higher bar for registration, and re-registration, can change the makeup of what’s on the road. I can also see how that can suddenly prevent a whole chunk of the population from participating.

I have always considered leasing a car to be throwing away money.

I was in the market for a car back in the start of 2023. I was floored at how leases were at the same monthly cost as just financing new for the same exact car. As in, there was practically zero advantage in doing so. Why do people do this?

this just means driving their fossil fuel burning car longer until they can figure something out.

The cost of new and used are at a point where if you own your car outright, it’s far cheaper to just keep it on the road. I know not everyone can afford the downtime for big repairs, and keeping $1000-2000 on hand for repairs is not easy. But it can work out to a lot less per year which is the trick. Sadly, economics got us into this mess and without some kind of intervention, they’re gonna keep us here for a while.

I’m inclined to agree. The idea that a cabinet-to-be is able to make headlines during a lame duck session is… well, I don’t think it’s normal, but I may be misremembering.

Nothing earth shattering today (Dec 13) but a few noteworthy things on AP: https://apnews.com/hub/congress

That’s not the point. For TIME to do that, they’re more or less stating that we’re already living in that world, and have for the past year. Just wait.

featuring a person, group, idea, or object that “for better or for worse … has done the most to influence the events of the year”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year

Real talk: do people just go nude/semi-nude at home on the regular? I had no idea.

**For some reason Lemmy is adding a ‘25’ between the % and s. Those numbers shouldn’t be there, just fyi.

The URL as shown is actually valid. No worries there.

The value 25 happens to be hexidecimal for a percent sign. The percent symbol is reserved in URLs for encoding special characters (e.g. %20 is a space), so a bare percent sign must be represented by %25. Lemmy must be parsing your URL and normalizing it for the rest of us.

I’m kind of blown away by this too. The sentiment here on Lemmy following the US presidential election was palpable by people in other countries, and how this might have ripple effects in Europe and beyond. I suppose it’s easy to underestimate the influence of US military, trade, and soft power abroad from within these borders. Still, the idea that politicians and leaders elsewhere would just freaking copy our homework, especially when we’re doing our best to fail the class, is mind-boggling.

It really exemplifies the fragility of democracy and civil rights, and the need for active defense of them.

Jefferson was quoted as recommending a re-write of the constitution every 19 years. So the fragility of all this stuff, and the need to keep with the times, was well-known by the founders at the very start. By that clock, we are decades overdue for some amendments. Then there’s the really famous quote:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” - Thomas Jefferson

For the record, I appreciate how absolutely metal this quote is. At the same time, I greatly dislike it because it suggests that violence is the right choice right out of the gate. I prefer to take this advice as, eventually, violence is the only option remaining.

I’m trying to wrap my head around this, partly because I haven’t been following Korean politics as of late. From Reuters on an earlier article :

SEOUL, Dec 3 (Reuters) - South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on Tuesday for the first time in the country since 1980. Below is a Reuters translation of the military decree: "In order to protect liberal democracy from the threat of overthrowing the regime of the Republic of Korea by anti-state forces active within the Republic of Korea and to protect the safety of the people, the following is hereby declared throughout the Republic of Korea as of 23:00 on December 3, 2024

Maybe it’s too early to know, but does anyone have the faintest idea what is meant by “anti-state forces”? Is this just a ham-fisted power grab that failed, or is there any legitimacy to that claim? I’m missing ALL the context here.

Force these shitters to make their products healthier for all age groups.

There’s a lot of nuance here, but in general I agree. Hank (of vlogbrothers and SciShow fame), summed this problem up brilliantly. To paraphrase: social media is engagement based, not quality based. Upvote/like content on all you want, but misinformation, propaganda, rage bait, and doom-scrolling fodder will dominate any platform where the only valued metric is eyeball time.

So, the top-down solution would be to somehow strictly define how for-profit ranked media feeds and news aggregators are allowed to operate. Unintended consequences of such a law aside, I think it’s possible to legally define a “well-behaved” social media site, but it won’t be easy.

Real question: how is anyone supposed to implement this without eliminating anonymity for those services?

A hypothetical neutral reserve currency would be a fiat-style monetary system. It would also require some kind of central bank and governance over it. It’s not impossible to achieve, but the politics around such a thing would be impressive to behold.

Also, I doubt the US would embrace either before seeing the dollar crash. It would take too much power away from the Federal Reserve, and by extension, global leverage.

For those with enough wealth, it’s a win-win. Either the dollar stays strong and you continue to trade assets/stocks/bonds accordingly, or it craters and you invest in cost-competitive labor on par with India and China.

In the latter case, while foreign goods are priced out of reach, a booming manufacturing sector will come in and “save the day” in states with poor worker protections/rights. The real magic trick is making sure you (the 1%) are in the room when the decisions are made to hold or fold before the general public knows anything about it.

They’ve distanced themselves from the optics, but not the principles. They think that by not flying swastikas everywhere that somehow that’s different enough to pass.

Welcome to the top of the sigmoid curve.

If you were wondering what 1999 felt like WRT to the internet, well, here we are. The Matrix was still fresh in everyone’s mind and a lot of online tech innovation kinda plateaued, followed by some “market adjustments.”

I was gonna say. It’s this exactly. Plus a nice feature of Fediverse stuff is that it can scale down to hobby levels if needed. Venture funded commercial services abhor this and will compromise all kinds of things (e.g. morals, ethics) to keep going at whatever scale they’re at.

This gives me hope. It’s like we’re all finally learning how to moderate forums in this ridiculous climate.