hrunt

Joined 12 years ago

Karma
1,092
Submissions
154
Member since
Oct 14
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/hrunting; my proof: https://keybase.io/hrunting/sigs/KTvFArsJzaSD3P0t5TMOYp7WTRKKYjk8T-VvdI-FXbU ]
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Recent submissions

Comment · 23 days ago
Comment · 1 month ago
The defendant is not getting a retrial. He is getting resentenced. His guilt wasn't challenged. I think the defendant's argument is that the lifelike AI avatar of the victim carried the emotional weight of actually being the victim, and since the statement was one of geniality and forgiveness that may not have actually represented the victim's true self. This prejudiced sentencing because it made it look like the defendant killed someone better than they may have been.

The AI statement was effectively a statement from the victim's sister. She can get up on the stand and talk about how genial and forgiving her brother was herself, and it will likely result in a similar sentence. Then, that sentence will be based on actual testimony and not invented testimony.

And to those questioning why the lawyer challenged the sentence, a defense attorney is going to look at any opportunity to argue for a lesser sentence as one worth taking. You may think this testimony yielded a "better" sentence for the defendant, but I'm sure the attorney thinks otherwise.

Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 3 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
In the flag examples given, I agree they are almost all uniformly uninspired. The six- and eight-pointed stars must be clip art, and the flat, solid colors and geometric abstractions are boring. It says more about the lack of design education over the past 50 years than anything else.

But that Newton, Kansas, flag is excellent. I only know two things about Newton, Kansas, and that is they grow wheat and have trains. And I learned 100% of that from that flag.

Comment · 5 months ago
> I feel like we could have like a >95% income tax when you are worth more than like $20 million and it wouldnt actually matter too much to the people who would cap it out?

It wouldn't matter, because the ultra-wealthy generally don't have much income relative to their wealth. Elon Musk (in the article listed at $817B of wealth) was reported to have had $1.52B of net income between 2014 and 2018, and had no taxable income in 2018. 95% of $0 is still $0.

The ultra-wealthy's wealth doesn't grow because of income (as the tax code defines it). Trying to tax income to redistribute their wealth (or even just slow its growth) is not going to address wealth inequality.

Comment · 6 months ago
In my school, I was part of a group of students who hand-programmed games on TI-81 or TI-82 calculators using TI-BASIC. No cable transfers. Games included: Hangman, Missile Command, Minesweeper, and R-Type. Looking back, it was really amazingly impressive. Both what those calculators could do and how much free time we had to make them do it.
Comment · 6 months ago
I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comments responding to that. All obvious bot accounts.

It's obvious on the channels, because these reply sets usually don't contain a lot of replies to comments (if there are any comment replies, it's almost always from the channel owner). It's so obvious, in fact, that I'm surprised YouTube hasn't done something to address it.

Comment · 9 months ago
Comment · 9 months ago
Yes, people expect SCOTUS to rebuff Trump on the tariffs. [0]

Lately SCOTUS has been providing stricter textual interpretations of Constitutional questions. Many of these have aligned with Trump administration arguments based on the power of the executive as outlined in Article II. The text says, "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America," and, "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." One of the key arguments is that Congress can't take that power away from him. For example, Congress can't tell him that he can't fire executive-branch staff, because the executive power rests with him, not with Congress.

One thing the Constitution is very clear on, though, is that only Congress can impose tariffs ("The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises"). Furthermore, recent rulings of this Court have established the major questions doctrine, which says that even if Congress delegates the specifics of implementing its powers to the Executive branch, that delegation cannot be interpreted broadly. It can't be used to create new broad policies that Congress didn't authorize.

Therefore, because the text of the Constitution explicitly grants the right to impose tariffs to Congress /and/ Trump's imposition of tariffs is both very broad and very substantial, many people believe that SCOTUS will deny Trump's tariffs.

The case as argued is about Trump's right to issue tariffs under the IEEPA (a law Congress passed to give the President some ability to take economic actions due to international emergencies, which do not explicitly include tariffs), and there is some debate about what a negative ruling would mean for the return of tariffs to merchants who have paid them. Both of those points require careful consideration in the decision. Will the ruling limit itself to just tariffs issued under the IEEPA or to the President's ability to establish tariffs under other laws? If the Court rules against the tariffs, will the government be required to pay people back, and if so, to what extent? It's not surprising that the decision is taking some time to be released. There's a lot of considerations, and every one is a possible point for disagreement by the justices.

[0] https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/prediction-market-trade...

Comment · 10 months ago
> Archive vs. Delete is another question but not as important. Over time I've found that I'm probably deleting too much (e.g. where did I buy that <nice thing> 5 years ago? want it again, can't find the order). Then business email are all archived with the exception of business spam of course.

An executive co-worker of mine used his Deleted Items folder as his Archive. Problem solved.

Comment · 11 months ago
Comment · 1 year ago
This is not what's happening in these schools. Many children have no outside-of-school work -- at all. My two children have had many classes with no homework up through 8th grade. And this is in a highly regarded, very competitive school district.

From what I can tell, this is mostly a parent-led thing, well supported by overworked teachers who are more than willing to avoid even more work grading out-of-school assignments.

Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 1 year ago
Bitcoin and Ethereum don't have "insiders", and the ownership pool is sizeable and diverse enough to make pump and dump difficult to perform with them.

It's important to recognize that pump-and-dump coins (scams), memecoins, and (for lack of a better term) cryptocurrencies have separate characteristics.

Pump-and-dump coins have insiders that control the majority of the coins and know when to exit. They are "in" on the game, and they specifically manipulate others to exit with a windfall with no expectation of the coin to last past the exit. TRUMP is an example of a pump-and-dump coin.

Memecoins have enough diverse holders that there's nobody with enough coins for a dump to kill it completely. Memecoins are volatile because they still respond to hype and the people involved acknowledge their questionable value, but there's not a person or group of people that know what's going to happen to the coin. DOGE is an example of a memecoin.

The more classic, well-established cryptocurrencies are like memecoins where the market sees real value in them or their future. Not only do they have a large and diverse pool of holders, but they serve general use cases that the holders perceive has having value (note, not the same as the holders perceiving the coin has value, but that the use-cases for the coin drive its value). BTC is an example of a cryptocurrency.

BTC and ETH may still have as much inherent value as pump-and-dump coins, but if they take a ride to zero, it will happen differently than a pump-and-dump.

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