Well yeah the AI support is just the next iteration of confusing telephone trees and long wait times. The direct hope is that they make it just convoluted enough that a chunk of people that they before would have to “waste money” serving and fixing whatever problem they had will instead just give up without opening them up to liability for denying service. Only now they can do it while hiring even fewer actual people to handle the cases that get through.

I think I get what it’s saying? It’s saying that while your phone isn’t directly listening to your conversations in any meaningful way they collect crazy amounts of other data on basically everyone and can piece it together in such a way that they can make some scary accurate guesses as to the kind of ads to serve you based on what their systems have gathered your interests are and where/with whom you spend your time.

I’m not entirely sure. They didn’t really seem to present much more than speculation on it.

Honestly I feel like it would hurt his ego more to be reduced to a generic Republican. I feel like he hates nothing more than getting ignored.

That’s always been my view on these subjects as a parent. Especially considering all 3 of my kids have autism and have a tendency to not follow rules at all if the rule doesn’t make sense to them.

Like seriously my father was the perfect example of this shit. The amount of times he’d bully me about not trying to have sex with any of my female friends while simultaneously saying “not in my house you won’t” is crazy.

Pffft, you believe in the Moon?

In group and out group baybee!

Saaaaaame…

I went from being homophobic because I mistook my being uncomfortable with overt sexual advances from anyone as being uncomfortable with gay men because “of course I’m attracted to women I just haven’t met The One yet,” to thinking I was bi because once I thought about it I realized I didn’t really feel any differently toward men and women, to finally my now wife when we were dating introducing me to the concept of being asexual and I realized that yeah I do have the same attraction toward men and women… Zero.

Compulsive Heterosexuality is strong yo.

Last I knew, yeah. Google bought them years ago. Moreover, I don’t remember that “feature” being in Waze before Google acquired them. Those ads were the biggest reason I dropped Waze a while back.

Of course. The only question they ask is “Does this make my side look bad?” If the answer is No, then this is Just, Good, and the Will of the People. If the answer is Yes, then it’s a False Flag, a Psy-Op, or the work of the Deep State.

This particular kind of hearing might not necessarily need to conclude before the election to be impactful. Trump’s lawyers arguing with a straight face that his alleged attempt at subverting the election was actually an official act just before the election could be fairly damaging on their own.

My understanding reading this is that they’re worried that some of their evidence might have just become privileged and inadmissible via the whole “can’t use testimony or communications between the president and his staff” part of the ruling.

I doubt that the SCOTUS ruling actually saves him here. It seems to me at least that the prosecution is agreeing to postpone sentencing mostly to go back and make sure that they aren’t likely to lose too much of their evidence on appeal.

The payment by Cohen to Daniels for her story happened before the election. The problem is that a bulk of, if not potentially all of the fraudulent payments to Cohen from Trump to reimburse him didn’t happen until he was president. I don’t remember exactly when the repayment started.

The worry I guess is that while the crime itself doesn’t involve official acts, some of the evidence of the crimes used in the trial might have just become privileged communication that can’t be used as evidence. I don’t think anything has changed personally reading it, but I’m no lawyer. So they might have agreed to postpone the sentencing as a bit of caution to review everything to make sure that too much of their evidence didn’t just become inadmissable. Basically, it seems mostly like a bid to make sure they don’t get torched on appeal.

They’ve pulled that one a lot recently, haven’t they? I seem to recall one of the other recent rulings, I think it was against the EPA basically being a hypothetical about a proposed rule they hadn’t even actually passed yet?

Yeah. The Roberts Court has been nothing if not the Court of Post-Hoc Justification. They’re great at concocting the most batshit crazy of legal theories to reach the outcome they want after shopping for the perfect cases to do so. I’m absolutely positive that if/when he gets an appeal to reach SCOTUS they’ll give him exactly what he wants even if they have to tie themselves in logical pretzels or even directly contradict themselves to do it.

Wouldn’t be that simple. The Stormy Daniels case was about things that happened before he became president. Sure reimbursing Cohen might have occurred at least in part while Trump was president, but Cohen was never part of the administration. They were disguising the reimbursement as paying Cohen in his capacity as Trump’s personal lawyer. So there’s pretty much nothing that this ruling does to hamper this case.

That said, I have no doubts that they’d find some way to rule in his favor if an appeal managed to land in front of them. But I think he’d have to go through normal appeals first, he can’t just go straight to SCOTUS.

Wouldn’t it be more like a 1.25% increase for most people since that part of the payroll tax is split half and half between employers and employees? I might be reading it wrong but sounds like they’re proposing raising the entire 12.8% or whatever it is payroll tax that much. So it’d go from like 6.4% to like 7.7%.

Kind of? It’s more like if all of YouTube functioned like the subscriptions tab. You still have a trending page but it seems to be just the raw “this has gotten X views in Y time” kind of trending. Not the “this is what our Ineffable Algorithm God™©® thinks will maximize the amount of time you spend on our platform” kind. Then you’ve got the subscriptions page which is just chronologically all the videos from the channels you’re subscribed to. But then there’s also the stuff like sponsor block, dearrow, and such.

It’s pretty good what little I’ve used it. It was just a bit of a pain to bring over your my subscriptions at least when I did it on mobile with the NewPipe app. I had to like download my data from Google, find the archive with my subscriptions data and give that to the app so it could find the channels I was subscribed to.

I prefer to think of it as… “Promoting healthy discourse among my peers.” Keeps the mind sharp.

Is a taco an open-faced sandwich? Or does an open-faced sandwich become a taco when you pick it up and fold it over to eat it?

I have no objections. A taco is technically a hot dog after all.