It’s the same thing as with “watermarking” music files - it’s a bunch of hot air, anybody anywhere can just play them back and recapture the analog, and if the watermark survives that then it’s absolutely going to be audible.

If someone is posting unmodified content to social media, it’s in their interests to sign and attest that authenticity.

Why is it in their interests?

Later, they may find copies of their original content, with trivial edits and others’ signatures attesting to the authenticity of “their” work, even though “they” didn’t travel to Antarctica and spend the winter to get that photo of the emperors incubating their eggs…

One way to make it work is for the edited photo to carry a copy of the original photo inside - so you have the original photo signed by the photographer, then the edited version signed by the editor, then the book compilation signed by the book maker, etc. If the editor does a terrible job - with the right software - someone can just go back to the photographer’s original image, make their own edit, modify the book including the edited notations, etc.

In the US it doesn’t seem to be a stretch at all. 50/50 dead heat races most places, and the big money backs both sides. No wonder that nothing changes for the big corps when “the other side” gets control.

they’re closing schools down, so the funding will likely go to some bullshit.

I think it’s a split, likely 50/50 between “other alternate more cost effective school options” which amounts to paying parents to home school or paying private schools by the state, but at a lower rate than state schools and with even worse effectiveness assurances than the public schools if you can even imagine that to be possible. The other 50 is going to go to all kinds of grift while the property tax payers aren’t looking at how the cost of schools (on their tax bills) is dropping.

Funny, a big problem we had in schools when I attended in the 70s/80s was sports sucking up all the funding, new money going to a football stadium instead of fixing the wet roof that filled the high school with mold spores - I had chronic bronchitis for 4 years, coincitentally only while school was in session, only while I was attending in that building - never in summers, off to college? Miracle cure.

buy properties here to get tax exemptions and live elsewhere the majority of the time.

Which is illegal, but hard to prove without tipping the hand of the surveillance state. They know who the cheaters are, but they don’t want to say how they know.

the proposed homestead exemption will increase the amount of property tax I will pay

Any change to property taxes increases the amount some people pay because property tax base rates are adjusted to be “revenue neutral” - getting all the money they need to provide the services they have committed to. So, rule changes never lessen the total burden, only shift it around.

Floriduh made a big deal about lottery income paying for education, but in truth (the educated know that) only 5% of the schools’ cost is paid by the lottery operations, the other 95% mostly comes from property taxes - so, thank a lottery player for reducing your property taxes by about 2%, 35-40% of an average property tax bill goes to education.

Or just ban mega corps from buying housing stock. It’s not difficult to enforce.

When the mega corps own the legislature and the courts it’s pretty difficult, when they own the executive branch then they de-facto will not have anything enforced upon them.

All too true - laws are for people who can’t afford lawyers.

To an extent “Homestead Exemption” can do this, if the exemption is a significant chunk of the taxable value - which it has been at some times (my first house’s HX was 50% of its taxable value), and not so much at other times (we’re at about 10% now)…

So, if you’ve got 50% homestead exemption, you only get that on your first home and you pay double taxes on others. But, if you’re playing in the 10% bracket that’s basically in the noise.

also live their lives in such a way that collecting any actual money from such judgements is exceptionally difficult. Again, making court a waste of time and energy.

“Only poor people commit crime or injure others.” Nope.

You don’t have to be poor, you just have to have your assets legally protected from seizure via civil judgement. Cross the wrong line in the woods and a wildlife officer can confiscate your boat and the truck and trailer you brought it in on. Do all kinds of terrible things ending up in judgements of virtually any amount, and if your primary residence is a million dollar mansion, the courts can’t touch it. I rented a room in a very nice compound while at University, paid $400 per month to the landlord who lived in “the big house” - turns out they only still had the house because it was protected under law from seizure - dad was in jail for fencing stolen cars, my rent, and the two women who rented the tennis cabana… free and clear to the family.

you are generalizing from a very small data set and acting like that makes you wiser; it doesn’t.

Life’s a bitch, and then you die. Your superior data set, you got provenance on that data? You trust it implicitly beyond your personal experiences? That’s a comfortable place to live, until it isn’t. My parents both taught science for 40+ years at various levels. They quit counting the number of times that “facts” they had been taught were overturned by newer, better, more solid findings - after less than 10 years of teaching. That’s the nature of science, and life. Data surrounding public safety officers has been, in my personal life experience, of wildly varying quality but almost always slanted in the direction of improving trust in our sworn officers of the law - improving it beyond what it actually merits.

Yep. Thanks.

deleted by creator

Of course all those things are true, which is why you generally want to live your life in such a way that doesn’t get you dragged into court by others, either.

However - should you ever consider dragging anyone else into court and getting a civil monetary judgement against them, you may also want to consider that an awful lot of the type of people who go around doing things that would make such a judgement relatively easy to obtain, also live their lives in such a way that collecting any actual money from such judgements is exceptionally difficult. Again, making court a waste of time and energy.

cops seeing a dash cam will make them want to take you to court.

You’re missing a subtlety here… cops don’t take you to court, they send you (or your lawyer) to court. Rub a cop wrong and they give you a bogus citation which all they have to do is get a tsk tsk about not showing up to court for, but you either A) pay the citation, or B) pay a lawyer to show up to court to fight the citation for you, or C) spend your time and effort going to court yourself to fight it. Option B being more expensive than option A and option C being most expensive of all if you value your time in the least.

I really think that’s an incredibly rare cop that feels that way

Well, I’ve been around since the 60s, and interacted with a few cops over the years, and most of them have been pretty great people on the whole, the vast majority I’d say, on duty and off. Still, I have interacted with several who did get petty and vindictive and have been tweaked by signs of “anti-cop-paraphernalia” in one’s possession, and I suppose when you offset those against all the “good cops” I have interacted with, I get that feeling that “anti-cop-paraphernalia” really does piss them off. All the online videos of cops in the 2000-2020 era trying to beat up people filming them with cell phones doesn’t help either.

I can’t reason you out of a position you didn’t reason yourself into.

Likewise.

The only thing worse than having courts (which by nature of being comprised of human beings, often get things wrong) is not having courts.

I agree to that, 100% - they do make life overall better by their existence. Where I disagree is: they don’t usually make individuals’ lives better by participation in them. There’s a certain “civic duty” aspect to participation in the system, but I strongly believe that taking cases to court, and winning the trial decision, but failing to make a real difference to society going forward - failing to ensure that the injustice will happen less in the future - is just a waste of time and irresponsible enrichment of lawyers.

That’s not acceptable, that’s not professional, somebody is going to eat that burrito - are you going to file their permission to use the image of their food? Too complicated.

OpenClaud is clearly an amalgam of most AI agents out there, a very accurate one.

Boss said add a picture, I said artist costs money, boss said “use AI” - just doin’ my job.

For professional work we hire experts (who use AI as their first pass, but then “clean it up” to their “high professional standards using native speakers”) - and then we do another pass with “subject matter experts” who both speak the language and work directly in our field, becaue the “professional humans” typically don’t have those niche experiences. We recently made this procedure 100% required after the “human professionals” effectively translated On to mean Off for one of our controls…

Not only the courts, I find many areas of life where “right and wrong” are best treated as a sort of ideal, aspirational thing, not something to invest a lot of energy in upholding - if you’re interested in overall quality of life. Especially when dealing with our (disabled) children and the school system, but also medical malpractice and other situations, there are fights we could have taken to court, fought hard - at great personal expense not only of legal fees but also time and emotional energy - and won the court case, but lost overall in terms of achieving the things we really cared about - that time and money was put to much more productive and life enhancing uses than “making a stand and proving the injustice.” You can argue that we “shirked our duty to society” by allowing the injustices to continue, I argue that society shirked its duty to itself by making tthe injusticies so individually costly to expose and correct.

I agree about seatbelts - though if I lived 3 or 4 near-death experiences where seat belts made my outcome worse instead of better, I’d probably say to hell with the odds…

I know a lot of people who have spent time in the court system, other than ambulance chaser backed situations, I don’t know many happy with the outcomes.