Can we just have the most qualified doctor regardless of race in place of the unqualified heroin addict? I'll take that. They can be a black trans lesbian (or not for any/all of those) for all it matters, so long as they actually know their shit.
Like RFK has already blown his stopped clock moment, and it was about food additives - can we get someone who will still do that bit but is also otherwise competent?
So I guess it is all legal
It's probably really not and the lawsuits probably have a good argument regarding the FACA, but courts are slow and Trump/Musk are basically steamrolling everything they can. An agency not given any delegated power from Congress functionally taking over and commanding agencies that do have delegated power from Congress probably has more than one means of legal attack against it. But courts are slow and any staff that challenge the Musk bulldozer have been relieved of their positions and escorted from their offices.
And way too much of the public is cheering it on.
Three suits have already been filed arguing DOGE violates the Federal Advisory Committee Act. But like you said, the courts take time and DOGE has only existed for like 10 days.
“DOGE” isn’t even a real Department, right?
Technically, Trump just renamed the United States Digital Service to the United States DOGE Service, then created a child agency within it called the United States DOGE Service Temporary Organization reporting directly to the President (which USDS does technically anyways) and hired Musk as a special government employee as head of that. A special government employee is essentially expected to work less than 130 days in the next year and are normally used to fill short term needs, or as expert topic consultants for specific projects, that sort of thing.
USDS is normally basically IT consultancy for other US departments, which is why he has access to a shocking number of keys to the kingdom, as it were.
And also, Musk hasn’t been elected or officially confirmed for any government position.
You don't have to be confirmed by the Senate for most government jobs (just a specific named handful of high ranking positions, like the Secretaries of various Cabinet Departments), and he was basically given the highest possible position he could without needing to be confirmed by the Senate.
Why the fuck is he giving orders and leading departments and having any power whatsoever over the U.S. Treasury and such? I don’t understand how this works.
The President has final authority and power over the executive branch and over time increasing power has been placed in the executive branch largely because Congress didn't want to fight over things every couple of years and the relative stability of a secondary agency staffed with experts was desirable for things like licensing radio bandwidth. USDS isn't one of these agencies though - it was created by Obama in 2014 to help manage US IT stuff (and basically started from the team that fixed the healthcare.gov site in 2013) and didn't need to be authorized by Congress because it doesn't have rulemaking power over anything outside the executive branch and thus doesn't require Congress to delegate power to it.
As for why he's giving orders and leading departments, legally he probably shouldn't be but he's also been assigned that power by Trump in a way that's questionably legal. There are at least 3 lawsuits that have been filed arguing that it's technically an advisory committee and in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. I could totally see a federal judge agreeing with that, but it would eventually go to SCOTUS and we know who's dick they sucked to get there.
TL;DR: DOGE exists because it's an existing department (US Digital Service) renamed DOGE, Musk was hired under that department in basically the highest spot that wouldn't require Senate confirmation and because that department is essentially cross-departmental IT consultancy it gives him access to a shocking amount of federal IT resources. He isn't being stopped because everyone involved ultimately reports to Trump and Trump has told him to do it. There are at least three lawsuits filed claiming the United States DOGE Service Temporary Organization is in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act, but since it's only existed for like 10 days the courts haven't really had a chance to even hear arguments about it yet.
Not that surprised. You have three options:
Since Trump is actively rejecting 2 and 3 is suicidal to a nation, that leaves 1 - promote people having kids above replacement rate.
Presuming there are still elections, this is basically calling for a general strike when it will have the most electoral weight. So, basically it comes down to whether or not you believe there will be another presidential election or if we'll already be a fascist dictatorship by then.
Don't worry, Trump is working hard to bring it back! Make Waterways Burn Again!
In parallel to what Hawk wrote, AI image generation is similar. The idea is that through training you essentially produce an equation (really a bunch of weighted nodes, but functionally they boil down to a complicated equation) that can recognize a thing (say dogs), and can measure the likelihood any given image contains dogs.
If you run this equation backwards, it can take any image and show you how to make it look more like dogs. Do this for other categories of things. Now you ask for a dog lying in front of a doghouse chewing on a bone, it generates some white noise (think "snow" on an old TV) and ask the math to make it look maximally like a dog, doghouse, bone and chewing at the same time, possibly repeating a few times until the results don't get much more dog, doghouse, bone or chewing on another pass, and that's your generated image.
The reason they have trouble with things like hands is because we have pictures of all kinds of hands at all kinds of scales in all kinds of positions and the model doesn't have actual hands to compare to, just thousands upon thousands of pictures that say they contain hands to try figure out what a hand even is from statistical analysis of examples.
LLMs do something similar, but with words. They have a huge number of examples of writing, many of them tagged with descriptors, and are essentially piecing together an equation for what language looks like from statistical analysis of examples. The technique used for LLMs will never be anything more than a sufficiently advanced Chinese Room, not without serious alterations. That however doesn't mean it can't be useful.
For example, one could hypothetically amass a bunch of anonymized medical imaging including confirmed diagnoses and a bunch of healthy imaging and train a machine learning model to identify signs of disease and put priority flags and notes about detected potential diseases on the images to help expedite treatment when needed. After it's seen a few thousand times as many images as a real medical professional will see in their entire career it would even likely be more accurate than humans.
you can’t say it’s OK to cut off my hand because once it’s off, it’s no longer attached to me.
No, but I can say that if you ask me to remove your hand, what happens to the hand after it is removed is not a matter of your bodily autonomy.
the whole point of the entire conversation is the control over women, and the unborn is just a pretense.
And I'm literally arguing that the pro-choice side isn't being honest about it either, that claiming it's exclusively about bodily autonomy is also just pretense. Notice that I'm suggesting a hypothetical where bodily autonomy and still having the child are detached from each other, where ending the pregnancy doesn't mean you don't still end up with a baby to deal with and you instead keep trying to find a way to make that still about bodily autonomy because the alternative is admitting that to an extent it isn't because that idea is uncomfortable to grapple with.
it’s also legal to marry children in some states
Yeah, California do be like that (seriously, CA has no minimum age of marriage if you can get a judge to sign off on it). Until 2022 MA had no hard minimum and only required parental consent to marry under 18. Most other states with "child marriage" are something like hard minimum of 16 or 17 and requires sign off from parents, a judge, or both for marriage under 18 (likewise in most states the age of consent is 16).
Actually surprised no enterprising pedophile with enough money to bribe someone has tried marrying a very young child in CA (or until 2022 MA) then traveling to somewhere like NM where marriage is an exception to age of consent.
99942 Apophis is scheduled to come visit for a near pass on Friday, April 13, 2029. It briefly held the highest rating of any object ever on the Torino scale when it was discovered 20 years ago. Another asteroid detected just last week is currently a Torino 3 but also won't be here for 7 years and only has a 1.4% chance of striking Earth based on current observations.
Of course it is, what else would you expect from the controlled opposition party?
I don’t think your example removes the woman from the equation. the transfer is still related to bodily autonomy. the fetus is part of the mother,
It's not "part of the mother" once it is no longer physically tethered to her, if it's no longer physically attached to her body why would bodily autonomy be relevant? Like, the entire point is to separate bodily autonomy from being made responsible for a child, because it demonstrates that the argument isn't really about bodily autonomy, not entirely.
To throw you another loop along these lines - if something that was part of your body remains part of your body once removed and you keep overriding power over what happens to it afterward would that mean after you donate blood you have absolute power over who is allowed to receive that blood henceforth?
and forcing someone to transfer it and keep it alive is still against that.
Once it's not attached to her body and is therefore not a matter of bodily autonomy, why shouldn't she be compelled to provide for it's continued existence whether or not she wants the child? Maybe threaten her with jail if she doesn't comply with payments to keep the gestation going.
you can’t force me to ejaculate into a cup, what makes it ok to force someone to transfer their fetus anywhere?
In this hypothetical no one is forcing anyone to transfer their fetus, they can carry the pregnancy or terminate the pregnancy as is their preference but what they can't do is terminate the pregnancy and then kill the fetus, instead a terminated pregnancy doesn't free you of the future child. Ending a pregnancy in this hypothetical doesn't end the future responsibility for a child, which is why it's illustrative of how it's not entirely about bodily autonomy, not really.
And for a fun question, what do you think happens legally if you ejaculate somewhere (anywhere other than a vagina is fine for this hypothetical) and someone retrieves that sperm and manages to inseminate themselves with it against your will or even knowledge? I'll give you a hint, it involves future responsibility for any resulting child. Same situation as applies for reproductive coercion, sexual assault and statutory rape for a person who produces the smaller reproductive cell (to use the US federal government approved phrasing).
why do pro choice people have to make the fucking worst arguments?
It's an ongoing struggle and essentially everybody hates you when you point out just how many pro-choice arguments are either just fucking dumb and ineffective or try to argue for being pro-choice as an application of a broader principle that doesn't get treated as half as important in most other cases where it's application would be controversial.
It's even worse when you yourself are pro-choice and it's just pointing out that bad or inconsistent arguments are bad or inconsistent.
there’s one argument here: freedom over your own body. you shouldn’t be legally forced to undergo an operation for someone else’s benefit. yes even if the fetus is a person, it’s viable, can feel pain, whatever. there’s literally no other situation where that is even remotely legal.
Freedom over your own body is really only sold as some kind of highest principle specifically in pro-choice arguments and blood and tissue donations. Usually the counter arguments rely on the notion that there's a point where you've agreed to the thing and can't demand it be undone (you can't for example donate a kidney and then demand it back), which for pregnancy brings it back around to things like whether or not a human being in the earliest stages of its life counts as a person that you've presumably consented to create by engaging in the reproductive act.
Also, by all appearances the line for when the bodily autonomy argument is seen as acceptable is specifically when the process involved is wholly biological - the moment it can be abstracted from that even a little bit suddenly bodily autonomy no longer applies.
A fun hypothetical to throw out there is this - artificial wombs are currently in development for agricultural use because they could potentially increase yields and reduce emissions (once the tech is mature, it's hypothetically cheaper and cleaner to run an artificial womb than maintain a whole cow per head of beef per season). This tech could probably be adapted for human use. So, in a hypothetical where artificial wombs are perfected for human use, would you support banning abortion in favor of transplanting to an artificial womb if the prognosis for the woman was the same, knowing that she will of course be responsible for the resulting child? If no, are you really arguing from bodily autonomy since the part involving the woman's body has been removed from the equation?
Applies in this case without the /s. He got shot while resisting arrest while armed, odds are had he complied (and thus not resisted arrest) he probably wouldn't have been shot.
I don’t know the exact details here, but if it’s like previous police shootings, there was probably a less violent solution.
Armed man resisting arrest? Maybe, but presuming "just let him go" doesn't count all of them are going to be considerably more dangerous for the officer and any bystanders.
Like?
You don’t name them or they’re aren’t an actual issue
The biggest and most obvious is that ID isn't available to literally everyone who can legally vote without cost to the end user of any kind, and as a consequence requiring such an ID is tantamount to a poll tax. Federal ID that's fully subsidized would be the easiest solution, and if done right you could even optionally fold most state ID systems into a federal one with things like being licensed to drive being an endorsement on the federal ID.
Notably, the same people who demand photo ID to vote also tend to be the people terrified of a federal ID as a concept.
or allow you to prove your identity with things like bank statements and utility bills, or just somebody else who can vouch for you.
My state's voter ID allows all of those things and more (including the voter registration card given to you for free when you register and whenever you update your registration as well as SNAP and TANF cards), although here the "somebody else who can vouch for you" has to have ID themselves and has to sign a sworn statement on penalty of perjury that you are who you say you are and that they have known you for at least 6 months.
So like nearly every commemorative coin then. I have half a dozen tied to various years I went to PAX because I thought they were a cool piece of memorabilia.
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Which is wild when you realize the original idea behind McDonalds was to apply engineering and mass production ideas to food to maximize speed and consistency, and now a lot of the time they fail at both.
It's genetic. It's more prevalent in some populations than others because sickle cell also makes one resistant to malaria, so the more common malaria has been somewhere historically, the more likely people descended from there are to have sickle cell.
Like how people of European descent are more likely to be resistant to the Black Death. Turns out diseases that kill lots of people apply significant selection pressure and those changes don't vanish quickly unless they cause a problem that would prevent breeding in successive generations.