she was denied citizenship

Which denies her a host of legal protections within the community, heaps additional bureaucratic burdens in renewing non-citizen residency papers, and exposes her to summary deportation on the whims of state security.

I fail to see the censorship

Threatening to deny someone citizenship based on their expressed political views is textbook censorship.

A popular grift for ex-military guys is to take you out into the wilderness and scream at you while waving a gun for a week or three, then bill you thousands of dollars for the privilege.

Where this gets really ugly is the “Scared Straight” teen boot camps. One of the more notable instances of this was Monarch School, Montana which effectively used the status of its students - kids with criminal records, history of drug abuse, or other behavioral issues - as cover to effectively get paid to inflict physical, mental, and sexual abuse on them for the duration of their stay.

I would be worried about it from a “this is how white nationalists can sucker their conservative/libertarian neighbors out of their meager savings” angle. Great way to turn a profit off the troop worship and profit from the mythological popular understanding of military academies. But if you think these wash-outs and blowhards are turning their even-less-experienced Republican wanna-be warrior neighbors into the next Vietcong, I would check your expectations a tad.

There is a middle ground

There’s no middle ground between citizenship and non-citizenship. And dangling threat of denied legal residency as a form of censorship is exactly the kind of fascist shit we’re seeing in Trump’s America.

Even just the act of writing something down helps solidify it in your memory.

Also, since you have those tabs, you can just… flip through them and check. Then close out anything that’s unimportant or past its usefulness. Its not like this information is “forgotten”. You’re just choosing not to look at it, for whatever reason.

Idk if I’d say they “fuck everyone” given how much of the market is already heavily concentrated in a handful of hedge funds and investment banks. Most people don’t have real exposure to the stock market. And of those who do, most don’t indulge in active trading - they have savings in a 401k that maps to an index fund or other basket of blue chips, updating on daily or quarterly cycle.

The folks the HFT really fuck over are the day traders and investment bankers who are, themselves, trying to rapidly reposition ahead of market data. Warren Buffet’s Berkshire team loses more to HFTers in a day than any lay citizen would lose in a lifetime.

Is Kagi worth it?

I’ve heard differing accounts. Some people definitely swear by it. But if you’re just using search as a portal to Wikipedia or Generic News Of the Day, it still points you to the same catalog of high profile sites as everyone else.

$5-10/mo isn’t a wallet buster. But is it really any better than searching Google with udm=14 turned on? YMMV.

Nobody has satisfactorily explained to me how much Kagi is cribbing from the other search engines and how much is their own internal web crawling and sorting heuristics.

My understanding is that HFTs - which are highly profitable - likely use some AI-techniques.

From my understanding of HFT, what they’re effectively doing is automated front runnings.

They scan market activity and look for spreads between orders and availability. Then they place very short term orders any time they see, for instance, “I’ll sell 1000 X at $49” and “I’ll buy 500 X at $49.05”, effectively buying up all the outstanding $49 orders and flipping them for a $.05 profit.

You don’t need an advanced AI for this. You just need to be able to see orders and make trades faster than anyone else in the market.

Because getting out ahead of trade volume is so lucrative, you’ll see huge investments in rack space near the physical stock exchanges and high speed lines between cities with big brokerages.

But AI trading is (theoretically) about spotting and predicting long term trends in the market, not front running active trades.

I just think that as an outsider challenging deeply held cultural beliefs she shouldn’t have expected to be welcomed as a citizen

Of course not. Keep people of different beliefs legally segregated and treat anyone in foreign soil as a second class human.

Otherwise, you might be annoyed from time to time.

A recent study at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology studied more than 100 cows carrying 12-pound bells at two dozen farms across the country, and found that the bells can lead to deafness in cows, whose hearing is more sensitive than that of human beings

Basically, they moved to another country, in the countryside, and immediately started telling everyone around them they were living their lives wrong

I say this every time I see someone complain about female castration, corporal punishment, or waterboarding.

If you don’t like how a community operates, you shouldn’t complain. You should leave. Or, better yet, don’t show up to begin with.

Get your fancy liberal ideas about social reform or rights for the disposed out of her. If we’re torturing cows in our town, with our own money, on our land, that’s our choice. Idk how you have the nerve to come in and try to make this place better.

Fuck you. I’ll torture my cows if I feel like it. As my father did, and his father before him. Cow torture is a tradition. Don’t be annoying.

Humans

I think it’s kinda cruel to the cows but

I get so tired of the “yes, this appears to be a historical atrocity people have deliberately ignored, but mentioning it now is rude” framing.

Slapping “we ruined her ability to interface normally with the bureaucracy as a punishment” on top is some reactionary bullshit I’d like to think the anti-Trump crowd would be above.

But nope… fascism is just a reflex for people.

Only ironic if you don’t see the motivations behind their actions.

Liberals who feared a school shooter or deranged ex aren’t the ones arming up now. Conservatives who knocked down the regulations aren’t the ones who feel particularly threatened by a liberal with a gun.

authoritarians end up making carrying arms easier

But organizing any kind of community defense significantly harder. There’s no magic bullet you can buy to protect yourself from the violence of your neighbors, much less your external oppressors.

A great deal of the pro and anti gun frameworks have been about organizing local political interests into activist groups and police-aligned influencers.

The pro-gun groups have won primarily because their organizations are in tight with sitting administrations, but because they simple have guns available to any dipshit with a credit card and a driver’s license.

Nonsense. I think if there’s one thing this US Senate has proven to be, it’s anti-pedophile.

But she never stood a chance with, what, a three month campaign

That was half her strength. Trump’s entire team was geared around shitting on Joe Biden. And then Joe Biden stops being on the ballot, sending oodles of oppo-research and Hunter Biden smears and god even knows what kind of October Surprise they had cooking down the toilet.

Biden dropping out and throwing up Harris in his place meant she was free to pummel Trump with negative ads while he had to fully reconfigure his campaign to attack someone who’d spent four years as a backbencher. And - early on at least - Harris capitalized on this well. She came in with a moderate Dem - Tim Walz - who defused some of the Zionist image built up around Joe. She spewed negative ads at Trump and Vance, leaning on the “they’re just weird” talking point that got plenty of mileage both on and off-line. She was a prodigious fundraiser, unlocking a ton of cash that Biden had left on the sidelines because he was too senile to call the mega-donors and ask for it.

And, as a tabula rosa, she (initially) ditched all of Biden’s first term baggage - his failure to secure student loan relief, his endless efforts at compromising with far-right Republicans, his pull-out of Afghanistan and dive into Ukraine, his just being a gross old fart who couldn’t talk good.

But then Harris had to take on a bunch of Hillarycrat advisers and tack to the right. She ditched Walz for Liz Cheney and Cindy McCain. She sucked up to the Silicon Valley Techbros as they lined up to knife her in the back. She repeatedly defended Joe Biden’s least popular policies. She undid everything that Biden dropping out was intended to accomplish.

If anything, it speaks poorly of her leadership potential that she was willing to be saddled with that mess of a non-campaign.

She never really had a choice. But that’s been the hallmark of her entire political career. Harris always just kinda blew where the wind took her. She shouldn’t have been VP to begin with, taking the job only because Biden confusedly promised a black woman VP when he was asked about his plans for a next SCOTUS pick.

But then she surrounded herself with some of the most abysmal neocon reject advisors $1.5B could buy. And she tanked her chances at becoming the First Woman President by running the Clinton Playbook that had cost her predecessor so two prior electoral defeats.

Harris adviser says VP ran ‘flawless’ campaign

“I would posit she ran a pretty flawless campaign, and she did all the steps that [were] required to be successful,” she added. “And I think – obviously, we did not win, but I do think we hit all the marks.”

…

Nix, Harris’ campaign manager, also attributed Trump’s decision not to participate in any debate following the ABC News presidential debate on Sept. 10 as detrimental to the Harris campaign’s strategy of presenting the choice between Trump and Harris clearly to voters several times.

“I think that was hard for us to then get the attention that we would have liked to,” Nix said.

Well, there you have it. Perfect campaign. No notes. Just wish Trump had been willing to debate, because we all know the problem Harris had was getting her face out there.

Is it possible there are some SNAP recipients taking advantage of the system?

The federal equivalent of asking “Is anyone abusing our Take A Penny / Leave A Penny tray”. It’s such a paltry amount of money with so many strings attached that anyone serious about abusing a federal system looks elsewhere. Why would I fuck with food stamps when I can get take a job at an investment bank that got in on the Trumpcoin scam or take six figures beating up the homeless as an ICE Agent? Hell, part time National Guardsmen get way better benefits than anyone accepting federal cheesebux. Or take a job at the state or municipal level doing any of a number of annoying bureaucratic tasks that guarantee a stable income and good benefits.

There are so many ways to get money out of the federal government if you’re able-bodied, middle-aged, and sporting an IQ in the high double digits. Food stamps are for folks who can’t be exploited or coerced into exploiting others on the state’s behalf. You’re kept at just above starving in hopes you can be roped back into the system somewhere down the line, but systematically abused by the bureaucracy to get you to jump off asap.

Mafiosos in the 60s and 70s were more generous to their neighbors than the Feds are with their benefits schemes. Its the last place you should look for fraud.

Finally, we can get to the bottom of this whole “Did Donald Trump has any kind of involvement with Jeffery Whatisface?” question, once and for all. I’m excited to see these files released so that the FBI can act and any prosecutions of those involved can begin forthwith. Can’t wait for this decision to Release The Documents to put this whole matter to bed, once and for all.

Preach. I almost got suspended for being punched in the face, because the school logged me as “being in a fight” and considered that evidence I’d broken a rule. My assailant was straight up walking down the hall and shoving anyone in his way, eventually deciding to punch me because I didn’t move aside fast enough. But because I was the only one who complained to a Vice Principle (and because his parents had enough money and influence in the school to make things ugly), school admin effectively tried to extort me into retracting the complaint.

Took six months and multiple hearings, along with a threat of lawsuit, to eventually get the school admins to reverse their decision.