So, for the actual answer to how you get private security: you hire a company like constellis (formerly blackwater, or Iraq war crime fame) or the honest to God pinkertons, who are actually still around.
You pay them unholy amounts of money and get some burly people to follow you around, with skills proportional to how much you’re paying them. If it gets to the six figure a month range, they also get more war-crime-y because you’re going for the highly qualified special forces folks who miss the fun of combat and murder.
If you try to pay what feels like a reasonable sum for private security you’re getting a cop working a second job who is definitely not taking a bullet for you, and probably not doing anything more to keep you alive than what’s coincidental to keeping themselves alive.

The company I work for does business in countries where kidnapping foreign business people is a common and lucrative way to make money (it’s effectively IT consulting, we’re not evil beyond the baseline capitalist level). We hire security people for preposterous sums and basically get former special forces who drive a car, make sure the person who showed up to the meeting is actually who they should be, orders delivery food, and tells you not to do stupid things. They try to keep you from getting kidnapped in boring ways, and if you do get kidnapped they coordinate the ransom exchange. (That I know of the most that’s ever happened was someone made the phone call to verify that the car they were about to get into at the airport was the pickup, and were told that it was not, abandon your bag if they’ve already loaded it and immediately go back into the airport and wait for the guard who showed up a minute later and handled the police interaction)

In general just try to avoid being in a position where you feel like you need to have hired a hero.

There’s an interesting, although ultimately flawed, argument that the 22nd says that a person who’s ineligible to hold the office of president can’t be VP, and that a person can only be elected to two full terms.
It’s an interesting argument that he’s not ineligible to hold office, so he could be VP despite not being able to be elected.

It’s ultimately flawed because the intent of the amendment was clear, and if we’re working around it to that extent we’re really sort of done with the law anyway.

Different people have different skin, oils, water supplies and diets.

Everyone needs to clean themselves regularly, but the exact details of what that means varies by circumstances.

Most people are fine with shampoo, a gentle soap, and warm water.
As long as you’re getting rid of old dead skin, excess oils and any grime you’re fine though. Soaps make that easier, but they’re not a requirement.
I’m prone to dry skin and greasy hair, so I use a shampoo, cool water and a scrub brush instead of soap for my body. Perfectly clean, just need to scrub a little longer to make sure I get everything.

https://blog.lukaszolejnik.com/biggest-privacy-erosion-in-10-years-on-googles-policy-change-towards-fingerprinting/

This article actually shares what changed, as opposed to just asserting that there was a change.

If you have reason to believe they are, you explain that reasoning to a court and if the reasoning is sufficiently persuasive the company can be compelled to provide internal information that could show whatever is going on.
Hiding this information or destroying it typically carries personal penalties for the individuals involved in it’s destruction, as well as itself being evidence against the organization. “If your company didn’t collect this information, why are four IT administrators and their manager serving 10 years in prison for intentionally deleting relevant business records?”

The courts are allowed to go through your stuff.

Just for an example that isn’t visible to the user: the server needs to know how it can communicate responses to the browser.
So it’s not just “what fonts do you have”, it also needs to know "what type of image can you render? What type of data compression do you speak? Can I hold this connection open for a few seconds to avoid having to spend a bunch of time establishing a new connection? We all agree that basic text can be represented using 7-bit ASCII, but can you parse something from this millennium?”.

Beyond that there’s all the parameters of the actual connection that lives beneath http. What tls ciphers do you support? What extensions?

The exposure of the basic information needed to make a request reveals information which may be sufficient to significantly track a user.

Everyone knows the best way to help poor people earn more money into take their money and give it to rich people because rich people are known for spending their money and thusly giving it to poor people.
If we wrongly focus on taking money from rich people, then they won’t have as much money to give to poor people, so poor people have less money if we let them keep their money instead of giving it to rich people to give back later.

This is how they start meaningfully erroding abortion rights at the federal level, as well a gay rights.
They’ve long held that preventing a Christian from interfering in someone else’s life is an infringement on religious freedom.
They’re going to find ways to end Christian persecution by removing rules that say Christians have to fill prescriptions they think might be related to abortion, aren’t bound by anti discrimination laws, are institutionally allowed to break rules governing the behavior of hospitals, orphanages and adoption agencies, or any number of other charities.

So you intentionally chose an example to produce the type of conversation you’re then complaining about?

Do you think that removing the dust spoils the appearance?

I don’t know what you expected the thread to be about when you gave an example of “wiping dust off a car” and treated it the same as “scraping the paint off with a box cutter”. You picked an example that just begs for quibbling over severity.

Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble. Thus, even though the words or phrases used in the headnotes might be found in the underlying opinions, Thompson Reuters’ selection of which words and phrases to use was entitled to copyright protection. Interestingly, the court stated that “even a headnote taken verbatim from an opinion is a carefully chosen fraction of the whole,” which “expresses the editor’s idea about what the important point of law from the opinion is.” According to the court, that is enough of a “creative spark” to be copyrightable. In other words, even if a work is selected entirely from the public domain, the simple act of selection is enough to give rise to copyright protection.

The court distinguished cases holding that intermediate copying of computer source code was fair use, reasoning that those courts held that the intermediate copying was necessary to “reverse engineer access to the unprotected functional elements within a program.” Here, copying Thompson Reuters’ protected expression was not needed to gain access to underlying ideas.

https://natlawreview.com/article/court-training-ai-model-based-copyrighted-data-not-fair-use-matter-law

It sounds like the case you mentioned had a government entity doing the annotation, which makes it public even though it’s not literally the law.
Reuters seems to have argued that while the law and cases are public, their tagging, summarization and keyword highlighting is editorial.
The judge agreed and highlighted that since westlaw isn’t required to view the documents that everyone is entitled to see, training using their copy, including the headers, isn’t justified.

It’s much like how a set of stories being in the public domain means you can copy each of them, but my collection of those stories has curation that makes it so you can’t copy my collection as a whole, assuming my work curating the collection was in some way creative and not just “alphabetical order”.

Another major point of the ruling seems to rely on the company aiming to directly compete with Reuters, which undermines the fair use argument.

I don’t think that’s the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn’t for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.

If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren’t making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don’t deserve any sympathy for altruism.

A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?

Dumb as fuck. I can also guarantee that if any organization is capable of hiding content it’s the NSA. Both via the tricky methods you think of when you think of the NSA hiding data, and the much more boring “having so much data that’s so sensitive that no one is allowed to just run a search over all of it, and if they were allowed to they wouldn’t be capable of actually doing so”.

It’s probably going to end up being pages from the HR wiki, random pages talking about historical stuff and things like that.
Dumb, wasteful and pointless, but also not going to actually impact NSA operations, which would really only be a problem if it deleted one of those tidbits of math the NSA figured out and has been sitting on.

More trivia rambling than anything: we do actually regularly send donkeys and mules into conflict. They’re better at handling rough terrain than the vast majority of vehicles, so if you can’t send a truck you send people with pack animals.

https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-05-213.pdf

The US army manual for the use and maintenance of pack animals.

The fun part of the idiocy is that the complaints are all public. A major complaint the financial industry had was that anyone could go and just say anything about an institution and it could be found by anyone.

So the only part they left behind is peoples ability to say bad things about financial institutions, and took away the agency’s ability to say “actually, quicken loans hasn’t been randomly adding $50 fees to mortgage payments”.

There’s a thread of truth to what they say. Humans are tribal, but that doesn’t mean that what we use as in group and out group signifiers is universal and lines up with western European racial boundaries.

In some cases, existing group divisions were altered to fit with other peoples notions about how it should work: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-48619734.amp

In Africa, certain ethnic groups defined themselves based on language and a rough “wide or narrow” metric. Talk or short, skinny or stocky, wide nose or thin. Etc. it’s like a racial categorization from the west, but it uses features that we don’t usually use , and only became overt once it was used by colonial powers to classify people and assign social status.

Point being that “I don’t know you so I don’t trust you” is a human tendency, but race and racism as we would recognize the terms are not, they’re just a specific instance.

Sadly, because the tax forms are mostly to get money back. They don’t rely on you doing the paperwork right once a year to get what they want. That’s why the money is taken out of your paycheck, and most people need to ask for the excess they took to be returned to them.

If you voted for Harris you’re not the person being talked to, are you? They asked why people were mad at those that voted third party.
Why would I be mad at people who voted for Harris?

I don’t buy the whole "you’re not allowed to be mad at the voters!” thing. They had the same information I did, and decided that instead of saying “gee, the easiest thing I can do to in anyway stop the obvious bad things that could happen is to vote against trump” they did some form of “not that”.

If it’s a choice between the zoo and the crotch kicking factory, and three vote for the zoo, four for the crotch kicking, and three more couldn’t be bothered to vote, *I’m gonna be mad at the people who voted for the crotch kicking as well as the people who didn’t vote", and I’m gonna be frustrated when they say it’s the zoo’s fault for not advertising more and we need to move on and hold hands through the kicking.

The election is over though, Harris lost because she ran a shit campaign on proven losing policy. People need to get over that and focus on actually dealing with the shit sandwich we’ve collectively been handed instead of continuing to point fingers and argue about whose fault it was.

I mean this with all sincerity: fuck off.
Arguing that letting this and everything else happen is better than what Harris brought to the table doesn’t just get forgotten because the people who said this would be better are upset they were wrong and don’t want to be blamed.

The “winning policy” is evidently “ethnic cleansing”. That’s what came of all this, do you get that? Milquetoast ceasefire and continuing the slow push towards a two state solution lost to ethnic cleansing.

Whether it’s Trump or Harris that wasn’t going to change. The biggest difference is just one of political posturing.

Trump has already increased the weapons being sent, rolling back a Biden administration block on certain weapons. You can’t just say “no, they won’t use US troops” when we’re on an article about trump wanting to use US troops for ethnic cleansing. Why do you think Israel gets a say in what troops go in? It’s not like they can stop US if we want to send ours in. Why do you think American troops wouldn’t do these things?

We’re not at the hypothetical stage here. There have already been concrete changes in policy that are beyond “posturing”.

The real problem ultimately though is that none of this existed in a vacuum. If this was literally a referendum on how the US should respond to Israel that would be one thing, but that was such a tiny slice of a much bigger discussion.

Yes, and that’s exactly the point. Even if their policies on Gaza were exactly the same, which they very much were not, it would still be better to have voted for Harris because of so many reasons, none of which mattered to the people who swore to not vote for her over Gaza.

This is being civil about things. We’re not saying that the people who refused Harris because of Gaza are transphobic, antivax, anti-education, anti abortion, racist misogynists, even though supporting Harris evidently makes one a genocidal racist in their eyes.

Maybe if people said “you know what? Maybe I made a mistake” there wouldn’t be such animosity, but here we are. Better a mask off fascist than an imperfect compromise.

And don’t worry, I am doing what I can to deal with the shit sandwich they wanted us to have. That doesn’t keep me from having the ability, nor seeing the need for, needling people who thought that this would be better for Gaza than what Harris wanted.

On what? It’s all crazy. “We’re going to invade Gaza” is just as insane as “we’re going to put 18 year olds in charge of the Treasury”, “eliminate the department of education” or “win the war on diversity”.