People differ in how they view what is morally right.
Illegal immigration for example.
Some may say it's immoral to not allow illegal immigration, those people are just searching for a better life.
Others point out that by looking past that you allow the exploitation of workers, the estrangement of families, and of course the horrors of the coyotes that rape, extort, and enslave those people.
Another one is crime reform (ie, releasing prisoners, no cash bail). Those who support it believe they are being compassionate of prisoners while often missing the compassion for the victims those criminals hurt and incentivizing further crime.
Sometimes one is so tunnel visioned in their moral argument, they cannot see that choice causes harm to others, often greater harm.
okay, but something like ethnic cleansing is not an "equal weighting of values" type of position. And it is the position of political parties and ideologies.
I agree that there are many contentious issues that have pros and cons. But this is a global product and there is a lot of horrific "main stream" political positions out there.
This obviously the correct lens but note that the 2008 plea deal was so neutered by the time of settlement it made it somewhat easy to stay friends with him.
This is of course ontop of the 2006 Florida prostitution charge though.
Especially when Epstein was paying off journalists at the NYT and intimidating other outlets.
But point being those people that were friends with him had to know. Whether it was socially acceptable by the elite because the public wasn't aware isn't very relevant.
I read the gp as saying you should just check the sources, not defending.
I mean here's a weird example. Searching Donald Trump there's the headline
(1994-06 Wexner Mansion NYC)
Donald Trump forced to perform oral sex and physically abused 13-year-old female plaintiff and 12-year-old female.
Like that sounds weird... DT forced to rape? That doesn't make sense to me. The longer summary reads
A declaration from Tiffany Doe (pseudonym) testifying that she witnessed Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump sexually abuse a 13-year-old girl and other minors during parties from 1990-2000 in New York City.
It references House Oversight 025937. The actual document looks much more like that summary. Here's a snippet
7. It was at these series of parties that I personally witnessed the Plaintiff being forced to perform various sexual acts with Donald J. Trump and Mr. Epstein. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were advised that she was 13 years old.
It gets worse so if you want to look further it's Case 1:16-cv-04642 Document 1-2 Filed 06/20/16 Page 1 of 2.
So far the paragraph summaries seem to be accurate in my poking around but the headlines are mixing ordering and have other weird errors like this. Anyways, always good to check when things are as serious as this...
13. I personally witnessed Mr. Epstein physically threaten the life and well-being of the Plaintiff if she ever revealed the details of the physical and sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of Mr. Epstein or any of his guests.
14. I personally witnessed Defendant Trump telling the Plaintiff that she shouldn't ever say anything if she didn't want to disappear like the 12-year-old female Maria, and that he was capable of having her whole family killed.
15. After leaving the employment of Mr. Epstein in the year 2000, I was personally threatened by Mr. Epstein that I would be killed and my family killed as well if I ever disclosed any of the physical and sexual abuse of minor females that I had personally witnessed by Mr. Epstein or any of his guests.
Doesn't make it true but this seems to be consistent across different accounts and serves as a possible explanation to your note as well as why so many people might have quiet for so long.
I think it is less about if he actually made any hits on people but rather that the threat existed. The question is not "has such threats been followed through" but "does the person being threatened have a reasonable belief that the threat is legitimate."
To that, I think the answer is an unambiguous "yes". If someone who is rich, well connected, and successfully covering up heinous crimes at a large scale, then yes, I believe a person threatened has a reasonable belief that such a threat is credible.
Seriously, we are talking about a world famous pedo who was pimping out girls to presidents, royals, billionaires, and when he was finally convicted he was only charged with prostitution and got a extremely light sentence that everyone now calls a "sweetheart deal." So years after does a witness have a credible belief that such a man can post a significant threat to her and her family?
Do you seriously believe that no person has any reason to fear Epstein? I find that laughable considering how much conspiracy there is about him being murdered and how the accusations are towards varying high profile people. You're trying to say that Epstein is a puppy dog that's all bark and no bite?
I agree, nothing is proven but it's absolutely laughable to claim that such a threat is not credible.
Not really. After Epstein got convicted in 2008, he set about trying to rehabilitate his image, to be seen as a philanthropist, a patron of science, and (perversely) a supporter of women and girls. He hired reputation management consultants to help carry out the project, with one of the models they used being Mike Milken (of Drexel infamy), who ultimately secured a pardon from Trump. A lot of prominent people, knowingly or not, served as "useful idiots" in this project, often due to financial incentives that were not wholly selfish. For example, the MIT and Harvard scientists whose labs and research he funded, and who visited his island for science-themed retreats. Clinton was probably another of Epstein's useful idiots, being lured in through his Clinton Global Initiative and the promise that Epstein, with his ample wealth, could help greatly expand it.
A significant number of Trump associates actually went to jail for Russia-related business, and I don't think it's been entirely ruled out for himself. Of course, it has not yet been proven either and I doubt it will be in his lifetime.
You don't need to trust the media or care about his views on immigration to know that the guy got 34 felony convictions (for attempting to cover up mere infidelity with a porn star), that he's lost a lawsuit regarding sexual assault claims, and that sexual assault claims against him go back to the 70s and involving at least 28 women and him walking in on naked teenage pageant contestants.
Then there's the non-sexual stuff. If you want to say it's "shady" being twice impeached, or hanging his own arrest photo next to the oval office, or the huge number of business lawsuits, or the way he's now able to sue himself and win, or that he's now pardoning convicted co-conspirators etc., that's on you: as the quote goes, democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
The possibility of pee tapes was funny, but did anyone really care if golden shower was a liquid reference or a "24 carat (plated)" like his redecoration of the oval office?
> Show me where it’s a felony to use your own money to cover up an affair?
The "falsified business records" bit, for which he was convicted under felony charges. Those bits, where he was convicted as a felon, are what makes it a felony.
Likewise, it wasn't a crime for Bill Clinton to have an affair with any of the White House interns (AFAICT Paula Jones was before then), but then Clinton went and lied about affairs under oath, which was.
There's a reason why I put emphasis on "mere infidelity".
> My esteemed colleagues in the bar would be outraged if a legal theory half as aggressively creative as this one was brought against a gang murderer. They would leap at the chance to handle the appeals pro bono.
The fact he was convicted says otherwise on the first part, and the observation that he's still having trouble getting competent lawyers to defend him even now he's back in office speaks poorly of either your esteemed colleagues or of your estimation of them.
> what fundamentally differentiates people who simply don’t like Trump for all the legitimate reasons to dislike Trump from the people who go full blown Rachel Maddow is deep-seated liberal universalism
You should know this isn’t me.
I was honestly optimistic for this Presidency. The corruption and lawlessness were annoying. But the masked ICE agents openly defying the law struck a nerve. And now we’re seeing folks like Megyn Kelly advocate for dismissing child rape.
That Trump is acting guilty, and has taken this from a fringe conspiracy theory to something worth considering, is almost besides the point. My condemnation is of the partisan dismissal of the crime per se, not Trump’s involvement.
> But the masked ICE agents openly defying the law struck a nerve.
The ICE agents are masked because people think they can violently interfere with federal law enforcement. People voted for the guy that promised mass deportations, and the government is entitled to carry out that policy and respond to violent resistance to those operations.
Nobody is “dismissing” Epstein’s crimes. Megyn is reacting to people trying to smear Trump as a “child rapist” and “pedophile” based on zero evidence.
> The ICE agents are masked because people think they can violently interfere with federal law enforcement
Actually it is wearing masks interferes with legal law enforcement. You know how we know, because FBI told ICE that. Because now anyone can wear a mask and pretend to be ice to kidnap people. That really interferes with law enforcement man
> ICE agents are masked because people think they can violently interfere with federal law enforcement
Not a problem for all other law enforcement. The precedent being set--that masked men can disappear people from the street--is dangerous and un-American.
> People voted for the guy that promised mass deportations, and the government is entitled to carry out that policy and respond to violent resistance to those operations
Sure. None of this requires a mask.
Also, the only injuries ICE officers have suffered have been due to e.g. being dragged by a car [1]. None have been due to someone tracking them down ex post facto.
> Megyn is reacting to people trying to smear Trump as a “child rapist” and “pedophile” based on zero evidence
She argued Jeffrey Epstein is not technically a pedophile. (A defense she similarly mounts with zero evidence.) She described a 15-year old as "barely legal," which is nonsense and disgusting and deeply unsettling given she literally has a daughter around that age.
And until now, Trump has been going out of his way to block the government from fulfilling his campaign promise around the Epstein files. (After his AG lied that they don't exist.) As a result, it took Democrats in the Congress releasing the e-mails to get Larry Summers to step down [2].
Yes it is. Trump cut ties because Epstein was poaching employees. That was confirmed by the employee in question, Virginia Giuffre, who always maintained that she was a normal masseuse at Mar-a-Lago: https://abcnews.go.com/US/virginia-giuffre-trump-jeffrey-eps...
You swallowed "Trump cut ties" whole, on a thread discussing messages that prove that wasn't the case. Wow. If I'm ever accused of dozens of felonious depravities I'mma call you.
I wrote “cut ties” because that’s the wording used by the post I was responding to. My point is to respond to the innuendo that Guiffre was providing some sort of sexual services at Mar-a-Lago when she consistently maintained that Trump wasn’t involved in anything like that. Please point me to the email that “proves that wasn’t the case.”
What I don't understand is the pretense of defending Trump at all. I mean, it's clear that even if you watched Trump assault a 13 year old with your own eyes, it wouldn't impact your support for him. Why pretend that there is some moral divide between Bill Clinton and Donald Trump in this when you can just say "I support Donald Trump no matter what, and despite Bill Clinton no matter what"?
Personally I've never been shocked that some of the most powerful people in the world like to go to a private sex-island where they could do as they pleased. That's precisely the incentive to becoming so incredibly powerful in the first place: to be able to pursue personal gain with increasingly less consequences.
Clinton at least has not been in office for 25 years. Trump is still in office. Surely the priority should be to get the bad people out of institutions asap...?
Pre-2009 records on Trump there are nasty. One example:
> ... It was at these series of parties that I personally witnessed the Plaintiff being forced to perform various sexual acts with Donald J. Trump and Mr. Epstein. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were advised that she was 13 years old. I personally witnessed four sexual encounters that the Plaintiff was forced to have with Mr. Trump during this period, including the fourth of these encounters where Mr. Trump forcibly raped her despite her pleas to stop.
Only difference between Clinton and Trump is that Trump is still president.
That's a lie that has already been proven false since Trump's entire trip was documented.
Love how we have actual evidence against people but discussions always devolve into some conspiracy related to Trump.
----
Based on the available evidence, there is no confirmed meeting between Trump and Epstein in 2017. While both men were in Palm Beach during Thanksgiving week 2017, there is no direct evidence they met.
Here's what we know about their presence in Palm Beach that week:
- Trump was at Mar-a-Lago from November 21-26, 2017
- Epstein owned a mansion in Palm Beach and was known to be in the area
- Epstein mentioned both Trump and himself being "down there" (Palm Beach) in an email exchange on November 23, 2017
While there were claims circulating online that Trump spent Thanksgiving with Epstein in 2017, these claims have been thoroughly investigated and found to be unsubstantiated
Trump's official calendar for that week shows his activities included:
- Thanking military members on a virtual call
- Visiting Coast Guard members at Lake Worth Inlet Station
- Playing golf with Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson
Even if Trump cut off ties with Epstein in 2017, he should clearly be held accountable for his past actions. Here's 2 pretty damning emails:
---
Epstein to Maxwell 2011-04-02
> i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump... [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75% there
---
Epstein to Ruemmler 2018-08-23
> you see, i know how dirty donald is. my guess is that non lawyers ny biz people have no idea. what it means to have your fixer flip
With any other administration I would have granted you that leap in logic, but we already learned, three years ago, from Stephanie Grisham that he held off the books meetings specifically to circumvent record keeping laws. So I think a slightly higher standard of evidence is needed before we dismiss the possibility that he met with the pedo who likely had dirt on him.
Not only are they not mutually exclusive, but if we're being honest, only idealistic programmers care enough to read Pragmatic Programmer, and they read it in the process of becoming a master.
That's from 2016 and it's widely accepted as being a hoax. She may or may not even exist as she's never been seen publicly or by reporters trying to verify the claim.
The court documents referencing Johnson were filed in California and New York but were dismissed or withdrawn due to lack of credibility and proper legal standing. The plaintiff provided false contact information, including the address of a foreclosed home, and repeatedly failed to appear for scheduled press conferences despite promises to do so.
The claims were tied to Norm Lubow, a former producer for "The Jerry Springer Show," who used the pseudonym Al Taylor to promote the allegations.
Lubow admitted to Snopes in 2024 that he was behind the Al Taylor persona and had helped draft the initial lawsuit and publicize the claims, though he maintained the story was true.
It’s pretty demoralizing to see how many people accept at face value a totally anonymous lawsuit backed by Norm Lubow. The plaintiff never made any court appearances and the suit was withdrawn or dismissed each time, in the first case because nobody even lived at the address “she” gave.
Ultimately Lubow recruited a patent lawyer to run the case who also apparently never met her. Then a real lawyer set up a press conference for her. This was the first time any journalist got to meet her in person - and it was the Daily Mail. They reported it was all made up and the case and “Katie Johnson” disappeared forever.
But still it keeps coming up again and again, because people really want to believe their political enemies are evil. I guess it’s no different than the conspiracy theories Clinton was killing people. I just hope we as a country get better.
Yes they will, they will prefer natural gas of those two. The main reason of emission reductions as we transition off of coal.
I really hope we go all in on nuclear though, with some natural gas and get rid of the windmills. Solar, hydro, geothermal can stay where it makes sense.
Unfortunately our skies and land are littered with windmills made out of unrecyclable polymers that are terrible for raptors.
Queue someone quoting how many cats kill birds like competing with the top predator is a good thing, or ignoring the fact that we put these in raptors' wind streams and cats don't hunt those large birds (which are usually endangered)
Aah a True Bird Lover. Wants to protect birds from windmills. Doesn't care how many bird habitats oil drilling destroys. Hasn't seen any pictures of oil coated birds from the Exxon Valdez or the Deepwater Horizon.
> made out of unrecyclable polymers
Does this mean you support banning plastic straws too? All plastics are essentially unrecyclable.
> Our kids deserve nuclear.
By all means. If it can be done as cheaply as wind and solar.
Ideally we could get rid of everything for nuclear, but that's not today's reality. The truth is natural gas is needed to transition off of coal and has helped reduce emissions.
That being said, I would like to reduce those drilling rigs. However I don't see their existence justification for more damage by putting up windmills.
It's classic whataboutism. Both things can be harmful.
Below is an exercise to help point it out.
> Like our lands and oceans are not littered ... already
Without the "what about" subject, this statement looks bad doesn't it?
That reasoning is no different than the people who see trash on the ground and throw more because it's already trashed, so why not.
> it's really the only way forward. seems like a win/win.
There is another way forward, which is not building these data centers, forcing AI companies to use power more efficiently, and use the excess energy production capacity towards the energy transition in order to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
It's not going to happen, at least not right now, but it's clearly what we ought to do. ChatGPT can wait.
> What I'm saying is that using gigawatts of power for "AI" in this day and age is madness
Why? American datacentres--of all types--use about 250 TWh per year, with another 500 TWh additional capacity expected by 2030 [1]. American paper manufacturing used about that much energy in 2018 [2].
If I read the data right (1) the US currently produces roughly 4,000 TWh of electricity every year. 500 TWh is a significant portion of that! The US will need a lot of additional capacity for things like electric cars and heat pumps. Most of the effort should be going towards that, not huge data centers attending to unproven demand (how many people will pay the real price for ChatGPT once the VC subsidy ends remains to be proven).
The sources for some of the future data centers will be local and not necessarily influence the US grid. Consider also that cement production uses about 3000 TWh per year worldwide, and aluminium smelting uses about 1000 TWh per year.
A lot of that cement production still uses fossil fuels.
In my mind, all the electricity production capacity we can build needs to go to the electrification of the existing economy, not new stuff and especially not the current brand of AI.
The US electricity grid is a complex problem at the interface of state and local governments and cannot scale quickly. There are no major concerns with scaling up the local electricity production however, other than the installation time (and safety, if nuclear). Reliability is easier to solve locally than for a huge grid.
> OK then I guess we should disconnect every large industrial electricity customer from the grid.
No, what we should do is put every "large load" electricity customer (including but not limited to these data centers) into their own rate-payer class like they did in Maryland and Oregon instead of lumping them in with everyone else.
Once they are in their own rate-payer class then their rates can be adjusted to pay for the costs of the increased infrastructure that is only needed because they exist (take away data center build-outs and electricity usage is largely flat or falling pretty much everywhere in the US).
I hope the data center developers are paying you to lobby for their ongoing corporate welfare? Because that's what you're basically doing here.
If they pay the same rates as everyone else then that's not corporate welfare. If the rates are artificially low thus causing shortages then we have a different problem.
> If they pay the same rates as everyone else then that's not corporate welfare.
It is, because the electricity companies don't have magic electricity generating machines that can scale infinitely.
To satisfy the new demand which only exists because the data center was built, they spend a lot of money on new infrastructure. They then raise everyone's prices by an equal percentage to support this new infrastructure even though the infrastructure was not needed until the data center was built.
Not charging the data center developers for that extra build out and expecting everyone to absorb the costs for new infrastructure that never would have been built if the data center wasn't built is absolutely corporate welfare.
I think you may be missing the whole national security part of the AI race. This isn't just about asking a computer what recipe you can cook tonight with the items in your fridge. In many ways it is similar to the race to build a nuclear bomb. We may individually not like that, but we might individually be best served to live in the nation that got there first.
We can see in Ukraine that AI plays a very very small role in the war. Production of small drones and their control across jammed areas is the current problem space.
And I bet that a majority of those LLM usage in Ukraine is via local focused models, good for picking shapes on a grainy images and not much else, but fast and cheap. There is literally zero use for the gigantic general LLMs which can produce human-like output and routinely generate fake numbers, in the army setting.
That's the story the proponents of the AI bubble would have you believe, because they are sucking in all available funding to their enrichment, or because they've been huffing their own hype gas for so long that they have no brain cells of their own left.
It is, however, complete nonsense, and the next few years of failed promises on AGI will eventually bring people to their senses, if a market crash and sustained economic depression doesn't do that first. It would be funny if it wasn't going to cause suffering for millions of people, whether we succeed at AGI or not.
I _like_ AI, I find LLMs and many other aspects of useful, and I am optimistic for the long term prospects of AI. But the rush to try and get to AGI is completely out of control at this point, and the fallout from when the bubble pops will set AI, and our societies, back a long time.
"Allowing" doesn't necessarily translate into "doing". Many people are seeing higher energy prices which are at least in part or wholly due to data center loads on local power grids. In Ohio, for example, we just skated by with a ruling from our Public Utilities Commission which effectively required data centers to pay for their impact on local grids [1].
Additionally, while these data centers do provide some jobs, where states are giving them grants, loans, infrastructure improvement, or otherwise they are ultimately extractive developments (like parking lots) where the wealth flows out from states like Ohio and flows in to states where the CEOs and HQ sit (California, New York, etc.).
I can tell you that people in Ohio across the political spectrum are not happy. We are losing good farm land, utilizing water, and our power costs are going up for negligible benefits at best. But hey now our state representatives can say "Meta is coming to central Ohio". Meanwhile costs are going up and we still have to ship produce in from other countries and states.
If our representatives and governors office thought about this all for about 2 seconds they would require any data center development to include 2x the number of corporate jobs over a certain income threshold or else not approve the development. If the developers balk, then fine it's not like we want them anyway.
The Trump Administration (and for that matter probably any admin) isn't doing jack shit.
Oh nice, that basically solves the issue. I've been hearing horror stories of datacenters overloading existing grids and raising prices for the average person, If datacenters generate their own power that basically solves the issue.
Out here in AZ, solar combined with battery would be perfect for datacenters.
> the public is expected to deal with higher prices after every data center build?
No. But the states that let companies put trillions of dollars of datacentre and power hardware in their borders will probably reap benefits from it for decades to come regardless of how AI pans out.
The most cost effective way to run a datacenter at some definition of "pedal to the metal", 24/7. This is not appropriate for solar, which is why these companies are looking into power sources that are most cost effective when they run pedal to the metal, 24/7, like nuclear.
With all that extra cheap energy, we can start making more steel again. Desalinate water. There are a lot of things that can be done with vast amounts of underutilized cheap energy.
Hm, I’m not saying it is good for America, but it seems to me that there are plausible senses of “good for America” for which it is plausible that illegal immigration is “good for America” in those senses.
Now, I generally dislike laws being broken. If there’s a situation where breaking a law is the right thing to do, then typically that indicates some problem (perhaps with the law, perhaps with something else).
So, I would hope that if illegal immigration is or were acting as a good thing right now, that there is or would be a better long-term solution for whatever situation than “a long term pattern of illegal immigration”.
Oh, I somehow misinterpreted “In no way is” as “There is no way that”. Oops.
Ask JD Vance, who repeatedly said that people legally in this country are illegal immigrants - and those screaming the loudest about illegal immigration walk stridently behind his banner.
Implying democrats use of executive power is the problem in the current situation is laughable at best and genuinely bizarre given the current administration's actions across so many avenues.
> The 136-metre-long vessel had to rely partly on its auxiliary motor and its remaining sail after the aft sail was damaged in a storm shortly after departure.
Last summer we motored ~10% of the miles.That includes full day leg when there was practically no wind and few hours occasionally with combined powering. Working towards less or fractional oil based power can have significant benefits.
thanks! in TypeScript, i've not noticed any glaring combination mismatches. i think most common combinations are covered by considering C and Perl. but feel free to try and report them if you find any.
Illegal immigration for example.
Some may say it's immoral to not allow illegal immigration, those people are just searching for a better life.
Others point out that by looking past that you allow the exploitation of workers, the estrangement of families, and of course the horrors of the coyotes that rape, extort, and enslave those people.
Another one is crime reform (ie, releasing prisoners, no cash bail). Those who support it believe they are being compassionate of prisoners while often missing the compassion for the victims those criminals hurt and incentivizing further crime.
Sometimes one is so tunnel visioned in their moral argument, they cannot see that choice causes harm to others, often greater harm.