British cops have arrested two Green Party candidates, accusing them of promoting antisemitism.

The statement attributed to Sabine Mairey is flagrantly antisemitic. Aside from being inherently bad, it is also foolish and self-defeating to try to support Palestinians' rights by attacking the Jews that support Palestinians' rights.

The statement attributed to Saiqa Ali supports HAMAS. Since HAMAS is a terrorist organization, arguably the statement supports terrorism. However, HAMAS does not advocate antisemitism. HAMAS is is Islamist, meaning it seeks to impose the rules of Islam on everyone, including non-Muslims. That would be unjust, but does not imply treating Jews worse than Christians. However, HAMAS would be likely to treat Atheists such as me worse than either Christians or Jews.

According to Wikipedia, HAMAS was formerly antisemitic, but ended that about 10 years ago.

Flock license plate cameras are networked to facilitate tracking of all cars' travel.

This is ideal for all sorts of abuses, from "running a plate for a date" to repression of protest groups once they have been identified as part of the mythical "terrorist" organization "Antifa".

The UK set up a national car tracking network over 20 years ago, and used it to find specific people and stop them from traveling to a protest.

Do you expect the persecutor to be less unjust than Tony B'liar?

Activists on the latest Gaza aid flotilla accuse Israeli soldiers of violently torturing them after seizing their ships.

Israel says the flotilla's leaders will be taken to Israel for "questioning" — which may include torture.

British king Charles III, speaking to the US Congress, tried to urge the US to move back to democracy and respect for legal rights.

Will it change the minds of some Republicans?

China will impose strict regulations on Pretend Intelligence chatbots that have conversations about suicide — a human must be notified to intervene.

Other things that chatbots will be prohibited from doing include encouraging violence, and emotional manipulation, and promoting "obscenity", gambling and crime, and misleading users.

An intelligent being can try to apply such rules because it can understands, more or less, the meaning of its communications. (Although it is not easy even for an intelligent being to understand reliably what a communication might imply to another intelligent being.)

A pretend intelligence will have trouble applying such rules beyond a superficial manner, because it is not capable of such understanding. It might have a discussion of "getting off this mortal coil" or "the big sleep" and not detect that as a reference to suicide or death.

Aside from that, I would expect that these rules will be interpreted by China as restricting discussion of political issues that lead to criticizing China. Alas, the US might restrict discussions of fascism and democracy, a few years from now.

Many low-income Americans can't easily get to a supermarket due to cuts in bus service caused by the end of a federal subsidy. (I suspect the wrecker ended it.)

However, there is no decrease in bus service in Somerville, Massachusetts. The MBTA has been increasing its bus service in the past few years and claims to have more bus service now than in 2019.

Supermarkets used to be far more numerous, a few decades ago. I think many independent small supermarkets went out of business.

*Democrats say EPA head's budget cut proposal "reads like climate change deniers' manifesto".*

A machine learning system did better than human doctors at providing a second opinion for emergency triage.

I think this justifies describing that system as "artificial intelligence", when used for that job.

Magat federal prosecutors have lost in court in their prosecutions of protesters, because judges found them to be stretching the truth to the point where it snapped.

Never apologize to your political enemies when they take offense tactically over a statement that wasn't actually wrong.

For an external USB 5TB+ spinning disk (not SSD), is HFS a better choice than APFS? Assume no weird edge cases like spanning volumes or RAID are involved. It's just a disk.

It is very easy to find either answer, but hard to find one that sounds like it's from someone who knows what they are talking about, and isn't just cargo-culting it or reading from a press release. So show your work.

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She seems to have argued at trial that she had no intent to harm anyone, and had only released the bees so they could "enjoy the lovely, flowering landscape" in the area. The landscape was also infested with deputies, though, and the jury does not seem to have believed that was a coincidence. [...]

I've seen no evidence that the one deputy taken to the hospital suffered from anaphylactic shock. It seems a lot more likely that his "elevated heart rate" was caused by his decision to tackle a 59-year-old beekeeper than by the bees themselves. But I'm speculating about that. [...]

This week, the judge sentenced Woods to six months on those charges. According to her lawyer, with time served she will be out in two weeks anyway. [...]

Finally, kudos to The Guardian for refusing to let society ignore the real victims in this case: the bees. "[A]bout a thousand of Woods's bees died during the encounter," it reported, "many of them crushed when several hives toppled as she wrestled with deputies trying to arrest her, and others because female honeybees die after delivering their sting." I assume that "about a thousand" is based on a careful reckoning by a court-appointed bee expert and not just a number that Woods threw out there. Regardless, while I don't really buy the deputies' story here, I do sympathize with the bees. They have enough trouble these days without humans getting them involved in dispute resolution. Leave the bees out of it.

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District 4 shaping up to be San Francisco's loudest and silliest race:

This level of turmoil befitting a Latin American junta is, again, incongruous for a nice, quiet little beach community. But, again, don't believe it -- this is a place where odd stuff happens. District 4 voters have managed to elect two representatives who later spent time in federal prison -- Leland Yee and Ed Jew. Other than Dan White, who murdered Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the only supes to be incarcerated have been from District 4. And, for what it's worth, both of them went down for on-the-job crimes. [...] In the era of district elections, no D4 supervisor has served two full terms. No district has run through more representatives than District 4. [...]

And yet these are the issues getting the most play in this race: hand-waving about a done-deal zoning plan, calling for the installation of a Great Highway on top of Great Highway and pushing distorted and hyperbolic crime narratives during a time of citywide and nationwide crime reductions. But it gets better: All of this is being undertaken via a tsunami of third-party cash. Vast sums of money are flowing into the sleepy Sunset to further rile everyone up.

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And about 1 time in 100, the customer draws a little picture for us instead. So I thought I should share some of those.

If you're thinking, "they're all dicks, aren't they"...

...you are a smart person.

Of the drawings, I'd say that it's 90% dongs; the rest are a mixture of smilies, pentagrams and cats, in about that order.

(I especially like the ones that just wrote out the word "PENIS", which is like, the Philip K. Dick of dicks.)

To generate this gallery, I had to place eyeballs on hundreds of thousands of signatures, going back to 2021. That's right, I just white-knuckled it, you're welcome. (If you're about to start replying with "Why Didn't You Just", I am begging you to Not.)

Now, if you're thinking, "Wait, why do you even still have that 5-year-old data"... you are, again, a smart person.

Even though the payment processors won't let you issue a refund or a chargeback on a transaction older than 6 months, our point-of-sale saves every bit of information it has about every transaction forever. "Oh geez, you should delete that" you might be thinking. There literally is not a delete button.

After a year, one might want to look at daily graphs, but there's no way you'd care about individual transactions, or anything of higher aggregate resolution than "hourly". Maybe "10 minutes" if you're a complete maniac. But nope, we still have the full PDF of the receipt, including name, last-four, scrawled signature and exactly what products were purchased.

(Though, the customer name isn't included most of the time, only sometimes. I'm not sure what the difference is.)

Anyway that means that when -- not if, when -- this vendor gets popped, all of that data will be stolen, sold, laundered, mixed, and purchased by a data broker who will annotate their profile about you with how much you drink and what, how many nights a week, and whether you attend gay parties. Some of it might even be true! That profile will then be purchased by your car insurance company, your health insurance company, the recruiters used by every future employer, Google, Amazon, Instagram, ICE, TSA, FBI, CIA, all of the "AI" companies, and Deputy Dewey of the East Cowfuck, Texas Police Department.

Oh no, what started off as a juvenile story about poorly-drawn dicks turned into a dystopian nightmare. Welp.

This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I'm talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. [...]

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences -- not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be. It's not that the wealthy become evil; it's that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.

When Peter Thiel said, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," he wasn't talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don't exist.

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