Communick News

Judge Tanya Chutkan has denied Donald Trump’s effort to block a new dossier of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s evidence in the election inference case from becoming public.

From the decision: “The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests.”

Chutkan said she will unseal the evidence tomorrow.

Since Gen. Mark Milley was quoted as saying Donald Trump is “fascist to the core,” a term avoided by top members of the Democratic Party is suddenly everywhere.

Not my OC

What a cool city. https://www.instagram.com/jeremymraymer?igsh=MXczY2FoZ2lmNnp5NA==

A Kootenai County magistrate judge with numerous reprimands who appeared in court dressed as Darth Vader on Halloween is up for re-election in November. A campaign led by a former litigant of a divorce and custody case he oversaw in 2012 hopes to remove him.

Judge Clark A. Peterson, 57, was appointed to the bench in 2010 and has faced complaints over the years that his fantasy role-playing hobby interfered with his judicial work.

Campaign fliers call Peterson “Demon Lord” in reference to his former avatar: the demon prince Orcus, Lord of the Undead. He posted hundreds of comments on online fantasy message boards while at work, according to a 2013 Spokesman-Review story.

The judicial council’s investigation also looked into other allegations of misconduct by Peterson. On Halloween, he appeared in court dressed as Darth Vader, walking out from his chambers with Star Wars music playing on his cell phone.

Title I do not want a Microsoft account. Microsoft doesn't need any more info about me than they already have. Thanks

My kids haven't seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind yet and I thought it would be a fun surprise to recreate the meal eaten in the mashed potato scene and watch the movie with the movie dinner. (I can't wait to see if they put two and two together when that scene comes up lol.)

Obviously there's mashed potato. And I can see sweet corn. Kids are drinking milk. But I can't tell what the little meat things are. I assumed they were crumbed rissoles but having not been raised or lived in the US, I'm unsure if I'm missing a common protein that was eaten at dinner around the late 1970s. Meatloaf has also been suggested but in my country we never have mini meatloaves that I've seen so I'm unsure how accurate that is.

I also can't tell what is in the bowls beside Roy and his sons - to the top left of Roy's plate, right hand side of Toby and top right of Brad's plate. Maybe Ronnie and Silvia have one of these bowls too but I can't tell. You can see Brad eat out of his bowl at one point and it looks like something pale (I wondered coleslaw or macaroni).

Anyway, anyone know or have an idea of what the little meat things are and what are in the side bowls?

About 25 years ago when I was still in college I thought it would be cool to get a motorcycle. I rode it around for about a year with no problems until one day I was riding down this mountain road near where I lived and a deer ran out in front of my bike and I swerved to avoid it, I flew off my bike and into a ditch on the side of the road and was knocked out, my bike fell off the other side of the road and down a sheer cliff face. It was not obvious anyone has ever been there or that there was an accident. I laid there for almost a two days until people started looking for me after missing work. When I came to my legs were messed up, I had broken an ankle, elbow and wrist and couldn't move. I sat there for hours convinced I was going to die. I was pretty upset about it but after a while the anxiety washed away and I just went completely numb. My next memory was waking up in a hospital.

Thank god I was wearing a helmet.

How about you?

Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas sued a Dallas pediatrician on Thursday, accusing her of providing gender transition treatment to minors in violation of a 2023 state law. Mr. Paxton described the suit as the state’s first enforcement action under the new law.

The doctor, May C. Lau, is an associate professor in the department of pediatrics at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a state school and medical research institution. She also treats young patients at Children’s Health in Dallas, which has ties to UT Southwestern, and has worked at a clinic for transgender adolescents that closed in 2021 under pressure from Texas officials.

A $28.5 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit against the university helped create a fresh precedent for prosecuting predatory advertising in for-profit education.

Context https://sh.itjust.works/post/26769547

Some advisers and allies of former President Donald J. Trump are concerned about his scattershot style on the campaign trail as he continues to veer off script.

Nate Silver's polling tracker now has Trump slightly favored to win (50.2%) the election. While this shift appears small, it has drawn attention because it pushes Trump just past the halfway mark in forecasts for winning the Electoral College.

Silver explains that while Trump’s rise over recent weeks is significant, and his polling model, is designed to minimize overreactions to new data to provide more accurate long-term predictions (i.e., it's likely a "real" effect), this doesn't in any way mean Trump "will" win, and the race remains highly competitive, especially in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, which are critical to determining the outcome.

Any thoughts? Seems interesting, looks like they're planning on developing communities as well.

It would be really interesting to see how this pans how and how it would affect the future of the Fediverse in general.

I would be really interested in seeing if an internal bridge to automatically translate their platform to ActivityPub will be built in order to federate with Lemmy Instances.

CNN tracked Trump’s watch to a building in Sheridan, Wyoming—and found strange ties to a “male enhancement honey” company with a similar name.

Last month, Donald Trump announced that he was selling limited-edition, gaudy watches ranging from $499 to the bargain price of $100,000, bragging about their Swiss-made precision.

But a CNN investigation traced the watches’ origin to a shopping center in remote Sheridan, Wyoming, where TheBestWatchesOnEarth LLC, the company behind the timepieces, is based. There’s no indication that a watch company is located at the building listed at the address, only a daycare. Its neighbors include an H&R Block, a Wendy’s, and a “vape and hemp smoke shop.”  

CNN couldn’t find the people behind the company either, because the business’s location allows it to legally hide those details from the public. The news network found that knocking on the door of the business’s supposed address didn’t answer those questions. Interestingly, the limited liability corporation behind Trump’s infamous gold sneakers is also based at the address, along with other random businesses. The watch company was registered on July 29, only two months before Trump announced the watch line.

🗳️ Register to vote: https://vote.gov/

The ambitious identity-verification project Worldcoin, now called World, wants a future where humans are “orb-verified.”

Sam Altman, the cofounder and CEO of OpenAI, one of the most dramatic tech companies of the modern era. An inkling of Worldcoin began in 2019 when Altman began exploring identity verification that could be used in universal basic income schemes.

He teamed up with technologist Alex Blania to turn the idea into a reality. In a world of rapidly advancing AI, they theorized, it would be important for a human to prove they were not a bot. The answer they came up with relied on individuals using iris-scanning tech to generate private tokens that would verify their identities around the world.

Worldcoin, then, is the ultimate attempt at tech solutionism: A human-grade AI world that Altman is building might also be technologically regulated by a tool that Altman has his hands in.

I received several texts today on my personal phone number addressed to a minor child in my household for whom I provide health insurance from Kaiser.

1. I opted out of Kaiser text message communications. They don't respect it because Marketing?
2. The messages are addressing a minor child, yet sent to me, the adult. Kaiser would know their age. If they're young, directly texting them is a violation of parental consent. If they're a dependent there could be all kinds of privacy concerns for say a teen who maybe doesn't want their parents to be involved in such conversations.
3. I went to Kaiser's website to make a complaint. They don't provide an e-mail contact so you have to use a web submission form. Attachments (e.g. screenshots) aren't allowed. I copied in the text of the text messages after noting my concerns above and tried to submit. The web form said "unsupported characters", which I then spent 30 minutes trying to guess which of the characters from the texts they sent me might be unsupported by their website.
4. I decided to call their web support to find out which characters were unsupported, I'm sure I wasn't the first person to have the issue. They asked for personal identifying information that isn't necessary to provide website support, spent 5 minutes locating my account, and then told me they'd have to transfer me to a different region as they don't support my region.
5. They transferred me and I received an audio notice that the region was experiencing technical difficulties and the call disconnected.
6. I went back to the web form to open a complaint about their web form and submitted it suggesting they identify which characters are not permitted. The form also is about 3 lines of text high but accepts 1,000 characters which makes it very difficult to read as the web user (I'm sure a dark pattern to reduce form submission)
7. I called support again to try to reengage them to find out if they could identify the characters so I could submit the ticket myself. I got a different agent and had to tell them my original complaint and then what had just happened. They said they didn't know which characters were permissible, that my regions support shouldn't be down as they had no alerts, and wouldn't be able to find out which characters the form could use, despite being web support. They said they could take my complaint over the phone.
8. I asked what else they needed to make the complaint. The woman said just a minute and pulled up a form after talking to a colleague and asked me to start from the beginning to make my compliant. I hung up.
9. I went back on the website, typed out the entirety of the text messages I had received, my concern and the form allowed me to submit. The text messages must have had a hidden character or space that wasn't visible to me when copying/pasting.

Now I wait to hear back on my two complaints. All so that, after furiously and competently struggling against the machine, I get back to a place where maybe if I'm lucky they will respect my communication preferences, not contact my child without my permission, potentially fix their shit website, which would leave me maybe about as good off as I was before I was aware of these issues.

I feel like Calvin at the bottom of the big snowball hill he and Hobbes used, only in the modern US it's a shit snowball and it's full of companies who are technologically incompetent and aren't incentivized to follow even the laws they likely helped shaped through lobbying. The above issue is hardly even bad compared to other situations I or others have been through, it's the routiniety of it that is so dystopian.