Via the Brennan Center. Elected judges are more punitive and more likely to rule against defendants.

The problem is that the judges often use their decisions to campaign instead of simply applying the law. So they might give an unpopular criminal defendant a harsher sentence to look tough on crime or even tilt a trial against an innocent defendant. Not that doesn’t happen with judges that are appointed by the executive, but it’s usually not as bad.

I’m not too surprised. It must be quite unpleasant working around a noisy piece of machinery like that.

Not really. It was always her tactic to make him go nuts. Provoking him into shouting over her would have gone along with that and just made him look bad.

I am a very narrow supporter of eugenics. Specifically, I am against any further breeding by Elon Musk.

I nominate Vivian Wilson.

Muskrat? They really are repulsive creatures.

Oh certificate, I thought you meant mark.

During the US occupation, the Taliban absolutely did attack civilian targets to further political goals. They attacked everything from restaurants to embassies to a university.

I just started looking up the different ways to order beers. Wow. Even if it’s based on the metric system, each country really did go and reinvent the wheel.

I’m doing a series of conversations/interviews with my parents’ generation to keep a voice record of their stories. As part of that, I’m doing transcripts that start with the transcript feature of Google’s Recorder. It can do some nifty things like assign speakers to individual voices. I have to clean up the transcripts some, but it’s far less laborious than dealing with a 15-20 minute conversation. I can fix up a transcript in maybe 5 minutes.

Place names in general in the Pacific Northwest. Alaska is from an Aleut phrase. Out of the 36 Oregon counties, 10 have roots in indigenous language or culture.

That’s the opposite of (genuine) fiscally conservatism, since it implies large fiscal deficits. Not that some fiscal deficits are inherently bad, they are widely misunderstood when used in a limited way.

That’s an obvious strawman argument. How about a spectrum between high taxes, generous social safety net and low taxes, skimpy social safety net? There are people with beliefs all along that spectrum. Of course, then there are people who want low taxes and a generous social safety net, but that’s another matter.

Yes but also no. There are many people who don’t have strong political opinions. Sometimes they’re misidentified as centrists. But there are people who have strongly held political positions that fall in the center of the political spectrum. Then, of course, there is center-left and center-right. They’re still politically engaged, but don’t have much patience for the policy proposals put forward by the far left and far right.

You don’t need to look hard and long enough. You just need to insinuate hard and long enough, then people will believe it eventually.

Well Mr. Trump, if you hadn’t dragged your heels for years, this wouldn’t still be going during the election.

I just gave the chat bot that was put in place at the IT department where I work at a poke. It answered my question perfectly: “How do I print from my laptop to the library?” And it’s not like the chat bot is the only route for support, but it does divert a lot of routine questions from our help desk so they can focus on questions that require a human touch. That could be people where a chat bot is not a good format or it could be a non-routine question.

If you start adding on mandates to the IP like that, that severely narrows the list of companies that are even capable of buying it. They have to have employees with knowledge of the specific device, which only a small number of people may be using.

As part of unwinding a company that is going out of business, they usually do sell off their IP. That doesn’t mean that anyone will continue this particular experiment.