mindslight

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

But at this point "To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world" is seemingly more relevant.

"I was planning on insulting the office myself, but I figured it would just be easier to post it to hacker news"

That does absolutely nothing for the time crunch. I'm more than happy to give my young child tours of my small construction site or whatever other projects are in progress. But it's not like I can also be working on things while doing that. And someone else was taking those pictures, right?

But you've got to shovel and clear snow regardless? Shoveling a small path and being careful how you take off your shoes sure beats scraping ice off of a car and dealing with the plows' windrow.

The biggest problems I see is wanting to frame out the walls with 2x6's for thicker insulation, ceiling trusses at 16 oc for snow load and thicker for insulation as well (or lose the headroom and build a traditional ceiling/attic), and of course more heating load from the heat pump.

I'm in the middle of finishing out my own (significantly larger) shed I just had built, basically all DIY except for the structure itself. The number that popped into my head at the start of your post was $30k - each step adds up when you're paying small job overheads. That you did it for $20k is pretty great.

> You are referring to ICE as a criminal terror gang, but they perform a very important function of enforcing immigration law

Sure, the point is that these two things are not tied. In fact they're actually sympathetic to one another - if the job of ICE is to uphold the law, then their mission should include upholding all law and order - not merely enforcing within their scope while running roughshod on everything outside of it.

> I don’t agree with some things that they do, but what is the alternative?

Read your question again. There ARE clearly other alternatives besides "let people enter freely", right? For example, institutional accountability. When you have a case like Jonathan Ross imparting his own agenda of premeditated execution as a summary punishment for disobedience, it's straightforward to separate that act from the overall mission of the agency, right? There is no conflict for firing and prosecuting Ross for how he personally chose to act directly contrary to written agency policy, while continuing to have the rest of ICE enforce immigration law.

But rather than working to keep the agency and its members accountable under the law, we witness the exact opposite framed as part of the all-encompassing "culture war", seemingly to distract from the administration's poor performance on this topic and elsewhere. This type of poor leadership drives rot in organizations, leading us to the point we've gotten to where ICE itself seemingly needs to be disbanded and its desired function (which I agree with you is mostly sensible) performed by a replacement agency - built up person-by-person to make sure agents aren't bringing their own personal grudges and lawlessness.

Furthermore, if you truly do want immigration law to be enforced, then it actually becomes more important to adopt this stance. It's taken over two decades to finally build up the political will to enforce immigration law contra to the open wishes of big business that wants cheap labor. What is happening right now is squandering that political will as the average person sees it merely being used to enable a group of unaccountable violent thugs who aren't even that effective at the political goals.

What specifically are you referring to? I don't see how that relates to anything in my comment.

It's not a matter of "cute" and thinking that Nuremberg-style accountability will definitively happen, but rather that if we are going to fight for our liberty then we must draw clear lines in the sand about things like morality and values. This isn't merely some political disagreement over how to implement policy that effects shared values, but rather a political party being wholly taken over by malevolent anti-American interests and convincing its constituents to shred their own morality. The need for moral lines in the sand applies across the whole spectrum - all the way from the edgelords still simping for the cucked Republican party because line goes up or trolling makes them feel powerful or whatever, to the would-be opposition party who needs to know that a message of "you have to vote for us because we're less bad" is woefully insufficient.

The longer this criminal terror gang continues to operate with impunity, the more we need to be thoroughly documenting individuals who will need to face justice for our society to heal when we eventually get our Nuremberg moment. In this case, at least whomever is signing off on this deliberately malevolent escalation of force, including up their autocratic chain of command, whomever tortures or kills using these devices, plus whomever is managing their manufacture/sale (graft being only real goal here beyond performative cruelty). Everyone involved knows what they are doing is at odds with the western values of liberty and human rights our country was founded upon and made great by - they simply don't care due to whatever grievance they have with the system (legitimate or not). Which is why when flagrant criminality happens within their ranks and turns into a national issue, they double down rather than taking a minute to do any sort of reflection.

And so - no clemency, no amnesty, no "just following orders", no "my orders were misinterpreted", no mass pardons, no slinking back into the shadows holding on to their "lost cause". Criminal responsibility, period. Government jackboots executing people might be considered just fun "anti-woke" entertainment in 2026, but it needs to be known that the winds will eventually shift.

Sure, in the same way a child tries to invoke unfairness when they don't get their way. Do you really fall for this?

Like most marketing you can basically invert it to arrive at the truth. Republican propaganda continually harps on about personal responsibility because Republican voters are lacking it and desperately wish they had some. The propaganda is a coping mechanism.

> I’m curious if your stance would be the same if someone was on trial for murdering a child

I don't know, right? This was a case where the harm didn't go beyond property damage. I hope to never have to find out - whether after or during a trial! There are obviously limits to how principled/logical/rational/detached any given person can be.

But those labels are generally directed at the executive branch (the $President administration). Their failure was due to checks in the judicial branch. So we have a regime in the executive, but still have a somewhat functioning judiciary (despite the related push to further rot it from the top down).

As you don't have any of the details, you cannot judge whether this decision is congruent or incongruent with the law (ie would most impartial judges have made the same decision). There could have simply not been enough evidence to indict in the first place. Or there could have been key evidence that was excluded due to violations of civil rights, improper procedures, etc.

I very recently sat on a jury for a criminal trial in which we found not guilty. After my service ended, I looked up the case docket and found several details that pushed my personal analysis to the defendant likely having committed the alleged offense in my personal balance-of-probabilities reasoning framework. But the evidence and arguments presented at the case were so lacking (due to those details having been excluded in limine, as well as needing to meet the standard of beyond a reasonable doubt) that we jurors deliberated for all of five minutes because we had started off in unanimous agreement of not guilty.

(and just in case it's not clear, I have no regrets about that! Even knowing what I know now, I would have chosen not guilty - the government simply didn't meet the burden of proof, and our civil liberties are important)

Getting back to this case. If we take it as a given that grand juries readily indict as the bar is low and prosecutors generally make sure to have their ducks in a row, we are still left with multiple possibilities of how politics might be involved here. Which is more likely - that the prosecution presented a well-substantiated argument that the jury then completely disregarded (ie "nullification"), or that prosecutors were politically encouraged to press this despite glaring holes in their case?

It does really demonstrate societal rot - the public's loss of trust in so-called "law enforcement" due to how they've come to often behave as lawless thugs. And so if you want to restore the public's trust (vital social technology), then advocate for civil rights and legal accountability on those tasked with enforcing the law!

Administration implies bureaucracy - separation of powers, the rule of law, formal procedures, dispassionately executing a job, etc. What we have at the moment is a regime.

Your phrasing is weird. In this case, the two are not in conflict but rather symbiotic - this grand jury chose to preserve the life of the person who was being accused of protecting our privacy. There is also a good chance that privacy (evidentiary rules) helped preserve this person's life.

But also you're going to have to elaborate what you mean by life being considered the highest value. Have you seen how we treat one another? We're always looking for rationales as to why someone else's life should be considered unimportant.

By "responses like this" do you mean any form of criticism? What I am calling out is your purely positive statement that lacks any sort of normative judgement. It's the type of thing which helps normalize the status quo, regardless of whether the cudgel is 35 or 7 years.

Here is a comment that makes a similar point to yours, but in a constructive manner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379992

How many days have you spent in jail or prison? I've done two, and it was weird coming out to freedom. Actual thought taking some of my first steps: "wait, if I want to be over there, I can just start walking?" The guards and fellow jailers were all quite reasonable, too.

I can barely imagine facing a whole year. I can't imagine facing five.

If there is a point to be made from what you're talking about, it's about how threats of inhumane prison sentences are used to eliminate our right to trial by jury.

I'm aware of them, but I'm not familiar with them as they seem like band-aids that add even more patient self-administrative bloat, rather than fixing the core dynamic - making healthcare pricing work like every other industry. The word "demand" is a tell, showing that this is not the normal course of the relationship. Another tell is that it's two prongs - why can't everyone receive a "good faith estimate" from a provider? Note I'm still not asking the provider to grok the patient's health plan - rather to be upfront about the prices they themselves are choosing to charge.

Also the ambiguous place between the two cases - "you have a health plan but we didn't do the work to actually bill it" - is a common source of the fraudulent shakedown bills, and this does nothing to constrain those types of fraudulent bills!

In general, I don't need to request a "Good Faith Estimate" from a grocery store about my upcoming food purchase for when I go later in the week, nor for an oil change down at the mechanic. If I go to the mechanic with "something is making a noise", then they are upfront about any fixed diagnosis fee, and then give estimates routinely in terms of a shop rate and book hours. If there are still unknowns about what might need to be fixed/replaced, they are up front about that and readily communicate with the customer. All of this is straight up missing in the medical industry, even when you try to engage. Rather they shove "consent" forms at you that say nonsensical anti-contractual things like "we can bill you whatever we want and you're responsible" and when you start pushing back on them they look at you like you have three heads.

(and just to head off the inevitable drive by comments like "It's not practical to shop around while you're in an ambulance" - the vast majority of medical care is scheduled ahead of time rather than on an urgent basis)

You're implying that "half the urine" describes something that could be a local optimum, but a local optimum would be something more in terms like urine output versus energy expenditure required to achieve that. But that doesn't even capture it, because you can directly control how much urine you produce - water in, water out. So what's really being optimized for is the pressure/stress/disutility function of the kidneys in the context of how much water you are intaking. Which is presumably moderated by your access to water, and higher level conscious optimization like how much water you're wanting to intake and how much urine you're wanting to produce. And that's not even capturing all the constraints in play! But it hopefully illustrates how the scope of what is being optimized for is quite large - it's not each metric in isolation, but rather some (probabilistic) utility function over the whole.

If the language doesn't matter, then why have the autocratic authoritarians made such a point of promulgating that language? To me, it's a line in the sand that they've drawn - along with the rest of their dubious alternative reality that we're supposed to eat and repeat to demonstrate allegiance.

I know it's real work to go against popularized framings, but it's work we need to do.

You keep misinterpreting "how much [a doctor] themselves will charge for something" as "patient's out-of-pocket cost". I'm certainly not asking for the doctor to get involved between the patient and their health plan [0], but rather what the doctor charges, regardless of who might pay. In other words, the straightforwardly-legible prices that exist in every other market - even markets where insurance companies often pay (eg auto repair).

I don't know the specific legal details that allow doctors to make up these post-facto bills (often fraudulent) and send them to patients, but I feel it's probably at the state level rather than federal. Also the big problem with regulatory capture is that businesses paying off politicians makes that kind of citizen feedback meaningless.

[0] in fact I think another good angle of reform would be "if a patient has a health plan, providers are prohibited from billing the patient directly". Any copays, outstanding balances, etc should flow through the health plan.

One can always craft some excuse, which is how the terrible system continues to perpetuate itself. Doctors cannot even tell you how much they themselves will charge for anything. The problem I'm describing originates completely with them - no escaping blame here.

(And "might take years" lol. How about eliminate whatever flagrant regulatory capture is allowing providers to create and enforce post-facto and downright fraudulent bills in the first place, and watch the system reform itself overnight)

Call me old fashioned, but I just bring a can of gasoline and a pile of super soakers.

While I do like the idea in theory, I don't love the inherent nudge towards off the shelf productized energy storage that will be placed somewhere without much of a plan, and then basically invites rewiring with extension cords. I get how those things are appealing for camping or determined apartment DIYers at the like, but moving them from a seek-them-out "pull" dynamic to a here-you-go "push" dynamic seems like asking for problems from people not thinking too much about storing 5kWh.

It's also caused by absurd nonsense like how doctors can't tell you how much anything they're proposing to do actually will cost (a necessary condition for entering into a contract!), but then the system makes up arbitrary bills after the fact - with fraudulent amounts that nobody actually pays! No other industry works like that, as it's not the foundation of a market in the first place. Imagine if going to the grocery store involved "paying" some token amount at the cashier for their time to put your items in bags, then for the food you received shakedown bills for years afterwards, that you had to spend time going through your old documentation to refute and bargain down. Absurd.

Regardless of "insurance", who is ultimately paying, or subsidies to provide a baseline of care - there needs to be reform that mandates simple up-front prices, constant per-provider regardless who is paying, and ruling out any other theory of billing. Doctors throw up their hands and act like they're dealing with some special problems, but there are plenty of other industries we can look at for the dynamics of how to handle routine procedures versus emergencies (and knowns vs unknowns) in a consensual and market-responsive manner.

If you didn't know - depending on the contract (who owns the hardware), plus the specific type of hardware it is, you can often move the monitoring to a different company and/or self-monitoring. There are national independent monitoring companies that will help you set this up.

(it feels weird to be advocating a different centralized surveillance solution in a thread about Flock. So I'll just add Fuck Flock!)

Sure - but it's a moot point unless you're proposing plausible ways of achieving that, and that could be adopted by a movement with credible political power.

Dignity is the fundamental problem that they're bemoaning. When scientists and other intellectual positions are funded beyond scraps and subsistence wages, they use some of the breathing room to start to asking questions about societal power structures. When they're afforded political voices, they start applying their critiques to how their own institutions are run - rather than keeping their heads down as "efficient" worker bees for the business vectoralists. And critiques/conclusions where they've gone cloyingly overboard then serve as convenient straw men that demonstrate how "out of touch" they are from "the real world".

> Energy Department spokesman Ben Dietderich told CNBC in a statement that assertions regarding cavern collapse were false. “The caverns are always full. All that changes is the ratio of oil and water that is filling them,” Dietderich said, asserting that the Trump administration was “responsibly managing the SPR as the critical national security asset it was designed to be.”

This statement makes me feel worse, not better. Translating from doublespeak: they are acknowledging the caverns are collapsing, and are running it into the ground like every other "critical national security asset".