What if instead you hid an encrypted signal within an otherwise perfectly legible audio signal? Imagine a song being played. To the ear the song seems perfectly normal. But, unbeknownst to a casual listener, there is an encrypted signal embedded within the audio signal. For example, data could be embedded within a song by ever-so-slightly raising or lowering the pitch of a song multiple times per second. Then if you had a copy of the original file, software could compare the original file to the song transmitted over the radio. The locations where the pitch rose or fell could be noted, and the data could be retrieved. You could send encrypted data without anyone realizing you're sending encrypted data. To anyone else listening, it would simply sound like a song or other audio track being played.
The law isn't code.
Past a certain level of wealth, it might make sense to invest in some really expensive jewelry just as an emergency and liquid wealth store.
Consider the US right now with its volatile political situation. Or any other country with volatile and uncertain politics. Or just uncertainty from major national disasters. People sometimes need to flee from disasters on short notice.
For a normal person, carrying around $100k worth of jewelry on your person would be foolish. For most middle class people, that would a substantial portion of your wealth that they're walking around risking. But imagine your net worth is $50 million. Now that $100k worth of jewelry you wear every day is only 0.5% of your net worth. But if you need to bug out of your city or flee the country for some reason, you now carry around with you the means to do so. International money transfers can take time, and bank accounts can be frozen. But if you have $100k in jewelry just on your person, you have a liquid form of emergency bugout money. You can get on a plane with nothing but the clothes on your back, fly to a far off country, and immediately have access to enough resources to get yourself set up. Even if your accounts or frozen or your nation's banking system has collapsed, you can pawn some of that jewelry off to obtain essentials like food, shelter, etc.
I think a fair number of rich people like having this amount of jewelry for the same reason that they often like having multiple passports. The odds of having to ever flee the country are low. And for most people, maintaining the means to flee the country at a moment's notice is simply too much. But when the cost is a tiny portion of your net worth, putting what is the equivalent of pocket change into the ability to quickly flee a country isn't so unreasonable anymore.
Seriously. Past a certain level of wealth, you don't even need to buy brand-named items for most everyday things. You don't buy a suit from an expensive brand. You hire a world-class master tailor to custom make you a suit from scratch. It's fit exactly to your body, made to your exact tastes and specifications. The same thing should be possible with watches. You don't buy an expensive brand, you hire a watch maker to make you an entirely custom piece.
Who says I'm worked up? You wrote a whole paragraph, I wrote a quip.
We freeload off of Mexico. They give us about $160 billion more dollars in goods and services than we give them. They give us about $467 billion worth of stuff, and in return we give them about $309 billion in stuff. In exchange we mostly give them IOUs and other pieces of paper.
Oh, and that's before we talk about the billions of dollars we steal from the Mexican government. Think of all the talented workers that move from Mexico to the US. That's millions of people raised and educated on the backs of Mexican taxpayers, who come to the US and never contribute a penny to the Mexican economy.
The US is a giant leech sucking the Mexican economy dry.
The government can fuck right off with their Newspeak.
It defines every human as belonging to neither of the 2 sexes. There is pretty much no other way to read it.
Read it carefully, and then read it like a Republican.
“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
This does NOT mean "a female is a person who can produce the large reproductive cell."
The BELONG is the key word here. They'll argue that anyone with XX chromosomes belongs to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. An embryo may not produce large or small reproductive cells, but they still belong to the sex that produces the large or small reproductive cell. Even if an adult is infertile, they still belong to the sex that produces the large or small reproductive cell. It's not like per-pubescent children or post-menopausal women don't have a sex marker on their passports.
That is how this is meant to be read, and that is how it will be interpreted by conservative courts.
In truth the definition is a bit circular, as it defines "sex" as:
“Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”
And then in turn it defines male and female in terms of "belonging to the sex that produces..."
But I don't think the courts will really quibble with that. It's clear what the intent of the order is. And that is how it will be interpreted.
You do not have to actually be capable of producing the large reproductive cell to be a member of the sex that produces the large reproductive cell. Is this definition all-encompassing and without issues? No. But legal definitions rarely are perfect, and courts have to find ways to still apply laws that reflect the intent of their drafters. And while the wording of the order is clumsy, the intent is quite clear.
I like how practically the whole article is people who just fucked it, in absolutely historic fashion, sharing their wisdom.
Exactly. Here's an idea. How about a simple rule for accountability? If you are a high-ranking leader in the DNC or a hired consultant in an election season, and the party loses the presidency? You are ineligible to serve in such a role for the next 5 years at least. If you are holding such a role and the party loses complete control of government, a Republican trifecta? You are permanently prohibited from holding such a role.
Yes, this is a bit harsh. But the purpose of these high level positions is not to provide jobs to people or to be fair. It's about winning elections. Sometimes there very well be elections that simply can't be won, and this rule might throw out some reasonably qualified people. But that is simply a necessary cost to pay for holding leadership accountable. There are no shortage of potential leaders out there. There are tens of thousands of people who can work their way up to roles like this. Being at the top of political organizing should be like holding a world leader athletic position - incredibly hard to get and easy to lose. Because in politics, like in sports, winning really matters.
Before seeing this was the Onion, my enthusiasm at the headline diminished precipitously as I read each word past the first few.
I don't really follow what you're trying to say. "Sex marker" does describe the meaning in the most straight forward way one can.
"Sex marker" has a pretty unambiguous meaning. It's something anyone of even low intelligence should be able to figure out from context. It's a marker that indicates sex on a document. If not, the term is easily searchable. And the term applies to any ID document, not just passports.
People need to learn new words all the time; we're not born knowing vocabulary. This isn't even something that requires a lot of theory or justification like oddball neopronouns or something. It's a pretty straightforward thing. If you have any kind of ID, it almost certainly has a sex marker on it.
Do we need to exhaustively define every word in a headline? There will always be some people who don't know the meaning of any given word. What if someone grew up in the tropics, never had an education, and doesn't know what freeze means? Should we expect the headline to provide a definition for that word as well? Or hell, why should we simply assume the reader knows what a passport is? "Sex marker" is a pretty common term. More people probably need to look up who Marco Rubio is than need to search what "sex marker" means.
Ultimately in order to make text at all readable and headlines at all concise, you need to assume some basic intelligence by the reader. You cannot exhaustively define each and every term. You don't want to use incredibly obscure terms. But "sex marker" is hardly obscure. And it is something that can be learned very quickly with even an iota of effort.
Did you really think sex was binary? "Male" and "female" are just two ends of a bimodal distribution. But about 1% of the population has some form of intersex condition. The X market is for intersex people and those who identity with a nonbinary gender.
I do quite a lot of that as well. In fact, woodworking was what made me first consider wood science as a field of study.
My username is literal. I'm literally a wood scientist. Or more specifically, I'm a current PhD student in civil engineering and wood science. Identifying Wood by Hoadley was actually a textbook in one of the courses I took.
Oh dear lord in heaven, I've apparently become a Dickensian villain...Did I just recreate the poor houses? Oh dear. Yeah, maybe separate rooms are better. There's spartan, and then there's "we built a prison."
Seriously. I want a world where everyone can have the basics of subsistence without qualifications. UBI is one way to do it, but even direct provision is fine.
Universal healthcare is an obvious one, but for as wealthy as developed countries are, providing basic food and shelter shouldn't be that difficult either. For food and shelter, I think we should just offer anyone that wants it the basics of life.
Every county should have a government depot in it that you can go and get a certain quantity of basic staples per month. Rice, beans, flour, that kind of thing. It need not be fancy or the best food on Earth, but enough of what people need to keep them alive. And you keep the demand for the service reasonable not by putting in place applications and qualifications, but simply by personal preference. Not many millionaires are going to go down to the depot every month and get their government-issued bag of rice, even if they could if they wanted.
Same thing with housing. There should be state-run dorms or boarding houses in every city in the country. Need a place to stay? Go down to the city dorm. I would build them just like college dorms - small shared rooms with bunk beds and communal cooking/bathing facilities. And anyone, from the richest to the poorest, can stay there if they need to. If Bezos wants to go live in the government dorm, he can. You keep demand for it low, and the cost of providing it reasonable, through personal choice. Most people don't actually want to live their whole life in a dorm room. Keep things clean. Keep them sanitary. But keep them simple and utilitarian.
Even within existing capitalist societies, we can provide for the basics of life for everyone. And instead of putting strict requirements, you open the programs up to all. You keep the demand for the services low by focusing on utilitarian versions of the benefits you provide. Anyone down on their luck can stay in the government dorm if they want, but very few people actually want to unless they really need to.
Saint Luigi of Baltimore, forgive us our debts. Deliver us from the greed of the Wicked. Protect us in sickness and in health. Lead us from the labyrinth of insurance denials. Bring Justice to the Merchants of Death.
If you reach the end of your days, and you haven't ever been on at least one watch list...Can you really even say you have ever lived at all?
You have to be willing to walk away from and ignore corporate media platforms, or else they'll never be defeated. And content creators need to also learn to not post their stuff to these platforms.