yeah, chiming in to say i think this is an acceptable case of US news in the World News section. obviously don’t go overboard with edge cases, but there’s really no dilution of World News from stories like this which do have some multinational significance.

basically, put it this way: if a cop stops you and asks you for your phone–what are you realistically going to do in that situation the moment they don’t respect your “no” and begin to pressure you, threaten you, and decide to throw the legal book at you (however dubious) for saying no? for most people, the answer is going to be “just give up the phone and start complying with the cop” even though that is not something the cop should be able to do. because at the end of the day they have a gun, and can put you in jail (or at least make your day hellish) more-or-less unilaterally, with very little recourse for you unless you want to do expensive litigation.

But if we’re talking about a law that actually says the cop cannot take your phone no matter what, and they do, then any public defender would be able to point it out and the judge would certainly have to enforce it. I can’t think of a way the cop would abuse their power because, in this case they don’t have it.

they can abuse their power because they’re a cop, with a badge and gun, and the right to maim or literally kill you with it (and probably get away with it even if it’s not strictly legal) if you don’t comply with their demands in the moment. again: cops consistently do not care about or follow legal procedures they’re supposed to, frequently fuck up those procedures even when they do, and most cops probably don’t even think of it as their job to secure some airtight case that stands up to legal scrutiny. it’s not a profession that lend itself to the kind of charitability that’s being given here, and the record of the profession makes it even less deserving of that charitability.

The MyColorado FAQ explicitly states that an officer cannot take your phone, even if they think your digital ID is fraudulent. This whole article is a ton of fear mongering.

no offense but: even if you were to grant the notion that this is an exaggerated problem–cops are not well known for their rigorous adherence to the law or proper legal procedure. they routinely fuck up and violate civil liberties, up to and including murdering people for arbitrary reasons. and unless police are held accountable (which they almost never are for a variety of systemic reasons), what a state says they cannot do is effectively meaningless. it’s just words on a screen, really.

In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court unanimously held that police need a warrant to search through cell phones, even during otherwise lawful arrests. But if you hand over your unlocked phone to a police officer and offer to show them something, “it becomes this complicated factual question about what consent you’ve granted for a search and what the limits of that are,” Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, told The Verge. “There have been cases where people give consent to do one thing, the cops then take the whole phone, copy the whole phone, find other evidence on the phone, and the legal question that comes up in court is: did that violate the scope of consent?”

If police do have a warrant to search your phone, numerous courts have said they can require you to provide biometric login access via your face or finger. (It’s still an unsettled legal question since other courts have ruled they can’t.) The Fifth Amendment typically protects giving up passcodes as a form of self-incrimination, but logging in with biometrics often isn’t considered protected “testimonial” evidence. In the words of one federal appeals court decision, it requires “no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking.”

it’s unbelievable that there is a distinction in US caselaw between giving up your biometrics and giving up your password, and your essentially unchangeable biometrics are somehow the one you’re probably obliged to give to the cops if they ask. just an incredibly goofy system

something worth remembering: even limited examinations of who is responsible for complaints about books show that the vast majority of them are made by a handful of people. while there is often a “broad” base of passive support for this stuff in the Republican Party due to partisanship, the actual crusaders are few and far between because most people don’t actually want to be that person.

These first serious restrictions on men have come as a surprise to many in Afghanistan, according to a range of Afghans, including Taliban opponents, wavering supporters and even members of the Taliban regime, who spoke in phone interviews over the past two weeks. In a society where a man’s voice is often perceived as far more powerful than a woman’s, some men now wonder whether they should have spoken up sooner to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

“If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now,” said a male resident of the capital, Kabul, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used due to fears of drawing unwanted scrutiny from the regime. “Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don’t want to be questioned, humiliated,” he said.

A 36-year old male driver in Kabul said the new restrictions feel “enormous” and pose a growing hardship for his work. His revenue has declined by 70 percent since late August, he said, partly because the Taliban has begun enforcing a rule that bans women from traveling alone in taxis.

Even in some government offices, a new sense of dread has set in. A former Taliban supporter recalled how a friend, who still works for the regime, recently had his salary withheld because his beard wasn’t sufficiently long.

“We are hearing that some of the civil servants, whose beards were shorter than the required length, were barred from entering their departments,” said a government employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.

you’re constantly getting into fights with people on threads like this and it’s neither good for you, nor the people around you, nor the community. i’m giving you a 30 day cool-off from this section accordingly

Thurman waited in pain in a hospital bed, worried about what would happen to her 6-year-old son, as doctors monitored her infection spreading, her blood pressure sinking and her organs beginning to fail.

It took 20 hours for doctors to finally operate. By then, it was too late.

The otherwise healthy 28-year-old medical assistant, who had her sights set on nursing school, should not have died, an official state committee recently concluded.

Though Republican lawmakers who voted for state bans on abortion say the laws have exceptions to protect the “life of the mother,” medical experts cautioned that the language is not rooted in science and ignores the fast-moving realities of medicine.

The most restrictive state laws, experts predicted, would pit doctors’ fears of prosecution against their patients’ health needs, requiring providers to make sure their patient was inarguably on the brink of death or facing “irreversible” harm when they intervened with procedures like a D&C.

“They would feel the need to wait for a higher blood pressure, wait for a higher fever — really got to justify this one — bleed a little bit more,” Dr. Melissa Kottke, an OB-GYN at Emory, warned lawmakers in 2019 during one of the hearings over Georgia’s ban.

three paragraphs saying you’re wrong and that the empirical evidence supports nothing you’re saying is not a “long-winded rant” lmao–this uncritical “trust me bro it’s actually fine, you just don’t get it” stuff is the exact reason i consider autonomous vehicle stuff to 98% worthless techbro hype and autofellatio. cite your sources if you want people to listen–i have, and you’ve refuted none of it!

The whole point of induced demand in highways is that when you add capacity in the form of lanes it induces demand. So if our highways are already full and if that capacity isn’t coming from increased EV efficiency then where is it coming from? If there’s no increase in road capacity then what is inducing demand?

just for example: “freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move”–every single one of these posited improvements would induce demand unless you literally demolish the infrastructure (which, if you’re just switching people one-to-one from regular cars to automated cars is not going to happen, because the number of cars will remain a constant). the existence of unused parking begets driving and is a predictor for more driving.^[1] the existence of more space to move obviously begets more driving because the “highways” aren’t “full” anymore; and again, if it didn’t that would actually be worse because it incentivizes less safe driving practices.

You are describing how humans drive, not AVs. AVs always obey the speed limit and traffic calming signs.

if by AVs you mean “fully autonomous” ones that literally do not exist currently then sure–they better! but at that point nothing you say is meaningful, because the technology literally doesn’t exist. we might as well be talking about mass-adopted hydrogen cars or whatever.

but, if we mean semi-autonomous ones—the ones that clearly exist, and which companies advertise as autonomous, and which people actually use—no. absolutely not. these things routinely violate even the most obvious traffic laws and necessitate humans to intervene in their ordinary function. Waymo hits pedestrians even now, and it’s ostensibly one of the most advanced semi-autonomous programs in the world. Uber literally killed a pedestrian and got into legal trouble over it. Tesla’s problems are omnipresent to the point where the NHTSA has said their feature is unsafe in practice and people make it a punchline. you can’t no-true-Scotsman this technology. even in the best and least ambiguous traffic circumstances it has obvious problems!

Yes, I have no doubt there would be induced demand, but that extra demand wouldn’t be at the cost of anything.

But if AVs add more capacity to our roads, that will be entirely because they are driving more efficiently.

you are literally doing what i mean when i say you are making assumptions with no evidence. there is, again, no reason to believe that “driving more efficiently” will result from mass-adoption of automated vehicles–and even granting they do, your assumption that this wouldn’t be gobbled up by induced demand is intuitively disprovable. even the argumentation here parallels other cases where induced demand happens! “build[ing] new roads or widen[ing] existing ones” is a measure that is almost always justified by an underlying belief that we need to improve efficiency and productivity in existing traffic flows,^[1] and obviously traffic flow does not improve in such cases.

but granting that you’re correct on all of that somehow: more efficiency (and less congestion) would be worse than inducing demand. “efficiency” in the case of traffic means more traffic flow at faster speeds, which is less safe for everyone—not more.^[2] in general: people drive faster, more recklessly, and less attentively when you give them more space to work with (especially on open roadways with no calming measures like freeways, which are the sorts of roads autonomous vehicles seem to do best on). there is no reason to believe they would do this better in an autonomous vehicle, which if anything incentivizes many of those behaviors by giving people a false sense of security (in part because of advertising and overhyping to that end!).

You’re asking for something that does not exist. How am I supposed to provide you evidence proving what the results of mass adoption of AVs will be when there has never been a mass adoption of AVs.

you asserted these as “other secondary effects to AVs”–i’m not sure why you would do that and then be surprised when people challenge your assertion. but i’m glad we agree: these don’t exist, and they’re not benefits of mass adoption nor would they likely occur in a mass adoption scenario.

For instance, what is your reasoning for believing that AVs could never be fundamentally safer than human drivers who are frequently tired, angry, distracted, impaired, impatient, etc?

the vast majority of road safety is a product of engineering and not a product of human driving ability, what car you drive or its capabilities, or other variables of that nature. almost all of the problems with, for example, American roadways are design problems that incentivize unsafe behaviors in the first place (and as a result inform everything from the ubiquity of speeding to downstream consumer preferences in cars). to put it bluntly: you cannot and will not fix road safety through automated vehicles, doubly so with your specific touted advantages in this conversation. the road designs that create bad driving behavior don’t cease to be an issue because people switch to an automated vehicle.

As long as cars exist, AVs will be better than human drivers,

this is at obvious odds with the current state of self-driving technology itself–which is (as i noted in the other comment) subject to routine overhyping and also has rather minimal oversight and regulation generally. Tesla is only the most egregious example in both respects; even stuff like Waymo is pretty much entirely reliant on taking their word for it that the technology would be safer than humans (which meshes awkwardly with well publicized problems and efforts to hide robotaxi safety records).

Secondly, it’s based on the idea that people even can drive more than they already do.

they can. induced demand is omnipresent in basically all vehicular infrastructure and vehicular improvements and there’s no reason to think this would differ with autonomous vehicles

Fourthly, it ignores other secondary effects to AVs, like suddenly not needing nearly as much parking, freeing up both parking lot real estate, but more importantly, freeing up on street parking, creating more room for actual traffic to move, and their increased patience not causing constant traffic jams because they tailgated someone and then slammed on the brakes.

okay but: literally none of this follows from mass-adoption of autonomous vehicles. this is a logical leap you are making with no supporting evidence—there is, and i cannot stress this enough, no evidence that if mass-adoption occurs any of this will follow—and in general the technology is subject to far more fabulism and exaggeration (like this!) than legitimate technological advancement or improvement of society.

When South Korea started tackling this problem 20 years ago, it threw away 98 percent of its food waste. Today, 98 percent of food waste is turned into feed, compost or energy, according to the South Korean Ministry of Environment. It achieved this by banning food scraps from landfills and mandating that all residents separate their food waste from their trash and recycling — and to pay for the service through fees and fines.

South Korea is one of the few countries with a nationwide system for food-waste management. While France made composting food mandatory this year — and some cities like New York have imposed similar rules — few places match up with South Korea.

The rate of stops conducted off-the-books has increased under Superintendent Larry Snelling, even as he has positioned himself as an agent of reform who is moving the Chicago Police Department away from its longstanding strategy of using traffic stops to find illegal guns and tamp down on crime. In June, Snelling reported traffic stops were down by about 87,000 over the same time last year. But behind that reduction is a pattern of thousands of unreported police encounters, which accounted for one-third of all traffic stops over the first seven months of Snelling’s tenure.

Records obtained by Bolts and Injustice Watch show police department officials know the traffic stop data they report to state regulators are an undercount. Internally, the department tracks stops using police radio data that doesn’t rely on officers filling out the state-mandated forms.

Mayoral candidate Victor Miller, a bespectacled librarian with an AI obsession, stood between an American flag and a Wyoming flag, preaching what he sees as the untapped potential of artificial intelligence in government.

Miller made this pitch at a county library in Wyoming’s capital on a recent summer Friday, with a few friends and family filling otherwise empty rows of chairs. Before the sparse audience, he vowed to run the city of Cheyenne exclusively with an AI bot he calls “VIC” for “Virtual Integrated Citizen.”

AI experts say the pledge is a first for U.S. campaigns and marks a new front in the rapid emergence of the technology. Its implications have stoked alarm among officials and even tech companies.

I am not understanding what you want from me

i think the basic confusion people are having is that, when you phrase it like “I use it/its in spaces where I do not plan on engaging with people as individuals” and “This space is not a chat room and there is no reason to treat it as such. It is a forum.”, how that comes off to some people is you are kind of treating this place like a dumping ground for what you want to talk about and then ignoring other people jumping off of your posts. that may or may not be what you intend to do; so that’s why people are trying to clarify the intent of your posts.

i’m honestly not sure Trump knows anything about the FTC, and if his campaign was smart these are the kinds of things they’d propose instead of “IVF should be illegal but also you’re a degenerate for not having children”

unclear (they don’t tend to announce enforcement mechanisms in these and it’s not a final rule until it’s a final rule), but it’s not like the FTC is lacking in power as an agency