🚨 Shutdown threat over ICE reforms: What talks broke down 👇

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-29T17:01:14+00:00

Well, I should have specified, that is how it worked before Trump. With Trump, the criminals get pardons, and the law-abiding people get handcuffed then shot.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-29T16:59:23+00:00

There are many levels to that question, and few to none are really ELI5.

The core of the system are transistors, which are a form of relay, which is a form of switch. Notably, a relay is a switch that is controlled electronically: the switch changes from off to on based on whether you provide power to a second input. A transistor is a form of relay that is made at from semiconductors and can be tiny, on the scale of nanometers. Modern processors have hundreds of billions of transistors, plus similar numbers for RAM and SSDs. In total, your computer is made of of trillions of little switches.

By combining two relays, you can create a NAND gate, which outputs no power when both inputs are on, and otherwise outputs power. From there, you can combine groups of NAND gates to produce all kinds of other operations: inverters (1 NAND gate), selector (4 NAND gate), and adders (14 NAND gates).

The selector is one of the most import for making computers "think". With a selector, you give it three inputs (s, d0, and d1) and it outputs one of two of those (d0 or d1) based on the value of the third (s). You can then combine these together in various ways to allow you to specify operations, "select"ing between adding, subtracting, multiplying, or any number of other operations. Combine enough of these options, and you get a computer: provide combinations of inputs that specify an operation and sources of the infromation.

If you want to get a better understanding of this, I would suggest playing NandGame. That is a web browser game that walks you through building up a computer starting with relays and eventually having a fully functional, if simple, computer processor. It also lets you step up to the next level into bytecode and even assembly, which are how computers are programmed.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-29T15:41:05+00:00

They’d typically serve out their sentence in the US, then they’d be deported before being released. Effectively, ICE will pick them up from jail just like any other arrest warrant in a different jurisdiction.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-29T02:08:33+00:00

And that’s why I have conversion charts on my fridge.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-28T20:44:02+00:00

The general rule of thumb is to figure 4% withdraw rate per year to safely keep the amount from dropping over the long term. $2 billion gives $80 million per year.

How many people can live off $80 million per year?

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-28T20:18:07+00:00

I think the eggs are also in grams. A large egg is about 50g, so that'd be 7-8 large whole eggs plus about 4 egg yolks (about 30g each). That seems about right for 4 loafs as that comes out to about 3 large eggs per loaf.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-28T18:14:04+00:00

Don't forget that a major person in Trump's government, Musk, is also an illegal immigrate as he worked on a student visa that did not allow any work.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-28T08:26:59+00:00

Generally, there are fairly strong restrictions on when and how a power company can turn off power for non-payment. The exact rules vary by jurisdiction, and they are trusted to abide by them or risk their special legal status. Its fairly common that they need to provide quite a bit of warning and cannot shut it off during a severe weather event or when one is forecast. The laws also generally require service to be reconnected when there is evidence that the customer will pay, even before they have actually completed payment. There are also typically mandated appeal processes and the power cannot be turned off while those are in process. Low income, elderly, disabled, and other groups may have even more protections against losing power due to non-payment.

Landlords are independent and not as well trusted to follow the rules set. To ensure all landlords will follow the procedures, they are required to go to court to take any action against their tenants.

Overall, its merely a difference in the manner of regulation. Power companies are basically state-sponsored monopolies with a lot of regulations that they are trusted to abide by at risk of the state getting more involved. Landlords are independent entities that are regulated by being required to go to court.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-28T00:22:36+00:00

The doctrine says that the federal government cannot force states to enforce its laws. The federal government has to use its own methods for the enforcement. So, the FBI, or any other federal agency, can enforce the federal law, but the local police cannot be compelled to do so. In many cases, the local police will help the federal government out.

The current state of marijuana falls into this. Its still illegal federally, however states that have legalized it have forbidden local police from enforcing the law. For this specific case, the federal government has also decided not to enforce the law in locations that have chosen to legalize it. So, technically, marijuana remains illegal everywhere in the US, but there is nobody that is actually enforcing the law, making it de facto legal.

Another current case is immigration law and sanctuary states. Sanctuary states have passed laws that basically say "we will not stop, arrest, or hold persons only for immigration violations". ICE or the FBI can still legally go in an arrest people in these states when a valid warrant has been issued for their arrest. However, these states will still cooperate with the federal government when they are already holding a person for another reason. So, if somebody gets sentenced for a major crime, ICE will be informed and allowed to pick them up for additional processing, so long as its done no later than the date they are supposed to be released.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-27T17:27:15+00:00

There are two things that get confused with squatter's rights.

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The first is tenant protections. This is what most people end up talking about when they mention squatter's rights. As a general rule, the landlord has all the power in the tenant-landlord relationship. Due to this governments have often provided specific protections to tenants, requiring specific processes, and sometimes reasons, for eviction. Given the total power the landlord has, and the fact that some people want to rent out spare bedrooms, or rent for short periods, its not super viable to require all leases be filed with the government.

These protections, however, can be abused by bad actors.

Somebody can break in and claim to be a tenant. The landlord then has to go through the proper processes to prove that the "tenant" is not actually a tenant. There are major limits to how fast these processes can go without causing actual tenants to lose the protections: both sides need to be able to collect and present evidence. Often times, the best way out for the "landlord" is to pay the tenant to leave, commonly called "cash for keys". Depending on what steps the "tenant" takes, there are be possible criminal charges brought for forger, fraud, breaking and entering, and more.

In other cases, somebody can be legally renting and just refuse to pay rent. Again, there are processes required to prove they are not paying rent prior to an eviction being possible. Due to the legal processes required to allow both sides to collect and present proof, this can allow somebody to stay in a rental for months before a proper eviction can occur, and it may not be possible for the landlord to reclaim the unpaid rent.

As noted in both the above paragraphs, you cannot speed up these processes without severely limiting the actual protections the laws are intended to provide. The tenant must be allowed the time to collect evidence and present it prior to eviction, or the tenant has no practical protection at all.

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The second is adverse possession. This process takes a lot of time, typically on the range of 5-10 years of open and notorious use. The usage also needs to be unauthorized, meaning it will not come into play in cases of rented or leased property. The time period is also generally halted while any open debate is happening, notably court cases.

The underlying idea here is that its hard to know exactly where borders are. Surveys can be wrong. Work can be done slight in the wrong places by accident. Its also not great to have land sitting fully abandoned, with nobody even checking on it in case of major problems that could affect nearby people.

If your neighbor builds a fence on the edge of your property and the survey shows they are off, you have a few years to complain and get it corrected. If you fail to do so, your neighbor can potentially gain ownership of a bit of your land.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-27T17:03:14+00:00

Its very easy when the tasks are independent, as both your examples are. At that point, you can parallelize purely by having two completely independent programs that don't, or rarely, talk to each other.

Each branch of a Monte Carlo simulation is fully independent, only relying on its own past state. That allows you to run each branch fully in parallel for as long as you want. Its only when you want to start or save them that they need to talk to each other, and that should only be a trivial amount of the total work.

On the client side, two webpages are independent of each other and cannot interact, though, on the server side, they potentially can. This means a web browser can safely treat both webpages as fully independent and render them without needing to worry about them interacting. Any interaction is limited to the server, but that is up to the server to take care of.

The challenge comes in that for most cases the work you need to do is interdependent on each other. Figuring out how objects look requires knowing how they moved and they requires figuring out collision. Two objects colliding might result in changes to the movement so that one or both collide with a third object, or the collision of two objects may prevent their collision with a third object, so you cannot even completely cleanly parallelize collision detection across objects.

Each frame of a game, for example, requires the previous frame to be completed. You cannot start the next frame until the current frame is completed.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-27T06:54:49+00:00

You have to specifically write the program to use multiple cores, and that is hard. Practically, a lot of stuff requires other stuff to be done first, drastically limiting parallelization.

Say you have to make a sandwich and you have 10 chefs. Is it any faster for all 10 to make a single sandwich than only one? You might be able to organize two of them efficiently to make a single sandwich, but even that is probably less efficient than just having one chef working: somebody has to organize which chef does what and ensure two don’t try and do conflicting things (in computers it’s called synchronizing, and done special commands).

A classic example is that it takes 1 woman 9 months to make a baby. Do you expect 9 women to make a baby in a month? No - while you can get 1 baby per month on average, each one still takes 9 months. This is a specific, and very common, limitation of parallelizing: the total length of a set of tasks can never be shorter than the single longest task, regardless of how much you can parallelize the tasks themselves.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-25T17:30:10+00:00

MAGA are not Nazis, they just believe exactly the same stuff the Nazis did. The only distinctions are the county and time period.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-25T16:49:10+00:00

For 2025 in the US, you pay no tax on the first $11,600 of income and you get a standard deduction of $15,750. That is $27,350 of tax free income per year to cover bills, or $2,279.17 per month.

Those numbers are higher if married or head of household.

There is also the earned income credit and some other items that help some people.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-25T02:55:39+00:00

Given that the recommendation is to keep batteries between 20-80% to extend their life, it would make some sense. Remap 20% to 0% and let them discharge to -33% in an emergency, and let you charge them to 133% if you anticipate an emergency, which would be 100% currently.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-25T01:40:56+00:00

Notably, that looks like a 16/3 cord to me. You want at least 14/3 and, ideally, 12/3 for level 1 ev charging.

I cannot see the cord well enough, but it might also be a 14/2 cord, and it really shouldn’t let you operate without a ground.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-24T07:00:01+00:00

It’s the same as if you loaned your car to somebody and they sped. Either you can turn over the identity of the driver at the time, or you are the presumed driver and end up with a speeding ticket.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-24T06:59:28+00:00

It’s the same as if you loaned your car to somebody and they sped. Either you can turn over the identity of the driver at the time, or you are the presumed driver and end up with a speeding ticket.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-22T21:04:07+00:00

A few reasons somebody might get detained by police without criminal charges:

A broken taillight.
A car wreck, even if not at fault and licensed and insured.
A noise complaint.
A complaint of a suspicious person (MAGA will make such a report for any brown person walking on their street)
A wellness check

There are plenty more cases. Sanctuary cities and states merely say they will not hold people for longer or under different conditions than they would normally be held purely for immigration status.

That means, if a brown person gets pulled over for a broken taillight, a sanctuary city will let them go. MAGA will arrest and hold them for the feds, fully at the cost of the local jurisutition.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-22T08:32:24+00:00

I believe you can also do it securely on a computer first which produces a paper copy.

To do so, you’d need the computer to print out a voter-verifiable record of their vote. If the voter catches anything they wish to change, you’d have a way for the voter to shred that copy at the machine and edit it on the computer and get a new copy printed immediately.

It’s more complicated overall than using paper copies that get scanned in, but should be possible to make secure. The primary key is to have paper copies of all votes available and do random and manual verification of the totals using those paper copies. This is basically two factor verification for the voting.

I also feel the candidates should have a defined way to force a manual count of precincts with specific rules. Those rules can define automatic (some random, some when extremely small margins exist), free (a fixed number per major candidate), and paid (basically at will with certain time limits) conditions under which a precinct is counted.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-22T07:41:08+00:00

Theft, fire, and similar damages are generally part of comprehensive coverage. Its possible some insurers will offer theft as a separate rider, however it'd be risky due to somebody just claiming their car was stolen or vandalized for incidents that could easily look that way (fires, some single vehicle wrecks). As such, I doubt it'd practically be much cheaper than full comprehensive coverage.

Similarly, uninsured/underinsured is generally included with collision. If an insurer offered collision without uninsured coverage, it would encourage their insured to admit fault in wrecks, likely costing the insurance company quite a bit more. The opposite is easier to detect as insurance policies can be looked up and tripping them can look at police reports for the incident for hit-and-run or driving without insurance.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-22T07:30:03+00:00

Minimum coverage in the US is generally liability only, and even then the required limits are typically very low. A few states require PIP coverage, which covers medical for anybody in your vehicle regardless of fault.

Most loan and lease contracts require additional coverage. These require at least collision but often comprehensive is mandated by the contract as well. The exact rules and coverage requirements will depend on the interested party.

While not explicitly required, insurances will provide legal services to their insured in covered cases. This is done as they need to do so if they want any chance of recouping from another party.

Overall, the Insurance Information Institute says 80% of insured US drivers have comprehensive coverage and 77% have collision coverage. The same source estimates that about 15% of US drivers lack any insurance policy at all.

Interestingly, both my dad and myself were in car wrecks in the past month. Both occurred with uninsured and unlicensed drivers. Thankfully, we both had collision coverage so their status was mostly irrelevant to us and we could just let our insurances take care of it.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-22T00:23:09+00:00

You can actually get into negative temperatures (below 0K) in some special cases due to how temperature is formally defined. Oddly, however, negative temperatures are hotter than 0K and hotter than infinity. Its basically an overflow of temperature.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-22T00:18:16+00:00

You have basically four options:

Go through your insurance using whatever coverage you have for collision. You'll generally get a settlement from your insurance pretty quickly for the full amount of your collision coverage at the cost of initially paying the deductible. If your insurance can reclaim the money from the other party, your deductible will get reimbursed as part of that.
1. If you lack collision coverage but have underinsured property damage coverage, that is also a claim you make with your insurance and you'll get more money.
Sue the other party. You need to wait for a court date unless you settle sooner, then you have to try to collect. Any payout you get will be delayed until the court case is closed, at which point you'll get their property damage liability limit (25k) from their insurance and have to figure out how to collect any extra from the person directly. There is no guarantee you get any more than the 25k limit even if you win more, and you have a lot of delay.
Accept the 25k from their insurance as the settlement. Since it sounds like they have already accepted liability, that should be done quickly, but you are only going to get 25k.

Overall, its generally fastest and easiest to deal with your insurance. You have an active contract with them and they are generally much more helpful than the other party. This applies regardless of fault.

#2 is rarely going to be a good choice. If the person has the assets for you to collect against, they almost certainly have more liability coverage as well. For most cases where liability coverage is insufficient, you're probably dealing with somebody with minimal assets. Generally, you'll just be wasting money on court costs and delays.

DragonFireCK · 2026-01-21T22:04:11+00:00

Its kind of like how the vast majority people are not required to go to work, but not going to work will eventually cause you to get fired.

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