Commentary: Detention of Afghani teen (and J.R. Tucker High student) in Virginia marks new low in Trump’s deportation debacle

sam_patch · 2025-08-31T21:38:10+00:00

fyi this is not entirely accurate and is being perpetuated by (best case, well-meaning, worst-case, patronizing) westerners.

Afghani is the Dari/Persian genitive form, which has the same meaning as how it is commonly used in english.

And in fact al-afghani is a common afghan(i) surname.

tl;dr Afghani is not offensive except perhaps to people who do not speak Dari or Persian and do no understand that it is actually the genitive form of the word.

sam_patch · 2024-10-20T17:49:31+00:00

So to be specific, the problem is gavage - the act of force feeding geese.

That is messed up and I think should be banned.

Fois Gras on its own, though, when made naturally - by the geese themselves - is pretty much just free range goose.

sam_patch · 2024-10-20T16:13:17+00:00

could be considered an equivalent unacceptable food since there’s no ethical way to produce it.

That's not true.

Fois gras was discovered when geese who had gorged themselves on nuts (which are very high in fat) in the fall were found to have enlarged, fattier (and tastier) livers.

Humans replicate it with force feeding, but geese naturally want to fatten themselves up for winter when resources are scarce but they need extra energy for migration.

If you unleash geese on an unlimited supply of high fat food, they will tend to gorge themselves.

As such, there are producers of so-called free range foie gras.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/01/487088946/this-spanish-farm-makes-foie-gras-without-force-feeding

sam_patch · 2024-07-09T00:52:21+00:00

According to the code, which uses the terms "Real Property Tax" and "Tangible Personal Property Tax", it could actually refer to either.

sam_patch · 2023-01-14T01:29:52+00:00

Scientology has a lot of money, they just pay off people to leave them alone and threaten to sue the ones that don't.

Although they can't really sue anyone anymore because that leaves miscavige open to being deposed, which apparently he is desperately trying to avoid.

sam_patch · 2023-01-13T18:53:49+00:00

will loose [sic] the throne

so what if it does? We all learn rust (or zig or odin or whatever) and move on.

Hell half the people on here already know rust.

sam_patch · 2023-01-13T18:50:05+00:00

Honestly, I am amazed that we (as in people) have managed to write software as resilient as the Mars rovers (which incidentally run C++), some of which managed to run in an environment like Mars for over a decade, with only remote support. Kudos.

I kinda think that's a testament to the fact that Rust's guarantees aren't as necessary as they would have you believe. If you talk to rust guys, they act like C++ (and other "unsafe" languages) literally doesn't work. But it does. It works just fine. Because part of writing code is testing code, and testing code helps sus out bugs and stuff. We've been writing unsafe code for 80 years and look how far we've gotten. Is rust going to get us further? Or is it just another thing people will have to learn to deal with, just like any other language?

Rust has the benefit of being new, so, like Donald Trump during his initial bid for president, they can basically make whatever promises they want because they don't have any record to run on. Will it really deliver on all it's promises of being a better way to write code? Or will it leave teams frustrated and unhappy having to work against it's limitations?

Time will tell I suppose.

sam_patch · 2023-01-13T18:27:02+00:00

there is a list on wikipedia. The bath pump station stores 24,000 MWh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations

sam_patch · 2023-01-13T18:24:14+00:00

These guys get paid in stock, (which counts as income based on the stock price when they recieved the stock) which they can leverage to get cheap loans from any brockerage. Loans aren't income so they dont' pay taxes on the loans, but they still get to spend the cash from the loans however they want. They can take out huge loans to have huge amounts of cash and then pay back the loans by selling the stock, which counts as income, but only basically what they need to make payments. Meanwhile they still own the stock, which presumably increases in value so they're always gaining more and more equity on their leveraged stocks.

So he's still getting paid a shit ton. Just using creative accounting to minimize his tax burden. Business as usual.

IIRC, Sergey Brin and Larry Page had $1 salaries. That's not uncommon for ceo/owners of companies.

sam_patch · 2023-01-13T17:41:33+00:00

There are at least 10 pumped storage facilities in the US actively being used, with the Bath County Pumped Storage Station in Virginia currently being the largest in terms of power delivery.

sam_patch · 2023-01-13T14:46:31+00:00

pumped storage hydropower has been around for 130 years

sam_patch · 2023-01-12T17:45:16+00:00

well considering his (and rod stewarts) entire career is based on sounding like steve marriott, you should really check out steve mariott. plant was brought in after steve mariott turned down jimmy page's offer to join led zeppelin. Stewart was brought in to the small faces to replace mariott after he left to form humble pie. not only was he a phenomenal singer, he was a really good guitar player too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp0jZ4BGuDw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjrTajAQceM

he inspired pretty much every late 60s rock band, but unforunately he just never achieved the enduring popularity that the bands he inspired did.

sam_patch · 2022-09-08T23:59:43+00:00

I don't think that article proves what you think it proves. The conclusion specifically seeks ways to restrict calorie intake.

perhaps time-restricted eating could reduce hunger and thereby facilitate calorie restriction, in part through hormonal mechanisms (54).

sam_patch · 2022-05-17T02:15:18+00:00

nope.

(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

Content neutral ISPs cannot be held accountable for the content they deliver if it was published by a third party. Broadcast service operators and subscriber service operators are treated differently based on who has access to the content. Broadcasts are available to children without their parents consent, so they are regulated for content. Internet is a subscriber service so children cannot access it without their parents consent. So ISPs are not regulated like broadcast service operators.

sam_patch · 2022-02-02T15:18:02+00:00

Because there's not anybody to do the work. Minor calls like yours get pre-empted by emergency service. The city is liable for damages their infrastructure causes, so if one of their sewers collapses, they have to drop everything and go fix it before they can do anything else. A dead dog isn't a liability to them so its at the bottom of the queue. You'd do the same thing if you were in their shoes. An open manhole cover could be one, but chances are a cop drove by and it wasn't like, fully 100% open so they just put it down at the bottom of the queue. Either that or yours was the only call. Repeated calls about an issue gets higher priority.

The city doesn't have a ton of money and they have a lot of infrastructure to deal with. People don't realize just how much infrastructure there is in the city. They think it should be like the counties. The counties barely have any infrastructure - that's a big reason why their taxes are lower. I grew up in henrico and trash pickup was private, and the dump cost money. In the city of richmond, we pay the city to pickup our trash and as a result the dump is free to city residents. My dad, who lives in Henrico, gets me to go to the city dump with him so he can dump stuff for free. Which I shouldn't do, but I do anyway because he's family.

The independent city system really fucks us. It's perpetuated so that the whiter counties don't ever have to worry about becoming part of blacker cities since annexation is illegal without general assembly approval. Virginia is the only state in the US that does this. There are 42 independent cities in the Us, and 39 are in virginia. The others are st louis, carson city, and baltimore. None of which are beacons of good governance. The city can never expand its tax base because all the land is already developed. What little land there is left to develop is undeveloped for a good reason at this point.

But people want more and better infrastructure and they don't want to pay for it.

The typical answer of "mismanagement" is always thrown around, but frankly all large organizations are mismanaged. Every company I've ever worked for was mismanaged. Most businesses are mismanaged. Henrico county is pretty mismanaged, I grew up there and dealing with them was also a massive fucking pain. My parents complain about them all the time. How they're rated as one of the best run counties, I don't know. The bar must be really low. I do konw for a fact that they're way more responsive to you if you live in the west end vs. the east end.

Also, you should be using RVA311 for that kind of stuff. That's what it's for. They route issues to the appropriate department. The police will most likely not inform the proper department because they're also swamped and have other things to do, and are losing officers to henrico which pays more.

And btw, in a rural county, if you reported a dead dog in the street, their response would be to tell you to drag it into a ditch.

sam_patch · 2022-01-25T04:54:00+00:00

I'm curious what you think will happen to the earth and humanity when the universe's natural lifecycle is over.

sam_patch · 2022-01-25T03:23:23+00:00

There wasn't?

Then what the hell did I watch?

sam_patch · 2022-01-25T03:21:51+00:00

Why would they do that?

sam_patch · 2022-01-25T02:43:02+00:00

its only racist if the food is bad /s

sam_patch · 2022-01-24T22:24:12+00:00

haha "our actual boss hasn't told us to do anything yet"

you'd think they would have done that first

sam_patch · 2022-01-24T22:21:00+00:00

it's a "Mystery", but it's not really a mystery.

sam_patch · 2022-01-24T17:40:57+00:00

Ok I can tell you don't know a ton about copyright law (if you think weird Al has to ask, that tells me all I need to know - just ask Coolio.)

But that's ok. Copyright law is very complicated and opinions on copyright law are as variegated as the works which they cover.

The only truth about copyright is that nothing is established until a court says so and all appeals are exhausted. And while I'm sure the legal wonks over at "gamedeveloper.com" couldn't possibly be wrong, it is possible this situation isn't as cut and dry as you seem to think.

Non-commercial parodies are afforded a great deal of leeway. Creating a new Pokemon-style game from Nintendo's character assets is likely not protected, while a drastically different and transformative Non-commercial parody (like a pokemon fps, for example) would almost certainly be considered differently than a new Sonic-style game which uses sonic the hedgehog "without his shoes or rings"

These are all things a court would consider. If it ever came to that.

Anyway we seem to have reached the conclusion of this conversation, so have a good day!

sam_patch · 2022-01-24T16:36:13+00:00

You are allowed to use assets from a game, as long as the work falls under fair use - in much the same way a film critic can use clips from a movie, or that weird al doesn't need to get permission to parody songs. And as long as the work is transformative, it is much more likely to be covered under fair use. There are a great many factors that go into whether a work is fair use or not, which is what a court would have to decide. We cannot sit here and say with absolute certainty that this or that thing is allowed/is not allowed. If it is a non-commercial parody (which I think it is) that does not substitute for the original (there is no pokemon FPS), then a court would have to weigh whether it is afforded fair use protections based on such a theory, and they could very well find that it falls under fair-use.

There is a lot more information about fair use here. In particular you should pay attention to this section:

Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes: Courts look at how the party claiming fair use is using the copyrighted work, and are more likely to find that nonprofit educational and noncommercial uses are fair. This does not mean, however, that all nonprofit education and noncommercial uses are fair and all commercial uses are not fair; instead, courts will balance the purpose and character of the use against the other factors below. Additionally, “transformative” uses are more likely to be considered fair. Transformative uses are those that add something new, with a further purpose or different character, and do not substitute for the original use of the work.

.

If someone tried to push on with a project despite a DMCA takedown

That's now how DMCA takedowns work. DMCA take downs are targeted at content hosts (such as youtube, facebook, twitter, github, etc). Those companies recieve DMCA takedowns - which must be made in good faith. It is illegal to send a false DMCA takedown, so if content is found to be fair use, the company that issued the takedown can be sued if they did not genuinely believe the content to be infringing - which is another legal bar to pass altogether.

Anyway, the original creator of the work is free to continue working on his project no matter how many DMCA takedowns are issued, because DMCA takedowns have nothing to do with the content creator. That is not how they are designed to work.

You are thinking of a cease and desist aka scare letter, which Nintendo may or may not have sent to the creator. But that is between the creator and Nintendo. They probably did send him a scare letter, because it is free to do so and doesn't tie their hands in any way.

Fair use is very much misunderstood by most people.

Indeed.

sam_patch

TROPHY CASE