2022-11-07

> suitcase full of cash and that it might impress some college coed to fuck

I think the sex in that story is a red herring. If you have a suitcase full of 700 grand you don't need to impressive anyone to have sex. If you have a bunch of illicit bitcoins converting that into cash also makes sense without bringing sex into it. Money makes sense as a motive.

> What does your assessment as to what's reasonable have to do with what Jack Teixeira thought was a good idea?

A crime like this needs a motive.

> this guy isn't a spook/source for any foreign government

We're on the same page. What I'm saying is if this guy was a spook the story would start to make sense. But it doesn't look like he is.

> what does his name have to do with it?

I'll go out on a limb and say the average person who's last name is Putin has more loyalty to the Russian government than someone who's last name is Teixeira.

> Actual spies [...] didn't have "russian" names

It's funny. In a parallel thread I'm being accused of thinking Cold War spy stories are real, and here's two men whose entire Wikipedia articles read like spy thrillers.

I'm not checking if this guy is a spy, just that some sort of evidence of Russian sympathies would make this all easier to swallow.

Your link is a about a bitcoin case, so unless I missed something this guy wasn't doing it for money (I don't condone it, but money is a reasonable motive for committing a crime).

And I said based on his last name he doesn't appear to be ethnically Russian. Why are you going on about foreign nationals?

Name the most nonsensical camp b-rated Bollywood spy thriller you've ever seen, one where actors land on their feet after getting blown 50 feet into the air. It still makes more sense than this.

This story just doesn't compute with me. A young guy (21) seemingly had access to all this information, and shared it despite being Portuguese (based on his last name) so seemingly not ethnically tied to Russia, shared it openly on Discord with his gaming club, a full document dump literally hundreds of pages not just screenshots or summaries, but not before faking some of the information, coordinated by a group that has members in Ukraine so seemingly they don't love Russia, the NYT knows more than Biden simply by having honed in internet stalking tactics, everyone and his Mom gave media interviews on request, and the one picture the media could find of him he's standing in the shadows like Batman.

> An attorney for Agrawal, Gadde, and Segal provided Twitter an invoice for legal expenses "which reasonably evidence that Plaintiffs have incurred Expenses in excess of $1 million, all of which is required to be advanced to Plaintiffs," the lawsuit filed today said.

The bylaws impose way way more requirements to getting paid than Ars is letting on. The expense has to be "reasonably incurred" (not just reasonable evidence that it was incurred), the plaintiffs need to have "acted in good faith", "be in or not opposed to the best interests of the corporation", and had "no reasonable cause to believe such person's conduct was unlawful" and payment "may be so paid upon such terms and conditions, if any, as the corporation deems appropriate".

A lot of our well-evidenced scientific ideas today would've been practically impossible to prove at some point in history. I think people forget that all hypotheses are nothing more than thoughtful just-so stories when they're first stated.

It's interesting that we have such different experiences. I'm on a small instance that's mostly insular. I have a good experience anytime I'm looking at local feeds, but anytime I look at the global feed or search outside the instance the results are very low quality. I follow people outside my instance, but never ones I've discovered through Mastadon.

Mastadon depends a lot on what instance you're on. You're community is primarily your instance and non-instance users are secondary (discovery is bad outside the instance). Unlike Twitter you have to be intentional about your community.

I've been on Mastadon since before Musk said anything about buying Twitter. I never viewed it as a Twitter replacement, but I never spent much time on Twitter to begin with.

I think a lot of people came to Mastadon to look for "Twitter but not Twitter". That's never going to exist. Not in decentralized form, not otherwise.

Even though that help page contradicts their decision to label it as state-affiliated media, it does not change the fact that NPR is state affiliated media. Maybe they just forgot to remove NPR as an example when they changed their designation?

This is not a very convincing defense. Most foreign outlets Twitter and US media label state-affiliated are not directly controlled by the state. It's more like, hey, this institution gets a lot of its funding from, or has close ties to, the state, so just watch out for that which is 100% true here.

NPR was literally created by an act of congress. You can't be honest and say in good faith it's not state affiliated.

My info is outdated then. I only know gun owners from the non-green states ont hat map. I didn't realize the castle doctrine was so widespread.

There's really not many cases where the risk/reward for a law-abiding citizen owning a gun is worth it, assuming the risk is protection from other people. Unless you're in a gun-friendly state and are 100% sure the gun never leaves the state you're risking massive legal action on both state and federal level for breaking the law.

The laws are ridiculously complicated because there's The Law, The Constitution, and The Courts which has to reconcile the laws with the constitution since they're usually not in agreement. In some states it's illegal to be the victim of a gun robbery if the robber uses your gun, sometimes unless you take some specific precautions.

And if you actually use your gun in the context of protecting yourself from someone else, the laws don't get any easier. In most states there's a very limited set of circumstances in which it's legal to kill someone, and it's not going to be obvious in the moment. Unless you work for the government, don't expect the jury to give you the benefit of the doubt. Hopefully you recorded everything.

After the fact it's often obvious that, yeah of course if this happens you need to fill out this specific form and notify this person and of course just telling the secretary doesn't count, and of course you should have a record of everything, etc etc etc. But nothing is obvious in the moment, and people have done some really stupid things because a cop told them, yeah that's good enough, because cops aren't trained in law and they're word doesn't overrule the law.