IHeartBadCode

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.

— George "W. Winner Winner Halliburton's Dinner" Bush Jr.

Okay so there's an aspect of law that's really needs to be considered when we talk about this 3rd indictment. Motive. So Trump's lawyers are asking the public to simply look at the actions that were taken. Which are questionable, needs a judge to iron out, but not massively culpable for the particular crimes Trump is being indicted on.

But when we look at what the DA is submitting before the judge, we see Trump talking, having arguments about knowing that what they are doing is questionable, and still continuing those things to elicit a much larger plan of delaying the counting of votes. This is where the conspiracy sets in.

It isn't that the actions themselves warrant the greatest concern, it's the underlying motive Trump had for doing the things he did that moves it into potentially criminal actions.

Like filing a lawsuit isn't any kind of bad thing. But if you file a lawsuit knowing that you're just doing it to enact some other aspect outside of justice for a perceived wrong, that's a frivolous lawsuit or can be a violation of the False Claims Act. Say your former boyfriend or girlfriend accuses you of some crime because you broke up. Filing the lawsuit isn't wrong in of itself, but when you consider the background details for why this lawsuit exists, oh boy are you in trouble now.

And that's where we are at with Trump. His angry speech is just that, a speech, but when there's emails going around indicating that Trump needs to fire up the group so they'll go marching on the Capitol, and that during that invasion of the Capitol Trump will start calling key people to try and get different slates accepted to be counted. Well now all that combined, that's the problem. No one thing in isolation is some massive "Oh no", but all together and it begins to become clear that the entire point was to "convince by any means necessary" any hold outs to Trump's idea of how the election should progress. That is a violation 18 USC §§ 1512(c)2.

From Trump's lawyer:

What’s the unlawful means? There was an effort to get alternate electors, which is a protocol that was used in 1960 by John Kennedy. And it was a protocol that was constitutionally accepted

And the thing is, it isn't that he just tried that. It's that there is a stack of emails and text indicating that the people attempting to work with Trump to do that thing knew that they were doing something that wouldn't be accepted by Congress, were told by members of Congress that they wouldn't accept it, and that a "plan" to "convince them" that they should accept it was needed to get them to accept it. That's the massive difference. It isn't the action in isolation that's at issue, it is Trump's team indicating that they will need to, in broad terms, help convince members of Congress to accept that new slate. That's interference. If you've cannot accept the answer and then motivate yourself to do things to change that answer you've already gotten, that's interference. Just like you cannot just keep on, keeping on in a courtroom after a Judge has ruled. It's over with, you got your answer.

So yeah, there's an attempt by Trump's lawyers to grossly simplify the conspiracy their client is currently facing. This is a pretty age old tacit of being a lawyer. It's like those bad videos where people jump out of nowhere on purpose to be hit by a car, then attempt to sue the driver, and then they fail at their act. Yeah, you can simplify that as "oh well they're just trying to cross the street..." But it's the motive that drove them to do the thing they did, they were motivated to do something in the commission of highly questionable conduct for monetary gain. So maybe they we're able to successfully convince the insurance you hit them or you had a dashcam. So technically speaking, they didn't get away with it. But just because they didn't actively defraud your insurance does not mean they did not still commit a crime.

That's the really important aspect of these new charges. All of the actions in of themselves aren't gross violations of the law, but they are manifest of a something deeper that was being carried out to defraud the US Government and overturn an election. That deeper part is what this indictment points out.

Alright so it's a colony NOT on the surface, hence the floating. Now the guy is still an idiot but the idea he's pitching is hypothetically possible.

Oxygen is less dense than the Venusian atmosphere. So hypothetically speaking, one could fill a balloon with an O₂ and N₂ mixture that is slightly oxygen richer than here on Earth and the balloon would float above the vast majority of the Venusian atmosphere where all the acid rain and huge temperatures would be. Much like a Helium or Hydrogen balloon floats here on Earth because the gas is less dense than our atmosphere here.

So the idea is to make a balloon that is large enough to have people inside of it, because they can breath the lifting gas keeping the balloon afloat. The catch is, you aren't above ALL of the atmosphere and there's still a lot of caustic things that the balloon would have to account for, otherwise it'll slowly leak. We don't have a material that would withstand some of the things in the upper atmosphere of Venus. So the guy would literally have to invent a material that would be able to withstand the conditions or be self healing enough to deal with the conditions. Both are highly unlikely, not impossible but I sure as shit wouldn't trust him on being the inventor of such.

So yes, the surface is inhospitable. But floating a colony above the clouds is doable and something that's been investigated. At the 50km altitude of Venus, there's still enough atmosphere to provide protection from harmful sunlight. The atmosphere at 50km is such that a balloon at 1.03 atm pressure would not have explosive decompression in the event of a rip, providing folks enough time to get emergency O₂ and ideally fix the tear. So basically, if a tear in the balloon did happen, it would be a light breeze and not a sudden POP as the oxygen escaped. So if the balloon is really, really big, it could take hours before the CO₂ slowly seeping in offset enough O₂ to start dropping your colony into the clouds of acid. And at 50km altitude, gravity there would be about 0.9g. Additionally, Venus is much closer to Earth than Mars, but since it's closer to the sun, it's actually a bit harder to get to.

So right around 50km above Venus is pretty much the most Earth like we've discovered in the Solar System so far. There's just all this dizzying complexity to having a floating colony on Venus. And we don't have anywhere near the materials or support infrastructure to really support anyone going to Venus, especially untrained people. But yeah you can see some of the renders NASA has done for a Venus colony. Here's a page I found with one of the renders they've pitched.

The Narcissist's Prayer (by Dayna Craig)

That didn't happen. <[ They are here]
And if it did, it wasn't that bad. <[ They are here]
And if it was, that's not a big deal. <[ They are here]
And if it is, that's not my fault. <[ They are here]
And if it was, I didn't mean it. <[ They are here]
And if I did, you deserved it. <[ They are here]

FTFY

Jury nullification, the people see this law and know it is 100% ignorant.

As indicated in the article, United States v. Williams, 553 U.S. 285 (2008).

Free speech does not cover pandering an illegal act. If what you’re saying is eliciting an actual illegal act, that’s not covered by free speech.

Trump asked election officials to change an outcome of an election. That is asking someone to violate 52 USC § 10307. Asking some to violate United States Title Code is not protected speech.

SLPT: To save money, consider just dying instead.

US FTC's statement about Google and antitrust investigation back in 2013.

We nonetheless recognize that some of Google’s algorithm and design changes resulted
in the demotion of websites that could, collectively, be considered threats to Google’s search
business… On the other hand, these changes to Google’s search algorithm could reasonably be
viewed as improving the overall quality of Google’s search results because the first search page
now presented the user with a greater diversity of websites.

Rather, we conclude that Google’s display of its own content could plausibly be viewed as an improvement
in the overall quality of Google’s search product

Yeah. FTC is going to do jack-crap about the situation given the tools that they currently have. The FTC is on purpose weak, the US Congress has sought to weaken it over the last three decades. People can go leave a comment on the FTC's website, but don't forget, US citizens, to stop by the House and the Senate. And if you need some background, here and here.

Now all that said, this isn't posted to discourage, it's posted to get you focused on what hinders the FTC.

Something…Something…a hero. Something…Something…become the villain.

— Harvey Dent

Is aforementioned drink free for life too? Because there's this whiskey distillery just up the road from me and they make a black tea infused whiskey that I wouldn't mind.

Next hardware reset and automatic reorientation for Voyager 2 is October 15th. Yes the device automatically resets itself about four to five times a year. Communications are expected to be reestablished then.

So the thing is the case has four parts, three out of four are basically (and I quote from the filing):

[X/Twitter] not only rejects all claims made by the CCDH, but, through our own investigation, we have identified several ways in which the CCDH is actively working to prevent free expression.

Which pretty much the vast majority of the filing is this. Which is basically"Nuh-uh YOUR mama so fat!" So yeah, it's going to go nowhere. The inducing folks to break contract, etc. Yeah, there's next to nothing there. CCDH has tweets showing the very things they indicated and it's a semantic argument on what "flourished" may or may not mean to a hypothetical person who wants to buy ads on your network. Basically if you've got demonstrable garbage on your network, don't be surprised if someone points it out.

The fourth part does touch on something to which we don't have clear guidance on. And that is how CCDH accessed the site to obtain the data. Scraping a website is mostly free, unless you're doing it for the explicit purpose of profiting. However, CCDH is a non-profit so this is going to be an uphill thing for Musk.

Except in the case where the court decides to toss a curve-ball. See, the various US courts don't have any actual legal framework to work from for web scraping. Congress keeps kicking the can on the issue. And that's the thing that's got CCDH awake at night, a Judge literally can just invent their own rationale on why scraping is wrong or a protected right. It could literally go either way given a wild enough judge.

Anyway, the entire point is that no one should be using X or Twitter or whatever the fuck it is now.