This reminds me of a trip to Guilin when I was an athletic 22-year-old. We'd booked a hotel on top of a mountain that was only reachable by hiking up a trail. At the trailhead, a five-foot-tall grandma offered to carry my luggage to the top. I thought it was funny — and a bit insulting — so I refused. About a quarter of the way up, I gave up and let her take it. She carried it all the way up without breaking a sweat. It was more a feat of endurance than pure strength, but still incredibly impressive.
A couple years ago, I did a 90 mile hike in Scotland, which was mostly flat. My pack weighed just at 20-25lb (light but not ultralight - a lot of water weight). The trail was MOSTLY flat, with a couple steep trails to bypass forestry work, and crest over some steep hill.
I'm a large man, at the time I was pushing 250lb on a 5'8" frame, but I found my flat land endurance was basically unlimited at walking pace. My uphill endurance was limited so short bursts, and I had to regularly stop for a breather.
Once on flat ground, again, 20+ miles a day no issues.
After the detours, and some one-off side trails to see something, and walking from the trail to a town for food and/or sleep, my entire trek was 125mi over 5 days. And when I got home, I weighed 255lb. I gained 5lb while hiking somehow.
All that to say, uphill endurance is no joke, and it is hard to train, even maxed on a treadmill if you live on flat ground. Stair climbing (or machine) is the only thing I can think of.
Related, it's wild what the porters on the Inca Trail carry. Both the weight and the pace they move. We'd get up and start hiking after breakfast, the porters pack up camp, start hiking 30-60 min after us, fly-by us mid-morning, and have a cooked lunch ready by the time we get to the lunch spot. Repeat again for dinner/night. The trail itself isn't technically challenging, just lots of elevation gain/loss each day and at a high enough altitude to make unacclimatized people feel pretty bad.
There are two notable differences between when the AGI-posters do it and when IRC-posters do it. AGI-posters extend their lowercase posting to what would normally be seen as more formal communication. They also tend to stick to using punctuation despite the lowercase. IRC posters usually keep it to informal communications, where it's a sign of casualness. That said, there is overlap, and it's of course not possible to instantly distinguish someone as a Sama devotee because of how they type; but it is clear that a lot of people in that bubble are intentionally adopting the style.
Me? I'd be very surprised if they can actually read encrypted messages (without pushing a malicious client update). The odds that no one at Meta would blow the whistle seem low, and a backdoor would likely be discovered by independent security researchers.
I'd be surprised as well. I know people who've worked on the WhatsApp apps specifically for years. It feels highly unlikely that they wouldn't have come across this backdoor and they wouldn't have mentioned it to me.
If there is such a back door, it would hardly follow it's widely known within the company. From the sparse reports on why Facebook/Meta has been caught doing this in the past, it's for favor trading and leverage at the highest levels.
It might be a mic issue but my wife, who is a native speaker, seems to get most characters wrong. I will try again later in a quieter place
to see if that helps.
“I’ll sell my car before it becomes an issue” - common statement I’ve heard.
It needs to be fixed, because aside from someone being left with the economic bag of disposing of the vehicle, it is actually an environmental issue to build these batteries.
Just not as bad of an issue as running ICE cars for the same period of time.
People tend not to think more than a certain amount of time away for some reason.
...the primary effect of which is that fewer than 4% of criminal cases go to trial, and our prison, parole, and probation systems are full of people who pled to crimes they did not commit, and poison trees of evidence are intentionally and ruthlessly planted without challenge or consideration by a jurist.
It unquestionably does - it turns out destroying your job prospects for life, removing a major contributor to a household for years, and destroying family relations in the process lends itself to continuing having strife in your life, or having strife when you previously had none
> The majority of cases don’t go to trial because the majority of cases are hopeless for the defendants.
...but are the lion's share of these hopeless on the basis of the evidence, combined with a fair process and a just, civically-informed legal framework?
A person who is searched pursuant to a prompted canine indication, and found to be in possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine has a "hopeless" case, but they have committed no offense to society that I can recognize, and their inclination to plea to a lesser charge means that the particulars of the search will never be heard by a jurist.
> Law-abiding citizens wouldn’t have a 50% recidivism rate.
This seems like a testable hypothesis, albeit only after a successful completion of the abolitionist movement. I'll bet that, in a society focused on restorative justice and no dependence on a slave economy dressed up as incarceration, that nobody will have a 50% recidivism rate.
> While it’s admirable to push back against the state, not all defendants earn our sympathy in their plight.
Agreed, of course. But there's no justice in taking even the worst in society forcing them to be laborers to make Starbucks packaging. Let's remove the incentive structure first, and decide how to distribute our sympathies second.
The estimated innocent population is around 9%. A far cry from the majority. This is just populist trash.
Now if you want to make a majority claim about those incarcerated being incarcerated for something which a rich person would go free, that’s something else
...of course not. But dramatically less chargeable conduct, dramatically more robust protections against search and seizure, and the complete removal of the slave labor incentive inherent in prisons might just remove it without further ado.
This is going to be hard to sell. "dramatically" sounds like >50%, and I assume not just old laws on the books that aren't in-forced. So you want to remove >50% of chargeable offenses? What else besides drugs?
Well running an investment firm into the ground is more legal than using deposited funds in an exchange to bail out an investment firm that is being run into the ground.
She didn't just run Alameda to the ground. She knew Alameda was using FTX customer funds, which makes her directly complicit. She got off easy because of her cooperation and guilty plea.
No. Alameda and FTX were the same company, in the end. Co-mingled, and no separate governance. Legally speaking, all of the inner circle people ran both companies, and they all knew about the crimes.
They = the people? Not precisely. Each of the perpetrators did certain things, agreed to certain things, and knew things at certain times. But I was responding to the notion in the parent that CE was just "running an investment firm" whereas SBF was running a company doing different stuff. It turned out to be all one co-mingled entity, contrary to how it was marketed. One company, and all of the main perpetrators knew things about both sides.
Honestly I wasn't sure what you meant by adding "legally speaking". It seemed to imply there was some legal ruling that both companies were the same. Cause otherwise imho there is no difference "they ran both companies" and "they ran both companies as a matter of law".
What? It's a bribe, he gains money. He doesn't care about pissing anyone off, he's (probably) not running for reelection, he cares about money, it's really that simple.
Besides the ~$1 million a head he's openly selling[0] pardons for?
Why wouldn't he pardon a white-collar felon fraudster? This president has pardoned dozens of those[1]—frauds who had no reason at all to be deserving of clemency, other than being incredibly rich. He's pardoned fraudsters who defrauded thousands of victims[2]. He's pardoned a fraudster convicted of fraud, who committed fraud again, and he pardoned them a second time[3]. There are no limits.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/politics/trump-david-g... ("Trump Frees Fraudster Just Days Into Seven-Year Prison Sentence / David Gentile had been found guilty for his role in what prosecutors described as a $1.6 billion scheme that defrauded thousands of investors.")
It is disappointing to me that people can look at the list of infamous people he has already pardoned, who have paid him, and then expect that he won't continue acting on trend, just because some shallow-book manipulable prediction market, which is primarily a money laundering tool for event fixers, tells us that it's "not likely".
I think that because of my own judgment, not because the market told me. Also, it seems unlikely that someone would burn money to manipulate this market as there's nothing to gain from it.
By the way, Trump literally said he won't pardon SBF[0]. It seems money is not the only factor he considers when handing out pardons.
Wha backlash? Trump pardoned a Honduran ex-president convicted of smuggling tons of drugs, right in the midst of using the military to bomb boats for unproven drug smuggling, and kidnapped Maduro presumably because of drugs too (or was it oil?). Zero repercussions except for futile anger from internet weirdos like me.
This administration seems to relish getting away with things that would destroy any other presidency.
The backlash was relatively mild because few of his supporters personally see themselves as victims of the Honduran ex-president. That's very different from SBF—almost everyone who invested in crypto at the time hates him, not to mention the actual FTX customers.
Everybody hates Trump, he's the least popular president ever.
Unless these crypto folks have massive money and are using it right now to pay Trump tk not pardon SBF, what would they do? What backlash could crypto do? It's not like he can unpardon Trump. Crypto just joins the long line of people who fell for it again and nothing happens.
What, is a Republican going to vote against Trump? Hah! Impeachment? What trouble could crypto cause for Trump? Even if they could cause trouble, Trump would just make up charges and send the DOJ after crypto.
Like most people, he probably understands the value of keeping a few friends and allies close, even if it's purely self-interest. At Trump's scale, some relationships are worth billions, so a bribe of a few million can be a poor trade-off if it risks burning a high-value relationship.
Sure some relationships might be worth it, but whose? Trump already got the votes, which is what let him avoid prosecution for insurrection, mishandling of classified documents, etc. etc.
What friend or relationship would he lose for pardoning SBF? It has to be a billionaire, because he respects billionaires, or it has to be somebody paying home more than SBF to keep SBF in jail. What billionaire would risk their relationship with Trump in order to express displeasure about pardoning SBF? Wha person would pay more than SBF to keep SBF imprisoned?
Again and again Trump burns people that supported him. There is zero loyalty, everything is purely transactional.
I'll give a concrete example. Suppose he were to pardon SBF. That would likely anger figures like CZ (Binance) and Brian Armstrong (Coinbase). In response, they could choose to delist Trump's shitcoin, which alone could wipe out hundreds of millions in market cap. Anyways, I guess we'll see who’s right in about three years.
Thanks for that concrete example! It's far more convincing. However I'm still not fully convinced, as Trump has greater leverage due to the ability to change tax and other crypto policy. He already gets what he needs by allowing bribes through Trump's coins, listing is not the primary purpose.
I appreciate you exchanging this information and your opinion.
Trump already got donor money and he's a lame duck. 'Pissing off crypto community' does not factor highly into his decision making processes. Pardoning him would probably help crypto go up.
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