Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 47 Posts
  • 2.22K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•Trump Administration proposes $1.5T military budget, an increase of nearly $500B from last yearEnglish
    41·
    3 days ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump-class_battleship

    In a press conference in December 2025, U.S. president Donald Trump announced a United States Navy guided-missile warship, to be called the Trump-class battleship.[5][6][7][4] The class is also known as BBG(X)[a] in some Navy documents,[1] and is intended to initially consist of the lead ship USS Defiant (BBG-1) and an as-yet unnamed other vessel. If and when commissioned, the class is envisioned as adding a nuclear-capable cruise missile option to the U.S. Navy surface fleet.[8]

    The Trump administration intends to revitalize shipbuilding in the United States alongside the construction of the Trump-class. Analysts have expressed skepticism about the Trump-class battleship, citing its lack of funding, unprecedented design, and high development costs. Its classification as a battleship is debated, as it lacks the heavy armor and large-caliber guns typical of historical battleships. The naming of the class after an incumbent president has also broken traditional conventions.

    The U.S. Navy has not had a battleship in commission since the retirement of the last Iowa-class battleship USS Missouri in 1992.[9] There have been no plans for new ones since the cancellation of the Montana class in 1943.[10]

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/USS_Defiant_BBG-1_graphic_1.jpg

    It’s not just a battleship with guns, it’s a battleship with pre-dreadnought-style armament, a secondary non-centerfire battery, in 2026.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-dreadnought_battleship

    These battleships were abruptly made obsolete by the arrival of HMS Dreadnought in 1906. Dreadnought followed the trend in battleship design to heavier, longer-ranged guns by adopting an “all-big-gun” armament scheme of ten 12-inch guns.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•The Feds Say Cutting Fuel With Ethanol Will Bring Down Gas Prices. We're Not Buying ItEnglish
    15·
    4 days ago

    Probably not. It will be a subsidy to corn farmers, artificially increase corn prices. Farmers have generally not been having a great time of it under Trump administration policies, so they’ll probably be happy about that. Corn consumers, maybe not so much.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-iran-war-farm-crisis-rcna266283

    The double whammy is hitting farmers just as they head into the spring planting season.

    “This is that perfect storm where everything comes together and hammers the farmer,” said Mueller, who also serves as the president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association.

    Mueller said his fertilizer supplier was selling a nitrogen fertilizer he needs for $795 per ton on Feb. 22, a few days before the war started. At the end of March, it was $990, Mueller said, a nearly $200 jump in just a few weeks.

    Meanwhile, the price he’s paying for diesel has jumped, too. Diesel is now averaging $5.51 nationwide, up from $3.76 right before the war, according to AAA.

    Mueller said he got most of the fertilizer he needs for spring before the war — but had to buy some at the higher prices. He’s holding off on purchasing the additional fertilizer he needs for summer, hoping prices will come down.

    President Donald Trump’s tariffs have also added to the cost of goods that farmers import from overseas — and frustrated many of the foreign buyers of America’s agricultural products.

    “Our government made our life more difficult by walking away from trade deals or instituting tariffs or just basically making our customers angry — our customers being other nations and companies in other nations,” said Mueller.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•Pam Bondi ousted as attorney general, source says | CNN PoliticsEnglish
    91·
    4 days ago

    In 2026, the S&P 500 is really a better metric of US large-cap performance than the Dow Jones.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_Jones_Industrial_Average

    It is price-weighted, unlike other common indices such as the Nasdaq Composite or S&P 500, which use market capitalization.[4][5] The primary pitfall of this approach is that a stock’s price—not the size of the company—determines its relative importance in the index.

    The Dow Jones index dates to before we had computers, and because it doesn’t care about market capitalization, it’s quick to compute by hand — you can just get the average of 30 numbers.

    But…that also means that it doesn’t do a fantastic job of reflecting the relative impact of each of those individual companies in the index.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•Trump delivers jaw-dropping and slurred Iran address that offers no end in sight to unpopular warEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/edgarsten/2026/04/02/high-gas-prices-boosting-interest-in-evs-but-will-sales-follow/

    The rise in gasoline prices due to the effects of the war in the Middle East is sparking increased interest among consumers in electrified vehicles, according to new data released this week by car shopping site CarGurus.com.

    But that interest isn’t likely to pay the dividend of a sustained spike in sales of battery electric cars, trucks or SUVs if the war ends soon and gas prices recede.

    "It’s kind of described as kind of a sugar rush,” observed Kevin Roberts, director of economic and market intelligence for CarGurus, in an interview. “Consumers are highly interested in fuel efficient vehicles when gas prices are going up or at a certain elevated point. Historically, we’ve seen that as soon as gas prices start to come down, consumers tend to go back to what they like previously, which tends to be large, large SUVs and pickup trucks.”

    That view echoes comments from Cox Automotive executive analyst Erin Keating who declared during a webcast March 25, “the one genie that often goes back in the bottle is gas prices. If tensions de-escalate tomorrow and gas stabilizes at, say, $2.80, the urgency to switch power trains fades quickly. This isn’t a permanent shift in consumer preference, yet. It’s a conditional response to conditions that may or may not persist.”

    Meanwhile, in Washington:

    Trump delivers jaw-dropping and slurred Iran address that offers no end in sight to unpopular war

    I think that the real problem for Trump is going to be getting an AUMF from Congress, but if we assume that the conflict does manage to continue…

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@lemmy.world•Ubuntu Linux raises minimum system memory requirements by 50% — requirements bumped to 6GB of RAM, previously raised from 1GB to 4GB in 2018English
    21·
    4 days ago

    I mean, it’s probably a good idea to have them higher, given that if someone wants to use it with some typical out-of-the-box desktop settings, that’s not unreasonable, but while I haven’t looked at the Ubuntu installer for a while, I strongly suspect that it permits you to do a minimal install, and that all the software in the Debian family is also there, so you can do a lightweight desktop based on Ubuntu.

    My current desktop environment has sway, blueman-applet, waybar, and swaync-client running. I’m sure that you could replicate the same thing on an Ubuntu box. Sway is the big one there, at an RSS of 189MB (mostly 148MB of which is shared, probably essentially all use of shared libraries). That’s the basic “desktop graphical environment” memory cost.

    I use foot as a terminal (not in daemon mode, which would shrink memory further, though be less-amenable to use of multiple cores). That presently has 40 MB RSS, 33 of which are shared. It’s running tmux, at 16MB RSS, 4 of which are shared. GNU screen, which I’ve also used and could get by on, would be lighter, but it has an annoying patch that causes it to take a bit before terminating.

    Almost the only other graphical app I ever have active is Firefox, which is presently at an RSS of 887.1, of which 315MB is shared. That can change, based on what Firefox has open, but I think that use of a web browser is pretty much the norm everwhere, and if anything, the Firefox family is probably on the lighter side in 2026 compared to the main alternative of the Chrome family.

    I’m pretty sure that one could run that same setup pretty comfortably on a computer from the late 1990s, especially if you have SSD swap available to handle any spikes in memory usage. Firefox would feel sluggish, but if you’re talking memory usage…shrugs I’ve used an i3/Xorg-based variant of that on an eeePC that had 2GB of memory that I used mostly as a web-browser plus terminal thin client to a “real machine” to see if I could, did that for an extended period of time. Browser could feel sluggish on some websites, but other than that…shrugs.

    Now, if you want to be, I don’t know, playing some big 3D video game, then that is going to crank up the requirements on hardware. But that’s going to be imposed by the game. It’s not overhead from your basic graphical environment.

    I’d also be pretty confident that you could replicate that setup using the same packages on any Debian-family system, and probably on pretty much any major Linux distro with a bit of tweaking to the installed packages.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•Humiliated Trump Storms Out of Catastrophic SCOTUS HearingEnglish
    154·
    5 days ago

    And Chief Justice John Roberts, another conservative on the bench, also had something of a mic-drop moment when Sauer tried to make the point that “we’re in a new world where eight billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S citizen.”

    Roberts replied: “It’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution.”

    So, Roberts probably isn’t going to make this argument, and I think that it is very unlikely that SCOTUS would rule that birthright citizenship isn’t a thing — there’s a lot of case law behind it being a thing — but there are a number of methods in constitutional law in which one can interpret the Constitution, and some of them do permit for an increased degree to which SCOTUS should try to actively adapt to changes in the world. You have textualism, originalism…let me go looking for a list, since I can’t rattle off all of them from memory.

    searches

    https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45129

    When exercising its power to review the constitutionality of governmental action, the Supreme Court has relied on certain “methods” or “modes” of interpretation—that is, ways of figuring out a particular meaning of a provision within the Constitution. This report broadly describes the most common modes of constitutional interpretation; discusses examples of Supreme Court decisions that demonstrate the application of these methods; and provides a general overview of the various arguments in support of, and in opposition to, the use of such methods of constitutional interpretation.

    • Textualism. Textualism is a mode of interpretation that focuses on the plain meaning of the text of a legal document. Textualism usually emphasizes how the terms in the Constitution would be understood by people at the time they were ratified, as well as the context in which those terms appear. Textualists usually believe there is an objective meaning of the text, and they do not typically inquire into questions regarding the intent of the drafters, adopters, or ratifiers of the Constitution and its amendments when deriving meaning from the text.
    • Original Meaning. Whereas textualist approaches to constitutional interpretation focus solely on the text of the document, originalist approaches consider the meaning of the Constitution as understood by at least some segment of the populace at the time of the Founding. Originalists generally agree that the Constitution’s text had an “objectively identifiable” or public meaning at the time of the Founding that has not changed over time, and the task of judges and Justices (and other responsible interpreters) is to construct this original meaning.
    • Judicial Precedent. The most commonly cited source of constitutional meaning is the Supreme Court’s prior decisions on questions of constitutional law. For most, if not all Justices, judicial precedent provides possible principles, rules, or standards to govern judicial decisions in future cases with arguably similar facts.
    • Pragmatism. Pragmatist approaches often involve the Court weighing or balancing the probable practical consequences of one interpretation of the Constitution against other interpretations. One flavor of pragmatism weighs the future costs and benefits of an interpretation to society or the political branches, selecting the interpretation that may lead to the perceived best outcome. Under another type of pragmatist approach, a court might consider the extent to which the judiciary could play a constructive role in deciding a question of constitutional law.
    • Moral Reasoning. This approach argues that certain moral concepts or ideals underlie some terms in the text of the Constitution (e.g., “equal protection” or “due process of law”), and that these concepts should inform judges’ interpretations of the Constitution.
    • National Identity (or “Ethos”). Judicial reasoning occasionally relies on the concept of a “national ethos,” which draws upon the distinct character and values of the American national identity and the nation’s institutions in order to elaborate on the Constitution’s meaning.
    • Structuralism. Another mode of constitutional interpretation draws inferences from the design of the Constitution: the relationships among the three branches of the federal government (commonly called separation of powers); the relationship between the federal and state governments (known as federalism); and the relationship between the government and the people.
    • Historical Practices. Prior decisions of the political branches, particularly their long-established, historical practices, are an important source of constitutional meaning. Courts have viewed historical practices as a source of the Constitution’s meaning in cases involving questions about the separation of powers, federalism, and individual rights, particularly when the text provides no clear answer.

    Justices tend to be viewed as individually favoring some methods over others. There are justices that tend to favor greater use of pragmatism in interpreting the Constitution, and a pragmatist might be more willing to interpret law differently in light of changes in the surrounding environment. I’m pretty sure that Roberts isn’t considered to be a pragmatist, though. I don’t really like the portrayal in the media of some justices as “conservative” and others “liberal” — I think that that this is misleading and presents a view of their actions that is over-politicized relative to the reality — but it’s generally the ones that are called “liberal” that are pragmatists.

    searches

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Roberts

    During his confirmation hearings, Roberts said he did not have a comprehensive jurisprudential philosophy and did “not think beginning with an all-encompassing approach to constitutional interpretation is the best way to faithfully construe the document.”[91][92] Roberts compared judges to baseball umpires: “[I]t’s my job to call balls and strikes, and not to pitch or bat.”

    Yeah, that’s not a pragmatist approach.

    searches

    Breyer — now retired — was apparently considered to be more of a pragmatist.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Breyer

    Breyer is known for his pragmatic approach to legal interpretation, which emphasizes practical consequences and the purpose of legislation. Cass Sunstein described this outlook as one that “will tend to make the law more sensible” and praised Breyer’s critiques of originalism as “powerful and convincing”.

    And here’s an article by Breyer specifically stating that he tended towards using pragmatism:

    https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-138/pragmatism-or-textualism/

    Pragmatism or Textualism

    I have not tried, in either Reading the Constitution or this Commentary, to describe advantages and disadvantages of different interpretive methods in theory: many scholars have already done so.30 Rather, I have tried to draw upon my own experience as a judge and a Justice, using illustrative examples (particularly those where traditionalists and textualists likely disagree). I hope that by doing so, and, in particular, by explaining why in a particular case I disagree with the textualist approach, I can explain why, in my view, textualism will not work. It cannot keep its promises. To the contrary, textualism threatens to make it far more difficult for law to work well for Americans and for the Constitution to keep its own promises of crafting a workable governmental system, protecting democracy, and safeguarding basic human rights.

    I might add that Justice Scalia and I used to debate the virtues of these different approaches, typically before student audiences. The audience would come away believing we were good friends — which we were. They might also remember what I thought was at the heart of the debate. I would say law must adapt. After all, “George Washington did not know about the internet.” Justice Scalia would reply, “I knew that.” Then he would remind me of the two campers, one of whom sees the other putting on running shoes. “Where are you going?”, he asks. “A bear’s in the camp,” the other responds. “You can’t outrun a bear,” says the first person. “Yes,” says the second, “but I can outrun you.” So too, Justice Scalia would argue, textualism and originalism did not need to be perfect; they just needed to be superior to the alternatives. And my system, he would say, was so complicated that only I could use it. I would reply that his system risked producing a Constitution (and laws) that no one would want. Who was right? I hope that this Commentary, alongside my book, will help convince some that a more holistic approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation points the way to a better interpretive path.

    But point is, the argument that the Executive was making there really relied on justices being willing to buy into more of a pragmatist interpretation of the Constitution, and I don’t think that that’s likely going to do terribly well with Roberts.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoNews@lemmy.world•TikTok Is Designed to Get Users HookedEnglish
    163·
    5 days ago

    Over that stunningly short amount of time viewing and swiping, the algorithm is able to direct hyper-personalized content to viewers.

    I mean, that’s…not really a negative. You could argue that the content is largely fluff (which I think it is), or maybe that material that appeals to a user isn’t what would help them the most or any number of other things, but being able to find and provide content that is a function of a user’s interests is normally something that one would consider desirable. I’d rather do less scrolling past things that I’m not interested in viewing.