The President has a constitutional mandate to ensure that the laws be enforced faithfully. The story you linked suggests that the bill would allow states to sue on the grounds that the President is not fulfilling that obligation:

Defenders of the measure say the provisions are necessary after President Joe Biden and previous administrations refused to use all the tools given to the executive branch by Congress to crack down on crimes committed by migrants.

Is that actually the case? I have limited knowledge of the issue, and on that basis decline to state an opinion on the question. But assuming for the sake of argument that it is, what other remedies are available when the people of a particular state are suffering alleged harms as a result of the President not faithfully enforcing the law? Passing another law for the President to fail to enforce faithfully?

This is extremely dumb:

Notably, the new legal powers would only flow one way. States could sue the federal government for deciding to release an undocumented migrant in custody, but it does not authorize state lawsuits for when a person is allegedly being unlawfully detained.

Someone who is being unlawfully detained has standing to sue on his own behalf. There's no need for the state to sue.

A lot of this is just bad reporting exaggerating very weak findings from low-quality or ambiguous studies.

Science journalism is, on average, really bad.

Community notes? Sweet. I'm going have a field day community-noting the garbage my Sanders-simp friends post.

A while back, ChatGPT fabricated a story about Jonathan Turley committing sexual harassment. This wasn't a disputed case---it was just made up out of whole cloth. So to stop this from happening, OpenAI put in a block where it would refuse to answer questions mentioning Jonathan Turley, and would just bail mid-answer if it generated a response that mentioned him.

Out of curiosity, I tried to see if I could work around this, and found that if I a) misspelled his name in my question, and b) instructed it to refer to him only as JT in the response, it would work fine.

All of Season 8 was a bit of a letdown, but after the first episode, which they apparently fished out of Shaun King's toilet, it gets better.

On a related note, here's some nonsense from the most smugnorant man on the Xitter:

Americans have ample opportunity to get training. For the last decade, about 45% of US high school graduates have gone straight to a 4-year university. 45% of high school graduates is definitely more than have the aptitude for careers in STEM. Another 15-25% go to a two-year college, which admittedly is not the straightest path to a STEM career, but if you do well you can transfer, and save money. I'm not seeing any evidence that a significant share of students with the aptitude for STEM careers are being denied the opportunity to go to college.

There are also abundant resources for free learning on the Internet, and paid boot camps. I personally know some people who have transitioned into software engineering careers through these non-traditional routes.

Tech companies do train people who demonstrate that the have a good grasp of the fundamentals of software engineering but have no industry experience, such as new college graduates with degrees in computer science. What they don't generally do is pay people to learn software engineering from scratch on the company dime, partly because there's no reliable way to identify in advance who will actually get good at it, and partly because it's a major investment into someone who can leave for a company offering higher pay at any time.

We have a perfectly adequate tertiary education system. The idea that companies should pass actually over qualified candidates in favor of people who chose not to take advantage of the opportunities available to them, and just hope for the best, is ridiculous.

Steve Bannon goes woke and says we should cut off skilled immigration until Silicon Valley is 20% black and 20% Hispxnic.

I'm not sure whether he's a blank-slater or is just giving a benchmark he knows is impossible to meet.

Ah, Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter. That's it!

As far as I can tell, he's wrong here. It's not that the US doesn't produce lots of highly-skilled tech workers, but rather that a) there's a lot of demand for tech skills that are rare because the vast majority of people are incapable of or uninterested in developing them, and b) the US, while it produces more than its share of those workers, is far from having a monopoly on them.

We have lots of highly skilled tech workers, but it would be better to have even more, because a) it leads to more top tech companies being formed in the US instead of elsewhere, with the associated high-wage job creation, and b) it means more high-income taxpayers to help shoulder the burden of the freeloading enabled by the welfare state.

Would it suppress my wages as an American software engineer? Eh...maybe, maybe not. It's hard to say a priori how it would shake out---increased demand from agglomeration effects vs. increased supply---but really, it doesn't matter that much. Software engineers are paid really well, and we'd still be paid really well with a moderate pay cut. We don't need the government to protect us from competition. And it's not like we're not already competing with foreign software companies.

A lot of the complaints about H-1Bs are contradicting each other. I'm hearing that they're terrible engineers, and also that they're going to take our jobs. That they're undercutting us, and that they're paid too much. People say H-1B visas are bad because they give employers too much leverage over workers (for the record, you actually can change employers on H-1B; there's paperwork, but no lottery or quota), but they don't want to increase visas for skilled workers that aren't employer-specific. I'm starting to think that they just don't want more skilled immigration.

I swear, there's a subset of right-wingers who are so stupid that they've basically turned into left-wingers.

In that SungWon Cho video you linked in the Control review, what's that silly voice he's doing? I've heard a similar voice done in a few other contexts, but was there a particular comedian or character that originated or popularized it?

This is interesting:

https://jabberwocking.com/americans-have-not-lost-trust-in-the-media-republicans-have/

Democrats' trust in the media immediately shot up 25 points after the election of Donald Trump, when the media abandoned all pretense of objectivity and explicitly dedicated themselves to shilling for Democrats as hard as possible, and then fell back down about a year or two ago, when they acknowledged that maybe they'd gone overboard and started self-correcting.

Isn't there a law requiring back pay for furloughed federal government employees?

Section 1002, page 938: Exempts Members of Congress from having to enroll in Obamacare.

What does that mean? They have employer health insurance.

I hate to yuck your yum, but as much as the idea that that's intended to be read in a fawning tone may turn you on, there's no real basis for that interpretation. Michelle Goldberg used the same wording in a clearly hostile manner a while back:

Once Trump won, decent outcomes for the country were probably off the table. The institutions are unlikely to hold. Establishment Republicans cannot be counted on to protect us. The best we can hope for is that our new rulers will be stymied by incompetence, infighting and self-sabotage. In that respect, Gaetz may be just the man for the job.

Here's Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, throwing a tantrum because the Supreme Court decided to rule based on the Constitution rather than on Eugene Robinson's personal policy preferences:

This isn’t your country anymore. You are now governed by a secretive and unaccountable junta in long black robes, and there are going to be some changes around here.

Our de facto rulers are Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. usually joining in. Be sure to remember their names, because they are now large and in charge — and because they envision a United States far different from the nation we’re accustomed to.

I describe them with a term more commonly used for Latin American military regimes because, well, that’s what it feels like.

The term is also sometimes used neutrally to describe a government, but it's more often used sardonically, and it would be deeply weird for someone to unironically use the term the way you want Collinson to have used it here.

Here's a recent piece by the author of the screenshotted article which is clearly critical of Trump. Note that it was written on November 26, after the election had been decisively settled.

Sounds like she found god in prison

Still serving five million consecutive life sentences for the Great Flood, I assume.

They must have really botched his back surgery.

This raises the question of how a new polio vaccine can even be tested, given the rarity of the disease, and why it's needed, which leads to an interesting explanation:

The old polio vaccine used a weakened form of the virus which is shed in feces, and in communities with low vaccination rates and poor sanitation, this can actually help vaccinate people through the fecal-oral route: You drink some contaminated water or whatever, you get infected with the weakened virus, and now you're at least partially vaccinated.

The problem is that in communities where the vaccination rate is too low, the weakened virus can mutate into a more virulent form, known as circulating vaccine-derived poliovirus. The wild-type poliovirus has been eradicated in Africa, and cVDPV is the only remaining circulating form of the virus, so the new vaccine, which is more mutation-resistant, is needed to combat this.

Note that the situation with the old vaccine is still greatly preferable to the pre-vaccine situtation; there are only about a thousand cases per year documented in all of Africa.

I'd prefer that you not have an ideology which creates a conflict between the two.

What tpot?

Maybe it's just going over your head. Sub-replacement fertility in advanced economies is a real problem, especially in East Asia, where TFR is close to 1, meaning that each generation is about half the size of the last. And it's not only a problem within those countries, where an ever-shrinking labor force will have to bear a heavy tax burden to support an increasingly long-lived and politically powerful elderly population, but also for the world. Our deepest pools of human capital are all drying up at the same time.

It's not clear to me that the wide availability of cheap simulacra of sex and romance, by reducing men's motivation to get out there and try for the real thing, is a major causal factor in falling fertility rates, but it's not obviously not a tenable hypothesis.

"Look at that weirdo saying something that hasn't been endorsed by the New York Times, NPR, or (ugh) even the Atlantic" isn't the dunk you think it is.

Maybe he's mad that the health insurance company didn't push back hard enough on his doctor's request to approve a risky surgery that's often no better than physical therapy.

There are forms of homicide that are not intentional, but they're generally not classified as murder, AFAIK.

Is there a category of murder which is not intentional homicide? Like if you intentionally shoot someone but don't intend to kill him?

Sometimes I try to be charitable to leftists. It's not their fault they aren't very smart; why should I hold it against them? But they just keep reminding me who they are.

That jackass Nick Hanauer, famous for falsifying data in his economically illiterate Ted Talk about economics, and then throwing a fit when they didn't feature it in their curated collection of talks?