> The defiant rapper testified Tuesday and said that he exercised free speech when he released music videos featuring images of Ohio deputies raiding his home, saying any suffering they claimed in their lawsuit was due to “their mistake.”
The deputies filed the civil lawsuit against Afroman in 2023, accusing him of defamation and invasion of privacy and saying they were needlessly harmed by music videos, most notably "Lemon Pound Cake," which included security camera footage taken in 2022, when they served a search warrant looking for drugs and evidence of a kidnapping at the performer's home.
These type of stories are typically attributed to anonymous sources. So it’s impossible for a reader to conclude anything about the sources’ own credibility. So they usually rely on the credibility of the reporter or media org who’s published about it.
The Information is also reporting on this, but paywalled. IMO The Information does solid reporting.
Editing to add some of the Information’s reporting:
> Speaking at a panel at Davos moderated by The Information CEO Jessica Lessin, Friar suggested that in the field of drug discovery, her company could, for instance, take a “license to the drug that is discovered” using OpenAI’s technology. In other words, OpenAI would take a profit-sharing stake in the financial upside its AI creates for customers.
> Friar is no doubt familiar with older AI drug discovery firms such as Recursion that struck deals with pharmaceutical firms to give them big bounties for successful drugs identified by their tech. There aren’t many, if any, examples of such successes yet, though.
> OpenAI isn’t the only firm eyeing this opportunity. Its rivals Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary focusing on using AI for drug discovery, have also held discussions with early-stage biotechnology startups about data licensing or partnerships.
When asked, “Do sanctions actually work (on Iran)?”, Bessent replied:
If you look at a speech I gave at the economic club of New York last March, I said that I believe the Iranian currency was on the verge of collapse, that if I were an Iranain citizen, I would take my money out.
President Trump ordered treasury and our OFAC division, (Office of Foreign Asset Control) to put maximum pressure on Iran, and it’s worked because in December, their economy collapsed, we saw a major bank go under, the central bank has started to print money, there is a dollar shortage, they are not able to get imports and this is why the people took to the streets.
If I blockade you in your house, is that failure to aid? Or something else? Sanctions occur via commission, not omission. They’re not a failure to render aid or to be maximally charitable. They’re active harm.
I am saying that sanctions are weapon of sorts and have worse effects than people realize, and you seem to be saying their effects are not as bad as those of kinetic weapons. Despite Lancet concluding their tolls are comparable.
> "great powers" are using economic integration as "weapons."
This is so true and I think economic sanctions should be recognized as the weapons they actually are.
Just a taste:
No Amazon, No Gmail: Trump Sanctions Upend the Lives of I.C.C. Judges
President Trump’s retaliation against top officials at the International Criminal Court has shut them out of American services and made even routine daily tasks a challenge.
https://archive.is/KflDP
Now consider the US has been doing this to entire countries for decades. Cuba, Venezuela, Iran. Forget Amazon, the inability to use the SWIFT banking system has all sorts of nasty consequences that get elided by a clinical sounding term.
From the Lancet:
Our findings showed a significant causal association between sanctions and increased mortality. We found the strongest effects for unilateral, economic, and US sanctions, whereas we found no statistical evidence of an effect for UN sanctions. Mortality effects ranged from 8·4 log points (95% CI 3·9–13·0) for children younger than 5 years to 2·4 log points (0·9–4·0) for individuals aged 60–80 years. We estimated that unilateral sanctions were associated with an annual toll of 564 258 deaths (95% CI 367 838–760 677), similar to the global mortality burden associated with armed conflict.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...
No Amazon, No Gmail: Trump Sanctions Upend the Lives of I.C.C. Judges
President Trump’s retaliation against top officials at the International Criminal Court has shut them out of American services and made even routine daily tasks a challenge.
> They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better.
How can I agree with this? Material conditions matter: whatever problem you have, being poorer will make it worse. Women have been earning less than men for decades, and most highly paid execs are men, not women.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-end...
I agree there are associations between effort and outcomes, and merit and outcomes, and integrity and outcomes. But timeframe is never guaranteed. The Beatitudes have not yet happened, the just have not yet inherited the earth, a casual glance at world leaders and recent current events will tell you that much!
IMO the questions you pose are not important at all, and not worth your energy. What practical difference does it make to you and her if it’s due to bad timing or something else? Some junior devs are being hired somewhere and you both should focus your energy on making sure she’s part of that number. Have you shaken all the trees in your network? Does she do side projects that can get her noticed? What about the MIT alum network? That’s what LinkedIn messages and X dms are for? What abt throwing wide the aperture of industry sectors and locations she considers? Is she going to all the meetups? What abt pursuing her own startup idea? I agree with someone else here: AI and YouTube (and X, tbh) make this the very best time to learn or build or promote anything that has ever existed.
I went through an identical experience as your daughter when I graduated in 2000. The only solution is perseverance.
As the parent IMO it’s your responsibility to help her dig deep, get resilience, find hope. It’s your household so why aren’t you celebrating Christmas?
And somehow there are no clarion calls from EU or elsewhere to seize Israel’s Euroclear central bank assets to cover it. As there are with Russia for Ukraine. Funny how that works.
From the ICJ doc you linked:
> In the Court’s view, at least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the Convention.
The doc establishes that “capable of falling within the provisions of the Convention” means “acts or measures which would be capable of killing or continuing to kill Palestinians, or causing or continuing to cause serious bodily or mental harm to Palestinians or deliberately inflicting on their group, or continuing to inflict on their group, conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. This is the definition of genocide.
So the court statement again but with a helpful substitution by me:
> In the Court’s view, at least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be [genocide].
So the LLM is correct the ICJ has not yet issued its final ruling and also the author is correct to say the ICJ has called it genocide. And in my view you are incorrect to imply the author can’t be trusted.