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Last Day of August Forum
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6 responses to “Last Day of August Forum”
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You’d think this would be a bigger story:
xAI is accused in a lawsuit of using CASM to train its model.
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The lawsuit accuses X of violating federal child pornography laws, as well as Masha’s Law, both of which give CSAM survivors a right to sue on claims of production, possession, and distribution. A lawyer for Doe, Margaret E. Mabie, suggested in the press release that all three are crimes and “xAI did all three.”
Keep in mind that this does not protect other children who were not directly abused but have had their photos used to create images that appear to be them. I expect that discovering that there are lifelike images and videos of them being distributed does cause harm.
And again, I am calling for prosecuting the product managers overseeing Grok in criminal court and sending their asses to jail. Suing the company only does so much, but jailing people can create a real deterrent.
What the hell, prosecute the software engineers as well — I think it’s a much harder case to make, but go for it,
As a worker, I would care less about the company I work for being sued than I would about facing jail time.
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Here is what the current West Bank violence looks like to an Israeli observer:
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Once upon a time we taxed high incomes at 90%. Now people like Musk, Buffett, Trump, etc. often pay an effective rate of 1 or 2%. I’ve complained here about GOP tax cuts, which cut not only rates, but the share of income subject to tax. The big game is buy-borrow-die. Get assets, borrow against the assets for spending while deducting the interest, and die without selling the stock or whatever and paying (now low) capital gains taxes. We used to get it as estate taxes, but we effectively don’t anymore.
In addition to cuts, somehow a conservative government funded by billionaires doesn’t seem very interested in checking up on the wealthy. IRS funding has been cut. In 2011 7% of people with million dollar plus incomes were audited, by 2019 it was 0.7%.
Yesterday I quoted Brad DeLong saying the first thing we need to do is reinstate tax law from 2000. Dr. K is talking about not legal avoidance, but illegal evasion. Yesterday he did a primer on the tax gap, the difference between taxes legally owed and actually collected. Today he talks about how we got here. (If you tap View Post and Pause on the video enough times you should get a transcript.)
The numbers are big, and in the primer I go through the tax gap. The money owed but not in fact collected is certainly north of $600 billion a year. It is something like 40% or more of the U.S. federal budget deficit. It is a major contributing factor to the accumulation of vast fortunes.
(Emphasis mine.) Forty freaking percent of the freaking deficit?! We’re almost halfway to a balanced budget if we just collect taxes from the freaking billionaires!? And jailing a few would have a salutary effect. Krugman coins the term “cheatistocracy”.
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Teen charged with murder for recording San Diego mosque shooting livestream
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/31/san-diego-mosque-shooting-teen-livestream-charged
A 17-year-old North Carolina girl who recorded a livestream of a shooting that killed three people at a San Diego mosque and disseminated the attackers’ white-supremacist writings has been charged with murder by aiding and abetting, a district attorney said on Monday.
Forsyth county district attorney Jim O’Neill said at a news conference in Winston-Salem that the girl, whose name was not mentioned during the news conference, was arrested last week. On Monday, just before she was due to begin the school year, a grand jury indicted her on three counts of murder and one count of conspiracy.
Under North Carolina law, the aiding-and-abetting charges carry the same penalties as if the girl had committed the attack herself, O’Neill said.
“The individual here, locally, was the person who was recording the livestream,” O’Neill said. “She disseminated that information and she published their manifesto.”
Unless they have evidence that she was in contact with the killer before hand, and there was a plan ahead of time to distribute this, these charges need to be smacked down. Because otherwise, this type of thing will be used to go after all sorts of reporters and activists. We’ve seen the government being very aggressive with people protesting ICE and getting indictments and convictions, so we are already sliding down that slippery slope.
Little Miss White Pride herself can burn in hell, of course. (I am assuming that she was distributing it because she endorses the actions of the murderer)
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Army Secretary Dan Driscoll is stepping down, White House says…
Good friend and classmate of JD Vance. But Hegseth is Telegenic
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