It wasn’t long ago that Brendan Carr, not yet the chairmen of the Federal Communications Commission, made clear that the FCC had no mandate to serve as the roving speech police.
But that was then, 2019 and Carr was not yet Trump’s chair. Times have changed. Continue reading
Now that the AI tech giants swear* they have fixed the problem of chatbots providing teens with the information needed to plan and execute violent attacks, lesser concerns are coming to the fore, such as AI giving people writing advice ranging from bad to mediocre in the name of a real person, without the person’s knowledge, approval or compensation.
The writing was clunky, the point weirdly unspecific. Grammarly had been offering paying users editing suggestions, supposedly from a handful of writers — including me. Pop a piece of prose into its service and little editing bubbles would emerge on the page from “Julia Angwin,” suggesting things like, “Lead with personal stakes to boost immediacy.” That sentence about Meta was something Grammarly apparently thought I would suggest. Continue reading
HEYA MON! Feeling Irie? Want to get away from it all and sail to a warmer climate?
That’s what the family and I did last week when we took a cruise to the Caribbean for my wife’s birthday. We’d planned to do this for the better part of the year and it didn’t disappoint in the slightest.
As your humble humorist embarked on this adventure, however, I made the decision to chronicle the entire voyage so you would have the benefit of all my wonderful opinions and observations should you choose to follow in my footsteps.
You’re welcome. I’m noble and humble like that. Continue reading
The underlying case of Olympus Spas v. Armstrong, challenging the application of the Washington Law Against Discrimination is very much the culture war case that makes most people rightfully cringe.
In 2020, the HRC, the agency tasked with enforcing WLAD, received a complaint from a transgender woman. The complaint alleged that Olympus Spa “denied [her] services and stated that transgender women without surgery are not welcome because it could make other customers and staff uncomfortable.” Specifically, the Spa excluded preoperative transgender women who have not yet received gender confirmation surgery affecting their genitalia.
This isn’t about whether the spa (or the court) used the complainant’s chosen pronouns, but whether a Korean spa for women could prohibit a pre-op transgender woman from its services. Sound familiar? Continue reading
The SAVE Act, which Trump prefers to call the SAVE America Act because it sounds better even if it’s wrong, a concern he doesn’t share even though he is “real smart” if he does say so himself, is bad law that does significant damage to a great many American citizens’ ability to vote. Had the bill merely required the showing of government issued identification by voters, it would be overwhelmingly popular, even if the fringe left would still argue it was too burdensome.
But that’s not all the bill requires. Beyond transgender prohibitions having nothing to do with voting, it would require voters to prove their citizenship with either a passport or birth certificate. That’s a grave burden for a lot of people, and an impossibility for others, even though they are very much Americans and have a right to vote. And it gets worse for people, like married women, whose current name on their government issued identification doesn’t match the name on their birth certificate. Continue reading
Is the Iran war pretty much over or what?
After a day of conflicting signals about when the war against Iran might end, President Trump struck a belligerent tone Monday evening, warning of even more aggressive action if Iranian leaders tried to cut off the world’s energy supply.
“We will hit them so hard that it will not be possible for them or anybody else helping them to ever recover that section of the world,” Mr. Trump said, meeting with reporters.
Earlier in the day, the president suggested that the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran could be near an end. The war “is very complete, pretty much,” Mr. Trump said in a phone interview with a CBS reporter, Weijia Jiang. He said, “We’re very far ahead of schedule.”
First, Judge Paul Crotty held that New York’s law prohibiting the unauthorized practice of law could not survive strict scrutiny in an action brought by Upsolve, a company dedicated to providing non-lawyer assistance to consumers sued for debt collection. The argument was that the law violated the First Amendment by prohibiting speech used to assist consumers to challenge debt collection suits. The Second Circuit then reversed, holding that intermediate scrutiny applied, as the law was content neutral.
The case then went back before Judge Lewis Kaplan, who held that New York’s UPL law easily survived intermediate scrutiny, holding that the state’s interest in prohibiting non-lawyers from the practice of law was “important” and “real,” and that the law did not burden speech any more than was necessary to achieve the state’s important interest. Fair enough. Continue reading
As might be obvious, I like to write. Writing enables me to think things through, to come to grips with the errors of my views and the beliefs that cannot be justified or explained. In other words, I don’t know what I think until I see what I write. (Sorry, Bill.)
At Techdirt, Mike Masnick tells an apocryphal story about his child.
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool flagged the essay as “18% AI written.” The culprit? Using the word “devoid.” When the word was swapped out for “without,” the score magically dropped to 0%. Continue reading
The cost to the United States of the war against Iran is estimated to be $1 billion per day, not including the cost of Pete Hegseth’s hair gel for his daily pressers. Everett Dirksen once had something to say about this. If there was no choice in the matter, that would be one thing. But when it’s a war of choice, paying for it is an issue, especially after the indiscriminate evisceration of federal employees by DOGE, the wildly mounting federal deficit, the monumental increase in ICE funding, the ongoing rise in inflation and the cuts to Obamacare subsidies.
But hey, we’ve got hundreds of billions of free dollars from the tariffs that other countries are paying to the United States, we’ve been told. Except now that the tariffs have been held unconstitutional, as was almost certainly going to be the case (and will similarly be the case with the Section 122 tariffs as well), they’ve been ordered to be returned. Continue reading
When Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, her string of deflections, non-responses and outright insults demonstrated her utter contempt for Congress. More to the point, it demonstrated Congress’ fecklessness when it came to forcing a cabinet secretary to explain her stunning failure to do her job or comply with the law. So naturally, the House is going for round two by subpoenaing Bondi to appear before the House Oversight Committee for a closed door deposition.
Over the objection of the panel’s Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, five Republicans on the Oversight Committee joined Democrats to force approval of the subpoena, which was introduced by Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina.