Oh, sure, I’ve been there. Am there. And Reddit may have gotten to that point with these features where maintenance costs overtook the costs of removing them.

Code that exists still needs to be updated and maintained. It interacts with the rest of the code. Sure you can leave it lying around, but at a certain point the technical debt is going to catch up to you.

Via the Brennan Center. Elected judges are more punitive and more likely to rule against defendants.

The problem is that the judges often use their decisions to campaign instead of simply applying the law. So they might give an unpopular criminal defendant a harsher sentence to look tough on crime or even tilt a trial against an innocent defendant. Not that doesn’t happen with judges that are appointed by the executive, but it’s usually not as bad.

During the US occupation, the Taliban absolutely did attack civilian targets to further political goals. They attacked everything from restaurants to embassies to a university.

You don’t need to look hard and long enough. You just need to insinuate hard and long enough, then people will believe it eventually.

I just gave the chat bot that was put in place at the IT department where I work at a poke. It answered my question perfectly: “How do I print from my laptop to the library?” And it’s not like the chat bot is the only route for support, but it does divert a lot of routine questions from our help desk so they can focus on questions that require a human touch. That could be people where a chat bot is not a good format or it could be a non-routine question.

They’ve tried. Didn’t work out well. I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader, I’m not sure what’s been decided is misinformation.

Ah, it’s all good. This discussions can be a little hard to follow in terms of who is responding to who.

Okay, what requires more assumptions:

Biden goes along with a hair brained Trump era plan with a nebulous link to the Trump administration. News media sources have found no link to any official agency, but fortunately we have social media to discover a link (based on nothing). Biden then goes on to prosecute the perpetrators for weapons smuggling. None of the perpetrators complains about a deal being broken.

OR

This only had links to political figures in the Trump administration, but not anyone in the intelligence services. Those figures are long gone. No one bothered to tell Biden on the way out the door. Biden is prosecuting the perpetrators of an operation he allowed for fun and they’re happy to stay quiet while they get imprisoned for running weapons.

All it said is that this group that was not part of the US government was in touch with someone in the Trump administration. That could be literally anyone, likely some Trump sycophant. The Trump administration leaves, attempts a coup on the US presidency on the way out, and now whoever was in contact is probably gone. Then the incoming Biden administration doesn’t even know this bullshit is going on, let alone who’s supposed to be contacted to call this thing quits. Now that same administration is prosecuting them for running weapons.

I’m well aware of the history of covert CIA involvement in Latin America, at least in broad strokes. But you’re still making assumptions to get to “why didn’t Biden immediately shut this down?” Just apply Occam’s Razor, he couldn’t shut it down because the Trump administration used unofficial side channels.

The article makes no mention of the CIA. The plotters were not only non-governmental but also violated US law (not that the CIA hasn’t done that before). They were in contact with the “Trump administration,” but that could be anyone. Given Trump’s distrust of the intelligence services, I suspect any operations would have side stepped them.

Someone with very large fingers?