In practice, authoritarian countries that you’re friendly with are treated as honorary democracies, and democracies you have a spat with become honorary dictatorships.

Modi isn’t going to like this. India-China rapprochement probably incoming.

I imagine Russia is like the Star Wars setting, lots of crazy steep drops and they never install railings.

If Trump may abandon NATO, sounds like it wouldn’t be a good deal for Switzerland to join…

The answer, of course, is that he hopes to pick up Trump supporters in the event of Trump suddenly dropping dead. We can call this the Big Mac route to the Presidency. And it’s why DeSantis and Haley are mostly going after each other.

Maybe that would finally get them to stop using fax machines.

Setting up an “independent board” that won’t rock the boat is the easiest thing in the world. And in this case, the report was tying itself in knots to avoid saying Gay copied. “Duplicative language” has the same vibes as “enhanced interrogation techniques”…

It doesn’t rise to the level of plagiarism if you look at it like a lawyer doing everything you can to defend a client.

If you look at the statements in question in context, even if she had put the quotation marks there, it would have been really weird to have quotations there. For the stuff she was writing about, a scholar would have been expected to write in her own words instead of copying what someone else wrote (with or without quotations). University educators fight a constant battle to get undergrads to understand this principle, and students get disciplined over such practices all the time, and rightly so.

The vast majority of undergrad plagiarism, which students are rightfully disciplined for, falls into this type.

The student copies some text verbatim from a source, changes a few words so that it is not so obvious, then the source is buried somewhere in the references without any indication that text was copied verbatim from it.

The way to avoid getting tripped up by this is to just avoid copying what other people wrote, and write things entirely in your own words. Undergrads are held to this standard, so a university administrator (let alone a president) cannot to held to a looser standard.

It’s entirely on Gay that she did this, and on most of her papers too.

It’s shocking that some of those Harvard profs said it doesn’t amount to plagiarism. Verbatim copying without attribution is plagiarism. University standards are all very clear about that, and undergrads are routinely disciplined for similar infractions. If the university president gets off the hook, it totally undermines all efforts to instill students with a sense of academic integrity.

It’s too bad that this plays into the hands of right wingers, but at the end of the day the blame lies squarely at the feet of Claudine Gay. She should not have plagiarized.

The one time the CCP backs away from clamping down on the private sector, it’s over video game microtransactions and gacha. Go figure.

Has he even been formally accused of insurrection?

Sure: he was formally accused of insurrection in the Colorado case. The judges deliberated, found in favor of the accusations, and disqualified him from the state ballot.

Honestly, many of these reforms are urgently needed and long overdue, such as lifting export controls—it’s literally insane that a country facing a shortage of foreign exchange would deliberately crimp its own exports. For these parts, Milei has a pretty good justification for issuing an emergency decree.

The big gamble Milei is taking is to stuff the package with a bunch of lower-priority items that, while arguably needed, are hard to defend as emergency measures. (This is quite similar to what the US government has often done, see e.g. the Inflation Reduction Act.) This increases the risk of the package being voted down, which hasn’t happened before with his predecessors’ decrees.

This is military spending, so two pebbles probably costs more like $76.

Bad title. An entire army division (10,000 to 20,000) surrendering would be a spectacular event. Turns out the article is talking about “some (~180) soldiers from a division”, which is totally not the same thing.

After a century of Peronism, the current state of Argentina isn’t a case study about libertarianism. Quite the opposite.

3200 images is 0.001% of the dataset in question, obviously sucked in by mistake. The problematic images ought to be removed from the dataset, but this does not “contaminate” models trained on the dataset in any plausible way.

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