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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • Depends upon how you measure “well”.

    The Kim dynasty is still going strong, three generations in. Odds are that the Kims and probably a number of people at the top would be worse-off if things changed. From their perspective, things probably are going pretty well in North Korea.

    Of course, the standard of living of the North Korean public is pretty horrendous, the economy is undeveloped, and North Korea doesn’t have a lot of international clout. If your metric is whether the typical person in society is living well or whether the country is powerful, wealthy, or secure, then things aren’t going very well.





  • So, this isn’t quite the issue being raised by the article – that’s bug reports generated on bug trackers by apparently a bot that they aren’t running.

    However, I do feel that there’s more potential with existing LLMs in checking and flagging potential errors than in outright writing code. Like, I’d rather have something like a “code grammar checker” that highlights potential errors for my examination rather than something that generates code from scratch itself and hopes that I will adequately review it.


  • I don’t know about the UAE, but in the US, most states have some lower age of consent to sex for married people, and I assume that normally marriages from abroad would recognized. So I’d guess that as long as you were having sex with someone you were married to and it met that lower bar for age, you could still have sex with them.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_States

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent_in_the_United_States

    So, for example, for Illinois’s age of consent, the age is lower if the people involved are married:

    The law allows the actor a defense to prosecution if the victim is currently or was previously married (the absolute minimum marriageable age in Indiana is 16[170]), although this defense does not apply in the case of violence, threats or drugs.

    Whereas normally, the age doesn’t go below 18.

    I’d expect that Illinois would still potentially charge people who were legally married abroad to, say, a 14-year-old and then have sex with them in Illinois.

    Specifically for immigration – not just visiting the US --it looks like US immigration considers whether marriage would be legal at the age in question in the intended state of residence.

    https://www.uscis.gov/archive/uscis-strengthens-guidance-for-spousal-petitions-involving-minors

    Interviewing earlier at the I-130 petition stage provides USCIS with an additional opportunity to verify information contained in the petition and assess the bona fides of the claimed spousal relationship. USCIS officers will now conduct interviews for the following I-130 spousal petitions as part of the adjudication of any I-130 spousal petition where:

    • The petitioner or the beneficiary is less than 16 years old; or
    • The petitioner or the beneficiary is 16 or 17 years old and there are 10 years or more difference between the ages of the spouses.

    While there are no statutory age requirements to petition for a spouse or be sponsored as a spousal beneficiary, USCIS published guidance earlier this year detailing factors that officers should consider when evaluating I-130 spousal petitions involving a minor. USCIS considers whether the age of the beneficiary or petitioner at the time the marriage was celebrated violates the law of the place of celebration. Officers also consider whether the marriage is recognized as valid in the U.S. state where the couple currently resides or will presumably reside and does not violate the state’s public policy. In some U.S. states and in some foreign countries, marriage involving a minor might be permitted under certain circumstances, including where there is parental consent, a judicial order, emancipation of the minor, or pregnancy of the minor.

    A related topic where legalities differ between countries: polygamy. I’m pretty sure that I recall reading that if you immigrate – not just the same thing as traveling to – the US, and are in a polygamous relationship, you are required to only choose one spouse to be your wife under US law.

    kagis

    Yeah:

    https://www.quora.com/Does-the-US-recognize-polygamous-marriages-from-other-countries

    For example, a refugee who was practicing polygamy before he immigrated will be required by U.S. immigration law to designate one wife as his legal wife to accompany him to the United States. Years later, after becoming a U.S. citizen, he might divorce that wife, and marry the woman who was formerly his second wife, in order to petition for her (on Form I-130) to immigrate to the United States.

    If the petition is approved, the new/formerly second wife immigrates, and then USCIS learns that the husband is still continuing to live with the first wife (even if only some of the time), all three could be accused of practicing polygamy. This is the case because all three come from a country where polygamy is practiced. Therefore, if the man lives with both women at the same time, whether the women live separately or apart, their joint behavior meets the USCIS definition of polygamy.

    Similarly, if an immigrant from a country where polygamy is practiced culturally but not legally goes through a ceremony of customary ‘marriage’ with someone in her country of origin who has other customary wives, USCIS will see her as a practicing polygamist. This will be the case even though there is no legal marriage between the couple, and even though she is living in the U.S. and he and his wives are living outside the United States.

    Islam is the most common religious tradition recognizing the custom of polygamy today. Nevertheless, as a result of the biblical practice of polygamy, there exist practicing polygamists in both the Hebrew and Christian traditions. In addition, many African and some South-East Asian nations have sociocultural traditions of polygamy.

    If you belong to any of these traditions (or certain sects within them), therefore, USCIS will pay close attention to indications that your household situation fits the definition of polygamy.

    Because many immigrants and U.S. citizens come from religious traditions that have practiced polygamy, it is not against U.S. law to believe in polygamy, so long as you are not actually practicing it.

    If you practiced polygamy before immigrating to the United States, but neither you nor your spouse(s) have practiced it since becoming a legal permanent resident, your prior history of polygamy should not cause your naturalization application to be denied.

    If you have personally practiced polygamy since immigrating to the United States, (even if it was many years ago) you should not apply to naturalize without first consulting with an immigration attorney. Practicing polygamy as a legal resident of the United States will not only likely result in denial of your naturalization application, but grounds for deportation.

    If you have not personally had multiple spousal relationships at the same time, but you have had a relationship with someone you considered a spouse (whether that relationship was legally recognized or not) and that person had other spousal type relationships at the same time, USCIS may determine that you are a polygamist. This is true regardless of whether your partner was living in the U.S. or abroad. It is especially true if you or your partner come from a country where polygamy is practiced, whether legally or culturally. You should definitely not apply for naturalization without first terminating that relationship (or making certain that your partner has terminated all other relationships). You should also wait to apply for naturalization until five years (or other applicable good moral character period) after the end of the relationship, unless you have a good explanation for why you got involved in the relationship; an explanation that makes it clear you did not intend to practice polygamy.

    If you knew your partner was a practicing polygamist, or if you want to apply without waiting, you should definitely consult with an immigration attorney first.

    Remember, USCIS examining officers are trained to spot polygamous behavior in applicants for naturalization who come from countries where polygamy is part of the culture. If you were knowingly involved with polygamy or polygamists, your application for naturalization is at risk of denial no matter who you were in the web of relationships.

    EDIT: Under certain specific situations, some states have no minimum age for marriage in the US – one could, hypothetically, become legally married to a four-year-old in California. Under the Full Faith and Credit Clause, all states are required to honor marriages performed in other US states, so someone can become married in State A and then move residence to State B. Thus, I’m pretty sure that it’s possible to be legally married to someone in a state where one could not actually become married to that person, and still be legally prohibited from having sex with them while in the territory of that state.


  • On one hand, yeah, that sucks.

    On the other hand, you go to a foreign country, you’re subject to their laws, and it’s on you to be aware of them.

    There are weapons that I could happily lug around in the US that the UK would take issue with if I were to be doing so in the UK. Do I personally feel that British law is going the right way on this? No. However, it’s British territory, and so British law has jurisdiction. Saying “but I’m from the US and that would be perfectly legal back home” isn’t going to carry a lot of water with British courts, or, I expect, with British public opinion.

    Similarly, a Brit can’t exactly go to the UAE and just do as one does in the UK and expect the UAE to accept it because something’s legal in the UK. International travel is a lot cheaper and easier than it ever has been historically, but once you walk across the line of a sovereign territory, it’s got real consequences, and if you choose to travel internationally, it’s on you to be aware of them. That country isn’t just a tourism spot for people from Country X, but a home for people who live there. They’ve got their own rules and concerns.

    The chief executive of campaign group Detained in Dubai said Mr Fakana felt abandoned by the British government. He’s expected to appeal against his sentence.

    I don’t really see a reasonable complaint against the British government here, at least from the article text.


  • I agree that that’s likely something like the underlying factor – they have two services, they named them in such a way that lower cost normally maps to the slower service, and in this unusual case that relationship doesn’t hold.

    However, OP’s got a legit point that from a consumer standpoint, where someone only cares about time/money tradeoff, not internal FedEx operations, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’d probably make sense for the “low end” option to just automatically map to the faster service in this case.










  • Mr Armstrong said the court must be “very, very wary of causing a grave injustice to Mr Howells” by refusing to allow the case to go to a full trial.

    “We seek, plainly and candidly, a declaration of rights over the ownership of the Bitcoin,” Mr Armstrong said.

    As I’ve commented before, I expect that what a court would find is that Howells owns the Bitcoin, but that this is a different question from whether he owns the drive on which the numbers necessary to access the Bitcoin are stored.

    The previous example I gave was that of a piece of paper on which a bank account password was written. It seems very unlikely to me that a court would find that ownership of the account contents is tied to ownership of the paper. I think that:

    • It would find that throwing out a piece of paper containing the account password does not transfer ownership of the account’s contents to the landfill.

    • But also, that simply having accidentally put something in the trash doesn’t create special ownership rights for me. Nor does having written something on the paper. I cannot compel the landfill to let me go search the landfill for that paper simply because I own the contents of that account.

    This is far from the first time that people have regretted accidentally throwing something out after the fact. If one is going to simply claim that the fact that the discarding was inadvertent means that a landfill must let someone go pick through the landfill, I suspect that landfill operation would become impractical. What’s unusual about this case is just the high value of the thing that was accidentally thrown out. And I’m dubious that courts are going to decide that someone has the right to compel searching a landfill based just on the value of something accidentally thrown out.

    I’d guess that a more-common scenario is someone owning intellectual property and accidentally throwing out the only physical copy of that intellectual property, like a recording of music that they made. Their intellectual property rights will not be transferred to a landfill or terminate merely because they threw out the only physical copy of a recording of that intellectual property. Throwing it out may make it difficult to actually make use of those intellectual property rights, but they still have those rights. Demonstrating that they have those rights isn’t going to mean that they own the storage media on which the recording lives, however.