And outside of that, basically everything you'd consider plonking another path already exists with some service: BART runs up the east shore of the bay, as it does west of San Bruno Mountain. You have two mountain crossings covered by BART and one by ACE. The main missing things are curving BART back into San Jose and reactivating the Dumbarton Bridge.

Still if you built that the gap between Millbrae and Redwood city is 12 miles.

I just don't hold much faith in the separation of power between state and federal government, it sounds like there has been a massive erosion of this barrier since the civil war and the abuse of the commerce clause and all that.

They will certainly attempt to dismiss any charges, but they are far from guaranteed that they will be successful.

So is it part of their official duties to walk in front of a car of someone who is trying to leave the scene, alter their path when the car turns out of the way to ensure they remain in their way, and then shoot the driver? Or is that merely the kind of excessive force that's in contravention of their training and not part of their job role?

1. Prosecution. US wont because of trump. State might not because of some threat from trump.

2. Proof beyond reasonable doubt. Video can make case for self defence so bar is high.

3. No presidential pardon.

2. We'll let the jury decide but ICE is specifically trained not to shoot at moving vehicles and not to approach them from the front.

3. The president can't pardon someone convicted of murder in a state court, he can only pardon people convicted of federal crimes.

"Minnesota officials say FBI blocked their access to ICE shooting probe"

https://www.startribune.com/hennepin-county-prosecutor-attor...

anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't been paying attention to the hundreds of analogous situations that have been happening to blacks.

literally just look it up, the exact scenario has already played out before. cop gets off. and I mean literally exact scenario - with two cops, one in front, one to the side, driver (black) tries to drive off, front cop shoots and kills the black guy, is convicted, and acquitted. seriously, look it up.

George Zimmerman stalked Treyvon Martin, shot and killed him and was still acquitted. you think this guy is going to be convicted really?

I wouldn't put the chance of a conviction here at 100%, but it's certainly well above 0%.

if you have an example of a similar situation where the cop is convicted I am very very interested.

The things the POTUS says, are intended to further the US Government's goals. The actual statements made may be true or false.

If POTUS says "We did X because Y", that's no guarantee that Y is the reason that X was done, or even that X was done at all. That just means that POTUS would like people to think that Y was the reason X was done.

That Trump is also a serial liar is not actually relevant here, this is true for every President. They make statements in service of their agenda, not in service of the truth.

Secondly, even if argument could be that 'some other, more credible president would lie' - this actually does not hold up, because nobody could operate in those terms.

The presidents statements in an official context are official, that's it. Except in rare cases.

"He tells people what to do on a whim" and "has longstanding personal beefs and gripes" - that's it.

We don't know what he's going to wake up and tweet tomorrow so all we have are his statements.

Also, I think we give way to much credit to this notion of '4d chess' - he lies in the moment because he can get away with it, not out of some well plotted deception. He's not servicing some complicated scheme - just his gut.

He'll say something else the next day, but for that moment, what he says is policy.

* "Statements", not "statement". Past statements can be used to assess the credibility of more recent ones.

* Actions speak louder than words. Pardoning the king of cocaine trafficking demonstrates just how seriously the administration is trying to counter drug trafficking.

I'm sorry, this is nonsense. "He makes things up, therefore we have to take the things he says as credible"?

The President is not an oracle of truth, nor are his words the most accurate representation we have on the intentions of US government actions.

Let's say he had said directly, "The January 3rd operation in Venezuela was a best-effort attempt by the US to take control over Venezuela".

Now let's say he had instead said "The January 3rd operation in Venezuela was a best-effort attempt by the US to take control over Madagascar".

You would genuinely, truly believe that in that moment, the capture of Maduro from Venezuela was the most effective thing the US government could do to take control of Madagascar?

The presidents statements are the legitimate statements of the State of the United States of America, it has nothing to do with what you or I think about 'Madagascar'.

He is POTUS, his words are nominally and pragmatically state policy.

If he makes a declaration of 'use of force' against another it should be taken at face value.

This would be true if were only a nominal figurehead, leaving policy to others, but he's not, he has material power and wields it.

Given the construction of the balance of power - 'He is America' at least for the time being.

The statements POTUS makes to the public are simply statements by a person and should be taken as such.

The instructions the POTUS gives, privately or publicly, to the various apparatuses of the US government, are what is nominally and pragmatically state policy. When these contradict public statements POTUS has made, it is these instructions that are what actually matter.

First this: "The statements POTUS makes to the public are simply statements by a person and should be taken as such." <-- this is definitely not true, even with a basic deference to the more traditional, formal view of the US president's role, or the role of any Head of State for that matter.

The US Presidents proclamations are policy, and always have been. Obviously - a statement at the 'correpondents dinner' is not the same thing as a quick media response, is not the same thing as a statement from behind the podium, is not the same thing as a prepared address or document - but anything above board is representative of the State.

Particularly given the current POTUS leverage over Congress and wide Judicial deference to his power.

Obviously, POTUS is going to have private discussions and give directions that are not consistent with public statements - that adds to the ambiguous nature of his statements, but his public statements are still facto policy and must be taken at face value.

A statement like 'force is on the table' internally may seem like a negotiating tactic or 'populist politics' or 'stuff tough business guys say' or even 'fodder for fox news', but geopolitically it's borderline a declaration of war. It should be taken seriously.

Sure, what a head of state says should be taken seriously. It has the potential to resemble what the country does.

That's not the same thing as "the most recent thing out of the mouth of the head of state Is The Best Idea We Have Of Current Policy". That's asinine.

You are welcome to believe everything that President Putin is saying about anything, including Ukraine.

That's a profoundly absurd statement. Appeal to authority is a fallacy, especially with a trackrecord of an "authority" lying.

If the President's words are the truth, what to do with the statements in which he contradicts himself? What about situations in which 2 presidents disagree?

>The presidents statements in an official context are official, that's it.

Official, perhaps most of the time. Truthful, definitely not.

What's up with the inability to separate "opinions/statements" vs. "facts/truth"?..

But his statements are the position of the US government aka the most 'truthful' representation of US policy.

I'm responding to the notion that because he lies and misrepresents, his statements don't count as representative somehow, which is not true.

If he says 'military force is on the table' for acquiring Greenland, we should assume he means to invade if wants.

2. "Truthful representation of US government policy"

They are 2 very different things. And even the second one can be easily debated against due to:

1. Discrepancy between what countries say vs. what they actually do. Threats, lies, dishonesty, hiding truth, creative paraphrasing, etc. are normal ways the politics operates.

2. Trump's twitter messaging. What he says does not necessarily represent even his own opinions and policy. Case in point, when he announced the no-fly-zone over Venezuela a few weeks ago. The problem? It was only a tweet. No actual commands/decisions were made/given to the diplomats, bureucracy, military. It was a fake news by the President himself.

There are other credible sources whose consensus could be checked.

An invasion with the intent of taking control of the country would not involve troops arriving in the capital, completing their mission perfectly with no losses on their side, and then everybody leaving, such that no enemy troops remain.

Your understanding of the relationship between the truth and the words being spoken by POTUS are the only discontinuity here. Update that expectation and everything makes sense.

The bet was, specifically:

This market will resolve to "Yes" if the United States commences a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela between November 3, 2025, and January 31, 2026, 11:59 PM ET. Otherwise, this market will resolve to "No".

FTFY

I know what you're thinking of here, but it doesn't mean anything like what you think it means.

So the US used to have a rule that every bank hand to have a certain percentage of its assets stored in its account at a Federal Reserve bank; it is this percentage which was gradually reduced to 0 by I think 2020. Note that only the funds in that account meet the requirement; a literal pile of cash contributes not a single cent.

The way banks are primarily limited nowadays is via capital adequacy ratio, which is essentially that you need to set aside a particular pile of capital that can be raided to guard against assets falling in value to 0. It's complicated because this pile of capital doesn't come from the money a customer deposits in their account (which needs to be held as an asset to offset the liability a depositor represents), but rather from income the bank makes in other ways. If a bank sells $1 million worth of shares, they get to issue ~$20 million more loans.

If a bank gets $1 million worth of new deposits, they get to issue... $0 more loans. Well, maybe less: if a bank gets $1 million worth of new bitcoin deposits, that probably reduces its capital ratio because bitcoin is such a risky asset.

Then it doesn't make sense for a classical deposit-lending bank to pay interest on those new deposits. They can't generate revenue from the new deposits since they cannot touch them to perform lending , and they are now a liability because they must perform banking services to the depositor, regulatory compliance, and insure against the risk something accidently happens to the money. Under your scheme maybe they could go park it at the fed and get interest that way but even that is technically a loan; they are giving up the notional money in exchange for interest in hopes they can collect it at a later time.

What it does is call the libm hypot function. The reason why everything is hand-wavy is because everything about the results of libm functions is incredibly hand-wavy, and there's nothing Rust can do about that except maybe provide its own implementation, which is generally inadvisable for any numerical function. (It's not even a case of "generates the LLVM intrinsic", because LLVM doesn't have an intrinsic for libm, although LLVM intrinsics are even more hand-wavy than external libm calls because oh boy is that a rabbit hole).

> But methods like scalar_mul are just screaming for a functional refactor. I assume there’s a trait similar to Haskell’s Functor typeclass that would allow me to fmap over the entries of the Matrix and apply an arbitrary function.

The way I've solved this in my own attempts to write my own sparse BLAS routines is to boil everything down to, at the very bottom, an Entry-style class where the hard part is implementing set:

    pub fn set(&mut self, value: Scalar) {
        self.entry = match (self.entry, is_zero(value)) {
            // Change zero entry to zero entry -> do nothing.
            (None, true) => { None },
            // Nonzero to nonzero entry -> set the value.
            (Some(e), false) => {
                self.vector.values[e] = value;
                Some(e)
            },
            // Nonzero to zero entry -> delete the entry.
            (Some(e), true) => {
                self.vector.soa_vecs_mut().swap_remove(e);
                None
            },
            // Zero to nonzero entry -> add the entry.
            (None, false) => {
                self.vector.soa_vecs_mut().push((self.index, value));
                self.vector.indexes.max_index()
            }
        };
    }

        // When you pivot a step of LU, the matrix looks like this:
        // [1 0] * [p ǔ] = [p u]
        // [ľ I]   [0 ǎ]   [l a]
        // Solving for the unknowns in L and U, we have:
        // ľ = l / p, ǔ = u, ǎ = a - outer(ľ, ǔ)
        let pivot_val = self.values.get(row, column);
        let pivot_row = self.values.get_row(row)
            .filter(|idx, _| self.is_column_unsolved(idx))
            .to_sparse_vector();
        let pivot_column = self.values.get_column(column)
            .filter(|idx, _| self.is_row_unsolved(idx))
            .scale(pivot_val.recip())
            .to_sparse_vector();

        // Compute the outer product of l and u and update A.
        for (row, li) in pivot_column.view() {
            // We didn't update A yet, so update the requisite value in A for
            // the column.
            self.values.set(row, column, li);
            for (column, uj) in pivot_row.view() {
                self.values.entry(row, column).map(|a| li.mul_add(-uj, a));
            }
        }

You'd want the reverse, implementing std::ops::Add on top of std::ops::AddAssign + Clone (or maybe Copy?). The advantage of op-assignment is that you don't have to any extra allocation, so it's usually the form you want if you can do it. In my sparse BLAS lib, I only implemented AddAssign and MulAssign for sparse vectors (although I did do an impl Mul<SparseVectorView> for SparseVectorView to implement dot product). Although truth be told, I'm usually trying to a += b * c in my code anyways, and I want to generate FMAs, so I can't use the math expressions anyways.

    int main() {
        printf("Sans headers, this is valid C89.");
        return 0;
    }

    int printf();

Ripper's argument that his tactics "won" the Millennium Challenge strike me as rather similar to the thoughts behind the Jeune École school of naval warfare, which argued for the use of massed small ships (torpedo boats) to counter battleships... except that had an easy counter in the form of the (torpedo boat) destroyer, and most naval theorists generally agree that the French Navy's embrace of Jeune École ended up doing more harm than good to their navy.

[1] The closest thing to a counterexample here is nuclear bombs, for which there isn't really a meaningful defense. Except that the use of nuclear bombs is predicated on the theory of strategic air bombing, which has been promising an easy-win button for wars for a century now, has been tried in every major conflict since then, and whose could-even-be-argued-as-maybe-a-successes in that timeframe can be counted on one hand, with some fingers missing. I'm galled that you still have military personnel and advisors today who advocate for its success, given its track record of the complete opposite.

Not that I want to give anyone any ideas.

Nope. It turns out you need astronomical amounts of spent waste to noticeably impact a large population.

The trial of Jose Padilla (aka "the dirty bomber") has the best data on this. He went to Al Qaeda, offering to build and detonate a dirty bomb. Al Qaeda wasn't at all interested. They had run the actual numbers from an engineering standpoint (unlike everyone else who had just said "ooh scary bad!"), and demonstrated clearly that dirty bombs aren't actually a viable mass casualty weapon.

Before the Jose Padilla trial, we used to hear lots about dirty bombs. Since then, not at all. It's not that people forgot about them. They just aren't actually a credible engineering threat. It's too hard to get enough material distributed over a large enough area to measurably impact health outcomes for the impacted population. That was a surprise that came out of the trial.

There are lots of attack types to worry about. Dirty bombs are very far down that list.

Ripper's tactics probably did have a perfect destroyer-equivalent counter. The entire question is: why didn't the Blue Team bring it? You can't declare yourself victorious because a counter to their counter theoretically exists - you have to actually preemptively include it in your forces!

Aren’t ICBMs and submarine-launched warheads the other two parts of the US’s triad?

Dark stuff.

Defending against strategic bombers is a different game from submarine-launched cruise missiles / hypersonics too. If you don’t spot the submarine 50 miles off your coast you can’t defend against the hypersonic. Whereas you apply a completely different set of detection and response systems for long-range bombers.

Sure the net intention of these capabilities may the same, but we are talking about whether there are counters to these weapon systems.

That’s a question best handled by Bush Junior and the American people.

What was the second war for?

The importance of e is that it's the natural base of exponents and logarithms, the one that makes an otherwise constant factor disappear. If you're using a different base b, you generally need to adjust by exp(b) or ln(b), neither of which requires computing or using e itself (instead requiring a function call that's using minimax-generated polynomial coefficients for approximation).

The importance of π or 2π is that the natural periodicity of trigonometric functions is 2π or π (for tan/cot). If you're using a different period, you consequently need to multiply or divide by 2π, which means you actually have to use the value of the constant, as opposed to calling a library function with the constant itself.

Nevertheless, I would say that despite the fact that you would directly use e only relatively rarely, it is still the more important constant.