It depends how it's set up. Often a block will reserve a certain number of rooms for attendees, to ensure people will have somewhere to stay close to the conference site. Usually any unbooked rooms in the block get released closer to the event date.
Effective organizations are busy replacing the low-quality contractors with AI. Seize the opportunity to demonstrate how you can get more done with a $1,000/month token budget than with $10,000/month in contractor salary.
That probably is exactly what is being referred to: the combination of low quality contractors who have access to AI means even more slop to wade through.
If AI is a 10xer the question is what is it 10xing.
I wasn’t talking specifically about trans dysphoria above, but having had to navigate those guidelines personally, I can certainly attest that they prioritized societal fertility over the needs of US patients. Fourteen letters of approval and two years and $25,000 of professional consulting required (at US cash rates before insurance) to receive a single body edit out of the four required. Cis women who aren’t even trans at all can get next-day breast inflation but must pursue months of paperwork and approvals for breast deflation (and the exact opposite for cis men, too). Tattoos are walk-in and don’t always have sobriety requirements. Religious body edits that permanently impair sexual function are routinely performed at birth without the consent of, and sometimes over the objections of, the newborn’s parents. (This is not a comprehensive list of US body editing biases, just some highlights as examples.)
Point being, cultural biases are reflected in body edit difficulties, and each culture has their own biases and stupidities. That should not prevent us from aspiring towards a better future, where body edits are uniformly treated with care, caution, and consent — rather than varying degrees condescension and Gilliam’s “Brazil” levels of bureaucratic bullshit and bribes: https://youtu.be/VveTsyjFlNA
This article may have done a terrible job at advancing any useful goals in the field of body editing, but the headline sure is some top-shelf clickbait.
It's just currying favor with Carney's voter base, senior citizens who are middle class and up. They uncritically read the headlines from the Globe and Mail or CBC that claim Canada is "standing up the Trump" meanwhile the nation stagnates, and the best and brightest move to the US. Canadian GDP per capita has been stagnant for 15+ years, while the US has had an incredible economic run. The results speak for themselves.
One thing to note here is that the Unslop contest rules required generating the entire work with a single prompt, no editing or modifications allowed. Those are pretty challenging conditions that leave a lot of improvement within easy reach, all it would take is an editing pass or two.
They are trying to avoid a situation where you end up with one juror who watches a lot of CSI and insists that they need forensic evidence to convict, despite having a dozen eye-witnesses. If a juror cannot imagine a circumstance where the evidence could be beyond a reasonable doubt based on non-forensic evidence, then they aren't suitable to be a juror.
For example, if you're sitting in your living room with a bunch of other people, many of whom know each other, and two people start fighting, you are all witnessing a crime and you can also all identify the two people fighting. It would be ridiculous to require DNA evidence in that situation.
At the same time though, a bunch of people who know each other and the people allegedly involved could very easily share the same incorrect testimony. You wouldn't believe in bigfoot if 5 guys drinking beers swore they saw him while they were camping. Sending someone to prison or worse is much higher stakes. DNA evidence might be too extreme, but I'd expect some sort of evidence to back up a testimony. "What if the witness was wrong" just seems like always a reasonable doubt, or at least the number of witnesses who would need to corroborate something such that it ceases to be a reasonable doubt is impractically high.
Courts are not solving math equations and despite the popular belief to the contrary, most lawyers and judges are not bumbling fools. But to use math as an example of why you don't need an "impractically high" number of witnesses:
- Let's assume "reasonable doubt" is 0.1%, so you need to be 99.9% sure someone is guilty before voting them guilty
- Let's assume a random witness to a random crime has a 5% chance of getting some material fact wrong through no fault of their own
- Let's assume that if you are on trial, there is a 20% chance you are guilty, based on the assumption if you're guilty and know you're cooked you're more likely to plea out, so the people remaining at trial are the truly innocent, the guilty who think they can beat the case, and the guilty who are just rolling the dice.
You still only need 3 witnesses telling the same story to reach >99.9% assurance of guilt. The odds of an innocent person getting convicted with 3 witnesses under this standard is 1 in 8,000.
In reality, witnesses are probably more than 95% accurate with material facts, especially when these are collected in isolation at different times, probably by different police officers.
And if we're being honest with ourselves, a lot more than 1 out of 5 people on trial are guilty of what they're being charged with. The bar for a DA to bring charges is very high, their entire careers are based on conviction rate.
Damn its almost as if juries exist to act as the sovereign so the violence which sustains the law can be vested in a general public that cannot be held accountable as a whole, similarly to how at least one member of a firing squad always has a blank.
Or perhaps the standards of evidence established for a pre-industrial society when eye-witness testimony was the best that could reasonably be achieved is not necessarily the optimal system for a digital society where everyone carries a high definition video camera in their pocket at all times.
Yes a high definition video camera that is slowly becoming indistinguishable (and has always been subject to tampering regardless) from an artificially generated version. We never have anything beyond judgement.
Prosecution time limits and those pesky rights people have is why so much stuff that would've been simple misdemeanors 70+yr ago is now "administrative" and "civil" law.
I think the idea is to test (with the jury as a sample) if the evidence is compelling enough for society at large to agree with the verdict. It's rarely going to be 100% clear cut so the jury has to use their judgment.
> I think the idea is to test (with the jury as a sample) if the evidence is compelling enough for society at large to agree with the verdict.
Exactly. It's all about consent of the governed. We need the government to prove that they've got a valid reason to take someone's freedom before we let them do it. That's also why jury nullification is so important. It's another check on government to make sure that we feel that the laws we're being held to and the punishments we'll face when they are broken are acceptable.
Jury nullification is a double edged sword. There are near countless examples of a jury determining a white man killing a black man isn’t a valid reason to take the white man’s freedom.
Reminds me of the Norm Macdonald bit where he says he would not convict someone based on DNA evidence. The punch line is something like "I'm not a scientist, what do I know about DNA?"
