I live in super liberal Illinois, which recently ended cash bail. It was a rough transition period but now it is fully implemented and every judge and prosecutor knows how everything works.
Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.
Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”
The end of cash bail was the right idea, though. At the time it ended there were ~100 homicide defendants out on bail (usually $150K+), yet there were hundreds of people held for months or years on petty offenses for want of under $250 to bail out.
Wouldn't wish my worst enemy to be held in the CCJ, though. Easily one of the worst detention facilities in the USA.
I disagree. Cash bail is about holding someone's money hostage to secure their presence at court... the problem always was the violation of 8th amendment rights. By demanding excessive bail, the person couldn't possibly cough up the amount, which forced them to utilize bail bondsmen instead. Except that turns bail into a fine, because unlike true bail which is returned when they appear at court, bonds are retained by the bail bondsman.
Simply obeying the 8th amendment would have fixed everything, and so much better too.
In some cases, high bail was used because judges were pussies who refused to deny bail to those who were actual threats to the public (see this alot whenever you hear bullshit about some killer whose bail is set at $5 million or whatever). Other times, it was just the status quo, and judges were giving no real consideration to the problem.
The whole concept of pretrial detention is fraught with problems.
At least in Illinois, the theory is that now most defendants should be able to be free, or on house arrest, until their trial.
Illinois doesn't allow bondsmen, which, while it meant you got your bond back† it also meant that, unlike other states, you couldn't pay a smaller amount to a bondsman for him to get you out. So I imagine in Illinois at least, more people were stuck in pretrial due to (as you say) excessive bail.
One issue is that a lot of defendants have zero cash, or zero access to their cash. You can't pay your own bond. Someone has to pay your bond for you. You can't go to an ATM and get the money out. You can't access the Internet to sell your shares or take a loan against your real estate. These people are stuck in pretrial until their case is resolved, which can take over a decade in some instances.
I had a cellmate who was wrongfully arrested and had a $20K bond set. He was homeless. I proved the case was frivolous and sent him to court with the paperwork. The judge agreed, but gave the prosecution 60 days to respond. He reset the bail at $200. I offered to pay it, but instead he just asked to use my phone credit. He spent all day calling his homeless friends and over the next three days over a dozen of them walked to the jail and dropped off $10 and $20 bills until he had enough to leave.
If a judge sets excessive bail, which the vast majority do, then you can appeal it. It's usually immediately appealable. In most states this would be a 6-stage appellate process to exhaust your rights. Each level taking usually one to two years.
The conditions in county jails are vastly more punitive than even the harshest supermax prisons, generally. Absolutely abominable conditions. I remember one recent case where a homeless person was grabbed off the street for having a bag of white powder. He was put in pretrial detention. He pled guilty to possession of cocaine and took (IIRC) a 5-year prison sentence. Just before he was shipped out the lab results came back as negative for cocaine. The bag was powdered milk he had obtained from a food bank. The judge asked why he pled guilty and he simply pointed out the conditions of the jail were so harsh that he couldn't take it. Pretrial detention vastly increases both the conviction rate (you're more likely to plead guilty even if the charges are wrong) and also the length of sentence (people dressed in suits coming from the street just look less criminal and are sentenced a lot lighter, compared to people in Hamburgler outfits coming from jail).
I think the writing is on the wall, though. There has been an absolute ton of hardcore litigation in the last decade on the legality of bail, and the intermediate appellate courts are striking it down. I think if SCOTUS had a slightly different makeup, then we'd see bail abolished at the federal constitutional level right now. The reason for the new statutes in Illinois and other states, counties and cities is that they are getting ahead of the problem. Better to fix it now than get sued down the road.
† You'd rarely get it back. Often the judge would impose a fine, if you were sentenced, that would swallow your bond. One bonus, though, is that you could usually make your bond do "double-duty" by using it to bail out, but at the same time signing it over to an attorney to pay his costs. When the case reaches disposition the bond would go directly to the lawyer.
>I think the writing is on the wall, though. There has been an absolute ton of hardcore litigation in the last decade on the legality of bail, and the intermediate appellate courts are striking it down.
I think this bodes ill, myself. I expect a slowly-but-steadily rising culture that just skips out on trials altogether, because there are no immediate (or even longterm) costs to doing so. Though you might argue that in such cases judges will just issue bench warrants, this too will stop when everyone involved becomes too apathetic and demoralized to do so.
Bail would be fine if it were carefully set such that the person can always scrape and afford it, enough that they wouldn't risk losing it but still low enough that they can gather it. Is there any reason at all that your anecdote had the judge set it to $20k? That's ridiculous. And for a homeless man as well... that's constructive bail denial. That judge should be censured and forced to retire.
Just once I would like to see a policy adjustment that wasn't absurd overcompensation. I turn 51 in a few months so I've got maybe 2 decades left but I don't think it's going to happen.
One issue is that most bails hearings I saw (and I sat through thousands) in Illinois were basically one-minute affairs with literally zero evidence presented on the person's ability to pay. I've heard that bond hearings in Illinois are now significantly longer and more evidence-based.
The judges were just making emotional decisions based on the heinousness of the crime, the ethnicity of the person, whether their family was in the room supporting them, etc. And the outcome was essentially random and arbitrary.
The cellmate who had the $20K bail set was a completely arbitrary number. It was a victimless offense to do with paperwork. All I did was file FOIA requests to prove no offense had been committed. I was infuriated that the judge reset bail to $200 knowing the guy was clearly innocent, and also knowing he was homeless.
Judges were ordered again and again and again in Illinois to run their bond hearings in a fairer manner, but it never happened.
So we're now in the situation we're in. A lot of detainees are on house arrest, and this is better for their mental health, but also presents enormous problems of their own. If you are ordered released on house arrest, but you have nowhere to go, then you get stuck. If you are on house arrest, often you can't get a job, so how do you pay rent and eat? Often if you're on house arrest the judge won't allow you to even leave to obtain groceries or medicine, which is a problem.
These are hard problems. I don't want to be the one trying to solve them because there is no way to make everyone happy.
FedEx'ing baggage between home and a distant hotel is awesome. I haven't done it recently, so maybe with airline fees it is always cheaper. It used to be that you had to have a corporate account with enough discounts to make it cheaper than checked luggage.
Big hotels host lots of conferences, legal depositions, business shows, etc. They get a FedEx truck almost daily and don't blink if a package arrives addressed to you with "Guest checking in on XXXX date" appended to it. It happens all the time! And when you leave, you call the front desk and ask them to take a box to the loading dock for the next FedEx truck.
> x50-class GeForce GPUs are among the most popular in the world, second only to the x60-class on Steam. Their price point and power profile are especially popular:
> For anyone upgrading an older x50-class system
> Each GeForce RTX 5050 graphics card is powered by a single PCIe 8-pin cable, drawing a maximum of 130 Watts at stock speeds, making it great for systems with power supplies delivering as little as 550 Watts.
The 1050, 2050 and 3050 were all bus-powered cards. I doubt 95% these systems even have the cable coming from their power supply. Imagine all the poor saps that excitedly swap out their old card for this, and... nothing works.
I've got at 1650 Super; it's not bus-powered either. I think it's got a 6-pin, but often you can plug a 6-pin into an 8-pin board and it'll just run a lower current limit (this might not be accurate --- a lot of internet comments say 8 pin boards will detect a 6-pin connector and refuse to work). A whole lot of modern computing gets ~ 90% of the performance with 50% of the power; so if using a 6-pin lead drops power to 50%, you would still get most of it.
I've got a ~ 2006 380W power supply hanging out near my desk and it's got a 6-pin pci-e cable; I really don't think people won't have at least that, certainly not 95% of systems with a pci-e x16 slot.
To bolster this, after the 750ti the 50 products have had pretty lame price to performance compared to the next step up, but have remained quite popular. Most people seem to argue that the lack of additional power is their main advantage and why they are popular.
I personally think people remember being happy with the 750ti and just keep buying those cards.
Note that the lawsuit has nothing to do with using models, only creating them. It is entirely possible for Anthropic to win, but still lose (somewhere else).
Other interesting things.
On pages 8 and 9, the judge points out that Anthropic made a claim about not being able to do something, then produced a document showing otherwise. They clawed the document back and are pretending it never existed. The two sides are fighting over this.
On pages 14-18, the judge discusses the issue of buying a paper book, scanning it, destroying the paper copy, and using the digital copy as if it were the paper copy. The judge rules that this is legal, which I am fairly certain is the opposite of what was decided in the lawsuit against the Internet Archive. Thus, this will almost certainly be appealed and we'll see how it goes. But if it succeeds, it could destroy the awful ebook schemes that plague libraries!
It's not going to be terribly windy in Boston... There are places that sell/rent temporary roof coverings, mainly for protecting from storm damage until it can get fixed. But anyway, white/reflective coverings are available, and can be held down with a few bricks for a week.
Hertz used to be a business, run by businessmen who wanted to build and run a business.
Hertz is now a financial instrument run by private equity and investment bankers.
Businessmen want money the same way you or I want money. They just want to run a business in order to make that money. The same way novelists want to write novels to pay the bills. The book has to be good, people have to like the book so that they buy the book and tell other people to buy the book. So goes business.
Financial instruments are disposable, to be squeezed and wrung of every available cent until it becomes untenable and then the owners drop it and move on. If they can cut, squeeze, and extract they will. If they cannot-- they will destroy the instrument and the trick is they never lose money doing the destruction. People who run financial instruments masquerading as business don't want money like you and I. They want money the way addicts want heroin.
Perhaps you should evaluate in terms of the price premium for speed. Sometimes you buy milk at the 7-eleven instead of the grocery store. It costs more, but is worth it for the convenience in the situation you are currently in. Most of the time it is not.
You can buy a used recent PC for a hundred or two, cram it full of memory, and then run a very advanced model. Slowly. But if you are planning to run an agent while you sleep and then review the work in the morning, do you really care if the run time is 4 hours instead of 40 seconds? Most of the time, no. Sometimes, yes.
IFAB doesn’t directly restrict heading, but permits each national FA to place their own restrictions at the grassroots level.
The US adopted restrictions 10 years ago. No heading at all for age 10 and under (indirect free kick to the opponent for violations). Under 13 years old coaches are required to keep track of heading and limit any individual player to fewer than 25 per week total between training and matches.
The English FA also has adopted rules limiting heading for youth. I image most of Europe has as well.
Cook County Jail (Chicago and close-in suburbs) population is higher than it has been in over a decade. They had to reopen a section of the jail to deal with it. Because people who do what that guy did no longer get to bond out. If someone fled to California and got brought back by the Marshal’s service, he’s sitting in jail until trial. And he is the one that needs to negotiate and offer concessions.
Note: crime is now dropping a lot [1]. Trying setting the date range to “last 28 days”
[1] https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/sites/vrd/home.html