It's been way too long since I've taken a political science course, but does this mean that the ban is struck down for the entire country, or just the area that the 5th Court of Appeals covers?
The ruling only has binding precedent in the 5th Circuit, other circuits aren't bound to follow it. Formerly this kind of ruling would come with a nationwide injunction to force the issue but now that those are severely curtailed by the Supreme Court it's only binding to the courts under the jurisdiction of the 5th circuit.
Decisions in other circuits can be very persuasive to other circuits but they're not required to agree the same way a Supreme Court ruling is binding. Circuit splits are moderately common and usually trigger a review by the supreme court if an appeal wasn't filed for the earlier decisions.
Seems like a perfectly valid one. If the government is violating the constitution or a persons rights why should there be suits all across the country to get that recognized? Especially when the question isn't on something with a lot of particularized tests that's sensitive to the exact case, eg 4th amendment law? Why should rights be so dependent on someone in my particular part of the country having sued?
> If the government is violating the constitution or a persons rights why should there be suits all across the country to get that recognized?
Because one judge in one county shouldn't be defining the laws for the whole country? Sure it's great when they issue a ruling you like, but what about when it's a ruling that you don't. If it's a knife-edge situation then letting several judges rule and having the supreme court sort it out is the right thing; if there's an obvious right answer then every court will rule the same way and it doesn't matter.
> Why should rights be so dependent on someone in my particular part of the country having sued?
Your rights are always dependent on your willingness to sue to defend them. It's nice if someone else does the legwork and sets the precedent, but you shouldn't depend on that.
It's rarely down to one judge in one county though, most are entered pending appeal and the appeals court can immediately put the injunction on hold or in cases like this the first injunction might come from a circuit court who's far from one judge, by the time it gets to a circuit it's gone through multiple judges and some cases are heard by a bank of judged instead of just one.
> Your rights are always dependent on your willingness to sue to defend them. It's nice if someone else does the legwork and sets the precedent, but you shouldn't depend on that.
I don't have a spare million sloshing around even if I could get granted standing for various things I would like to defend. It's not just a problem of willingness.
> It's rarely down to one judge in one county though, most are entered pending appeal and the appeals court can immediately put the injunction on hold or in cases like this the first injunction might come from a circuit court who's far from one judge, by the time it gets to a circuit it's gone through multiple judges and some cases are heard by a bank of judged instead of just one.
When the circuit court rules the ruling is binding on that whole circuit, which is a pretty huge area and population (bigger than most countries). When one judge in one county rules the ruling is binding in that county, when the supreme court rules it's binding on the whole country. Isn't that kind of how it should work?
Rights violations because of federal laws or actions are almost never contained to a particular circuit and if the Supreme Court wants to quietly allow them to continue it can refuse to hear appeal(s) from the circuit decision so without nationwide injunctions the only way to relatively quickly vindicate people's rights is to file 11 cases one in each circuit wasting tons of time and money when it can easily be decided by a singular case.
On the other side, why should one crazed/corrupt judge in some state which has nothing to do with me be able to infringe on my freedoms and make my life worse? Worse, why is it possible to jurisdiction shop for the single bad actor and impose your will on the entire country?
You're not wrong, but (like most issues in a 350M-person country) it's complicated. The system is tailored to some expected level/type of corruption and bad actors. If you expect that the government is basically fine and that out of 50M people per region surely somebody will file suit if the issue is important then the current system makes a lot of sense. You get judges with more knowledge and awareness of your local issues, anything important still gets addressed, and you're resilient to some degree of random bad judges and bad actors. If those expectations are out of whack then you get worse outcomes.
In reality, the world is complicated enough that even boiling down the lists of judges and whatnot to that simple of a description is misleading at best. Neither solution is anywhere near optimal by itself. So...what next?
Yeah it's a definite mixed bag and maybe the solution is to require them to be approved by at least a multijudge panel at the circuit level before going in to place. In effect that basically already happened though, the normal pattern was for injunctions to be stayed for a few weeks pending the appeal and the appeal court would be able to extend that stay if they believed it was flawed or unjustified. The characterization of it being "one crazed judge" doesn't really hold up to the pattern of their actual use, and where judges didn't put in a stay the appeals court could as well.
Only the 5th court of appeals. However if you get caught elsewhere your lawyer will have a good appeal grounds just because your area will need to decide if they agree. If all areas eventually agree it probably never will get to the supreme court. Once several different courts hear this and make a decision if they disagree the supreme court jumps in reading all the logic of everyone below them to try to find a real answer. (It doesn't always work this way, that is the textbook ideal way, but the real world is often different).
Note that unless you think nothing of spending 20 million dollars on lawyers this is probably not something that you want to fight.
Prior to this year, the entire country. Today, thanks to SCOTUS shenanigans, it likely only applies to the states involved in the lawsuit, LA. But who knows, hard to keep up with the game of calvinball the SCOTUS is playing.
Probably though the old pattern was that the plaintiffs would request and the Circuit would issue a nationwide injunction with the ruling when finding that a law in full unconstitutional.
Now we have the weird situation where the constitution is more patchwork because you have to get rulings in all the Circuits or wait for one case to make it all the way to the Supreme Court.
It doesn’t say that. It says that the D.C Court of Appeals issued one in 1963, and then quotes the DOJ as saying “ nationwide injunctions remained ‘exceedingly rare’ for a few decades after 1963[,]” notwithstanding one issued by a district judge in New York in 1973.
Regardless of what you think about nationwide injunctions, your original assertion that “prior to this year,” a decision by a federal appellate court would apply the entire country is categorically false.
I realize Trump is being used as a hook here, but isn't the real story the fact that at this point solar is completely viable to build without federal subsidies? As the article notes, the OBBB axed a lot of solar subsidies, yet 73% of all new solar last year was installed in states that voted for Trump, which probably don't have solar friendly subsidies.
I live off-grid in California, and pretty much every time I've evaluated options for something that would save energy, I've been better off by forgoing the subsidized
option. It can be difficult to motivate behavior as intended through subsidizing, especially in a quickly changing field. If I were naïve and assumed that the subsidized products would always save me energy usage, I would be spending more money and saving less energy.
When a state is against subsidizing, but not against what is being subsidized, it can be more beneficial than an inefficient subsidy.
I think solar starting construction before July 2026 or completed before 2027 still got the old federal subsidies. Residential cut off was the end of last year.
So we don't know exactly how things will look after subsidies and there will have been a pull forward effect before the various deadlines.
>I imagine it's legally risky to buy a large quantity, test it, and then resell smaller quantities
It is illegal, but it doesn't stop people from doing it. In fact, if you don't have any sort of test results for your peptides people will absolutely avoid buying your wares until you have them. Purity and mg/ml are the 2 basic test results that any shop worth their stuff will have.
To be fair, most everyone I know who is buying on the gray market considers vendor tests to be minimally required, but still insufficient -- there is no assurance they tested the product they shipped to you. Plan on testing it yourself. I'm sure some people do trust nexaph enough, though, to not worry so much. Whether that trust is well placed, that is a separate discussion.
With most of these you can really tell if they work or not and there is a pretty predicable dose dependent reaction profile. With slow meds like semaglutide you'd maybe not notice it in the first week but you will by week 3. I had mine tested but if that wasn't available I probably would have considered the anecdotal evidence to be sufficient. It appears that most of the scamming is just people taking the money and not shipping anything.
The most dangerous failures I've seen have been sending the wrong peptide. 15 mg of tirzepatide and 15 mg of semaglutide is a very different experience.
After nearly getting hosed in a group buy (I did get refunded, but that is far from a guarantee) because of a product mismatch, I decided to just pay for nexaph. Love him or hate him, his popularity relies on his reputation and he has been more careful than most suppliers to cultivate it with more extensive testing and quality control.
That makes sense, I don't like that the bottles are unlabelled so the first thing I have to do is label them. The box is labelled and this seems to be standard practice. Semaglutide is falling out of favour so I guess they're substituting. I have 4 years supply now so I guess I'll check back then and see where the market is at.
I know a bunch of people with multi-year stockpiles. I've got ~5 years of reta and ~6 years of tirz. This is too much, of course, but I determined a while back that under no circumstances do I ever intend to find myself unable to source it. My life is immeasurably better after losing 110 pounds.
Could you direct me to some resources you used to figure out dosing and sourcing? I’ve been interested in trying it out (need to lose a lot of weight) but have been paralyzed by too much contradictory information.
Yeah I'm always amazed at what they can get people to pay for individual vials. I buy kits of 24mg reta for ~280. And that's not the cheapest, for certain.
To your first point, if you know where to look, you can get tens of vials of GLP-1s that have much higher dosing per vial for cheaper than you can get a third of the amount on the grey market. A lot of these sites even have purity testing to soothe consumers worries that they're getting garbage. For your third point, you have the FDA limiting HGH, yet you can buy the growth horomone releasing factor peptides (tesamorelin, sermorelin, ipamorelin) after doing a simple Google search.
As for broscience, moving into peptides was a logical next step after exhausting anabolic steroid "research". In fact, I'd say that biohackers are actually behind the bros when it comes to trying various peptides out and documenting experiences.
This exact scenario happened with me in a prior job. Invoices, payments, everything could (and sometimes was) sent through WhatsApp. It was absolutely shocking to see people do this.
I dropped Claude Code months ago. I'm just an amateur who plays around with bringing screens in from Figma and turning them into websites so I can get practice with AI tooling, but their limits were absurdly low on the $20 plan. Codex, for now, is much better in terms of daily limits.
And probably unsustainable. OpenAI desperately needs to catch up so they’ll throw yet more cash at it, while Anthropic are market leaders in this particular space.
I sound like a broken recorded in these threads but the $20 dollar Google AI Pro is unbelievable good value. You get more Claude tokens in antigravity than you get with the pro subscription from anthropic AND you can share it with your family for free and they also get the same amount of tokens. That's 5x the tokens for just $20.
That was indeed the case until last week. AGY right now hits the limits super fast on the Pro plan. I’ve had to start using Gemini CLI all the time, and am now considering what’s next.
It feels like we’ve sped-run the golden age of Claude and AGY.
It does not, but it has a sane scheduling agreement with the railroad which the railroad actually respects.
This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Florida East Coast Industries shares heritage with Florida East Coast Railway, but the companies were split in 2007.
I attended a design conference last week where Figma has been basically delegated as a design library tool, and that was it. They'd use it as a source of truth for components such as buttons, colors, typography, etc, but the actual design work that was being done was done through Claude Code. Multiple designers who had this stack said that they preferred it as their designs were now closer to what the end user would experience (i.e. code). One person actually eschewed Figma completely and used Storybook as the source of UI truth. I think that Figmas moat is a lot smaller than people think and that within a year or 2 there's going to be some very solid competitors out there.
Yep, my experience as well coming from Big Tech although they'll be buoyed by intertia for some time. And yes, source of truth just makes more sense in code, so I don't think there's much of a moat there either. I think there's still value in this collaboration layer, but collaboration will change substantially as well and take a different shape. The world where the design team spends weeks / months designing, refining, and doing crits on the same file just doesn't make sense now - it was driven by the high costs of implementation so the decisions had to be made upfront. That's going to change.
It is truly staggering to see a tool used by (almost) every large tech company in the world so quickly lose ground. I don't think they're done done, but their position in the value chain has shifted drastically.
There's already Paper Design and Subframe which handle design to code better because they're built for it. Figma is slow and not building what they need to build to keep up. Perhaps they'll make an Adobe and acquire one of these.
Paper Design etc all have the same fundamental problem as Figma - they’re designed for a process that won’t exist as we know it within a few years (and arguably half way there already). All of these canvas-based design tools assume that people want / need to directly manipulate things on a canvas fist before building vs going straight to building it (and by building I also mean you can ask Claude to build you 10 prototypes for different directions so exploration is not dead, just starts elsewhere).
Paper is canvas-based but code-first. Subframe is not canvas based and is fully code based. And yes, designers will always need to be able to directly manipulate the canvas for some things.
>Why bother with a drawing tool when you can literally mockup with real components and react etc.
I think that there's still value for the canvas (I'm a UX designer). I like seeing changes in the vector tool first, and then pushing out any changes to a JSON file where it can be used by the AI tool. That being said, this is just my preferred way of working, so somebody else may not even want to use Figma.
I totally get that. But soon will it be your primary mode of output vs yet another way to try ideas? Like how we sketch on paper to get creative juices flowing.
Cue up people shouting about how this is horrible and that they're totally going to cancel, only to be followed by Netflix making even more money next quarter.
Speaking from experience, I had Netflix for years without thinking about it, starting at $8/month. At that price I didn't care if I watched it or not. Then it went to $10, $12, etc. Once it got to $15-16 (I forget), I cancelled it.
I now sign up for 1-2 months a year to catch up on shows I like and just rotate which streaming services I have. Yes, this is anecdotal.
It's hard to find data on how common rotating streaming services is. I would guess not common. I found this from 2021 showing the number of streaming services the average US household has [1]. It's worth noting that this was based on lockdown-era data.
The number if still quite high. I still have 3-4 mainly because my ISP gives me 1 and Amazon Prime bundles it. Were it not for those, I'd probably stick with 2. This is imperfect data because is it the same 4 or are some or all of these rotated? We just don't know.
Most of the data around this is how streaming is cannibalizing satellite and cable. But at this rate Netflix will cost $30+ in 10-15 years. Will it still have growing revenue and the same subscriber numbers? There is price elasticity here.
This makes sense to me as a strategy for most users.
I cancelled a year or two ago, but not for the price changes alone. I didn't like the new interface much, and I found myself endlessly scrolling through the same things looking for stuff to watch.
I'm not sure if Netflix vastly removed most of its content, or they just made discoverability a nightmare, but it felt often like I 'ran out of stuff to watch.'
It's hard to justify 20 something a month for what is essentially a few 6 episode shows that will last one season, and maybe 4 or 5 passable movies in a year. It seems rather silly to me to pay for that all year.
I think this is a lot more common and I suspect people decide to do monthly and that they'll cancel after catching up on shows ... and then they don't cancel. So I'm sure the streaming services don't care that people do this because they might come out ahead anyways.
Well they'd have to lose a huge percentage of people for this not to be profitable quarter over quarter. But it likely cuts in to future growth substantially.
And with what seems to now be an unavoidable economic storm as in-transit tankers dock and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz starts to be felt, there might be a larger than normal amount of people looking to cut costs in the coming year.
Or maybe not, people seem to have stopped responding to economic pressure by cutting costs in the US! When vacations got super expensive, people still spent, and increased their complaining. We will see what happens in 2026.
Netflix, cable, etc. and other at home subscriptions tend to be the last things cut because people generally stay home more when the economy is bad so they want their in-home entertainment.
Netflix is more resilient to economic downturns than you'd think. For many people it's a higher ROI for entertainment when compared to a lot of other alternatives. e.g going to bars / restaurants / movie theaters.
Pirating is honestly, by-far the least painful experience to watch things.
I recently started watching a series, and I figured I'd check if it's on any streaming services I have access to. I found it on Prime Video, but when I clicked into it, it needed some other separate subscription to a service I'd never heard of to watch it. And even then, it had like, seasons 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 8 of the 9 total seasons. If there was any chance I'd subscribe to watch it before, I definitely wasn't now. I couldn't even figure out where the remaining seasons are available to be watched legally. It's especially hard to find this information in Canada because searching "X where to watch" just gives you results of where things are available in America, which has completely different licensing deals.
So I found a torrent for the complete series and I've been watching it pain-free. Piracy tends to be my default now. It even has the advantage that I can frequently find a Bluray rip rather than a reduced bitrate internet stream. Anything I really like and I want to support the creators, I purchase a physical release, or official merchandise or something.
No ads or previews to skip before each episode. Skip button seems to appear at different times.
No waiting for the skip button for recaps or intros. Sometimes they decide not to appear. If you jump 10s, sometimes they don't appear. Most pirated shows are appropriately bookmarked.
No waiting for the "next episode" button to appear. Sometimes they decide not to appear. If you jump 10s, sometimes they don't appear.
Some services make it harder than it should be to get to the episode/season list.
Must use their player. Usually means controls and subtitles appear on top of video. Screen dimmed on pause. Wack-a-mole controls.
That's not even counting the "few outliers" that I seem to encounter frustratingly often.
I worked at Netflix, I'm a huge Netflix Stan, but even I have to agree pirating is way easier. Especially now that they started cracking down on account sharing.
Having to constantly re-authenticate in my own home is annoying as hell.
Yup. If my gf is streaming something and an ad appears, I'll trigger the download for it during the first ad break, and then when the second ad breaks, it'll most likely be finished downloading and then we switch to JellyFin.
The only use we have for streaming apps is finding what we want to watch.
Yep, and that's already way more sophisticated than it needs to be. I no longer bother with the collecting aspect and just download everything on the fly, usually takes less than 5 minutes
If you set it up so it's convenient and usable by everyone in your house, including visitors, just like Netflix, it's not much cheaper. Electricity and occasional hard drive purchases add up. I bet mine averages out to ~$300/yr. I'm not sure whether just buying discs for stuff we actually watch, and the occasional 1-month binge-subscription for a series or something, would work out better, or not, but it's not a slam-dunk sure-win for piracy on the cost front.
> Except for a few outliers like you describe, streaming is an order of magnitude less painful.
Sort of. A good piracy server takes some time and effort to set up, certainly more than subscribing to even ten different streaming services would, and of course is beyond what most people can accomplish with computers, period.
However: 1) "I just plug in my laptop an play the movie" probably is less painful than having a bunch of streaming services, though not quite as friendly for all members of the household, and 2) Once it's set up, in actual use by people who aren't maintaining the system, the well-configured piracy server is less painful than streaming services, for those users.
I'll admit it's a bit of a pain to initially setup, but it's a one time pain. With Plex + arr services already set up, it's definitely easier to pirate than use a streaming provider.
Now, if I want to pirate, I just go to my browser, search for a movie/TV show, tell it to download, and it ensures it shows up seamlessly in Plex.
The benefits:
- Searching is easier
- One interface (Plex) vs many streaming interfaces, each with its own quirks.
- You don't have to worry that they'll take the show away while you're in the middle of Season 3.
Plex is pretty easy to set up. The arr services, though, were a royal pain. If there's some automation that sets it all up for you on your machine, though, then it would be a game changer.
I'm fairly pro-streaming services. I want the content producers to get paid when I watch. However, Apple TV's royal screwups[1] drove me to the edge and I decided to go through the painful process of figuring out all the *arr services.
If the streaming services don't make it a pain, I won't even think about pirating.
(I'll add that there was one time I pirated a Netflix show - even though I had Netflix - and the audio in the pirated version was much better than if I watched directly with Netflix. Not sure why).
[1] Locked out because I couldn't confirm the CVV of a card that I had reported lost almost a year prior. All the attempts to change the card/account failed. Even with a new account, once you'd enter an updated CC, it would tie it to my old account because it would realize I'm the same person.
I didn't just get locked out of Apple TV. I got locked out of all Apple services until that CC expired. I could not even apply for a job at Apple unless I confirmed the CVV. Thank God I don't use Apple devices!
It’s 2 clicks with tools like Stremio. I use Plex with the arr stack and sure it has more configuration needed upfront but once that’s done you no longer need to figure out which streaming service has what. Plus things like realdebrid mean you don’t even need storage anymore.
If there was a single service with everything on it then I'd agree with you. Hell, even cable was better where you could just choose packages of stuff you wanted to watch.
But as it is, no. It's more painful for the reasons I highlighted in my comment you replied to. It's an endless slog of hunting down where to find things, managing what you want to be subscribed to, shows and movies disappearing from your watchlist, acquisitions killing off apps and pushing you to new services and apps that are worse than the one before, etc. I don't have to deal with any of that because piracy is a better service.
I host a Jellyfin + Jellyseer combo for my friends. It makes pirating as easy as Netflix, except you don’t have to worry about “on which platform is this available?”
I don’t understand why with music streaming, every service has all the same songs, but with video streaming, everything is locked to just one service.
If I have a show/movie I want to watch, I first have to go to an indexing site like JustWatch to figure out which streaming service it's on. If it's not on any, or not on one I'm subbed to, I'm already having to go pirate.
Whereas when pirating, I typically just search my tracker for the show I want to watch, sort the results by most seeders, then download the highest one. I just save the .torrent on the shared network folder on my Raspberry Pi (Which literally just shows up as Z:\torrentfiles), and Transmission starts downloading it. A couple minutes later, it's ready and I sit on my couch and watch it.
I will grant you that the initial setup takes a little more effort. I signed up for a private tracker where torrents are vetted. I had to configure Transmission to auto-download. I had to install Kodi. But...meh? That's it? All that takes less than 10 minutes and only has to be done once.
If you're still using pirate software akin to LimeWire where you have to wade through results like "Pluribus-S01E01.mpg.exe" and deal with results where for some reason people renamed files (Back in the KaZaA days, I downloaded "JackAss.avi" expecting it to be the Jackass movie and it was actually Fight Club. WHY!?), then yeah, pirating is a pain in the ass. But otherwise, nah, it's really easy.
EDIT: As others have mentioned, pirated content is simply easier to consume. I can watch offline and have full control over playback. Never any ads or unskippable content.
nah, it's definitely a better UX if you do it right.
There are "shitty" ways to do piracy (usually the sketchy streaming alternatives). But the media management and playback tooling is genuinely great right now.
I still buy most of my media, but I pick up cheap physical copies of things and put them on a NAS for playback through jellyfin.
It's... MILES better than netflix/amazon/hulu/etc. No ads, no bullshit, no marketing, no "self-promotion that's totally not an ad, wink wink". Just your media.
Playback is per-user, it keeps all your stuff just fine, you can resume later from wherever you left off, I can shuffle series (great for kids shows like Arthur or magic school bus), and it's never offline, down, or unavailable.
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Basically - you're very confused. I have "streaming" it just comes out of my own equipment, playing my own content. All the affordances are there and it has none of the bullshit.
I've been out of that scene for a long time, hasn't Netflix implemented a bunch of anti-piracy methods, or are people just recording HDMI/DisplayPort output and saving it?
Reading around a bit, yes to Netflix adding anti-piracy measures, maybe to folks recording HDMI/DisplayPort.
Apparently, Netflix is using steganography/content watermarks in their 4k content itself to trace users who are pirating. This is from a totally unsourced Reddit thread[0] but they do reference a real company which claims to do this watermarking[1]. The claim is that in addition to Netflix requiring 4k content to be available only on platforms with Trusted Execution Environments[2], Netflix also encodes each ~10 second "chunk" of the video stream into at least 2 different versions: an Y and a Z version. Then, they serve each customer a unique series of chunks when that customer streams their content, e.g. YYZYZZZYZYYZYZYYZZYZYYZ. Then when content leaks, Netflix can examine each chunk of the leaked content to extract the ID of the user who streamed the content. Apparently, Netflix can encode a lot more than just the userID, they can also encode stuff like the individual device ID, the TEE key ID, etc.
I know you might be thinking "I could do something to defeat that" and you're probably right (e.g. take streams from multiple users and intercut them so that the bits of the watermark through time are being constantly shuffled), but I'll also bet that there's many layers of steganography we don't know about, and unless you get them all, you'll not escape scot-free.
But the only real world impact is that the device that was used to stream that 4K content gets blacklisted at the hardware level.
To workaround this, piracy groups try to batch 4K rips because they know that the device will be burned soon after they upload the content. They then acquire another device, and the game of whack-a-mole continues.
Not that I would ever pirate a movie because I'm a good boy, but I remember the Cinavia DRM that affected Blu-ray players thirteen years ago.
I'm not 100% sure how it worked, but I guess it could do a similar kind of steganography-style thing to the audio track, where they would embed keys silently and the blu-ray player would check against that.
I'm not sure if anyone actually ever managed to defeat it, I think they just stopped implementing it in streaming boxes.
What are they gonna do? Ban your account? You don't need to go through KYC to get a netflix account, so what's preventing you from using a prepaid card to sign up for another account?
Apple tv is quite a bit better than the other streaming services. If people truly cared they would either watch blu-rays or Apple tv. But few actually care.
I just don't think that's true anymore. Netflix isn't going anywhere. Twitter and Reddit have taken highly visible user-hostile actions since back in 2023 and people stayed. People have become too passive and docile to switch anymore. The portion of the population that's discerning enough to leave is small.
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