It is federalized. Marijuana is illegal at the federal level.

But one of the advantages of the split between state and federal laws is that states can experiment with decriminalization.

Are you supposing that the party could settle on a non-Harris replacement for Biden before their convention??

Getting delegates to agree on someone other Harris in smoke-filled backrooms in Chicago is unwise and unlikely, but at least within the realm of possibility.

Getting them to agree before they’ve even met sounds like pure fiction. And that’s what would be necessary to meet the Aug 7 deadline. Kamala Harris will be on the Ohio ballot no matter what happens in Chicago.

As you suggest it’s a regulatory problem. There was a recent kerfuffle involving the Ohio ballot, which was solved by putting Biden/Harris on the ballot before they are officially nominated. So any changes made at the Democratic convention will come too late to change the Ohio ballot.

There was a similar issue in Alabama, but it looks like they just moved their deadline after the convention.

Another example: the people driving in the opposite direction right before 4th of July!

I agree more states should go this, but radical changes in laws aren’t so unusual. For example, marijuana possession can be legal in one state and a felony five minutes away.

Fair point. I think they would absolutely go with Harris. Partly out of deference, partly because she would remain in control of the Biden/Harris $100 million warchest and ground operations org, partly because her name can’t be taken off the general ballot in multiple states, and partly because Democrats need to campaign on women’s rights and it would look awful to pass over a Black woman.

I also think that Newsom/Whitmer/Beshear/Pritzker et al are not interested in replacing Biden. They will inherit chaos, are very likely to lose in the general, and that will be the end of their presidential aspirations.

In the US, unlike Russia and North Korea, you can vote against the incumbent without fearing for your safety.

Get the most votes. That’s the only thing that matters. Everything else is just making excuses.

Sanders didn’t get the most votes. I don’t care about the excuses.

Bernie Sanders got fewer votes than Clinton in 2016 and fewer votes than Biden in 2020. That’s why he wasn’t the nominee.

Politics ain’t beanbag. If you can’t get the most votes than you deserve to go home.

They aren’t required. But Biden/Harris delegates aren’t chosen randomly, they are Democrats who have demonstrated loyalty towards Biden and Harris and have personally pledged to support them.

The guy responsible for killing Roe v Wade literally took credit for it on TV yesterday.

You get a chance to vote for your dream candidate in the primary.

If they’re not on the ballot in the general, that’s because other voters didn’t find your dream candidate so dreamy.

If Biden decided to step down, his delegates are pledged to support Kamala Harris. So it’s either him or her.

Still certain Democrats would crush it without Biden?

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?”

Thanks to the Supreme Court, that’s how

The impact of the IRA on climate change can be studied by the same models that predict future climate change.

In other words, claims that the IRA doesn’t affect climate change are as scientifically baseless as claims that global warming is harmless.

Either you believe scientific models or you don’t.

But the training data does contain songs, and they need to pay for those.

Courts have found that scraping data from a public website is legal, because data is not protected by copyright. But copying protected works without permission is generally illegal, it doesn’t matter if you use a scraper.

If the defendants in this case admit using RIAA works, then they will probably try to argue fair use. At that point their product will become relevant, including its commercial nature. This will weigh against them, because their songs directly compete against RIAA songs. In fact, that’s why artists who include samples in their work usually obtain permission first.

This is the basis for the RIAA claims, which sure sounds like piracy:

On information and belief, similar to other generative AI audio models, Suno trains its AI model to produce audio output by generally taking the following steps: a. Suno first copies massive numbers of sound recordings, including by “scraping” (i.e., copying or downloading) them from digital sources. This vast collection of information forms the input, or “corpus,” upon which the Suno AI model is trained.

There is no evidence the AI devs bought any music, for any use. Quite the opposite:

Antonio Rodriguez, a partner at the venture capital firm Matrix Partners, explained that his firm invested in the company with full knowledge that Suno might get sued by copyright owners, which he understood as “the risk we had to underwrite when we invested in the company.” Rodriguez pulled the curtain back further when he added that “honestly, if we had deals with labels when this company got started, I probably wouldn’t have invested in it. I think they needed to make this product without the constraints.” By “constraints,” Rodriguez was, of course, referring to the need to adhere to ordinary copyright rules and seek permission from rightsholders to copy and use their works.

I don’t think this is frivolous. If you publish a song that includes part of my song, that’s good evidence that you copied my song.

This isn’t a prosecution, and nobody is alleging a crime. This is a civil lawsuit.

In a civil lawsuit, the standard of evidence is much different. You do not have to “prove” things beyond a reasonable doubt like in a criminal trial. The jury is instructed to weigh the evidence like a balance, and whichever side has the best evidence wins. Even if it’s only a small difference that only slightly favors one side, they win.

That’s why it’s so important to have evidence that counters whatever the other side claims. You are bound to lose if your opponents are the only ones offering evidence on their side of the balance.