Civil liberties groups decry plan to use gloves linked to death of Kentucky man allegedly shocked 27 times in county jail
Plans to supply Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers with special gloves that can deliver electric shocks have alarmed experts and drawn scrutiny amid some high-profile lawsuits over their use in local correctional facilities.
In one extreme case, a 43-year-old man died after allegedly being shocked 40 times by officers with a combination of the gloves and a Taser in a county jail in Kentucky, and the man’s widow is suing authorities.
Kinshuk Surjan’s documentary follows women in dire financial straits whose bereavement compounds their social plight, which they confront together
Out in rural India, a crisis casts a dark cloud over the seemingly tranquil vistas of wheat fields and soy farms. Over the past 20 years, more than 400,000 farmers have killed themselves, beset by mounting debts and low market prices for crops. Shot in Maharashtra, the state with the highest rate of farmer suicides in India, Kinshuk Surjan’s documentary sensitively captures another tragedy that lingers after death: left behind by their dead husbands, generations of grieving widows struggle to find their way in a society still burdened by patriarchal values.
Sanjivani, a woman in her 30s, is one such case. Eight years after her husband killed himself, she has taken over some of the farming responsibilities, along with other odd jobs, to provide for her two children. The camera rarely finds her at rest; Sanjivani not only works in the fields but also performs domestic labour for her extended family – cooking, cleaning and doing laundry. Her resilience is stunning to witness, but even more impressive is the emotional support provided by a tight-knit network of other widows. Together, the women gather for counselling sessions where they can freely discuss their emotional, physical and financial issues.
It used to be that dorm rooms were chaotically messy. Does this new generation really need an £80 spice rack and velvet clothes hangers?
Of all the questions this year’s freshers may be nervously asking themselves as they prepare for this next phase – did I pick the right course? Will I make friends? Is uni worth 30 grand when my future job prospects may be limited to dusting a datacentre? – one is particularly pressing: “How many clothes hangers do I need to bring?”
Fret no longer, enquiring young minds: John Lewis has the answer on its packing checklist for students. Thirty to 40, it claims, wildly, “consisting mostly of standard velvet or plastic hangers”. “Standard” velvet? I missed this memo.
Plans for gloves that can deliver electric shocks underline the homeland security department’s sadistic practices
On 11 August, the Associated Press reported that the Homeland Security Agency will spend up to $20m to equip its agents with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks to the skin of a person deemed uncooperative. The “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices”– branded Glove, for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter – will be supplied by their manufacturer, Compliant Technologies, through a no-bid contract.
News of the acquisition inspired the editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes to publish a cartoon of an ICE agent wearing the glove, underneath which are a branding iron, an iron maiden, a rack, and other compliance technologies. AKA, instruments of torture.
He has chased a deer across a dual carriageway, eaten an entire tray of chocolate brownies and jumped head first into a canal. But despite all the worry he brings us, he is extraordinarily lovable
Ernie found his way into our hearts and home about nine years ago, when he strategically crawled into my lap during a family visit to meet a litter of puppies. While all the other beagle puppies ran wild, Ernie sat comfortably on me with his long, soft ears dangling down. We chose him because of his placid nature and named him Ernie after my mum’s late dad, who coincidentally also had short legs and a bit of a round belly.
After a few weeks we realised that Ernie was anything but placid. His gentle temperament quickly morphed into an unruly and persistent need to find his way into danger.
The Democratic and the Republican candidate each blame the other for the bungled recovery effort after storm struck region
Two years after North Carolina suffered the worst natural disaster in its history when Hurricane Helene struck the state’s western half, life in the hardest-hit areas appears back to normal. Downtowns are lively, blocked roads have been reopened and rivers are flowing below their banks.
But the telltale evidence of the disaster’s expensive impacts can still be seen – from “for rent” signs in storefronts whose businesses never came back to debris from the storm still lurking in some waterways. And in the race for North Carolina’s US Senate seat, it’s almost as if the hurricane never left.
Civil liberties groups decry plan to use gloves linked to death of Kentucky man allegedly shocked 27 times in county jail
Plans to supply Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers with special gloves that can deliver electric shocks have alarmed experts and drawn scrutiny amid some high-profile lawsuits over their use in local correctional facilities.
In one extreme case, a 43-year-old man died after allegedly being shocked 40 times by officers with a combination of the gloves and a Taser in a county jail in Kentucky, and the man’s widow is suing authorities.
Идея так называемого «мертвого интернета» витает в воздухе довольно давно (если мне не изменяет память, уже в 2014 году были робкие высказывания в поддержку этой теории), но с каждым годом голоса тех, кто считает ее реальной, становятся громче. И действительно, развитие ИИ, автоматизации, парсинга ресурсов способствует наводнению интернета ботами. Но так ли все критично, как кажется на первый взгляд?
Мы решили изучить, что происходит в современном интернете с точки зрения человеческого и ботового трафика и разобраться, так ли близок «мертвый интернет» или это все еще напоминает теорию заговора.
Look closely at a painting, and you might be able to see where an artist changed their mind. Beneath the finished surface, there may be an abandoned line, a figure moved several inches to the left, a color that looked splendid in the morning and became unbearable by night. There may be a smudgy fingerprint at the edge of the canvas. The back may hold a date, a repair, uneven staples, a signature, or the name of a previous owner. These messy marks were once incidental to the artwork. Today they are considered evidence.
AI can produce an image in nano-seconds, then create hundreds of variations before a painter has mixed a color or cleaned a brush. Some of the results are technically bewildering and others inspire disbelief: How is this possible? Yet their abundance is changing our relationship to novelty. When nearly any visual idea can be summoned on demand, newness becomes easier to manufacture but harder to believe in. In an age of effortless images, the mess left behind by making something may become part of what makes it valuable.
So much recent visual culture can appear at once new and strangely familiar. Generative systems learn from immense archives of existing images, then assemble patterns according to statistical relationships. Their output can startle us, though the surprise often arrives cloaked in a recognizable visual fluency: the cinematic light, the dreamlike architecture, the glossy portrait or the eerily composed impossibility. After enough exposure, even the surreal can begin to feel conventional.
A study presented at the 2024 CHI Conference proffers one perspective about how this happens. Participants who used an AI image generator during a visual ideation exercise became more fixed on an initial example and produced fewer ideas, with less variety and originality, than those in the control group. The study involved only 60 people, so its findings should be treated cautiously, though they articulate something many artists and designers have begun to notice: a tool built to accelerate imagination can also narrow it by presenting a polished answer before a more difficult, original idea has had time to form.
Against this flood of frictionless imagery, fine art acquires another kind of presence. A physical artwork occupies time and holds emotion. An artist stood before it, considered it, changed it, ruined it, waited for it, and eventually decided to either finish or abandon it. All artwork contains a sequence of often messy choices that could have gone in any number of directions. The object becomes a record of attention, and attention is becoming one of the scarcest materials we have.
Researchers have already observed a version of this shift. Across six experiments involving 2,965 people, participants consistently valued art labeled “AI-made” less than work labeled “human-made,” even when the images themselves were identical. Awareness of the machine changed the perceived value of the human hand.
This preference extends beyond art. A 2015 study in the Journal of Marketing found that people considered handmade objects more attractive in part because they believed those objects symbolically contained the maker’s love. The participants were projecting on and responding to an imagined human presence embedded in the object, expressed through the perceived time and care required to make it.
Nostalgia is part of the current attraction to the handmade. We remember darkrooms, paste-up boards, paint-stained clothes, and the physical tools that digital technology has made unnecessary or irrelevant, and often forget the expense and tedium the processes demanded. Still, the renewed power of visible erasure or the pleasure of encountering an unrestrained line reaches beyond nostalgia. These marks allow us to envision the intent and the decisions behind them.
AI can attempt to imitate these marks. It can add a false thumbprint, invent pentimenti, reproduce a stray brush bristle, and generate an image that appears to have survived a century in an attic. But mess itself will soon prove very little. Provenance and an intelligible creative process will become more important as appearance ceases to represent authenticity.
In educated hands, AI can still become a profound artistic medium. Photography and digital tools have disrupted ideas about skill and authorship before becoming vehicles for extraordinary art. AI will be shaped by artists whose choices are specific enough to resist its defaults, and those artists may create work we cannot yet imagine. The presence of a tool has never settled the question of artistic value; the depth and consequence of the decisions made with it still matter.
We are entering a period in which polished images and endless variations are available on command. The works we retain or collect may be those that let us encounter another person’s limits: the place where control faltered or the artist had to surrender to something unresolved.
I think our nostalgia for mess is growing from a hunger for evidence that making something still requires time, effort, commitment, and—dare I say it—love.
Vanitas Still Life with a Skull, a Book and Roses, c.1630, from the collection of Nationalmuseum Stockholm. | Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images
Americans want to soak the rich. But few have strong opinions about precisely how.
Indeed, even among our nation’s most impassioned class warriors, contemplating the fine details of tax policy is an eccentric pastime. In an interview earlier this month, Democratic Socialists of America co-chair Megan Romer called for taxing “the hell out of” the wealthy. When asked exactly what that meant, Romer conceded that she had no “solid answer.”
Key takeaways
• A loophole in the tax code allows the rich to escape capital gains taxes by dying.
• Closing that loophole would raise a lot of revenue while also making other investment taxes more effective.
• A tax on the unrealized capital gains of the dead poses fewer logistical and judicial challenges than many other approaches to soaking the rich.
On one level, this is understandable. Anyone can freeze up when put on the spot. And in any case, Romer believes in collective ownership of the means of production. When your preferred tax policy is 1,000 times more radical than anything Congress would entertain, sweating its particulars might not feel urgent.
Still, there’s more than one way to soak a fat cat. And some approaches work better than others. Thus, for non-revolutionaries, thinking through the details of a “tax the hell out of them” platform seems worthwhile.
Many of that platform’s potential components have already attracted widespread attention. Wealth taxes — which expropriate a certain fraction of the super-rich’s assets each year — are on the ballot in California and the progressive agenda in Washington, DC. And Democrats perennially call for raising the top income tax rates.
Yet there is a less-discussed, populist tax policy that would raise a lot of revenue, pose relatively few logistical challenges or economic trade-offs, and make other levies on the wealthy more effective: taxing the investment earnings of the dead.
The rich are dying to avoid taxes
Shaking down the deceased might seem distasteful. But doing so would close a large loophole in America’s tax code — one that lets the wealthy cheat Uncle Sam out of hundreds of billions in revenue.
One way that the government currently soaks the super rich is by taxing their investment earnings (also known as “capital gains”). If President Donald Trump buys shares in a hot dog company for $10 million — and then sells them for $110 million — he will need to pay a 23.8 percent tax on his $100 million profit.
If Trump holds onto his stock until death, however, his unrealized capital gain disappears. When the shares are passed down to his heirs, the tax code resets its initial value: If Eric Trump inherits the frankfurter fortune — and then immediately sells it for its market value of $110 million — he will owe $0 in capital gains taxes.
Essentially, the tax code treats Donald’s heir as though he purchased the firm for $110 million, then sold it without turning a profit. This rule is known as “stepped-up basis.” And it costs the Treasury upward of $70 billion a year.
That forgone revenue doesn’t all go to the rich. Middle-class heirs also benefit from stepped-up basis. But the policy’s benefits flow overwhelmingly to the affluent and super-wealthy: As of 2022, the richest 10 percent of Americans held roughly three-quarters of the nation’s unrealized capital gains — while the richest 1 percent lay claim to 43 percent of them, according to the Survey of Consumer Finances.
Beyond directly sapping government revenue, stepped-up basis also creates problems for raising taxes on investment income. Democrats have long called for increasing the top capital gains rate to 39.6 percent — today’s top rate for labor income — so that investors aren’t taxed more lightly than workers.
And yet, in a world with stepped-up basis, the higher you raise the tax rate on capital gains, the more incentive you give the rich to sit on their most lucrative assets until they die. For this reason, hiking the top capital gains rate can theoretically cost the government money. In a 2021 analysis of President Joe Biden’s proposal to lift the top rate on investments to 39.6 percent, economists at the University of Pennsylvania projected that the policy would reduce federal revenue by $33 billion over the next decade, as investors sold off fewer assets.
Critically, when those same researchers modeled how the Biden proposal would impact revenue if stepped-up basis did not exist, they found that his capital gains tax hike would raise $113 billion. Once rich investors lost the death loophole, they became more willing to sell assets, despite the high capital gains rate.
This last point illustrates one final perversity of stepped-up basis: It promotes economic inefficiency.
In an ideal investment market, capital is fluid. Investors shift their savings toward firms that seem capable of putting it to more productive use. If an established company loses its competitive advantages — or some upstart develops better technology or products — capital markets are supposed to redirect investment toward the more promising enterprise.
Stepped-up basis undermines that process. By rewarding wealthy investors for holding assets until death, it encourages them to lock their capital in place, even if they would otherwise reallocate it. In this way, the policy saps both the government’s revenues and the market’s dynamism.
The case for a death tax
There are multiple ways to address the stepped-up basis problem. The typical approach is to change how an heir’s tax liability is calculated, when they sell an inherited asset — a rule known as “carryover basis.” So, in our hypothetical, if Eric Trump inherits and then sells his dad’s $110 million cylindrical sausage stocks, he will pay $23.8 million in taxes on his family’s $100 million capital gain.
But there is a better way of closing the mortality loophole: Treat dying as equivalent to selling one’s assets.
Under this policy, the government doesn’t need to wait for Eric to sell his hot dog holdings before collecting on his father’s capital gain. Rather, the IRS essentially pretends that Donald Trump sold all of his assets at market value on the day that he died — and then adds the resulting capital gains liabilities to the trillionaire’s final tax return. By the time Eric gets his weenie windfall, Uncle Sam has already taken a cut of the proceeds.
This approach has some major advantages. While carryover basis ensures that Donald’s tax bills survive his death, the policy still allows his heirs to put off paying those bills indefinitely: If Eric clings to his tube-steak equity, he can delay paying taxes on his father’s gains for decades (while, perhaps, lobbying the government to restore stepped-up basis in the interim). By contrast, if the government simply collects on Donald’s earnings when he perishes, the waiting game ends.
For this reason, the latter policy generates far more revenue than carryover basis. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, establishing carryover basis would raise $197 billion over a decade, while taxing the dead’s accrued gains would raise $536 billion.
The most prominent argument against collecting at death is that it could force the sale of family businesses. Say your dad bought a glue factory for $1 million and now it’s worth $11 million. Even though the adhesive plant has become a lot more valuable on paper, your family might have no way of paying a multimillion-dollar capital gains tax without selling it. Which you don’t want to do, since glue is your passion. Many lobbyists think this scenario should break our hearts.
Personally, I’m not sure that preserving dynastic ownership of businesses should be a priority for tax policy. Firms run by heirs tend to perform worse than those helmed by executives unrelated to the founder. If we must avoid forced sales, however, the government can give closely held businesses the option of paying their dead founders’ tax bill in installments.
Taxing dead billionaires should be the bare minimum
Taxing the deceased’s investment earnings is compatible with myriad other progressive fiscal proposals, such as a wealth tax, a higher capital gains rate, and, of course, a larger estate tax.
This said, there is one prominent tax idea that directly competes with soaking the dead: annually taxing the wealthy’s unrealized capital gains.
In broad outline, that policy is simple: If the value of Mark Zuckerberg’s stock portfolio rises by $1 billion in a year, then he must pay taxes on that appreciation, even if he has sold none of his assets.
This rule makes taxing the Facebook founder’s unrealized earnings at death largely unnecessary: The government will have already collected taxes on most of those gains as they accrued.
A yearly tax on unrealized gains is popular with progressive economists, who persuaded the Biden administration to pursue a limited version of it. And the policy does have much to recommend it. Taxing a rich person’s unrealized capital gains each year would generate more revenue than taxing them at death. And doing so would also combat a fundamental source of unfairness in today’s tax code: If a worker gains $100,000 in 2026 through labor, she needs to pay taxes to the government on that income immediately. By contrast, if Zuckerberg gains $1 billion over the same period through asset appreciation — and holds onto his investments — then he can wait decades to pay the 23.8 percent tax on that gain. Given inflation, this means that the tech billionaire can effectively shrink his tax liability; $238 million will be worth much less in, say, 2052 than it is today.
Closing the death loophole would prevent the Zuckerberg family from avoiding their tax bill forever. Assuming normal life expectancy, however, it still lets them postpone their tax payments for ages, then pay Uncle Sam in depreciated currency.
So, why am I talking so much about closing the death loophole, when we can just tax unrealized capital gains every year? The main reason is that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority probably won’t let Congress do the latter.
In 2024, multiple Republican justices suggested that it is unconstitutional for the federal government to tax capital gains in the absence of a transaction. Fortunately, according to many legal analysts, taxing accrued gains at death would likely remain viable under the justices’ reasoning. This is because death triggers a transfer of assets from one person to another — and the Supreme Court has long held that Congress can tax such transfers. Thus, even if the Court ultimately bars Washington from taxing billionaires’ unrealized gains while they’re alive, the government will probably still be able to do so when they exit this mortal coil.
Less importantly, closing the death loophole arguably presents fewer logistical challenges than annually taxing either unrealized gains (or, for that matter, total wealth). The latter requires the government to determine the value of often hard-to-price assets — such as closely held businesses that aren’t priced on the stock market — year after year.
Taxing gains at death, by contrast, requires determining these valuations only once — and at a moment when estates must already catalog and price their assets for inheritance and tax purposes.
Closing the death loophole isn’t frictionless. To calculate a deceased person’s unrealized capital gains, you need to know how much they paid for all their assets initially. That’s easy enough with public stock. But figuring out what someone paid for a painting or parcel of land in 1955 can be difficult. Nevertheless, the administrative burdens of taxing the dead’s investment earnings are almost certainly lower than those of taxing their unrealized gains annually.
In my view, those latter two policies would be worth the trouble. But the relative simplicity of closing the death loophole may make it an easier sell.
That said, prying capital gains from billionaires’ cold, dead hands won’t necessarily be easy. Biden tried to close the death loophole for the rich, only to see moderate Democrats veto his plans.
If the broad left wants to prevent a repeat of that history, then they’ll need to make opposing taxes on dead billionaires at least as politically radioactive as supporting data centers is today.
Benjamin Franklin famously quipped that nothing is certain “except death and taxes.” For America’s richest investors, however, only the first looks like a sure thing. That can be fixed.
Идея так называемого «мертвого интернета» витает в воздухе довольно давно (если мне не изменяет память, уже в 2014 году были робкие высказывания в поддержку этой теории), но с каждым годом голоса тех, кто считает ее реальной, становятся громче. И действительно, развитие ИИ, автоматизации, парсинга ресурсов способствует наводнению интернета ботами. Но так ли все критично, как кажется на первый взгляд?
Мы решили изучить, что происходит в современном интернете с точки зрения человеческого и ботового трафика и разобраться, так ли близок «мертвый интернет» или это все еще напоминает теорию заговора.
Two Phoenix police officers were fired and arrested after an unreported traffic stop in which they assaulted a man and woman and shocked them with a Taser, the city's police chief said.
At a conservative center for women leaders, interns told stories about their lives. One said a male classmate told her, “I don’t know if women should be lawyers.”
A century ago, Mexican American families came together to build an adobe church near the border in West Texas. Can its bell toll again as the wall expansion nears?
After the departure of thousands of federal workers, rural communities report problems obtaining loans, grants, technical assistance and support for infrastructure and other services.
Republicans still have some clear advantages on the map, but President Trump’s unpopularity has opened the door for an outcome that once seemed far-fetched.
The move to call off the high-profile event was communicated in June, South Korea said. President Trump shortened another joint military exercise earlier this month.
In recent weeks, the police have closed dozens of cafes, often citing laws that stipulate women must veil in public. Experts say the closures are part of an effort to control public space.
The tech giant says it does not sell the devices in Russia, but they are widely available on resale markets. When purchased that way, they are virtually impossible to track.
В первой части мы разобрали язык, компилятор и байткод SwiftII — Swift-подобной среды для Apple II 1977 года. Но чтобы на этой машине действительно писать код, одного интерпретатора мало: клавиатура без строчных букв и обратного слэша, дисплей без половины нужных символов, 64 КБ памяти, которые приходится переключать банками. Во второй части — как автор всё это обошёл (собственный редактор, файловый браузер, ввод через диграфы) и, отдельно, как весь проект собирался с помощью Claude Code и Codex: честный разбор, где ИИ реально помог, а где им пришлось управлять вручную.
«Playwright сейчас модный, Selenium старый, Cypress удобный». Именно так чаще всего звучит выбор фреймворка на планировании — и именно поэтому команды потом полгода разгребают последствия решения, принятого за один созвон.
Я сам проходил этот выбор не один раз, и каждый раз он оказывался сложнее, чем «взять модное». Дальше — разбор архитектуры, реальных ограничений и того, во что выбор фреймворка выливается через год, когда тестов становится не 20, а 2000.
The deepfake epidemic in schools is affecting more than students. Four teachers tell WIRED about becoming targets of sexualized, AI-generated content—and how difficult it was to find accountability.
На Хабре не так много информации об интеграции между различными СУБД, и я решил поделиться своим опытом построения информационной системы на базе Oracle, которая взаимодействует с PostgreSQL (PG). Статья состоит их двух частей: в первой описана конфигурация СУБД, а во второй описан кейс по получению и обработке данных. Надеюсь, этот материал сэкономит Вам время при решении подобных задач.
Плазменное кольцо в колбе ведёт себя почти как живой организм. Оно самостоятельно плавает по объёму колбы, реагирует на поднесение руки, отзывается на магнитное поле, и временами создаёт поразительной красоты визуальные спецэффекты.
Концептуально устройство простое до неприличия. Снаружи колбы стоит катушка в три витка, по ней течёт ВЧ ток на 13 МГц. Магнитное поле проходит сквозь стекло, наводит в разреженном инертном газе (ксеноне либо криптоне) вихревое электрическое поле и зажигает разряд. Наведённый ток замкнут по кругу, поэтому и разряд имеет форму кольца. Самое простое и короткое описание, которое я обычно использую: плазма в колбе работает вторичной обмоткой трансформатора, первичка которого намотана снаружи стекла.
Индуктивно связанная плазма известна с XIX века и давно используется в науке и промышленности в самых различных областях. Теперь ей нашлось совершенно новое применение, которому и посвящена эта статья.
