If he's doing it from the White House, it's not personal business. Actually, it's really difficult to be sure that anything a sitting president does is purely personal. Proper presidents address this by avoiding anything that even looks like it might be a conflict of interest.

Because Bondi doesn't know what the Attorney General's job is. She -- and Trump -- think it's to be his lawyer and advocate. It's not. It's to be the American people's lawyer and advocate, which would include going after the president except the DoJ has a long-standing policy that due to the complicated conflicts it will not prosecute a sitting president.

Trump and Bondi affirmatively declaring that the Trumpcoin dinner was not official business may enable prosecution after he leaves office, though the incredible breadth of the Supreme Court ruling will make that hard. SCOTUS ruled that not only can a president not be prosecuted for any official acts, nothing that even looks like an official act can be used as evidence to substantiate personal criminal behavior. This effectively means that as long as Trump is talking to a government employee, even if it's about personal business, the judiciary has to consider it an official act which makes it inadmissible in trial.

Also, at the rate he's going downhill, by the time Trump leaves office he'll be incompetent to stand trial.

Of course, what really should happen when a president abuses his power for personal gain is not that the DoJ should prosecute him, but that Congress should impeach and remove him. Of course, there's no way the GOP is going to do that, no matter what Trump does.

In theory, Congress is supposed to be the check on this sort of thing, which is why it's generally fine that the DoJ is part of the executive branch. There's significant value in ensuring that the judiciary and the cops don't report to the same boss, because there needs to be a little tension between them.

So the way it's supposed to work is If the president is abusing his control of the DoJ for personal or political purposes, Congress should impeach and convict. This is perhaps the clearest and simplest form of "High Crimes and Misdemeanors" (which is a phrase that doesn't refer to either crimes or misdemeanors in the usual sense). But this assumes that there is also tension between the legislative and executive branches, so they can check and balance one another. In the current situation, the GOP does whatever Trump says, no matter how corrupt, and the GOP controls both houses.

No wonder my Commodore stock went up.

If the bot can do the judge's job for them well, it gets an "A"

Perhaps if it had adequate funding... ?

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

In the Navy,
startups sail the seven seas...

In the Gov't time ... goes ... slower ... er.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.archive.org%2Fweb%2F20...

That depends on the country's takings law. I'm more familiar with the United States Constitution, which provides: "nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation." Canada's Expropriation Act (fact sheet) likewise guarantees market value to the property owner.

This isn't advice for slashdotters, all of you will have your own approaches, many quite sophisticated. But, if you have family or friends who use gmail and want a simple suggestion that they can easily understand and follow, and from which they'll get results that are about as good (and maybe better), tell them to click the "report spam" button instead of using the unsubscribe link. If Google believes the unsubscription flow to be legitimate, gmail will prompt with a popup that asks if they want to unsubscribe. If they click "unsubscribe", gmail will attempt to take care of the unsubscription.

If they click "report spam" on another email from that sender, gmail will consider it spam and ask if they'd also like to block the sender. They should, of course, click "yes".

Before Trump, indeed before Trump's second term, everyone understood that this would create nasty conflicts of interest which would undermine the integrity of the office. Because all previous presidents acted responsibly, trying to avoid not only actual corruption but even the appearance of corruption, it was never an issue that had to be legislated. Now we have a blatantly corrupt president who openly sells access to the White House, not for campaign contributions but for cold cash directly into his pocket. He's almost certainly selling pardons and other political favors, too. It's a very, very sad day.

Assuming we don't continue our descent into corruption and autocracy, and assuming we can get SCOTUS to eliminate the near-total immunity they've granted to presidents, I expect we will have legislation to specifically ban presidents from "doing business" while in office, requiring them to put all of their assets into a blind trust, over which they can have no control, and can't even know what investments it holds.

Oh, I don't know. They're now subject to the UCMJ. I doubt they've realized how many constitutional rights they've given up, and how much stiffer the justice system they're now subject to is.

If they knew what they were getting into, they might well have refused and insisted on working only as the aforementioned overpaid consultants. Their new commissions come with a lot of responsibilities and obligations they don't understand, and basically no real benefits. Light colonels make less money than they'd have been paid as consultants, and since no one will be in their chain of command the position doesn't come with any real authority. All they get is some meaningless military courtesies.

As for the obligations/risks... I wonder if they realize they could now be court-martialed for making public political statements that they could make with impunity as civilians. Or the fact that the UCMJ applies the death penalty in some cases where civilian law does not (e.g. sedition and child rape), and often defines crimes much more broadly. The UCMJ penalizes things like "Conduct unbecoming of an officer" which can apply to things that aren't normally crimes at all, or can be prosecuted even the officer is acquitted of a crime that provoked the charge.

Probably they'll be fine, but they've opened themselves up to significant risk, likely without realizing it. I hope they at least had a sit-down with a JAG or similar before being sworn in.

He really doesn't. He swings his arm around improperly, and puts his hand in the wrong place, and at the wrong angle. I'll grant that his "salutes" aren't as awful as some actors' are but they're definitely not good.

Saluting correctly is actually quite simple. If you're not wearing a hat, your middle finger should come to the right end of your right eyebrow. Your hand should be perfectly flat, with your thumb tight against your hand and in the same plane, which should be angled about 45 degrees to the ground, palm towards your face. If you are wearing a had, it's the same except your middle finger should be at the forward right corner of your hat brim.

How your hand should get to that position is very simple: a straight line. Generally your hand starts from a position alongside your right thigh and it should track the straightest possible line from that position to the final position, with no extraneous movement, no unnecessary elbow or shoulder movement. For example, no throwing your elbow out and then swinging your forearm up, or swinging your hand out in a big circle or anything else likely to smack the guy next to you in the ranks. Note that fancy drill presentations do alter this for effect, but that's only certain sorts of ceremonies. Outside of those, a smooth, straight, crisp line from starting position to ending position is how the US military salutes. (Officers are generally not as good at this as enlisted.)

Ending the salute is the same. A straight line from the salute position to wherever the hand is going to go, generally to a position along the seam on the outside of the right thigh. Along the way the hand transitions from the flat plane to the "holding a roll of quarters" configuration with the thumb on top and parallel to the pant seam.

Indeed. The UCMJ is considerably less gentle than the civilian judicial system, and deliberately sets aside many constitutional rights. I would find it hilarious if some of them got court-martialed for things they didn't even realize were crimes. I'm not so concerned about how they learn about the UCMJ and its implications for them. They chose to accept commissions, they spoke the oath. If they don't bother to learn what that means, that's their problem. Ignorance of the law is no defense, and this is at least as true under the UCMJ as the civilian system.

Sorry, that's just petty, and irrelevant.

Good point on the "benevolent dictator fantasy". :-) The EarthCent Ambassador Series by E.M. Foner delves into that big time with the benevolent "Stryx" AIs.

I guess most of these examples from this search fall into some variation of your last point on "scared fool with a gun" (where for "gun" substitute some social process that harms someone, with AI being part of a system):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fduckduckgo.com%2F%3Fq%3Dexam...

Example top result:
"8 Times AI Bias Caused Real-World Harm"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.techopedia.com%2Ftim...

Or something else I saw the other day:
"'I was misidentified as shoplifter by facial recognition tech'"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fnews%2Ftec...

Or: "10 Nightmare Things AI And Robots Have Done To Humans"
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.buzzfeed.com%2Fmikes...

Sure, these are not quite the same as "AI-powered robots shooting everyone. The fact that "AI" of some sort is involved is incidental compared to just computer-supported-or-even-not algorithms as have been in use for decades like to redline sections of cities to prevent issuing mortgages.

Of course there are example of robots killing people with guns, but they are still unusual:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftheconversation.com%2Fan...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2021%2F06%2F01...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FFutur...
https://f6ffb3fa-34ce-43c1-939d-77e64deb3c0c.atarimworker.io/story/07/...

These automated machine guns have potential to go wrong, but I have not heard yet that one has:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
"The SGR-A1 is a type of autonomous sentry gun that was jointly developed by Samsung Techwin (now Hanwha Aerospace) and Korea University to assist South Korean troops in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. It is widely considered as the first unit of its kind to have an integrated system that includes surveillance, tracking, firing, and voice recognition. While units of the SGR-A1 have been reportedly deployed, their number is unknown due to the project being "highly classified"."

But a lot of people can still get hurt by AI acting as a dysfunctional part of a dysfunctional system (the first items).

Is there money to be made by fear mongering? Yes, I have to agree you are right on that.

Is *all* the worry about AI profit-driven fear mongering -- especially about concentration of wealth and power by what people using AI do to other people (like Marshall Brain wrote about in "Robotic Nation" etc)?

I think there are legitimate (and increasing concerns) similar and worse than the ones, say, James P. Hogan wrote about. Hogan emphasized accidental issues of a system protecting itself -- and generally not issues from malice or social bias things implemented in part intentionally by humans. Although one ending of a "Giants" book (Entoverse I think, been a long time) does involve AI in league with the heroes doing unexpected stuff by providing misleading synthetic information to humorous effect.

Of course, our lives in the USA have been totally dependent for decades on 1970s era Soviet "Dead Hand" technology that the US intelligence agencies tried to sabotage with counterfeit chips -- so who knows how well it really works. So if you have a nice day today not involving mushroom clouds, you can (in part) thank a 1970s Soviet engineer for safeguarding your life. :-)
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

It's common to think the US Military somehow defends the USA, and while there is some truth to that, it leaves out a bigger part of the picture of much of human survival being dependent on a multi-party global system working as expected to avoid accidents...

Two other USSR citizens we can thank for our current life in the USA: :-)

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
"a senior Soviet Naval officer who prevented a Soviet submarine from launching a nuclear torpedo against ships of the United States Navy at a crucial moment in the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The course of events that would have followed such an action cannot be known, but speculations have been advanced, up to and including global thermonuclear war."

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
"These missile attack warnings were suspected to be false alarms by Stanislav Petrov, an engineer of the Soviet Air Defence Forces on duty at the command center of the early-warning system. He decided to wait for corroborating evidence--of which none arrived--rather than immediately relaying the warning up the chain of command. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear strike against the United States and its NATO allies, which would likely have resulted in a full-scale nuclear war. Investigation of the satellite warning system later determined that the system had indeed malfunctioned."

There is even a catchy pop tune related to the last item: :-)
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...
"The English version retains the spirit of the original narrative, but many of the lyrics are translated poetically rather than being directly translated: red helium balloons are casually released by the civilian singer (narrator) with her unnamed friend into the sky and are mistakenly registered by a faulty early warning system as enemy contacts, resulting in panic and eventually nuclear war, with the end of the song near-identical to the end of the original German version."

If we replaced people like Stanislav Petrov and Vasily Arkhipov with AI will we as a global society be better off?

Here is a professor (Alain Kornhauser) I worked with on AI and robots and self-driving cars in the second half of the 1980s commenting recently on how self-driving cars are already safer than human-operated cars by a factor of 10X in many situations based on Tesla data:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

But one difference is that there is a lot of training data based on car accidents and safe driving to make reliable (at least better than human) self-driving cars. We don't have much training data -- thankfully -- on avoiding accidental nuclear wars.

In general, AI is a complex unpredictable thing (especially now) and "simple" seems like a prerequisite for reliability (for all of military, social, and financial systems):
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.infoq.com%2Fpresenta...
"Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicityâ(TM)s virtues over easinessâ(TM), showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path."

Given that we as a society are pursuing a path of increasing complexity and related risk (including of global war with nukes and bioweapons, but also other risks), that's one reason (among others) that I have advocated for at least part of our society adopting simpler better-understood locally-focused resilient infrastructures (to little success, sigh).
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fprincet...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Fsunrise...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkurtz-fernhout.com%2Fosc...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpdfernhout.net%2Frecogni...

Example of related fears from my reading too much sci-fi: :-)
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fkurtz-fernhout.com%2Fosc...
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
Autonomous military robots out of control
Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
Ethnically targeted virus
Sterility virus
Computer virus
Asteroid impact
Y2K
Other unforseen computer failure mode
Global warming / climate change / flooding
Nuclear / biological war
Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
Terrorism w/ unforseen wide effects
Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
Religious / philosophical warfare
Economic imbalance leading to world war
Arms race leading to world war
Zero-point energy tap out of control
Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
Unforseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)"

So, AI out of control is just one of those concerns...

So, can I point to multiple examples of AI taking over planets to the harm of their biological inhabitants (outside of sci-fi). I have to admit the answer is no. But then I can't point to realized examples of accidental global nuclear war either (thankfully, so far).