I think it’s healthy for opposing viewpoints to be expressed

Yeah, that way the community can get inoculated with these ideas and learns how to respond to them, and over enough time the response gets faster and more efficient so that the body as a whole builds up a resistance against whenever those types of comments show up.

How you gonna keep them down on the farm factory (after they’ve seen Paris a school library stocked with books)?

That’s not an outrageous medical bill. It’s an outrageous bill for clawing back government benefits for those whose full time care for family members prevents them from working.

It’s not a dismissal. It was stricken, with the option to refile the exact same substance in a new format.

And this kind of stuff happens all the time, like when someone forgets to attach a table of contents, a certificate of compliance, a certificate of word count, an incorrect word count, improperly formatted documents, etc.

This is a pretty common response to improper format, like certain courts that require a particular font, a particular page size, a particular spacing requirement, etc. Those usually have a written rule the court can point to and say “hey follow local rule so and so” and just make them re-file.

It’s a little bit less common where someone violates an unwritten rule, and the court comes in and says “cmon you should’ve known better.” But it happens.

You use Signal to avoid government surveillance.

I use Signal to avoid government accountability.

We are not the same.

Slim Charles, one of the Barksdale enforcers from The Wire.

In 2024.

Helpfully highlighting the baseline so that we can see how much it changes over time.

You’re still too narrowly focused.

The courts can and still do order the executive branch to follow the law, and undo unlawful actions, and order them to follow the law into the future. That’s the whole reason why at any given time there are thousands of lawsuits against the government under the Administrative Procedure Act, and the type of lawsuit being brought against Trump’s new policies.

If he ignores court orders, that’s a constitutional crisis, but it also really fucks up his chain of command. Elon Musk can’t fire thousands of people or freeze thousands of contracts, he has to direct the thousands of people who actually control those things to do the paperwork to do that, and those individual civil servants won’t violate court orders.

The lawsuits are important, and people need to not roll over and just accept Trump’s illegal actions.

This is a misconception that should stop.

The Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch can’t bring criminal charges against someone for acts that were done as President.

Here’s what that doesn’t stop:

• Criminal cases against the former president for non-official acts.
• Civil cases against the former president for acts, whether official or non-official.
• Criminal charges against anyone else who wasn’t literally the president
• Civil cases against the government, its agencies, its officers, or its employees.

The Supreme Court fucked up when it said prosecutors can’t use official acts as evidence relating to unofficial acts, which basically made it impossible to prosecute a whole bunch of types of crimes.

But what it doesn’t do is stop people from suing the government, here and now, for breaking the law, or stop the courts from ordering the government to comply with the law.

And the scope of immunity covers only the President personally. Any other adviser, employee, or officer can still be prosecuted for breaking the law, including following the President’s illegal orders.

Part of the Trump strategy right now is to demoralize the opposition and make us believe that he actually has all the power. He doesn’t, at least not yet. We shouldn’t make it easy for him by assuming that he can break the law with impunity, and instead we should make sure we continue to do everything in our power to hold him and everyone who helps implement his agenda accountable.

Microplastics are stored in the balls.

In the U.S., they meter gas by the “therm,” which is defined as 100,000 BTUs. It’s a misconception that it’s equal to 100 cubic feet of natural gas at standard temperature and pressure, and is merely a coincidence that those values are very close.

BTUs are like a shitty imperial calorie, the energy it takes to heat up one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.

Also, don’t confuse therms for thermies, a totally different unit that means the amount of energy required to heat up a tonne (1000 kg) (not to be confused with the imperial ton that is 2000 pounds) of water by 1°C.

Energy is so useful in so many different contexts that we can just always expect a million ways to express it.

It’s pretty common to use acre inches and acre foot as a unit of volume for measuring water in agriculture, water use, flood mitigation, etc.

So if we can use area height as a volumetric unit, by not volume/area as a height unit?

Unless you’re converting seconds to minutes, hours, days, years, etc.

Then you get things like watt hours. Or light years.

The mass exodus from the Facebook platform has already happened. The others are in progress.

It’s already happened to Facebook. And it’s happening to Twitter. And Reddit. This stuff takes time, but the character and feel of each service has shifted considerably.

Any quiet firing will tend to selectively get rid of more good workers than bad workers. The stars with good resumes and reputations in the industry can find good work elsewhere, and on the margins shittier work conditions will cause them to leave. The ones who can’t get another job are the ones that stay, and aren’t going to be as productive.

Yes it does. It’s only offered on an irregular basis, so for the people that would only go to McDonald’s for the McRib, and no other item, would need to be notified when it’s available.

Which business leaders were killed on the way to securing a 5-day workweek? Those gains were achieved through direct action affecting business bottom lines: strikes, sabotage, and direct action on the streets, not secret targeting of soft targets.

Put another way: there were two attempted assassinations of Donald Trump in the past year. Do you think that will change his political actions to be more popular?

Do you think that United Healthcare’s next CEO will suddenly forgo profits? What about hospital administrators, pharma CEOs, or any of the other tens of thousands profiting off of this fucked up system? Do you think that a mass assassination campaign will actually happen in large enough volume to change any behavior at all?

You’d take the 2nd choice and hire bodyguards. Sure, you might. But not everybody would.

No, the question isn’t whether everyone would. It’s whether anyone would. And the answer is obviously yes.

So now the position is filled. Did the healthcare system change?

My argument is that no, you can’t kill your way to reform on this one. There will always be another CEO to step into that place.

And the ratio of dead would-be assassins to CEOs would also pile more bodies on.

This is ludicrous. A person faced with unpopular decisions that might send assassins after him is going to make himself harder to assassinate, not less hated.