Spyke

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*Permanently Deleted*

If two states disagree, what alternative would you suggest? "Flip a coin and move on" or "Just give in to the other side" are solutions that are likely to be abused: one rogue state can wreck havoc by making unreasonable demands. Going to war over it seems worse than spending millions in court. The courts ARE our inexpensive, fair way of resolving disputes (even if they aren't as inexpensive as we might like).

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Announcing freenginx.org

How concerned should I be?

What are the unspecified policies the developer claims that the company has failed to uphold? Who is this particular developer, and how much should I trust them? (I don't follow nginx development at all.)

I celebrate the fact that open source licenses exist specifically to allow people to make a fork like this when they have disagreements! But I don't know enough about this particular case to decide how it should affect my own plans.

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Donations to Luigi Mangione's legal defense fund slowed, then surged

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I have two arguments to defend jury nullification. First of all, in our system "jury nullification" is NOT a policy. It is the name for the inevitable fact to that members of a jury can decide to vote "innocent" without being subject to some kind of interrogation.

My second argument is this: I think jury nullification is actually a good policy, because the only thing it produces are delays unless fully 12 out of 12 randomly selected citizens think this application of the law is completely unfair. If the citizenry believes a law is unfair with that much unanimity it probably IS unfair.

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"Cis" and "trans" are different types of a person's.... what?

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I like the way you express this. "Cis / Trans" isn't about your gender, it's about whether your gender has CHANGED. (Although it may not be your GENDER that changed, but what people THOUGHT your gender was.)

In a similar way, I (a cis male) usually call myself "straight", but that's not really accurate. I don't feel like I'm attracted to whatever gender is different from mine (which happens to be women); I feel like I am attracted to women (which happens to be the gender that's different from mine).

Putting it differently, if some magical spell were to transform me into a woman, I don't imagine that I would then be attracted to men, I imagine that I would be attracted to women. So instead of calling myself "straight", I should probably be saying that I am "gynosexual" (attracted to women).

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If presidential immunity is absolute..

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Yes, that is exactly what he is saying. Yes, it is completely absurd and would undermine the bedrock principles of our legal system. However, apparently somewhere between 3 and 6 members of the US Supreme Court may be seriously considering it.

(To be fair, he does claim that this absolute immunity would go away if half of the House and 2/3 of the Senate decided to impeach the President.)

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Uncanny X-Men, October 2024

Hear hear! Whenever society picks out a particular minority group and says, "THESE are the ones it is OK to look down on and mistreat" it just makes me want to defend and support that group.

These days I am a strong supporter of furries, never-Trump Republicans, and trans folk.

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Third party keyboards no longer accepted by HSBC's banking app.

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Actually, banks are a heavily regulated industry and they have to comply with strict non-discrimination requirements including making all reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities.

If you know someone who uses a screen reader and is therefore unable to use HSBC's app, encourage them to file a complaint with the appropriate regulator (in the US, try https://www.consumerfinance.gov/complaint/ ).

Banks are very attentive about listening to their regulators.

(Of course, it's possible that what HSBC did still works with commonly used screen readers for the blind because they actually thought of this.)

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I'm a US citizen, people in other countries, what do you think when you read stories like these about the US health care system?

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Here is my perspective on the answer to your question:

Our government is not functional. It is not that it doesn't "want" a healthy work force, but that it isn't capable of setting any sort of a policy.

The last time the US made any meaningful change in healthcare policy was under Obama. My impression of what happened is that there was a brief (2 yr) moment when the Presidency, House, and Senate were all controlled by the same party. The Democrats passed "health reform" which was basically the Republican health care reform package from 4 years earlier.

In the 13 years since then, the only Republican position on health care has been that Obama's "ACA" law is "bad". There is literally no suggestion of what else would be better. (I'm not counting the anti-abortion laws as "health care" -- they are seen here as a moral issue, not a health care one.) The Democrats' position has been a mix of "we shouldn't let the Republicans take us back to something WORSE!" and "the whole system is broken and needs to be replaced".

We have two problems. First, our government is structured so that it cannot easily accomplish anything, at least without cooperation between the two opposed parties. Secondly, one of the two parties is insane and wants to destroy the government (and has enough electoral support to win almost half the time).

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*Permanently Deleted*

Well, I have certainly seen the opposite. I have seen a number of cases where a parent has chosen to leave a significantly bigger portion of their estate to a disabled child because that child would need it.

Ethics is not an area in which there are right and wrong answers -- just ethical principles that do or don't appeal to you. For me, I think parents should have the right to decide how their wealth should be distributed without any "must be even for all children" constraints. But I would never choose to leave my least able-bodied child less for that reason.

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How do you remain on track with toddlers onboard?

My approach was something like this: for a few years (maybe until all my kids were at least age 3 or 4) I simply didn't try to push my career forward.

When I was at work I put in plenty of effort, but I didn't work much overtime, I didn't do my own software projects outside of work, and I didn't even spend much time reading programming blogs.

Young children are really overwhelming, if you are going to really parent them!

My career was fine. Career advancement is a marathon, not a sprint. Mmmm... that's not true -- I've seen people sprint through the career ladder. But if you want advice on how to do that you'll need to ask someone else. MY approach to career advancement has been a marathon; keep improving until I am so ready for the next level that it's really obvious, briefly do enough politicing to secure a promotion, then go back to the self-improvement. For me, the approach worked (I'm a "senior director" level non-manager-track software engineer today.)

When my kids were young I really just focused on them; these days they are in highschool and college and they work WITH me on my outside-of-work person programming projects.