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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • That clause doesn’t limit the scope to only members of Congress or laws they write. Supreme Court interpretation, 14th amendment, etc. have expanded that to government writ large.

    Free speech protections generally extend to government employees, except in the scope of speech related to their official duties, to my understanding. It would be difficult to seriously argue a pride flag in someone’s office in the past meets that criteria of official duties. My faith in the courts to consistently hold that precedent is not high these days, however.



  • It is because Apple has been dominant in the premium smartphone market for years, including in China. Huawei have started to make a big dent in that tier in China after eating Apple’s lunch in the lower price categories.

    This is a feature that Huawei brought to market before Apple, which was kind of a first. Until recently, they were just following Apple’s innovations. It’s early and I wouldn’t want one now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if smartphones-that-fold-out-into-tablets was the standard by the end of the decade.


  • Just housing them is really damn effective in my experience. They recently opened a pallet shelter “village” in my area. Since, I basically never see encampments, and the number of visibly unhoused folks has dropped a lot (since they just look like everybody else due to regular access to hygiene facilities). According to the cops, they’ve had zero calls out to the village.

    We should still do all the other things, but just put up a ton of free basic housing and you can make enormous visual progress.




  • Technically, yes criminal conversion is certainly a thing. If the laptop was expensive and you lived in a really low crime area where the cops were bored that might get pursued. My experience is that cops are practically more likely to say, absent a court order, to sue the person because it’s he-said she-said. It’s just too much effort for a potentially muddy situation.

    You’d be surprised how often things that are theft/technically theft are not actually pursued by police in the US. The property crime clearance rate (resulting in at least arrest) is <15%.

    Holding onto a rental car, on the other hand, is both expensive and cut-and-dried enough (contract states definitive end date ahead of time) to be a bad idea.





  • An acquaintance of mine has basically been doing this for years in the form of slop code written by the cheapest outsourcing firms on earth who cannot comprehend rudimentary requirements and have no concept of coding standards. But management insists this is the most cost effective way of doing things, rather than just having a competent group of qualified people do it right from the start.

    It seems as depressing as you’d think.