FactolSarin

So then what's your problem with adding a small Democratic-leaning state?

It seems like you're fine with small Republican states that give your preferred party an outsized power over larger states, but don't want the other side to benefit from that same dynamic.

There's nothing logical about giving a population larger than that of two existing states and with it's own distinct history to Maryland. When pieces of DC were given back to Virginia, it didn't come with a population larger than Vermont.

The only reason to oppose DC statehood is naked partisan power.

Regardless of who it benefits, giving statehood to DC gives more people the right to vote and be represented by their government. Maybe if you find yourself opposing giving people votes because they won't vote the way you want, that's a sign of a problem.

Only one side is trying to undermine the electoral process itself. Don't forget that many Republicans voted against certifying election results.

Sorry those nuns are upset about buying health insurance, but I pay for all kinds of things I don't want to pay for too. Having good faith debates about that kind of thing is part of democracy though, and in the end it's pretty minor.

Showing restraint in institutional power means not using that power in an attempt to overturn an election just because you think you could legally get away with it.

Public Schools aren't just benefiting people with kids. It benefits society (a society you and OP are members of). Getting rid of schools is like getting rid of the military. Maybe you feel like you don't personally benefit from it and you want your taxes back, but that's not how it works.

Not should it. An ideal government functions to help the people not individual persons.

For anyone who doesn't check the video out, it was on display for one day: April 1st.

I agree with a lot of that, but there's a difference between something being art and something being worthy of support.

If you buy into the idea that art is about creating reactions, then the reaction that you're going for is very important. In fact, maybe it's the main way you judge whether the artwork or is good or not. From that perspective, you can consider a Confederate statue art but unworthy art.

All of Amazon's "we're not actually a monopoly" and "we're not responsible for defective products" arguments are based on this. They claim they are very much NOT a Costco or Walmart.

I mean, it takes money to make money. It's a lot easier to get a hundred million dollars when you start out with 1 million to put in the stock market.

Not quite, there is a difference... but close enough. If we all stopped minifying tomorrow, I doubt a single end user would notice. The few kilobytes you save don't really matter when you're downloading a 12 MB image as well.

I would love to see those!

For social networking companies like Facebook, is that bad? Shouldn't each county be able to enforce the things that are important to them (ie, outlawing Holocaust denial or allowing more nudity) rather than the entire world bowing to US mores and customs?

Nothing really changes for the rest of the web. You're allowed to stand up your own webserver if you want.

There's two ways to interpret the constitution: the honest way, and the way where you pretend that not only were the Founders of one mind on what the Constitution meant, but also that you can read that mind two and a half centuries later.

You can already send money to friends, though being confused about that is understandable. Originally, you could send payments from Google Pay, then they moved that functionality to a separate app called Google Wallet. Then they changed the name of Google Wallet to Google Pay Send and then they moved it back into Google Pay.

You know, a normal Google product history.

But Elon says it's happening next year!

> It always starts like that.

That's the "slippery slope" fallacy. There's a knee-jerk reaction in America that any censorship is bad and will somehow always lead to more censorship. But there area places where censorship has been implemented in small ways and it hasn't led to some sort of free speech apocalypse. In Germany or Israel, for instance, it's illegal to deny the holocaust. That's a pretty sensible limit considering their history. All these years later, they're still free an functioning democracies.

Obviously this is a screw up on Adobe's part, but this is a good time to remind everyone that if you're not backing up your data, then it must not be very important to you.

Back up your stuff! You never know when something unexpected will cause you to lose it!

"I only block ads because of privacy reasons."

"OK, then we'll offer the option to pay a small fee to support the content creators and not have to deal with ads."

"Why would I do that when ad blockers are free?"

While I'm sympathetic to this idea, one thing that I get hung up on is game consoles. I enjoy multiplayer shooters, and I like knowing that none of my opponents are using bots. So the fact that the console is locked down is part of the value proposition for me. It's a pro, rather than a con.

In most states there's no legal monopoly. It's just there's a high barrier to entry for new providers. This is what an unregulated market looks like

The Mexican food in what is now Texas already I used a a lot of beef and cheese before it became part of America

It actually depends on the judge whether the lawmaker has a say in it. Traditionally, most judges looked to the legislature for this kind of thing, but that type of judge has been in rapid decline over the last few decades.

Let's take an example. Imagine a municipality wanted to pass an anti-electric scooter law. So they pass a law that bans "electric scooters, electric bicycles, and other such electric motor powered conveyances not generally used by handicapped people" from city sidewalks.

Then one day someone gets arrested for driving a mobility scooter on the sidewalk (like, the three-wheeled things in Wal-Mart, not a Bird). Is this covered by the law? On one hand, it explicitly bans "scooters" and this is a scooter. On the other hand, it says it doesn't target conveyances generally used by the handicapped.

So the court takes it up. Traditionally, a judge might look a the transcripts of the city council as evidence, and find that the line about handicapped vehicles was inserted by a city councilman who said he specifically wanted to allow mobility scooters. When he said this to the rest of the council, they unanimously agreed to add the exemption. So with this very clear evidence of legislative intent, the judge rules that mobility scooters are fine.

Another judge is a textualist. This is an increasingly popular way to look at laws in judicial circles right now. A textualist doesn't care about what the city council meant only what the law says. The text of the law is the text of the law, period.

Which sounds convincing, but the problem with that is two people can look at a law that's a bit vague or seems to conflict in two places, and come up with different readings. One textualist might say, sorry, mobility scooters are banned. Hell, the law is called the "Get Scooters Off Our Sidewalks Act." It's a dumb law, the judge says, but that's what it says.

Another textualist looks at the same law and says, of course it doesn't mean mobility scooters. Any idiot can see that!

The great thing about textualism to a judge is it basically boils down to "the law is what I think it is." And they can ignore the legislature's opinion. It gives judges much more power. Which is why it's popular with the kind of judges that like to overturn precedent like Scalia was.

Atheism isn't a religion. It's simply not believing in God. Even the stronger version of actively believing there is no God isn't a religion any more than actively believing that there is no Bigfoot.

In short, not all atheists would say "I believe there is no God," and even if they did, not all beliefs are religions.

How does something like this get to the front page? Someone provides a cracked copy of Windows and calls it "Ninjitsu OS" and then cries foul when it's taken down because of course it was.

Is there that much of an anti-Microsoft sentiment that people upvote something like this uncritically?

That's not really what's going on here. "Ninjutsu OS" is a modified Windows 10 ISO. Basically a pirated copy.

A corporation is a device for maximizing profit and minimizing ethics. Everyone can say they're behaving ethcially. Consumers can say, "Well, all my friends are there, I can't quit," and it's true for some people. The CEO and other decision-makers can say, "Well, I have to do this otherwise the shares go down and I could get fired," and they may be right. Shareholders can say, "I'm just investing in the most profitable companies, if they were doing something bad, it should be illegal," and they have a point too.

This is where governments come in. Companies should behave ethically, but ultimately we shouldn't just leave it up to them. That's why societies have laws. What we really need to do is use regulation and penalties to force Facebook into ethical behaviour.

Of course, this isn't going to happen because there's no political will to do so, generally due to "free speech" or "free market" objections.

People get good quality healthcare and spend less doing it?

I really do hate the lack of native notifications. It's ridiculous

Empirically, there are plenty of democratic socialist countries

Hangouts seems to be down altogether

Chromecast has gotten a lot better about not losing connection in the last few years, or maybe it's because I have Pixel phones.

If you have Google Home, the voice control is awesome. I feel like I'm in the future every time I tell it to pause.