fairly passive in their expression

It was still harassing a student all the same.

So wristbands are okay… Because they’re just clothes, not marching in circles and chanting? How about if it’s t-shirts instead? After all, both are just clothes. How about if those shirts or wristbands have wording that calls the student a slur?

The student will undoubtedly find any kind of protest clothing offensive because they’re protesting her existence… So where do we draw the line on parents’ right to offend a student? Is it just slurs that aren’t allowed? Who decides what is and isn’t offensive? It obviously can’t be the person doing the protesting, because their entire goal is to offend the targeted student.

How about if it’s signs instead of clothing? The student will likely find any kind of signs demeaning, but are they okay because they’re just passively holding them? How about if those signs call the student a slur?

The issue with allowing protest (especially one that targets a specific student) is that someone has to decide where to draw the line. And every individual will have a different line in the sand… So if our goal is to protect the student, (and again, this protest is 100% without a doubt harassing a student) they need to go by the lowest threshold, not the highest.

Public schools aren’t private institutions though, which is where things get so convoluted. The school is a government funded organization, and therefore has to do its best to avoid infringing on constitutional rights. However, courts have repeatedly ruled that schools have a higher obligation to protect the students in their care, even if it means restricting first amendment rights. So schools have a fairly high degree of discretion on what they do and don’t allow.

A more mild example is dress codes. Students could easily argue that a dress code violates their freedom of speech, as the way they dress is a form of speech. However, courts have ruled that dress codes are allowed, because the school has a duty to maintain an environment that is conducive to learning; even if it means restricting their students’ freedom of expression.

34 or 35, I think. I remember learning that she was around my age.

Yeah, I was going to mention that modern gun control was started by republicans because they were scared of armed black protestors. But that felt a little too tangential for a single comment.

Here’s a reminder that the Black Panthers started because people realized that peaceful unarmed protests were quickly met with police violence… But peaceful heavily armed protests had cops politely watching from across the street. Turns out, cops are a lot less likely to blindly fire into crowds when the crowds are capable of returning fire with overwhelming force.

Even MLK Jr said that peaceful protest only gets you so far; Disrupting highway traffic is fine for bringing awareness to your plight, but at a certain point the lawmakers and dug-in oligarchs need to be forced to change.

Yeah, the “$15 an hour” debate has been going on for so long that the number has realistically increased to ~$23 per hour. And if a $23/hr minimum wage makes you balk, maybe you should consider how little you’re being paid for the job you currently do.

Not if the charges are brought by separate entities. State prosecutors are entirely separate from federal prosecutors, which means you can be hit with charges from both.

Musk needs to get lucky and avoid it every time; The public only needs to get lucky once.

Here’s a reminder that the Allied forces had multiple opportunities to assassinate Hitler, but chose not to do so… Because he was a laughably bad military tactician, who was surrounded by yes-men. He would repeatedly make bad military decisions, and everyone around him was too afraid to tell him it was a bad idea. The Allies were worried that if they assassinated Hitler, a competent military leader would take his place.

Sun Tsu’s Art of War has a line that goes something like “Never interrupt the enemy when they’re making a mistake” and it feels germane. I wouldn’t be surprised if historians are writing about how Europe had several opportunities to assassinate Musk/Trump but chose not to because they didn’t want anyone competent in charge.

I would rather not do it and hope nobody else does it.

While this is certainly something to dream about, I live in the Bible Belt. If I hadn’t taken it, there would have been a hundred others lining up to do it.

“Oh, if I don’t use my electrical engineering skills to bomb children for a MIC company then someone else will do it, nah bitch I’ll work in a different field”

It’s a bit of a stretch to equate it with making bombs. And if you have the flexibility to work in a different field, then you’re already speaking from a position of privilege. Not everyone has that luxury. Some people have niche skills or have small tight-knit job fields, where burning a bridge with one company could cascade to other companies as word spreads.

Edit: although I do have to say you have to consider all aspects. If you’re only making content that changes gender to sex and you gotta feed yourself, then it’s a big jump from killing people for a war company for fun.

There are absolutely arguments for why we should require engineers to take engineering ethics classes. Hell, even city zoning departments can be abused by racists. But it all eventually boils down to a cost/benefit analysis for the person considering the job; Ethics studies may cause an engineer to weigh the moral “cost” more heavily on certain topics. But it’s still essentially just a mental calculation when deciding whether or not to take the job.

At what point do the benefits of the job begin to outweigh the moral costs? When you’re going to go hungry if you turned down the work and burned bridges? When your family is going to go hungry? Sure, the high horse may be attractive when it’s just you… But nobody wants to see their child go hungry because they refused work. Eventually, people will compromise on their morals in order to put food on the table. And effecting change is a lot easier to do when you have a good job and can afford to donate (either your time or money) to causes you believe in. Homeless people aren’t exactly known for their political weight.

So I used to do a lot of freelance, and encountered similar situations a few times.

The most blatant example that comes to mind was a charity run. I had the client reach out for AV gear and crew for a charity run. They needed some projectors and a small stage (and all of the AV gear+crew to go with the stage) for a charity event; They were going to be at a college campus, with joggers making laps on a 1/2 mile loop. For every lap, sponsors would donate to charity.

The projectors and stage were to give the MC a place to be, and to keep the audience entertained while the joggers ran. They’d have a band playing, and cap the event off with a movie screening. Sounds fun. I quoted the job like any other gig. The perceptive reader may have noticed that I haven’t mentioned what kind of charity they were raising funds for. That’s because I didn’t think to ask ahead of time. I got there, and discovered it was a pro-life fundraiser. Fucking yikes.

But I still did the job. I needed the money, and didn’t want to burn future bridges with other companies that were involved. I simply made a mental note to ask more questions the next time a charity event came across my desk. But the big takeaway is that even if I didn’t do it, someone else inevitably would have. The event still would have happened, and the charity money still would have been raised. At least with me doing it, I was able to avoid adding another enthusiastic voice (whoever would have taken my spot) to the echo chamber. Even if I had climbed up on stage to interrupt the event, it wouldn’t have changed any minds. Afterwards, I donated what I could afford to Planned Parenthood and moved on.

For the confused: The SCOTUS ruled that Jackson wasn’t allowed to force the native Americans off of their lands and onto reservations. Jackson responded with something along the lines of “they’ve made their decision, now let’s see them enforce it.” He pushed ahead with the reservations anyways, which led to the Trail of Tears.

Until fairly recently, it has been the most direct “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” between a president and the SCOTUS. It led to Jackson’s opponents sarcastically dubbing him “King Andrew”.

It’s in French, but here’s a link:
https://www.watson.ch/fr/!884988581

Basically, Yen did an interview for Watson (a magazine) where he talked about the swedish government encroaching on encryption. He got political when he started talking about how all of the Swedish government officials were useless bureaucrats, and praised the US government’s methods instead.

And the CEO just did it again, because apparently it wasn’t enough backlash the first time.

The issue with baby formula is that it’s pretty strictly regulated by the FDA, and getting approval is a lengthy (and extremely expensive) process. So there are only a few companies that hold a functional near-monopoly on the production, because they’re the only ones who had the resources to go through the process.

And to be clear, I’m not advocating for looser regulation on formula. Safety regulations are writ in blood. But local formula production would essentially require massive subsidies and fast-tracking to offset the costs and testing associated with starting production.

Was gonna say… First it starts with stealing treats, and next thing you know they’re gonna be returning stolen artwork to the louvre.

The Gatcha system is why I never finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The first game was phenomenal… But the second game required a gatcha system to unlock new party members. There were even quests that were locked behind certain ultra-rare party members. It’s an entirely single player game.

Does that really count? As far as I know, the golden keys mechanic was just a way to get some good gear. It wasn’t exclusive gear, and you could get it just by playing the game.

it’s hard to really prove he’s a fraud at spacex and tesla and pretending to be some super genius

I mean, even this isn’t very hard. My relative used to work at SpaceX, and it’s an open secret that the company has a team of people dedicated to keeping Elon away from the engineers. Like as soon as he steps out of his office, there are multiple people whose sole job is to push paperwork and “problems” (read: “literally just basic decisions that anyone in middle management could make”) in front of him to keep him completely distracted with inane and inconsequential things, while also making him feel like a big important decision maker.

All so he doesn’t have time to wander down towards the engineers. Because if he does get to the engineers, he’ll inevitably try to one-up them with some “why are we doing it this way that I’m too dumb to understand? I don’t like that I can’t understand it. We should do it this dumb way instead” decree. And now the entire company is going to grind to a halt until the engineers can redesign the entire system to fit his new dumb design.

Like he desperately wants to fit in with the engineers, but the only way he knows how is to try and flex his (nonexistent) technical expertise. So the company has hired people specifically to prevent that scenario from ever happening.

Yeah, you’re paying for consistency, not quantity. The standard reference material will contain exactly what it says on the label. No more, no less. It’s meant to be a reliable and dependable product, with absolutely zero variation between batches. And that consistency costs a lot of extra time and testing to guarantee.