Right, and on the other hand they are risking state prison.

If they are acting illegally, they could in theory face state charges for assault and battery. In theory. Because they have no arrest powers. Maybe. Right? That’s the tricky point.

So they would have to be super confident to not find out the scope of their authority.

Protests turn into riots when the police wanted to, exactly then, and very rarely before that point.

We can blame the officials. Don’t let the heckler’s veto work. It’s murder of course, but it’s also bullying. And capitulation only makes it worse next time. They’ll always have lunatics with guns.

qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.

I don’t think we can accept your argument, because in point in fact Hong Kong was an independent country. Certainly trying to disagree but now we’re getting into a definition question, but if that’s going to stop us from applying the proposed principle, then we can do that in every situation.

Now is the worst time to try to enter the field. We need to see the AI bubble burst much more spectacularly, and only then might it be more reasonable. You certainly don’t want to try to get into a field when you have a lot of other choices when that field is already flooded with all of these people who have been laid off, combined with the increased availability of programmers in other countries, knowing that at the moment many domestic programmers are not smart enough to form strong unions to protect their own jobs.

Right … except for all of the poor Boomers out there … let’s just forget about them. Let’s forget about all the Boomers who tried very hard to stop the wealth shift to the rich. They don’t count; they don’t exist.

You decided to blame the old people instead of … checks notes … the rich people. That was a bizarre choice. Meh.

I would qualify your first point. Parkinson’s Law tells us that we have pointless bosses in huge numbers, and they need to justify their own existence. The people who actually produce things, everyone can see if they’re working or not by looking at the output. But their supervisors, and especially their supervisors’ supervisors, those people are desperate to make themselves relevant, to justify their pointlessly-large salaries despite a complete lack of utility.

Yes, and you should understand the corruption quite well seeing it firsthand over there, right? (Sad to say.)

I’m not worried about the hypocrisy here. I couldn’t give a f*** about Trump being hypocritical. But I care an awful lot that he’s threatening to do something terrible to someone he considers a political opponent.

How cool! This is one great point of FOSS.

We agree that taking money from them would in fact take money from them. Want a cookie?

No time like the present.

The average consumer doesn’t care about that aspect though.

They do, of course. There’s plenty of rice of other kinds.

There are other comments that already give practical ways to accomplish what you say is impossible.

The federal government lawyers have said in court that Elon Musk was not the leader of that organization. Therefore, the fact that he said he has departed from Washington would not affect that organization.

Of course we know that he was leading it, and the president has said as much, and the above claims are all being contested in court by quoting the president. But anyway, if you want the official answer, now you have it.

But the official answer also changes over time. Because if Musk was not the leader of that group, then many of the actions that he claimed to take and many of the actions that people attributed to him would now be actions of a private individual, which would expose him to massive civil liability. Therefore, we can be sure that the government’s lawyers will continue to change their story about when and where and how he worked for the government.

Definitions are important, but you don’t get to unilaterally choose them. Depending on the person you’re talking to, sometimes it’s more effective to ask them to define the terms first, or to ask them which dictionary they prefer.

So depending on the situation, it might be more beneficial to bring in the quotes from various Israeli leaders about how they’re trying to get Palestinians gone, and how they’re happy with Palestinian death, and then bring in those graphs that show the numbers of the dead, and ask whether they think that’s acceptable.

Another way to think about it is that sometimes questions of definition can distract us from questions of morality, and if the person that you’re trying to talk to is running away from the issue. By doing so, you can reasonably adjust your focus back to the facts.