Holy crap. I have Tidal on my phone and Plex at home. I didnt know I could connect them. Thank you!

I said “option” to retreat not “duty” which is an important distinction I think. And there’s also the option of other reasonable force. I don’t think killing to protect my TV is reasonable, but fighting back possibly even causing injury might be. If I lived in a place where the intruder wasn’t likely to be armed, I’d probably whack his hand with broom handle, and I wouldn’t even feel bad if I broke his wrist because some use of force to keep a stranger from entering my house is warranted. When it comes to lethal force though the standard should be higher, which is why I prefer the self-defense/defense of others test. Did the guy have good reason to think the person breaking in was an imminent danger, that he might be armed and therefore escalation to firing a gun was reasonable? I don’t pretend to know, but I think that’s the test that should be used. That test should take into account that it was his house being broken in to, and that there was another person present he might have wanted to protect, because that definitely affects your perception of danger. We don’t need a set of principles that say you automatically get a pass when it’s your house, I think it’s better to look at each case individually.

Do Renaults often figure into your thinking? ;)

No disagreement. I’m a commie pinko by American standards, which is to say slightly left by European standards. I support gun regulation but it won’t solve the proliferation until we face up to this weird fetishization of guns we have.

I do not agree with the castle doctrine. It’s too easily used to justify lethal force when retreat is an option, however self-defense is a valid justification and from the description given I think that’s completely plausible. An unknown person breaking the glass and potentially armed could be a threat. It sucks that a guy who possibly did nothing wrong has to defend himself in an investigation, but we should have a high bar on lethal actions for civilians and cops (the standard should be higher for cops).

Of course. They’re patient. They chipped away at abortion for decades before finally getting it overturned in Dobbs.

Similarly they went from Masterpiece Cake Shop to the Creative LLC case which widened the exception further because it’s a “creative endeavor”. Don’t for a minute think they’re not queing up a case to deny medical services based on a “sincerely held religious beliefs”.

“against your Christian religion”. Fixed that for you.

He’s the male Gwyneth Paltrow selling brain pills instead of Goop. He promotes alt-right and far-right conspiracies. He told people not to get the COVID vaccine. If he just interviewed people – even people from all sides – I’d be fine with it. Problem is he promotes dangerous conspiracies and usually ignores fact checking. He’s using his influence and authority to do harm. And worst of all, I think he just does it for the ratings.

The drunk driver, and sometimes the bartender who overserved: https://www.scribd.com/document/627785752/Press-Release-4

The idea of donating alternative posters has already been tried and that particular school board just ignored the issue: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120239381/texas-in-god-we-trust-arabic-signs-chaz-stevens I’m sure they’d treat a donation of 100s of posters the same way.

And as I (not a lawyer) read the law it only says that a poster has to be displayed in each building and has to be donated or purchased with donated funds: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/html/SB00797I.htm so I don’t think you as an administrator would get away with plastering up hundreds of posters around your school, but let’s say you did. The parents will complain to you AND the school board (i.e. your boss). They’ll say you’re making fun of their religion, you’re a communist, etc. Even if they law was unambiguously on your side, they’ll only see what they want to see. You’ll find your chances of promotion to be zero, or you’ll just be managed out. Even if the Board somehow agreed with you, you made a stink.

I have friends who are teachers and administrators, not in Texas, who have left or been kicked over lesser issues. The rest are looking forward to retirement.

These bozos passing these laws don’t understand irony. They just want misdirection, conformity, and compliant kids. We just need to directly tell them to fuck off at this point.

I’m sorry for my continued Very Seriousness.

Yeah, I don’t read it as “must display every poster”. It says it has to be displayed in a prominent place in each building and that it has to be donated or purchased with donated funds. https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/html/SB00797I.htm

No. They’re not interested in playing fair or being consistent. They’ll simply warp the rules to fit their outcome and declare these posters noncomplaint. You can’t out-maneuver people who simply cheat.

The assholes on that side of things are a mixture of those who actually believe and want the US to be a religious state, and those who simply are using religion as a method of control. That second group is happy to see religious conflict because a) it distracts from real problems while they consolidate money and power, 2) they can use the fervor to further solidify their support form that religious base.

This is absolutely not new and has happened before in history. It’s just sad to see the US going down this path.

You’re about a decade off. It was started in the 80s and ended under Clinton. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative

I have created several variants of StopMakingMeCreateAccountsToInstallWindows@outlook.com and then change to a local account after install.

Humans are good decision makers, we’re just not good at paying attention for long periods of time. Which is why I think self-driving cars will eventually be better, but they aren’t yet. And those are expert systems (I refuse to call them AI) trained on a well-curated and limited set of data for a limited and specific purpose. Which is an important difference over the generalized generative models. More data does not make systems, especially more unsorted data.

But here’s another important difference: I can grab the wheel at any time and take over. If we are going to give these systems decision making authority there needs to be an obvious and intuitive override.

The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. It doesn’t have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.

Luck, car engineering, and medical science. She was seriously injured. Was she trying to kill herself, I have no idea. Clearly needs mental health treatment which she’s not likely to get in prison. Not that I think she should be free either.

Well that sounds like socialism! /s

I happen to be one of those Americans that think despite their many flaws, the authors of the Constitution had some fundamentally good ideas. And we used the Constitution as intended to expand individual rights after the Civil War with the 14th Amendment. Shamefully we never got around to the Equal Rights Amendment to include women.

What most Americans don’t realize is that the vast majority of what we consider foundational principles are not actually in the Constitution but are instead case law, and how recent much of that is. It wasn’t until 15 years after the Civil War that there was a Supreme Court case which established the idea that corporations are persons under the law and deserving of many of the rights granted under the Constitution using (or mis-using in my opinion) that same 14th Amendment.

Why does that matter? Because it gave corporations an “equal” seat at the table when it comes to disputes. The problem, as you point out, is that our civil dispute resolution system DOES depend on the resources of the “person” and corporations will ALWAYS have more resources. Lots and lots of cases have given corporations more rights and the result is the corportacracy we have now. In other words we went fundamentally the wrong direction diluting the power of the individual. And because corporations have such disproportionate influence on the laws and administrative procedures, we diluted the power of government to represent the people. This has been going on for ~120 years but it kicked into high gear in the 80s (Reagan era).

I’m glad that you guys are still somewhat rational about this, but unfortunately the anti-democratic trend in the US is replicating in the rest of the world. I worry that future histories will compare the rise of this garbage in the US to the start of fascism in Italy in the 1930s.

Sorry, went off on a tangent deep in the comments, but I spend too much time thinking and worrying.

Some isolated pockets of people would be in areas where it’s possible to farm and hunt. Keep in mind I’m talking about the case where we thoroughly trash the planet. Maybe 99% die but as a species we’d probably survive. Personally I’d like us to wise up and keep a technological civilization but one that’s sustainable. Not holding out a lot of hope.

Short of engineering a plague I don’t think we’ll make ourselves extinct but we can very easily wipe out civilization and turn ourselves back into hunter gathers. And it won’t be like those post apocalyptic movies where everyone still has good teeth and discover caches of supplies and weapons all the time.