• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Exactly. All censorship could be a violation of 1A. The bar is high on this one. The government has to jump through difficult hoops to legally suppress most speech. The courts have long since ruled against the “but they have other channels” argument that you propose.

    As for the latter point, again you miss the legal argument. The government is targeting a company, and not conduct. That could easily be a Due Process violation.

    Of course we don’t know. The courts will rule. But what you wrote ignores basic legal precedent.



  • 1A protects us against censorship, and this law is precisely that. If I have TikTok and I use it to communicate, the government is censoring my speech by taking it down. There is a lot of case law on when the government can legally censor speech, and I’m not going to repeat it here, but the government’s lawyers have a massive hill to climb on this one. Maybe they can succeed, maybe not.

    There’s other precedent about “making a specific business illegal”. Essentially, legislatures can make conduct illegal, but courts don’t like it when they make businesses illegal, because it’s a violation of due process. But this is complicated and detail-specific.

    Anyway, there’s a lot of great information online about these two legal arguments. I encourage you to look it up.





  • Is there anything specific to open source about this question? If you’re a software developer, you might have to decide whether you want to work for a shady company, or whether you want your smaller company to contract with a larger shady company. Those are I think harder decisions to make, because it could be your job on the line.

    In the open source world, at least you don’t know for sure what people are going to do with your work.

    But we do know that if a company is looking to be evil, it’s probably going to find a way, whether or not it uses your library.




  • All of those questions are entirely unreasonable, because they’re all manipulative.

    Many years ago my old boss gave me an interview before I got a promotion and he asked me if I was still going to be working for the company in 20 years. And I lied and said that I thought I probably would. But why did he ask me? I believe he was trying to pressure me into saying that I would be there, knowing that I have integrity, knowing that if I said it then I might be less likely to quit.

    Except that he didn’t have any integrity, and he had on other occasions promised employees that they would get promotions and then delivered them nothing, or even let them go when the contract ran out.

    And that’s normal. Every medium to large sized company in the world has bosses like this.

    Anyway, so if you’re in a situation where they make you lie, then you lie, and then you ask them to improve the quality of the workplace. You just said that you’re planning to stay there for many years into the future, so now you’re wondering what concrete steps the bosses are going to do keep your wonderful co-workers happy enough to stick around and build that bright future together with you, bearing in mind that the best way to retain employees is to pay them more.


  • This post kind of ignores basics of grammar instruction that we’ve known for centuries. Some people try to teach grammar from a prescriptive fashion. They tell us what the rules are, they have us memorize them, and then we can speak perfectly.

    The problem is, that’s not how language works in reality. Even if you had a perfect language to begin with, something with no exceptions of any kind, after 20 years people would have added their own changes. So then the original instruction that you gave, that wouldn’t prepare future language learners for reality.

    This is why we have to teach grammar and spelling descriptively. We’re talking about what actually happens in the world when people actually speak and write in English. Of course it’s nice to point out common customs and conventions, but we don’t get to ignore all of the irregular things just because they’re irritating to memorize.

    And this is true for all languages that are used by even a medium-sized population over time. You cannot avoid it, you’ll find it in every language, sorry.




  • How many hours did you practice? What did you practice? These are fundamental questions for any new instrumental hobby.

    If you are doing everything solo, it’s easy to have misplaced expectations or a bad practice menu, or even worse, no solid practice menu at all. Screwing around is cool once you have a basic level of proficiency.

    But also, it’s OK to try it and later realize that you don’t like it.




  • Do you know if it was productive and informative for them?

    For example, I left a job several years ago, and not long before I left, I met with the boss and explained some of the massive issues facing my department. He sounded interested, but of course he never did anything about those problems, and my former co-workers have told me that the situation is worse than it was before. In my observation, and that of my friends, this is what happens most of the time. After all, if they didn’t listen to you before, and especially if they didn’t ask you before, then why would we expect them to care what you say now?