Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) is getting called out on social media after she called out White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre a “DEI hire,” a term that many consider racist.

No, we don’t consider it racist. It is in fact racist, and in this case both racist and sexist. That is the entire point Boebert said it. Why else would she have used the term, indeed.

One of my favorites is in Japanese. Laughing is “w” or “www” or something. The word is “warau”. So then the ws, they look like grass, so people use the grass emoji, so then people write “kusa”.

If only there had been a time in the past 15 years when the Democrats had the White House, the House, and the Senate. If only that had ever happened.

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.

Um, actually that’s one perk of federation. It’s much harder to take down networks that are run on dozens or hundreds of servers across the globe… In other words, we already solved this problem, at least in large part.

No. It shows how bad a candidate she was. People love reform candidates for a reason: Washington is so dirty, and our interests are not corporate interests. Centrist Democrats inspire leftist voters to stay home or vote third party.

You could, if you ignore history. Assange didn’t make anyone investigate anything. He was a journalist with no special powers.

Lineage OS could be OK for you.

I think that depends how you write your web scraper. Of course the web scraper is going to load the page, just like your web browser does, which by all accounts is not an issue. What happens after the page is loaded depends on how the software is written.

I could try to summarize it, but if you just do a web search for EFF and TikTok, you will come across a good explanation.

Of course we don’t know how the courts will rule. My belief is that the odds are in favor of TikTok and of TikTok users, but we’ll have to wait and find out.

I think we should be careful. It’s certainly true that greedy powerful people in the world today are getting increasingly aggressive about seizing more money and power, and that’s terrible, and we need to do whatever we reasonably can to stop it.

I don’t recall seeing any data that suggests the average level of greed among the general population has grown, or that the average desire to work among the general population has gone down.

The reason this distinction matters is because when someone makes the claim that too many people are greedy these days, it sounds like a problem with the general population, when what we’re actually seeing is a problem with the ultra-rich.

Oh I don’t know that I would make the claim that major world religions are all about people getting along. I’d say we can find some parts that are much less friendly than that.

Why don’t we go back to Genesis. Lot is an exciting character, and tells us a lot about God’s character. And then it gets creepy too.

I think the reason the Democrats haven’t tried to add members is the same reason that they didn’t mean to coin to handle the debt ceiling and they didn’t bother to either use or destroy the filibuster.

Many entrenched Democrats in Washington are happy to be the second worst party. That’s their identity. And it makes sense if you consider their funding source. Big money comes from big companies, and they give it to people who will represent their interests.

Oh yes, one way or the other. Things are certainly crashing, and the question is what will happen in the aftermath.

Sure sure, there are dozens of options. That’s not the issue. IMO internal DNC power is what is at play. It doesn’t matter what Biden does because he’ll retire soon, but a young leader would take power away from corporate backers for decades to come.

Also, to hell with the Times.

Most people have always been OK with working reasonable jobs for good pay, though. Work is not the problem. Unchecked greed is.

Nothing. The law is unconstitutional.

He spoke carelessly, but he didn’t exactly say what the author said he said. You can in fact do many things with it. Copyright doesn’t care what you do if you aren’t copying. That’s the definition of the word.

That was … not convincing. I’m here to learn things. Why are you?

To be clear, all of the big media groups and all of the big AI companies are in favor of expanding copyright law to give themselves more power. If one of them wins or loses on an issue like this, it doesn’t improve our life in any way.

Everyone has their own opinion, but I think the problem with AI is not that people are developing fancy Turing test machines, but rather that the whole industry is full of cynical speculation where people are getting rich knowing that they can’t deliver what they’ve promised, at great expense to everyone else in society.