Whoa unexpected call for violence.

I think you make a good point. Choosing your timing for a Supreme Court ruling is important. But the court is likely to be hostile for a very long time, and the businesses bringing the case are probably reeling from having to block half of the US market, so they can’t wait forever.

If I were them writing the law it would be based on viewed content. Not files sitting on servers.

Occupancy is hard to monitor and easy to fake though. Purchases are impossible to miss and are a single point of enforcement as opposed to an ongoing burden like you’re suggesting. Though I do appreciate the spirit of your plan.

It sounds like (at best) some of Gaiman’s victims consented to some form of foreplay or sex and then rapidly found themselves on the receiving end of some brutal BDSM without consenting to it. If I were a woman reading this I would find it hard to ever trust any man, going into sex, even if I wanted to have sex with him. When the world’s most harmless-seeming man can suddenly become a punishing torturer in the sack, how can you ever know that a guy is safe until after the fact? Jesus.

100%.

People have different hair and skins colors and skull shapes and hair types and they may share some or many or none or one of these genes with this person and these other genes with that person.

But the idea that there are these huge groups of people who are some kind of “species” is ridiculous and unsupported. People club together with others of their skin color because families share more genes and everyone has fear of The Other.

That’s it. “White” for example is the most fake bullshit concept in history. I’m the son of an Arab but he happens to have blue eyes so I pass as “white.” Italians in the US used to be considered some kind of dark skin other but then over time they magically became “white.” At some points in some places, Japanese were considered “white” but Chinese were not. You might think someone is “white” but then you find out they’re Jewish and you scratch your head and say “huh… are Jews ‘white?’” And you don’t actually know.

Because it’s totally fucking made up. People will dress it up as “western civilization” or whatever the fuck but it’s entirely invented. It has a very real effect, mind you, but there’s no actual there there. Entirely a mirage. There is more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world combined many times over.

I hope it bursts soon. It’s not creating any hiring activity, which is what we little people in the industry need. But it is disruptively shifting things around and stealing funding from everything else as companies panic to put forth some kind of trash so they aren’t seen as being “behind.”

Enterprise software is weeeeeeird. Salesforce, JIRA, Workday… these are terrible products by user standards. But they get purchased on other strengths, obviously. Compatibility with other shit software being high in the list. Configurability. Access control. Permissions roles. Some shit. I dunno. All I know is that every time we have to do something in Workday our HR department literally sends out a PowerPoint of step-by-step instructions on how to do it.

Woman is a gender identity which is a socially constructed notion. Whether you’re a trans woman or a midwestern blonde beauty queen, it’s just as much of a made-up complex. It can and does have different meanings in different cultures and contexts. It is distinct from any clinical criteria such as genitalia, chromosomes, etc - it has never been able to be mapped to any of those cleanly so I don’t try. You have the genitalia you have, which is none of my concern. You present yourself as a woman, then that’s how I’m going to take you.

Because I’m pretty open minded I am willing to support multiple answers to this question as valid. However tolerance comes into a conundrum when it comes to tolerating intolerance. I tend to resolve this by not tolerating intolerance, hence my disgust for JKR. If you want to attend the party you have to agree to have fun with everyone there. If you’re going to object to some guests being present, fine, and you can leave. That’s my policy in my house, and that’s my policy for the bigger picture too.

J.K. Rowling invented “fragile femininity.”

She loses her shit any time anyone tries to broaden or complexity the narrow little definition she is stuck on. She just can’t handle it. A woman has to mean exactly what she says it does, or her femininity is under attack. Such an asshole.

It’s the sickness and its own cure! Just like other drug addictions.

The word “chattel” sometimes gets used in conversations like this one, and I think we should stop doing that. It’s a confusing word that most people don’t understand, and is often confused with “cattle” ie cows. I mean just look at this definition:

Chattel is a catch-all category of property associated with movable goods . At common law , chattel included all property other than real property . Examples include leases, animals, and money.

TBH I think “livestock” is a better word all around. It means live animal property, which is accurate. People know what it means. And it has the right negative connotations, too: associating human beings with pigs and chickens, as if they’re on the same level.

I have never interacted with an enterprise software salesperson as a customer. But I’ve had a ton of them as coworkers since I work in software development. Knowing them from the inside, so to speak, it is impossible for me to imagine how anyone takes them seriously. The only things they actually know or care about are their quota and bonus. How anyone bases a large cash spend on the things they say boggles my mind.

It must be so discombobulating when your special life partner stops responding whenever your internet service goes down.

Pulling his API key is nothing even close to shutting his project down. But hell I know better than to expect some journalist to have a clue on that.

I guess you know you’ve made some progress when there’s some lashback about it. I tend to take an optimistic view that racism isn’t going to die quietly, so we shouldn’t despair if it puts up something of a fight.

Not sure what we expected of Facebook, soulless bastards that they are.

I will say though that DEI departments have sometimes breathed their own farts so long that they put out truly ridiculous shit that makes them look like clowns.

I work in software and our DEI group said “hey can we start saying ‘block list’ and ‘allow list’ instead of ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist?” And I thought okay sure, that’s a pretty clear case of white=good, black=bad. Not that anyone means ill by it but it’s a very easy thing to let go.

Then they came out and said we should not use the phrase “long time no see,” because native Americans might think that you are talking in a Native American stereotype caricature voice, and feel excluded.

I was like uh… what? “Long time no see” is Native American blackface? Give me a fucking break.

You don’t know what a hellscape is, son.

Do we yet have a legal framework to call LLM training copyright infringement?

I find homophobia to be a mental illness. I mean it’s right there in the name.

I know right? They’re not having sex BECAUSE contraception is available. Unfortunately these conservatives are great at ignoring the data on this and perpetually jousting with this windmill.