There's a general argument - not strictly applicable to you, I don't know you - to be made that a natural-born citizen of a given country is more likely to be loyal to that country than a "foreigner", for lack of a better word, and more familiar with its culture and society. It makes sense then that a country would want to restrict their higher public offices to "their own people". (How much those people actually care for the wider body of constituents is a different question, of course.)

Voting on local politics that influence you more directly isn't the same as participating in federal politics. Musk is essentially a foreign actor, he shouldn't have such influence over the government of a different people.

(He shouldn't have any influence at all, actually, but I'm just talking about the "try to change the law so he can run for president" concern you responded to)

Not strictly: he says only an educated people can be a free one, meaning that all free peoples are educated ones, but the inversion of that is "No uneducated people can be free". By that, I assume he means that uneducated people are far more susceptible to deception and manipulation compared to the educated that will be better able to detect lies, point them out and understand explanations of why that's bullshit.

As an example: If I tell you that the "vaccines cause autism" study was a) just a pilot study, not an actual one at scale, b) heavily fudged to the point that one scientist was kicked off the project for refusing to falsify results, c) only examined a specific vaccine, the MMR combination vaccine usually given to infants and d) led by a guy that had financial stakes in a company trying to sell individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, you can probably smell the bullshit.

If I tried to explain that to someone who's not educated enough, they'll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of "Well, you never know what to believe these days" and change absolutely nothing about their stance.

Things get far worse when someone tells their base that some group is capturing and eating their pets and ends up inciting violence by people who take him at face value.

Edit: I don't know why I said "harmless" there. Anti-Vaxxers aren't harmless, even when compared to incitement of hate crimes.

I hope he loses everything he holds dear: Public respect, wealth, his entourage of yes-men, powerful allies...

Not because I'd wish suffering on anyone, but because all these things enable him to keep doing damage and I want that to stop.

At least something would be right with her then

I mean, isn't part of the purpose of a jury to allow for nullification in cases where circumstances absolve the defendant from moral guilt even if the letter of the law might have condemned them?

Whether that purpose is always dutifully carried out is a different question, of course.

You know what fucked me up?

All, sadly, direct quotes I've heard in church

The fact that my reaction here was "Well, duh."

I had to take a step back and reflect that being so used to this shit is not normal. It should do more than make me shrug and go "The usual crap, eh?" I often forget just how deep the damage goes that church has left me with, but moments like this where blatant sexism doesn't really register emotionally make it clear how, even after all these years, my intuition of "normal" is still borked.

Me too, let's touch circles

Eh, between the financial expense, the human reluctance to change and the still very real barrier of "We can't migrate where there's nowhere to go" with respect to the software landscape, I think we need to compare our definitions of could. It's not just a business culture issue either. All change brings friction, but trying to replace the entire infrastructure of a company (and it has to be pretty much everything - one selling point of MS is how thoroughly integrated its products are) is basically ripping out most of the internal organs and replacing them with transplants, but also trying to keep the patient alive somehow... and you need to sell the people with the money on the idea.

Throwing away and starting over is costly, no matter the context. So no, I don't think larger companies can even make that choice at this point.

Smaller companies without the same inertia, in industries where there are Linux-compatible tools? Yeah, they can, provided the software they need is there too.

I use Linux privately, and haven't had a Windows OS on my PC in years except for a VM I needed for a university project. I'm all for hoping that specialised apps get developed for Linux too. I like mine and would probably enjoy using it for private purposes too, but it won't work with wine and learning different tools is obviously an additional time investment in my free time compared to the one I get paid for learning.

But I'm both quick and happy to learn. Many people are not (and I see that daily with my users). The cost of switching and disruption in productivity would probably be disastrous enough to ruin the company even before considering the fact that "industry giant unable to fulfill contractual obligations because they have to rebuild half their infrastructure from nothing" would be a crippling blow to its professional reputation in an industry where IT is still considered second-class at best, the ideological gain of no longer depending on Microsoft would net them nothing and in an economic system where short-term profitability is more important than long-term independence.

And that's not considering the difficulty of convincing company leadership that Windows really is that bad and Linux really is much better and that we only need to provide the financial incentive and invest the time and money to have someone port already expensive software to a different platform. FFS, we're still struggling to get people to see IT as a service rather than an expense.

Finally, even if they were to switch out their entire IT infrastructure, they'd start asking whether it would be cheaper to outsource our internal IT to a company that already knows the new stuff than to retrain all of us. I'd very much like to keep my permanent position, even if it means using Windows.

Like .ml admins cracking down on people suggesting that Mao's "Great Leap Forward" was catastrophe because it forced a political will ignorant of economic reality on a society violently robbed of the ability to resist, even terrorised into meeting their quotas at any cost? Or the fact that purging and suppressing all dissidents in the first place was cruel and authoritarian, a brutal abuse of power of the same kind as Stalin's and (in this one aspect, at least) Hitler's?

I'm a leftist to the bone, I recognise that a revolution without bloodshed wouldn't have been possible at the time (and maybe never will be) and that a hard hand forcing fundamental changes to the political and educational system may well be required, but .ml has a well-known Tankie problem and they're all too eager to follow in the steps of the boots they so love to lick.

Praise the Sun, my friend

Ours is. Last I heard, our Client Management team is already looking for different ways to disable it and make triple sure it stays off.

(inb4 "Switch to Linux": several thousand users, specialised software and a technologically conservative company would already make that a non-starter)

Ideally, tradition and innovation are two parts of a healthy system: Tradition is what had worked so far, but as circumstances change, innovation seeks ways to improve and adapt. Critical reasoning needs to balance them, so that their oppositional forces can pull society towards their shared purpose: prosperity.

The issues arise when the tempering mechanism of critical reasoning breaks.
Without the lessons of the past informing the decisions of the presence, odds are that mistakes will be repeated eventually.
On the other hand, rigid tradition obviously risks failing to adapt to changing circumstances.

Where modernity exacerbates those issues is in the sheer destructive power of modern weaponry and the complex infrastructure and administration required to maintain modern population and living standards: errors of either kind can easily become more costly than ever before. At the same time, modern state capacity puts far more power into the hands of those entrusted with it, enabling far greater mistakes. And finally, as you noted, the fast pace and scope of modern developments and changes quickly invalidates many old premises and requires faster adaption.

Not all traditions are bad, but figuring out which ones are and how to fix them is hard to do quickly.

Schon gewusst? Es gibt ein Schild, das es erlaubt, mitten auf der Autobahn zu wenden: "Willkommen in Hessen"

Denial ("I feel comfortable being addressed and seen as a guy, so I can't be enby")
Anger ("Why do people always ignore the 'it' in 'it/he'?")
Bargaining ("I just care a lot about respecting pronouns, so that's why I get upset. I'm just doing this to add to enby visibility, because I don't really mind.")
Depression ("I suppose people just don't like referring to humans with pronouns normay used for objects, that's just how it is")
Acceptance ("Okay I definitely feel good about being called 'it', so I'm probably agender")

Bargaining again ("Maybe I'm some in-between? Not really cis, but not really enby either?")
Proceeds to cycle between Denial, Bargaining, Acceptance and Bargaining again, with Anger and Depression playing a constant tug-of-war as backdrop

Insert meme of mother yelling at her kid "Why can't you just be normal", but it's me yelling at my Identity "Why can't you just be simple"

Anyone convinced they're immune to propaganda, bias or plain human error is extremely vulnerable to being wrong and never realising it.

Relatedly: One of the easiest mistakes to make regarding fields you're no expert in is to underestimate just how much there is to know that you don't (or maybe nobody does). I'm very prone to that one, personally.

Was it used to demean people to the same extent?

48% of those who voted?

Democrat Strategy: Beg, then bend over and spread wide.

(Not that there's anything wrong with that in your private life, but when you're in public office, you kinda have a responsibility to be representatively picky about who you bend over for)

Had one guy apply for a job in my field saying "My experiences in different field> will help me as <job title>."

There is very little overlap in hard skills (soft ones obviously do help). Not like that matters a whole lot - their actual list of past jobs and skills would have landed them an interview at least, because we already expect it to be a learn-as-you-go type of deal. Bro would have been better off leaving it out and I would have just assumed they're trying to strike out in a different direction.

(I told HR to invite them for an interview anyway, because fuck cover letters - I'm not gonna hold anyone to a higher standard there than I'd like to be held to)