IMO there is no definitive mainstream any more. Hasn’t been for a decade. There’s just too much music out there for you to know all the “popular” stuff.

That’s okay, we feel the same way about you. But more to the point, when you’re in a situation where the only choice is whether to laugh or cry, it’s just a question of how you want to cope.

I don’t think anyone is actually shocked. It’s quite obvious that if you push policies that benefit large numbers of people, you might get support from large numbers of people. Of course that’s not a guarantee, but it doesn’t need to be.

But many Democrat politicians have been keen on appeasing their corporate backers by pretending otherwise, even though they knew it, we knew it, Bernie was saying it The cat has been out of the bag for a long time.

Rights have nothing to do with anything.

When you say most countries, which countries are you talking about?

And if you’re wondering where the US goes for help, I’m not sure what you mean, but there have been a variety of peacekeeping missions and wars over the past few decades where other countries worked alongside the United States. Whether you think those military operations were justified is a different question, but if you’re looking for which countries worked together, you can easily find out by browsing Wikipedia for 20 minutes.

qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.

I don’t think we can accept your argument, because in point in fact Hong Kong was an independent country. Certainly trying to disagree but now we’re getting into a definition question, but if that’s going to stop us from applying the proposed principle, then we can do that in every situation.

How cool! This is one great point of FOSS.

The federal government lawyers have said in court that Elon Musk was not the leader of that organization. Therefore, the fact that he said he has departed from Washington would not affect that organization.

Of course we know that he was leading it, and the president has said as much, and the above claims are all being contested in court by quoting the president. But anyway, if you want the official answer, now you have it.

But the official answer also changes over time. Because if Musk was not the leader of that group, then many of the actions that he claimed to take and many of the actions that people attributed to him would now be actions of a private individual, which would expose him to massive civil liability. Therefore, we can be sure that the government’s lawyers will continue to change their story about when and where and how he worked for the government.

Definitions are important, but you don’t get to unilaterally choose them. Depending on the person you’re talking to, sometimes it’s more effective to ask them to define the terms first, or to ask them which dictionary they prefer.

So depending on the situation, it might be more beneficial to bring in the quotes from various Israeli leaders about how they’re trying to get Palestinians gone, and how they’re happy with Palestinian death, and then bring in those graphs that show the numbers of the dead, and ask whether they think that’s acceptable.

Another way to think about it is that sometimes questions of definition can distract us from questions of morality, and if the person that you’re trying to talk to is running away from the issue. By doing so, you can reasonably adjust your focus back to the facts.

It’s kind of a mistaken premise. Yes, there’s a feud, the feud is real, but those people are both narcissistic liars. They don’t actually believe in anything except at the time they say it, so if they can get some kind of benefit by saying it now, they will. If they can get some kind of benefit by making up next week, they will.

It’s not like you or me, where if we actually said all of those things, we would never be friends with each other again. They can be friends with anyone in the first place.

Exactly. Reverse DNS lookup matters in some situations.

It’s certainly true that the system is broken, but at the same time you’re suggesting we should forgive HR employees for the bad stuff they do, and I don’t think that’s how morality works.

Not only that, we all understand that sometimes employees don’t have control of a situation and they’re going to follow company policy or go along with their bosses. But we can see through their words and their body language how they feel about it, and we can recognize small actions that they could take to make a bad situation slightly less bad. In my experience it’s very rare that you will encounter such behavior in HR, because the vast majority of HR workers are perfectly happy to f*** us over as much as they can.

Last year I was talking with a veteran coworker who was worried about where the company was going to end up in 10 years, but my contract ends in a year and will not be renewed. I told her openly, they’re not paying me to think about 10 years from now, they’re paying me to make the next year a good year, and I don’t really care about the long-term future cuz I won’t be here. She was furious, but she wasn’t furious enough to go get me a long-term contract. I think she never saw the hypocrisy; even today she still thinks that I’m a bad worker.

Of course what you wrote is not what it actually says in the Bill of Rights.

You can buy loyalty. Give someone a high paying 3-year contract and they’ll probably work to the end of it. But of course HR doesn’t want to hear that.