New senators and representatives are slightly cheaper than the existing ones, although with a fixed size of 100 and 435 it’s not highly variable.

And fixing the house at the size it was a century ago when the country was a third its current population contributed to the house.not being responsive.

Listen to your therapist over random strangers on the Internet.

And, that said, cishet women showing affection to their masculine partners is entirely ordinary, healthy, and expected.

$100k is generally not “small claims”…

In utah the limit looks like $20,000

https://www.utcourts.gov/en/self-help/case-categories/consumer/small-claims.html

Sure!

It’s just either app-walled (AOL and IE could do things without JavaScript), essentially static (turn off JavaScript and browse around. Many pages won’t work anymore, but many will be seamless) or functionally equivalent (modern browsers support web Assembly, meaning the stuff that JavaScript is used for would instead be in C or java or something.)

That’s a weird way to pronounce “we’re an abusive workplace and I advise you to form a union.”

The diagnosis is always a variant of “they need some help feeling normal”.

For a substantial number of people, a full blown psychiatric diagnosis is way less useful than convincing everyone else to extend what counts as ordinary. (See: gay, trans, etc.)

“Open Source” LLMs are, by their very nature, about as open as a compiled EXE offered without source.

It is impossible to create any system that cannot be corrupted. Especially if said system runs on opaque technology created in secret by a private entity using a nondeterministic process. Especially if the system itself was designed to be nondeterministic.

If you want to interject AI into the governmental process it’d be way better to separate governance of the legislative process away from legislators, since there’s all kind of chicanery that we don’t easily see. ( the majority party in either chamber picks what votes they want to have, decides when voting is done, and even decides what day it is and how each member is recorded as having actually voted. )

Did anything I say have anything at all to do with academics?

Yes. In America – the country which the Democrats are a political faction of – the only places where government has standing to regulate the specifics of sport as such are in those leagues attached to schools. Professional and recreational leagues are only governed by employment and public-access law.

~(You’re free to, say, create a private club that allows only white men and play whatever games you want. You just won’t get any tax breaks or liability protection, and would have a hard time renting stadiums or selling coverage of your matches)~

And since you decided to focus only on the trans issue in my comment I should remind you the thrust of my argument was in regards to Democrats putting identity politics before good governance

I’m sorry, I thought my position on the matter was clearly While you may have a valid point regarding the democratic party’s over-reliance on identity based anti-bigotry and their messaging to non-aligned voters, the sole supporting example you provided of either was phrased in a way that I found so odious and wrong-headed as to render whatever else you said irrelevant.

Throwing minorities under the bus is neither good governance nor good politics. Especially when said minority is facing prohibitions so ornerous that they could be fairly described as genocidal.

~(Although genocide is not strictly possible for any LGBTQ+ letter since trans and queer humans have existed for as long as humans have and would reappar naturally even if you killed every last living example.)~

Which studies? Done with what methodology? And what are the rebuttals against their claims? Did the study differentiate trans women who are not on HRT, newly on HRT, and on HRT past the several year adjustment period? Same question, for age at which HRT or puberty blockers began. And does the reported difference fall outside the expected range for feminine athletes? Did the study include a group of cis boys or cis men as contrast? Were trans boys and trans men also included to show the presumable equivalent disadvantage?

There have been some infamous studies recently done by transphobes and cited as evidence of their bigoted viewpoint. Science thankfully doesn’t itself care about politics and these studies will either be refuted or confirmed as more science is done.

And as I alluded to before, even if merely having been assigned male at birth gave some advantage in competitive sport, that advantage is entirely irrelevant to scholastic activities and only relevant to professional conpetitions if it puts trans women substantially outside the range of expected competitors.

A good example is trans rights in sports. It seems fairly obvious to me…

While your larger point is worthwhile, this part is indistinguishable from the positions where it “seemed obvious” that africans not as smart as europeans, or that women were not as mature as men, or that the poor were less deserving of the rich.

Trans women who go through HRT are essentially indisinqyusihable in ability from Cis women. There may be a reasonable bar in some sports for trans girls who are old enough to have undergone male puberty and aren’t on HRT or puberty blockers, but blanket bans aren’t at all supported by science.

Personally, my response is “these are children.” Yes, our daughters should be free from being assaulted by fully mature men. But so should our sons.

It wasn’t that computers would crash. Its that they might treat midnight Jan 1 as a hundred years before almist-midnight Dec 31, instead of one minute later.

Really critical things like airplanes would probably be OK, but your savings account would suddenly be drained thanks to 100 years of negative interest, while your credit card would sudddy go from owing $1000 to having $60,000 in available credit.

Y2K, if no one had done anything, might have ended capitalism. Assong that there were no nuclear launch systems with a date-based “don’t shoot” dead-king switch.

Preparation steps for safely drinking lava:

1. Obtain lava.
2. Allow to cool to room temperature
3. Use a hammrer and food processor to reduce to a fine powder
4. Add water and stir until you have a drinkable slurry
5. Die anyway because drinking glass shards is still really bad for you.

Great rant, but “nice” and “good” aren’t synonyms

The money changers who setup shop in the temple were nice. The Germans who smiled and reported where Jews were hiding were nice. The whites who thought MLK was too radical and the gays who told Obama that civil unions were enough were nice.

Throwing the first brick at pride was good, not nice. Calmly braiding a whip to flip over some tables was good, not nice. Flashing your tits to lure Nazis so you could kill them was good, not nice.

Mormons are incredibly nice. They just aren’t all the other thing.

There are some games tbat are sold on both steam and other platforms. Many of these games have external modding communities. Steam provides slick integration for “workshop” mods, which helps drive sales.

A few years back steam used to allow fairly open API access if you acquired the game elsewhere and just wanted the mods. And then they turned it off, but still allow direct anonymous downloads. A decision that only makes sense if they wanted to lock in any steam-adopted community to make going elsewhere difficult.

Turning off something people were using to avoid potential competitors is kinda exactly what would count as “monopolistic behavior” if Steam were to be ruled a monopoly by a court

The American right is all about pretending they didn’t lose. Short list of examples in cronological order:

• the civil war
• the great depression.
• the JFK / Nixon POTUS election
• the vietnam war
• the Afghanistan war
• the Biden / Trump election

Of course the USA lost this thing with Iran. We didn’t even state a clear goal and STILL wound up in a state where the absolute best we could hope to describe it is as a draw.

It isn’t running to the right to describe things factually. Reality, after all, has a well known left-wing bias.

Starfield is “fine” if you compare it to stock Skyrim or fallout 4.

It continues the aggravating tradition of being a rubber-banded pseudo-sandbox with just enough randomness to make you realize how little randomness there is in the game.

I read it as “torrent isn’t stealing, but if it was id do it even harder because those guys suck”.

A billion 3-inch circular tailpipes have the area of a 1.5 mile tailpipe.

Which would be… Very big.

Linguistic drift requires a considerable majority understanding, not just a large minority

By way of example, no matter how many men think “chartreuse” is a vaguely pink color or that “trans-man” includes Caitlyn Jenner, it’ll still be lime-green and Eliot Page.