Are you aware that there is a significant population of white people in South Africa and a long history of racial conflict there between them and the black majority? The white minority ruled over and oppressed the black majority until the end of apartheid in the early nineties and the idea that the majority could now be persecuting the minority is not ridiculous per se the way that you imply it is, although the general consensus outside of the circles Trump listens to is that such persecution isn’t happening.

Ah yes, an “unauthorized modification”. It must have been the janitor pressing buttons accidentally while mopping the mainframe room.

That works out to an annual salary of about $62,500 for a full-time employee and my intuition is that the marginal value of the lowest-paid hotel employees to their employers is a lot less than that, but the nice thing about this being a local law is that LA can experiment on itself and the rest of the country can watch and learn. If this works well, other cities can do the same thing and if this doesn’t then the harm is relatively limited.

(I noticed that the law only applies to hotels with over sixty rooms. I already stay exclusively in Airbnbs when I travel because that’s cheaper. Is LA also one of those cities making it difficult to run an Airbnb or is this going to make large hotels even less competitive in that regard?)

Your interpretation of “subject to to the jurisdiction of the United States” is the one that would make this clause meaningless in the context of the amendment. A sovereign government has that sort of authority over everyone in the country, so presumably the amendment is talking about something different or otherwise there would have been no point in explicitly including the clause at all.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I admit that I’m not sure how to interpret this in a way that includes freed slaves, people born in the Confederacy during the Civil War, but not everyone else born on US territory, but the implication of having two separate clauses is still that a person may be born in the United States but not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. I think that the Trump administration’s arguments seem like a stretch, but so is asserting that the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause means nothing.

Is there any large city where people would have responded? I don’t think anyone would clap in NYC, because people who ask you to do things in public are usually mentally ill, want your money, or both, and so the normal thing to do is to pretend they don’t exist.

So is referring to a woman as “Barbie” not sexist if she works for Trump, or is it still sexist but it’s ok to be sexist towards women who work for Trump?

(I’d ban Daily Beast links if I were in charge.)

Employees shouldn’t make public announcements (in their capacity as employees) unless authorized to do so by management. The official policy at my last job was that we weren’t to say anything unless explicitly instructed otherwise by marketing. The places I’ve worked at that didn’t have an official policy would have expected the same thing from me, just because it’s common sense.

As an employee, you can speak about your own specific working conditions with your manager. You can, through private channels, contact upper management about the company’s general strategy but that seems like a silly thing to do unless you know something that management doesn’t. (And Tesla’s upper management is well aware of what people think of Musk.) You definitely can’t try to organize public pressure against upper management’s decisions while you’re being paid to obey those decisions.

Lifting sanctions on Syria is not wrong just because Trump does it. Biden/Harris would probably have done it too, and rightly so because this guy as the ruler of Syria is the best the US can get.

It would be shooting the messenger if they were expressing their concerns privately through internal channels but that’s not what they’re doing. They’re going to the public because management already knows what they want and chooses not to act on it.

Firing employees who organize a public campaign to discredit the CEO is generally the correct thing to do.

Their true purpose is sinister.

No portrait-orientation video is worth watching.

Edit about the article of clothing: men’s legs and feet look weird and so I don’t like going out in public without long pants and shoes.

“Compelled by law” isn’t a sufficient justification for Catholics in this case - they’re supposed to die rather than reveal something that was said to them in confession, like Saint John of Nepomuk.

Confession is a sacrament of the Catholic Church - pretty much the definition of “religion” in Europe for two thousand years. It’s clearly something the first amendment is intended to protect and this law is well over the line into unconstitutional.

readmit the priest after a penance

The priest actually has to repent - if he still thinks he did the right thing, he isn’t forgiven.

TRIO

I’m not sure how people are supposed to talk about autism with precision when the official diagnosis can encompass both someone capable of being a brilliant inventor and someone not capable of even comprehending language. It’s broad to the point of being useless. Even RFK can see the difference between people with severe mental disabilities and people who are socially awkward and like math. What’s the point of confronting him with examples of the latter group when he’s talking about the former group?

Trump is open about the fact that he’s cutting funding because PBS is “biased” rather than to save money.

There is a very good reason for the super rich to support the rule of law: it secures their own wealth and power. Even if they may want to be aristocrats in a highly stratified society like, for example, 19th century Britain rather than a modern democratic welfare state, they don’t stand to benefit from the transition to a modern autocracy. 19th century Britain was very much a nation of laws where the government would protect the lives and property of the super rich whereas modern autocrats quickly co-opt them into personal lenders whose well-being is entirely at the mercy of the autocrat.

Thus, while some super rich individuals currently support populist autocracy either due to idiosyncratic personal beliefs or short-term political expediency, transitioning to it is not in the best interest of the super rich as a class. Rule of law isn’t the same thing as democracy but I don’t see a global movement towards rule of law without democracy - the two are in the present day apparently inextricable.

(China seemed like it could become a powerful example of rule of law without democracy, but Xi’s consolidation of power seems to have returned it to the standard autocratic track.)