I mean, with asterisks? The Catholics only get away with that because they reject Sola Scriptura, and sometimes treat some of the words of their Church Fathers as “the next best thing”. Even then, they’ve gone back and forth on abortion (and largely treated it as a minor issue) until only the last few centuries.

…but along those lines, I’ve never really seen a Catholic argument against abortion try to lean too heavily on Biblical sources. Because they know they’d lose.

In religion’s defense, many religions are also being used to prop up pro-choice. It just so happens 2 or 3 of the largest religions are very outspoken so the rest of them are getting ignored.

Stealing from Pew, almost all of Judaism, Universalism, and many of the major non-evangelical protestant religions are pro-choice. Even Islam is largely “limited pro-choice”. If I had to guess, the majority of religions weighted by adherents are either morally pro-abortion-rights, or at least pro-choice due to lack of mandate otherwise.

…if we look back at the US Civil War, the Christian churches fell on both sides of the Slavery argument fairly consistently, basically based on what their constituents wanted to hear.

If you insist on that, secular society is also a religion. As is regional atheism.

People don’t hate abortion because they’re afraid of God. They hate abortion because their parents and teachers taught them to. Yes, some religions help propogate societal behaviors, but they are not solely, or even primarily responsible for them.

Honestly, just look at the way Catholic Priests in conservative areas have been largely rejecting Rome on anything that isn’t radically conservative despite claiming to inheret their morals from Rome. Or more starkly, just look at the undying history of sedevacantism.

Nothing about the anti-choice movement is religious; it’s tribalism. Same way as gun rights have nothing to do with the sky god either.

If we’re being honest, the only strictly biblical argument on the topic of abortion leans heavily pro-choice and sometimes even pro-abortion-as-punishment. Throughout most of history most Christian branches have been neutral or passively negative on abortion, usually considering it a minor sin that it wasn’t their job to prosecute (yes, occasionally either banning or encouraging it as well). The idea that life begins with conception is distinctly non-traditional (Judaism or firstgen Christianity) and was picked up from the Pythagorians.

It’s important to differentiate cultural mores from religion. Organized Religion can make you convince yourself something is wrong when you are otherwise strongly predisposed to find it right (or vice versa). Cultural mores is more like “omg, you can’t see my ankles how dare you!”. They’re like behavioral “dialects”, much like happens in language. Technically, when I say something is wicked pissah, I “inhereted” that from the Mainers despite my not being from Maine. That doesn’t mean it came from my religious ties with them. My parents and peers taught it to me. Same as all my fucked up knee-jerk morals I grew up with.

I’ve always seen it more that the Roe decision is what happens when an anti-choice majority rules on abortion in “reasonably good faith”, leaving the opening for erosion when a 14th Amendment Decision would have been steelclad. I don’t think they wanted to appease everyone, they just didn’t want to compromise their legal ethics OR their personal morals.

And I guess I don’t think it would have been steeclad because Dobbs wasn’t about leaning around Roe insomuch as saying “Roe was wrong” because “the fetus is special and should be treated as such” (paraphrase because I’m too lazy to look up the offending line in Dobbs right now). Bodily Autonomy could easily be overturned by a bad faith judiciary by simply pointing out DUI laws, or even “the spirit of drug laws”… OR just saying “the fetus is special” the same as they did in Dobbs.

In fact, call me paranoid, but I question whether the current SCOTUS wouldn’t overturn a national abortion protection on States Rights grounds, finding some reason to disqualify the Commerce Clause from being applicable.

My tool experience is limited, but with Makita you seem to be describing the same anachronism principle you find in espresso machines.

Arguably the best espresso machines in a class are reminescent of the same model you found 40+ years ago. If you’re looking for the B+ range, everything worth buying has a big metal E61 grouphead with manual levers. In the S-class range, you tend to have more manual levers as often as bells or whistles. My new machine that cost more than I deserve (wife bought it) is basically an oldschool machine with nothing modern in it but a PID controller. Legend has it, it will be passed down in my family for generations to come (exaggeration, but not much).

What’s Ubuntu’s “particular madness”? They used to be a little FOSS-only, but they’ve chilled out on that.

I agree on the other points, though, with one caveat on both.

No matter how many games run on linux, it won’t be enough because there aren’t ever going to be linux exclusives. Without linux exclusives, there will always be more games that run in Windows than Linux, even if the majority of them run in linux AND run better than in Windows.

Office sounds like a big deal, but Apple managed to prove you don’t need it. The real problem Linux has with office is that it has no well-marketed office suite. There’s nothing wrong with Libre- or Open- except the complete lack of advertising and passive training to its nuances that we get from MS and Apple office products.

It’s not that linux can’t win on games or office. It’s that the game is rigged against it on both. It took me a few years back in the early 00’s, but I quickly realized that there will never be a “year of the linux desktop” regardless of how good Linux gets at games, office, user-friendliness, or anything.

And that’s ok because MY life is easier when I use linux.

I don’t know if we know it’s shrinking back for sure. With the exception of Q1’23, there seems to be a balance around 19M sales per quarter. There’s a way to read it as shrinking, but there’s also a way to read it as stabilizing. There’s just not enough samples to be certain.

What we have to remember is that we’re finally reaching a turning point in GPU pricing. Laptops that were in the $2000+ range a year or two ago are closer to the $1000 commodity price. There had been a “value stall” that just broke, where a new computer used to not be a significant upgrade on an old one, and so people might hold onto their current computers a year or two longer.

I mean, I sure I pulled a few discounts out of my ass, but I just landed an i9 laptop with a 4090 for just over $2k as a replacement to a computer that died. Two years ago almost to the day I bought a middle-of-the-road gaming machine with a 3070 in it for about the same price.

I wonder at the various nuances of that. My wife and I have 4 phones and 3 tablets between us between home and work. It would seem any multi-person household would be likely to have more mobile devices than PCs due to the variety of the former. So that chart seems to be that there are more mobile devices per person, but perhaps no reduction in PCs.

In fact, PC sales rocketed up in Q3’20 for very obvious reasons, and have largely not come back down to pre-COVID levels.

Welcome to the United States. Federally speaking at least, there are very few protections for hiring/firing. You can be fired for your hair color, unless the hiring manager is as much of an idiot as he is an asshole and says “black people don’t have blonde hair” (happened in a Hooters case I remember reading). The company policy reads “right hair color for your skin tone”, and is actually normally enforceable in the US because it’s implying no “unnaturally dyed hair”. They hypothetically can turn away an Asian redhead with no legal ramifications so long as she dyed her hair that way.

So yeah, they can 100% not hire you because you’re a Scorpio. More realistically, you’d probably see someone who doesn’t hire Aries, Virgo, or Aquarius because the New York Post had an article claiming those three signs are more likely to get fired.

I interviewed a guy whose dev career involved a (pretty good) front-end for a grow operation. I believe the ownership at that company may have opted against hiring because of that. I’ll admit, I wasn’t wowed by his skills enough to go to bat for him.

Age discrimination in the US at least is driven by “40 or over”. I think any lawyer would be able to argue that “which day of the year you’re born” is not indicitive of a protected class. Because we’re fucked in the US and you can still formally be passed up on a job for being under 39 years old as long as you it’s not because “you’re almost 40, and we’re not allowed to get rid of you when you turn 40”

Every time I’ve seen an HR degree, conflict resolution was a required course.

It’s one thing to say that they’re “not good at it”, but I suppose by expert I mean professional qualifications. I like to have coworkers who are proficient in their professional qualifications, and then forgive them for the things they’re not qualified in but replace them if they are incapable in the things they are supposed to be qualified in.

Maybe I’m a jerk, but I’m used to having competent people around me and having difficult discussions with those who aren’t. HR is the same as any other department in that, to me.

EDIT: I realize how much of an asshole I sound like. To be clear, I’ve got the Boston IT scene in my blood. Starting salaries in the 6-figure range, incredibly low oversight. But zero pity for people who can’t keep up. I know I need to have more sympathy than that for people who aren’t as capable in their job - it’s not like I love capitalism as concept.

And I recognize the irony of acknowledging my own assholishness when the topic is Linus Torvald’s assholishness. But then, I’m also used to HR that can move heaven and earth to reconcile a situation with a valued employee. To keep your job where I come from, you need to be so valuable that they’ll hide bodies for you (figuratively).

There has apparently been historical disagreement over whether 6÷2(3) is equivalent to 6÷2x3

As a logician instead of a mathemetician, the answer is “they’re both wrong because they have proven themselves ambiguous”. Of course, my answer would be RPN to be a jerk or just have more parens to be a programmer

If I had to guess, probably for the same reason you can’t sue for not being able to pick what apps you install on your toaster.

Google probably opened themselves up to this monopoly shit by trying not to be as much of a monopoly as Apple is trying to be.

I’ve heard a lot of lawyers say that the law punishes virtually every good behavior because that behavior can be construed in a way that you can be sued for, and that it favors being a dick more than anything. In this case, that might be what happened?

I mean, not that Google is a saint at all.

You are under the very relevant misassumption that HR is less likely to be handling a situation inappropriately

I have something called an “expertise bias” that I use to make decisions. In a vacuum, I trust an expert to solve a problem over someone with no experience in a given field. I don’t ask a barista to fix my car, or my doctor to fix me a latte. Both can screw up in their field, but they are less likely to do so than someone without experience in their specialty. I’m not a barista, a doctor, or an HR expert. Or to put it simpler, the odds of an HR person mishandling someone being non-serially abusive in the workplace is simply lower than the odds of the situation without that person involved. I need this attitutude to live; if a junior dev is trying to override the devops engineer on infrastructure, you’ll never guess which one usually wins.

A simple verbal overstep, on the first occurrence

What are you talking about now? The topic at hand wasn’t verbal and certainly wasn’t merely an overstep. We have a an insulting teardown in writing. Substantively different from a verbal teardown. I never said the moment a person loses their cool with em and tells me “fuck off man” I’m knocking on HR’s door. But if a senior dev on my team sends this flaming email to a junior dev on my team, I better find out about it and it’s getting handled… By HR.

I love how everyone online is psychic.

Actually, I’ve watched two GREAT workers and good people end up losing their jobs because a easily resolved situation turned toxic. The person who felt uncomfortable tried to take care of it 1-on-1 but had too passive aggressive a nature to really be clear when she confronted the guy.

So 6 months or a year later, she was on the verge of quitting and went to HR. He was terminated because it had gone too far. She left soon after because she still wasn’t comfortable at work after the cause of that ended.

…look. I “obviously never dealt” with anything because nobody is allowed differing opinions here, but I have 20+ years experience at businesses where the existence or lack of good HR has been a deciding factor of the work-culture and comfort level of team members. I work 1-on-1 with my company’s Directors of HR on a regular basis to make sure my team is happy and because I am involved with other teams at my job who have their own interpersonal conflicts. One of HR’s responsibilities in a good company is to involve themselves in interpersonal conflicts BEFORE decisive action has to be taken.

The problem is that face-to-face confrontations without a mediator don’t always end well. And I would rather not have HR decide “we have to fire our Rockstar senior dev or this random guy”. But if you address it earlier, HR deals with it earlier (yes, because the paper trail m eans HR can’t just fire “this random guy” later over the Rockstar senior dev). It’s win-win for all parties INCLUDING the Linus Torvalds in this explanation.

But I’ve “obviously never dealt with a real-world scenario” and my experience doesn’t count. So you can ignore everything I said.

The term is “hostile work environment”. HR doesn’t just respond because of strict liability. Just one occurance of something like this can lead to an otherwise solid worker to spiral from discomfort of the situation, both feeling like a prisoner at their job and producing far less value for their employers.

The latter is why HR cares, but the former is why it’s OKay to go straight to HR. If HR is well-trained, things like this shouldn’t escalate just because you went to HR. They should be able to diffuse it productively.

From my memories of the Arch linux labs in college, no there isn’t…

… genuinely I’ve never been offered (even had to google EMLA)

But now that you mention it, I’ve never had this particular issue from novicaine at the dentist. And they always use a topical.

Next time I need a shot/blood, I’ll see if they’re willing to try that! Since it really does seem to be about the poke itself, something that changes the feeling might be exactly what works.