Sorry for being pedantic but the toddler with stage-4 cancer that got deported was a US citizen, not an illegal immigrant.

Also it's pretty fucked up for people to talk about "curing" neurodivergence. It's not all that different from "curing" queerness or transgenderism. Ultimately the biggest problem with autism is a misalignment with social expectations, which leads to social disadvantages. So maybe it's really society that needs to be "cured". Maybe we should structure society in a way that doesn't punish people for being different.

If the security team and the operations team are willing to obey the order and revoke access then the illegal firing is very much effective.

The jackboot thugs that work security for these government agencies have repeatedly demonstrated that they're happy to listen to the children running DOGE over the members of the agency that they're supposed to be securing, so at that point what do you expect one of these beaurocrats to do? Get into a fist fight with all the mall cops that are itching to serve the fascists?

How exactly is an individual supposed to determine which cops will be good and which will abuse their power?

Just as we can't make a general statement that all cops are definitely bad, you can't make a general statement that all cops in any particular country or town will be good.

From a basic risk management viewpoint, it doesn't make sense for anyone to accept the risk that any given cop won't abuse their position, even if we were willing to accept that very few would actually do so.

Cops have an extremely privileged status in society and the amount of damage that a bad one can do to an individual - on purpose or even by accident - is incalculable, including setting up an innocent person for capital punishment as we're seeing unfold in Missouri right now.

I honestly believe the two are related. I think big meat agro business is paying influencers to promote toxic masculinity and push nonsense like "plants emit toxic hormones" on social media.

I find it hard to believe that anyone who votes Republican will care enough about Taylor Swift's influence to change their vote, but I can absolutely believe that her endorsement would swing the numbers in a big way if she just motivates politically apathetic Swifties to go to the polls.

I think Trump is accustomed to thinking his spouses are lesser beings that exist only to bolster his image and serve at his pleasure, and he probably harbors deep feelings of disdain for all of them that he can't express publicly.

So for him it totally tracks to be married to a type of person that you hate.

Nothing is ever better in every conceivable way than the current state of the art.

Probabilistically, sure, but it's not impossible that there has been some piece of knowledge or understanding that's been missing, and that massive breakthroughs are possible once the process is figured out.

I think a fair modern example is LED light bulbs. They are better in every conceivable way than incandescent or fluorescent lightbulbs: they last longer, use less energy, shine brighter, use less toxic materials, and are easy to mass produce. But there were several decades where much of the industry believed that LEDs would never be very useful as a light source because we could only produce red and green, and it was generally believed that a blue LED would be impossible to produce.

Then one guy decided it would be his life mission to invent the blue LED, and the sonuvabitch did it. Now LEDs are the only sensible thing to use to produce light.

It's always possible for this kind of breakthrough to happen, especially in material science where the complexity of how molecules interplay is nearly incomprehensible.

Your graph also cuts out early. Eventually you want to get performance gains with multi-threading and concurrency, and then the line drops all the way into hell.

In Deep Space 9 there's an episode called "Trials and Tribble-ations" where a number of the crew from DS9 go back in time and find themselves in the TOS episode "Trouble with Tribbles". The producers literally overlayed the DS9 cast onto TOS footage, and shot some new clips in the same setting, so canonically the DS9 crew was present for the events of the TOS episode (... at least as canonically as you can get when time travel is involved).

Warf and O'Brien were two of the DS9 crew involved in that episode, and they also happen to be on the Enterprise when Scotty is found trapped in a pattern buffer.

This is exactly what I thought about abortion rights but they really went and plowed ahead on that.

Now they've shifted the culture wars over to trans rights and whatever other kinds of bigotry they can muster up. There's really no bottom to the depths of horribleness that they're willing to plumb.

This is a rare case where sentient is being used correctly. Sentient beings do have feelings, e.g. dogs and cats are sentient and can have cravings and even feel hate.

Sapient means having enough intellect to understand and reason about the situation. The post doesn't actually require that.