Catzilla. Truly a loaf incarnate.

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A mild cigar.

With due respect, it is time to go outside.

When I fall off my routine I lose a ton of progress. That first hundred K after a long rest absolutely sucks for me. I won’t run on an injury, but I understand the fear of the pit.

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All hail. I was very, very young to this.

Relatable. You know how it is when your sleeves get wet and they kinda stick to your wrists or flop around getting other stuff stuck to them… ugh.

My first night in my freshman dorm, I played this on the upright piano. Excellent decision. Pro tip to the young geeks: nothing waters the flowers like suicidal ideation wrapped in a veneer of artistic integrity. I can’t even sing for shit, that’s how well it works.

You’re right. I’m sorry for taking my frustration with the forum out on you.

Yes, if you throw democracy in the trash, ignore the rights of the unpopular, and pass any law that appeals to today’s public morality, then you’ll have lots of options. I just don’t want to hear you guys complain after this idealism gets spun to fuck you over by corporate lawyers more skillful than your populist politicians. But fuck me for pointing out the logical inconsistencies in the useless seething groupthink machine, I guess. Apparently I only have rights if the public likes me.

We’re talking about criminal law. Can you clearly, objectively, without arbitrary valuation of goods or services, define a legal principle which identifies the point at which a health plan cut becomes a crime?

What’s your point? That people organize themselves to commit crimes? That risky behavior is more dangerous when it’s amplified by concentrated capital? None of this justifies the phenomenal leap you made to say that an employer is responsible for the lives of their employees. None of this is precedent for the further corruption of the justice system into subjectivity and emotional bias.

Can’t you see that you’re actually making it worse? You go after organizations whose bread and butter is legal entanglement, using legal entanglement as your only weapon. You make the regulatory environment more difficult for startups and SMBs to compete in, and you do nothing but give your (supposed) worst enemies more political tokens with which to negotiate advantageous positions in that environment. Why do you think these corporate elites flush hundreds of millions of dollars sponsoring progressive media outlets? Do you think they’re stupid?

I’m going to ignore the insane part of your point where you equated layoffs with murder.

Greed, like hate, is subjective. It is therefore, like hate, a terrible prerequisite for the activation of the criminal justice system. The idea that motivations for crimes should change the definition and/or penalty of those crimes has fostered popular corruption of the justice system since its inception. Industrialization has accelerated the adoption of human fears into that justice system, to the point where we can no longer even count the number of infractions under the law.

Adding more subjective emotional consideration to a punitive system which is already weighed down beyond the ability to enact swift justice is the opposite of helpful.

Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.

This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.

Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.

He cannot protec
Nor can he attac
But he is a little hat

And Jesus said, “verily, I say unto you, know thy audience.”

There are people who think they understand olives but have never tasted kalamatas. Sad but true. Great post OP; you made me get up to eat.

Rembrandt’s lighting is magical. He grabs your focus without force. It’s a little less dramatic but no less important in my favorite Rembrandt, The Apostle Paul.