Optimistic of you to think we’ll all make it to next time. I’m on that list several times already.

By private companies. Federal employees have a lot more protections.

By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming

That policy is surprisingly on point.

Mutual funds are a systemic risk by being dumb money. Normally this is talked about in the context of index investing. The more money blindly tracks an index, the more that index becomes detached from reality. This causes measurable inefficiencies in the market [0]. In practice, this isn’t that big of a deal, since “follow the index” essentially means “do what the smart money does”, so the distortion is not that great.

In the context of voting, the analogous action would be abstaining (or voting with the majority of voting active shareholders). I suspect the reason this is not done is a combination of there not being enough active voting shareholders (as you say, that is why boards are a thing), and the risk of activist investors.

On a much smaller scale, we have something similar happening in my local HOA. The county owns about a dozen units as part of it’s public housing program. Combined with the low turnout at HOA meetings, and the 1 property = 1 vote, this means that they could vote for essentially anything they want.

In practice, their policy is to show up to all meetings but abstain from votes unless they are needed to make a quarum. If they are needed, they vote for whatever the consensus was among every else there.

[0] See the index effect. Being added to an index increases a stock’s value, despite there being no change to the underlying fundamentals.

They are working with the Palestinian Authority, which is generally recognized as the government of Palestine.

The president ordered it. There is no legal mechanism to compel private companies to use the new name.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-names-that-honor-american-greatness/

Reading the orders, the gender one is much more impactful.

Canceling DEI programs cancels those programs, which just isn’t that impactful. Maybe it slows or reverse progress on equality at the population level. But an individual is not going to notice a difference (unless they were explicitly working in administering it). Further, those DEI programs were only for federal agencies, which are going to have a much bigger culture shift from the coming idealougical and loyalty purge. Minorities are still protected by strong anti discrimination laws and the 14th amendment.

The anti trans order, in contrast, declares that trans people don’t exist. And the entirety of the federal government must act accordingly. This will have a direct effect on every openly trans person in the country. Further, the legal protections trans people have are based entirely on an interpretation of gender discrimination laws that the current Supreme Court seems unlikely to endorse; and which Trump has directed the Attorney General to not follow.

The electoral college was entirely a compromise to protect the interest of the slave holding states.

The US has a separate mechanism to prevent run offs. If no one wins the election in the first round, the House of Representatives gets to ignore the election entirely and pick whoever they want as president. In another nod to slave states, this vote is done by state declaration, unlike every other vote the House conducts, where each individual member gets to vote.

If they wanted to have a popular vote for the president, they could have easily done so within the logistical constraints of the time. States still send an electoral delegation to the capital to submit. However, instead of those delegations voting, they simply report their state’s election results. Then, the President of the Senate tallies all the state results and announces the result. If no one wins a majority, we fall back on our current stupid procedure in the House of Representatives.

There’s been reporting for months that the hostage families have been frustrated with Netenyahu for not getting a hostage release deal, as they think Netenyahu sabotaged perfectly acceptable deals that Hamas has agreed to.

Once you are already angry at him for, at best keeping your loved one trapped for a year longer than necessary, and very possibly killed, then it is a relatively short distance to cross to say that those policies are also war crimes.

When was that house built? What should the current owners do with it? If they sell, someone else needs to buy. Someone is going to be left holding the bag for a decision made decades ago.

And our current approach already indemnifies them, because their flood insurance is provided by the federal government as no private insurer will offer it. Then, when a flood hits, we all pay for it, along with the emergency response during and after the event.

The problem is that people cannot simply get out at scale. The homes themselves are not portable and represent a significant investment that most homeowners cannot afford to lose. An individual can sell, but that requires there being a buyer, so doesn’t actually solve the problem.

What is needed here is a government funded relocation program. The government buys houses in eligible areas at market rate (locked in at the time the program starts, as market rate should collapse to 0). Then, the government does nothing, and saves money from not needing to subsidize the insurance market, and need needing to spend as much on disaster response and relief. Given that the disaster relief savings is largely born by the federal government, this program should receive federal funding as well.

Just because you have been found guilty does not mean that you cannot subsequently have that finding overturned on appeal. Procedurally, there are a bunch of rules on how that happens; and death row inmates are given more appelet rights than those with life sentences. By having their sentences commuted to life, those would inmates may lose some of their extra appelet writes.

Renters are not that captive of customers. Once it becomes a common amenity, renters will start considering it as part of the rent when deciding where to live. Just like they do with utilities, garbage collection, and other amenities that landlords can charge for outside of base rent.

Most of the Golan Heights was occupied in 1967, and annexed in 1981 (in a move that most of the world still does not recognize as legitimate).

As far as I can tell, the settlements being discussed are still in that region, not the newly occupied region.

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.

Gaza’s Health Ministry casualty numbers have been stuck at around 40,000 for months. This is consistent, but not reliable. From the beginning, the GHM has only ever counted deaths directly attributable to the war who make it to a hospital (including those who are dead on arrival). Dead due to preventable caused like lack of food, water, sanitation, medicine or shelter? Not counted. Dead because a building blew up and your body is under a pile of rubble? Not counted unless someone dug up your body and took it to a hospital.

Even developed and functioning countries take a long time after “small” disasters to get an accurate count of the dead. The disaster in Gaza is still ongoing, and their capability to count the dead has been declining the entire time.

The GHM’s official numbers may be accurate for what they are. But what they are is a systemic undercount that is practically meaningless.

It is certainly possible to prove innocence in some cases; but those cases almost never make it to trial. Even if you think you could, you generally don’t want to tell the jury that, because it risks burden shifting

It depends on how you count. Jones is unlikely to ever pay the full value of his debts, so the value of the victims forgoing their portion should be discounted proportionally.

I would comment on how the calculation was actually done, but federal courts do not allow for public recordings, and this court does not appear to make it’s written orders public either.

Unfortunately, the GPL (and similar AGPL used by the software in question) is pretty toothless. If they wanted to spend the money to persue this in court, pretty much all they can get out of it is them coming into compliance with the license. If they are a great tech company that invested significant engineering effort to actually improve the software, that would be worth something.

However, I doubt that is the case. Whatever tweaks they made are likely not even worth the effort of reviewing, so even pursuing license compliance doesn’t have a real upside. This is why you rarely see GPL enforced.

All indications are that he was still an active militant and a perfectly valid target for Israel to strike.

However, the Iraq war is over. Having that be the frame in which we find his death to be good news is nothing more than celebrating vengeance, and that is not a good thing.