Two notes on style: As always, at the top of each item I try to include some context, at least enough to make it clear what I'm responding to. If I need to add context here to what I originally said, it will be in square brackets ([ ]) in italics.
Also, both relies to my comments and my replies to other comments on the same original post (if you follow that) are grouped together.
With that said, let's get to it. And oh yeah, comments and reactions are always welcome.
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2026-04-15
[Re a WaPo op-ed on a proposal in Connecticut to limit/regulate self-service grocery checkouts.]
It is, of course, not surprising that a newspaper with an openly declared editorial bias in favor of "the free market" - that is, favoring corporations over the public and the bosses over workers - would carry something from "a newsletter on the consequences of overregulation" without a whisper of a concern about the consequences of under-regulation.
But as to the particular case, I refuse to use the self-checkouts on principle because I am aware of how they are marketed to the corporations.
Simply put, the pitch is that the company can boast about "service" and "speed" and "convenience" while the real impact is to get customers to do more of the work so the company can hire fewer workers. The net effect is that they are job-killers, especially of the sort of entry-level jobs long lauded by corporate America as a "way into the job market" for the young and those lacking specialized skills.
So limit them. Regulate them. It's probably unrealistic, but I'd say get rid of them as not only imposing costs on the jobs market (meaning our neighbors) but because those costs are unnecessary, recalling how long and how well we got along without them.
In the meantime, I'll deal with the "slowness" and "inconvenience" of waiting in a grocery store line. So should you.
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2026-04-15
[“So should you?” Wow, talk about sanctimonious.]
1. There is nothing either smug or condescending about my statement. There are occasions where the wider impacts of our choices makes YMMV inadequate as a response. I say this is one. (If you want to mentally add "unless limited by physical inability/disability" to my closing, go ahead.)
2. Attempting to wave off my argument with a dismissive sneer is not a rebuttal.
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2026-04-15
[Let the businesses run themselves and legislature keep your nose out if what they’re doing isn't illegal.]
Did it ever occur to you that everything is legal until it's not? "Don't act unless it's illegal" would have blocked every law ever passed anywhere. Say what you will about this proposal, but the principle you're applying needs much better definition.
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2026-04-15
[proposal of 8 regular checkout lanes per 4 self-checkouts required 4 cashiers on duty at all times regardless of traffic; cashiers are "jobs for buggy whip makers."]
Just for clarity, as I read this, a store with (for example) eight self-checkouts would not have to have four cashiers always on duty at a register regardless of traffic but rather that it would have to have a minimum of four such lanes that could be staffed if traffic called for it.
If it did intend what you say, I'd agree that was silly. But I strongly suspect, indeed expect, it does not but was if anything (and assuming there is an issue) the result of sloppy language that could easily be corrected by amendment.
As for the rest, as the AI-driven self-checkout wonderworld you image for grocery stores inevitably starts to spread to the rest of retail, I'd advise you to be careful what you wish for.
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2026-04-15
[WaPo article: SCOTUS making religion outweigh all other considerations; here, allowing exemptions from public school vaccination requirements.]
I will say this and only this: We told you so.
If you're surprised by any of this: You were warned.
If you say "I didn't know," you just weren't paying attention.
And most particularly if you say anything like "I voted for Trump, but I didn't vote for that," yes you did. It's on you. Because we told you so. You were warned. And you just wouldn't listen.
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2026-04-15
[Atheists have worst of it. Discrimination not only tolerated, celebrated; have to follow ALL laws, can't pick/choose."]
In at least some ways, the legal question about atheists has already been answered. In US v. Seeger (1965), SCOTUS ruled that conscientious objector status under the draft was available to non-theists if they had beliefs that if I recall the term correctly "occupied the same position" in their life as a traditional religion would. In Welsh v. US (1970), the Court expanded that to make explicit that those beliefs need not be religious or called such, that a personal moral code would suffice.
In short, if you had a set of core beliefs that would guide your judgment in the same way traditional religious principles (supposedly) did, you were eligible for CO status. (It was still tough to get for anyone not a member of a traditional "peace church," but you were eligible.)
It'd be very interesting to see someone pursue a demand for an exemption from some civic duty on the grounds of their atheist beliefs being as valid as those of right-wing Xians to see if the Court would be true to its declared principles. The downside is I'm afraid such a suit would be successful, ripping out another support from the already-rickety concept of community responsibility.
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2026-04-15
[re article on decision of MT SupCt state constitution provided broad protection for trans rights, wondered if GOPpers in Congress would try to pass law overruling it.]
The "supremacy clause" in the Constitution says federal law can (depending on the particulars) override state law and the same is generally true about state versus local law - but here we're not talking about a state law but a state constitution and federal law cannot override that. And as I think the article notes, the guiding principle is that your rights within a given state are protected to the extent guaranteed by the state or federal constitution, whichever is greater.
This is why the efforts of The Orange Overlord and RFK "My father would be ashamed of me" Jr. to cripple trans health care have revolved not around outright bans but through threats to cut off various sources of funding, i.e., banning it through fiscal blackmail, making such care inaccessible, even though not technically illegal.
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2026-04-16
[oral arguments on CO SupCt case ordering reopening of trans health care clinic noted trial court sympathetic to the plaintiffs, denied relief for fear of potential reactions from feds re hospital financing.]
District Court [trial] Judge Ericka F.H. Englert was wrong. She was not being asked to "call the bluff of the federal government." She was being asked to rule in accordance with the Colorado constitution without relying on speculation of what actions the feds might take outside the court system.
And, oh yeah, there is no federal law involved here. Neither an Executive Order nor an agency declaration is a law.
It's an indication of how far were have come towards authoritarianism that even a state judge is treating whatever foams out of the mouths of RFK "My dad would be ashamed of me" Jr. and hydroxychloroquine fan Mehmet "I really am from" Oz as instantly becoming law.
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2026-04-17
[DOJ demanding Reddit turn over personal info re user who criticized ICE]
"Be careful what you say" is exactly what we should not do. Be honest, yes. Be truthful, yes. If you are asserting particular facts (as opposed to expressing opinion), be correct or at least have a reasonable basis to believe you are correct. (In other words, don't just make crap up. There are more than enough hard facts to suffice.) In any event, do not engage in the self-censorship of "be careful." Rather, be defiant.
As for this particular case, the latest news I can find is that John Doe is going to file a motion to quash the subpoena. Personally, I would think the absence of any legitimate law enforcement purpose would suffice, but we'll have to keep watching.
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2026-04-18
[comment on YT vid: "I never imagined I'd see the rise of the 4th Reich in this country." response: because people "got complacent," ignored warning signs. then: "not that simple; super rich have been undermining the system."]
"It's not that simple" is a truism, but we should never forget that it implicitly acknowledges that the original assertion [i.e., that people got complacent] is indeed part of the cause. Shifting blame does not absolve us of our responsibility as citizens.
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2026-04-18
[meme cited CNN story to say 62M cishet men "attend" "online rape academy" re sex with women either drunk, drugged, or asleep]
First, I found the link to the original CNN article. I also found an analysis by Snopes.
(The link is to a re-posting because Snopes.com is now behind a paywall.)
The criticism Snopes had is that the “62 million” figure is an estimate of the total traffic to the entire website over that month, which safely does not consist of 62 million individual cishet men going once each.
And please don’t anyone try to claim I’m downplaying or minimizing the horror here. It’s rather my conviction that when what you can prove is bad enough, exaggeration only invites dismissal.
Footnote: What was not clear from either the CNN article or Snopes was if the whole site is the sort of stuff that is the topic here or is it a pornsite where that is one part.
So I bit the bullet and went there.
It is indeed a site with what I suppose would be the usual range of material; I didn't even find a link on the main page to "sleep" content, although I may well have missed it or it might be deliberately buried. (The main page being as far as I went.)
I think this reinforces my concern about exaggeration. You never want to be in a position where your argument leans on a number where a more accurate figure could generate the response "Actually, it's only such-and-so," thereby trying to dismiss your entire argument even if the "only" number is more than enough to make the point.
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2026-04-18
[re-post opened "Republicans just introduced a bill to force doctors [to] build a government list of trans people."]
Links, dammit! What GOPpers? Where? This reads like it’s referring to a state-level proposal in which case “where” matters in terms of resistance.
Certainly it is painfully obvious to anyone who looks that the ultimate goal is to wipe trans folks from society altogether, to drive them so far into the closet that they couldn’t even find the door even with a flashlight. But while resistance is rooted in awareness, it requires actionable knowledge to bloom.
[Posts and memes with no source provided is an on-going complaint of mine.]
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2026-04-18
So the real estate salesman who became The Orange Overlord convincing people to vote for him on a promise of “no more wars” is now saying the federal government “can’t take care of day care ... Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things.”
Why? “We’re fighting wars.”
So everything that doesn't involve being ever-more ready to kill ever-more people has to be up to individual states.
I'd say "Any questions?" but if at this point you still have any, it's too late for you.
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2026-04-18
[Re why some folks don't realize are trans until well into adulthood.]
I thank you for this even though as a cis male I have little to add to the conversation.
I do have one passing observation: When folks say "I always knew," I don't think they're saying they had "independently formulate[d] an entirely different theory of gender" but rather that looking back later, they "always knew" that things just felt, well, wrong; not that they always knew "I'm really a boy" or "really a girl," but that what was expected of them didn't fit somehow.
Thanks for adding to my understanding, including to some degree of myself.
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2026-04-19
[Re April 17 The Fucking News.]
This certainly up to your usual standard. (How's THAT for a politician's answer?)
However, the phrase "will 'restore the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE at the CDC'" sent a little shiver through me.
"Gold standard" is a term used regularly in trying to deny gender-affirming care on the grounds that the evidence is "low quality" - most commonly by people who don't know the first thing about the scale or what it's for.
The term "gold standard" in this context is usually taken to mean blind randomized controlled studies. The problem is that a great deal of modern medicine is not based on such studies but on observational studies, i.e., "what has been tried, what worked, what didn't," which are by definition lower quality.
What's more, it is sometimes impossible to do those kinds of controlled studies in an ethical manner. Consider puberty blockers and hormone therapy. It's well-established that they work and how they work. Doing such a study today would mean denying people needed medication, giving people undesired medication, or both.
And blind? How is a young person to not know if they are or are not going through puberty? If they are or aren't experiencing the effects of prescribed hormones?
Hearing The Orange Overlord reference "the GOLD STANDARD OF SCIENCE" in the context of the CDC does not give hope; it gives me pause. We need to watch this space.
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2026-04-19
[Oligarch Watch: AI cos push use chatbots for guidance on personal health care.]
I thought this might be worthy of inclusion. Back in November I took a YouGov survey related to public perceptions about the use of AI in healthcare. Three of the questions asked for general responses rather than picking from among multiple choices. This is quoting my responses.
Q: What ethical considerations are most important to think about when adding AI tools to healthcare?
I was told by my surgeon some years ago “You treat the patient, not the X-ray.” The more we use AI, the more that adage is reversed. During my recent hospitalization my PCP came by on their rounds, during which they displayed not through words but tone and demeanor a genuine personal concern for my health, something of which AI is incapable of expressing or feeling, at best offering instead merely an algorithmically-driven facade of concern, a programmed pretense, which well could be likened to the comforting reassurances of the scammer.
Q: What is your overall impression of AI in healthcare?
Not ready for prime time. For now, it’s a bandwagon promising what it can’t (and perhaps never will) deliver, driven less by public health than by the profit-driven preferences of the corporate spectrum of health care (i.e., hospitals and the insurance industry) who pursue a goal of “efficiency” (read as “fewer employees”) and would, as I suggested earlier, “treat the X-ray, not the patient,” with us coming to exist less as patients than as datasets.
Q: Is there anything else about AI in healthcare that you would like to share with us?
AI is good for, indeed excellent at, analyzing large amounts of data, producing results that can be viewed and considered mathematically because that’s what they are - mathematical derivations from mathematical data. But healthcare in general and medicine within that reach involves more than mere data but also includes personalities and foibles and trust and other human interactions along with unavoidable judgment calls driven by such non-mathematical considerations, all of which are beyond its capabilities. Which makes the use of chat boxes by consumers for health information advice fraught with risk and worse as shown by recent suits against various companies whose chat boxes are accused of having encouraged teenager users to commit suicide. AI simply is not up the task to which the health care industry is trying to set it in pursuit of profit.
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2026-04-20
[Open ended YouGov poll Q: "How do you feel about the use of AI in making movies?"]
I can see its use as a tool in areas such as special effects in ways similar to how previous technologies have been used to make them more realistic. Beyond such areas, that is, where it functions as an improved version of already-existing tools employed under the same sorts of conditions, direction, and control as those, I would strongly prefer it was not used at all.
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2026-04-21
[Ruling en banc, 5th CCoA upheld TX law requiring 10 Commandments in every classroom.]
Wait wait wait.
"They compared it to the Pledge of Allegiance - which is also religious, with its “one Nation, under God” line - to argue that students aren’t forced to say it."
Did they actually say the part about the Pledge being religious? You say they made the comparison but don't present it as a quote, so it's not clear.
Because if they did, I clearly recall a SCOTUS decision that said the Pledge was NOT religious and "under God" was a mere "civic exercise" which had at most a "tinge" of religion - which was why having to say it did not intrude on the rights of atheists.
In either event, I have to say I disagree on one point: The majority was not "delusional." That knew damn well what they were doing and they did it consciously and deliberately.
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2026-04-21
[SCOTUS will deny cert, and it will stand.]
Just to make it clear, it will stand in the 5th Circuit, nowhere else. However, the danger there is that it will serve as precedent for other circuits to consider. So either it will spread to significant parts of the country or at some point there will be a split in circuits, at which point SCOTUS would feel entirely justified in stepping in, even feeling obligated to.
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