@GodEmperorDune why are they citing a foreign court?

It's a tougher call for me here, because obviously no one needs to feel denigrated like that, but I'd also assume we wouldn't want a baker to be forced to write something awful on a cake (and surely those forms at the grocery store or whatever often decline to write something inappropriate)

Which this was a very specific "put a message on the cake" while the US case wasn't

That said! These bakery cakes are absurd because who the hell cares where the cake came from like 99% of the time?

Like no one's out there thinking you're writing a message in support of anything because they don't know who tf made the cake anyway

@Memor-X i don't know

i mean if i owned a bakery and someone wanted me to make a MAGA cake i would ban them from my shop

but being a nazi supporter is not a protected class so....

I mean the cult might be a religion now in a broad sense but yes :P

@TimStone first off one of the methods of free advertising is word of mouth, so guest ask where they got the cake from because they want something like it and the buyers points them to the bakery.

second would be the personal aspect. say you're on a bus and there's a piece of shit yelling racial profanities at at a Muslim passenger and telling them to "go back to your own country you _____" and no one is saying anything to stop them, you stand up and tell the ass wipe to fuck off. no one thanks you, you don't get a mention on TV for standing up to it, but personally you feel good that you stood up

But it's a "I will sell you a cake but not that cake" thing. In the US case I think the wedding cake should have definitely been sold per Kagan's concurrence (where she points out Gorsuch is a n00b), compelling the sale of a cake with a specific message is more complicated for me even though I think "just sell the cake don't be an asshole wtf"

@Memor-X I mean it'd have to be really good cake for me to ask on account of buying a custom cake from a bakery not being a thing I usually do :P

@TimStone we got robbed in so many ways that gorsuch got the seat over garland

@TimStone we've done it for my daughter's birthday. it gets pricey real quick

in a more extreme but closer aspect, assume white supremacy becomes the norm in the US yet you are against it. you know that no one is going to give you a medal for helping that African, Indian, Asian, Arabic or Mexican person, the country isn't going to suddenly change and hell you might be the only one. but you hold fast to what you believe in. now change that to acceptance of the LGBT+ community and refusing to serve them

@Memor-X 1) it is already the norm, 2) we have already had a situation where a white supremacist was yelling racist things at minority passengers on public transit, a bystander stepped up to defend the minority passengers and was stabbed and killed for his trouble

3) there is a fundamental difference between advocating for increasing oppression of oppressed groups and advocating for liberation of oppressed groups, flipping them is not the same thing

@GodEmperorDune in regards to 2 i know that as well as it's happened here in Australia though the upstanding bystander was a woman and the racist prick was a man (which makes it that much worse) and as much as the bystander there probably didn't want to die, i want to believe that they died not regretting what they did

@Memor-X yeah from what was told about the person that died here, he probably didn't regret it either

GOP official in Kansas resigns after being called out for sending racist Facebook DMs

lol

"I want to replace you but I don't want to try too hard"

@GodEmperorDune obviously the latter is better (unless they are from the International State of Idiot Shitfuckers) but i was more trying (and probably failing) to play devils advocate in seeing where they are coming from. the white supremacy example i used because that was the easiest to envision where a society has changed to something you don't want which the acceptance of the LGBT+ Community is to what some of those religious groups who are against them

for the record, i stand on the side of "fuck the exclusion of groups who do no harm to you"

@TimStone chief of staff, not deputy AG?

@GodEmperorDune isn't the deputy overseeing the Muller Investigation?

@Memor-X ahhh, that's right, he's pissed at rosenstein too

Yeah

There's some reason Sessions' CoS is an ass but I forget offhand

I mean besides the obvious

I miss this earlier, lol libertarians

@TimStone good riddance

(the CEO was like "Ah, what if I ran Sears like Ayn Rand would want me to?" and here we are)

you can sorta see a genius in this if it wasn't reported because rather than Trump looking to get rid of Sessions and it looking like it's all about him wanting to stop the Muller Investigation, it'll look like someone else aspiring to be big and wanted the job

Being a big box store is hard regardless these days but more so when your working environment is crazy

it's like what my first boss said when i told him that i didn't like the mind numbing testing - "then you should try to get my job and tell someone else to do it"

@TimStone See, this is the bit I feel like folks are dismissing too readily.

Of course folks ask

Not everyone. Maybe not me or you. But...

Like, my wedding... I just went to my favorite bar/restaurant, the place my to-be-wife & I would go to get a bite now & then, & asked 'em if they'd let me use the back room & provide food & liquor. Then I went to my favorite bakery - the place where I'd go & get donuts before work in the morning - & ask 'em to make me a cake.

I didn't ask around. I didn't research that stuff.

But... Folks asked me where we got the cake.

Not everyone. But... There were guests who were... Y'know... thinking about these things for themselves, or for friends/family.

And it was a good cake, of course.

So how do folks expect these places get their business?

Selling donuts? Or... word of mouth.

These cakes are pretty visible. You bring donuts to work, they sit there on a table and get stale and who even asks who brought them? But a wedding cake? It sits on display in front of a whole bunch of people who all know who to ask. It's like an edible portfolio.

We flew my wife's grandmother out for the wedding. Turns out, she had a little side business making wedding cakes for years. Just out of her house, upon request, no shop, no advertising, just word of mouth. And for everyone who knew her, she was the go-to person for these cakes.

And it was like... Almost an insult that I didn't ask her to bake the cake. She was retired, she was a thousand miles away, but still... Folks had to keep reminding me how great she was at cakes.

I wonder if maybe this all seems a bit silly because we've gotten so used to, y'know, baking being an impersonal craft.

"I can order 10 cakes at Kroger any day of the week and they'll print anything I want on 'em"

The idea that folks have some sort of connection to their work beyond the monetary exchange - "I give you $xxx, you give me n hours of your life" - has become an oddity.

My son called me today, excited - he's heading to Europe for the first time in a few days, and a co-worker told him that tipping isn't expected and may be considered rude.

We get so used to these demeaning little practices here that any pushback ruffles our feathers.

That's fair, but it still seems weird to me to associate the baker with the event the cake is for and not just the cake itself, which would be the implication here?

@Shog9 I somehow didn't know you had a son, TIL

I don't talk about my personal life much, for what should be obvious reasons.

nods

@TimStone again, it's only weird if you treat it as... what's the "gig economy" term here? Work for hire?

If you treat the cake, made for you, as... like... your creation, which just happened to be made by someone else's hands which you temporarily owned rather than the ones you were born with... Then yes, it's weird.

And for sure, we treat an awful lot of stuff that way.

But, that's a bit weird too, ain't it?

I mean, if I hire you to... I donno, write a bespoke accounting package. We're gonna work out who owns that - not just the software itself, but the copyright on the source. It's gonna be in the contract.

@Shog9 sounds like the a typical IT Contract. everything you program at work belongs to the employer

@Memor-X sometimes those contracts don't include the "at work" bit.

Anyway; I'd guess most of us are kinda used to our work being sorta ephemeral, its value defined more by the ideas it represents than whatever the physical representation is at any moment.

And we barter on those ideas more than anything.

@Shog9 true but the ones i have seen personally they always do but then they also define what is "at work" being any time you are a representative of the company, like if you were wearing their emblem on your clothing or you were working out of the company car (why you would program in the back seat of a company car is baffling)

@Memor-X it's somewhat debatable how much that can be enforced. Of course, if it ever needs to be, you can bet it's gonna cost you to find out.

...I guess what bugs me about these controversies isn't so much the core question as it is the way folks talk about it. Like... What you should have to do and who you should have to serve as part of your job is a hard question with hard answers, for just about everyone. So dismissing these as "how dare those CAKE BAKERS get all uppity like that?" seems... I donno... classist.

Google's programmers can ask hard questions about the ethics of what they're doing, and have brutal discussions with one another about whether they're ok with it. But not bakers. People who work with their hands should do what they're told and not give us lip.

It feels like we're denying others something that we very much value having ourselves, not because we disagree with them but because we're incensed that they have the temerity to even assert that privilege.

It's not that, I was just saying from the concern of "advertising support", the mere presence of a cake didn't seem central enough to be any reliable indicator on the part of the baker. I reckon that you disagree, and feel that a cake can be of greater importance

I don't think cake is particularly important; I don't very much like cake.

But I guess if making cakes is what you do, it probably matters a lot more.

I suppose so. If I wrote an application for someone who also did Crimes though I wouldn't assume people would think I myself was a supporter of Doing Crimes. I can see why the cake baking process here might be more intimate and thus different, but I didn't when I made the initial comment

Now, if the program hello worlded "Doing Crimes is Awesome" that'd be a different story, which is why I wasn't sure what was to be done in the Irish case

@Shog9 *gasp*

@TimStone yeah, that's not quite what I'm saying.

I think... If you can admit there are limits, in your own profession, to who you'd be willing to work for or what you'd be willing to do... Then you have to concede that this is true for others as well.

Now you can and should disagree where those limits lie

But "limits for writing, no limits for cake" is troublesome

@Shog9 Absolutely, but I don't think everything everyone does is an express conveyance of support?

That was the argument in the case, though, that it was

Maybe we're off into the weeds here, I dunno

@TimStone :shrug:

I suspect most of us have, at one time or another, done work we'd very much like to believe isn't an expression of support.

How much we're able to convince ourselves of that varies. And at the end of the day, probably isn't a very good metric for allowable individual discretion.

@TimStone to be clear, such a program would be correct

Oh cool john

Are you going to stop your sherriffs etc from literally doing ice raids

No

🆗

@Shog9 I dunno, I feel like there's a difference between say, me adding -military to my SO jobs profile and this, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how. I think it's a bit of "institutional power vs individuals", and a bit of "one of those moral judgements is correct and the other is not" so idk

@Unionhawk most obvious difference is... If the draft ever gets reinstated, -military won't matter much.

That's what this all boils down to though. Gov't has the unique ability to compel you to do a job you don't want to.

Not just via compulsory military service either

Ah very cool audio service just deciding to stop working

Oh, we banned gag clauses? Interesting

Thank you The Hill for being as substanceless as ever though, not really clear what the bills specifically say

lol at the guy on my ballot who put his name down as john "lower taxes" loew

He transferred a series of ethics complaints to the 10th Circuit for review

@GodEmperorDune loewl

@TimStone isn't this one of people who Kavanaugh now works with?

or are they a Chief Justice somewhere else and not of the Supreme Court (which is generally where i hear Chief Justice come from)

Apparently: "The Chief Justice of the United States is the chief judge of the nine-member Supreme Court of the United States, the highest judicial body in the United States."

@Kevin so that means the main person of the Supreme Court has concerns about Kavanaugh

Yup

Apparently there are some republicans that kind of care about justice and such? Neat

@Kevin John Roberts apparently tends to be a key swing vote, so while he was nominated by a republican, he does sometimes join the liberal bloc

Trump phoned into Fox & Friends and suggested Nunes receive the Medal of Honor if his fight with the DoJ somehow pans out, if you were wondering how off the rails today would be

isn't the medal of honor the one awarded to troops in the line of duty

surprising for the president to support valor theft

Crown prince sought to lure Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia and detain him, U.S. intercepts show

reformer btw

@Unionhawk Look he's waging war against the Deep States alright

he's setting up precedent to give himself the Medal of Honor for his war against the fake news. the one he would have gotten had he not weaselled out of the military like he did

@TimStone yeah, but you did choose to marry trump

Presumably not much of a choice but still

🤷

> The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled Canada's lawmakers do not have a duty to consult with Indigenous Peoples before introducing legislation in Parliament that may affect Aboriginal and treaty rights — a decision that will be welcomed by the federal government, which argued such an obligation would be far too onerous.

Title is missing a bit there, that it's not all laws just ones that impact treaty rights

Either way I'm not hugely surprised. They still need to be consulted, but this would have made it so they needed to be consulted much earlier in the process.

@Unionhawk he did something valor thefty with Purple Hearts during the campaign

> "Just goes to show. You can't fool journalists, unless they are from the Washington Post or Esquire or Gizmodo or Fast Company or Upproxx," Curtis said in a Facebook Messenger chat.

@GodEmperorDune :|

@GodEmperorDune lol, maybe he should get some new material so it would at least feel like a different event each time 🤷🏼‍♂️

Ahhh Jamie Dimon, how we've missed you

Oh wait aren't they meeting Kanye today too? lol what a Thursday

@TimStone it really rules that we won't reexamine our alliance with the Saudis because selling them weapons is too lucrative

To be clear, this does not in fact rule, and sucks actually

@TimStone I... don't know what that means

@TimStone I think it's true in some sense but like, seriously, if we can't get people out to vote now we're all screwed anyway tbh

@TimStone Lol, some drug company didn't give him the money he wanted

(the abort was successful, crew is safe)

@SaintWacko It's probably best we don't ask but I too was like ??

Like presumably he was saying "f you" but differently and like 0/10 there buddy

@Frank Just for the record, I think you are misplacing at least the majority of the blame. Americans as a whole are much more partisan now - it's not just a political party act.

I personally don't believe Americans are "much more" partisan than they were before.

Just like I don't believe social media is causing these divisions.

More than anything, we know much more about other Americans than we did before.

@Frank 538 Gerrymandering Project covered the fact that gerrymandering accounts for only about 20% of increased partisanship, much of the rest accounted for by actual increased partisanship among citizenry.

It feels like we're more divided not because we've become more divided, but because we're now aware of how divided we were.

@Yuuki I think this plays a role but I'll stick with my original statement.

@Yuuki partisanship isn't about how much you know, it's about how highly you value party loyalty and view other parties as The Enemy

Like, knowing more about other can definitely drive increased partisanship

@Yuuki That sounds nice to me, but it doesn't explain past voting records.

It was a lot easier to view republicans as the well-meaning but misguided opposition ten years ago

@ToxicFrog I'm even more on-board with this, this would be a mechanism that could explain past voting.

@Unionhawk So sure in fact we now say the quiet part loud

@TimStone Did it happen in the consulate or the embassy?

@TimStone Oh, well in that case...

In the video he literally comes out and says that the value of the arms deals is too much to consider pulling them a response to this

Apparently, both consulates and embassies have sovereign territory. So technically, it happened in Saudi Arabia.

Even more technically the embassy doesn't constitute soverign territory despite enjoying diplomatic protections, so still Turkey :P

Like if Turkey had a glass box in which the murder took place and they could do nothing directly about but was still in Turkey

@Wipqozn @TimStone This has happened many times. For example, Trump has wanted to talk with Mueller directly on the record.

………k

@puzzlepiece87 I think that's a knock on effect of politics in the US; with only two parties, the camps get further and further apart, and the rhetoric gets more and more charged.

@Wipqozn We read too much into many things here so I'm not picking on you in particular or anything, but that's reading too much into it. McGahn's big thing is getting nominees through. It's not clear that they were worried about an investigation because they were afraid of findings - could just as easily be preserving work accomplishments/avoiding midterms.

In essence, its a self defeating cycle.

@Frank Please explain how this works mechanically.

@puzzlepiece87 Neither side is interested in the middle ground.

Since the other side is the enemy, anything they stand for is bad, and must be opposed.

With multiple parties, there's much nuance than left wing or right wing.

Granted, what we have isn't a whole lot better, but it seems to be much less partisan.

@TimStone I'm going to assume that he's speaking from experience.

@Frank You're not really getting into any mechanics for why that happens.

Also that isn't true because the democrats are extremely interested in middle ground. They are the party of middle ground.

In FPTP, if one party moves to an extreme, the other party has incentive to move to get voters in the middle if those voters actually exist.

They operate within the middle ground

@Unionhawk Exactly. Well, that's the emotional truth. In actual truth, Democrats have moved left while Republicans have moved right, because there are fewer centrist voters. There's not really any to take anymore.

because idk maybe if we let them amend our already half-measure healthcare bill they might vote for it

ron howard narrator voice, except they didn't

@Frank This also doesn't explain all of American history's periods of less partisanship than now.

It's easy to look at recent history and read too much into it, but political science is really helpful in challenging our emotional assumptions (like Uni's and mine that Dems are the party of middle ground)

Depends on how you define "middle ground" though.

I think we will have to see about what actually happens, because I'm afraid it's going to turn into a new jersey (I think?) situation: they campaigned and won on taxing the rich. Now they don't want to do it.

Because relative to the other party and general US politics, no the Democrats aren't the party of the middle ground.

But relative to world politics, they're kinda center-right, IIRC.

This is true, we do have two right wing parties

that quote about how america is a one party state, but with typical american exceptionalism we have two of them

"oh no the left is far away from the right" MEANWHILE

@Unionhawk Is that the link you intended? What does Republicans characteristically ignoring climate change issues have to do with the left/right thing?

@murgatroid99 This is the link I intended, yes. I think it is pretty clear that working with these people is incompatible with continued existence on this planet past 2040. Therefore, the so called "middle ground" should be a non-starter.

Damn :/

@Unionhawk I think you're ignoring the reality of the situation, which is that, however shitty they are, they have power

Working with them sounds bad from the point of view of doing good things, but necessary from the point of view of accomplishing literally anything at all

Oh yeah for sure I'd much rather accomplish bad things if it means accomplishing anything, that's much better

I hadn't considered that we also need to take power in order to have a shot at survival

@Unionhawk So, in the meantime you think we should just let them do whatever they want without even trying to compromise or temper things?

I'm saying we should stop them from doing anything.

For values of we meaning they

But you cannot reconcile, for example, the two positions of "we are going to die in 2040" with "no we aren't"

You cannot compromise with that

@Ash Technically they came up in our country music discussion one month ago, but you didn't directly react to their mentions so maybe you missed it :)

The right wing understands, correctly, that all they need is the numbers

they have that

Do you think they're going to weaken their stuff for a promise of a slightly bigger majority of the house vote?

Because they aren't

I understand the Kanye thing is off the rails but most importantly he unlocked his phone in front of the camera and his passcode is just 0000000

Nothing that passes through this congress can possibly be good.

@Unionhawk So, if you think the Democrats have no chance of impacting anything anyway, why does it matter whether they try to compromise?

@TimStone That was NOT the tl;dr of that story!!

@murgatroid99 It matters when we take power

"they" I suppose but whatever

The tl;dr of that story was "Google covers up data leak", not "dead service officially dead now"

@puzzlepiece87 *potential data leak

If a tree falls in the forest but also the forest has no trees idk

@murgatroid99 potential data leak for 3 years

@puzzlepiece87 I can't actually read the WSJ article because it's behind a paywall. Where do they get 3 years from?

Looks like they did deal for Brunson's release after all

> Rand Paul - Stop Military Aid to Saudi Arabia. The regime must be held accountable for Jamal Khashoggi.

heartbreaking etc

What's that Rand Paul? You don't give one single fuck about the Yemeni lives taken?

lol this is also true

but no, he doesn't

@murgatroid99 observer.com/2018/10/google-plus-shuts-down-amid-data-breach

Rip Belgium. We have voting for city politicians this weekend, lots of places make you vote on a pc. The software used for it is apparently susceptible to Man in the middle attacks and is using a bloody self-signed certificate.

Did I mention that the key for the encryption of network traffic is hardcoded and apparently openly available.

@Arperum So, basically, the most tech savvy politicians will, "win".

> Kanye West Drops F-Bomb in Oval Office with Trump

This is the stupidest timeline

@murgatroid99 Use outline.com

@Frank Not exactly. The politicians don't need to be tech savvy. They just need to pay someone who is.

@Frank There are also still a lot of places where it is voting on paper (which is good) such as the town I live.

@Moacir But they need to know its a problem, which only tech people will.

@SaintWacko Oh, that's cool. I've never seen that before

@Frank It's in the national news, they all know now.

> We don't like it, .... But as to whether or not we should stop $110 billion from being spent in this country, ... that would not be acceptable to me.

oh

of course

@Arperum So, corruption ahoy.

Sounds like a good case to vote twice; once on PC, and once on paper, to show exactly what will happen.

@Unionhawk @GodEmperorDune Yes but so does a disapproval rating indicating, at best, a difficult race.

for a bit I thought that this was about brazilian voting machines

@puzzlepiece87 it's a multifaceted strategy

@Ave I was about to mention them

I work at the elections here, and to be fair I think we got our bases covered

We have a check before we allow anyone to use the machines (A list of all candidates showing that there are no votes registered)

Then we enable voting. People have to sign a book before we send the "all clear" signal to the booth, enabling it to receive votes

People go, vote, then leave, with the machine waiting for an all clear again to allow the next one to vote

@GodEmperorDune Politics isn't about policy, it's about charisma. You had your chance. @TimStone 2020.

After the time to vote passed, the booth prints a list of all candidates and how many votes they have, with a QR code

This list is fixed in front of the voting place, so its public and anyone can see it

@Unionhawk I mean you saw what those whales did. They swam under the boat. There were like 3 of them.

We then take out the seals of the machine, take the media, and give it to the elections guys

They then send the data to a master server, where anyone can check the total votes, but you can also check if the qr code of a certain voting place matches with the one the server claims

There are lots of checks to ensure everything is fine and also that the votes are secret

@Unionhawk No one else was in the room where it happened?

@Ash :D

LadyWacko and DameWacko and I listen to it all the time

LadyWacko and I were singing along with it last night while playing Civ lol

Our favorite is the Farmer Refuted one. She's learned Hamilton's part in it and I sing the other one

@GodEmperorDune You mean like coming up for legal justifications for Iraq/Gulf War 2?

@GodEmperorDune inb4 May justifies Brexit with "well, the Americans left the British Empire".

I've gotten into an argument with someone elsewhere who claims that it is simply incorrect to refer to Trump as the 45th President because only 44 different people have been President

Was Cleveland both the 24th and 26th president or whatever numbers that'd correspond to?

Yeah, he was 22 and 24

That's not common usage, so they can be weird and wrong in terms of common usage if they want.

Personally, I can't even get past these lines

Did we do Schumer's amazing deal prowess yet?

What a fantastic trade!

taps earpiece Ah, actually the opposite of that

lmao the WH mailer for today is just titled "A busy day at the White House"

@Ash there are complicated rules for when the senate is in session and when it is not

but they can be simplified to "when the party in charge wants it to be open, it's open"

then there are other rules and laws in place that only take effect if the senate is open or only if it is closed

(recess appointments by the president, for example)

so in this case, the democrats wanted the senate to be closed so they could go back to home districts to campaign for the election in a month and not be worried about missing important votes in washington

and even though republicans probably wanted to go home as well, they made dems confirm yet more judges before closing the session

Yep

Ah, well

@Ash Essentially I'd argue there are only a few Senate Democrats who would actually potentially benefit from going home to campaign in any meaningful way, so it seems reckless for them to blindly confirm GOP judges just for that purpose

Ah, okay

So when a spot opens up on the federal court circuit (like the SCOTUS), the President gets to pick some nominees and they have to be approved by the Senate

So the deal here is "Say okay to Trump's picks and you can go home"