Well, the suit that overturned his bonus was a single shareholder suit and that one was obviously successful.

I have been surprised there haven’t been more shareholder suits to be honest. They could challenge fiduciary responsibility on the basis of him robbing Peter to pay Paul by raiding Tesla for engineers, not to mention dividing his own time and effort between too many unrelated interests.

Why don’t they have cameras on every door that sends an alert and a video of who is going in and out? This seems like a solved problem. They can even do facial recognition on some of them.

Are they barred from veteran’s day and St. Patrick’s Day parades as well, or does the NPS participate in those? How about 4th of July?

Has this always been the case? If not, who was on the board that made the decision and what is their political affiliation?

In a world where half the electorate thinks a judge must be prejudiced and has no problem with their autocratic leader saying that ethnicity decides whether someone is “fair,” I think these are legitimate followup questions.

We needed a de-trumpification of the government. Anyone appointed by Trump or hired by an appointee should have been dismissed. This is basically what Trump is planning on doing.

Between the “I have an immune system and I don’t need no mask and covid isn’t real anyway” crowd and the munchausen patients, there’s a lot of people. One reason why “whole body scans” as a diagnostic tool on healthy patients is controversial is that you end up making the patient think they have something that they demand treatment for. In this case, patients will request specific meds or tests based on a marketing campaign specifically designed to sell drugs. Patients don’t need that kind of input, and it’s potentially harmful - not because people want to be sick, but because of the kind of phenomenon that makes WebMD users think they must have cancer.

Soft on crime.

The Kids Who Lived.

I was really thinking they were going to challenge Musk since it’s not only their name, but he chose practically the same logo.

RIP to one of the greats. This is a really good bio, too.

This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.

There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”

Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.

I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.

That makes perfect sense.

At one point, many years ago, I read that earth’s water cycle is such that, at some point, you’ve drunk Napoleon’s urine. The author didn’t show their math, but let’s assume it’s true. We can take the same approach to holy water.

We might make the assumption that all water on earth has holy water mixed in with it, like cosmic background radiation. Now, obviously it doesn’t have sufficient holiness to be considered fully holy water - it doesn’t damage such creatures as vampires, possessed children, or Jews - but it’s necessarily present in at least trace amounts. And it would increase as a function of time.

So if the water is holy, does that mean in addition that the evaporated water is also holy, or does the holy get left behind, making future batches even holier?

If the former, does that make the air containing the water vapor holy? Is holiness a percentage thing - the more holy water humid it is, the more holy? Could you take out a nest of vampires simply by boiling a pot of holy water and letting the place steam up?

The Covid pandemic could be a contributing factor, says Dr Christine Crawford, a psychiatrist and associate medical director at the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Ffs. The chart included with the article shows that suicide rates dropped during Covid, and are just now returning to the same (linear) climbing rates we’ve seen since 2000. That’s not how you establish a causal model.

Menthol cigarettes were historically and still are targeted at the black community. Menthol was added as a flavor to cover up the harsher taste of cheaper tobacco. There have been some studies that indicate that menthol makes it easier for kids to start smoking, but there’s not been a full consensus on this. It’s also popular in working class white communities, but cigarette makers specifically targeted black communities. In the 1970s, for example, the gains made by the civil rights movement resulted in increased social and economic integration, which was associated with the phrase “Moving up.” Those of you old enough to remember the sitcom The Jeffersons might remember that phrase. Newport came out with an ad campaign targeted at the black community around the slogan “Move up to the great taste of Newport.” At one point they even tried to debut a brand called Uptown.

The US has banned flavored cigarettes for a while now because flavors are associated with inducing smoking. Menthol got a carve-out when that regulation was approved due to political pressure. Without the carve-out, it’s unlikely the regulation would have been approved. This is a move that’s been anticipated for a while, but required time and the decrease in the political fortunes of big tobacco to get passed. I don’t know if this is going to be successful, but we will see.

“I want to personally apologize to our team members who felt we let them down,” he said. “While this was a collective recommendation by some members of our leadership team, I approved it and take full responsibility for it.”

These statements always seem so facile when “taking responsibility” means no consequences apart from issuing an apology.

Making someone eat saltines plus peanut butter plus sardines sounds like a war crime.

I think you mean Prisoner 24601.

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

I was thinking of Thailand in particular since that was where my studies were grounded and my understanding is that the general conceptualization of gender is not identical to western approaches. I do tend to try to steer away from terms like “trans” when talking about other cultures because I’m not sure how well the western idea of a trans person translates into cultures with different ideas of genders. I know enough to know that I don’t know enough, but I do know that what we in the US consider LGBT has absolutely no relation to Ancient Greece or modern Thailand.

But I do know that there’s gender-based separation in most of the Thai monasteries that I’m familiar with, and that monks are conscious of sexually based attractions as distractions to be avoided. I strongly suspect that a person we consider trans would be accepted as a nun - at least, in a non-western, traditional order. But that’s based on my overall readings - it’s really weird to realize that I’ve never even thought to ask that question.

I think they might be coloring with a bit of a broad brush, but religion - broadly speaking - is conservative. Some religions may promote values that we agree with and traditionally associate with progressivism (pacifism, egalitarianism, altruism). It’s because they’re based primarily on old or even ancient writings.

I was raised a traditionalist Catholic. I went to catholic school until high school until I went to high school where I became an atheist (which I didn’t even know was an option) and was invited by the school to investigate other educational opportunities.

I also studied Theravada Buddhism for many years. Theravada Buddhism isn’t conservative in the MAGA sense of the word, of course. Especially in the tradition I studied, it concentrates on personal investigation rather than treating the texts and teachings as literally true. A common way of presenting teachings is to say something along the lines of “If it helps, let it help. If not, ignore it.” Still, monks are not permitted (generally speaking) to interact much with women, monks and nuns live separately, and I honestly have no idea how a trans person would fare in that environment.

There’s always a problem when you found the basis of your philosophy in a historical text rather than a constantly evolving understanding. One of Chomsky’s chief complaints about Marxism is that it’s founded on and bound by Marx. He points out correctly that people don’t call evolutionary biology “Darwinism”. I mean, creationists do, and biologists might if they’re referring to a very specific concept, but for 99% of the time we just call it “biology.”

So, building your worldview around a fixed text is by definition conservative. Being flexible about its interpretation can make it less conservative. By and large, though, they’re trying to conserve something.

If they have curtains they don’t need blinds.

Biologist here.

This is incorrect. Via Wikipedia:

Birds are feathered theropod dinosaurs and constitute the only known living dinosaurs. Likewise, birds are considered reptiles in the modern cladistic sense of the term, and their closest living relatives are the crocodilians. Birds are descendants of the primitive avialans (whose members include Archaeopteryx) which first appeared during the Late Jurassic.