timewarp

This subject arose because I had been looking for ways to use Microsoft & Google's Family features to manage my kids in a co-parenting arrangement. I have children with my ex that I currently manage. She has other children that she manages.

I quickly learned however that the features are only designed for parents that are still together & that don't have kids outside their relationship.

For example, parents & kids can only be assigned to one family plan. So she, or her partner, can't maintain their own plan while still managing the kids that I share with her.

Now I thought this was poor planning on Microsoft & Google's part to design their products around a traditional family. This might not rise to the levels of discrimination most people are concerned with, but it got me thinking.

For example, if a company learns someone was born out of wedlock if they can refuse to hire them. One of the reasons we have protected classes is to prevent discrimination based on personal characteristics that have been held to be suspect when used as the basis of statutory differentiations. Surprisingly, there are little to no protections when it comes to people born out of wedlock.

Even protections from discrimination by the government for children born out of wedlock is not absolute. While the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution to provide some protection from the government, it has been inconsistent and contains intentional loopholes that allow for the imposition of greater procedural burdens.

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt14-S1-8-7-3/ALDE_00000834/

To me this is surprising, considering that individuals cannot control whether their parents were married or stay together, but yet are not protected by the constitution & congress has not made laws to protect individuals in such scenarios. Some states have included limited protections, but those are generally applied to the parents & are specific to things like housing, not when it comes to employment.

Netanyahu starts a war & then hides in a bunker.

UnitedHealthcare sues Guardian for trying to capitalize on CEO's killing by reporting the news.

Update: Mastodon.social has decided to ban my account for posting content that is anti-genocide.

I've generally felt like progressives were the first community to call out the genocide being committed by Israel. I also had assumed Mastodon.social was more progressive, although I had seen lots of defense of genocide when Biden was the one supporting it. Recently however I encountered a post claiming Palestinian was a newly invented term to describe Arabs in Gaza, and that the word Palestinian itself was antisemitic & represented the eradication of Jews.

I responded that statements like this makes it easier to dehumanize Palestinians, and that there really is no difference between Nazi Germany & Israel at this point. However, the mods at Mastodon.social removed my response claiming it is Holocaust inversion.

There are plenty of Jews that are against the genocide & mass murder Israel is conducting. It is a real shame that Mastodon.social mods believe the genocide being carried out by Israel represents the views of all Jews worldwide, and the mods intend to use the Holocaust to justify it.

Despite a few short-lived news articles on the lawsuit back in January, the case against Sam Altman is still heating up. The case filed by his own biological sister, alleges that he started molesting her when she was only 3 years old & it continued throughout her childhood. Although he argues counterclaims in this case like defamation, the defense of Sam Altman thus far appears to be primarily based around his sister being mentally unfit and that she is only making claims of him molesting her because "their family stopped giving her money."

Based on her YouTube videos though she appears lucid, compassionate & intelligent. Sam's main argument for dismissal appears to be that she wants financial support, while Ann claims to be a beneficiary to her late father's trust where she already receives money. Proving someone is lying about a trust requires minimal effort, but so far Sam's motion to dismiss appears to indicate that his prestige alone should be all that is needed to support his motion.

Other executives claimed to have shown the board screenshots of Sam's manipulation & lying when he was briefly fired as CEO. We all saw firsthand Sam cozy up to one of biggest liars & manipulators of all time, which Sam is now defending. Given Trump's own accusations of sexual abuse and his department backtracking their alleged Epstein files release, it begs to question whether Sam & Trump both share something much more sinister in common.

After Biden's terrible debate that showed us the Wizard behind the curtain in plain view, my immediate reaction was to re-evaluate the media and establishment Democrat's response to the Robert Hur investigation. The investigation declined prosecution, noting they were convinced Biden was an "elderly man with poor memory." Little did we know, this meant Biden couldn't even recall what year Trump was elected.

The Democratic apparatus went into overdrive to defend Biden, claiming he was young and dynamic behind the scenes. Biden's press secretary stated many times that he was more energized than ever, and no one in his administration ever doubted his mental capacity. In fact they argued it was so strong, that it was offensive to question it. Afterall, did Biden even need to campaign and talk to the press when everyone "knew" just how vigorous he was.

Biden asserted executive privilege over the tapes with Republicans eventually voting to hold Merrick Garland in contempt for failing to provide them. If they had released the tapes after the investigation, they could have left it to the people to judge at the beginning of February, 2024. Instead, we were forced to wait until Biden's shocking June debate performance, where we all saw the emperor had no clothes and that we had been gaslit and lied to by the same people that we felt obliged to trust. Afterall, they kept telling us democracy depended on it.

In this moment, had Democrats not insisted there was nothing to hide and do-nothing Merrick Garland actually provided the tapes publicly, it could have presented a new candidate sooner.

Sass is a popular open-source CSS framework for building websites. It is commonly used in some of the most popular open source projects, like Next.js. It is one of the few open source projects that when developers navigate their website for docs or whatever, they see a banner at the top of the page that says "Free Palestine." It is a shame that more software projects are too scared to show their support for Palestine, or that are actually opposed to Palestine's existence.

Trump is bad. I agree... but why is the left suddenly all sympathetic towards rich people & CEOs like this, who exploit cheap labor.

A reminder that everytime you get upset at Trump & Musk that you should also be upset with the Democrats that got us here.

A recent event led me to fact check something that I thought must be untrue, which is that Ukraine conscripts people into the military against their will, including making those people that had previously fulfilled their obligations return to the battlefield.

Moreso, when browsing X recently I saw bunch of videos being posted of what claimed were police forcing people into vans to go fight in Ukraine. The police were beating these people in the process. Now, it is possible that some of this content is propaganda, but I did want to find out if Ukraine forces conscription.

It appears that it is true:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Ukraine

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/lacking-manpower-ukraine-resorts-to-harsh-means-to-force-draft-dodgers-into-combat

I am very much against conscription. I still support Ukraine's independence, but the fact that they are forcing people to fight through beatings, arrests, etc. is sickening to me and makes me lose respect for Zelensky. According to an estimate by Ukrainian commanders, 50% to 70% of Ukrainian conscripts are killed or wounded in their first few days in combat on some areas of the front.

What are others thoughts on this?