admiralteal

Preventing the collection of data by the state may be impossible, but they should be accountable for who has it, who it's given to, and they should need to go through proper due process to use it against you in any kind of official proceeding.

It might be impossible to get everyone out of the databases, but we can at least force warrant requirements and the like.

Good answers here, but ignoring probably the most realistic and practical truth of the matter in my opinion.

You won't immediately be sent to the stocks for saying "I don't want to answer", the worst case scenario is that some officer of the court informs you that you must answer the question even if you don't want to. And even that is only going to happen if the attorney asking the question insists. And I struggle to imagine a situation where a competent attorney would do so.

Being hostile towards your prospective jurors, making them feel exposed and uncomfortable, is not a way to march to victory in a trial. They want to ensure you aren't prejudiced against their client/case. Making you dislike them personally IS prejudice. Causing prejudice is a bad way to eliminate prejudice.

They will ask questions, mostly yes/no ones, that you need to answer honestly. They may ask for clarification. If you don't want to answer and say so, it's unlikely anyone will press you because that unnwillingness to answer is just as clear an indication of who you are as anything else.

You jumped into this comment tree defending someone claiming elections are meaningless team sports.

Oh, he's getting downvotes for being a bothsider.

The dems have changed profoundly between Obama and Biden. Doesn't even take any kind of deep political knowledge to see that. No, they haven't become a revolutionary socialist party, but sorry, democracy doesn't mean getting exactly what you want all the time. The party is vastly different. Maybe not as different as the Republicans from Bush to Trump, where they abandoned all pretense of Liberalism and switched to being a fascist cult of personality, but different nevertheless.

The bothsiders like you and he pretend political parties never change and aren't influenced by their voter at all, contrary to evidence that anyone who had even PRETENDED to follow news and politics during their life would have seen. Then use that complete nonsense premise to justify the argument that it doesn't matter who you vote for, it's all the same, you shouldn't bother.

It's just a brain-dead political take. One that actively and constantly suppresses political turnout, hands elections to the far right, and prevents the exact progress you claim you want.

Oh look, a "we found some people on the internet tweeting their opinions" story.

The membership of Trump's personality cult flip out at everything, all the time. It's not really news worthy of report when it happens. Not even when their gary stu power fantasy icon's actor makes them feel bad.

This technology existing would essentially be the end of all knowledge-sector jobs, instantly. It eliminates the value of your time, which means the labor market would almost definitely use it to pay wages VASTLY below minimum wage-per-perceived hour. People would take that bargain. You only have to work ONE day a week and we pay you a million dollars a year! ...that one day a week will be time chambered up to 15 years, though.

Why pay one ace coder a bigshot salary when you can pay a whole village in the developing world to spend as much time as the problem could possibly need the same price and they'll still finish by Thursday?

The economic ramifications are just beyond my fathoming, but I know it cannot possibly work in a society which has any kind of resource scarcity.

Such excuses being allowed would also be inherently discriminatory against young people.

Seniors have way more antecedents to generate excuses for them. Especially wealthier ones who are more likely to normally be able to take time off/travel for these events.

It goes without saying that this absolutely will not pass constitutional muster.

You can categorically try to ban pornography but the second you try to ban it based on its content and not based on it being pornography you no longer have a leg to stand on.

I wish there were some way to have criminal consequences for deliberately passing unconstitutional laws. It definitely feels like it's some kind of sedition, violating your implicit or explicit oath of office so profoundly.

Especially if it's against anyone that can be interpreted as Arab.

Sounds like a compelling argument for why we need better safety standards for cars and traffic engineering.

The argument for drive-by-wire in personal automobiles is basically that it's safe enough for airplanes, so it should be safe enough for cars.

I mostly buy that. But there's a glaring omission in the reasoning.

In airplanes, there's a full incident investigation for EVERYTHING that goes wrong. Even near misses. It's an industry that (mostly lol boeing) has a history of prioritizing safety. Even at its worst, the safety standards the airline industry and air transportation engineering are orders magnitude more strict than those of the automotive industry and road engineering.

In real terms, automobile incidents should be taken just as seriously. Even near misses should have reporting and analysis. Crashes should absolutely have full investigations. Nearly all automobile deaths are completely avoidable through better engineering of the road systems and cars, but there is mostly no serious culture of safety among automobiles. We chose carnage and have been so immured by it that we don't even think it's weird. We don't think it's weird that essentially everyone, at least in the US, knows someone who died or was seriously injured in a car accident.

So yeah, we should have drive-by-wire. But it should also include other aspects of that safety culture as part of the deal. "Black box" equivalents, for example, and the accompanying post-accident review process that comes with it. A process that focuses not on establishing liability, but preventing future incidents, because establishing liability is mostly a thought-killer when it comes to safety.

...of course, if we actually took road safety that seriously it'd be devastation to the entire car industrial complex. Because much of that industry is focused on design patterns that, in fact, cannot be done safely or sustainably.