Clearly the nomadic lifestyle does not work for everyone. Many people try it for a couple of months or a couple of years and then make a change. If you’re enjoying it, great, and if you enjoy it for years or decades to come, great, but don’t pretend that everyone does. And this is important because social workers cannot predict your future. They can only play the odds and make reasonable preparations for possible future badness.

You want certainty, but I think the many high-profile cases this year have shown that there is corruption in prosecutors and police and judges, and that often overlaps. How do you possibly think you could create a justice system that would prevent it from ever occurring?

I understand you’re speaking casually, but in fact many of us do not say that. It’s always a risky proposition when you conflate an organization with individuals in it.

Let me give you a related example that should shed light on their stubbornness…

If someone gets in an accident and hits their head, they might have a concussion. How can you tell? Basic first responder training says to ask several questions. What we don’t ask is, “Are you OK?” because the patient will say “yes” even when they aren’t OK. It’s answers to the other questions that give us enough information to get a sense of whether our help is needed.

It’s quite possible that some social workers are acting in a similar fashion to first responders here. They want the details because their checklist is longer than yours. (There are other reasons that social workers might be annoying, as others have explained, too.)

That doesn’t negate your frustration, but maybe it helps you understand one cause.

Can you explain what you felt was harsh?

The DOC will be responding to it in future lawsuits. At least one of those 1300 people definitely didn’t do anything to justify their reaction, they certainly have the time to file pro se, and discovery will tell us what we need to know. Sadly, that will happen years from now.

Finding out people’s salaries is a good thing. It’s how you prevent your bosses from screwing everyone over. Of course that information might be sensitive so don’t go around inquiring willy nilly, but it’s definitely a topic that you can and should sometimes visit.

(I know this is a s*** post so it’s all good but some people don’t realize the value in discussing salaries, and they think it’s something that has to be super secret when that only hurts you, the employee.)

If you get on the internet and go find a comment section that has a couple hundred comments, you can always say that it’s a dumpster fire. Some people are lazy, some people are trolling, some people are addressing concerns that you don’t understand because they didn’t frame it with enough background.

I think you have several options in a situation where it seems like the comments are a disaster. You could download and walk away, you could comment about how it’s a dumpster fire and walk away, or you could throw in something a little bit constructive. I recommend the first or the third, unless you feel like you’re in a trolling mood, and then do whatever you want.

No doubt various TLAs have compiled dossiers on various very important people. It would be irresponsible of them not to. People who have so much power and access are intrinsic security threats, and that’s no secret to the spy agencies.

Of course they might frame it differently. They might say that they compile information so that they can make sure that the powerful person doesn’t get blackmailed, for example. It’s easy to try to phrase things in a way that suggests you’re protecting them, when the actual theoretical goal is protecting us from what they could do if things went sideways.

The two people are just two people, as you say. What we’re actually talking about is how thousands of relatively famous Republicans and tens of millions of other Republicans react to the actions of those two.

Will the courts shut this down? If so, which ones might do so?

The Reuters authors are far too generous to corporate leadership. No, the bosses weren’t blindsided. No, the bosses weren’t surprised. All of the demands and expectations are ones you would predict.

This kind of situation is exactly when strikes happen, and if anyone in management wasn’t prepared for it, they’re unqualified for their job. Or they’re liars. Or both.

Depends on the country, sad to say. This is not American uniqueness.

You still have spending wars. Politicians are bought and sold every day, and any large company probably donates to politicians of multiple parties.

I don’t see the problem originating from Congress necessarily being polarized. I think the problem is that corporate and big money interests are too strong, and they fund politicians that will try to divide the people on social issues so that they can distract the people from badness happening on the economic front. In other words, I think we’re seeing a problem with corruption that’s expressing itself as polarization.

Even the term “polarization” can also be used as a trap, because it tends to be used in a way that frames politics as a linear spectrum, and your views are somewhere between these two end points. In reality everything is far more complicated. People have highly nuanced views on many different subjects with good reason, and there’s no way you can easily capture it on one single sliding scale.

Exactly. If you’re as interest candidate, or arguably a center-right candidate, saying a few things to try to pretend you’re left wing is not going to get the support that you want. You need to actually change your policy in a major way well in advance.

Nobody is attacking your father here. At least I hope they aren’t. My questions were about your knowledge and beliefs.

If I told you that your assumptions about my background or wrong, and if I told you that I wasn’t confused, what would you say?

… It’s kind of sad, because you could have been part of an interesting discussion, but you got careless and decided that you would go into attack mode to protect someone who wasn’t being attacked from … I have no idea what you think you were protecting them from. Clearly they were trying to get a sense of why people have various intuitions, and presumably they are willing to be somewhat introspective about the things they grew up believing, too.

I think many of us, and many Important People, give a fuck. It’s just that we know to take our time and gather information before making any strong proclamations about exactly what happened. We all know that Trump would lie about everything, and initial reports from police and neighbors are notoriously unreliable.

Finally now, more than a day after the event, it feels like maybe we’re able to put together the beginning of a reliable picture about exactly what happened.

If you want to know how people feel about assassination attempts on presidential candidates, just look at what they said two months ago.

If only people could have predicted this kind of thing a few decades ago… Oh wait, they did. But still it’s weird to frame it this way. We should have natural campuses because that’s better in general, not just because of the heat island effect.