Which is why we don't do that.

A sliding scale of taxes implies that we give a certain value, politically, to certain sized religions. It's almost like an establishment of small, unobtrusive churches that don't threaten anyone and are easy to control. Which is sort of the same goal, with different tactics, that the old time governments had in establishing their state churches.

The right to petition has never had the authority to do anything but offer a means to go straight to the top without being stopped by the bureaucracy and gatekeepers, but it is important to have so that people can actually sign it and show that there is a large number of people who support the proposition and it won't be stopped at the door.

I think, however, that the people who post the petitions vastly underestimate the number of people needed to sign in order to use that strategy as a primary method.

Petitions are useless unless they represent a message that can't be ignored. They need to have enough signatures to crash the site. Getting 10,000 or 50,000 people on a petition would probably only rate the brief attention of a staffer. You could probably get a congressman's attention, but *only* if those signatures were primarily in their district. Otherwise, it's a big fat "whatever".

For the *President*, you literally need high hundreds of thousands, possibly well into the millions of signatures to make a real difference. His electorate is 300+ million people. 100,000 people is nothing. And even then, that million or so would be better if it was strategically concentrated in certain swing states.

I wouldn't say that they are "scared" of CoS. I'd say that it doesn't really matter much to them. CoS is a constitutional headache that the government doesn't need.

I'd say it is a religion as defined in law, but a religion currently run by criminals.

Take the Catholic Church. You can sincerely be a Catholic and believe in the value of the position of Pope, but there have been times that Popes were tried and their corpses thrown into the Tiber. And this was actually done by Catholics themselves.

CoS could (in 100 years) be a nice bland religious organization if it eventually comes under the control of more sincere and reasonable people who actually believe in that twaddle and want to run a church, as opposed to a scam.

The CoS leaders should be investigated and tried for the crimes that they have committed, but I'm okay with CoS keeping their exempt status.

The charity aspect is only one reason for tax exemption. It's a good one, but tax exemptions are also to keep them out of politics (directly anyway) and also, in the US, to avoid the situation where politicians can use tax policy to squeeze out those religions that they don't like.

So they can't operate a Political Action Committee. They get to, just like any other corporation, if you take away their tax exempt status.

Scientology, however, is a for profit business that is masquerading as a religion. In that sense, it is a fraud. It is not sincerely a religion to those who founded or operate it.

I'd also argue that some of the megachurches out there are also for profit frauds.

We may need to redefine what "non-profit" means. You can get very personally rich if you hold certain roles in a big non-profit, which can lead to undermining the concept of a non-profit. Sometimes, it is warranted, if you are simply an employee with specific skills needed to operate the organization. If you operate your church as a family business, however, I am not so sure that certain restrictions are unwarranted.

That said, given a choice of letting CoS have their tax exempt status and removing tax exempt status from all religions, I'd let them keep it. Taxing them removes money from them, but they'd probably just increase their pricing to pass it on to the ahem, "customer".

At the time, fighting that suit would have been an existential threat to the site given the CoS's aptitude for using lawyers. That's fine and all, if your primary activity is fighting that stuff and you're ready to do so.

However, this is primarily a tech news aggregation site that has a free speech commitment, not a free speech at all costs site. I'm willing to give them a pass on it. The reality is that the way the site works would allow someone to post that material again, and until CoS finds it and they set the DMCA on it again, this site would be able to temporarily host it, and would continue to do so until the lawyers attacked. That's good enough for me because it gets the material out there. If you're sharp-eyed enough, you could then grab it and spread it via your other channels. Mission accomplished.

This is actually what I heard about the Federal Obamacare exchanges. Effectively the contracts person at CGI was rolling over as the government kept shifting the requirements and adding extra. And it wasn't so much that more money wasn't provided, but it was the fact that you had a deadline to work against and even if they had added extra resources, the amount of time to get those resources up to speed would have crossed the deadline.

You need people that stand there and say, "You didn't get this in the contract, it's not reasonable to add this now, and even if you give us more money, you can't get it in by the deadline." That is the job of your legal, contracts, and ultimately your executives. It can be a fine line, because you don't want to piss off your big customer too much, but you still have to lay down the terms. If not, you'll get walked all over and the project will fail.

It is a much different world after 9/11 for Americans, especially with flying. There were hijackings and all before, but nothing like 9/11. I could believe in the 1990's someone would still be complaining about rather light security.

Today, you are lucky to just be asked a few questions, and whatever you are faced with, you shut up and deal with it or you have somebody in a room groping your genitals.

This is true. As a contractor, I paid absurd heath insurance rates. Now that I am older and married, forget it.

Granted, now we have Obamacare, but that shit is pretty damn expensive too, unless you are getting a grant to offset it. It may be just as much, if not more, than the rates I paid to obtain health insurance on my own.

Of course, I also know that I have to switch jobs every few years to make a decent raise, so in that respect, I'm living the contractor experience with less pay, but more overall safety. It's a trade I am happy to make as someone with a family, but as a young, single person, I'd might drool over the raw cash more because I'd have fewer things putting their claim on my paycheck, so I could invest the extra money more freely and make it work for me while still driving around an econo-box and living with roommates.

Which honestly, isn't the example to be had here. Jackie Robinson had to be superior to other ballplayers because there was a barrier. He gets credit because he had to play at that level to basically be "employed" due to that barrier.

If you take away the barrier, and you have two people in front of you for consideration with equal qualifications, the person who works hard to get to the same place is commendable, but no more intrinsically qualified to do the job you're hiring for. The reward in their work is that they are in that chair, they are not rewarding *you*. You may admire their tenacity, but there is no guarantee that their tenacity can be put to work for you. More to the point, there is no reason that the person who "got off easy" is not more useful to you for various reasons.

Does that person have to continue that level of effort just to maintain their spot on the team? If so, they may be working at 120% every day and have little to give when it comes to be crunch time. I remember an IT manager who I used to work with. He was Employee of the Year at the place I worked at because he worked 18 hour+ days and bled for his systems. The problem was, he was a hard worker, but he had little left for improving the system. After his inevitable burnout, we were left with a pile of crap that only someone who was working 18 hours a day could manage.

Work != Outcome. No matter if it feels morally satisfying.

No, unless that adversity and the skills obtained from it have direct application to your job.

Adversity can make you bitter and jaded. Or it can make you the sort of person who will claw their way to the top over the careers of their peers. That's not necessarily a trait that you want to hire.

That's not to say that this is what will happen, it is just there to show that "adversity" can have two sides to it.

I think that adversity can "build character", but it's not a slam dunk. Your hires shouldn't be judged based on their background, only their capability to do the job, unless that background is one which prevents you from doing the job well. There are plenty of people who "work hard" who are not as good at a job as people who just sit there and daydream most of the day until they do some furious work at the last minute. The fact that some people can do things the "easy way" may be infuriating, but doing things the "hard way" does not have any objective benefit by itself.

Given how "genocide" has been dealt with in the last century, there may be the idea that being guilty of it paints the whole country as being responsible for the killing much like many people held all Germans responsible for the Holocaust through their action or inaction.

Which is to say, Turks are willing to say that someone who happens to be Turkish was part of a gigantic mass killing, but if it becomes "genocide" then they probably feel the overwhelming tendency is national guilt by simply being Turkish which turns Turks into pariahs.

And the answer to that is those who look at Turkey don't see a difference between the Turks under the Ottoman Empire and those in today's Turkey. They're both Turks living in Anatolia. They may have benefited from the genocide via their ancestors. Or not. Who can really say?

And let's not forget that the Turks aren't done with ethnic strife, considering their conflicts with their Kurdish population.

These Turkish hackers are proud of Turkey, and that is causing them to want to revise history. In one sense, I have some sympathy. Sometimes you want to move on from what someone else did in the past.

However, I don't believe that you should try to change history to maintain your comfort levels, especially by trying to silence people with attacks. There should be some acceptance that their ancestors did do these things and perhaps they should work to not emulate them in all respects in the future.

In the same way, I'm not happy with the general white guilt trip having to do with slavery, but I find it very important to be able to remind myself and others that we are not immune from doing things like conquest and slavery, lest we repeat the mindset that allowed those things to happen to begin with. We may not be the devil because we're white, but we're also not automatically morally superior either.

Dark energy is *not* confirmed, but the need for something like it to explain the observations has not been removed by the change in the standard candle. So, contrary to the headline: it is still status quo.

More specifically, instead of a Type Ia supernova always having the exact same characteristics throughout the universe, they discovered that there are two types of Type Ia supernovae. They are still standard, but now there are two standard sub-types.

Since we assumed that all of them were exactly the same, that may have messed up calculations that were expected to be more accurate than they actually are. Now instead of saying that object is 1.6 Mpc away by this method, it is now either 1.6 Mpc away or 1.2 Mpc away because there are now two possible types of Type Ia supernovae. However, because both sub-types are actually standard, one of the two of those is correct and you could, in theory, account for that.

Anyway, using the CMB and BAO a s a "standard ruler", they independently verified the current figures for the expansion of the universe, so this new discovery has not kicked the legs out from under the investigation. Indeed, it is possible that even if supernovae were the *only* way of making this measurement, the recalculation would still have required dark energy, just not as much as was expected.

More specifically, we would be looking to disprove the *need* for a placeholder like Dark Matter or Dark Energy, and not the existence of any one possible candidate.

All we have now are a bunch of requirements for "something" which will make observations match existing theories/models. Some have taken that need one step further and suggested some candidates which could fulfill the requirements for the "something".

That said, no one has been able to strictly prove that the need for the required matter/energy is actually real and not some error in the model or in the observations, let alone anything which would actually fit the requirements.

However, the naming of the placeholder has given a lot of fuel to the popular notion of those concepts being a "thing" which needs to be found or disproven. Just like people believe that the "aether" is a thing that was disproven. In reality, it was the need for something like an "aether" which was ruled out. There could be something like an "aether" as conceptualized by some, but if such a thing exists, it is not the thing we needed to answer the questions we had at the time.

It is important to point this out, because ruling out dark energy or dark matter in the current context doesn't mean that something like it doesn't exist, it just means that it is no longer needed to answer these specific questions. Admittedly, if the requirements are specific enough, this is usually the same thing as the discarded notion being imaginary, but it is important to keep the context of the investigation and its conclusions in mind. We may have an instinctive idea something is correct or beautiful, and we may find it difficult to let go of that notion, so it is important to understand that discarding the use of such a concept is not ruling it out, only setting it aside because it is no longer necessary for the next steps.

I have no idea if something will be found, but until it is, we should certainly keep asking whether we have done our experiments correctly or if our understanding of the observations is accurate.

Standard candles not being standard is a fairly big deal. You need things like that to aid you in making measurements of distance for theories that span the observable universe. The Type Ia supernova standard candle has been critical for measurements at around 100 Megaparsecs and above, because they are about the only thing luminous enough to be made out at those massive distances, while still having predictable standard characteristics. This is because they can actually rival the luminosity of the entire rest of the galaxy that they are part of when they go off. Not much else can do that, and nothing else that I am aware of is expected to do it in a standard way no matter where in the universe that it happens.

There are other ways to measure distance, but the Type Ia supernovae are very widely used and studied for this reason, and so this bears some watching.

Having said all that, we didn't just measure the expanding universe based on the supernovae, the CMB and Baryon acoustic oscillations as a "standard ruler" seem to give the same data about an expanding universe. So, probably not as big a deal as has been suggested.