Well you can believe it now. The inconsistency of their positions has not been lost on me. But I haven't believed that Republicans have principles (or act according to them) since the second Bush administration.

However, you would do well to research the Republicans' position a bit more. The Republicans are trying to resolve the conflict between LGBT rights and the exercise of religious liberty. Among Christians, both homosexuality and racism are sins, and while most Leftists would defend a Christian bakery refusing to bake a cake for the KKK, they would would not extend that to refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. It's not that Christians want to discriminate against gays, but rather that they don't want to participate in evil. That's why Jack Phillips would have sold gays a pre-made wedding cake, but not actually custom make one for an event, which from a Christian point of view, desecrates the sacrament of marriage and mocks Christianity in general.

The problem, of course, is that the law is a blunt instrument, and while most Christians - including the Catholic Church - believe that gays should not be subject to unjust discrimination, they realize such anti-discrimination laws will be used by activists to force them to participate in immoral activities. The challenge for Republicans is to leave enough leeway in the anti-discrimination law for Christians to live as they believe, but not so much leeway that a person can be denied their basic rights because of unchosen feelings.

And, on top of that, you have conservatives, who have come to the understanding that you can't legislate morality. If you could, the civil rights act of 1964 would have eliminated racism from society, and yet... here we are. To them, anti-discrimination laws are ineffective at best, and harmful at worst.

And this brings us back to the social media companies. Yes, it's their platform. Yes, it's the public square. Yes, they are bigoted against Christians and conservatives alike. And yes, I consider the censorship morally wrong, and problematic for democracy. But unlike the Republicans, I don't believe that Parler and Gab are a solution - it's no longer a public square, but more like a town with a bunch of private back yards. It's not going to bring people together, but further divide them. And I part from the Republicans even further at this point, because while I believe they're well intentioned, I don't believe these laws will actually return the social media companies to the public square. They are, after all, advertising companies - they're not interested in facilitating the type of public discourse which would lead to better policy decisions. However, that said, the marginalization of conservatives, and Christians, is very real in certain parts of America, and Republicans, being politicians, are trying to show that they're "doing something" about the issue.

What they don't know, though, is that the horse has already left the barn. Social media is the problem, not the solution. Even a Leftist should realize how dangerous it is to let a single corporation control the public discourse in this country. The only solution left is the socialization - that is, government takeover - of the social media companies, but Republicans can't bring themselves to admit that public ownership of anything is a good idea. No Republican wants to leave himself open to the charge that he's secretly a socialist.

I'm waiting for the first cloud-hosted malware app, where your windows install doesn't have to be infected to be affected. You know, that does something like redirecting your cloud-stored files somewhere else... and charging you a ransom to retrieve them.

Because if there's anything Windows is good at, it is finding new ways to create security holes and host viruses.

First of all, the Republican party is only conservative during election season. The fact the Donald Trump - who was a socialized medicine advocate - won the Republican nomination has pretty much destroyed any semblance of conservatism in the Republican party.

Secondly, this force your business to accommodate my beliefs notion began back in the 1960's with the Civil Rights Act. I find it amazing that people don't see the similarities between a business serving the public (i.e. "public accommodation") requiring segregation and certain social media companies segregating people by their political or religious beliefs.

Whether you are serving meals, or serving social media users, technically speaking, it's a private business. If you would not allow a restaurant to segregate according to race, religion, or even marital status, why would you allow a social media platform to do the same? In both cases, the business is run on private property. In both cases, there is no direct discrimination, but rather, a subtler form - in the civil rights area South, Blacks were served as long as they sat over there, and in social media today, you can say anything as long as it doesn't make anyone feel "unsafe". Which means that in either case, you're allowing de facto segregation even if you call your policy something else, like "code of conduct", or "ensuring a safe space for white people".

If we allow social media companies to discriminate because it's their private platform, we can't rationally prohibit racial discrimination in other areas of business, either. In fact, the very fact that these companies suppress the free exchange of ideas indicates they have either not understood the greater social contract that comes with being an American, or at least are opposed to a free America. If anyone wants to understand why it was that the South remained racist for more than a hundred years after the civil war, they need look no further than the behavior of social media companies. The groups are different, but the bigotry, the desire to discriminate, to exclude "those people" from the public sphere is the same.

It's not capitalism, but mercantilism, where the state serves the interests of business, rather than requiring businesses to create value for their customers and investors. It is the opposite of a free market when the government uses its influence to favor one business or industry over another.

Even Glenn Beck admits that we've never had true capitalism in the US. Calling it crony capitalism only disguises the fact that this has already been tried centuries ago and resulted in colonialism and slavery.

One nit - in a KY nursing home, 20 of 26 vaccinated residents got covid, and one of them died.

1 in 20 is a 5% mortality rate; granted this demographic probably has a 20%+ mortality rate, so the vaccine did provide some protection. However, in the only demographic for which a serious risk of death exists, it provides only a modest improvement over unvaccinated people. It is far from the total safety provided by other, more developed vaccines.

The folks against vaccination, I suspect, are coming from the demographics where no serious risk of death exists even should they catch it. It comes from those people who don't want to admit that Trump got the vaccine produced before anyone else said they could. It comes from those who know history, and know they can't trust the government. Berating someone because they're capable of independent thinking - rather than blindly swallowing government propaganda - may make you feel better about yourself, but it doesn't make you safer. Someone with enough life experience to be cautious about unapproved (emergency authorization and FDA approval are different things) vaccines also likely has the judgement to practice good social distancing, masking, and proper hygiene. While I know this is far from a scientific survey, my friends in blue states complain about people not wearing masks, whereas here in my red state I see them all over the place. I think the MSM is deliberately blurring the line between those who don't wear masks, and those who don't want to be forced to wear masks. It's more a question of freedom than of risk.

The science is clear: unless you're elderly with comorbidities, you have a very good chance of surviving covid-19. And if you're in a vulnerable group, the vaccine significantly reduces your chance of death, but doesn't eliminate it. I'm more concerned about the vaxxers walking around infecting others because they have a naive false confidence in science. Not everyone can be vaccinated, and we simply don't yet know the long term implications, or even how long immunity lasts.

You've missed the point: the $5M payout is less than they'd spent if they'd done it right the first time. It's cheaper to ask for forgiveness than to get permission.

Let's look at this from the business perspective:

1. Colonial has saved money on IT spending.
2. The oil companies have increased profits from the shortage.

The only people getting screwed here are the little guys. IOW, Colonial is doing good business, maximizing revenue for their clients and minimizing cost. Sure, you have to pay more for gas, but that was the entire point of business in the first place. You may not be happy about it, but would you rather pay twice as much for gas all the time, just to know the pipeline was secure?

It's like the credit card fraud finding algorithms. American credit card companies delayed chip-and-pin systems by more than two decades because they found it was less expensive to catch most of the fraud through pattern matching software than to implement a more secure system. Because they could pass the cost of fraud onto the merchants (a third party), the had very little incentive to change.

Since when have conservatives ever argued that social problems can be solved with more government, and more government regulation?

Oh... right. These are Republicans, sorry, my mistake. They're only play the conservative during election years.

Is it any wonder, with the majority of Americans being conservative, that with every passing year more Americans feel they have no voice in government? Does anyone in government understand that freedom of speech is not a problem, and even if it was, would not be a problem government could solve?

Neither do corporations. Some, like Amazon and Uber, haven't turned a "profit" in years.

New England progressives are a special bunch; even as they cry foul about climate change, they would rather flood indigenous Pacific Islanders out of their homes than ruin their view of the ocean. Every time I try to convince a conservative that climate change is serious, they can win the argument by claiming that if it was true, the die hard environmentalists on the East Coast would be demanding, rather than blocking, more wind farms.

I'm not trying to troll here; we need real answers rather than virtue signaling. I know a lot of conservatives, and from their perspective, climate change is either not true, or no big deal. Most of them believe that rising sea levels over the course of a century can easily be mitigated through better engineering - after all, if the Dutch reclaimed seabed to live below sea level with centuries old technology, why wouldn't we believe future generations with future technology can deal with the change of global warming?

Believe it or not, a very large portion of conservatives actually care about the environment. However, they also care about the poor and the marginalized in society. So one would think that climate change would be a slam-dunk amongst conservatives, that the only debate would be how fast we need to move to get it done. During the Reagan and Bush years, Acid Rain was dealt with, CFC's were banned when a hole was discovered in the Ozone Layer, and asbestos was banned when it was discovered cancerous. So what changed since then?

In the 80's, science said - or rather, journalists misunderstanding science, said, that butter was bad for you and margarine was good. Trouble was, the opposite was true - in the end, science learned that with every additional serving, margarine consumption doubled the risk of heart disease. Before that, asbestos was regarded as this wonder-material - my Childcraft encyclopedias even had an article touting its benefits. And before that, (in the 50's), there were doctors endorsing cigarettes. The end result has been that science has killed off its most faithful adherents. And those whom science didn't kill learned a valuable lesson: it takes science centuries to get anything right.

So today, the science of global warming is only a few decades old. Yes, there have been papers suggesting global warming well before that, but it wasn't until the 90's or 2000's that a consensus of scientists came to believe it was happening. And even after that, there were some real fumbles by the science community - the ClimateGate affair, the NOAA publishing incorrect temperatures for five years, etc... which served to lessen the public's trust in science. So now comes the conservative, who uses tested science in his everyday life - he drives a car, rides a bike, but can't directly observe global warming, and observes that even those who shout the loudest about it don't themselves lead green lifestyles:

• New England progressives block wind farms
• Climate Scientists fly to conferences, rather than hold them virtually.
• Al Gore builds a mansion, flies a private jet, etc... rather than actually reducing his carbon footprint.
• Democrats propose a cap-and-trade scheme, by which their well-connected capitalists can extract even more money from poor people.

When history looks back at the turn of the century and wonders why we fixed acid rain, the ozone hole, PCBs, lead, etc... but did nothing about global warming, they will come to the conclusion that whenever a realistic plan for reducing global CO2 emissions was proposed, it was defeated by infighting among the very side that proposed it.

A lot of conservatives believe in being good stewards of our environment, that sustainable, long-term planning is a good thing. The 1980's gave conservatives a good environmental track record. So why don't we get on the climate change bandwagon? Well, I would say that most of them don't trust science, or don't believe the consequences will be catastrophic, or see the hypocrisy of AGW proponents and believe that - aside from them personally reducing their carbon footprint - they can't effect real change. President Biden is a perfect example of this - he's trying to change things, but only in ways which hurt conservatives; when he runs up against his voter base, they'll fight him tooth and nail. Maybe he'll succeed; maybe he won't, but when the final account of history is written, progressives will be blamed for global warming. They did all of the virtue-signaling, but would do none of the hard work necessary to actually reduce carbon emissions. Hard work, after all, requires a conservative.

So if you progressives want to mitigate climate change, you need to first highlight those who are successfully reducing their carbon footprint - not merely shipping your pollution overseas to China. That EV you're driving is virtue signaling; true, it has a lower carbon footprint than its gas guzzling counterpart, but when the whole lifecycle is considered, you're paying two or three times the cost of a gas guzzler for less than a 5% reduction in total lifetime carbon emissions. It's a hard sell to someone who can scarcely afford a gas guzzler. And like you, we conservatives would like free electricity, but how does a single mother afford the $50k to install solar panels, much less the mortgage for the house on which they'll be installed? And why, in an era where companies are falling over themselves to prove how "woke" they are, do companies still require their employees to come into the office rather than telecommute? We conservatives are open to the idea of living a carbon-neutral lifestyle, but if you progressives, who really believe in climate change - can't, or won't, live a carbon neutral lifestyle, how can you honestly expect anyone else to?

It may be a brutal policy, but it doesn't even achieve its purported goals.

The ramp up time for productivity for software engineers is often 6 months to a year for modestly complex systems. For systems with more than 250kloc, the process can take years, and even then, the productivity improvements may extend well beyond the 5 year mark.

To hire and fire every year means that you always end up with at least one underperformer, and relative to the more experienced peers, the performance gap only grows. Constant turnover destroys the productivity of even the more experienced engineers, because they are constantly mentoring the new guy, rather than concentrating on getting work done.

The Army takes a different approach: the mission is critical, and if there is a team member who is underperforming, they undertake training to improve them. When it comes to productivity, the Army achieves more each day before most civilians start work, and in conditions far more hazardous. It is through teamwork they are able to achieve far more than just the sum of their individual efforts, a lesson seemingly lost on Amazon.

When it comes down to it, the phrasing is intentionally vague. Here's why:

At their heart, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are ad agencies. Their revenue comes from convincing companies to place ads with them.

It just so happens that 80% of all consumer decisions are made by women. This partnership of men making the money and women spending it has a long history in western culture. Thus, the advertiser who wins over women sells more.

American companies, instead of making a better product, typically perform cost control in the production division, and rely on the sales and marketing departments to sell the product. Thus, if you're selling a product which isn't genuinely better than your competition, you must appeal to those people who make emotional decisions. A rational consumer, OTOH, who does their research isn't going to be swayed by advertising.

Consequently, if you are an American advertising agency, you want to appeal to the emotional decision makers, rather than the rational ones. This explains why facebook, twitter, etc... are about making "safe" spaces. They need the emotional users who will be swayed by advertising. Yes, free speech may be nice and all, but when you're cultivating a user class of emotional people, it's better to have those who can be emotionally manipulated rather than rational users. A rational user isn't going to be swayed by hate speech, but an emotional one very well might. In short, these platforms are cultivating gullible people because it is in their best interests to do so.

Rational, sane, cool-headed people may be able to engage in thoughtful discourse online - but that doesn't sell advertising, because they aren't gullible enough to dupe with emotional appeals. Social media companies are not there to facilitate free speech, thoughtful discourse, or public activism. They exist to sell advertising to gullible people. Regardless of what they may say about freedom of expression, their principles are still subordinate to their ultimate goal of making money.

Regardless of how correct your point is, if it would embarrass an American or Chinese company, or cause an ordinary person to ask deep introspective questions - that is, cause them to start thinking for themselves, rather than reacting emotionally, it is likely to be cancelled. The last thing an advertiser wants is someone with a habit of asking salient questions. They would much rather have someone primed to react emotionally, because it's far easier to manipulate public emotion than thought.

The thing about wood-burning stoves is that they're carbon-neutral. Just about anything else that would replace them - natural gas, oil, etc... contributes to global climate change.

Yes, we know that wood-burning pollution creates respiratory illnesses, which place you at increased risk of death should you catch Covid, but don't you think it's worth it, UK, to lower your carbon footprint? I mean, what's a little breathing problem when we have a planet to save?

Perhaps it would be better to say the working classes don't like government policy which aims to reduce wages by increasing the supply of labor.

Those in the working classes sympathize with immigrants, but not the federal policies which enable businesses to exploit their desperate circumstances.

I can remember when a vaccine was just that - it would actually prevent you from getting sick in the first place, not just prevent hospitalization. The fact that a disease with a 2% fatality rate can put 6% of fully vaccinated people in the hospital (of the high-risk group) is not reassuring. This is more like bringing the risk of older adults down into the range of young adults, not providing the protection one would typically associate with a vaccine.

And it gets worse - there are already more virulent variants out there more contagious than the first.