The state could separately bring criminal charges. Also, the standard in civil court is preponderance of evidence (more likely than not) rather than beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s much easier to meet that in civil court, especially for sexual assault.

You can see some case study examples on their consulting website.

I’m pretty sure you’d still have to make quarterly estimated payments in that case to avoid potential fines.

That clause doesn’t limit the scope to only members of Congress or laws they write. Supreme Court interpretation, 14th amendment, etc. have expanded that to government writ large.

Free speech protections generally extend to government employees, except in the scope of speech related to their official duties, to my understanding. It would be difficult to seriously argue a pride flag in someone’s office in the past meets that criteria of official duties. My faith in the courts to consistently hold that precedent is not high these days, however.

It is because Apple has been dominant in the premium smartphone market for years, including in China. Huawei have started to make a big dent in that tier in China after eating Apple’s lunch in the lower price categories.

This is a feature that Huawei brought to market before Apple, which was kind of a first. Until recently, they were just following Apple’s innovations. It’s early and I wouldn’t want one now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if smartphones-that-fold-out-into-tablets was the standard by the end of the decade.

Just housing them is really damn effective in my experience. They recently opened a pallet shelter “village” in my area. Since, I basically never see encampments, and the number of visibly unhoused folks has dropped a lot (since they just look like everybody else due to regular access to hygiene facilities). According to the cops, they’ve had zero calls out to the village.

We should still do all the other things, but just put up a ton of free basic housing and you can make enormous visual progress.

And he never shut up about how embarrassing Biden apparently was.

If one of my friends showed me a collection of hats with their name on it, I would pull them aside and ask if they have considered getting professional help.

I imagine many of those are ordinances intended to regulate fraternities and sororities—or similar college student shared housing situations.

McDonald’s stopped using beef tallow for fries in 1990. I suppose that might be relatively recent if you are an elf.

From what I’ve read, 65+ was about evenly split Harris-Trump in 2024. 40-64 broke decidedly Trump. If the markets (and 401ks) manage to bounce back by the time the 40-64 cohort largely enters retirement, I fully expect they will have learned absolutely nothing.

I saw a local restaurant with its branding on it the the other day. Well, there’s one restaurant I never need to try.

Yep. He wasn’t really reviewing the nuts and bolts, just the drive experience. I didn’t get the impression he got a ton of time with it and only spent an afternoon puttering around. It felt below his standard honestly for thoroughness.

The fragmenting of teams needs more attention. My group uses a follow the sun model that has our team split up across at least seven countries, plus a decent chunk are always contracted through a vendor. Add in remote workers, and it’s very difficult to see an effective way to organize.

That was my thought also. Trump getting rid of a legal gender distinction altogether by accident would be hilarious. I hope he stands his ground and insists it’s not a mistake.

As far as company material, at least public facing, you’re entirely correct. It’s almost exclusively corporate speak rather than anything useful. That’s not unique to DEI, though, and convincing corporations to make their public HR content more exact when they’re not quoting the law is unfortunately pissing up a rope.

DEI is not a singular method. It’s a larger framework in short concerned with certain outcomes. A number of different methods may be part of DEI at a particular place. I think you are driving at a salient point in that the grammar used with it can give that impression. It’s easier to speak about in a way that isn’t repetitive by using shorthands, and there’s definitely danger there that uncurious people not willing to have good faith discussions like we are will make assumptions.

Conquering that is going to be difficult because it’s a larger linguistic issue common to many unproductive politicized topics. I hate that a lot of discussion time is taken up by essentially semantic arguments rather than substantive ones. I’m not sure how to solve for that because language almost always creates more generic categorizations to lump similar but distinct ideas to save time. To your point, by its nature that introduces vagueness.

For me, the lesson needs to be to seek depth where something seems disagreeable but has vagueness, especially ideological labeling. I wish that was a realistic ask for all people. It has made me change my opinions a lot over the years as I’ve learned more—not necessarily dramatically, but it has tempered them with nuance.

That’s certainly a fair point. Though, there is a difference between complaining about what something actually is versus what some supporters may desire. Not sure I see much distinction made from the grumbling crowd when they cry DEI hire.

My opinion on that matter isn’t a simple yes or no. If we could realistically make significant progress undoing generations of institutional racism purely looking at socioeconomic background, I’d be much closer to no. Socioeconomic background is not really a checkbox that many companies are willing to suss out, however, since it requires a lot of effort and has many dimensions.

The hope with using it as part of decisions is that, since in aggregate a race or gender may have statistically worse representation, you’ve got increased likelihood of a hit than going in blind. But if a company is achieving the same results going on their metric of socioeconomic background, that’s sufficient to me.

I’m sorry if recognizing the complexity of the situation leads to bad perceptions, but I’m not going to pretend the world is simple to appease those who are not interested in nuance. My interest is in achieving outcomes and frankly we don’t have the knowledge on which methods are most realistic and effective. I can’t make a hard decision about something without that.

I’d really like for there to be a mostly agreeable method of evaluating socioeconomic background that companies would be willing to implement and have real A/B testing. That’s total fantasy considering how the world works, though that is why I don’t take a hard stance that there’s one way to work at it.

There really is no mentionable amount of DEI hiring quotas, at least the market I am familiar with (US). It’s practically illegal due to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions. Though it was rare even before that. Not sure if that is the case in other places.

I think that’s sort of an impossible task though, for any sufficiently large idea. You can’t control all people. I definitely agree there should be concerted effort to educate people on what something is truly about. However, that is already happening, but you can’t teach people who won’t hear or only listen to outlets who oppose it ideologically. Basically every company with a DEI department gives training of some sort to their employees, yet many of them will ignore what they are told if it doesn’t fit their preconceptions. I have seen it at my own company (people arguing we shouldn’t do something we already don’t do).

For the point about universities, this is a fairly significant area of discussion in the field of education. I won’t pretend to be an expert on the ideas or statistics. But deciding what is “better” is a very difficult question. An elite school in the US is objectively more likely to produce better outcomes in the aggregate, but a lot of that (in my opinion) comes down to confounding variables: only accepting already high performers, having more opportunities, having access to already successful people, not having to work their way though school, etc.

If we could truly remove many of those, especially around wealth, access, and opportunities by making school affordable/tuition free and distributing access and opportunity amongst all schools (e.g., internships), I think we could much more accurately measure the quality of schools here. But we simply can’t right now.

Those are all inseparable parts of a whole for DEI. Frankly, they are the most significant parts. Much of the time, companies have zero DEI policy at the hiring step. It’s part of why the griping about it is confusing to me. Most of the companies I am familiar with are already where you seem to want them. But I guess they have to pretend to throw it out and call it something different to appease the complainers.

I never said it was a silver bullet. I explained why doing away with an effort like it and achieving a fantasy of background agnostic hiring will not solve the problem in a generation, since you were not sure why generations of institutional racism would go away with one generation of blind hiring practice.

There is also a very large difference between no college education and just not going to an exclusive institution, which is explicitly what my example was about. The people who go to state schools also get a quality college education believe it or not.

One can be critical and consider if the candidate has some attractive points because they are truly more capable or they just had better opportunities. More questioning beyond that may reveal that they truly are great or just had it easier. The problem is a lot of traditional hiring stops at taking things at face value.

Part of the problem with the hypothetical is not everyone in one of these positions is truly hired. I mean if we completely got rid of inherited wealth so nobody could pass on their company to their kids, that’d certainly accelerate the timeline.

Background-agnostic will also still miss the knock-on effects. If someone goes to a high quality college with a name because their rich parents can afford it that leads to an attractive internship that lands them a career job, on paper they got their current job because they had good qualifications.

Or, if the company has a history of only white men in positions of power and goes background-agnostic with zero outreach to marginalized communities, you’re not going to get a lot of applicants from there. They may not even know the company exists, while every kid of those powerful white men sure do, and they know which skills are most necessary to look good in a job interview.

DEI is not just handing out roles to unqualified people because they’re not white men. It’s about access, outreach, thinking differently, being welcoming. It’s complex. It’s certainly easy to rabble rouse over because dumb people don’t want to take the time to understand complicated things. I don’t believe we should abandon nuance because some people refuse to attempt to understand it. They’ll just do that with the next thing until everything is dumb and simple.