To be somewhat contrarian, what advantage is there in BLM raising these concerns and making this demand? What does it do, in this election cycle, to advance their agenda?

Thank you for sharing your experience, it's a fascinating anecdote.

numerous bear sightings led to a plea for people not to use 911 to report non-emergency bear sightings.

Not to make light of the situation, but I really must insist that these be re-categorized into "casual" and "competitive" bear sightings.

I'm not the person who you're discussing things with already, but to chime in in case it's useful.

It’s quite clear to me that these types of “men” just want women to be slaves or corpses.

When I read this, it reads to me as "these types of so-called men" or "these types of self-defined 'true men'" which may or may not be your intention.

I think there's a divide here on the perception of your phrasing, perhaps?

It doesn't seem clear to me at all why landlords wouldn't be able to pass the value on to tenants.

To delve into a slight tangent on your final point about the grammatical quirk of writing in all-lowercase, I'm curious as to your thoughts on a related question. What of an individual who prefers their name be written with lowercase letters? To use my own handle as an example, imagine that I requested that others refer to me as "ava" rather than "Ava", and had styled my display name accordingly. Does your opinion vary depending on whether it's a chosen name as opposed to a handle?

I have someone in my circles who prefers her name be written thusly, and while I occasionally find her somewhat inappropriately (unfairly? rashly? my vocabulary fails me at present...) militant about the topic when strangers err, I have no opposition to using the name for her as she requests, whereas I comparatively share your reservations about the use of capitalized pronouns and their associations with dynamics of power/relationship between parties.

I wonder too how I might feel should a requested name require other deviations from standard grammar, such as unusual punctuation. Were I to identify myself as "Ava!" it would certainly cause some occasionally grammatical frustrations, but I wonder if a reason given might affect the perception either in favor or against adoption. For example, the Sharks! installation rather literally evokes exclamation through its name.

I feel like it would be more efficient to simply give her the same discount (without the middleman's fee) on her actual rent, given that this is a state-sponsored program and she already lives in subsidized housing.

The admin has been away, and so it was basically just an error page for an extended period. Now, it seems to not be federating properly (either due to defederation, or some issue on the server side, but I honestly haven't bothered looking into it) and bots/spam have overrun a lot of the site. The admin is apparently planning to hand over the instance which could help recover it, but it's pretty much unusable right now.

Don't worry, I'm sure Texas will start regulating this soon.

The proposed penalties seem low to me. A max of $3.65M annually for operating means that so long as your operations in the county make more net profit than that, there's no reason to leave. It seems to me that by merging any smaller operations, one could end up with a large enough operation to make that math work pretty trivially. Hell, for all I know even a rather small operation could be making that much.

Given that this was an activist-driven ballot initiative, it confuses me why they're not simply basing the fines on profits...

I mean, there are trivial reasons for this. If I own a $1.2m home and have $100,000 in the bank, I'm a millionaire who couldn't post a $250,000 bond.

That's great, and there's nothing wrong with those of us who feel that the death penalty is immoral. But as long as we are still committing some executions, I'd at least rather we try not to torture people while we do it.