I will never understand why these corporations spend big bucks on this cringe. I've been to one such event and I was shocked. What's worse is that long-serving people said you had to act as if you were enjoying it or else you'd hear from your manager afterwards. Imagine a bunch of middle-aged men at a sales conference shaking their hips and pretending to enjoy a cheesy rap battle. What an utterly soul crushing, suicidal-thought-inducing experience. I can't tell if senior management actually believes that this sort of corporate cringe is inspiring, or if they do it purposely to crush your soul and make you into a servile automaton. Are they out of touch or is it an Orwellian power move?

I think it's because most religions, by their exclusive natures, are divisive and offensive to many. Many current and historical wars have been fought over religion, so some of their outward symbols carry a political message, whether intended or not.

Wearing outward symbols with a political message is banned among civil servants. If you wonder why, ask yourself how you would feel showing up to the welfare office and asking for service from an employee with a gold Trump necklace or a MAGA hat. Or, more prosaically, imagine getting pulled over by a cop for speeding. You are a Muslim wearing a keffiyeh and the officer is a Jew wearing a yarmulka (skull cap). You know that police have discretion to give you a ticket or a warning. He eyes your keffiyeh skeptically, you respond with a look of defiance, and he gives you a ticket. You might suspect that you got a ticket instead of a warning because the cop is a Jew and he saw your apparent support for the Palestinians. Now, of course, all of this could happen without the overt symbology, but the government would rather not open itself up to such obvious accusations.

These laws ban overt religious symbols only. If you want to wear magic Mormon underwear or a small cross or star of David or crescent moon under your shirt, you can. You can even wear Trump-themed butt plug if you want to.

But fuck all of these cults and their symbols.

I've been in management for about 15 years and have hired many people. My take-away is that standard HR interview practices ("Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker...") are basically a popularity contest that strongly favors extroverts and people with good story-telling and language skills. I suppose these techniques are good if that's primarily what you are looking for. However, if you are hiring for actual technical skills, these interview techniques are worse than useless, they are discriminatory.

Also, HR people, in my experience, are quite under-educated when it comes to interview techniques. I've worked with about dozen different HR people over the years and none of them had any kind of imagination or technical expertise when it came to interviewing. In my organization and in other similar organizations where I have peers, any deviation from the standard HR interview is entirely driven by managers who are sick of the usual HR crap.

Agreed. Musk was a good hype man back in the day, but now he is a liability. It seems like Tesla would be better off without him at this point.

The school is trying to be helpful and do whatever is necessary to molify the cop, which is understandable. However, the school's best bet, once they became aware of the cop's intentions, would have been to whip out their phone cameras, refuse to answer questions, and refer him to the school board's lawyer. What's the cop going to do? He either has to leave and try to get a warrant, or he can double-down on a school-wide search, on camera, and look like an even bigger jackass.

Like everyone else, schools should remember to Shut The Fuck Up (tm).

I think you are getting downvoted because you don't know what The Satanic Temple is all about. It definitely is not about worshipping some fictional being. It's motto is: "Empathy. Reason. Advocacy." They enjoy exposing the hypocrisy of religious, but also do advocacy work for good causes.

Check out their mission and tenets:

https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/about-us

For those that don't know, even though that passage sounds very Old Testamenty, it is in fact the supposedly more enlightened New Testament, and it was written by Paul, THE major New Testament authority (after Jesus, of course). And that section in its full context gets even worse:

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Timothy%202&version=NIV

"Therefore I want the men everywhere to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or disputing. I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, adorning themselves, not with elaborate hairstyles or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety."

This is Handmaid's Tale stuff.

Valve is a private company right now. But Gaben is 61 and it goes without saying that Valve is at the top of every predatory tech capitalist's wishlist. Can you even imagine what Microsoft or Google or Meta would pay for Valve? Steam is great, but that probably won't last forever. GOG is waiting in the wings if Steam ever becomes enshittified, but most of your library cannot be transferred over.

Well, I'm a Windows user who just installed Linux Mint and spent a day setting up the free software media streaming server stack. It was a fun project, and it is impressive how well the many parts work together.

So, I'm just here to say THANK YOU to all of the FOSS developers out there. I am truly amazed at the incredible work you do!

It's even more amazing than that in the case of Rome. To cite just one example, by the time of Constantine I in the mid-300s CE, Rome could support armies totaling 650,000 men. The logistics and organization required to do that are staggering. After the fall of Rome, it would take until the time of Napoleon's Grand Armee in the early 1800s before numbers like that were fielded again. Even today, there are relatively few countries with an active military force of that size. They weren't just sitting around either. Rome was always fighting someone. It speaks to the ability of ancient peoples to organize and support truly massive endeavors and sustain them over literal centuries. I mentioned Napoleon's Grand Armee earlier. It was large, but it only lasted for about 5 years.

So, yes, a ton of technology was lost for a long time, both physical and social/organizational.

Nailed it, except that older Gen X and boomers who weren't part of the intolerant majority ALSO had to put up with all that bullshit.

No, it would be much, much worse than that. Nuking a country is a declaration of war and an unprecedented violation of the post-WW2 norms that have prevented global nuclear armageddon. If the nuked country is in NATO, then NATO will absolutely go to war. That's the whole point of NATO. NATO would probably not start with nuclear retaliation, but India would get invaded and/or be forced to capitulate. It would be like Japan after WW2. India would be forced to give up its nukes. Modi and other leaders would be tried as war criminals. Significant adjustments to the Indian constitution would be made. Permanent NATO bases would be established in India. Within a couple of years, India would be allowed to hold elections and self-govern again as a non-nuclear NATO ally, which would both protect it from Pakistan or China and make it entirely dependent on NATO for that protection.