Trademark infringement, as opposed to copyright infringement, is all about customer confusion. If my vacuum repair shop is called 𝕏, then it's not likely to cause customer confusion if a sandwich shop opens up and brands themselves as 𝕏.

This may be why there are so many different X trademarks, and why none of them "went after" each other.

If I remember correctly, Meta's does pertain to social media, but as far as I know they're not using it, so it might get messy there.

Also, in case it's not clear. The 𝕏 is just a normal unicode character. Dude couldn't even be bothered to pay someone to make a logo for him.

Abolishing slavery, ending Jim Crow, giving women the vote, becoming one of the first dozen countries on the planet to legalize gay marriage, helping win WW2, helping support Ukraine, donating more to foreign aid than any other country on the planet, the Marshall Plan, everything about NASA, best national parks on the planet, entertainment capital of the world, first country to land a man on the moon, the whole "nation of immigrants" things making us one of the most diverse countries on the planet.

• Slavery isn't abolished; it can still, per the constitution, be used as punishment.
• Jim Crow may be ended, but the racism that enables it has always been alive and well
• Gave women the right to vote way later than it should have
• Same as above
• Only after being directly attacked
• Only because we spend so obscenely much on war. A billionaire that gives $1000 is not as generous as someone making min-wage that give $10.
• Self-serving imperialism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Modern_criticism
• like defunding it to where we have to privatize space flight now? Elon Musk approves!
• I... guess? Arguably has nothing to do with being an American. Lots of countries were throwing money at this-- we just randomly got there first.
• We're openly and emphatically racist, as a country. We simultaneously reject immigration while requiring immigrants to be used as borderline slave labor to ensure our produce doesn't get too expensive.

We've never been the shining city on the hill, but we sure want to pretend we are.

You're right, there's not much the federal government can do to force this directly, but indirectly, they can decide where federal funding goes. and Alabama gets 41.2% of it's state revenue from federal funding.

I think if someone is getting a judge to officiate a wedding, they're not doing it in a ceremony, but in a perfunctory way, at the courthouse. They literally just want to make the union legal. Which it is, even in Texas, so this judge has no standing to refuse.

I thought this already came up when that woman in Kentucky refused to sign marriage licenses for gay people, and it was ruled that while she didn't have to personally sign it, if she refused it was up to her to find someone to do it instead of her.

This line of attack against LLMs seems just foolish. The data was put into the public for public consumption. There is no right to control whether the data is used to train something; that's just something people are making up.

and honestly, businesses too. There is opportunity here in the business sector, I think.

But in an ongoing federal suit over the ordinance, the city said the ticketing was part of “Houston’s governmental obligations to ensure food safety.”

This reminds me of the now-infamous Lee Atwater quote. (warning: racial slurs) It's abstracting bigotry.

What could go wrong with giving a democratic government the power to strip voting rights from those people they deem unsuitable to vote on how they are governed? /s

Steam released an entire Linux OS; I think it's safe to say that Steam is on-board with Linux gaming in general. Everything has bugs. If you're just looking for a reason to justify piracy, then fine, but this seems a little out there. What will you do if Lutris releases with a bug that crashes your system? Switch to Windows? haha

I don't mind those so much-- for me it's more annoying when they assume their instance/platform is the only one; for example, "How do you cross post" or "should we implement so-and-so feature?" without mentioning the platform being discussed. It's simple enough to determine what instance/platform the user is from, but it's still a little annoying.

When you're discussing traits inherent to a person-- not things they do or believe, but things they are, it's almost certainly hate speech. A quick test would be to swap the inherent thing you're talking about with skin color, since that one seems obvious to most people. So, would you say that an opinion that you support people of color, you just don't support them playing sports with people that aren't POC, be nuanced opinion or hate speech?

As for your second hypothetical, that is a discussion for doctors and experts, and they've already had it, and that's why children can't get non-reversible procedures until they're 18. No one is transitioning children; they are blocking their development so they can have a choice on how to proceed when they're adults.

Which god? Zeus?