Hard disagree, I’m a huge fan of the way spaces work on Mac. Windows is a nightmare, and linux is good but takes a lot of time to tune and maintain. I honestly haven’t ever noticed the hidden files issue because I use a terminal for launching anything that would need them, though it does sound annoying if you do.

Where MacOS shines is being able to customize the important parts of your workflow, while ignoring the basic parts because those all “just work” in a standard way. The biggest win is all of the a11y APIs they’ve added for apps, they really let you get in there and change almost anything. I use Karabiner to layer on custom keymappings, capslock is an extra modifier that turns my home row into arrows/delete, hold down command is jump by subword, and many more optimizations. And that is system-wide, it works the same in every single app. I basically have Emacs style macros universally across the entire operating system, every app, and it’s awesome (oh, and I don’t need an external keyboard for it, so I can work on the train and have the same keymaps).

You might not like the base OS’s UX, but it does “just work” for what it is, and that lets you focus on layering on so much more.

Ok, cool. Law should be updated. Noted.

In the meantime, here in reality, I know this because I got married at city hall as a formality and my wife and I tried to just have it signed, since our real ceremony was months later. We were refused, because according to the clerk, we needed to follow a full procedure.

Stop arguing in bad faith, you’re just plain wrong here. Until laws and procedures actually change, the fact is that those are the minimum requirements and she refused to do them.

The point is that it’s part of standard process and procedure, and she made an off-duty judge come in on her day off to do it instead.

It’s an asshole move. She should not be a public servant if she intends to hold up proceedings based on her beliefs. Especially one with authority like a judges.

The ceremony aspect of marriage is not just a ceremony, it’s a requirement. Asking the basic questions is part of the court procedure, it’s what makes an officiant different than a notary.

She refused to sign the paper, essentially.

This was a court proceeding, look at the actual article. The marriage happened in court.

By the sound of it, she was the on-duty judge at city hall. It was a public service because it’s the most basic kind of legal marriage, a courthouse marriage. There is barely any ceremony or performance, and lots of people do it prior to the real ceremony because it is considered a formality.

Why shouldn’t a public servant who is assigned that duty be required to follow through? I understand not wanting to do it if it’s a whole ordeal, but if this is the bare minimum required to formalize a marriage, should that not always be available to all people regardless of their race, sex, etc?

This really conflicts with the idea that, as platforms, websites are not legally liable for the content their user’s produce. At least at a high level, it feels like those two should be mutually exclusive. If X owns all of the accounts on its site, it should be legally liable for all of them. If X is not legally liable, it should imply some amount of individual ownership.

Like, yes federation is better and we should be pushing for it, but also, we should be trying to push for better regulation of incumbent social media platforms too if we can. Seems unlikely but we can try.

NY to DC is solid, it’s the one inter-metro train I’ve taken that’s faster than driving or flying (when accounting for security and travel to/from the airport).

Using it really makes you realize how much better the train system could be. Not even bullet trains, and they’re so much better than cars.

Again, we can do both. This is not a zero sum game, there are nuclear physicists and people who are passionate about nuclear who will either be working on nukes, OR pivoting to software engineering so they can make money on the crypto/AI/whatever boom. I have met them.

The enemy is not the person who wants to build a parallel solution to the same problem. The enemy is the person who says “oh oops, there’s just not enough money 😬 we gotta fund only one, which one should we do? Figure it out and then we can move forward, in the meantime we’ll just keep using these fossil fuels.”

They are playing us with divisive politics. My expectation if we fund both is one of the following happens:

1. We reach 20 years from now, and between storage breakthroughs and renewables scaling out we are 100% renewable capable. We stop construction of new nuclear plants, we keep the few that came online for a while and then we decommission. We win.
2. We reach 20 years from now. We have made significant progress on renewables and storage, but we still haven’t been able to replace base load entirely. Storage breakthroughs didn’t happen, and we have to keep funding more research. In the meantime, we’re able to decarbonize and rely on nukes instead of fossil fuels. We win.

Hedging bets is smart in all cases, especially when it’s not a zero sum game. Don’t let them divide us.

We can do both. There’s nothing preventing us from doing both, and the most effective way for the oil and gas lobby to get what they want is to divide us.

If pro-renewable people say “we must only have renewables, nothing else!” It makes us seem like ideologues. If we seem like ideologues, moderates get confused because they think “well I do like to hedge my bets and try all things out.” And pro-nuclear advocates (who are all over the spectrum) get louder, complain more, and swing more moderates and politicians back toward nuclear and away from renewables. Then you can repeat the cycle in reverse.

The conservative trick is not to substitute something that doesn’t work for something that does. It’s to keep us divided, blaming each other, and going back and forth between different solutions so often that we never get anything done. Chaos is a ladder.

I just don’t see it in terms of fundamentals. We’ve heard this for years, yet countries that have denuclearized have not been able to go full renewables, they have become more dependent on fossil fuels. Storage has just not been able to keep up with demand, baseload is still necessary, and we don’t have other options.

We should absolutely keep investing in renewables and pushing forward, they help. There is no reason at the same time to prevent investment in nuclear and other non-carbon emitting solutions, and if tech companies are willing to foot the bill we shouldn’t complain. Every gigawatt counts at this point.

I just want to say as a trans person, first off, your views are very valid. I think it’s actually great that despite your misgivings you respect the principle of bodily autonomy, which I very much agree with myself. Totally think this is a good take.

I also wanted to give my 2 cents on the experience itself. You liken transition to body modification, and there definitely are parallels. But in my experience, the two are distinct. Like, I have both dysmorphia at times, and dysphoria at others. I’m not 100% happy with my body after transition, but now it’s like, less because I look like a guy and more because I look like a girl but, maybe not with the ideal body I wanted. When that first hit me, my wife told me “welcome to womanhood” and I laughed a little (and cried a little) because it was true, I’d never known a woman who didn’t struggle with her body image.

I also just, can’t really explain how much my mental health has improved. I had terrible anxiety when I entered puberty, and it wasn’t about gender or anything (that I was aware of at the time, anyways). It was almost just like my brain started malfunctioning. I got quieter, I overthought everything, I self medicated with weed and alcohol, became kind of aimless. Then I turned it around, got my career going, got married, worked on myself. I still drank to take the edge off and be able to socialize, but put on a face at parties and figured out how to push through the anxiety. I tried therapy, medication, meditation, you name it, but it never really got too much better, I just got better at working around it.

I had kinda given up on there being an “answer”. I just figured, you know, this is life for me. Not bad, just hard. And then this thing happened, where a lot of stuff I had been pushing down all came up at once. And I transitioned.

I really, really didn’t think it would “solve” things. Like, I thought it felt right, that it would make things better. But I was trying not to get my hopes up. And at first it didn’t, like hormones didn’t really immediately fix everything. It was more subtle. It was like.. like slowly waking up from a long and tiring nightmare. The kind you don’t remember much of, you just keep that vague sense of unease for a while.

It’s been a year and a half. I can go to parties and not drink now, and just, relax. Have fun. Socialize. I can make friends and talk to strangers. I still have anxiety, I still have problems, but like, my brain just works better. I don’t know how else to describe it. I make connections I never did before, understand people and empathize with them more.

I feel happy. Not in a like, “this is new and exciting” kind of way, but a sort of deep contentedness. Peace.

I don’t think this is a silver bullet. It doesn’t solve all your problems, and it sure as hell won’t solve anything for a cis person. It just helps to take a constant burden out of the way. And for me, even if there had been 0 physical changes, I would 100% take estrogen just for the mental effects it has had alone. It’s been the best mental healthcare I have ever received.