I think we need to be honest about the actual context and meaning. We’ve seen what happens when presidents lose the election and refuse to concede. It happened with Bush Jr, and it happened with Trump. When Joe tells us that he wouldn’t do what they did, we shouldn’t be upset at his honesty. We should be happy that he’s not evil.

By that standard, as long as the Republicans push a shitty candidate, voters have no choice but to pick the Democrat. Gotta do better than that if you wanna sway people’s actions on election day.

I think your take on his perspective is a dangerous one. You sound willing to “do anything to save democracy”. That’s exactly what wild Trump supporters would say, and it’s just as patently immoral and impossible.

Politics is always biased. That’s the point of it. There is no strictly objective reporting that has any meaning.

Oh, Washington Democrats know exactly what they are doing. Push pro corporate policies, campaign as “not Trump”, hope that the leftwing voters don’t vote third party or stay home, and blame them for losing when necessary.

Barack, Barack. That might be what you wish it was about. Reality paints a different picture.

You come across as anti-tech out of spite. Yes, generative AI is snake oil, but that is a question of scope and power and speculation, not utility of easy to create pictures.

I am so happy with the vast amount of free art available these days. As a blogger, it’s easier than ever to find a free topical picture.

Well doesn’t that depend on this history books? Try again, my friend. :-)

If you want to suggest that 16 is a great age to allow people to start work, I don’t think you’re going to find much resistance. That’s true in the United States, and much of the world, as you remarked. But 13 is nowhere close to 16, so that’s where you’re seeing resistance here.

Another point that I thought it was obvious, but perhaps it isn’t, is how easy it is for older coworkers and bosses to manipulate children. Kids don’t have the experience, and they don’t have the experience or composure necessary to reliably walk away from bad work environments. So then, is there some totally necessary societal function that we desperately need young teenagers to feel? If there’s not, why don’t we take the risk off of them.

And finally we have to come back to the elephant in the room. In reality, people who propose allowing children to work are doing so because they don’t want to pay adults more.

And again I think it’s obvious, but maybe it’s not so obvious to others, that if the goal is to give kids a variety of experiences then there are plenty of great ways to do so. Sports, music, school, volunteering, extracurriculars, you name it. Structured environments with proper supervision, managed by people who care about the safety of those kids, and aren’t going to try to make a buck by mistreating them.

You say he was not a journalist, but we’ve never seen good evidence of this. At worst, he was a bad journalist.

Anyway, maybe Democratic presidents and candidates could have considered the impact of their actions on his life. Did they think he would be sympathetic to them, after all they did or failed to do? This is common sense.

Right. Please research child labor exploitation and you will understand. It’s clearly documented. Just because you were lucky doesn’t mean others were, or will be.

Sometimes people in OP’s situation don’t say too much information because they don’t want to jeopardize their professional relationship with the other party.

1A protects us against censorship, and this law is precisely that. If I have TikTok and I use it to communicate, the government is censoring my speech by taking it down. There is a lot of case law on when the government can legally censor speech, and I’m not going to repeat it here, but the government’s lawyers have a massive hill to climb on this one. Maybe they can succeed, maybe not.

There’s other precedent about “making a specific business illegal”. Essentially, legislatures can make conduct illegal, but courts don’t like it when they make businesses illegal, because it’s a violation of due process. But this is complicated and detail-specific.

Anyway, there’s a lot of great information online about these two legal arguments. I encourage you to look it up.

Um, actually that’s one perk of federation. It’s much harder to take down networks that are run on dozens or hundreds of servers across the globe… In other words, we already solved this problem, at least in large part.

You say no issues while ignoring the exploitation angle, which is historical fact. But even if it weren’t, are we so pathetic that our society somehow needs these kids to work instead of being kids? Really? We can’t do any better?

Um … you want permanent punishments for 13 year olds? That is sick, my friend. Do jobs teach teamwork better than ice hockey or D&D? That is a claim you could make, but maybe we don’t believe you. Remember, life is long, and expecting kids to learn adult lessons is at odds with psychology and reality.

High schools get jobs and learn that the assistant manager is always an asshole. Useful to know. But there’s no rush to figure it out, is there?

No. It shows how bad a candidate she was. People love reform candidates for a reason: Washington is so dirty, and our interests are not corporate interests. Centrist Democrats inspire leftist voters to stay home or vote third party.

You could, if you ignore history. Assange didn’t make anyone investigate anything. He was a journalist with no special powers.

I could try to summarize it, but if you just do a web search for EFF and TikTok, you will come across a good explanation.

Of course we don’t know how the courts will rule. My belief is that the odds are in favor of TikTok and of TikTok users, but we’ll have to wait and find out.

I think we should be careful. It’s certainly true that greedy powerful people in the world today are getting increasingly aggressive about seizing more money and power, and that’s terrible, and we need to do whatever we reasonably can to stop it.

I don’t recall seeing any data that suggests the average level of greed among the general population has grown, or that the average desire to work among the general population has gone down.

The reason this distinction matters is because when someone makes the claim that too many people are greedy these days, it sounds like a problem with the general population, when what we’re actually seeing is a problem with the ultra-rich.