I assume you're referring to the technicality that the thirteenth amendment allows unpaid labor to be legally compelled out of prisoners, and that's a valid thing to be outraged about, but your statement is wildly misleading to anyone who isn't already aware of that technicality.

The existence of the loophole is terrible and should be amended, but it's nowhere near the humanitarian crisis that widespread chattel slavery was. Ironically that will probably make it that much harder to be fixed since it's more difficult to draw pubic outage towards it.

Probably the most important thing is keeping up with security fixes. I'm not an expert in web security, but my impression is that there's a never-ending cat and mouse game between hackers and browser developers to find or patch exploits. And since browsers play such an important role in the activity of hundreds of millions... billions?.. of consumers, it has the largest possible attack surface for hackers to target.

Then there's things like better support for web assembly (how I would love the web dev world to break the JavaScript hegemony), and the constantly shifting web standards that are meant to make websites more capable, easier to program, and more performant. E.g. things like websockets and WebRTC.

... She hasn't chosen her VP yet...

I think a lot of our collective notions around "merit" need to be challenged in general. How is merit really measured? A person's achievements? Who decides what qualifies as an achievement? If a person has the deck stacked against them (e.g. coming from a low income household, not as much access to quality education) and manages to get a college degree then it's easy to say they've "achieved" more than someone who grew up privileged and obtained the same degree with similar grades.

But how should these things be weighed? If someone grew up privileged but is also exceptionally skilled, have they achieved more or less than someone who grew up underprivileged and obtained above average skills? Who has more merit? Who deserves greater recognition? And who decides if one skill or another is even meritous? Is the merit of a skillet ultimately just decided by how much the job market is willing to pay for those skills?

These aren't meant to be leading questions; I genuinely don't think there are any good answers here. When I'm in a position of making hiring decisions for my company, I make a point of not thinking in terms of merit. Instead I think about these factors:

• Alignment: Will the candidate be interested and motivated in the work that we have available for them?
• Qualification: Do I have good reason to believe the candidate will be able to competently handle the role we're hiring for after a reasonable ramping on period? They don't need to immediately have all the skills required, but I should see evidence that they have a good foundation to build off of and a willingness to learn what's needed.
• Perspective: Does this candidate bring and new and potentially valuable perspective to the role? This perspective could come from past work experiences and/or their personal life experiences. I don't want a team that's totally homogenous because that will fall too easily into groupthink and miss valuable opportunities to improve.

I think when people talk about merit they fixate on qualifications, but I genuinely believe that alignment and perspective are equally important. I would much rather take someone who is highly motivated but less qualified on paper than someone with amazing credentials who won't really care about what our team is trying to do. I would also rather have someone who is going to challenge our team's assumptions and bring insights from other fields and experiences than someone who will very competently agree with our status quo.

I think people who complain about DEI are totally missing the value of diverse perspectives, to say nothing of the moral concern of systematically reinforcing social divisions and the inequity that naturally follows from that.

One person posting a lot is not astroturfing. Astroturfing is about faking the appearance that many different people support the same cause. If it's the same account doing all the posting then they're not trying to give the appearance of being many different people.

At worst you could call it spamming. But personally I hope they keep up the spamming because seeing all troglodyte meat industry shills make asses out of themselves is giving me a new lease on life.

This might surprise you but people who have lots of money still generally like to save money when they can. If mass transit is appealing enough people won't want to spend a lot of money to avoid it.

But he can siphon crucial voting blocks away from Biden, causing Biden to lose states that he should've won. This is clearly a sabotage effort and I wonder who's funding it and how Cornell West's personal integrity could have dropped so low so suddenly.

(On a more serious note, if this is happening to you then you're not following the instructions to clean the device and replace the filter once a month.)

You're right, he was there since 2009, so he has probably been helping to design the cannibalization, but it certainly didn't begin with him.

Then you don't actually know anything about Reagan or his party.

That's explained by the muscle memory of the sleeve that he's in. A mouth that has only practiced pronouncing American English will not have the neural pathways to pronounce words in a Japanese way. The consciousness and memories transfer but the sleeve doesn't change.

It's a convenient plot device but also it fits the narrative cleanly.

When it comes to certifying your own software, the evidence is the key thing needed by the certifying bodies.

If I'm someone who wants to get my Rust software safety certified, it's not enough for me to tell the certifier "I compiled my software with this compiler from a project called Ferocene and they have a blog post saying that they're safety certified. Give me a certification please."

Instead you need to show the certifier all the evidence that went into the safety case that achieved certification for Ferocene and then make a case that the evidence is relevant to your own safety case. This evidence from Ferocene is what you pay them for.