gallopingcomp

Yes.

Back to the matter at hand: There’s a difference between (potentially) losing your professional license for beliefs and practices related to your professional practice, and being put in a re-education camp. The former isn’t always right either (and can sometimes be weaponzied for political reasons), but they’re not the same thing.

(Speaking as someone from an authoritarian/totalitarian country that puts people in re-education camps, and sometimes weaponizes professional licensing for political reasons. JP’s case looks more like an unfortunate coincidence than that.)

The solution is that society shouldn’t make people dependent on any single means of income for survival, not that no one gets rejected/disbarred from any occupation ever. Ultimately any negativity towards a person lies along a spectrum, and it’s important not to lose sight of the degree of harm involved.

The revoking of professional licenses is not (and should not be) intended as punishment of the individual in question, but rather limiting the damage to society of their recklessness.

That can sometimes be a slippery slope of its own, but I will argue that it’s a somewhat different slope (the “for the greater good” slope) from the “totalitarian government hates nonconformity” slope. Sometimes they intersect though.

As opposed to professional beliefs.

Which might be a tricky distinction sometimes, especially in psychology, because (1) some beliefs and speech aren’t exactly object-level, but aren’t quite political either; (2) previously non-political, purely object-level issues (eg. treatment approaches for trans people) sometimes become seen as politicized (make no mistake, JP very much played a part in making it so), or conversely lose its previous political connotation.

Hence the “salesman” part. The government is technically depriving you of your livelihood because your employer is out of business, or has moved to non-leaded gasoline, but you insist on only selling leaded gasoline, because you sincerely believe it is superior. Now you are out of a job. (Or rather: now there’s talk going around that you might be out of a job.)

I am not a lawyer, but it isn’t the Constitution that prohibits lawyers from engaging in (and exploiting) conflicts of interest for personal gain.

There’s an extended discussion to be had about the merits and drawbacks of professional licensing as state-enforced gatekeeping, but equating this with political persecution doesn’t seem useful.

Has it not occurred to you that professionals could lose their licenses for reasons that at are not solely political? Like professional malpractice, or advocating for quackery? (There’s a line to be drawn there, too, about what constitutes reasonable standards, but you seem to be suggesting that there be no standards at all.)

Banning lead from gasoline (and paint, plumbing etc) is also governmentally-punished wrongthink, if you’ve built your whole identity and livelihood around being a salesman for leaded gasoline.

Or. Could a certified driving instructor lose their license for telling their clients to drive aggressively, regardless of safety concerns? They might just become a brave martyr challenging the safety-obsessed culture that coddles our drivers.

It’s curious that you chose JP, as opposed to the much better example of Hamline University (or that stupid halloween costume thing from a couple of years back; etc, etc). Instead, we choose to entertain JP’s ever-escalating persecution complex.

It’s “persecution” only when someone I like loses or suffers, it’s “consequences” when it’s someone I dislike/in the outgroup (never mind the actual circumstances of their behavior in context). Or maybe the alternative is that no one on any side ever gets any consequences for doing anything. Lawyers never get disbarred, drivers never lose licenses, and everything is exactly the same shade of grey. /s

Note that in these contexts (comparing with European, Asian cities) tunnels are typically employed to (1) carry mass transit (which requires and in turn supports density), and (2) carry through traffic through dense urban centers without having to take up as much surface space.

Keep in mind that low-density sprawl is likely to * create much higher infrastructure costs (in terms of streets, utilities, etc) per capita (I believe Strong Towns has written extensively on this topic); * force more people to buy, drive, & maintain a car (and spend more time commuting) when they would not otherwise need to (if you like driving, good for you, but it isn't for everyone).

Yes (should be obvious from context). This includes federal, state, and local taxes.

Edit: point being, if your taxes are super high, it's usually a combination of very high income & owning very expensive property.

Edit 2: if you have very LOW income and own very expensive property, then you could end up with astronomical tax rates overall if you include property taxes. But that's usually not what people talk about in this context, and is kind of a separate problem (cost of housing).

I don’t know how rich the average HN reader is but, for a bit of perspective: I’m solidly middle class and I only pay about 30% total (and that’s if you include property taxes).

One thing of note: there is likely no unified “they”, given that a document seems to be a mixed bag of elementary clarity-of-language items (“this is wild” vs. “this is insane”) and obsessive pedantic nonsense (about distinctions that do not exist to either the general population or most of the affected communities, eg. “committed suicide” [1]), and the forcibly mild language in the introduction.

If I could hazard a guess, this document was probably the result of an uncomfortable compromise between some folks of varying levels of assertiveness, obsessiveness, and linguistic myopia[2]. Likely not intended to be a minefield by some/most of its authors, but would be treated as one by small but frustratingly vocal segments of both its staunchest defenders and most enraged critics.

It would be really nice if both all of us could maybe just (figuratively) go out and touch some grass, instead of letting isolated personal frustrations turn into pet peeves and then into poorly-justified prescriptivism.

[1] This also reminds me of the alleged distinction between “transwoman” and “trans woman”. (German speakers and the like might find it particularly superfluous.)

[2] Speaking as a person with severe near-sightedness. (Edit: typo)

Nitpick: This may be true of “folx” and “Latinx”, but “womxn” (despite sometimes-similar connotations) seems to have originated as a way to highlight/signal feminism, and has only acquired queer connotations recently.

This almost sounds like a description of my local unitarian universalist church (minus the “trained psychologist” part - there are quite a few in the congregation, but our minister went to theology school).

That's not quite the same as running a red light. In many places in the US, it is legal to make a right turn when the traffic light is right, provided that you slow down to a complete stop first. In practice, if there aren't any cars or pedestrians around, many people just slow down to ~3mph and keep going (a "rolling" stop, which is not quite legal).

> JUST TO DELETE A FOLDER?!

The standard solution to that is compeltely anticlimactic. Just run the disk cleanup program (diskmgr), and there’ll be an option to remove “previous windows installations”.

It IS possible to manually delete it, but you would need to do the “take ownership” thing; being an admin user does not immediately give you permission to override security on files owned by TrustedInstaller, but you COULD still take ownership.

That being said, the last time I checked it wasn’t easy to get the “take ownership” thing work recursively.

It seems to me that under the hood, Windows is actually reasonably good. But the user experience had been slowly going downhill for a while since Windows 8, even though IMO it’s still okay-ish, despite Windows 10’s many annoyances.

I do see your point. But I think you are being too pedantic... By saying it's incompetence and "bad", the poster probably meant that the people at Amazon aren't doing a great job (in achieving whatever goals they want to achieve or we customers want them to achieve, in this case keeping the scammers out). Maybe the poster is just frustrated with Amazon not doing its job. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with egos in the sense that the people at Amazon are pathetic idiots that that we should scoff at or that we can indulge in a sense of superiority. It's simply about solving a problem.

Also, I don't think you were fully correct in saying that surprising is usually in reference to the ego. I think it's simply in reference to what you've seen before, what you are used to seeing, what you expect to see or would like to see. It's not necessarily ego-related. But yeah, having an open mind and not being limited by what you've seen is important. But I digress.