The Beatles famously stopped touring, and stuck exclusively to studio recording (apart from the Abbey Road rooftop concert), in no small part because they got tired of not being able to hear themselves sing or play due to all the girls' screaming.
> no ban on a married Catholic man (possibly a layman, a Latin Rite deacon, one of the already exceptional Latin Rite priests, or an Eastern Rite priest) being ordained Bishop of Rome after being elected by the College of Cardinals
That was the theme of the third "act" of one of my favorite novels, 1978's The Vicar of Christ by Walter F. Murphy.
Act 1: The protagonist — a young Catholic, son of a U.S. diplomat, and U.S. Marine Corps junior officer, is wounded at Iwo Jima in WWII. After becoming a law professor, he's recalled to active duty for the Korean War, where he's awarded the Medal of Honor for valor as a battalion commander in combat. (The author was himself a decorated Marine officer in Korea.)
Act 2: Years later, the protagonist is a longtime law school dean. He's appointed Chief Justice of the United States because of political deal-making between the President and a couple of different senators who have agendas.
Years after that, after a personal tragedy, the protagonist resigns and joins a monastery.
Act 3: Having been a monk for just a couple of years, the protagonist is elected pope by the College of Cardinals as a compromise candidate after a long deadlock between the two front-runners. He takes the name "Francis" (after Francis of Assisi) and immediately begins shaking things up both institutionally and doctrinally — to the displeasure of traditionalists.
> Let me guess, you've never worked in a real production environment?
The comment to which you're responding includes a note at the end that the commenter is being sarcastic. Perhaps that wasn't in the comment when you responded to it.
It wasn’t thanks for highlighting. Can be hard to tell online because there’s a lot of people genuinely suggesting everyone should build their own software on the fly
If the amount of code corporations produce goes even 2x there's gonna be a lot of jobs for us to fix every company's JIRA implementation because the c-suite is full of morons.
That gets tricky: To the extent that an AI is just a tool — along the lines of a trained pair of hands executing a human prompter's specific, detailed instructions — the human prompter might qualify as an "author."
From the U.S. Copyright Office in January 2025:
"The Office affirms that existing principles of copyright law are flexible enough to apply to this new technology, as they have applied to technological innovations in the past. It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements.
"This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.
"The Office confirms that the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability.
"It also finds that the case has not been made for changes to existing law to provide additional protection for AI-generated outputs."
The closest analogy is to a music producer sampling public domain audio. The composition will be protected by copyright but each individual sample will not.
Every single CGI rendered frame of Shrek is protected by copyright because it was human authored. It they used a diffuser to make Shrek 7, the individual frames would not be protected by copyright but their arrangement into a movie could be. That's a hugely different legal situation (for instance, if I chopped it up and made my own remix of it that would be protected).
Though this is complicated by the fact that the LLM initial training may have been massively illegal (or at least massively tortious). There's still a bunch of legal shoes to drop, one way or the other
> For people who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in the south, it was a generic symbol of rebellion or regional rivalry. Remember, Dukes of Hazzard, which aired in the 1980s ....
For people who grew up in the south in the 1960s (me, mostly), the Confederate battle flag was indisputably and unambiguously a symbol of white supremacy and keeping "the coloreds" in their supposedly-proper place. I really don't think it changed that much in the 1980s and 1990s.
I’m talking about a completely different generation that grew up decades later. Dukes of Hazzard was not a white supremacist TV show. It was a top rated prime-time show on CBS.
You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them. I once use the phrase “atomic bomb of patent law” half a dozen times in a brief to describe inequitable conduct doctrine. It’s a quote from a line of federal circuit cases. Co-counsel from Tokyo sent us a polite email asking if we can reduce the number of times we say “atomic bomb” out of consideration for the Japanese company that would be co-signing the brief.
The Federal Circuit obviously didn’t mean to suggest that inequitable conduct findings vaporize entire patent families the way the atomic bomb vaporized hundreds of thousands of Japanese families—even though that’s the only thing atomic bombs have ever been used for.
> You can’t take people’s use of symbols out of the context in which they use them.
So: What a symbol means to the writer (or speaker) is supposedly more important than what the symbol means to readers — who (according to the writer) must accommodate themselves to the writer's mindset instead of vice versa. This sender-oriented approach is in contrast to the writer's seeking to serve his readers — and the writer's intended message — by using the readers' language, if you will.
(I'm curious whether you've found the sender-oriented approach to work when writing a legal brief for a court or agency — in our joint line of work, the received wisdom is that it's decidedly suboptimal.)
> Instead, they resist the idea that those things are relevant to contemporary political disputes involving the descendants of the people who directly caused the harm and who were directly harmed.
There's such a thing as generational wealth — financial, cultural — that seems to pay compound interest to successive generations. When prior generations are deprived due to racism, classism, etc., it's not unlike someone who doesn't save for retirement because s/he was repeatedly robbed at gunpoint in earlier years and so was deprived of both those savings and of the compounding effect.
Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent.
I think few people dispute that people's circumstances are path-dependent. But it doesn't logically follow that this path dependency makes a difference morally or politically. Say you have two people who are equally poor, a white guy in Appalachia and a black guy in Baltimore. It's undoubtedly true that historical events contributed to each one's circumstances. The Appalachian's grandfather went a crappy school because he grew up in a coal mining town, while the Baltimorean's grandfather went to a crappy school because it was segregated. But the people who perpetrated those harms are dead. And our two individuals in the present were not victimized--neither of them were "robbed at gunpoint." They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. And both got really lucky on that dice roll--they were still born in the U.S. instead of Afghanistan. So what's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty differently than the other's? What's the logical basis for treating the one person's poverty as carrying greater moral and political weight than the other's?
My daughter's grandfather was worse off than either example above. The mortality rate for U.S. black infants in 1950 during Jim Crow was about 51 per 1,000. For infants born in 1950 in Bangladesh, like my dad, it was 228 per 1,000. Worse odds than Russian Roulette. And nearly any segregated school in America would have been an upgrade from the one in my dad's village, which had no walls and required people to take a boat there during monsoon season. That sucked for my dad, but that's irrelevant to the moral or political evaluation of my daughter's circumstances. She's a spoiled private school kid, just like her friend whose grandfather was a partner at Simpson Thacher in New York. And if she had been poor instead, like my wife's cousins in Oregon, there would be no logical basis for treating her poverty any differently than any of the multitude of poor people in Oregon.
> Your argument shifts between two frames--from talking about "successive generations" to events in a specific individual's life--without explaining why we should treat those frames as equivalent.
It's an analogy: If the relationship isn't self-evident, then I chose a poor analogy.
> They were simply born into particular circumstances by random chance, just like everyone else in the world. ...
Would it be unfair to summarize this position as — ultimately — "yeah, it sucks to be you, but that's a problem for you and your family, not for me and mine"? (Perhaps we even leave out families, so that in life it's sauve qui peut, every man for himself?) The societal group-selection disadvantages of that position are obvious, I'd think — most military organizations recognize that sauve qui peut is a hallmark of defeat by others who have better unit cohesion, which comes in part by putting your shipmate's welfare on at least an equal footing with your own.
The short YouTube video I linked to is worth the time. TL;DR (paraphrasing Barry Switzer): Some people like to think that they hit a triple in life but conveniently forget that they were born and raised on second base, while some other people's antecedents were forced to bat with balsa wood yardsticks and to run with 50-pound weight vests — that is, if they were allowed to step up to the plate at all.
> Mega is big enough to buy entire islands, and be its own country. A corporate country. One with a very specific constitution, enshrining rights, but also?
It's a charming thought. But it can't possibly survive the brute reality that the world is full of people with guns, planes, drones, boats/ships, missiles, etc., who feel entitled to call the shots, and sometimes to take whatever they can from whomever they can.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/why-did-the-beatles-stop-tourin...
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