About a few million less Americans than a few years ago, I guess.

Yes. There's a difference between walking a trail and maybe littering a a few pieces of trash, and walking a trail while actively setting branches on fire.

One scenario is manageable to leave be, or perhaps one or two volunteers clean it up. The fires have an entire trail closed down to everyone.

With some FOSS projects being bombarded by scraping traffic, redoing their PR system, considering ways to limit contributiors, and even going closed source, I don't think such a metaphor is an exaggeration.

We don't technically have "winner take all" capitalism. At least some people 90 ish years ago we had many mechanisms to regulate such situations.

Then more vampires creeped in and convinced people that the government they were voted into sucks. So began a campaign to ruin the regulations protecting them from the vampires as they slowly filled their blood banks.

As your parents about stability. It's not a foreign concept. We just let America throw its labor away.

Do most people in an organisation have that power?

Whichever pays for health insurance longer.

>in manacles chained to an oar on a slave ship

Yeah, we call that health insurance during a recession in the US

For a while now, the US has been on a position where they do not care about "better work", because better work is not making the line go up as fast anymore. That's pretty much the core factor that will lead to the next major financial crash when reality eventually catches up.

> No amount of knowledge or discussion will make a person accept something they don’t want to accept.

I think this is what causes many people (software or otherwise" to shut down. Listening is important but a 2-way street. Someone choosing not to listen to you turns a discussion into a demand.

And "demands" are where the technical/Non-technical split get tricky . Does a doctor listen to some executive to do a thing that betrays their parient and oath? Less seriously, does a programmer listen to a product manager to prioritize B over A (A in which turns into a showstopper in a few weeks' time), or try to go around them to emphasize A needs work now (remember, PM is assumedly not accepting it anymore)?

Discussions devolving into demands into your craft is the worst.

Oklahoma, huh? Wish I could be surprised.

Even then, hard to tell if this will hold up in court. Town halls should be recorded ("should") and there's inevitable up and downtime for speakers. This is why police have a radar tolerance of 5 mph before trying to write a speeding ticket.

It was recorded(linked elsewhere in this thread) and clearly shows that he wasn't merely arrested after going a few seconds over time.

I see he stood up at 1:55:00 and by 1:58:28 the security is behind him.

I don't know if that's long enough for a trespassing charge to really stick. But then again, Oklohoma.