I always found it fascinating how the law is such a unique and cloistered ecosystem.
The sciences and arts encourage self-education and self-discovery. Constructive disruption is admired and moves the fields forward. Those who make it accessible and reachable are celebrated.
I love your phrasing "law-priests". The law is the religion in a secular state. It has all the same trappings:
The ranks and orders of clergy, where only they are fit to interpret the sacred scripts, with strong bias and penalty for trying to do so as an uneducated layman
Adherence to doctrine and continuity (precedent) even as the environment it was established in no longer exists
The constant urge to obfuscate and revel in exclusive language, to continue the air of mystery and impermeability.
An overall attitude of fear and submission encouraged by the impenetrability. Even our richest and most powerful still fear the legal system for its caprice, and attempt to ward themselves from it with sigils and charms made of contracts.
Someone needs to nail up some theses to the door of the Supreme Court.
TBH, I sort of wonder the history of why they push the LGBT repression so hard in Russia.
In a place like the US, where you have culture war manifested through elections, it's an easy way to score points with a specific and identified demographic/donor group. Demonize the gays and then you don't have to lean on other voters who will ask about why the schools are failing and the economy is spiraling.
Does the Russian political system have such pressure groups?
I could sort of see it as part of a larger suite of "traditional values/restore past glory" messaging, but even there, it seems low on the checklist, and again, is there even meaningful campaigning where it pays dividends?
The immigration angle is bait and switch politicking. Has been for decades.
People feel economically stagnant and culturally disconnected.
Couldn't be the capitalist machine grinding you to dust while gnawing away any sort of social institutions or greater visions than "line goes up". It's clearly Juan or Abdul who are scrabbling to send a few dollars or Euros to their family. Excluding them is gonna roll back the clock to when a single worker could get a no-degree factory job straight out of high school and raise a sitcom-style family of four, you know!
Next one that comes to the door, I'm telling him he can have $20 if he humanely escorts the Latrodectus Hesperus living in our cupboard out. Let's see if he has any tricks up his sleeve other than poison.
Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.
I go to RMA and they ask "If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?"
Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I'm going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.
I started with some UMSDOS-based "full X11 desktop in 5 floppies" distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I'd go consistent, but I'm not sure I'm sold. Everything works, but even for an "unstable", the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.
I think 2049 is the 100th anniversary of the current PRC, so a reasonable target for ceremonial goals.
No different than saying an American leader said he wanted a Mars landing for the tricentennial in 2076. It's good symbolism, not necessarily a technical merric.
Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.
I'd expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn't pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.
It makes shopping for laptops either super-easy or super-hard.
I can either get a Thinkpad, or try to find the one or two HP and Dell business laptops with one... and we all know how it ends (looks at stack of X230t, E585, and new L13)
Is it a GE product?
It has some of the design cues of the export models of the UxxC series models.