D- day is a great example of why opsec matters so much. The Germans knew that the allies were going to invade, and if they had been prepared they very well might have rebuffed the invasion. But the secrecy worked, and operation overlord succeeded instead of being a bloody failure.

If the target of the military raid had known when it was coming, they could have simply relocated anything actually important away from the target zone.

A useful analogy is probably a boxer and a ring: your opponent knows that you’re going to throw a punch, but you really don’t want him to know exactly what punch you’re going to throw when.

As said elsewhere: 30 days or else what?

Trump will withhold the federal dollars Congress appropriated to NY that he already wants to withhold? Projects that would be DOA in a hard-right Congress might be even deader?

Hochul will get another empty threat from the fed DOT?

I assure you that anyone who ever put on a town hall debate, including the League of Women voters and definitely the TV networks, screened the questions and reserved the right to exclude anyone they chose to.

No debate or political event since well before Nixon/Kennedy has been “open to everyone”.

“town hall” is a style of event. Back when there were meaningful debates during presidential campaigns, it used to be a regular choice.

I guarantee you that they were closed events, with attendees chosen legally-arbitrarily by whatever TV network was hosting the event.

So long as he takes questions from those in attendance, it’s a town hall. Even if no cameras are allowed.

So, what rule do you think makes “congressional town halls” work differently than any other campaign activity?

So, how does it work? Does your state have a law requiring congressional “town halls” to be open to the public?

Things like the MS-PL strike me as Open Source but not Free Software, but I can’t think of a contrary example which is Free Software but not Open Source.

Unless the town hall is paid for with taxpayer dollars or held on government property, it’s a citizen who happens to be in Congress having a private event with their political supporters.

Same as a political party convention or fundraiser dinner,.AFAIK.

(And, depending on state law, even a function on government property may be legally private.)

“task masking” happens for only one reason : managers value appearance over honesty.

Gallant writes code and documentation quickly and efficiently, then pulls out a Gameboy while waiting for new issues to come in = must be a bad worker.

Goofus mutters all day and types furiously, but produces no usable code = obvious the backbone of the team.

This really depends on what you mean by “pray.”

Sincerely worship and praise a pagan godhead as if they were responsible for the deeds Scripture attributes to God? No. It’s as bad as lying in court, stealing, or killing someone.

Falsely go through the motions of pagan prayer, such as in a game, as an actor, or under threat of death? Usually. Some are sticklers, but most are OK with leaving cookies for Santa.

Sincerely giving praise or worship to a being other than God, for things asserted as being done in God’s service or things not done by Her? It depends. Some may be hard no, some may be open yes.

There are something like 3 billion nominal followers of the God of Abraham alive today. With such a large population, it’d be hard to find a statement that they all agree on, including “water is wet”.

There’s plenty of references in the OT to Jews doing the same thing.

And European Christianity chased out worship of anyone save the God of Abraham rather violently after a generation or two.

My parents chose each other. They’re both good people, but they weren’t a good match at all and none of us were especially surprised when they divorced.

The Mrs and I chose each other, and while it would be arrogant to assert that we’re definitely a good match I get the impression that my kids would be shocked if we split.

The structural key to a happy marriage is, I think, the freedom to leave. If my parents had split when I was a kid they’d probably have a better relationship. But because of economics and law and pride they didn’t, which made the pain last way longer than it should have.

It sounds like you’re not proposing a technocracy, and are instead proposing a direct democracy with a bureaucratic civil service chosen by popular vote.

Which is a fancy way to have an inefficient and easily gamed democracy. As is done in Iran and Russia.

If “people vote” is a core and meaningful part of any system, that system is democratic. And inefficiencies in democracy are always and only ways to prevent the people from getting what they want.

If you don’t see how avoiding bloodshed for power changing is a fundamental advantage of democracies I think you may want to re-read your histories. The ONLY way power ever changed hands from one group to another prior to the American election of 1796 was through violence or the threat of violence.

The American political system occasionally having a terrible choice is one of the tradeoffs for having power be changeable without bloodshed.

Because of lifetime appointments the US legal system is nearly a technocracy as you describe. It arrived at a decision in 1971 that a wide swath of the body politic was so opposed to that they essentially lost all faith the status quo. What followed was a decades long campaign to shift that pseudo-technocracy. Not a bloody insurrection.

You and I may disagree with their position, and we both dislike some of the results of their movement, but the worth of a government form is how well it responds to such discontent.

I don’t think you’ll get any disagreement that the current administration is exposing some flaws in the American political system. But the potential fixes for those flaws are numerous, while a brand new system as you propose would have its own expected and unexpected flaws.

Let’s talk about those goldbugs, since anything else urges trolls to show up. If they’re in power what stops them from declaring that their opponents are “fake” economists? How would we remove them from power?

If we’re talking about which forms of government are “better” than others, we need a benchmark of what makes one better or worse. I’m a big fan of the ideal stated in the US declaration of independence: governments exist to preserve the rights of their people, in the broadest possible sense.

A technocracy, where established experts make relevant rules, is probably the worst form of government that’s still trying to be good. For whatever topic you have, the original paradigm becomes fiercely embedded, and because power wants to preserve itself that basic framework would be even worse than what we have now.

Imagine if a group of goldbug economists had been in charge of markets and banks when the great depression hit. Or if ma bell has been in charge of telecommunications when the Internet was invented. Or if the same GM engineers who killed the EV1 and bet on trucks were in charge when electric cars and hybrids started becoming popular.

Technocracies don’t have a way to change perspectives. You get all the bad parts of a bureaucratic democratic Republic, and none of the way to short circuit bloody revolutions that makes democracies the least-bad option. You might as well just go back to monarchies – at least for those, there was a person who could be almost impartial when it comes time to decide if old ways need to change.