Everything they do is heavily regulated. They cannot do things like cut off service for any reason whatsoever, or raise rates without justification.

The best houses in the best locations go to the nomenklatura, to the governor's cousin, to the nephew of the town party boss, and to black market operators who are capable of providing large bribes to those who decide housing allocations.

Normal people live three hours outside the city center in a low quality concrete highrise.

Paints have predictable mathematical properties in terms of what color they produce when mixed; they just mix nonlinearly, which is counterintuitive for people who have not practiced mixing paint a lot.

Photoshop and the other comparison programs on the page illustrate the linear mixing that most people intuitively expect.

Stoicism is about not allowing your emotions to govern you.

Subtle but profound difference.

Then you said "there is no point at which the process is 'complete' for a given policy and must be merely accepted..." This sounds very much like you believe it is both possible and correct to revisit any policy topic at any time, and with no particular criteria for when it is valid to do so -- it is always valid to do so, under that statement.

Thus, I asked for clarification -- it sounds like there are no possible objective standards for the lawmaking process in your formulation above; any law or policy can be revisited at any time, and without any objective criteria that leaves purely emotional arguments and whoever successfully gathers a bigger band of followers to their side as the main determining factor in what policy we get.

No ongoing rational standards, logic, or objective argumentation is required or even relevant -- just might makes right, anything goes, whoever convinces the most people to agree through sophistic "advocacy" wins?

I suppose that such a system could exist in theory, but it seems to be heavily at odds with the constitutional legal system that the United States uses.

Why ought we revisit and overturn that process in this case? Is there any objective criterion beyond "it seems bad to me, I don't like the result of our lawmaking process?"

Society has already spoken on this matter. It seems that your criteria amount to nothing more than "when I personally dislike the results of the social process, the social process has failed, and we ought to revisit it."

So I ask again the question you've begged: by what formula or philosophy are we to determine when a social decision such as "allow gambling" is bad? Is there anything beyond your personal feelings on a topic that we can turn to as a criterion?

Note that I am not agreeing or disagreeing with the merits of that outcome; I am just noting that the process you describe has already been done, and has determined in this case that "gambling is OK."

Why should we revisit that process simply because a few people dislike the result? By what right do you suppose your personal views ought to overturn this social process -- simply because you and a few others personally disapprove of the outcome?

Should social processes always yield results that you personally like, and be considered invalid when they don't?

By that standard, we're done, the matter has already been concluded in favor of "allow gambling."

Can you propose a universally acceptable formula or philosophy? Shall we just consult you on a case by case basis to determine when and where a putative power differential exists, and exactly when such a differnetial becomes large enough to verge into "unfair"?

_A few employees_ they acquihired support Datomic.

If those few employees quit, get fired, get transferred to some other project, etc., then no more Datomic support.

This is the intractable and unavoidable problem with the use of KPIs as a management tool: Goodhart's Law -- any metric used as a target ceases to be a good measure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

You are -- literally -- telling the team, "go make this KPI number go up. Your entire job performance will be evaluated on that basis." It is unsurprising that the team therefore focuses on making that number go up.

If you want teams to consider the goals of the company, or anything at all besides their KPIs, don't use KPIs.

These views are replete with many untestable and non-falsifiable axiomatic assumptions, which must be accepted on "faith."

That word means "accepting the validity of those axioms _despite_ their lack of congruence with reality."

Catholicism is, by far, the largest Christian denomination in the US.

Moreover, large areas in the south, midwest, and California favor the "evangelical" and "fundamentalist" varieties of Protestant theology, where Hell (and inculcating mass fear of Hell) is very much the central concern today.

Your immediate local community likely does not have many of either group.