DÉJÀ VU ZONE

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

"We'll fire you if you tell others how much you're making" The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 specifically protects employees who discuss their own wages with each other (you can't reveal someone else's wages if you were given that information in the course of work, but you can always discuss your own or any that were revealed to you outside of work duties)

"If we can't fire you for [discussing wages/seeking reasonable accommodation/filing a discrimination complaint/etc], we'll just fire you for something else the next day." This is called pretextual termination, and it offers your employer almost no protection; if you are terminated shortly after taking a protected action such as wage discussion, complaints to regulatory agencies, or seeking a reasonable accommodation, you can force the burden onto your employer to prove that the termination wasn't retaliatory.

"Disparaging the company on social media is grounds for termination" Your right to discuss workplace conditions, compensation, and collective action carries over to online spaces, even public ones. If your employer says you aren't allowed to disparage the company online or discuss it at all, their social media policy is illegal. However, they can forbid releasing information that they're obligated to keep confidential such as personnel records, business plans, and customer information, so exercise care.

"If you unionize, we'll just shut this branch down and lay everyone off" Threatening to take action against a group that unionizes is illegal, full stop. If a company were to actually shut down a branch for unionizing, they would be fined very heavily by the NLRB and be opening themselves up to a class-action lawsuit by the former employees.

"We can have any rule we want, it's only illegal if we actually enforce it" Any workplace policy or rule that has a "chilling effect" on employees' willingness to exercise their rights is illegal, even if the employer never follows through on any of their threats.

"If you [protected action], we'll make sure you never work in this industry/city/etc again." Blacklisting of any kind is illegal in half the states in the US, and deliberately sabotaging someone's job search in retaliation for a protected action is illegal everywhere in the US.

"Step out of line and you can kiss your retirement fund/last paycheck goodbye." Your employer can never refuse to give you your paycheck, even if you've been fired. Nor can they keep money that you invested in a retirement savings account, and they can only claw back the money they invested in the retirement account under very specific circumstances.

Grace is joking around with a selectively violent creature that can rip his soft squishy body apart in an instant!

But it’s also a lot of fun to hear Weir talk about all the stuff he wants to include in a possible sequel, like the fact that eridians can have several conversations at once even with the same eridian. He imagine Rocky and Adrian bickering in one conversation while having a nice conversation at the same time that slowly turns into a fight and all of a sudden they’re yelling at each other in two conversations about different things.

He also says they have terrible spacial memory because they can see everything around them all the time thanks to their echo location so to them it’s crazy that humans can only see in one direction but still remember what’s behind them and even what the last room they were in looks like. Apparently eridians mostly just remember that the room exists and that it has the computer in it but if you asked them where the computer is placed in the room they’ll struggle to give a precise answer.

And Rocky got scared when Grace hugged him because eridians don’t have a concept of expressing affection with physical touch. To them it’s only neutral or violent because thanks to their hard shell they can’t really feel much. They only use it to move each other around or to break through their prey’s shell to get to the soft insides. So in their inter-species friendship only Grace would feel any desire to touch Rocky. It makes it very cute that Rocky joins in on Grace’s hugging ritual. It’s purely for Grace’s sake.