EGG_CREAM

The sun would come up even earlier without dst. It’s just the earth’s tilt that’s causing the sun to come up earlier after spring, nothing we did to the clocks.

Having it, physically. It’s harder for companies to play silly games like put the media into a vault, take it off their streaming platforms for tax reasons, etc… I started collected physical blu rays when HBO randomly took a million things off its platform so that it could do accounting tricks.

I want to support artists who make content I like, but I also want control over my media library. Physical media is the best way to do this.

Agreed about the 2-3% target. Seems like a crazy low target for a country that has been, historically, a strong exporter. Or at least seems to want to be an exporter. I wonder if one of the reasons behind this low target rate is that inflation will ultimately decide how expensive government debt is, since under normal circumstances people will want their bonds to at least pay out enough to cover inflation.

3. Is an interesting perspective, because it’s not at all how I see it. There really isn’t anything for Apple there right now except that they stumbled into making hardware that is perfect for the technology right now. They could a.) burn all their cash and go into massive debt chasing a big foggy question mark that may be entirely overvalued or b.) focus on the hardware right now, wait for the technology to mature and apply it judiciously as applications for it come to light, rather than racing to hamfist it in unnecessary, expensive, and ultimately broken ways.

Siri is useless, so is Alexa and Hey Google or whatever they are calling that. LLMs will change that but cost has to come down to make that feasible. On-device AI would be the gold standard there, I hope that’s not a pipe dream. Apple seems to be positioned niceley for that outcome, if it comes to pass.

UBI is the opposite of centralized planning. Instead of the state deciding what resources people need, and who “deserves” help, it leaves it up to individuals to decide how best to divvy up resources, and everybody gets it.

As for tools that make citizens obey, the government already has the best one: a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Everything else is child’s play compared to that.

I kind of lost the UBI plot, to be fair. I don’t really understand what UBI actually had to do with this exercise fundamentally, the exact same thing happens with or without it, it’s just that the floor of what “affordable housing” is gets risen. Unless you think that an unfettered, UBI-less economy doesn’t produce expensive housing? Which, I think we have many real world case studies in almost every major city in rich countries to disprove that assertion.

I do see what you mean, I think, now that I’m rereading and contemplating. A monthly stipend probably does more to raise prices than anything useful, unless you also pair it with regulation to stop the wealthy and powerful from taking it all for themselves. And at that point you could have just done those regulations without UBI. Hmm.

Do you think a few lump sum payments over a citizens lifetime would have the same effect? Maybe some large sum paid when you reach age of majority and then again at retirement?

I am a progressive government. The free market has failed to provide a necessary service. So now I pass a law that creates a not for profit contractor that builds houses. It’s not that complicated. We do it with fire departments, police, and many other services already. Free market might have been more efficient theoretically, but when it fails in practice we find another solution.

That’s because our mass protests are focused on the overseas concentration camps, illegal detainment and arrests, and the other authoritarian moves our president has made. It’s true that Americans in general care little about foreign policy. It’s not an anti-Europe thing, it’s just that people care about stuff that more immediately affects them. European countries are smaller and more integrated, so foreign policy has a more immediate affect on them. Foreign policy has a dramatic affect on Americans lives, but it’s usually indirect and therefore not top of mind for the average citizen. That doesn’t mean we like our government’s foreign policy. And all that’s without mentioning that many believe the Greenland talk is not serious, and simply a distraction, and therefore mass protests would actually be playing into the admins hands.

Just because it goes away doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

I don’t have any citations, but I don’t think that “work” was at all similar to what we do now. Early hominid work would have involved many different tasks throughout the day, such as tracking, hunting, cleaning, gathering, building, repairing, traveling, etc, right? Compare that to “do this one task 8-16 hours in a row,” and it does seem like a mode of work we would be particularly ill suited for. Orrrr maybe I’m wrong, I’m using general knowledge and inductive reasoning, so I would not be suprised to learn I’m off base here.

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I don’t know why I keep hearing that conciousness “could be an illusion.” It’s literally the one thing that can’t be an illusion. Whatever is causing it, the fact there is something it is like to be me is, from my subjective perspective, irrefutable. Saying that it could be an illusion seems nonsensical.

It’s very intellectually lazy of you not to be curious about why the creator and decades long, knowledgeable guardian of Linux has the opposite opinion as you, all because you read the Wikipedia about logical fallacies one time.

No. I think plenty of us recognize that the law has to have rigidly defined lines that don’t always line up neatly with morality. A great example is the “jailbait” subreddit that was talked about above. It makes sense that it’s technically legal, but I’d rather not be associated with the site that hosts it or the people who frequent it.

Something to point out also is that more equality is actually better even for the 1%. They are just too short-term-focused and greedy to see that. There is nothing they can get today that they wouldn’t be able to get tomorrow if we taxed them appropriately. In return, they would live in a more stable and safe society, a less brittle economy, and wouldn’t be as reviled socially. But they are just too focused on their net worth to see that.

No it’s not. It’s just a picture of a naked pregnant woman showering. She’s not in a suggestive pose, having sex, or anything else that would suggest sexual content. There’s nothing inherently sexual about nudity by itself.

If you say “everyone’s idea of what is sexual can be different,” I would agree, which I think is part of the point of posts like this: why does the most restrictive definition of sexual content always seem to be the point of view our lawmakers are protecting?

Edit: she’s not showering, I think. I went back and looked at it, when I read the post from my phone I thought she was showering.

I think so, because the users seem to like having different options. For commercial software, it makes sense to count how many devices use a particular distribution as the measure of “success”, but for projects like most Linux distributions , I don’t know that number of users makes sense. Why should we care how many users a particular distribution has, when almost all of them aren’t paying or contributing? Having more users doesn’t make the software any better inherently, and nobody is making money from those users. Instead, I would argue that user enthusiasm and dev interest are better measures of success for open source projects like this, and arch, Debian, Linux mint, etc are all doing fine in those regards.

Where is “racist” even factoring into it? I see this argument all the time, mostly about North Korea or china. There is nothing racist about suspecting someone from a specific country because you don’t trust that country’s government. That is not racist and what’s more I think you know that. It think these arguments are extremely bad faith. Here’s the test: is it about race? If not, then it’s not racist. For example, if I don’t trust Chinese nationals to work at my company because I think they will steal secrets, but I absolutely don’t have that same fear about people who are ethnically Chinese but born in my country, that’s not racist. If you want to call it xenophobic, sure, I’ll buy that. But racist? You are conflating nation and race on purpose.

Heard from where? How would they do that? Tutanota doesn’t have the key, the end user does. I keep hearing weird things about Turanota that sound like the types of rumors intelligences agencies who really don’t want people to use the service would start.

In their defense, using Athena again here would have definitely sounded strange and not natural. But, they could have used the word “it” without introducing ambiguity, which they do 2 times already.

The point is to make working for the federal government a traumatic experience.

https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/10/inside-key-maga-l...

Stop it with the false equivalency. China’s government is not Chinese people. You can’t be racist against a government.

Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding, but it sounds like you feel there should be some higher, ideal-based reason for the ban. But this is happening in the anarchic environment of international relations. The USA’s goal is to reduce the potential for its citizens to be engaged by enemy propaganda. Yes, they are more worried about the influence of Chinese propaganda than domestic propaganda, why shouldn’t they be? This isn’t about ideals, it’s about power. And probably also lots of lobbying from X and Meta.

After your very last sentence, I’m not even sure what your point is here. You just listed a bunch of reasons you don’t think mail in ballots are safe, and then ended with saying the alternative also isn’t safe from vote buying.

Vote buying also does not appear to be a problem in the US electoral system, as another commented pointed out: in order to make a difference in the election, you’d have to buy enough votes that someone would be bound to tell on you.

I did notice from the article that reading is destructive, so every time you read (or at least every time you read a 0), you have to re-write it out. I wonder how much that affects the practical durability.

You are making so, so many assumptions, many of them false. For instance, there is all likelihood the OP doesn’t mind meritocratic systems, and just thinks ours aren’t nearly meritocratic enough. That’s what that “too much” could also mean.

For instance, Elon Musk is one of the richest people in the world. He inherited a ton of wealth, made some good decisions, and made a ton of bad decisions. In your version of the world, because he is the richest person in the world, he is also the most “competent” person in the world.

You’re completely ignoring the possibility that the poster is lamenting that there isn’t enough meritocracy, not that there’s too much of it, because you are for some reason assuming we all live in a 100% meritocratic world, or at least that’s the impression you give in this post.

Why do you assume that? It’s for a very similar reason that you attribute others not being able to accept the unfairness of meritocracy. You are presumably relatively successful, or think you will be, and don’t want to live in a world where that’s not 100% because you are more competent than others. You don’t want luck to have played a role.

It may be frustrating to hear someone who doesn’t know you make a ton of possibly false assumptions about you, your circumstances, and your motivations, but I’d say you invited that on yourself when you did the same.

Your comment has me wondering what it is specifically I find so irksome about the interview question in the blog post. In one of my first interviews they gave me a fairly well know riddle and asked me to work out the answer on a white board in front of them. I had no problem with that, actually I found it pretty fun. There’s something about this question, I haven’t figured it out quite yet, that bothers me more than other analysis questions. Maybe it’s just the flavor the writer added to it, I’ll have to figure that out.

Fair enough, I have also worked with people like that. On the other end, asking asinine questions with limitations id never have in real life is also NPC stuff. I would say if an interviewer is getting dead eyed “I don’t know” answers a lot, it says something about the questions they are asking as much as the quality of interviewees they are getting.

Sorry, edited my comment to clarify. Your advice is good, I just don’t like that that’s how so many interviews work.

I really don’t, not when the question is something as simple as something I can type into a calculator.