lores

The American propaganda machine has done a good job on Americans...

In the immortal words of Ladré:

  Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
  Les aristocrates à la lanterne.
  Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!
  Les aristocrates on les pendra.
  Si on n’les pend pas
  On les rompra.
  Si on n’les rompt pas
  On les brûlera.

These convenient and cheap book/game/video platforms sure killed piracy. Now that piracy's gone forever, we can enshittify the whole thing again! At least I imagine that's how it went in the meeting of 35 year-old corporate suits.

That's not what's considered waterfall, though. Specs are always required for any work, even if they're only in your head, even if the work takes 15 minutes. It's the length of the feedback loop and the resistance to spec change that makes waterfall, and by his use of tracer bullets I very much doubt it's the case here, if there was any doubt at all to have.

If you are on the spectrum at all, you have a high-to-very-high chance of being more clumsy than average due to differences in sensory processing.

They don't? I'm in London, and my local grocer will happily sell me one bean if I want. I've bought 1 bird chilli several times.

Those only work as long as legislators have shame, or there is a significant faction that can use the provided legitimacy to redistribute power away from the elites towards the people. That's not the case at a national level in the US right now.

Why not? There are only two redresses against elites who don't abide by a social contract: the law & courts, and physical violence. The courts are much preferable, but legislators now serve those elites rather than the public, and the courts are impotent or unwilling to use what power remains with them. What's left but physical violence to either dissuade or punish?

The specific stigma against physical violence (and not against other types, even for cumulatively worse actions) strikes me as very self-serving, an instance of "the law forbids both rich and poor to sleep under a bridge." It's increasingly the only remedy available to everyday people, and the mad acceleration of government capture by elites in the last decade is making murder and rioting inevitable, at least as long as ordinary people still feel they should have some power.

Any sort of violence is bad, singling out physical violence as uniquely bad gives misbehaving elites impunity.

Society still has paid at least for your education, depends on your working power to at least fund your dependents, and at least on some degree of reasonableness from you not to raise everyone's insurance premiums.

There's a line to draw somewhere, but even the most ra-ra-individualist heavily depends on society, and has/should have obligations in turn.

I would switch to Codex, but Altman is such a naked sociopath and OpenAI so devoid of ethical business practices that I can't in good conscience. I'm not under any illusion that Anthropic is ethical, but it is so far a step up from OpenAI.

Change and progress like the people of France deciding they had enough of injustice and nobles' impunity, then? A little short-term pain for social progress? We agree.

A CEO can choose physical, mental, legal or financial violence against the common man. The common man only has the choice of physical violence. Without it he is impotent.

[flagged]

I was referring to the myriad of things.

Holding the EU back from the role models of two fascistic societies is an excellent thing.

I'm glad you bring that example, because I was in fact an immigrant in the Netherlands for several years. Do people speak English? Many do. Will they speak English by default? No. They are obviously more comfortable in Dutch than they are in English, and anything not directly addressed to me was said in Dutch, at work and with local friends. Many people do, in fact, not speak enough English to communicate effectively. Official documents are in Dutch. That made not knowing Dutch very difficult.

I didn't think it was them being stubborn, just me being ignorant, because I don't think I am the center of the universe. Yes, am immigrant to Germany should absolutely learn German. Countries and their people are not the backdrop for someone's main character complex.

Calling people's preference for their own language "stubborn" is a puzzlingly entitled take. Do you expect every country in Europe to change their language to English? If not, how do you propose immigrants be fully functional in a country without speaking the local language?

Same problem as rating your pain on the pain scale: is 10 the worst pain I've experienced, or the worst I can imagine? Because I've got a... very vivid imagination. And still, that's the best we can do. I blame an imperfect universe.

To be fair, the US has never been peaceful, and it's the country that started the most wars since WW2. It's just that it used to be in our team, and human nature makes the aggressiveness of our team justified, or at least understandable, or at least ignorable, or at least not quite changing our deep feelings.

That's unnecessarily cynical. I've been in plenty of companies where the staff, managers included, enjoy going for a pint together. I'm in the UK, maybe it's cultural.

Don't forget driving, the most dangerous thing one can do in the West. It sounds be the first thing to be banned, really, the costs are just too enormous.

Please provide a source for that claim. An honest person would rather doubt than resort to logical fallacies.

And Zapp's scene in the restaurant was a parody of Shatner's spoken word covers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yfbsu1bbQE

This is the most toxic of urban legends. Fiduciary duty to shareholders means acting in the interests of the company rather than your own. There is no duty to maximise profits against all morals.

See https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty

That's the technical meaning, but in common language the two gave been interchangeable for centuries, so it's regrettably hard to be pedantic.

There's a sizable logical jump between your second and third statements.

If you own an item you want to destroy, no problem. If a company owns an item it want to destroy, it can't anymore. The conflation of persons and corporations has been responsible for an enormous amount of evil, and it's time to start distinguish the two again.

That's what the judiciary is for. Really!

Because as long as there is a theoretical edge case, nothing should be done, your model is flawed. That's a mentality very common amongst software engineers. In the real physical world, even tying your shoes has edge cases.

Hmm, thinking of it, it may explain the love of sandals in said community.

Then fewer clothes will get manufactured, which is exactly the goal.