satellites

Bandcamp rules. I do still subscribe to Apple Music for cheap streaming, but for albums I really like, I'll spend the $8 on bandcamp for the high quality album download. Better support for the artist, and protection against license-pulling BS like this.

“A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police.”

“By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here.

This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.

You’re making a huge false equivalence. We’re talking about anthropogenic climate change specifically. Implying that it is the same as ancient weather patterns from before the Industrial Revolution is comically dishonest.

1. Replace the protesting mods with new ones who don’t care about 3rd party apps

2. Continue making Reddit more addictive and user-hostile, attracting casual browsers and alienating super users (who they don’t care about anyway)

3. Cash checks from advertisers and VCs who like the new strategy

4. IPO

5. Eventually lose relevance and get replaced by the next fledgling community forum site before that, too, gets hollowed out by VC money

I fell for this once when I was a newer developer. I bought a book on my Kindle about Ruby on Rails, thinking it might be more insightful or accessible than the Rails docs. But every chapter was literally just copy/pasted from the Rails docs (which are free).

The more vague and hand-wavy it sounds, the better it is for corporate PR statements.

The trouble with arbitrary societal consensus is that it’s arbitrary. And not necessarily any wiser than an individual’s personal desires.

These monks aren’t impulsively killing themselves, they seem to be towards the end of their lives anyway and are choosing how they want to go out. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I might prefer to be in hospice hopped up on drugs when I pass, but I won’t claim to be morally superior for it.

Gotta get those engagement metrics. Also it actually is nice having them all in a row in a tweet thread.

I think we can safely say that social media hurts mental health worldwide, and school shootings are also really bad for people. It’s almost like they’re separate issues and we don’t have to pick one or the other to deal with. Does that sound reasonable?

The person you’re replying to said that the possibility of being shot at school is psychologically taxing. This would apply to all students at all schools, not just ones where a shooting literally happened. It is relevant because of how frequent school shootings are now, compared to say, 30 years ago. Columbine shook the country when it happened, now we’re at a couple Columbine-style incidents per year. You can say “well that’s still a low overall percentage of students who get shot” and be technically correct while ignoring the gravity of the situation and the fact that other first world countries don’t have this problem.

The fact that school shootings have been so normalized that we’re sitting here and discussing the math around whether they’re worse than social media is… so profoundly sad it’s hard to describe.

Can you explain how TikTok (a Chinese “psyop”) is more harmful to the average citizen than Facebook or Instagram (a corporate American “psyop?”)

Can you explain how TikTok is more harmful to the average citizen than the constant mass shootings that happen in the U.S.?

Touch grass, indeed.

How long have you been following politics and economics in a serious capacity?

Being conscious intelligent creatures, humans ought to be able to learn from their mistakes and implement change accordingly.

We sure ought to, I agree with you there.

Social Security in the U.S. is typically for retired people age ~65 or older. There are other social programs for low-income people, but they are abysmally insufficient for what we’re talking about. Usually disabled people are paid by “disability insurance” but you have to get a job first to even qualify for that. So that’s usually for injuries etc.

If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society.

Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.

I’m sorry that happened to you but this seems like a bit of an overreaction.

Yes, I’m sure an actor adds more real value to a SaaS company than engineers do. Recognizable talking heads who read lines into a camera are famously hard to find.

Most people don’t give a shit about 3rd party app stores. I doubt 90% of iPhone users even know this is happening. (I say this as an iPhone user myself). So, I’m not sure negative PR is that much of a motivator.

But that price and convenience is at the cost of quality and employee safety. And honestly not even worth it as a consumer even if you don’t care about the ethical issues. I’ve been severely disappointed with the quality of the average item on Amazon over the last few years, to the point that I have stopped using them completely. Even Walmart is better, which is saying a lot.

I think they were just mentioning some catchphrases that got stuck in their head at the time, not presenting a grand theory of everything based on cartoons.

She admitted on video that she misrepresented work hours “by mistake.” That’s how they got her.

I’m usually guilty of not reading the whole article, but this time I did.

She admitted on video that she misrepresented some working hours “by mistake.” That video was cited in the ruling.

Social media and gig economies are also net negative, yes.

I’ll always pay for Spotify or something like it because the UX is 1000x better than pirating everything and trying to sync up my collection to the cloud across devices. Not gonna bother with that. The ease of discovering new music and sharing it with friends is also unparalleled.

For movies, I usually just pay $4 to rent it from iTunes on my Apple TV. If it’s something I love and want to keep forever I might pirate it.

Agreed. I've worked at a scarce few companies who organized this way, but it seemed to work better than "frontend team, backend team, devops team." When each piece of the stack is a different team, it creates unnecessary hostility and miscommunication. Aligning engineers around products, such that your iOS dev and your backend dev are on the same team, seems to run more smoothly. YMMV.

Primarily used for illicit goods and services

This is the only actual use case. And it’s not a great look.

That’s a blatant straw man fallacy. No one here is insinuating that financial institutions are pure and innocent.

If anything, crypto news over the past year has proven one thing: that the crypto space is just as corrupt as “traditional finance,” but with none of the guardrails that make it harder to commit blatant scams.

Society developed immune responses to financial fraud in the form of regulations. They are insufficient and evil people still take advantage of loopholes in the system. However, crypto right now is a living example of how much worse it could be.

I noticed this happening pre-Covid and gave up on Prime. I didn’t use it enough to justify the price anyway. But I was experiencing 3-4 day shipping instead of 2 days. Not a big deal, but it broke the promise of “free 2 day shipping” in my mind which was the whole point of paying for Prime.

Industrialized humans have a historically abysmal track record of ham-fistedly “optimizing” ecosystems.

Any manual intervention into an ecosystem generally requires establishing an indefinite commitment to more manual maintenance.

Who determines what “optimal” means? Who implements the optimization? Who pays for it? What happens in a few decades when people lose political interest in the project? Which creatures do we optimize for? Why are we doing this at all? How have similar projects fared in the past?

I can tell you haven’t seriously studied ecology from the way you are approaching this question, so I’m not too worried. But consider questions like those as you ponder this scenario.

Yes, but in specific quantities, no? Manually depositing them on the surface after extraction would still disrupt the system’s balance.

Why are you assuming that rare earth metals deep below the surface of the earth would benefit the life ON the surface that has evolved to live in the absence of those metals?

Even if for some bizarre reason the metals were beneficial, what about when the mining operation is done and humans leave the area? It just goes back to the previous status quo.

It’s a disruption either way.

Yes. It’s farcical at this point.