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stretchcat

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How do you think those of us not using facebook manage to not starve to death for want of a bakery? Trust me, I can find local businesses just fine without Zuck crawling up my ass.

Bakery A feels compelled to buy ads from Facebook because Bakery B does. Bakery B has to because Bakery C does. Bakery C has to because Bakery A does. Facebook isn't providing value here. Facebook is a parasite that specializes in creating prisoner dilemmas used to bleed small businesses dry. Facebook is lower than mosquitoes, who at least provide nourishment to birds.

To be fair, solving a great many murders is probably a simple matter of finding the family member with literal blood on his hands and a history of domestic abuse. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure that out.

I've never tried going that far, but once a cop looked offended when I said he couldn't search my car, like I had impugned his honor, so I volunteered the explaination 'It's nothing personal, just a matter of principle." That seemed to satisfy him.

A calm tone won't necessarily make the cop calm, but a bold/agressive tone will almost certainly make the cop respond in kind. When I decline a request from a cop, I make sure to do it with a sugared tongue. The cop isn't entitled to the 'sorry' in "No, sorry", but that little indignity might make the difference so I'm willing to suffer it.

Even randomized numbers wouldn't liberate you from the complainers. 69 and 420 would probably be the first to fall. 13, 88, and 14 would also likely get some people upset. And if you remove 13 but not 4, 17, 39, 616, or 666, you'll leave an opening for the complainers to accuse you of all sorts of biases.

Take a closer look at roadkill the next few times you see it. You'll often notice the eyes, tongue, etc are missing. Sometimes the corpse will look like a skeleton with skin but no organs.

These are circumstances commonly attributed to aliens or cuppracabra attacking cattle. However it's very common in roadkill when you start to look for it. It's pretty mundane, though I understand some people will find it startling the first time they see or hear of it.

My Bluetooth headphones have been pretty bulletproof since I started using them a few years ago. Battery life still lasts two or three weeks ay my usage levels too. But I only keep them paired to one device, and I understand most of the grief with these sorts of things comes with switching between hosts often.

Losing faith in UX 5 years ago

Did I stutter?

Leave the kids alone. Adults who market harmful products to kids are predatory assholes. I'd hope there is a special place in hell for whoever dreamed up count chocola and all the other bullshit used to sell candied cereal to kids. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it was ethical. And in the case of Juul, going into highschools with their marketting material, I doubt it was even legal.

Do-ocracy. Just because none of those devs want it enough to implement it, doesn't mean they'd turn away somebody who did. If somebody wants it bad enough, they'll do it.

Losing faith in UX 5 years ago

Quibble over the word 'empathy' if you like, but those peddling addictive substances to teenagers are still scum.

In your eagerness to paint me as a hypocrite, you forgot one important little detail: I never implied Tesla invented electric cars.

No clue what that cmdrtaco quote has anything to do with this conversation, but let me be clear here: you're the one giving Telsa credit for things they didn't do, not me.

My theory is that using cannabis as a coping mechanism to dull your mind to some other sort of trauma or despair will often lead to harder drugs. Cannabis is not a good drug for such coping because with sustained heavy use it will inevitably lose it's efficacy. When a well adjusted healthy person develops a cannabis tolerance, they can take a break for a few weeks to reset their tolerance. Not a big deal. But somebody who's using cannabis to cope? Going sober for a few weeks may be intolerable, but weed is no longer helping them, so many turn to another drug. Consider that coping with problems instead of addressing them directly often leads to worse outcomes in the long run, since many problems can get worse the longer you ignore them. This makes the apparent need for another drug feel even stronger in this sort of person.

In brief, cannabis cannot solve your problems and trying to mask your problems with cannabis is often the start of a downward spiral.

Public school anti-drug programs told kids that cannabis use often leads to other drugs, and also said that it would make you peal your skin off to get rid of the spiders.

They casually mixed truth with lies to create the most frightening narrative possible. But once the lies became apparent, everything they ever claimed came into doubt.

Nazis like Adolf Eichmann were simply germans... who actually believed in what they were doing. Those who didn't but followed orders anyway were probably doing so out of fear, not simply because humans are order-following rubes.

No, if we were to do the experiment in modern terms, you would place an actor in the chair and have a professor instruct their student that they are experimenting with correcting racist behavior out of the subject in a humane way. Would a liberal student reject this sort of experiment in 2020?

If you think a liberal student of 2020 would follow orders instructing them to torture a racist, but would reject an order that wasn't accompanied by a justification tailored to their ideology, then it sounds like you agree with my take. Given a free choice (e.g. no threat to kill their family if they refuse) people will follow orders if you convince them of the necessity of those orders by appealing to their ideologies and biases, but will refuse orders if the explanations for those orders are incompatible with their ideologies. But this is the 'water is wet' conclusion, not the attention grabbing conclusion Milgram sold to the public.

Here's my problem with it: when the 'Experimenter' appealed to the necessity of science, compliance rates where highest. When the Experimenter appealed to pure authority and gave direct commands, compliance rates were low.

The experiments were performed in a proud university town. What Milgram actually demonstrated is that those people trust scientists and believe in the value of science. In other words, they obeyed commands when those commands seemed to align with their preexisting worldview and ideology.

The inspiration of these experiments was Adolf Eichmann's plea that he was merely following orders. Milgram obstensibly set out to disprove that, but is said to have inadvertently proved Eichmann's plea plausible; if Milgram showed that people do follow orders, then maybe Eichmann's innocence plea was plausible. But we know Eichmann was not simply following orders. There is ample evidence that he was enthusiastic about the Holocaust and went above and beyond what was required of him. Eichmann may have been following orders, but they were orders he was ideologically aligned with. Just like the Milgram subjects were ideologically aligned with the value of science.

Many variations on the Milgram experiment were conducted. When the Experimenter didn't dress like a scientist, compliance was lower. I didn't hear this until years after I was told about the experiments in my undergrad psychology class. When I learned this, I felt deceived. It turns the mainstream conclusion on it's head.

If we were to run a modern experiment more applicable to Eichmann's 'following orders' plea, the Experimenter would be dressed like a cop and the Learner would be a black man. How many people (except the overtly racist) would follow orders in this scenario, when the orders were so flagrantly in violation of their personal values? Virtually none I assert. That's the obvious water is wet answer, while Milgram's answer is the shockingly unintuitive headline grabbing conclusion. Milgram's conclusion asks us to believe there is an Adolf Eichmann lurking inside all of us, waiting for heinous orders to execute. That just doesn't jive with what we actually know about Nazis.

However, there is no proof that the photographer was deliberately seeking to create a distorted impression of the scene.

How could there be? Do you expect the photographer to outright admit that intent? Short of such an admission, what would proof of the photographers' intent look like?