Arn_Thor

What’s the mistake? Putting on the “Captain Obvious” cape and summarizing news clippings?

A key problem is that when people make purchasing decisions, price ranks extremely high on the priority list, even when it will be costlier and worse for the consumer in the long run. Capitalism has found a thousand ways to exploit that inherent trait we all share, and we have to work damn hard to counteract it—-and most people won’t even know they should be making that effort.

A lifestyle business isn’t elitist, nor necessarily for elitist customers. It is in most people’s interest to invest in quality, but not everyone can afford it and even among those that do, the final price tag has an undue weight in the equation. (Not to mention that big brands are removing quality as an option even in the higher price ranges)

I’ve flown internationally for a decade and it was only around 2018-20 I noticed most airlines reminding you to keep your seat belt fastened. Before that it seemed like the exception, not the rule.

Interesting notion. Perhaps the same is happening with LED lamps and fixtures now, in the UK. Every rental is flooded with lights in all kinds of shapes. They are sold extremely affordably everywhere. To me at this point the novelty has worn off and it looks tacky. Also, most damning, they aren’t replaceable or repairable so all it’s doing is creating future e-waste…

If any regulator acts it will be the EU. The action, if it comes, will of course be very late, possibly years from now, when the horse has long left the stable.

Taste is absolutely linked with temperature. Cold vs hot coffee for example. Don’t know exactly why. Most things tend to taste “more” when hot. Could be the intensity of molecular activity, which is what temperature is, that varies and so registers more or less strongly with our taste preceptors

Not to be rude, but isn’t that just, like, your opinion, man? That brain sizes correlate with consciousness in the way you state? At least some scientists, these, seem to disagree so at the very least it may not be quite so cut and dry as you make it out.

They explain this in the article. These scientists talk about a basic level of consciousness that does not include a notion of self. This would put the bees in the same category with animals that experience for example pleasure and pain but have no notion of self. You may disagree with calling that consciousness, but it is at least consistent

It may be a stretch but since we don’t know the exact criteria for the kind of consciousness the article and scientists refer to, it seems rash to dismiss it out of hand. And quite the leap to call it “absurd behavior”

You seem to be reading something into my wording there that I didn’t intend. I meant proper jail, not a fine, not a suspended sentence or one of the cushy prisons financial criminals tend to go to. I mean the same jail as a non-rich murderer, for example. No “ don’t drop the soap” tropes implied. Those piss me off too.

But yeah, white color crime that for example kills people (deadly pollution for example) should absolutely be treated like murder, or manslaughter at the very least. Why the hell not?

When is the last time someone from the C suite and had a good relationship to the government/defense sector went to big boy jail? I can’t think of an occasion, even though I can think of many deadly events where it’s very well arguable there should be criminal liability

The interfaces are great but the setup process is still far beyond “plug and play” so the mainstream pirate probably still do it the cumbersome but simple way

I’ve got a healthy respect for psychedelics after noticing lingering effects on my reality perception and mood for several days after taking some strains of marijuana. I know it can help many people, but the thought of anything stronger than weed messing with your sense of reality should demand caution at the very least

On the surface that seems correct. But let me go on a tangent. Brutalism is functional in the sense that a space is designed only with the task at hand in mind. In a narrow sense, a library should be a place to come to and read and borrow books. Nothing else matters, so bare concrete surfaces are the efficient ideal. But critics would justifiably point out that there's more to a library than that. It's a place of community, imagination, inspiration. If we see the purpose as fostering those things, then the architecture should be visually stimulating, culturally resonnating, architecturally consistent with the buildings around it, etc.

But this is a bit of a charicature of brutalism. In reality it does consider human experience, but it perhaps values different aspects of it. Brutalist paces are built to facilitate flows of people, to make it easy to get done what you need to. But it is also a reaction to traditional architecture styles which carries with them a lot of baggage: often certain social structures such as stratification, empire, patriarchy, racial inequality, etc. When we consider brutalism as an act of opposition to these, the humanistic intent behind it shines through, even though it make the building no more appealing.

Brutalist spaces can in my opinion be welcoming and inviting if furnished correctly. To me they have a nostalgic and hopeful connotation because I walked through them growing up. Nowadays they're a refreshing change from the kind of corporate glass and plastered concrete spaces of today.

The “purpose” (for lack of a better word) of brutalism was never to make people feel small and unimportant—though individual architects might have had different motivations from time to time. Rather, the style is about making buildings that are true to their purpose, simple and without ornaments, and that show the materials (concrete mostly) they’re made of.

This specific website we’re discussing is actually quite full of flourishes, and so not brutalist in the architectural sense.

I suspect very few customers have the wherewithal and time and effort to “tell the regulators”. (Who, to issue a fine, would have to show malfeasance so the customer needs to produce evidence of the interaction sufficient to show the insurer broke the law)

Honestly, any manual tagging is still too much work. Jellyfin would be a better Plex alternative if it got this right

Seconded! (Or thirded?) Prologue is so much better than Audible. I’m using Libation to liberate my copy protected audiobooks, not to share them but to avoid that godawful Audible app

“You can buy this other thing” is not a good defense against antitrust allegations simply because that’s not what it’s about.

That used to be the driving factor, politically at least. But things have changed. As older folks retire and sell to fund their end of life care, funds, corporations and the super rich have swept in to buy the properties, increasingly pricing out regular folks who depend on an (also more expensive) mortgage which the investors don’t have to worry about. So on the margin, fewer and fewer homes are in regular people’s hands. That is capitalism’s inevitable consequence: those that have wealth can ever more quickly acquire more of it.

Ok, so you don’t like the titles. Do you have any problems with the actual content—the thing that matters?

I said stopping, not reversing

On net I don’t think it makes a difference. When the energy is spent as electricity it basically releases heat in some form or other eventually

Absolute madness. Do you realize how much of humanity, and the biomes we rely on, are dependent on the Amazon? And even it were a good idea on balance we have no idea of the ripple effects and externalities. How about we just focus on stopping the changes we’re already causing and get to an equilibrium state with our planet first?

Seems odd to call that exhibition a “show” but I’m not British so what do I know

Wonder what show this refers to

You're baking in a lot of assumptions in the statement "profitable overall". I take it that you mean "benefits society in a way that more than makes up for its cost" but a private company doesn't care, they naturally want immediate or (relatively) short-term profits. A country's first trans-national railway is naturally almost always a net benefit, to take an example, but it's too expensive for the private sector to build alone and almost certainly wouldn't be properly profitable for decades until the infrastructure grows around it.

Some infrastructure or public service building also facilitates something else indirectly, or over a long enough time that it wouldn't feature into any direct calculus. The same goes for services. And how does one quantify this "profitable overall" requirement? This is why big projects are often ultimately a political choice, lambasted by businesses and economists, which often (but not always) are greatly appreciated in hindsight. That shouldn't be carte blanche for people to go out and spend tax money, but it illustrates a certain dilemma.

Reviews have remarked on it but I don’t think anyone I’ve seen have complained that it’s a problem. Its other features make up for the FOV shortfall. And lord knows it has other issues too that are probably more important than the FOV

Top of the line displays, not one but two advanced CPUs one of which is brand new, a smorgasbord of sensors…

Profit is not a dirty word. I don't think that's an argument anyone is making. Profit is not _sufficient_ motivation to make a lot of infrastructure happen, and until that's recognized we'll be building too little, too late. I think most actually would agree with the rest of your points--I certainly do.