Frondo

It depends, of course, but yes, I have had noise complaints addressed by some kind of code enforcement officer (i.e. unarmed, but able to write citations.)

Why (and I realize this is one of those questions that sounds snide, but I do not mean it so) should a creator's kids gain from a piece of art or work of music after a creator's death?

Editing to clarify: I fully accept that copyright is a good thing to give incentives to people to make art and music and creative works, I just don't understand why that incentive should be transmissible to their kids, i.e. people who were presumably not involved in making it in the first place.

My one experience with Booking.com was a mixed bag. I paid for a room for a few nights in a city on the Black Sea, and when I got there (pretty late at night, after several hours of driving through the lovely and beautiful mountains), they couldn't find any record of the booking. None, and no rooms available. We suddenly had nowhere to stay.

I went out and sat in the car, and eventually got to chat with a Booking.com agent, who said they could do nothing at first. After 15 minutes of chatting with them, they said, "We don't have any relationship to that hotel. What is the local number you have for them?" And about 15 seconds later, "I am issuing a full refund."

Frustrating, but I did get my money back, and did find another room elsewhere in the city (unbelievably, with the one hotel chain where I use their rewards program!)

Turns out someone had simply set up a fake hotel profile for this prominent hotel in the city and was collecting booking fees from people like me! Like I said, at least I did get my money back...

My take on smart people in the crypto space comes down to the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The "essential services" are kind of the big thing in dispute -- you say "common defense, a legal system to enforce contracts" and that's a typical libertarian perspective, but certainly not the only set of essential services that reasonable people could posit for their government.

Indeed, even in our beloved tech industry, the biggest employers have absolutely colluded to keep workers' wages down:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...

And still people trust management...

Since you're asserting that you don't believe the results of this research because it's "woo" -- can you explain what type of evidence, or what degree of impact, or how deep or impeccable the link must be established for you to accept it?

Is it even possible that you are, as you say, open to being proven wrong? (I ask this in good faith, because I've been arguing on the internet for 25+ years, and whenever someone says this, I end up asking them what would persuade them and the answer is usually "nothing," which, ... okay ..., but I am an eternal optimist and I strive to take people at their written word.)

America's poor can't travel (it costs! even if you bus it, you need time off work, a place to stay, etc), they can't have gourmet food delivered (it costs!), they can't fetch a driver (it costs!), they often can't drive themselves (cars cost!).

They also generally can't afford medical care, child care, a wide variety of leisure activities (plays, shows, even movies cost!)

They do have access to information and music, but if I had to be a medieval king or a poor person in Cleveland, it is such a no-brainer I can't even understand how the question is being asked.

I'm in my late 40s now, and have been using computers for nearly 40 years (yeah, one of those kids.) Installed Linux on my 386 from floppies, and now in my day-to-day I write C# and maintain the linux servers where the .NET Core business application lives.

I've set up bouncers, ran my own email for years, and at some point I just became immensely bored of doing those things. There's an ungratifying sameness to having to fiddle with self-hosted email or hunt down why my irc bouncer crashed/went offline. This kind of friction extends up and down the stack, too, which irc client works on my phone? There are a few I might choose from, do I spend time trying them out over a period of days to see which is a decent one? Oh, well I still don't have threads, even if one client or another will auto-preview image URLs. And on and on.

I am disinterested, as you say, not because I don't want to learn it, but because I have.

Sure, it could be a fun thing to do (I'd have done a little treasure hunt for $50, too), but the professor's syllabus doesn't say it's $50 at all. "Free to the first who claims" -- claims what? free what? It isn't even a complete sentence, in the middle of boilerplate that's if anything exceedingly verbose. It doesn't parse like meaningful instructions. That's why I think it's a hokey gotcha, and not an actual sign of "people don't read instructions" (which we all instinctively know anyway??)

It's not just that it's embedded in some of the university boilerplate that the students probably have on all their syllabuses, it's that it doesn't read like anything, certainly not a promise of a free $50.

Is it a typo? A copy-paste error? Only knowing that "free to the first who claims" is part of a boomer gotcha for kids these days does that whole parenthetical make any sense to me.

Heh, and where was this interpretation when the Black Panthers were arming themselves in California? Even the NRA supported gun control back then.

> In contrast to the NRA’s rigid opposition to gun control in today’s America, the organization fought alongside the government for stricter gun regulations in the 1960s.

https://www.history.com/news/black-panthers-gun-control-nra-...

Why is liability -- which can only kick in after some damage has been done, possibly displacing someone from their home -- a better solution than a process by which dying/dead trees can be compelled to be removed?

This sounds like the usual libertarian answer to things like "eliminate government food safety inspection"; the idea being that the market would eventually reflect that some restaurants regularly sicken people and would then go out of business. Why is it better to let people be sickened, even if they can later sue, than put some stops up on risky behavior in the first place?

For both tree hazards and food safety, it's not a surprise when something is risky, even if you can't predict exactly when someone will have their house smashed by a falling tree. Why wait for the damage to be done?

While true, this ignores how widespread wage theft is, especially among lower-paid workers.

Here's one example of unpaid overtime wages, nearly a million dollars worth, being stolen from workers:

> After receiving a wage complaint from a worker who failed to receive any money for his work, California Labor Commissioner Julie Su’s office began investigating contractor Tadros & Youssef Construction’s work on the Highland Oaks Elementary School construction project. Su’s office discovered that nine other employees earned below the prevailing wage and were not paid for overtime hours on this same project. The resulting settlement forced Tadros & Youssef to pay $877,876.64 restitution to the 10 workers. The contracting firm is no longer in business.

From: https://www.epi.org/publication/epidemic-wage-theft-costing-...

In the US, you are never forced to join a union. The Taft-Hartley act of 1947 banned so-called "closed shops" at the federal level.

> The Taft–Hartley Act outlawed the closed shop in the United States in 1947. The union shop was ruled illegal by the Supreme Court.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_shop#United_States

Not saying I ever buy illegal drugs, but my venmo history is full of people buying $80 of pizza or $150 of sushi -- this seems to be seller's preference, as far as I can tell. No one in my rather wide extended circle has ever tried to or even suggested using crypto for these kinds of transactions.

> allows your immune system to adapt and become more stronger

This is precisely what vaccines do, without the "falling sick" part first.

There were never great fears of a new ice age in the 60s/70s.

> This distinction can be made because a serious review of the literature shows that there was no such “scientific verity”. There are anecdotes that can be plucked from the record, primarily from the popular media. But a rigorous review by Tom Peterson and William Connolley (with some minor help from myself) shows that, even as the planet was in a short term cooling trend in the 1970s, concerns about greenhouse warming dominated the scientific literature. The paper documenting our results has been accepted for publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and Doyle Rice did a nice job summarizing the paper last week in USA Today.2

From http://www.inkstain.net/fleck/2008/02/global-cooling-the-und... but there are lots of places where you can find the "we once worried about global cooling" myth debunked.

Literally has been used as a term of hyperbole since at least 1769. That one's hard for me to get too worked up about. :-)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/misuse-of-lite...

If you have convinced people to change their minds by dint of your ideas, how is that a dictatorship? No one's sending people with guns into lobster boil festivals or grocery stores.

Parent said "don't cook them alive," not "don't cook them."

It's not hard to kill a lobster before you drop it in the pot - slip a knife into its neck above its carapace. This was a test on one of those Gordon Ramsay shows, so if he can kill them first and still make tasty food, I think we all can.

But really, if there were an animal that I could only eat by inflicting pain on it first (i.e. causing pain and not striving to minimize its suffering), I wouldn't eat it.

Horse and beef really taste pretty different (I've had both, in a number of different preparations), but I suspect that mixing the two together would render the final result close enough to beef that the psychological effect of expecting to eat beef would allow people to taste it as just beef -- sort of like those blind taste tests of wines where they added red food coloring to white wine and people (if I remember right, even a couple of wine experts? I dunno, I'd have to look up that study and it's late. :) ) interpreted the taste as a red.

Just as an aside, "NASA, but for your climate" is the coolest idea for a government agency. Big climate moonshots, stuff to inspire people. I love it! I wish it could be so.

I would defer to no less than a luminary like Thomas Jefferson in my attitudes toward the would-be inheritors of all those million-dollar ranch-style SDUs, who said something along the lines of..

> I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living": that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

(Though really, even before I knew of Jefferson's attitudes about inherited wealth, I'd read enough to know that divesting children of unearned windfalls isn't necessarily a bad thing. Can't take it with you, ya know.)

Having been one of the "people" who lived in "affordable" housing, yes, I would have myself and people like me as neighbors.

What a disgusting comment.

Not the original poster, but I don't want to spend my limited time on earth trying to minimize the money I'm leaving on the table -- thinking about credit cards, points, money systems and wheeling and dealing in order to eke out a little extra scratch is thinking I would personally rather put toward nearly anything else.

That's why I would rather spend my own money when someone is willing to lend it to me for free.

Could this be a hardware issue with your M1 Air? I've had one for about 8 months, run it pretty hard (memory pressure is usually in the yellow, lot of applications and server-like processes running for both web dev and media production) and it hasn't crashed once.

Not contesting your experience at all, but if you're having crashes every 2-3 days it might be hardware-related?

I've spent much of my money-making programming time doing CRUD web apps in PHP. Several years ago, when .NET Core was in its infancy, I had the chance to try a different language for a new/different CRUD web app.

The .NET Core ecosystem was a lot sparser back then but picking up the language was actually the most pleasant "learn a new language and be productive in it" experience I've ever had, and I don't think I'd ever turn away from it now. YMMV, of course, depending on how much you like whatever you're writing in now.

Boy, if paying to keep people imprisoned upsets you, wait til you see how much we law abiding citizens have to pay when the state fucks up and locks up the wrong person.

Philly just paid nearly $10 million to some guy they'd wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 30 years.

I would ask the opposite question -- why is that an important number to conceal? (Please no "it's none of your business" replies, that doesn't really answer the question and it's not an interesting direction to go.)