Judgmentality

Your arguments are entirely theoretical while ignoring the fact that payday loan businesses are regularly shut down for fraud. Just because debt as a concept isn't flawed doesn't mean the people selling debt are moral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Tucker_(businessman)

Likewise, just because I post one extreme example of payday loan businesses being a fraud doesn't invalidate the entire industry. As a whole though, I feel the industry is quite scummy and often scammy.

> Living things (animals) are for better or for worse shipped that way all the time.

They also die a lot this way.

https://www.treehugger.com/as-pet-deaths-continue-airlines-p...

> I can think of fewer things less inline with classical American Constitutional ideals than to cheer on organizations that hunt down individuals and silence them for thoughts expressed on other platforms.

The moderation team of twitch is pretty much universally hated by the internet. I don't think anybody is cheering them on.

I understand that as a US citizen I have more freedoms than most people throughout history, but the idea that it's really free for everyone is a little idyllic. Obviously this is a hyperbolic example and is a tiny fraction of the populace, but you can't possibly talk about due process and reconcile that with Guantanamo Bay. There are many more examples to fill spaces in the spectrum, that's just meant to be a single point to prove it's not really equal for everyone.

It was meant to be a fun example of focusing on reality instead of theory, not a political tangent. Anyway, apologies.

> The most glaring omission is that it doesn't stop to acknowledge at all the impressive growth that WeWork saw.

WeWork would rent the office space, and then rent it out for less money than they were renting it. It's not hard to grow when you can raise billions to sell dollars for pennies.

I'm pretty sure I could sell millions of phones a year, just give me billions to buy those phones and then I'll sell them at a 90% discount and I'll dominate the phone market!

Everything I'm saying is speculation. I'm asking questions, not providing evidence one way or the other. I never said there was a problem.

> The real comparison would be between SSRI-treated patients and untreated depressed patients, because healthy people aren't prescribed SSRIs.

I see it very differently, as you are focusing entirely on the parents and completely ignoring the children. If the untreated patients weren't going to have kids, the question is only whether or not the children are happy. If the children of parents with antidepressants are more likely to require antidepressants themselves, I'd say that's indicative of a serious problem.

If antidepressants really are pervasive as you say, I'd be concerned about what it's doing to us as a species when it comes time to reproduce. Are the offspring of parents who regularly take anti-depressants any worse off than those who don't?

I think these are the sorts of questions that would be useful to know when really mass-prescribing drugs to humanity. To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the drugs are inherently harmful to offspring - but it seems like something that would be good to know. If the parents have a chemical dependency, what does that mean for the children?

JFC talk about a "you're with us or against us" mentality. I tend to be somewhat neutral on unions (depending on the context I think they're sometimes good and sometimes bad), but your rhetoric has pushed me further towards unions being bad.

Batteries have to hold substantially more power now than they did 5 years ago.

EDIT: Huh, I looked it up and I'm completely wrong. Battery sizes haven't changed.

The only reason I bought a Pixel 4a instead of a Pixel 5 is because I wanted a headphone jack.

> Most women in the US surely aren't raped right? Not even 0.1% of women in the US get raped no?

It's closer to 15%.

https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem

EDIT: Wow people really hate rape statistics.

Many people never change phone numbers. I've had the same cell phone number since I was a teenager, and I suspect I will have it until I die.

It's the most identifiable thing about me other than my social security number. Even my driver's license number has changed more than my cell phone, and I don't always have a valid passport.

I feel like you stopped reading his comment after that part, because he gives an example that disproves your claim.

I understand your point, but everything you're saying is hypothetical. You're not going to persuade anyone of something happening if you can't come up with any evidence of it happening.

I don't think this is true at all. I think Amazon has realized they can't make twitch profitable just from subs, and are heavily pushing ads in order to try to fundamentally change how they make money with it. I also think Amazon, the entire company, is making a big push towards ads. Amazon is still terrible with ads, but I think this is one of the overarching themes of how the company is shifting focus in the near future.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/3/14/do-amazon-...

You ask for feedback on usability, someone gives it to you, and your response is "you're using it wrong."

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I agree, there are lots of great small streamers on twitch.

It's not just becoming more like reddit. Reddit still allows you to post porn and whatever you want in your own subreddits, and you can even make subreddits invite only.

Twitch inconsistently applies the ban hammer across the board. DMCA takedowns apply to everyone, even if it's your ringtone while you're coding with just 1 viewer. And takedowns rarely are given any sort of explanation, and if you aren't already a big enough streamer to create an uproar on twitter you're likely fucked.

And as little faith as I have in reddit's moderation, I have none in twitch whatsover. Trusting twitch's moderation team is like trusting facebook's privacy team. Yes, it really is that fucking awful.

Microsoft tried and failed, plus Facebook and Google never really got anywhere. The irony is most people on twitch are surprisingly unhappy with it and want a better alternative. The other thing to know is that twitch is still a significant money loser for Amazon.

Well, if they got any stock, it's worth about 50x as much now as it was then (not adjusting for inflation or other factors). So if they were getting $25k in stock for 4 years, that would be worth a few million today.

The sad thing is I'd wager 95-99% of startup employees put in work hoping for some kind of similar payout, only to never find it.

"Behind every great fortune is a crime."

Sure, but if you have no evidence of it happening you have a fairly weak argument.

Sure, but there's no guarantee there won't be duplicates of that work later. Unless the author has a legal contract guaranteeing never to make another NFT of that work again, there's no reason to believe in its authenticity.

And call me crazy, but the kind of people selling NFTs don't strike me as trustworthy.

You can't legally gift money above a certain value though without paying taxes on it. The situation depends a lot here, but if it were legal to just gift everybody money without interest nobody would ever have to deal with inheritance taxes.

> So for example, if Jack minted multiple NFTs for the same tweet it would be clear to everyone which one was first. Only the first one would presumably be considered valuable.

That's not how I see it at all. Once Jack has been shown to be willing to oversell himself just to make a quick buck, it will immediately devalue everything associated with him, including the original NFT. You're buying into the quality/credibility/longevity of the creator here, and once it's shown he's a shill there's not much reason to value any of his original "work" highly.

I am open to being wrong, but it still boggles my mind anybody could think NFTs are anything other than a scam. At least bitcoin had lots of legitimate theory to be used as an alternative to currency, even if it only ended up being an investment alternative for gold. An NFT is like trying to sell art without actually having to create art.

This is also my understanding, and my point was (in this example) Jack Dorsey can just do it a second time, and a third time, and so on.

And it's not like Monet making more paintings, because each painting is unique. This is an identical digital copy from the same person, with no guarantee of its longevity.

I'm pretty sure the person you were responding to was being sarcastic. Then again it's the internet, so who knows?

I read it as a state of self-driving cars in general. The technology isn't developing as fast as people had hoped. Waymo is still in the lead, even if this guy failed to deliver (he announced Waymo would be a public service for 2018, and that obviously didn't happen).