SpEd3Y

Not saying this is the case, but I heard an argument made about this on the other side. Saying the ICE situation is manufactured by the Democratic party by not playing ball like they did in the Obama times. Instead they encourage protests and and "wait or provoke a violent outburst" that's "often triggered by carefully planned repetitive" tactics like blocking ICE vehicles "then be ready to film when" an inevitable violent act happens then "make a enraging video out of it and show only that in prime time to families dining".

Again, not saying that's the case, I'm not from the US so I don't much care, but it's funny to me that both side accuse each other of the same strategy.

> I can't think of a game available on GoG that sells on Steam for > $20. I am sure one exists, but in general these are older, cheaper games.

Fair point but I think there are quite a few of those: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind. Expedition 33, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II even Cyberpunk, but it's true that nowadays Cyberpunk is a ~20$ title.

But not sure these were on GoG day 1. Or they added them after ~1 year after they got most of their sales on Steam and already the piracy of the games started.

I never said that a person cannot appreciate the contribution while agreeing with the decision to break it apart. The idea was if monopolies are bad an Bell Labs is the product of a monopoly in an ideal world AT&T would never be a monopoly and Bell Labs would never existed, right? That's the first part of my question. The 2nd part was kinda asking if that's the case and Bell Labs should not have existed, why is that? Was it bad or good for humanity? If it was good then why should a good thing not exist and create so many crazy innovations. Did AT&T monopoly created so much bad in the world that it offsets the good Bell Labs generated?

This was my idea but answering 10 comments I left this short and indeed oversimplified version of my thoughts. I have since edited the comment to be clearer.

Noise for you maybe. I don't expect people with limited time to give me a scientific paper level details regarding every idea they have. If their idea is interesting I spend time researching it myself.

> That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Fair enough :) That's one way to think about it ^^ If this would have been a debate I would agree. But I don't have time for a debate so I threw an idea out there and expected people to do their own research and figure out if my idea has any teeth or not.

I initially encountered the idea in Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Feel free to dismiss it or research it further. I do not have time to provide statistical evidence :)

I'm sorry, I should have used more explicit terms: "free of monetary charge" is what I meant. Nothing can be free in this world. For some people not paying money for something but getting their privacy invaded is an acceptable tradeoff.

Google should allow this free tier where your privacy is invaded and monetized or a paid tier where your privacy is intact but you pay money for that.

> then paint a black and white argument

I fail to see how my argument was black and white when I say there's a trade off. Can you please tell me how my argument is black and white? Maybe we have different understanding of what a black and white argument means.

Thing is Google lost money for many years in YouTube. Nowadays I think it's profitable but it seems unfair to ask a company to take loses for a decade or more and then force to sell it when it's making profit. If we set that precedent nobody will take risks with the next YouTube like company that loses money initially.

> By that logic, people should still be at the mercy of AT&T because Bell Labs gave so much back to humanity.

So your argument is that Bell Labs should have never happened since it's the result of a monopoly?

My argument is that Monopolies are trade offs. In a world without monopolies you have very little innovation in peace time. Monopolies are bad for consumers but the trade off is that they can afford to innovate and push the world forward. It's not as black and white as people like to think.

Getting rid of all monopolies and having a market in perfect competition will make Bell Labs impossible and all the innovation that came from there. A ballance is required. "There are no solutions only tradeoffs" - TS

Edit: Clarify my question about Bell Labs happening.

I meant OSS or free products. Windows / Office / Visual Studio are for profit products? GitHub was free before Microsoft bought it, they just made the private repos free as well. But arguably GitHub was better before.

But I do agree C#, VS Code and TypeScript are nice Microsoft OSS/Free gifts to the world.

I agree that war pushes innovation the most, but I assume you don't want humanity to be in constant state of war. So how do you get innovation in peace time? I would argue if you're in a very competitive market and you're margins are 1-2% you cannot afford to go for innovation. Bell Labs which arguably is one of the most innovative places in peace time was the result of the AT&T monopoly. Most innovation comes out of monopolies or excess capital in peace time.

I agree. Love C#, VS Code and TypeScript. Microsoft changed a bit lately. But there's a lot of history with Microsoft and the recent CoPilot ripping off OSS code and blocking C# support in VS Code are still mudding the waters.

Fair. These are good examples of open source that Microsoft did! I love all 3 of those.

You're missing my point. In a perfect competition environment all profits go to 0. This is great for customers horrible for innovation. Innovation happens when there's enough capital to take huge risks and lose. Google had a ton of innovation attempts that flopped really hard and lost ton of money. Without the extra capital none of the attempts would have happened.

It's not but it is free to use.

Arguably out of the big 4 (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon) Google gave the most back to humanity: Android, Chromium, Kubernetes, Google Office suite, the Go programming language, Tensor Flow, Alpha Fold (and Google DeepMind), donating to Linux, etc. All these are things everyone has access to precisely because Google is such a big player and can afford to lose money on innovation that fails. What did Microsoft and Apple gave us? Yet Google gets targeted while Microsoft, Apple and Amazon are left alone. Why is that?

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but if you're serious, I'm pretty sure the OP is talking metaphorically. It's just a slight annoyance he's not "emotional" about it.

I also fail to see how someone who is annoyed by code that doesn't follow well established standards is somehow not a good fit in the C-suite.

Why do people compare Netflix with cable? It's a completely different technology. There are more differences in the technology that similarities. It's similar to asking someone who's using a mobile phone to buy a 2nd mobile phone for work because "You don't expect to be able to use your land line phone at work as well, do you?"

I agree with what you're saying. I don't like racist/homophobic/transphobic behavior but I find it hard to reconcile that with free speech. And I think they only way you can change someone's mind is by allowing free speech and engaging in conversations with them to try to change their minds. Banning them would just make them look for other channels to communicate and find like minded people and their bad ideas will never be challenged.

You mentioned the "black little mermaid" and it's hard not to draw a parallel between a mod in a game that allows you to change the skin color of a character and the "woke" media race swapping well known characters like the little mermaid, Triss from the Witcher, Achilles, etc.

Yeah, frustration breeds frustration. So I agree that it's better to disregard it if you can't handle it.

But I'm just wondering, is it possible to ignore the form of the message and listen to the content? Looking back the stoics were very good at controlling their own emotions and dealing with insults. Insults would just not get to them, they would bounce right off them. Is this a skill we've lost as a society?

It seems that nowadays we're focusing external, not internal. Instead of developing a thick skin we're focusing on changing the behavior of the people who's insulting us. To me that seems like a pointless endeavor. You can't change someone else behavior if they don't want to cooperate. And without a thick skin, all it takes is one jerk to ruin your day. With thick skin the insults from a jerk bounces off you and your day is still a good day. So, it seems to me that we should focus inwards instead of outwards. Not saying it's easy. Just saying humans were capable of that in the past, nowadays I don't hear anybody talking about it.

I agree. And ideally this is what all emails should look like. But you're ignoring the context. Do you know what that guy was going through?

Maybe his wife just cheated on him, divorced him and took half his money, his kids don't want to have anything to do with him, his bank took his house and he just crashed the car. And he tried to use Notepad++ and the same old issue happened and he snapped and sent that email.

99 out of 100 times he would have send the email you mentioned here but he had a horrible day and vented in the email. Does it make it ok? No. Is it understandable? Yes. Should we discard the feedback because he was frustrated? No.

Only true if you're expecting the the person who provided feedback to behave like a robot and exist without any kind of emotions.

Loose analogy, I don't watch videos with people buying a bike with no breaks, fall and get hurt, then go to the vendor and calmly explain to them that they should modify their bike design so the breaks function and think, that customer is behaving like a human being.

See what I did there? :) My analogy might not be great, I give you that. But frustration is a normal human behavior. Granted I strongly believe you should try to vent a different way and then give clam feedback, you can't discard feedback just because the person giving it is frustrated.

We should be able to distinguish between frustrated good feedback and just abuse. I know I was able to get feedback from very hostile messages. And last time I checked I'm not a robot. So it's as skill you can gain.

Isn't it smart to invest in Nuclear? Sure, there might be drawbacks right now but if we invest in research and improve it we might find a way to make it "greener"?

Also we seem to be focusing on space exploration again. To take off we're always using fossil fuel. I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that you cannot take a ship into space with wind and solar. Also a wild guess but if we develop nuclear enough we might get smaller generators that are able to help a ship take off and then continue to have energy while in space. I know too little to make these claims but I'm sure the smart people here can help me understand if I am wrong or correct :)

I think is so popular because of the Killing Monsters trailer.

He does end up actually making a choice. But the choice is not between killing Renfri and Stregobor (which was the initial lesser evil choice) but he chooses to stop Renfris' gang from killing innocent people to draw Stregobor out. Renfri could have then left and look for another opportunity to kill Stregobor. Geralt told her at least two times to leave and she refused saying she made her choice, attacked Geralt and died. So Geralt ended up killing Renfri but as a result of her choice, not his. And he did stop Stregobor from taking her body and study it (which was his initial intent). So he did definitely not take his side. I would argue Geralt chose between good and evil, not between two lesser evils.

Why? :)

Edit: Switzerland chose to stay neutral in a world war. I think that's fine. Not getting involved is a viable option in my opinion.

Andrzej Sapkowski in the Witcher books, through Geralt, said something that might apply to this situation: "Evil is evil [...] Lesser, greater, middling, it's all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I’m not a pious hermit. I haven't done only good in my life. But if I’m to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all"

Thoughts? :)

Cause most likely they will be thankful and reward you financially and in the long term you might get your fortune back and then some. You have to play the long game! xD

But what if in 100 years most of humanity dies, all that's left is a group of 5 survivors that took shelter in a trolley station. Then all of the sudden a trolley appears out of thin air and kills all 5 of them? You would be the man/woman that ended human race :)

How cool would that be? You don't need containers for the water as they will just float, outer space is very cold. Perfect medium for this experiment.

When I was a kid we used hot water to defrost the windscreen regularly. A couple of hundred times over multiple winters. Temperatures around -20. No cracks or anything like that ever occurred.