bluebarbet

HDI is indeed a better metric than the various alternatives based on dollars.

But still. The six US states that score less than 0.9 (i.e. Kentucky, Mississippi et al) are supposedly peers of EU countries like Portugal, Estonia and Croatia, i.e. exactly the places that well-off footloose Americans are choosing to move to (Portugal is packed with well-heeled US refugees).

So apparently HDI does not fully measure quality of life, either.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...

>the company starts falling apart.

This site will start falling apart if we don't keep things civil.

>desktop/laptop with a mouse is the only way to interact with this site

Lamentable if true. Speaking personally, I haven't touched a mouse in well over a decade.

You're both wrong. It only becomes a meteorite once embedded in the rock. Until then it's a meteor.

Obviously you're wading into hot water by even outlining this analysis. Personally I'm tempted to buy it (if it's true, it's true!) but recently I saw an interesting argument that softened me up a bit to the feminist line. It's that the traditional deal between the sexes has been broken. Before, women would suffer the hardship and danger of childbirth, and in return men would take on the physical perils of war. In modern society, of course, conflict mostly means playing video games in an armchair. And yet bearing children remains a stubbornly physical chore. Hence a latent feeling of injustice that may balance out the real one you describe.

>Meetup got enshittified years ago already

Citation needed. Not my experience at all. And it has the major benefit of being independent of the tech giants, who already know too much about your social graph.

My (controversial) view is that a psychologist is to a friend what a prostitute is to a lover. In a truly healthy society there would be no need for psychologists and prostitutes because everyone would have a handful of good friends and at least one lover. Back in messy reality, psychologists and prostitutes are a decent fix to keep society on the rails.

So. I think I agree with you.

This whole debate is such a chestnut. Of course, you will do as you please, it's your right. But these choices do reveal values and priorities. Speaking personally (and, I suppose you will say, sanctimoniously), I choose to use Firefox despite its flaws because I don't want the internet to be privatized. I know what I'm missing out on. It's less important.

More likely you're living in a bubble unrepresentative of the rest of the world. I just did some research, inconclusive because nobody is tracking this data. Personal-computer ownership in rich countries (i.e. "OECD") is indeed high. But only 12% of the world's population lives in Europe and North America combined. The figure is much much lower elsewhere in the world, where everyone lives. For example, 16 computers per 100 people in Brazil in the 2010s. [1] Most people in the world have never touched a laptop or desktop. Now that computing has gone mobile-first, the figure is only going to keep dropping.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/computers...

Surely useful if only to see the list of apps you can trust.

It was true then and it is true now. Outside businesspeople and students and the middle class of OECD countries (all amounting to a low single-digit percentage of the world population), ordinary people never bought desktop or laptop computers. By contrast, everyone has a mobile one in their pocket today.

The difference is that the only people who used those personal computers were (are) an educated subset of the middle class in developed countries.

Or putting `Installed apps` under `Settings`. Still not fixed after 15 years.

As others are explaining, these calculations are essentially spurious due to all the off-the-books externalities.

In a city the only question that surely matters is: Can the mode of transport be scaled? For private car transit, the answer is no. No city can function if everyone gets around by car. Even Houston has light rail and a bus network. If you can drive and your city somehow remains livable, that is because other people are taking transit.

Alas there is none but I can recommend the Lexicon Valley podcast.

Indeed. This has to rank as one of the worst branding mistakes in history. All TBL had to do was call the subdomain "web" but instead he went for the infuriatingly fussy and tongue-tying "www".

At last, some actual linguistics.

The really common "determiners" are this, that, and possessive forms such as their and your.

People often call those last words (your, his) "possessive pronouns", which always confused me because they are obviously not nouns. They are actually "possessive determiners", which is quite logical. The possessive pronouns are mine, ours, etc.

But only in US English!

Perhaps it was planted (satire)

>How it's any better? Small companies can be bought by big companies. French government is as capable of trampling over their citizen's privacy the moment they feel they need it as US government is.

It's better for Europeans because the company in question is European and so will not export their data to New Jersey. And because any success it has will presumably better benefit France and Europe.

Empty snark adds nothing to the conversation.

True, but both of you are missing my main point.

>if we’re cutting down on inefficiencies, laundry folding robots will give people more time to exercise [...] going to the gym

Exercising while a machine folds one's laundry is akin to running on a treadmill instead of running in the park. The technology is the inefficiency.

To me it does not seem like progress that, on a stressed and finite planet, humanity might "need" an energy- and resource-intensive machine to complete a task as physically undemanding (and even frivolous) as folding a sheet. But here we are.

Here's an alternative take. Climate change, and the myriad related environmental crises, are essentially a product of human population and technology. Population will follow its course, up and then down. The wildcard is technology. Yes, AI's energy hunger is worsening things right now and that's a problem. But, personally, I can't help be hopeful that AI's sheer potential might come to invert that curve. At the very least we could really use a revolutionary technology and now we may have one.

Indeed. Even easier: complain on the article's Talk page. Somebody else may then do the work for free.

The average person has absolutely never heard of X11.

ITT: a disappointing number of low-effort drive-by comments responding to the headline alone.

I'm glad we all agree (i.e. you, me, and the bot you're replying to).

>LaJolla

*Jolla, pronounced yolla. It's a Finnish word. Maybe a bad choice given the geography of tech.

That assumes that you never visit a new site. Indeed it's why I think twice before clicking links to new sites. Honest question: Are you happy with the current state of affairs, really, and just waiting patiently for all the world's websites to decide to comply with EU law so that we can have a usable web again?