loki49152

"Google contains multitudes"

It does not contain people who flout Google's privacy, security, or intellectual property policies. Those people are, quite rightfully, un-contained from Google with speed they can't muster for anything else in the company.

A lot of the people who comment here are techie provincials who literally have no understanding that the things they believe, or at least the things they recite as their beliefs, are ideas that might be analyzed and judged against reality.

.... as opposed to what? What do you think they should have done, sat around waiting to be captured so the could be featured in a NoKo TikTok video?

The latter is an "impossible question" because it's a meaningless question.

"You essentially outline why it should be broken up."

No, they didn't. They explained why breaking Google up would kill all of those "free" services.

"Google is a monopoly, they exert monopoly power and enjoy monopoly pricing."

No, they aren't. There are a multitude of other ad platforms available for anyone to use. Google has no power to stop them. "Most desirable service" does not constitute a monopoly in an open market. Monopolies can only be created by government dictate, like old AT&T or modern cable companies.

We don't need new regulations. This is probably covered by commercial fraud statutes, as they represented the sale of the device as a sale of tangible personal property. There is no condition required to complete that purchase - the offer is of the physical device and the implied ability to use that device for its obvious purpose.

That's not entirely their fault. Those programs were designed and instituted to make as many people as possible dependent on them so they would become a captured voting bloc.

You can derive morality from observation if you aren't looking for ontological "ought statements". Hume's position assumes that the religious approach to morality is the only one possible - that morality consists of these detached and universal "ought statements" that must be observable in the Universe somehow and take on the same form as Commandments from a God.

That's not how the Objectivist ethics works, at all. There are no "ought statements" because ethics, in Objectivism, is a system of judgement and reasoning. It's applied epistemology.

So, no, you won't find a mythological ethics in reality. But you can learn how to identify the nature of things and judge how they relate, positively or negatively, to human life. And that's the essence of Objectivist morality.

She didn't "feel like she needed Social Security".

In fact, she instructed her fiduciary to not apply for it on her behalf because she didn't need it, and her detractors would use her participation to smear her.

Her fiduciary convinced her to be enrolled by citing her own "restitution" argument and the fact that, as a fiduciary, she had an obligation to pursue all of her client's financial interests to the extent of her ability under the law.

That's what you just cited above. At Rand's death, her estate was estimated to be worth somewhere between $500,000 to $2 million dollars. Rand didn't feel she needed it. Her fiduciary did risk management for her.

And she didn't engage in hypocrisy. It has a meaning.

The NixOS team is an order of magnitude more unstable than their software. The most surprising thing here is that anyone who needs their systems to actually work would rely on it, given the history of the project and the maintainers' psychotic behavior.

- their attempts at having kids decades later take longer or fail completely

Isn't that normal when you try to have kids "decades later"?

LLMs don't do formal reasoning. Not in any sense. They don't do any kind of reasoning - they replay combinatorics of the reasoning that was encoded in their training data via "finding" the patterns in the relationships of the tokens at different scales and then applying those to the generation of some output triggered by the input.

Not to mention the reincarnated Norse gods

No. According to the Mujahadeen who did work with CIA, ObL was considered an "extremist" even among them because he expected to go to war against the US immediately after they were done with the Soviets. According to them, he didn't want anything to do with CIA.

You can't have an ideology that claims both "people have a right to things that others must produce" and "bodily autonomy". This isn't a potluck dinner. You can't just mix and match contradictory beliefs because it pleases you.

No mention of Strigoi. I guess they're still covering that up.

"we don't put people to jail for things that hurt their health, like alcohol, or pizza."

And yet people keep trying to get the government more and more deeply involved in the medical industry, which would lead to exactly this outcome.

It's easier to snark at something than to actually address its content. Witness the vacuous "dunkage" of that quote above. Literally any book with heroes, people of principle, or people who achieve things can be in the second slot. It's just something for people who have nothing to say, to say.

Citizens United didn't change any established laws. It reiterated the already-existing fact that people don't lose their free speech rights just because they've banded together into a business entity. The Clinton campaign tried to use the law to silence her political opponents and the court said "no".

This is an absurd take on social relations. It's equivalent to declaring that you're owned by "society" from birth, with an unchosen obligation you can never escape, because everything you do with other people is done "on the back of society".

Society, as such, doesn't exist. There is no corporeal "society". The only reality is other individuals, living their lives, interacting with you or not. In a civilized society they're able to interact - or not - by mutual consent.

The belief that every individual exists only to serve the group is false and evil.

I've noticed that headlines on some of the major news outlets sometimes change after the javascript fully loads. I don't follow WaPo, so this isn't unique to them.

Sun machines always seemed to have weird environment-dependent behavior. In college, one of our classmates got the nickname "the human eclipse" because no matter what time of day, no matter what else was going on, when he walked into the Sun lab the machines all went down.

You don't want to start a business. You want to get a new job working for someone who has started a business.

Few people remember that Trump likely won the nomination due to "cross-over" voters in states with open primaries. There was an organized effort by Democrats to cross-vote for him as the Republican candidate under the belief that he couldn't possibly defeat Hillary Clinton in the actual election.

I don't know if there is a way to determine whether or not that effort actually succeeded, but it did exist and was spoken about with great pride until Trump became the President.

Fascism does have a body of works. The inventors, Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, were quite proud of themselves and their creation. They wrote and spoke a great deal about it.

The idea that there is no explanation for Fascism and that it's some inexplicable mystery is gaslighting from Socialists who don't want anyone to understand that such an obvious evil is, actually, the true face of their ideology.

In terms of mathematics and physics he was a genius. In every other field, he was just some dude.

In fact in this instance he's repeating the common Germanic gestalt. Nothing profound, nothing out of the ordinary, just standard-issue Prussian Socialist talking points he adopted by default like pretty much everyone else who grew up in that culture.

You do realize that this is, in fact, very similar to what the people who stumped for "just letting us have bike lanes" have progressed to advocating, right? Totally car-free roads, roads that technically are car-usable but have been rigged so that they won't support normal traffic, various pushes to force (or "nudge" or "encourage") people to ride bikes or take mass transit instead of driving... etc.

And they even helped with convenient tax credits for taking their preferred modes of transportation! (spending tax dollars)

"I think you're kind of overreacting"

There is no such thing as "overreacting" with foraged mushrooms. The bar for "competent" identification is far too high, and the downside of being not-quite-competent-enough includes spending 72 hours knowing that you and your friends are going to die with no hope of a cure.

This should be what we expect to find, at least in US schools, because it was the explicitly stated, intended purpose of Progressive Education. They designed the entirety of their program after the Prussian model which was to produce workers trained enough to succeed in farms or factories but not smart enough to question the orders of their leaders.

Read William James. Read John Dewey - but really read him, because he was more aware that he had to soft-sell the socialist indoctrination program to an individualistic culture that wasn’t interested in buying.