luckylion

> But giving you a gun limits my liberty, because I would feel threatened and unable to express myself fully in a society where I would have to assume that random people on the street carry guns.

Yes, I understand the point. There are others who feel threatened and affected by people of different sexual orientations, even if those people never interact with them different than everyone else. You'll protest, no doubt, their feelings aren't legitimate - those are phobias while yours are rational feelings!

In pretty much every EU member state, you'll have to assume that random people on the street carry guns. Not everyone, not most, but some, none visibly. Would it make you more or less comfortable if the same number of people openly carried the same guns?

"Wholistic view of individual freedoms" sounds to me like a quote from the movie Thank You For Smoking. My memory is terrible, but it goes something like this (context, old movies are being edited to remove cigarettes in order to not promote smoking): "Aren't you altering history" - "No, we are improving history".

I find it much better to just flat out say "the collective over the individual", and not dance around it with fancy terms. Redefining liberties as privileges instead of rights isn't the way to go. Arguing for the merit of something is much better than trying to sneak it in by bending language and concepts.

I feel like the biggest question to ask is: how expensive is it exactly, how often do you need to do it, and how important is the speed of it?

If you have some complex queries on every page load with a huge number of users, put it in the DB as much as possible.

If you need to iterate over a bunch of records and do something based on some combination of values, and it's for a weekly reporting thing, I'd much rather see 3 nested foreach loops with a lot of early exits to skip the things you don't care about than a multi-kb SQL-statement that took two days to develop and nobody every dares to touch again because it's hard to handle.

Yes, liberty is generally about individuals and often juxtaposed with collective interests. Your freedom to choose what to do with your life hurts the interests of the collective that would benefit from some choices more than from others. And Europe is, compared with the US, definitely much more collectivist. I'm happy you agree on the fundamentals!

I think that's perfectly fine and primarily a cultural choice. There's no need to make it a moral question and declare this or that the "right" way.

Europeans tend to mistrust the individual to make good decisions without laws removing choice, I think you've demonstrated that part very clearly. And, that's all I was saying, that is a primary driver for mandatory pension systems that removes people's ability to make their own investment decisions. Again, you'll say that's good and necessary - but it's happening.

It very much is what happens. Yes, there are _also_ historical reasons for it, but today's arguments are centered around the state's risk that you might mismanage your stuff and require assistance. Hence Germany's insistence of allowing separate forms (with tax-advantages) only via long-term committed insurance policies ("Riester-Rente", "Rürüp-Rente").

You'll see echoes of the same ideas in other parts, be it recreational drug use, gun-ownership, what you're allowed to name your kids, building codes & zoning laws, school laws etc etc.

You can absolutely argue the merit of limiting people's choices, but I don't think you can deny that we do.

That's the stability vs risk trade-off, I think. The European approach is much more stable, but stability isn't free.

I'd compare it to investing in the stock market (volatility & good yield) vs investing in government bonds (more secure, you know what you'll get back after they mature, lower yield).

While the public doesn't have immediate power, it has a lot of freedom. If you manage your retirement fund, you can use it in whatever way you want. Buy a boat. Start a company. Gamble it all away in a week.

A lot of European countries have a much more paternal approach. Citizens can't be trusted to make good decisions, so they only receive part of their salary, and the rest is being managed "for them" - and that's non-negotiable (but there are some exceptions). A lot more stable, but a lot less free because you have a guardian making those decisions for you.

The payer is the owner of the account? I doubt that is AWS' default stance, because their contract is with the account holder, not the payer.

Me paying your bill doesn't give me ownership of your stuff - as far as AWS is concerned, your bill is paid, and that's the extent of their involvement, everything else is between you and me.

If what he writes is true, he remained the account holder and even had a backup billing method in place - something he probably wouldn't have if he wasn't the account holder.

I don't know if he's completely honest about the story, but "somebody else paid, so we decided they are now the owner" isn't how that works.

There's a difference between rights and privileges.

If the government gifts you $1000 a month because they like you so much, that's a privilege. Privileges can be taken away.

If the government gives you $1000 a month because it's the law, then they can't take it away without breaking the law (or changing it first).

Public funding for specific universities is not the law, so the government can stop giving it to someone (yes, yes, there are contracts and laws involved and what not, but the general point stands).

The government cannot imprison you for saying you like pineapple on pizza, but they can stop funding your pizza experiments.

Usually it's brought up by people on the left and I think they're right: freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences. Freedom of speech protects you from the government as in the executive branch can't just imprison you, but it doesn't protect you from any and all consequences. It's just that they usually don't find themselves the targets suffering those consequences.

And opinions often depend on whether you're affected.

I wouldn't say it's "just as bad", but I also couldn't imagine a big university publicly and strongly going against the federal government in Germany on "culture war" issues.

If you're fully aligned, there's no telling what would happen if you weren't, and you can't use "nothing happens" as evidence that nothing would happen - you're always allowed to share the opinions of whoever funds you.

If Germany got a right-wing government on the federal level, I expect to see either funding being slashed or universities adjusting their positions.

You don't though, unless your funding depends on him. If you're a contractor for Oracle, you'll probably get in trouble if you loudly proclaim different values than them - but that doesn't make it a non-free country.

I've received messages from people (who don't even report to me) asking whether they did something wrong because I had forgotten to close some google doc they shared which then showed me as "active on the document" for hours and they thought "he's combing through everything, I'm in trouble" and eventually reached out because they couldn't take it anymore.

People read things very differently based on their perceived (job) safety. If you add culture differences (I'm german in a company with a lot of non-germans; what's normal communication to me makes some people gasp), there's a lot of opportunity to accidentally cause stress.

> How do you see them living in five years? Almost nothing is left standing in Gaza.

Depends mostly on how they react, I think. How would Germany have looked in 1950 if it hadn't surrendered but instead transitioned into a partisan war against occupying Allied forces?

Anyone who is militarily defeated and wants peace must eventually surrender and stop trying to wage war. Germany managed to do that in Europe and make peace, and not immediately try to rearm to try again like they did after WW1.

That's not a statement on what's happening in Gaza today, but on what happens in Gaza in 5 years. Had the Arab nations accepted their defeat 70 years ago, we'd be looking at a very different history.

That sounds similar to me like the argument against anti-depressants that it's "not real", and you're not actually better, you're just addressing symptoms, not the cause. But my experience is very clear: that's a huge improvement.

Clearly people have needs, clearly they feel chatbots satisfy those to some degree (otherwise they wouldn't use them). To those people, it's an improvement, I don't see how that's a negative.

> before they even try to do the work at getting human companionship

Why do they have to "do the work" to be deserving of companionship when most of us don't have to do anything because it comes natural to us and we can relatively easily regulate the amount of companionship we want.

I fail to see the bad thing. For some people it's either a chatbot (or a dog) or no interaction at all. Should people starve instead of eating at McDonald's because that's "not real food"?

What about people who don't have human companions? Should they not have any companionship at all over having dogs, birds, cats, or chatbots?

But "a few months" isn't 5 years, right? Last update in January 2025 seems fine for a lot of things. If that was January 2020 I'd probably bypass it as well.

> Data breaches hardly ever cause hundreds of deaths in a violent fireball.

Insurance people will be happy to tell you the price of the average citizen's life. Estimate the total cost to the economy, divide by the average citizen's life-value and you have the statistical deaths caused by this type of incident. Draw a fireball next to it for dramatic effect.

But generally, I don't think _every_ SaaS needs to be tightly regulated. But everyone that handles customer data needs to be. It would also very quickly make them stop hovering up any data they can get their fingers on and instead would make them learn how to provide their services securely without even having access to the data, because having that data suddenly becomes a liability instead of an opportunity.

While I'm absolutely not a design-should-rule-all person, I think there's quite a range between "pixel-level control" and "you can't choose which font to use".

If we'd reliably have the top 50 google fonts on every OS, there'd be a lot less webfonts used.

Oh, I misunderstood the GP then, thanks for clarifying!

> I can’t understand why anyone would become emotionally invested in any of them.

I think that's simple: because they are financially invested in them. That's obvious for the developers working on the frameworks themselves or building libraries / plugins / UI-themes for them, but I believe it's also correct for "normal" developers who build things with these frameworks.

They know these frameworks and can use them, and they've made an investment in time to get to that point. Likely they're also making at least some of their money _because_ they know these frameworks. Emotional attachment follows the economic attachment, and then you'll get plenty of rationalizations.

That doesn't affect the parent (.group) based on the child though.

> Leaving a power vacuum, like dismantling the UN, will just open the door for places like China to step in.

The UN has no power, so dismantling it cannot leave a power vacuum. The US abandoning its overseas policies, that'd leave a power vacuum, because the US has power and projects it. But the UN has no power - it's some UN member states that have power.

Case in point: the general assembly demanded Russia withdraw all military forces from Ukraine. But what are they going to do about Russia ignoring that demand? Nothing, they're powerless.

The UN didn't prevent another world war. If you'd want to include an organization, it'd be the UN security council, but not anything else of the UN. And realistically, it's nukes that prevented WW3. It's not a coincidence that the permanent members of the security council, the veto powers, all have nuclear weapons.

It's definitely no "let's just do it over the weekend" job, but otoh, you don't have to do it all at once, nobody uses every tool. You'd probably need to still roll out by unit or at least in waves (e.g. for the unit that handles building permits, which is much less complex).

I do agree that there's no good incentive. The other reason I've learned is their organizational issues: heavy focus on certifications, much lower salary vs private industry, heavy on the bureaucracy and office politics, and a lot of dead weight. That doesn't get you skilled people with plenty of motivation, and you get the outcome you'd expect.

I doubt that the average employee could tell Linux and Windows apart if you applied a Window-style skin to Linux.

But at least in Germany, I've seen Windows being written into agreements between state governments and trade unions representing clerks and employees. Good luck changing those without a negotiation running 3 years.

That's unlikely for sudden and short-lived surges, isn't it? There probably won't be plenty of new rentals popping up in LA because of potentially high demand during the next wildfire.

How do they handle it when you get your inventory sent back? I.e. you send them 100 pieces of X and after three months you tell them to send them back to you. Do they just take 100 pieces of X out of their general inventory, or do they know which ones were yours? Because otherwise it seems like an obvious scam where you could send in trash and get real items back.

The same factories you wouldn't trust with the replacement also make the originals. So you wouldn't buy a phone at all?

Yes, I'm aware. I checked when they killed the pixel4: there's no shop close to me.

I wouldn't spend half a day to get to an authorized partner and back and have it repaired, it's not worth that much.

Yeah, while I liked the pixel 4a, I just upgraded to a 7a because of this nonsense (thankfully I did not go with a 6a!) If they come for the 7a next year, I won't choose a pixel again either.

Sure, I could send it in for a battery replacement. and not have a phone for a week or two, and get my phone back or maybe not.