The janny smacked you but I thought you raised a valid point. The "moral high ground" is and has always been subjective. Do the ends justify the means? Depends on the ideology. Is a soldier surrendering a dishonorable act, or should he be treated with professional dignity? During WW2 the Japanese thought that surrender was dishonorable and treated POWs very poorly. They also deliberately shot at combat medics, they didn't have any sort of taboo against that. Nor did Europeans, until most of the way through the 19th century, think much about leaving wounded soldiers to lay dying in the field, or even casually murdering the wounded as they lay helpless after the battle was already decided (these sort of behaviors lead to the creation of the Red Cross.) In all of these cases it wasn't because those people were fundamentally evil. They were acting according to the norms and expectations of their culture. When two sides with radically different norms encounter each other in conflict, both can feel as though the other is depraved. But that's not necessarily an accurate reflection of the mental state of the other guys. American soldiers in the Pacific thought that the Japanese were savage animals, but with cooler hindsight we know that the Japanese had and still have a strong sense of honor. The catch is that it is, or at least then was, a very different sort of honor that held people to different expectations than Americans were accustomed to.
Indeed. I think anything short of tossing your drink at McDonalds workers probably doesn't phase them. They deal with much worse shit from the public than somebody snarking at the premise of having an app.
It sure seems like whenever a corporation grows old, large or expansive enough, it will inevitably morph into an spy agency. Even what is obstensibly a burger flipping business wants to spy on people.
Earlier this week I was in a regional gas station getting lunch, they've got maybe 30 or so locations scattered around this part of the state, and watched them tell an old man that he couldn't get a loyalty card from them anymore because they only do apps now. "But I don't have a cellphone" - "Uhhh... You can also do it online?"
Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically soulless already; they care more about their own immediate convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about the human being on the other end of the phone line.
Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.
My friend, letting yourself be bothered by this is just pissing into the wind. Humans have been anthropomorphizing machines and other objects for as long as we've been making them, it's a fundamental aspect of human nature. Thousands upon thousands of ships and trains given human names. Tanks, guns, cars, anything that is at least moderately complex or that people find themselves relying on and forming relationships with. AIs have been getting human names since at least 1966 with Eliza, probably earlier, and certainly with many earlier examples in fiction.
It's not really the radiation from radon itself which is the problem, but rather radon's daughters. Radon is a noble gas, so it's not going to accumulate in you and doesn't get much chance to do damage to people even if they inhale it; they'll just exhale it moments later before barely any of it can decay. But radon's daughters, the chain of atoms which are produced from the decay of radon and each other, aren't gases, so if stagnant air with radon sticks around it's going to 'rain' an atomic dust of radioactive isotopes which can accumulate and, if disturbed, can be inhaled and stick with people.
It's probably reasonable to say that radiation actually being beneficial is very theoretical, but the linear no-threshold model of harm from radiation is definitely in the theoretical category too. It's used because it's very conservative, but evidence supporting it for low radiation dosages is very weak.
Because parasocial relationships with ewhores isn't healthy, particularly at a stage in their life when they should be forming real relationships with their peers.
> Researchers found TikTok suggested sexualised and explicit search terms to seven test accounts that were created on clean phones with no search history.
In the world that you can only get anything remotely that close to that much from Musk once. You cannot seriously plan to fund federal programs like this to any substantial degree, either those programs need to be sustainable after the wealth taxes are spent, or you need to keep dropping the wealth threshold year after year to keep the wealth tax money flowing.
$400B compared to the federal budget is negligible. $100B compared to working class people struggling paycheck to paycheck might as well be a trillion. If it's not about knocking Musk down to a mere millionaire, then I genuinely don't get the point.
> My friend, nobody is talking about taxing wealth at a rate higher than that wealth grows.
Then I don't understand why most of the rhetoric behind this idea focuses on reducing inequality. If Elon Musk was now worth $100B instead of $500B, how does that make any practical difference?
I've had my dad, with similar usage patterns, using XFCE for close to 15 years now. Very few problems with it, I only have to play tech support maybe once a year. Worth considering..
Even if wealthy people didn't move or otherwise evade or avoid the wealth tax and fully complied with the spirit of the thing, I don't see how it could work over time. If the tax "worked" and reduced their wealth, then the revenue from the tax would drop. There would be a natural tendency for the system to then start moving the threshold down to keep the revenue up. Where does that end, with everybody being equally poor?
Maybe so! The way I see it going in the next few years is CLI tools remain valuable because they're useful to these coding agents. At the same time, users increasingly use GUIs which have been custom made or modified for them personally. We might even eventually get to the point where user-facing software becomes ephemeral, created on on the fly to meet the user's immediate needs.
Respectfully, what you should do is first make sure you don't live somewhere that recognizes common law marriage, then commit to that person without actually legally marrying her.