shswkna

I do not understand the downvotes.

It is a rational response to bureaucratic excesses worldwide in public procurement.

It is a plea to more common sense, to more down to earth thinking and decisive action in the public sphere.

This is not a call to ignore processes. But it is a call for civil servants to respect that they are exactly that. In service, and their ambition should be to do it well and efficiently.

The downvotes are an expression of those that think civil servants should be protected from such sentiment.

Man. This is where I stop engaging online. Like really, what is the point of even participating?

In this response, I detect the typical European tendency of elevating risk over opportunity.

This is not meant as a personal attack, or meant to be defamatory. I am detecting a familiar pattern, that is entrenched culturally.

Further, I identify this cultural trait as one of the obstacles or reason for many European problems.

It’s an opinion I have.

Nihilistic garbage lecture, that is my first opinion. On the other hand, he could have intended the exaggerated pessimistic outlook, to spur into action.

But my bias remains, I don’t like his defeatist attitude.

There is another, third perspective one can have on this.

One can both find good reasons and explanations for his behaviour, and at the same time his choices can be judged harshly.

I feel we have to heed the complexity of life and the situations people end in.

Each of us has different tendencies. Some are by nature straight shooters. Others again, overthink a situation and lack the cognitive or emotional intelligence to always arrive at the perfect answer for a situation we are in.

Both things can be true:

Him making a choice that seems inevitable for the situation he is in.

Also can be true, him wasting the life of another person (his wife) and him not seeing it this way. This is a bad deed from her perspective and can remain so.

But consider, for example, that he probably resented her and she was proxy for society’s pressure to confirm. Or, he thought that he gave her what she wanted (kids) and provided for them. In his eyes he paid his dues and got nothing out of it.

He might have realised that if he doesn’t get those small escapes (the affairs), he might not make it. You won’t know the make up of his reward system and his emotional make up.

When she wanted the divorce, his coping behaviours became habit. And he might not have been able to see a way out, or not have had the strength to change his reward seeking habits.

We also don’t exactly hear how he died in detail.

Im am not excusing him, but I am trying to be devil’s advocate to your absolutist stance, to provide a counterweight.

Yes, this is what happens.

From the article:

> They can also increase suicidal ideation.

A very close family member committed suicide, after Prozac dosage adjustments made his brain chemistry go haywire.

This happened 30 years ago, and it has been known to us that Prozac can cause this, since then.

The Guardians headline is way, way understating the real situation here.

Its exactly this. And the majority of persons in powerful regulatory roles completely don’t get or comprehend this effect.

When regulatory efforts depart from reality,and fail to find the correct middle ground, this happens:

The reality still exists, and will always find its expression in one of the following:

- people circumvent rules and go criminal

- undesired behaviours move elsewhere where the regulation doesn’t exist

- sections of an economy die

- issues remain unaddressed with the over regulated issues becoming too taboo to even discuss in a sane way.

This leads to us asking the deepest question of all: What is the point of our existence. Or as someone suggests lower down, in our current form all needs could ultimately be satisfied if AI just provided us with the right chemicals. (Which drug addicts already understand)

This can be answered though, albeit imperfectly. On a more reductionist level, we are the cosmos experiencing itself. Now there are many ways to approach this. But just providing us with the right chemicals to feel pleasure/satisfaction is a step backwards. All the evolution of a human being, just to end up functionally like an amoeba or a bacteria.

So we need to retrace our steps backwards in this thought process.

I could write a long essay on this.

But, to exist in first place, and to keep existing against all the constraints of the universe, is already pretty fucking amazing.

Whether we do all the things we do, just in order to stay alive and keep existing, or if the point is to be the cosmos “experiencing itself”, is pretty much two sides of the same coin.

Good question that probably shouldn’t be downvoted.

A subjective answer is, if you have been there and know this to be real from personal experience.

A more general answer would be, as long as we humans sufficiently interact with reality, we will have a respository of life experience to benchmark against.

Once we cease to do that, and are the product of a life in front of the screen, then we won’t know anymore.

Edit: This place is relatively close to where I live.

Thats why this move is good news for the rest of the world. Our competitive advantage will increase, year after year, albeit from a low level compared to the US.

To add to this, it is even funnier how travel agents undergo training in order to be able to interface with and operate the “machine readable“ APIs for booking flight tickets.

What a paradoxical situation now emerges, where human travel agents still need to train for the machine interface, while AI agents are now being trained to take over the human jobs by getting them to use the consumer interfaces (aka booking websites) available to us.

The world is full of very shitty, manipulative people.

These can be predatory men, or scheming women.

For me, the dichotomy is between people that try to act in good faith, and those that don’t.

Please elaborate?

I would believe so. But someone that better understands the PFAS molecules should confirm.

This should be the top comment.

Get angry at Europe, not Microsoft and USA.

Europeans live in a fairy land dream and need to wake up.

Most important question on this entire topic.

Fast forward 30 years and modern civilisation is entirely dependent on our AI’s.

Will deep insight and innovation from a human perspective perhaps come to a stop?

If there is any way to avoid Paypal, and still continue your business viably, this would be my recommendation.

Paypal is not a company that exists for its customers.

The central problem with this statement is that we expect others to care, but we do not expect this from ourselves.

We have agency. Whether we are brainwashed or not. If we cared about ourselves, then we don’t need another class, or race, or whatever other grouping to do this for us.

I would argue that the sentiment

>> GAME OVER is near and they should hurry up

still lacks the maturity that comes with age. Or take it as a compliment - you are not there yet. Taking this too seriously also diminishes the quality of our brief existence

In terms of economics and utility, the last 80% of effort produces 20% of the result. But the last 80% give us something much more that isn’t quantified: The feeling of having completed something of value, and having done it properly, carries an inherent value that surpasses the last 20% output. It is unquantifiable and priceless. This is when work or products become timeless and truly valuable. Not to mention that feeling of satisfaction and completeness of taking an accomplishment to that level.

If a company’s goal is to bring rockets to mars/solve world transport logistics/create driverless cars/etc/etc, you are not going to care about what is fair or what creates pressure. You will find the persons that can get the job done. Things like preventing burn out or balancing work with personal life will be dealt within the scope of reaching that goal. Many sensitivities in this thread or considerations of whats fair and isn’t, is really irrelevant. What goal is being pursued, and how can it be reached sensibly, is what matters in the end.

Without trying to ridicule you, asking “what social contract?” In this kind of discussion is like a first year university student asking “what’s a fraction?” in first year maths classes.

An entire section of philosophy is built on this question alone, and why there is such a thing as a social contract.

The lack of responses so far on this thread is just sad.

To the prosecutor: please just get a chill pill, for gods sake.

In Germany, the VW Minivan (“T models) were and still are iconic, and desirable. They are just very expensive.

The elephant in the room is this question:

What do we value? What is our value system made up of?

This is, in my opinion, the Achille‘s heel of the current trajectory of the West.

We need to know what we are doing it for. Like the OP said, he is motivated by the human connectedness that art, music and the written word inspire.

On the surface, it seems we value the superficial smuckness of LLM-produced content more.

This is a facade, like so many other superficial artifacts of our social life.

Imperfect authenticity will soon (or sometime in the future) become a priceless ideal.

Thank you for the reply!

This is published by a website that needs to be visited in order to justify its existence. Like the majority of the web these days.

Small signals in study data are overhyped and extrapolated to make general sweeping conclusions.

I’m not saying coffee is either bad, or a miracle substance.

I am saying everyone and everything on this planet craves relevance.