nfh

two billionaires, unfathomably rich individuals, in the last ten years that having a good public image was overrated, but decided they’d rather use their platform to hurt people, and alienate anyone who liked them, but wasn’t a raging bigot. is the allure of being mean to people on twitter.com that great?

if Musk had shut up just 5 years ago, he’d probably have more money, more respect, but somewhat less power. instead he’s become the guy a lot of people are excited to see have a total breakdown, and hopefully lose everything.

There’s an important distinction here: “is a good idea” is not “is the right way to do it”. You can also keep kids off of dating apps by banning dating apps, banning children from the Internet, or even just banning children. All of those are horrible solutions, but they achieve the goal.

The goal should be to balance protecting kids with minimizing collateral damage. Forcing adults to hand over significant amounts of private data to prove their identity has the same basic fault as the hyperbolic examples, that it disregards the collateral damage side of the equation.

It’s all about the implementation. The Washington bill is treating diet products as similar to alcohol (check ID in-store and on delivery), which seems fine to me.

The NY law seems to be suggesting that dating app services need to collect (and possibly retain) sensitive information on people, like identification, location data. That’s troubling to me.

Am American, please keep it up.

Born in 1952, I think it’s safe to say Putin was small during the Soviet era.

I think I basically agree with you and the author here. People applying technology have a responsibility to apply it in ways that are constructive, not harmful. Technology is a force multiplier, in that it makes it easy to achieve goals, in a value neutral sense.

But way too many people are applying technology in evil ways, extracting value instead of creating it, making things worse rather than better. It’s an epidemic. Tech can make things better, and theoretically it should, but lately, it’s hard to say it has, on the net.

n a normal administration I think you’re right, but this isn’t a normal administration. Officials who take an oath are sworn to uphold the constitution, not to follow orders from the president. Soldiers have a duty to disobey illegal orders, and DOJ attorneys have similar traditions.

If the president and top Justice department officials are knowingly and repeatedly ordering them to take actions that are clearly illegal, and are publicly known to be doing so… they’re not whistleblowers, they’re conscientious objectors to a criminal enterprise being run openly by public officials.

But how many of them do you think put it away within a week of using it to make content? I would bet the ratio of people who possess one to people who will be disappointed is huge, assuming there are in fact disappointed users.

one man’s fizzy water is another man’s treasure, or something

You need to qualify for membership in the UK?

As an American, It’s the cheapest place to get a variety of fruits, veggies, several types of cheese, coffee, and toilet paper, at least on average. The catch is just that you need to buy in large quantities. They definitely have fancy and expensive brands too, but I don’t think they do as well here. They’re also a really popular place to fuel up cars, because they’re usually cheaper than the area around them, but sometimes up to 10% cheaper.

I guess that you need to drive a car there is also a catch, but I just moved to the second place I’ve ever lived that’s within reasonable walking distance of a grocery store, so driving to get groceries is normal to me. I lived near an Aldi for a few years, which was awesome.

Layoffs by profitable firms are horrible, but I’d rather see it done by giving agency over the decisions first to the workers affected by them, than to people so far removed from the work that they make essentially random decisions.

Don’t threaten me with a good time

Yeah but even if there’s some initial confusion, most normal people will get to a clear negative answer pretty quickly.

Cheap garbage is cheap garbage, no matter the price they expect you to pay for it.

If a store has an intentionally terrible interface like this, or displays a video feed of you using it, I’m not touching self checkout. Going through a cashier’s line is fine, and walking away from my cart and never coming back is fine if that’s not an option.

And there’s lots of subjectivity with coffee; you can get the tools to dial it in exactly how you like it, or just a machine that makes it really easy, with lots of space in-between.

Homeopathy convinces people to take a mixture that has no active ingredient instead of one that can affect what they’re sick with. If it’s a cold, eh whatever. If it’s cancer, that’s incredibly dangerous.

It’s just like TikTok, but if you don’t drink milk in your tea, you will be exposed to corrective content as needed

You call it the External Revenue Service despite the fact that American consumers are obviously going to pay for it?

The risk of starvation isn’t the only way to get there, but people who have little to lose in trying to change things are motivated to try. “The alternative is starving” is a really quick way to get there.