Many years ago I had to explain to a coworker how progressive taxation works. He was like “that’s a great idea! We should do that! It’s stupid that now your pay goes up but you take home less because you get taxed more”
I had to tell him, yes it is a good idea. It’s how it works now. You don’t get more pay and suddenly your whole income is taxed more.
He’d had no idea
On the one hand, omnipresent surveillance is bad and ripe for abuse.
On the other, I feel like the haphazard and selective enforcement of traffic laws by police officers is also really bad. Cops can selectively enforce laws so poor people or black people or whatever out-group suffers more. A machine should be impartial.
On the last hand, no traffic enforcement is probably going to get people killed. So that’s not desirable.
Also, fines are problematic. Fines should probably scale with wealth, but also it shouldn’t be a revenue source because that’s a perverse incentive.
Adding websearch to the start bar’s search was solving a problem that didn’t exist.
Maybe the average user is so ignorant and bad at computers they don’t understand this. They don’t know what a browser is. They don’t know what a website is. They don’t know what a program is. It’s all just stuff.
Personally, I’d rather spend billions on education than AI slop and other patches on “people are kind of dull”
Yeah, but I guess megacorps like Warner Brothers are even more obscene than elder gods.
One of the shadow of Mordor games made sexy shelob and it was bad.
Just remove all violent people first
Communication aims at information exchange,
Metadata is data. Skipping small talk is exchanging less information.
One time in a game of DND the players were exploring a strange cave system, and found a strange thick goo collecting in a pool. Players being players, one of them decided to eat some.
It was, in my notes, some sort of celestial honey made by these extra planar insects that were causing some of the region’s problems. It was supposed to taste amazing, but with some drawbacks. I started to blank when trying to describe how good it was, and the phrase that came out was “it’s like… It’s like … it’s like seven pizzas!”
The player eating it, his eyes lit up and was like “AMAZING”
The other players were like “wat”
I think that adequately captured how delicious it is but also maybe you shouldn’t be eating it.
may genuinely be unskilled when it comes to computers in general.
I do not accept this idea that people are so unskilled at computers they can’t install Linux, and are so immutably so they can’t get better.
Like yeah sometimes you have to ask for help or watch a YouTube video. That shit’s free and right there.
I would not be surprised if my old coworker-friends started a separate group chat without me after the nth, “Maybe you should come to one of these protests” and “Please at least read the wikipedia summary on this historical topic before you start going off about it” message from me.
They’re fine people but they’re also kind of very… apolitical.
Just one dish and one fork, typically. Sometimes the rice cooker.
I pretty much wash as needed.
Need a fork? Take out of sink, wash it.
Need a bowl? Take out of sink, wash it.
Need more room in sink? Take stuff out of sink and wash until there’s room
Works pretty well. Never really have a big stack up in the sink. Throws me off when guests come over and just grab stuff out of the cabinets and drawers like normal people, though.
That’s not really small town though, in my mind. I was thinking of like suburbs where people drive everywhere.
People in walkable cities tend to be hottest. Daily exercise does a lot of good for bodies.
A lot of people struggle to read, and it’s kind of sad. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ was an interesting post about it (available as a podcast and transcripts).
That said, some people really just do wallow and the slop and that’s an embarrassment.
Emulators are pretty great. The touch screen isn’t an ideal interface, but for less action-y games like final fantasy it’s fine.
One of the best responses to kirk’s death said something like “This is like writing an obituary of Joseph Goebbels that goes ‘Gobbels was a gifted marketer and father of six children’”
They do it for money. If people had standards, they’d behave better. Imagine if every time they announced they were doing more ads, every user cancelled. There is power in solidarity.
Unfortunately, most people are some mix of tired lazy stupid short-sighted
I feel like everyone knows the ownership class is ruining everything, but no one wants to do anything.
But that’s not true. I just hang out with people with more class consciousness, I guess. The average idiot probably blames the queers and the non-whites. “They had to raise the price of CoD because of all the money spent on sensitivity and diversity!” is probably something a dud sincerely believes.
Sometimes I wish real life was more like some video games, and I could just crouch behind those people, snap their neck, and dump the body in a bush with no consequences.
The other day I had to use a browser without any plugins to go to a site, and it was unrecognizable with all the ads. When I normally visit it’s clean and simple. These ads pushed content under the fold. Horrible.