If I’m saying anything, it’s that legislation is the one thing tech can’t get around. Europe has put out a lot of legislation that tech hates, some good, some bad. But tech complies. The government contracts thing won’t hurt - it could possibly help legislation come about in one way: if government contracts force a handful of companies to do something, at least that shows the thing can be done. That’s kind of important because tech loves to complain that what this legislation calls for will be impossible!

I’ve had to implement wave after wave of compliance with European laws in the last several years. We tend to just comply with something like GDPR everywhere because that’s simpler and it’s a best practice. But without the teeth of legislation we’d never bother. There’s always too much to do. I would have a hard time doing something that’s better for consumers but takes a lot of effort or might even undermine our ability to monetize as aggressively as we choose to. Not without those teeth. Not a chance. Even with teeth, tech companies often find some shitty way to meet the minimum bar but really do nothing. We must offer an API? Okay. It has almost nothing in it, but enough to say we did something. We’d never stand up an API that competitors or scammers could benefit from.

Did you also have a robustly enshittified consumer business?

I’m thinking of his classic users —> advertisers —> shareholders model and struggling to come up with companies that have that model but also thrive on government contracts.

Yelp is a pretty classic case of enshittification. What government contracts do they have?

I find Macedonian is close enough to English that I can get by /s

Yeah are they talking about themselves? Someone else? No one in the region is restraining themselves whatsoever.

Sadly it’s probably also the case that publishers’ ebook pricing to libraries is based on paranoia about them destroying all book sales, plus the usual corporate greed.

First thousand’s free. Yep, genius policy. (Which is why I doubt they do this).

I have heard this same story except with employers tracking employees who steal money. That one makes a lot more sense to me because they know the identity of the person involved.

Someone gonna tell me that the second I walk into Target their system is like “here comes Mr. Scara Bic, currently at $570.” ??

I liked my jumbo iPhone for a while but it was too long to fit comfortably in my pocket. Making it foldable wouldn’t help though, because the main reason I got rid of it was I kept dropping it. Too big to use with one hand.

I could allow that some people would rather carry a thicker but shorter object in their pocket than a thinner one with larger surface area. But I can’t think of much more than that. It bugs me that all foldable now ALSO have a miniature screen on the outside. Like they immediately admit that their primary feature is a nonstarter and add bulk to the phone when bulk is a primary issue with foldables.

This is not a word that has a strict definition nor is certified by any agency or standard. As you can see by this thread, there may be a variety of personal opinions about what should count. But it’s like asking at what point in learning to ride a bike do you become a bicyclist? Is it enough to just know how to ride? It’s a semantic question, which, if you’re not familiar with that term, just means that it all depends on what you want to call something and is not a question of any objective criteria.

It is a position you hold until a belief system provides sufficient evidence for you to form and hold a belief.

Gnostic atheism is a specific form which nobody actually holds to, which says that there positively is no god and this is known to be a fact. Any reasonable person would admit you can’t know this. And so virtually all atheists are agnostic atheists.

Being an agnostic atheist does not mean you are “on the fence” or “undecided” or “accepting of all beliefs equally.” It means you are intellectually honest that you cannot prove the non-existence of a god any more than you can prove there isn’t a planet in the universe where it rains lemonade. But until you have a firm reason to believe that some god exists, you’re going to proceed as if they don’t, because that’s the conclusion, however perpetually provisional, that best matches the evidence.

I don’t know that Jesus asked for a church to be founded either, or left behind any guidance on how to organize it or run it properly. If SG specifically said “don’t do this” then wow that’s even worse that they did. But it seems like much the same deal all around.

There’s actually a nuance here that religious people love to make much of. They would say that just because everyone who’s ever lived has died does not mean you know we all will. They would say you are just generalizing from the examples you have to all cases, which is fine but is inductive reasoning and therefore involves faith. They will say you cannot conclude deductively that we will all die, you can only reason inductively that you think we will, therefore you are operating in uncertainty and therefore you are exhibiting faith. Therefore science and religion are the same thing. (They’ll say).

This seems to be the latest favorite philosophical whipping post among religious people trying to find some basis in the modern world for their magic sky fairy beliefs. The funniest thing about it, to me anyway, is that it is an argument that boils down to “you’re just making shit up as much as we are!”

aLL ReLigiOnS aRE reALly AbOuT tHE saME uNdeRlYinG tHinG!! ٩(◕‿◕｡)۶

Well, I have a plan and I’ll tell you what it is.

This idea of a majority Jewish state, kept so through military occupation of Arab-dense territories, needs to simply go away.

I’m a one-state solution guy. Let everyone there practice their religion in peace and access their holy sites freely, and let democracy reign.

Israel’s big sin is that they want democracy BUT only with a majority Jewish population and an official state religion etc etc etc. It’s more than a Jewish homeland - it’s an ethnostate.

That is what needs to end. It doesn’t go somewhere else. No one gets pushed into the sea. We just stop pretending like we can use arms to carve out the “democracy” we want, and Israelis and Palestinians all live in a state that guarantees their freedom and safety.

Some fear that extremists will rise and take over that pluralistic society: build a constitution that prevents this. Embrace pluralism. Marshall Plan the fuck out of Gaza until the Palestinians see they have more to lose than their misery.

Iran’s last change in ruler was barely noticeable: one ancient dude in a turban for another with almost the same name. I’m sure the next will be similarly unnewsworthy.

Israelis have been much more open about dehumanizing their enemies since last October, arguing outright that they are “not human beings” in many cases. I feel sad for them because they do not see how dehumanizing others is eating away at their own humanity, and that this is probably the very intention of their opponents.

Without getting into subjective topics like what it was like to be alive in the 1960s, there’s certainly a few ways you can argue that delivering on today’s building codes is more complex than it was back in those times. Buildings are also safer now as a result. This is a simple thing and surely never took up an iota of HST’s attention, but it’s a straightforward fact about how you just get more now than you did then, even if it is something invisible like the safety of improved electrical wiring.

Uh yeah that definitely needed to be “spelled out” from your prior comment.