I don’t know I thought it was pretty good.

I don’t, in general make this same bargain, and I’m not more than happy to give my data, and thus sacrifice my privacy. However, I have had to reckon, and I think many of those who value privacy must too, with the fact that it isn’t inherently valued by everyone, that simply adequately communicating this in a way that’s better understood won’t translate to people suddenly realising what they’re giving up. We aren’t always simply one great analogy away from changing every person’s world view and likely many have come to their view from a place at least as well informed as those of us who jealously guard our privacy. I also have to reckon with the fact that to some extent, my own desire to protect my privacy is at least not fully explainable by logic and rationalism, especially in light of how difficult it is to protect and how easy it is to have unwittingly ceded it. You might call that defeatism, and to simply conclude “well I lost some privacy, so I might as well give it up completely” is accepting defeat, again not something I’m yet prepared to do, but it is also perhaps important to acknowledge and factor present realities in to one’s thinking. It might sound defeatist to point out an enemy’s big guns pointed toward you from all sides, but it’s insane to ignore them. That quote that you’ve produced, while antithetical to my thinking, really isn’t irrational or illogical, and only defeatist if you were onboard with fighting to begin with. If you do not value your privacy and you get something useful in exchange for its sacrifice then it would seem obvious to part with it gladly and it’s difficult to offer a rational reason why someone shouldn’t. My strongest motivation for protecting it is more idealistic than personal and has more to do with a kind of slippery slope argument and a concern for hypothetical power grabbing and eroding of our rights and autonomy. I like to think that’s reason enough, but at least right now, for almost everyone, none of those concerns represent clear nor present dangers and I can’t prove it definitely will become such in future though I certainly feel like it has accelerated trends firmly in the direction of my fears.

No person nor source gets it right all the time, I like your idea as an evaluative technique but I think the assumption that being incorrect here is necessarily because of lying might mean discounting a lot of sources/creators who are otherwise reputable. I’d look at it more like degrees of doubt cast over everything else they say where you don’t have the expertise to evaluate the accuracy. Much like a driver’s licence, you get dinged enough times for more and more infractions and eventually you lose your license. If they keep continually getting things wrong where it’s something you know something about eventually you can probably discount them on anything else as well, but if it’s just once or twice, especially where they’re not egregiously wrong, some benefit of the doubt could be beneficial to all concerned. Better I would have thought to take what feels like their salient points on the content they produce on topics where you aren’t knowledgeable and check if other people are claiming anything similar and where something is verifiable, try to verify. Of course theoretically you should do that all the time but in practice at least each time you know someone is wrong about something it’s an indication that for them specifically further checking is required.

I was sure 103 was going to win that.

These things are always subject to challenge but as I understand the oldest ‘verified’ person to have ever lived was 122 when they died.

I would be super dissapointed to learn that they figured out FTL travel and the ability to simply materialise food and all the other amazing technological feats but still hadn’t automated cleaning yet. I godamn hate cleaning.

It’s weird, I hated every minute of it and was so glad to see the back of it, but for some reason I find myself sorta day dream wishing for exactly this more frequently than I’d like.

I think my mind has sort of gamified it now and that first run was a bad run that I want to retry. Ironically despite wanting nothing to do with it ever again, I kind of want to relive it not just once but many times over. I’d like to do a run where I pay attention and learn and do very well using my adult skills and accumulated knowledge but I also most want to do a run where I just do a way better job of making friends and having girlfriends and a very active social life in general. I realise how cliché and shallow that is, not least because I’m pitching both those things as opposites which they aren’t necessarily and also that that’s what I would do with what amounts to time travel when it’s so frivolous and trite. But I just, I saw those people in school, effortless social butterflies that people felt good being around and I’d like to have experienced that. I wasn’t a hermit or unloved in school, but it was a huge struggle with a lot of pain and rejection and I was so paralyzed by crippling depression and insecurity, I’d just like a glimpse of what experiencing it on easy mode would have been like.

I know the people I’m thinking of that seemed to have an easier time from afar had plenty of problems and probably some insecurities of their own that I just didn’t see or appreciate in my little bubble but there was a burden I carried that comes from an extreme lack of confidence that some didn’t have to shoulder and I would like to go through that particular period that can be a very special and formative time for a lot of people without so heavy a burden marring it. Second time around I think, that fear and insecurity that plagued everything while I was living through it would be greatly eased.

Then again, if I had to try to deal with cruel teenagers again with my grown up sensibilities I don’t know for sure I’d really do much better, teenagers are experts at cruelty and finding your weak points, there’s a good chance my confidence would be very quickly shattered leaving me with only the misery of having to go through it all over again. Also, on the point of wanting to have “had girlfriends” as others did, if I’m going back with my adult memories and brain development, well… Yeh that’d be pretty fucked up, I’d probably end up having to forego that except this time by choice.

I judge this… 4th of October

The fun thing about October is that whenever the date is written for the first 10 days it looks like a score.

Title seems dumb in context but the post itself is top notch.

Only for the poor cake to be sliced to pieces shortly afterwards by Kate herself. :'(

In case you get raided and the flush isn’t working.

I mean I have no problem with it. Might even help the economy with all the extra wedding services from arachnid customers.

The other day at the supermarket, I was reading the ingredients and nutrition guide on the back of a bottle and I tried to scroll up through it.

I really feel very uncomfortable with the notion of tracking the kids anyway. Arming them with knowledge as best as possible, and as usual showing interest in their behaviour to try and look as best as possible for signs of problems but ultimately kids are still people with their own lives even if people in development. Yes you need to protect them, to a certain extent, but ultimately some of this is no business but their own. You can try to educate and forewarn and hope some of it sticks but the tendency from my memory of being a kid is that that tends to be met with an eye-roll, this is probably where the temptation comes from to track children or drastically restrict the choices they’re able to make so they can’t ignore you but this is hardly a great way for that person in development to ultimately… develop.

This is dicey though, not least because as yet another random person on the internet offering their unsolicited opinion, I don’t even have kids, and if you follow my logic to extremis, you basically have, “let the kids just figure it out on their own they’ll be fine” which definitely won’t apply to everything and can have disastrous consequences in some contexts. But nevertheless I think this concept of tracking, either covertly, or overtly with the intention of making a kind of panopticon effect for the kids, is likely ineffective but even if effective, is indicative of something going wrong with the intent of the surveillance.

Exactly. The article is pay walled so I couldn’t get too specific since I don’t known it’s scope but my suggestion here is that it’s not complete naïveté not to have automatically assumed the war in Ukraine would lead to both actual inflationary pressure as well as cover for just plain old price gouging because that price gouging behavior on its own doesn’t make good business sense even hard nosed and cynically motivated, it requires both greed and concentrated ownership in cartels. Presumably we should see this greedflation happening unevenly in particular sectors where cartels or cartel like conditions have flourished.

I guess one way it’s surprising is that, it takes a degree of coordination for this to happen. I mean you have some major international event that can trigger international economic consequences like some degree of inflation and then some genius thinks that since the public have been forced to swallow price rises across the board because of this, what if we just raise our prices some more and it will be assumed it’s for the same unavoidable cause. Okay, I get the scam, great. But, whether consumers believe the pretense or not and have sympathy or not, wouldn’t stop them going elsewhere if someone else didn’t come up with the same clever scheme or hasn’t launched it yet, and still has higher, but not extra high prices. Or maybe they do all see a great caper and jack up the prices at the same time, eventually, for the same greedy reasons, those businesses would want to take the other’s lunch if they could and would see the benefit of being at least just a little bit cheaper which is supposed to create a cycle that is the way capitalism supposedly works.

This doesn’t happen when you see monopolies or near monopolies. Supermarkets in Australia are in particular being talked about for price gouging and there’s an associated near duopoly between 2 dominant chains. In that context it’s definitely not very surprising. I’d bet that this particularly recent example of price spikes without adequate explanation are associated particularly with sectors where there is very little competition. The article was pay walled so I can’t tell if they’re referring specifically to prices for groceries or economy wide problems.

I don’t know, have you seen their creepy eyes? Who knows what they’re up to when you’re not riding them somewhere.

I know, just something about it doesn’t look like coffee.

I’ve gotten so used to being able to just use the zapper in ublock origin that I forget that in apps outside of the web browser you can’t just get rid of unwanted bits of the UI. That sucks man.