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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It doesn’t help that wage growth has largely been in the “unskilled” sectors (I hate that term, every job is skilled), but inflation reduction has largely been in non-essential goods. Which means that upper-middle to upper income people have been noticing their wages not increasing with inflation despite inflation overall being lower, and lower to low-middle income people have been noticing inflation impacting their budgets despite their wage increases.

    But in aggregate, “everyone” is being paid more and “inflation” is down. So at a macro level everyone “should” be happy with how things are going. But human beings don’t live at the macro level.



  • I would bet that every single person commenting here thinks of him- or herself as being deeply invested in privacy, ranting against things like ad tracking, etc. But as soon as someone (or some ones) you don’t like, or have no affinity with, wants to have the same privacy afforded to every single person who drives a car, all bets are off.

    Or are you suggesting that people (including the police!) should be allowed to have real time, constant information about where you drive to every day?

    Just because it’s a plane, and just because it’s a rich person, doesn’t make it any less of a privacy violation.





  • I’ve been an Apple fanboy for years, too, and I still am. The alternatives aren’t exactly better. And anyone who is surprised that Apple is dragging its heels and trying to do the bare minimum to comply, well, get back to me when you’re no longer twelve. Companies aren’t your friends, even when they look like they are. Hell, Google’s sudden about-face regarding Right to Repair is 100% intended to fuck over Apple. It’s not about the consumer, it’s about the money. Always, with every company, every time.

    Developers want alternate app stores because they want to make/keep more money. There’s no other reason. Every other reason given just comes back to more money. Is that a more valid argument simply because they’re smaller?

    I’m in favor of Apple opening up iOS to alternate stores. I think it’s going to be a privacy and security nightmare, but the horse is pretty much already out of the barn and the barn is burning, so… whatever. But I’m not so naive to think Apple’s going to fully embrace the ideal concept of alternate stores unless somehow it’s a way to beat Google’s or Samsung’s face in, and take their money.



  • Even if risks are under-reported (plausible, but unlikely, given the amount of scrutiny), it’s definitely the case that the risks from getting COVID are still not fully understood. Long COVID is a major issue that is still under investigation. So by your own metric - “highly reluctant to try the new possibly risky thing” - the vaccine is important. Because “the new possibly risky thing” in this case is getting COVID. You definitely don’t want to “try” that.











  • At what point does the world look at this and say that enough is enough.

    Do we ever, really? Over the sum of all war-related humanitarian disasters, the West responds to very few of them, and only when it’s economically or geopolitically useful. The Palestinian crisis is no different; it’s not exceptional in any way. There’s an ongoing nightmare in DRC that’s orders of magnitude worse than what’s happening in Gaza and… no one cares. Europe and the U.S. are on the verge of disengaging from Ukraine.

    The thing is, it doesn’t even matter if we “condemn this behavior.” We could do that all we want and it wouldn’t make much difference. And no one wants to be interventionist - there’s too much awful history around it, and it smacks of colonialism, and it means taking resources away from “domestic issues” that always seem to matter more.

    We’ve got to move away from the notion that the situation in Gaza is somehow unique. It allows us to conveniently ignore the root causes of the problem, which is much more universal, and stems from the ongoing sense of cultural superiority on the part of Europe and the U.S.