The only way this gig is ethically justifiable is if the support act is a guillotine.

Curl up in a ball and weep a salty creek.

There was a greek-australian comedian who was standing in front of the parthenon and said something like, “You can tell this house is greek cause of all the pillars”.

That headline really is a thing of beauty. It’s like finding out that your trash is piling up because the city retasked all the sanitation workers to lie in fields of filth and create a heavenly host of garbage angels.

I can’t not read that in a garbled south african accent.

Uber is a bad faith actor, their business model is entirely monopoly-seeking. If they’re trying to expand into bus routes, the goal will be to reduce the choices available to just Uber.

Yeah, everyone dreams multiple times every night. I’m sure these days most people mean ‘don’t remember dreams’ when they say ‘don’t dream’, but when I grew up so many people honestly thought they did not dream and wouldn’t believe me when I tried to explain how that’s biologically impossible.

Kind of like modern pickup trucks

Except nice to look at, yep!

Pick ups seem like a great example because they are so often a status/identify token.

A lot of these hand axes may have had some kind of not-strictly-functional purpose during their heydey in the stone ages as well. Heaps of them show no evidence of wear or use and are noticably gorgeous - just really pleasingly shaped.

I personally believe that preserving a false and misleading picture of reality designed to trumpet a deranged cult that is working to make the world objectively worse for everyone including themselves is not acceptable.

I would say, “Look mum I love you more than anything in the world but preserving some of these movies crosses an ethical line for me.”

Of course I grew up in a house of atheist jewish academics, so making and justifying personal ethical stances that contravene wider group stances is expected behavior in my family. And we take document preservation fairly seriously.

I agree with you pretty much everything you said, I just think that drawing a strong distinction between any one species and every other one mischaracterizes the situation. Evil is a human construct that applies as poorly to human behaviour as to the behaviour of every other animal, for the same reasons.

If you’ll excuse me simplifying your point, “They’re animals of course they do that, evil doesn’t come into it” is not quite as accurate as “We’re all animals, evil doesn’t come into it”, to my mind at least. Because OP didn’t just misunderstand an aspect of non-human animals, they misunderstood an aspect of how life works.

They can do those things because they’ve been beneficial

That describes human behavior just as well.

We’re animals. Like all social animals we have behavioral norms and individuals who violate them in circumstances that benefit them.

Many animals display empathy, both in their behavior and neurology. Many animals understand, remember and display reciprocity. Many animals mourn. Many animals show strong evidence of forming assessments of individuals from other species.

Our actions are determined by the sum total of our genetics, experience and social expectations, same as any other social animal.

I vaguely remember hearing that you can know whether someone was born before or after a specific year, depending on whether they use by or on accident.

It’s very naive to think that a weapons dealer who also kills it’s commercial airline passengers for profit isn’t also killing whistleblowers.

Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics

According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ’s attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law.

It’s perfectly reasonable to see this practice of avoiding the creation of evidence of their wrongdoing as evidence of wrongdoing, which is 100% what it is.

It’s not the same as a person using TOR, it’s a company hiding evidence.

That code is to computer porn as the Hunt the Wumpus is to computer games.

Yes, getting sued for stepping on a mine like rounded corners is so good for inventiveness.

It’s so strange to me that people buy this BS line about IP laws having anything to do with why we get cool new things.

Either competition fosters innovation and therefore IP laws stifle it, or protecting monopolies fosters innovation and our IP laws make sense.

There has been a centralized bureaucratic autocracy in china since the legalist reforms of qin, a couple thousand years ago. Yes, the empire once united must divide but even during the long disunity before the sui and tang, there were multiple centralized autocratic states. Unity across all of the territory called modern china is not necessary to have a centralized state, and you’ll notice I never once used the word united.

forcibly “united” by external forces, such as the Western powers in the 19th century, dividing up and ruthlessly controlling economic spheres of influence

Wait were western powers dividing or uniting china? You’re claiming both in the same sentence. But that’s kind of immaterial to my point that the centralized autocratic state has existed in china for a couple thousand years and that many important new technologies came out of the cultures governed in that way.

I wouldn’t be looking for ‘game changers’ - that’s a marketing phrase with no firm meaning and very low applicability to reality. All invention is just iterating on existing ideas.

We didn’t see much cutting-edge tech coming out of China while they were recovering from the collapse of the imperial system and the colonial period, but now that they have more resources to throw at new tech, we’ll see new tech.