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The fact that innocent people are purposefully being killed in Gaza is just that - a fact.
What you can do is argue that that's okay. What you CAN'T do is argue that that isn't happening.
For example, it is a fact that the US slaughtered hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
You can argue it was justified and the lesser of two evil - people do it all the time. What you CAN'T argue is that hundreds of thousands of innocent people werent slaughtered. They were, it just happened.
I'm sorry, you just have to live with that and live with whatever resulting beliefs you may have.
Ultimately, a lot of the wealth of the West comes from core countries siphoning wealth from the periphery and propping up psueodo governments to place their thumbs on the scale of world politics. Exhibit A: Israel.
Ultimately sharing opinions is a two way street. If you want to share yours and be met with absolute silence, then it might be time to start working on that interdimensional transporter and teleport away to an alternate reality.
Or move to Russia or something. I don't know.
Point is, your comfort is not something I care about. Not in a rude way, but just in a pragmatic way. If I had to care about the comfort of every random person, I wouldn't be able to say anything, ever.
And, for the record, I don't want to hear about Israel either. Nobody does.
Why? Because it sucks. Regardless of "which side" you're on, it sucks. People are dying, children are starving, bullets are blazing, and humanity is hurt.
But I listen. Because it's important. For humanity, for my country, and for me. Even if you're perfectly selfish, the selfish thing to do is to listen and pay close attention.
Once again, that's not Israel's money. That's not gazas war. If you think you're somehow exempt from this, then you're not selfish, you're much worse - you're naive.
Despite, you know, literally creating it.
If you want to actively make the world a worse place for everyone be my guest. But naturally, people are probably not gonna like you. People might point to you as an example of what's wrong with humanity.
That's a something you have to live with.
The laws regardless this almost always make a distinction between intentionally surveillance and by chance background noise. Taking a picture of the street with people on it doesn't matter, recording the street 24/7 probably does, and purposefully singling someone out and photographing them definitely matters.
We already kind of have this. Think about it - stalking is illegal, but you've walked behind people right? You've glanced into someone's window before, right? You've taken a picture of a random person before, right?
So why aren't you in jail? Because laws aren't algorithms
Maybe loyalty is the wrong word - if they really go to left field, I would abandon them.
But I have a lot of faith in their design decisions and overall vision. Their software works, continues to work, and has always worked amazingly for me.
I also feel the same way about Firefox but donating to Firefox isn't like donating to thunderbird.
No, housing is not always cheaper, feel free to do some research. Its highly dependent on your city.
If you truly think buying is cheaper in Manhattan then I don't know what to tell you. You're just wrong, period.
What's happening here is youre comparing suboptimal housing to THE ABSOLUTE most expensive apartments you can find.
My parents do the same thing. "Oh housing is so much cheaper, imagine renting in Dallas!"
But... We're an hour and a half outside of the city.
The reason the housing is cheap is because nobody wants it.
And, if you really want to compare apples to apples, you have to compare properties in the same area. Its easy to make housing look cheap when you compare upper Manhattan to New Jersey.
Suddenly that 4,000 dollar apartment looks pretty competitive when the alternative is 5 million mortgage + 3000 a month HOA.
- multi-unit buildings are significantly more efficient in cost per-unit.
The cost of a 1500 sqft apt and 1500 sqft home is not the same, the home is going to cost a few times more. Because it's on its own lot, with its own land, and it's on the ground, and it gets its only municipalities (gas, water, steam, electricity), and then it also has its own road requirements.
Basically with, say, a 12 story block you can get hundreds of units for the same amount amount of land (and associate cost) as a few homes. And then you can spread the cost of municipalities, too.
Even with just a duplex or dingbat you're looking at the same land costs and the equivalent accomodations as a few homes. But it doesn't scale linearly, meaning a duplex != the cost of 2 homes.
Also large landlords (corps) can spread the cost of price across all their units. Meaning, like Walmart, some are loss leaders for competitive reasons and some make more money than they need to.
Interestingly, the cost per unit continues to go down until about 12 stories. Then it goes back up, because of building requirements. Which is why commie blocks were historically 8 to 12 stories tall, it's the cheapest way to build housing.
Can't really move companies easily if you're owning a home, ergo, about 10% potential loss per year over renting, not including the difference in investments you could achieve by having more liquid income w renting vs buying.
Buying DOES make sense. I think it almost never makes sense if you're early in your career. The ceiling is just too high to give up potential earnings that early. The closer you get to the ceiling though, the more sense buying a home makes.
Made up numbers: consider:
Mortgage: 2,000 Home price: 200,000 Difference from rent: -500
Rent: 1,500 Home price: 0 Difference from mortgage: +500
If (500/month invested over 30 years) > (200,000 appreciated home price over 30 years) then you came out on top by renting.
It might be or it might not be.
Also, the type of asset matters. Stock might be a more flexible asset than real estate, in which case you should probably rent depending on your location.
If you have your first job and therefore little to no liquid cash, and then on top of that you require tenants to make your mortgage, you're in a pretty risky position.
That means that if just about anything goes wrong you can be absolutely fucked.
If you compare homes and apartments in the same location, the gap grows even wider. Yes, $4,000 a month in Manhattan is expensive.
But $4,000 might be JUST the HOA cost for buying in the same area. Never mind the 10 million dollar mortgage.
(Spoiler: fake numbers, actually do the math for your city)
Also, if you're buying in NYC you WILL get recurring and increasing monthly costs.
That $800/month HOA? Yeah, it's not gonna be $800 in 5 years.
Buying is not the same everywhere.
If you lose your employment and you have a home, that's a much riskier situation than if you're renting. Because, if you cant find a job in time or in a very small location radius, you must sell.
The mobility of renting lowers the risk associated with extraordinary life events which requires relocation.
No, it's not like email, or a web server. I can run an email server or apache on my rinky dink computer and get hundreds of requests per second.
I can't run chatgpt, that requires a super computer. And of the stuff I can run, like deepseek, I'm getting very few tokens/s. Not requests! Tokens!
Yes, inference has an energy cost that is significantly more than other compute tasks.
What we're looking at is mostly JavaScript monkeys who feel personally offended because they're unable to differentiate criticism of their tools from criticism of their own personal character.
The outrage is purely theoretical.
Writing code is easy. Not writing code is much harder. Know what code to write, and what not to, is hardest.
That is to say, I would not be surprised if, in China, people are quiet fluent in English.
Yes and no.
Yes in that: all of those tools can be abused.
We need to take steps to ensure they are not, and we need to actively deprive the government of tools they can use for evil. The US has fought wars over this, which we why we created the constitution as we did.
No in that: information is both everlasting and fundamental. Privacy does not address bits or paper, those are proxies. Privacy addresses the human mind. This is the key people miss when they try to make an analogy.
The police and justice system only address actions by their nature. They are fundamentally restricted.
Private violations go to a deeper, lower, level. They attack the precursor to actions - thoughts and identity. Who you are, and what you believe.
What does this mean in practice?
Suppose I am a terrorist. If I want to avoid the justice system, it's simple. I will not commit acts of terror. I am untouchable, no amount of police activity can compromise my life or liberty.
Suppose we, instead, don't look at actions, and attack privacy. Suppose you deduce I am a terrorist. Maybe from the color of my house, from the jokes in my messages, from my patterns of movement, from the length of my hair, from the activities at my job.
Now, I can no longer avoid the attack, because it is intrinsic to my character. Like a stain, or a marker.
In theory this sounds like a good thing: we caught terrorists before they could commit terror.
But notice something: we cannot know someone's identity or beliefs. Mind reading is currently impossible. We are trying to implement thought crimes, without the ability to know thoughts.
This is compounded with the fact that surveillance is forever. Every data point collected on you, we should assume, will outlive you.
It does not matter if you're not actually a terrorist and you're just a brown person, and then you spend the next 10 years donating to children's hospitals. The damage is done.
This is all, of course, the happy path: we're trying to get terrorists. I'm assuming the government is not evil.
But, that's a bad assumption, isn't it? Time passes whether you want it to or not. What is good tomorrow is not what is good today.
This doesn't mean privacy should be absolute. But it does mean that a complete lack of privacy is disasterous.
Up until right about now, that has simply not been possible. We are limited by the physical world and technology.
What we have right now is a fatal combination of unprecedented surveillance tools and a complete disdain for privacy.
Make no mistake: such a combination will result in casualties never before seen to mankind. This allows a type of warfare and destruction that operates at a more fundamental level than primitive guns and tanks. Even nuclear weaponry is nothing in the face of the absolute dissolution of privacy.
If you don't agree with me, I don't need to kill you or your family. I don't need to invade your country. I know what everyone is thinking, so I will change their thoughts, and now you do not disagree with me. Think supercharged propaganda and complete silence of dissent.
When you do not have privacy, you must then have trust. You are trusting, typically blindly, that your governments and other organizations will not use knowledge against you.
Before the Holocaust, Germany built a registry of known Jews by census. Obviously at the time, nobody knew what it could be used for, the latent evil within just plain information. It was done innocently, naively.
The same applies to all privacy violations. Yes, we could monitor, record, and analyze all text messages. Sure.
What are the consequences of that? What if you live somewhere where being gay is punishable by execution? What if you out yourself?
What if you're not even gay, but it seems as though you might be?
Or what if you live in an authoritarian state, and dissent is punished with death? Your government has cornered you. They can do whatever they like, and you cannot so much as vocalize complaints.
You may say, "oh well this isn't the case for me, so who cares?"
Yes, now, in this particular point in time, in your very specific place. What garantees do you have that things stay that way? None. You are blindly trusting that those who hold your information will not weaponize it.
You have given your enemies a gun, loaded it for them, held it up to your forehead, and said "please don't pull the trigger"
As a thought experiment, imagine how differently the underground railroad would look if everyone had smartphones that were tracked and communications surveilled.