settsu
Yes. Absolutely yes. I mean I don't know what "people" "believe", but that's how public benefits are supposed to work in an equitable system.
"An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport." In my opinion, that idea extends to anything that we know makes a society better: libraries, public education, etc. It shouldn't even be controversial to a sensible person that those are not revenue generators, let alone profit centers.
It's analogous to "handicapped parking" (as it's called in the US) and similar accommodations: people will balk at the costs or other arguments used when compared to a relatively large population who don't need them, until they suddenly require those accommodations for themselves or a loved one.
Be a poor, physically-disabled human being in a small, underfunded town, then come at me with "farebox recovery" BS. We need to stop pretending like we don't live in a post-scarcity world, but we just choose to allow terrible people to run things and make bad faith arguments to keep ignorant people ignorant.
I grasp that such an approach might draw unfiltered surrounding air along with the filtered stream of air, and imagine that it would likely be easily overwhelmed by a steady supply of exceptionally polluted air (wildfire smoke or simply a heavily polluted urban area), but I still would be interested in knowing if the compromise never overcomes a level of placebo effect, or if there's a point where it actually achieves measurable benefit (both in efficacy and portability—like a even more compact and directional version of the Corsi-Rosenthal computer fan solution.)
A workplace can have good work and great coworkers, but have truly awful people in positions of power over you. Which you may not realize until you're suddenly at risk.
Thinks they want (where "think" is doing some massive heavy lifting because it's simply factual that wide swaths of voters have demonstrably exercised very little "thinking".)
https://www.project2025.observer/
They want a Autocratic Theocracy AKA God's Chosen One-ocracy (and take a wild guess at which demographic gets to decide who the chosen one is...)
I've come across sealed Blurays or even the occasional former Blockbuster rental so it's actually kind of fun in a record-crate-diving sort of way, if you're into that. But of course you can always just buy new, which you'll probably have to do in some cases: the odds are against me finding Koyaanisqatsi at the thrift, let alone the Criterion Collection Qatsi Trilogy, but I'm okay with that.
(Why? Why do companies do that??)
I know you think you're dunking here, but unfortunately you're just proving that either: - You genuinely don't understand how the real works for vast amounts of people, in which case it would behoove you to educate yourself (maybe start by looking into topics like food deserts or Walmart's business practices in small towns) - You're consciously making a strawman argument, in which case please don't insult us with that BS
However I think as I’ve gotten older, certain realities have occurred to me:
1. there is a fairly significant amount of people that would still pay more for the shirt the “right” logo and who would absolutely not pay less if it had the “wrong” (I.e., vs no logo). In fact, they wouldn’t wear the wrong logo even if the shirt was free. I include myself in this under certain circumstances and would conclude that some times the recognizable name actually helps put my mind at ease about the purchase, while being fully able to acknowledge that it was entirely a psychological thing.
2. Unfortunately there’s just simply no way of knowing this information (brand name product vs essentially same product without brand name) most of the time so letting that weigh too heavily on an otherwise thoughtfully considered purchase achieves effectively nothing.
3. The thing was probably entirely discretionary for my existence, so don’t buy it (otherwise, see #2…)
But it’s also possible that they have other, more important stuff going on in their life? Or that they find writing legitimately difficult?
I’m not excusing anything, or saying that you can’t feel dismay or even sickened.
I was merely proposing another perspective, that’s all.
Always weird to see what posts really bring out the negativity on HN, but pay that no mind. Some people can't stand others being happy (and some are just having a bad day...)
Be proud of what you accomplished and it must feel great to have contributed to something like Firefox!
It's okay to exercise nuanced views (as well as choosing to say nothing.)
Editing to add my own salient tl;dr: shifting the "easy" tasks onto AI agents leaves the human ones to shoulder the cognitively demanding loads, resulting in burnout.
There are nuances, of course, but if you imagine that while once a human might have been responsible to move 500lbs a day, broken up into primarily small loads, now a robot is moving anything under, say, 20lbs and the human is left to only carry the heavier loads across the same time period so is now hefting 50 or 100lbs at a time and required to do across the same day, so now they're moving 1,500lbs a day.
And, to be clear, I do actually think a good middle manager is beneficial, if most commonly in the way of any necessary evil, as a very effective grease for the oft poorly meshing cogs of business. Not unlike the fresh breeze of an actually effective project manager or personable AND productive engineer.
The irony of this comment can even be found in the post itself:
> ...the magazine’s fortunes soared by exploiting the public’s appetite for outrage. Articles frequently relied on exaggerated – and at times outright false – stories... Accuracy and integrity were secondary to the relentless churn of opinions. The formula worked.
Whereas it seems this might be a situation where the situation is actually inverse: being paid enough to not care.
That this is a foundational idea for anything is nauseating...