There's probably something eloquent by Hannah Arendt about how 190,000 Americans killed by health insurance companies goes unnoticed while one person killing a CEO becomes a spectre of "left wing extremism" held up as an example.
Or was it by The Joker from Batman?
Or was it when protesters in Latin America sat down blocking a road to protest environmental destruction and an American driver was so angry that he was mildly inconvenienced that he got out of his car and murdered one of them with his gun. And Joe Rogan's podcast commentary was "what did they expect?", more annoyed at the inconvenience to drivers than the murder of a human.
Or maybe when Just Stop Oil protestors threw soup and mashed potato on the glass in front of a painting, with the idea "look how angry you are at the damage to a valuable and irreplacable object, this is how angry you should be at the damage to the valuable and irreplacable environment which keeps all humans alive" and Fox News laughed at them for both damaging something important and not causing any real damage so they were ineffective. Then the judge gave them 2 years in prison on the grounds that throwing a can of soup at someone's face would be violence, so throwing it at a painting is violence. But no oil executives overseeing the Exxon Valdez disaster or the Gulf of Mexico disaster faced any jail time at all.
Or when the suffragette movement cut a painting of Venus de Milo to protest against Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested and rough-handled, and people were angrier about the harm to the painting of a woman than about the harm to a real woman.
Or when Fox News says "they aren't protesting the right way" so Kapaernik asked actual verterans how to peacefully protest respectfully and they told him to kneel during the national anthem, and the complainers didn't care a whit and said that was still the wrong way and disrespectable, and he lost his job and the president tweeted rude things about him personally, and the national football thingy made that kind of protest forbidden, almost as if the objection "protesting the wrong way" was all bullshit.
Yes, probably Hannnah Arendt could put it eloquently.
But you're right, murder is wrong, and that's all there is to it.
> There's probably something eloquent by Hannah Arendt about how 190,000 Americans killed by health insurance companies
Health insurance companies don't kill people, quite the opposite. If it weren't for health insurance, a lot more people would die. Murdering their CEOs is crazy extremism.
Physicians For A National Health Program put the figure at 200,000 people annually[1]. What's your source for saying the number is zero? When they deny claims, people die. When they override medical doctor recommendations and insist on cheaper treatments, people die. When they tangle up customers with paperwork and bureaucracy, that some people can't access the health insurance they pay for. When they take money out of the system as profit, that money isn't helping the sick. When United Healthcare spends $12M/year on lobbying[1] it isn't doing that to improve patient care.
> Murdering their CEOs is crazy extremism.
When a system doesn't have a pressure release valve, the pressure doesn't go away. When a system blocks or ignores peaceful protest, the pressure doesn't go away. The thread running through my comment is that harming humans is wrong, yes murder is wrong - but sticking a label on it and saying "leftist extremism" and then denying real issues is not helping. The system needs ways to hear people saying "things aren't fine" before those people go crazy extremist, not after.
> Physicians For A National Health Program put the figure at 200,000 people annually[1]. What's your source for saying the number is zero?
I'm not saying the number is zero. I'm saying the number is vastly negative. They are overall saving a lot of people rather than killing them. Health insurance companies are hugely net-positive.
> but sticking a label on it and saying "leftist extremism" and then denying real issues is not helping.
Talking about murdering CEOs is helping far, far less.
Imagine I believe that the Democrats are net-negative. Would this justify people saying that Democrat leaders should be murdered? Or that labelling these justifications of murder as "rightist extremism" is "not helping"?
Compared to no healthcare at all, yes, but similar could be said of Crassus' firefighting service in ancient Rome. He brought his slaves to your burning property and they stood around outside while you negotiated selling your property to Crassus at a bargain price. If you agreed, he ordered his slaves to fight the fire and you got some money. If you didn't, they let it burn and you got nothing. Crassus would be there to buy the ruins for even less if you couldn't afford to rebuild. That's a net positive for Rome compared to no fire service - fires don't spread to other buildings as often, people get something instead of nothing - but it's hardly a ringing endorsement, and it could be better.
Observation 1: you are bothered by the murder of the CEO. You dismiss the business-as-usual harms to hundreds of thousands of poor people. You consider yourself to have a good grasp of what is crazy.
Observation 2: when faced with claims that insurance companies kill people, you turn to dreaming of a world where you can talk of killing Democrat leaders. You still consider yourself to have a good grasp of what is crazy.
Complaints, letters to the editor, letters to congresspersons, achieved nothing; the murder of a CEO has achived nothing; what size event would make you notice?
> "Imagine I believe that the Democrats are net-negative"
Just feels important to say, for the record, that facts don't support that position; the Economic Policy Institute[1], and the Senate Joint Economic Committee[2] found that since 1949 the economy performs better under Democrat administrations than under Republican administrations. Job growth is greater. GDP growth is faster. Unemployment is lower. Small business creation is higher. Manufacturing investment is higher. Stock market returns are higher. Wage growth is faster. Recessions start less often.
> "Would this justify people saying that Democrat leaders should be murdered?"
First problem here is your implication that I would support the Democrats being awful and not be on the side of people objecting [although not calling for murder]. Second is the implication that I would want to silence your free speech instead of, say, supporting your right to say things I disagree with, or sarcastically mocking you. Third (or really, first) problem is that you're replying to claims that insurance company behaviour causes humans to die with "Left bad".
There was definitely sync bugs with replays at various points.
There was even desync bugs even in live multiplayer games; there was detection that it desynced which would end the game, which in turn meant exploits that would intentionally cause a desync (which would typically involve cancelled zerg buildings for some reason).
I think "offer unlimited but TOS ban behaviors that would cost too much to support" is actually a very normal way that things work instead of "raise prices until equilibrium is reached", including in credit cards. Credit cards do simply ban people they think are "rewards churning" based on a completely subjective TOS policy for example.
Raising prices is a bad strategy if you have a smaller base that costs enormously larger than the rest. "A million users that cost $1 and one user that costs $10 million, charge everyone $10 equilibrium", you're screwing over almost all of your users. The $20/month sub price is basically just not trying to capture the openclaw users, it doesn't make sense that all of the vanilla Claude users should subsidize them (and in fact it wouldn't even work because they will just go to Gemini or ChatGPT if your cheapest paid plan was very expensive to try to subsidize the other users)
Yes, it's an unsurprising strategic choice. It's just sloppy PR that places the blame on OpenClaw somehow being irresponsible, when the actual rationale has little to do with that.
Do you think that had this not launched that it would have been spent on something else that would have "saved humanity" better?
US spends 4x as much on just nuclear bombs as the NASA budget for some perspective. Nuclear bombs are only 10% of the military budget, and as big as the military spending is, all of that is still only 15% of the federal budget.
It seems a bit ridiculous to be thinking NASA spending is in any way meaningfully holding us back from whatever "save humanity" spending we could be doing.
This is something that it seems some Go people just don't "believe" in my experience, that for some people that letter in that context is not mentally populated immediately.
It's honestly a shame because it seems like Go is a good language but with such extremely opinionated style that is so unpleasant (not just single letters but other things stuff about tests aren't supposed to ever have helpers or test frameworks) feels aggressively bad enough to basically ruin the language for me.
I think the community is split on such things. I ended up telling the side that gets persnickety about short names and only using if statements in tests to pound sand. I use things that make my life easier. I now care less about some rude rando on r/golang than I did five years ago.
Do you mean people underestimate how steep the gradient is, or they don't know it at all?
It seems kind of dubious to me that "everyday" people don't understand that land in cities is worth more than land in suburbs. It seems very transparent that you get a smaller lot size for the same price.
Both. They do understand that it’s worth “more” in the city but they vastly underestimate the magnitude, and they vastly underestimate what that means in terms of where the total bulk of land value is concentrated, and therefore what the distribution of winners and losers will be in any tax shift scenario.
It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy.
It definitely does some of both, and we have no obvious measure or counterfactual to know otherwise.
You also have to take into account not just if optimal reform or optimal dismantle is better, but the realistic likelihood of each, and the risk of the bad outcomes from each.
Protect even more conceptual product ideas seems pretty strongly like it will result in more of a tool for big guys only, it's patents on crack and patents are already nearly exclusively "big guy crushes small guy" tool, versus copyright is at least debatably mixed.
> It's not at all obvious whether copyright net protects or destroys the little guy.
It's super obvious, unless your perspective basically stems from someone who was mad they couldn't BitTorrent a ton of movies.
I mean, FFS, copyright is the literal foundation for open source licenses like the GPL.
My sense is a lot of the radically anti-IP fervor ultimately stems from people who were outraged they could be sued for seeding an MP3 (though it's accreted other complaints to justify that initial impulse, and it's likely some where indoctrinated from secondary argumentation somewhat obscured from the core impulse).
That's not to say that there are not actors who abuse IP or there aren't meaningful reforms that could be done, but the "burn it all down" impulse is not thought through.
GPL was created as a workaround for copyright - it wouldn’t have been needed if there wasn’t copyright. There are complex arguments both for and against copyright and there’s no reason to simply assume it must always be just as now even as circumstances change.
It is ad hominem that people who see it different are just pretty criminals.
Yes it is a genius move that copy left used copyright to achieve their goal. But the name is literally reflecting the judo going on in that case. Copyleft licenses also does have a lot benefits to big companies as well too so it's not strictly a David vs Goliath victory.
I don't think it's a commonly held belief that copyright benefits small YouTube creators more than it hurts them as a concrete example, they seem to live in constant fear of being destroyed in an asymmetrical system where copyright can take away they livelihood at any moment while not doing anything to meaningfully protect it.
FWIW I have received mail from the USPS in places that had no canonical full address as well. It's not the case in reality that the USPS only delivers mail to mailboxes that have an associated entry in their canonical database here in "messy" reality.
That may be true but changing the department's name can only be done with an act of congress, which has not been done yet. Thus, the name is still officially and legally Dept of Defense.
Just because a name is more accurate doesn't mean that it's its new name. Otherwise we wouldn't be the United States of America (we are literally not united bc Hawaii and Alaska are not contiguous, and we are figuratively not united because... Well, you know)
As a recap, my reply to your reply was that DoD is the actual newspeak, and your reply to that evolution of the discussion is that you were not discussing newspeak.
In trying to understand if I'm missing something, I looked up what newspeak means. I (as well as probably a few other commenters based on the contents of their comments) was under the assumption it meant "new speak" meaning it's something new.
In case anyone else reading this was not aware of this, this is what I discovered.
It's a term from George Orwell's 1984, describing a language used to make thoughts unthinkable by removing words from the language. It has nothing to do with "age of the term."
Hence, Dept of Defense is indeed newspeak. Dept of War, while being a new name for the dept, is too literal to be newspeak.
Thanks for the opportunity for me to learn something!
Department of Defense has historically been a prime example of newspeak.
I think Department of War is also newspeak. Or at least, they didn't change the name just to get the name in line with the amount of war the department does.
They changed it because they wanted to do more even more war. The amount of war the department does under the name "Defense" has been status quo for a long time, and my take is they wanted us to think of them differently so they could do even more war, which they have since been doing.
