dionidium

> Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.

This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.

You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.

We almost certainly have opposing ideological views, but something I said a lot during this era (that I'm happy to see you hinting at) was that if you come into office as a progressive prosecutor without any plan to deal with the people in your office or in law enforcement who aren't on board, then that's really the more immediate failure. You can't just say, "I would have been successful if not for my detractors," because the detractors are a totally predictable obstacle for which you need a plan.

In big systems you can't always just do whatever you want!

> How did Uber somewhat break even? They lost $34b before making a profit.

It took them ~14 years to lose that $34 billion. Some projections suggest that OpenAI has lost a third of that in a single quarter. Even the most optimistic projections indicate that they're losing that much every 2-3 years. There's talk that they might lose ~$150B before profitability.

These are just numbers on a page to regular people, but $34 billion and $150 billion are very different numbers.

> We can produce enough food for everyone on earth to eat,

Who is this "we?"

There's a kind of circular complaint built into all such endeavors that goes like, "we can do this, but unfortunately we as a group don't want to, but we could definitely do it if we wanted, but sadly we currently have the wrong opinions, but we can definitely do it, if only we weren't inclined not to, but we should and we will, as soon as we all come around to the truth."

Your "we" doesn't seem to want to do what you want them to do, which is why communists so often end up thinking that the real problem is the existing populace and maybe what they really need is to be re-educated or even replaced.

> That’s a rare case where I support NIMBY.

It's kind of darkly funny that NIMBY ever came to refer to housing in the first place. The term was originally meant to apply to stuff exactly like this -- i.e. genuinely noxious uses that most people nevertheless agree are necessary somewhere. Almost everybody is a NIMBY in this sense.

Yeah, that's how I knew that he was born 13 years after the establishment of the city's modern borders and that your original claim is incorrect (and, incidentally, not corroborated by the result of your quick google search, which doesn't even attempt to suggest that he had anything to do with the city's "ring suburb design").

> A good starting point for reading about this is "Harland Bartholomew". He's the architect of what turned out to be St. Louis's ring suburb design

Bartholomew was born 13 years after the Great Divorce between St. Louis City and County was approved by voters, establishing the city's modern borders, and ultimately dictating the "ring suburb design" that we see today.

I am of two minds about this. As a matter of human disappointment, I totally get it. They liked working there. Now they don't. It's not their choice. And it sucks. This is extremely relatable.

But the naïveté and confusion on display in the post are extremely not relatable. What do you think a company is? What do you think a job is? What is it that you think you're doing there? And what is it that you believe you are owed?

On this front, this person talks like an alien -- or, more condescendingly, a child. I can't relate to it at all, nor do I think it's polite or kind to play along and pretend that their worldview is understandable.

Maybe -- maybe -- you could say something like, "look, these companies lie to their employees. They tell them that they're family, that they should bring their whole selves to work, that they are changing the world, that they matter to the company as an individual. You can't blame them for believing it."

But I do. Those are such ridiculous lies that I somehow have more contempt for anybody who believes them than I do the liars, who I view mostly to be playing out a kind of benign social fiction that's transparently fake to everybody involved.

In the United States we have a long, foundational legal tradition in support of Free Speech and free enterprise for this very reason.

The bar is set very high precisely because we know where things go when it's not.

This specific case wouldn't clear a low bar, much less a high one. I, too, have been turned off by Musk's behavior over the last year, but the idea that this case has nothing to do with that is risible.

> Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said.

Obviously you can write a law that says anything you want, but as an aesthetic matter, this strikes me as pretty ridiculous. A company makes up a thing called a "blue checkmark" and then, what, it has to mean the same thing for the rest of all time? It's not like the new Twitter lied about what was happening. They said plainly that they were changing the checkmark system to mean something new. Why would anybody cheer a government stepping in to say, "no, sorry, you can't do that?"

> "In our information-saturated world, ads manipulate, but they don't inform" is an evidence-free assertion.

It's worse than that in that it's just plainly wrong. I learn about useful products via advertising all the time -- so often, in fact, that I'm sort of bewildered that anybody could claim otherwise. We must be experiencing the world quite differently.

My primary computer, the one I'm typing on right now, is a 13-year old 2012 Mac Mini.

It couldn't be more fine. It does everything I need it to do.

> I genuinely can't understand the thought process of a Yankees fan.

There is very little free agency in American sports fandom. People are (for the most part) fans of the team local to where they grew up. (This kind of bums me out as someone raising kids in New England, which is not where I'm from, and so not whose teams I root for.)