panragon

>Especially to the level of sacrifice they were willing to take for the cause.

We have no idea that they were sacrificing anything personally. The packages Microsoft offered for people who separated may have been much more generous than what they were currently sitting on. Sure, Altman is a good leader, but Microsoft also has deep pockets. When you see some of the top brass at the company already make the move and you know they're willing to pay to bring you over as well, we're not talking about a huge risk here. If anything, staying with what at the time looked like a sinking ship might have been a much larger sacrifice.

That's not true, Capital would still accumulate returns higher than the cost of inventory plus wages, the return would just be the same 'everywhere', and you'd have a perfect market alpha for all stocks, whether it be 1, 2, 5, or 10%. Even perfectly rational markets do not establish socialism overnight. Now maybe you could argue under a Marxist lens that exploitation would be more 'visible', causing socialism to arrive out of social rebellion faster, but that's really besides the point.

What would cease to exist would simply be speculation and arbitrage. Since all prices are perfect, you simply wouldn't be able to make more (or even less, for that matter) money than the return on capital everyone gets by buying and selling shares quickly.

I don't think it's so much about the timidity of the driver, it's the effect on driving slow has on people behind you. Driving below the speed limit increases the amount of drivers who need to do overtaking, which are moments substantially more dangerous than just driving straight. If it weren't for forcing other people to overtake I don't think we'd really care, even if it was a sign of timidity.

Very common to see older people drive slow on the highway because going 100KM/h seems scary to them. This is, of course, absurd, since driving 80KM/hs on a 100KM/h road causes way more moments for bad things to happen because you're forcing everyone to merge into the speed lane, including trucks with bigger blind spots, rather then only the drivers choosing to go above the speed limit. If you do this you should absolutely be fined, and that's not because it's a good metric for timidity (which I agree can be bad for drivers in general), but rather that the action itself causes harm.

This is actually true, but I still use PayPal probably 10-20 times a year and I haven't logged into their site for probably 2-3 years, at least whenever I last had to update my payment cards.

The site is suboptimal, it's probably not a great company and I have no idea if they're charging me anything - but the one-tap purchase system just works, and that's all I need. There are other great options in Klarna and similar, but even they give me too many options to coax me into paying later so I inadvertently pay fees. PayPal literally just withdraws from whichever card has sufficient funds at the time, has worked exactly as stated for over a decade, so I really have no incentive to investigate alternatives (especially for sites where my PayPal is already setup, like Steam).

Or they just work for Google, of which there's a reasonable amount of members here, but yeah.

This is completely false, I stated very clearly that they have jurisidiction regardless and that anti-trust is fine. I was just pointing out that it's pretty unfair to use the size of Google Ireland as if it's "just another EU country" when it accounts for basically all EU-based revenue.

€50bln is still a huge amount, but based on the phrasing of that comment you'd assume we were talking about figures well over €1t!

>Google Ireland alone had a 50B euro turnover.

Not to discredit the rest of what you're saying, because it is true the EU has jurisdiction and that anti-trust is a lost art in many places in the world. Still, saying Google Ireland 'alone' is a bit funny when Google (like all multinationals) is known to take advantage of Ireland's tax laws to funnel as much of their EU business through.

Whatever money Google is making in Ireland isn't just what they're making from the Irish market, it's also from whatever they're making everywhere else in the EU who's origins are ambiguous enough to not be attached to any single country.

That's just because he's using the word 'intelligence' here in place of the word 'competence', but that might just be because it's the verbiage competent people often use about themselves. This is a fair correction, but other than that he's obviously correct, being a talented software engineer doesn't give you any ability to understand the nuances of neurochemistry.

Handled under the hood by Next 13. To be honest, they probably could have done something to make that a bit more obvious when looking at the code - it probably wouldn't hurt to throw in a simple 'cache' keyword or something.

>A lot of these policy changes can also be used as a cultural side show (the "culture wars") to mask the lack of democratic policy in areas that affect everybody, and were those in power have actual interests, such as the economy, foreign policy, surveillance, police brutality, jobs, and so on.

I agree with you here. But do you really want to reach for the economy and police systems to justify how ineffective representative democracies have been since their mass adoption over a century ago?

OK, so compare the US military to the US power grid then. It's much smaller, why should the military itself change? It's a nonsense argument used to redirect responsibility.

If you don't want to do anything then don't, as far as I care that's entirely within your rights, just don't justify it by pointing to other people or organizations that are worse then you, because they can inevitably do the same to someone else. I really don't care about people doing nothing to solve an issue, but I certainly won't play defence for people who do nothing about the problem while feeling good about because they pinned it all on someone else. Either work on the problem or move on to something else, listening to you whine about how terrible other people you have no impact on are isn't doing anything for anyone.

For the environment this is obviously true, but you change the total by treating everyone equally and expecting them to make the same per capita movements. It's not equitable that wealthy small nations have an infinite excuse to do nothing because they can't pollute as much as China if they tried. The citizens of China and India should have to suffer carbon cuts alone because they happen to look like the worst perpetrators when you blob together pollution by countries?

You initialized this thread by talking about real numbers and not per capita. US military emissions is what, 1-2% of the US' total emissions? So even if you were to change something about the US' per capita emissions, removing their military entirely would barely move the needle. Why then is it the existence of this military in particular that's the reason your country doesn't need to change?

I get that you don't want to do anything, but you can just choose to do that, you know? You don't need to justify it at all, you have every right to simply do as you wish, at least for the moment.

Yes that's true, literally all representative democracies are the same and no political progress has been made anywhere in the world the past few decades. We have seen no advances in equitable social democracies, and gay people are just as oppressed as they've ever been. Access to gender reassignment surgery and abortions? Oh, we've never heard of that. Just don't do anything, it's fine, you literally don't matter!

This argument is used intensively in my country to argue that we have no reason to do anything, as our population of 5 million has no impact on the world. That's fine argument to go down if you want, but then you'll also have to concede that democracy is pointless and you shouldn't partake in it either, given how little impact you have.

As for the US military polluting too much, that's a political issue and the US citizens obligation to fix. If you don't think you should do something because someone else is worse, I'll remind you that there's almost always a bigger fish. The US military pollution itself is a mere fraction of what China's power grid is using, so why should they bother to change anything until China improves it's own power production either?