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That's eBay's fault, if not their problem.

As a professional procrastinator, even the title makes immediate sense, and has already helped me reframe my to-do list. I'll read the rest of it ...later.

Yeah, I don't regularly use straws, but when I do, I just need/"need" a straw and really hate having an inferior straw. For whatever reason, I just really hate stainless steel straws.

Not only are there much bigger priorities, but it's also ridiculous in some forms, and that creates another type of distraction from what actually matters.

Can you even buy anything with a $10 gift card these days? Maybe a coffee?

Something, something, national security?

I think that was the codename for their billing module.

It's definitely legal (and not uncommon) in the US, but you can at least trace it up to a human at some point. Those humans, at least in theory, can be held accountable, even if it's their shell company's shell company that broke the law.

The new FinCEN BOI reporting requirement seems to be an attempt to make that easier. I don't see them accepting URLs as company officers any time soon.

OTOH, there are also towns with dogs and cats as mayors, but I suspect being elected makes the difference there.

I guess the only way to know for sure is to try, but I can't see the tax people accepting "my dog is the CEO and ate the taxes and ChatGPT was our treasurer, so collect from them", for example.

But I've been surprised before.

At the end of the day, a business still needs a human to sign on the line and be registered with the state.

Until I can submit an App ID as a responsible party, I'm guessing CEOs will be here to stay.

Keep manifesting, fam!

Yeah, we had a couple customers ask about this, but they were ultimately satisfied with dropping the token from the session to give the appearance of logging out (so they could log in as another user), and just decided to accept whatever risk goes along with someone copying the session token, hitting "logout", then running cURL commands for 4 more minutes.

I think you've nailed it exactly, and I've saved this comment to my "COVID Stupidity" Zotero collection for later.

The parent is also certainly on to something with the Cluster B's and those pesky "ideologically intolerable fact[s]", I'm just not sure it's so one-sided.

The entire thing was ideology first, science second, to the point of science worship. Many people with a reasonable grasp on science were labeled as heretics simply for asking questions or talking about anything that suggested masks/vaccines weren't 100.00% effective with 0.00% downside. Remember Faucisexuals? Yikes.

As someone said, we need to stop "believing" in science (or not) and start "understanding" it.

Yeah, yeah, but N95s didn't come into play until much later.

The earliest piece of advice was "please don't go out and buy all the masks because the hospitals need them (and the common ones won't protect you anyway because the virus is too small - you'll need an N95, which are expensive and also needed in hospitals)"

A little later, the advice was "on second thought, if we all cover our mouths and noses, we'll probably slow the spread by virtue of not coughing and sneezing all over everything. Save the N95s for the doctors, and cover your face with I-dont-care-what".

The opprobrium cited the earlier advice, with a "wait, you said these were useless, now we have to wear them?"

Instead of addressing this most simple point of confusion, it jumped to "MASKS WORK! SHUT UP AND PUT YOUR MASK ON, IDIOT!"

By the time production ramped up and we had N95s to go around, the conversation was already stupid beyond repair.

Again, it was never The Science™, but the piss-poor communication of it - and by people who should have known better.

But this falls apart immediately, in much the same way as the rest of it.

If someone tells me I'm incapable of driving because I had a glass of wine with dinner, I'm likely to laugh at them and disregard everything they say after that, because I now perceive them as someone who understands neither drinking nor driving.

It doesn't take a PhD to understand that people react differently to alcohol (etc, etc). Most people I know figured that out before they were 18 and had a pretty robust understanding by their early 20's.

The right level of discussion, IMHO, is not paternalistic, absolutist condescension, but one that promotes self-awareness and enables people to appraise individual risk in specific situations. (Be careful: if you assess wrong, you die or go to jail!)

I'd also disagree that the people who excuse their behavior like this are seizing upon nuances of academic discourse, but rather rejecting an insultingly-simplistic slogan held up as some kind of absolute truth.

It reminds me of a line from this thing my dad had framed, to the effect of "Be wary of giving advice: the fool won't heed it and the wise don't need it." Somewhere in the middle are reasonably-intelligent, non-sociopathic adults who need to understand the limits/risks/benefits so they can make informed decisions.

To the original point, I think we'd have seen much better results and much less collateral/residual damage if we were in the habit of "ELI18" and not "ELI5".

Revisiting The Science™ today is obviously useful for tomorrow. Suddenly dropping the issue is a bewildering position, especially from such a "pro-Science™" crowd.

Why wouldn't we want to know how effective (or not) a given intervention is? It feels like a way to avoid embarrassment.

But I'd argue that most of the lessons to be learned are not about virology or the minutiae of masks. They're about the consequences of politicizing something that's not political, of implementing drastic measures with poorly-communicated rationale.

They're of non-physicians spreading their own opinions and misexplainations (however well-intentioned) while condescending to other non-physicians that they're not entitled to their own opinions because they're not a physician. Like, what?