Bandcamp rules. I do still subscribe to Apple Music for cheap streaming, but for albums I really like, I'll spend the $8 on bandcamp for the high quality album download. Better support for the artist, and protection against license-pulling BS like this.
“A survey from YouGov found that Americans in the highest income category were by far the most supportive of defunding the police.”
“By far” means “10% more” in the actual graph the author cites, which comes from an online poll that had 1500 respondents. I’m no statistician but that seems like a small difference and small sample size to be the key piece of “data” here.
This article follows most tropes of behavioral science blog articles: broad moral statements taking a vaguely contrarian stance, analogies comparing humans to random animals (gazelles?), and “gotcha” survey data with questionable sample sizes. I find it difficult to take it seriously.
You’re making a huge false equivalence. We’re talking about anthropogenic climate change specifically. Implying that it is the same as ancient weather patterns from before the Industrial Revolution is comically dishonest.
I fell for this once when I was a newer developer. I bought a book on my Kindle about Ruby on Rails, thinking it might be more insightful or accessible than the Rails docs. But every chapter was literally just copy/pasted from the Rails docs (which are free).
The trouble with arbitrary societal consensus is that it’s arbitrary. And not necessarily any wiser than an individual’s personal desires.
These monks aren’t impulsively killing themselves, they seem to be towards the end of their lives anyway and are choosing how they want to go out. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I might prefer to be in hospice hopped up on drugs when I pass, but I won’t claim to be morally superior for it.
I think we can safely say that social media hurts mental health worldwide, and school shootings are also really bad for people. It’s almost like they’re separate issues and we don’t have to pick one or the other to deal with. Does that sound reasonable?
The person you’re replying to said that the possibility of being shot at school is psychologically taxing. This would apply to all students at all schools, not just ones where a shooting literally happened. It is relevant because of how frequent school shootings are now, compared to say, 30 years ago. Columbine shook the country when it happened, now we’re at a couple Columbine-style incidents per year. You can say “well that’s still a low overall percentage of students who get shot” and be technically correct while ignoring the gravity of the situation and the fact that other first world countries don’t have this problem.
The fact that school shootings have been so normalized that we’re sitting here and discussing the math around whether they’re worse than social media is… so profoundly sad it’s hard to describe.
Social Security in the U.S. is typically for retired people age ~65 or older. There are other social programs for low-income people, but they are abysmally insufficient for what we’re talking about. Usually disabled people are paid by “disability insurance” but you have to get a job first to even qualify for that. So that’s usually for injuries etc.
If you don’t live in the U.S. it’s hard to grasp just how hostile the political/economic system is towards the lower and middle classes. The idea of a UBI program to support people whose jobs get automated and lack the skills to work elsewhere is completely out of the question. A trip to the hospital can easily bankrupt the average American family ffs, but we can’t even fix that. There is zero political will to provide robust social programs here, despite any evidence that shows it might improve society.
Sorry for the rant. TL;DR if you look at the last few decades of politics in the U.S. you can see there is close to zero chance of the solutions you’re describing.
Yes, I’m sure an actor adds more real value to a SaaS company than engineers do. Recognizable talking heads who read lines into a camera are famously hard to find.
Most people don’t give a shit about 3rd party app stores. I doubt 90% of iPhone users even know this is happening. (I say this as an iPhone user myself). So, I’m not sure negative PR is that much of a motivator.
But that price and convenience is at the cost of quality and employee safety. And honestly not even worth it as a consumer even if you don’t care about the ethical issues. I’ve been severely disappointed with the quality of the average item on Amazon over the last few years, to the point that I have stopped using them completely. Even Walmart is better, which is saying a lot.
I think they were just mentioning some catchphrases that got stuck in their head at the time, not presenting a grand theory of everything based on cartoons.