I've thought down lines like that, too. Then I ask myself how I draw the line between who's a kid and who gets decapitated, and why anyone else should trust my judgment. After that, I just feel like violence is futile in that it will always produce motivation for more violence, and probably end up hurting more kids, the opposite of what I claim I want.
Instead I reaffirm my commitment to actual sex and emotional education, and easily accessible birth control, and access to abortion. I figure threatening to decapitate people only makes people more fucked up, not less.
Maybe they do respect themselves and have decided the money in the job is just a means to other ways of respecting themselves that don't involve benefiting MS or customers or users.
“Good for you!” it said. “You have wisely purchased the Dis-organizer Mk II, the latest in biothaumaturgic design, with a host of useful features and no resemblance whatsoever to the Mk I, which you may have inadvertently destroyed by stamping on it heavily!” it said, adding, “This device is provided without warranty of any kind as to reliability, accuracy, existence or otherwise or fitness for any particular purpose and Bioalchemic Products specifically does not warrant, guarantee, imply or make any representations as to its merchantability for any particular purpose and furthermore shall have no liability for or responsibility to you or any other person, entity or deity with respect of any loss or damage whatsoever caused by this device or object or by any attempts to destroy it by hammering it against a wall or dropping it into a deep well or any other means whatsoever and moreover asserts that you indicate your acceptance of this agreement or any other agreement that may be substituted at any time by coming within five miles of the product or observing it through large telescopes or by any other means because you are such an easily cowed moron who will happily accept arrogant and unilateral conditions on a piece of highly priced garbage that you would not dream of accepting on a bag of dog biscuits and is used solely at your own risk.”
The imp took a deep breath. “May I introduce to you the rest of my wide range of interesting and amusing sounds, Insert Name Here?”
> Anyone with any meaningful experience with using machines should know better.
I think this should be "experience with making or maintaining machines" instead. It's those cases when you don't get to be lazy--you have to fix the machine yourself. As long as you're just the user, it's someone else's responsibility if your machine-aided work is wrong.
Yes, we can point out how that's not actually correct until we're blue in the face. But in practice, the way we have set up our economy and our institutions, it is correct.
This sounds flippant, but I agree with it, so I'll expand on it:
"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Ideas and information, however, are not scarce. Any number of brains and storage media can hold them simultaneously. That's not true of a pizza. But for a long time "intellectual property" worked pretty well because the copying of ideas and information required significant effort and materials. Books had to be typeset and printed. Music had to be stamped onto vinyl or written onto tape, which needed specialized equipment. All this made it so that we could pretend that ideas and information were scarce.
Now, that's not true anymore. Our technology has advanced to the point where the equipment for copying information is ubiquitous and unspecialized. We have to face the actual nature of information: It's not scarce. "Property" doesn't work on it anymore.
Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down. We have this kind of thing now where it either doesn't exist at all or it exists in such abundance that the adjective is unneeded. How do we economically incentivize something like that?
Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
Thing is, AI will also be able to provide substantial support for software it writes. And it will make self-hosting a lot less painful, too. Quirky behavior will still happen, but eh, Excel imports numbers as dates. You can't buy your way out of quirky behavior for all the money in the world.
I could get behind "exercise", as in your rights (while you have them), and your power (to stop relying on specific conveniences, businesses). Combines with imagery of gaining strength, independence.
This was the very first thing I thought when I was taught about requirement traceability matrices in uni. I was like "Ew, why is this happening in an Excel silo?" I had already known about ways of adding metadata to code in Java and C#, so I expected everything to be done in plain text formats so that tooling could provide information like "If you touch this function, you may impact these requirements and these user stories." or "If you change this function's signature, you will break contracts with these other team members (here's their email)."
> One guy with a tendency to procrastinate extrapolates his expierence as a universal truth without providing any grounding.
Other commenters here are doing that too, more or less. But yeah, no one's proposing forced immortality. We have a cultural habit of assuming our right to choose for everyone else, we see people doing it even when they're actually advocating for universal rights to choose.
If you're sufficiently bored at age 450 or 45, go ahead and end your life. Your life belongs to you, not to other people. Just don't harsh the mellow of the person who's happy reading books until age 45,000.
A single person, by definition, can't construct a social illusion. "Social" requires a society, which means at the very least two people. "A social illusion constructed by the person it is acting upon" is nonsense.
We could call a language a social illusion. There's nothing red about the word red. And the distinction we draw between "earth" and "sky" is not one that the universe appears to use in its operation. Language does, however, require us to negotiate symbols, their meanings, and the consequences stemming from them. Like in how I rejected your definition of "official" with a rationale which you may attempt to overcome, accommodate... or just walk away from. And like in how we have structured our interactions so far as a contest of truths with bold and uncompromising assertions, when the option remains available to switch to a search for truth with tentative and attackable statements.
It's exactly with the same with governments and other organizations, all based on language as they are. We make them up. We make up rules for making them up. Occasionally someone hits someone else with a big stick. But although the stick is real, the reasons why we do things, and the reasons why we believe we can do things with these consequences or those, are things we all work together or in opposition to establish. "Official" included.
I'm conflicted about it. On the one hand, I'm angry that society would simply give up and leave people behind. On the other hand, societies have always done that in one rationalized way or another, and at least this way is slightly more honest and compassionate.
Uneducated guess--somewhere someone will have archived the discussion--but I wonder if the technical complexity was also a factor. If you've made the combining characters for gender, and you've designated which characters can combine with them, but you didn't plan for characters that must be combined only in certain ways, then you're looking at having to specify all that out, and then implementers will have do their thing, and it just... wasn't worth it.
Instead I reaffirm my commitment to actual sex and emotional education, and easily accessible birth control, and access to abortion. I figure threatening to decapitate people only makes people more fucked up, not less.