As someone who was a professional baker for years, agree. Baking very much has intuition and art like qualities. It's just less forgiving of loose measurements until you know what you are doing.
I don't know that it's helplessness, I think it's genuinely difficult to notice when a product shrinks in size by an ounce or two and when a chemical composition changes. You probably make one batch, it fails, and now you have to research the size of the previous box and the size of the new box and do a bit of math. It's doable, but also, that's hoping the cake mix hasn't changed chemically. Research and math and experimentation is not zero effort.
The thing to remember is that no one cares about hypocrisy. The people in power least of all. It's a classic authoritarian move to condemn something they engage in, because the authoritarian doesn't care about doing the right thing, they care about eradicating people whose will resist them in any way.
You will see capital L Liberals complaining about hypocrisy the whole time the autocrats rise to power, completely missing the point that hypocrisy doesn't matter. There's no scoreboard out there that says, opponent was hypocritical, automatic loss.
What makes it not a social media website? Social media is a function of what it does, and it's a place people comment, converse, share links, there's a user scoring system, there's a feed of recent events on the front page... how is it not social media?
You are literally topping that comment on a peer to peer social media website right now. It's hardly dead, it just happens away from meta and X. Discord is absolutely popping off, for example. HN and other forums are still very lively.
Anyone who wants, in your case, is "whomever pays me the most", which is a far, far cry from "anyone who wants".
You can tell yourself this is the free exchange of ideas all you want, but when it's an auction for who can hold the microphone it's anything but free.
The thread is about how an "At last I got mine" attitude towards making money from government propaganda ad revenue is a shit attitude.
You are the one who is out here building windmills to tilt at about bans on government propaganda. That's not something I ever suggested. Nor is it even germane to the thread. Again, you are engaging in some elementary school level straw manning.
One does not need to ban government propaganda, or propaganda generally, to avoid being proud to be paid to spread it. Consider: you could be not proud you sold that ad space. You could not sell that ad space to those people. You could not sell ad space generally. I'm sure one could come up with other ideas as well.
I hope you see now how infantile your diversions are, how juvenile the comments around thinking around corners. You wandered completely off topic and seem quite upset I didn't follow you there, then invented a version of me that did to fight.
If you are going to build strawmen to cut down over and over, there's clearly no intellectually fertile soil here. You seem to be enjoying operating both sides of some imagined conversation quite well, and I'll leave it to you.
You can argue that, but you'd be wrong. Don't confuse mercantilism and trade with capitalism. They are outwardly similar, but very different internally.
The fundamental feature of capitalism is the inversion of commodity -> money -> commodity relationship into money -> commodity -> money.
If you hold it up to light to get a reflection, you are telling me there's zero perceptual warping of that reflection around the crease? None? It's as flat and perfect as a single sheet of glass?
We have had capitalism since the late 1700s, or early 1800s. But I think you and I would agree it's not been a uniform experience across that time. Capitalism evolves and adopts new ideas, and experiences different opposition in different places. Since the early 70s in the US, there's been a very different regulatory and cultural environment for capitalism in the US.