I find it interesting that your comment centers around principles and justice. There are thousands of young people who are dying in trenches and blown to pieces by drones each week, and have been for the past three years. You don’t even mention them.
Well, see, we learned nearly a century ago that when someone aggressively expands and you give in to them to maintain "peace in our time", you don't get peace for very long. You wind up with more dead bodies, not less.
Fighting when it's needed leads to more dead this week than abject surrender would cause, but if history is any guide, it leads to fewer dead bodies this decade.
What AnimalMuppet shows with the failure of "peace in our time" is how speaking softly only works in combination with a big stick, to paraphrase a different politician from a different continent around a generation earlier than "peace in our time".
It was snowing. I scraped the windshield of my car. When I was done, I turned the key - and the battery was dead. I shrugged, gathered my belongings and was about to go back into my apartment building. But a woman who has just arrived in her car came up to me. And she asked, “Is your car not starting? You can use mine if you like.” I had needed seen here before. I took it. I returned it with a full tank in the evening. I’ve since had two other random strangers lend me their car, both in Germany and in the US. It’s something I wouldn’t have believed people would do. And it’s something I wouldn’t have accepted out of fear. But I had learned: Being kind and accepting kindness are two sides of the same coin. The one cannot exists without the other.
I wouldn't be comfortable borrowing someone's car, especially in the snow. If I were GP, I'd have driven it up next to my car, used the battery to jump mine, and thanked the stranger.
We got a new fridge a few years ago, throw the old one up online for free. It worked just fine, but it was one of those freezer-on-the-left and fridge-on-the-right, split down the middle. Tolerated it for years, and finally saved up enough for a new one.
So, someone comes to pick it up. Well, 3 someone’s. A older woman, a younger woman, and a younger man. The man was missing a decent amount of teeth and had a decent amount of prison ink.
The car they came in to pick up this enormous full size fridge was probably only slightly bigger than the fridge. It wasn’t even close to being possible to fit.
I looked over at my 25 year old truck (I love that truck more than any other vehicle I’ve had) and made a decision.
“Hey look man, I love this truck. You can borrow it to lug the fridge. Please bring it back. I’ll even level with you, if you don’t bring it back odds are I’m not even going to report it stolen, I’m just going to be bummed. I get notes on my windshield all the time asking if I’ll sell it.”
Guy kind of looks at me. The other two people glance at each other, and the whole thing felt very strange. So we load the fridge and off they go.
I looked at my wife and said “I’m never going to see that truck again, huh?”
After about 4 hours I gave up. They stole it. I was strangely ok with it. I made the decision, knowing the risks, and had accepted them.
3 hours after that, they brought my truck back. The guy gets out and kind of started sobbing. The older woman (I assume the mom) was crying. Guy gave me a huge hug. Everyone was incredibly emotional.
I didn’t ask, but can only assume they considered stealing it. I also assume they used it all day long based on the mileage.
I'd do it in a heartbeat in a situation like this, except that I have no idea what the insurance implications are.
Actually, maybe someone here knows: How much would I expose myself lending my ~$20k car with full coverage to a random idiot? For the sake of argument, say I'm reasonably assured they are legal to drive.
I looked into my policy once, and it said that if I let someone else drive my car, the coverage from my policy would revert to the state minimum, around $15k.
If the driver has insurance, that would probably get tapped first, but if they don't have enough it could end up hitting your policy.
When I looked into it for my situation, a one-off thing was fine. You'd get into trouble if you lent your car for an extended period of time or if it was something like you didn't tell the insurance company you had a spouse and they drove the car regularly.
Not exactly -- legally speaking people are always primarily responsible for their own actions.
However, basically all insurance in the US extends coverage to people who the owner allows to drive the car.
But if you borrow someones car and you cause damages that go beyond their insurance limits, you can be personally sued for the remainder because you are still liable for your actions as a driver.
There are some exceptions where the owner can also be held liable for damages that someone else does, especially when they do it recklessly (e.g. lending to a drunk driver)
That’s what Elon’s vision was before he ended up buying Twitter. Keep a digital track record for journalists. He wanted to call it Pravda.
(And we do have that in real life. Just as, among friends, we do keep track of who is in whose debt, we also keep a mental map of whose voice we listen to. Old school journalism still had that, where people would be reading someone’s column over the course of decades. On the internet, we don’t have that, or we have it rarely.)
> Transplanted, moreover, to a world in which women had to work, and work hard. On washdays, clothes had to be lifted out of the big soaking vats of boiling water on the ends of long poles, the clothes dripping and heavy; the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands; the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
And what he left out of this book (and included in the memoir or in some interview) was that there was a scientific study of women in the area at the time which discovered that a very high percentage of women had birthing complications serious enough for hospitalization that went untreated as they had to go back to their chores next day and there was no hospital anywhere close.
Dying businesses like newspapers and local banks, who use it to save the money they used to spend on shutterstock images? That’s where I’ve seen it at least. Replacing one useless filler with another.
It must have been around 1998. I was editor of our school’s newspaper. We were using Corel Draw. At some point, I proposed that we start using HTML instead. In the end, we decided against it, and the reasons were the same that you can read here in the comments now.
So tell me where to find a not-profit-seeking human.
I’d say a government employee just seeks profit by doing as little as possible for the fixed paycheck they get. _Everyone_ has a profit motive. The question is how their profit aligned with that of others.
> tell me where to find a not-profit-seeking human.
Easy, most people fit that description actually. And that's fortunate because otherwise the world would collapse pretty quickly from lack of midwifes and gynecologists.
In fact, the neoliberal cult that neglects the human nature and pretends everything is shaped by monetary incentives is slowly destroying our societies…
Everyone need to pay their bills but that's a completely different thing from being “profit seeking”.
I'm pretty positive that very few of the women you know do prostitute themselves for a living despite it being the most profitable activity imaginable. Turns out most women aren't profit-seeking after all.
Reporting. I try to solve problems just to get them solved. I don't seek to enrich myself. By the way, living in your world of profit-seeking-at-all-costs maximalism is the cruelest fate imaginable, but assholes normalizing maximized greed are a dime a dozen, ruining things for everyone else.
It would be nice of them to diffuse the clickbait.
As it is, when a video has a catchy clickbait title, I screenshot the thumbnail and have ChatGPT give me the solution. Or I’ll copy the URL into a transcript fetcher and feed that into Gemini so I can ask specific questions.
He who clickbaits is demoted to the role of “Suggest a topic for me to ask ChatGPT about”.
You know... When I see something that crosses my threshold of clickbait on my YouTube feed, I just select "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".
Given the contrast between my usual logged-in Youtube feed, and the rampant sea of unfettered clickbait I see when I've been logged out on any particular device.
He who clickbaits is therefore demoted to the role of seldom or never being seen [by me] at all.
This makes sense: If the algorithm exists to increase viewership and engagement, then the algorithm therefore serves to show me stuff that I'll watch. It does not serve to present to me things that I will not watch.
And it works. I can't even find any clickbaity material right now to reference.
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