> Many people invest for ideological reasons, myself included, and that's fine.

Sure, but I'm under the assumption that many people, yourself included, are conflating "buying some company stocks" with "investing".

To first order approximation, it does not benefit a company that you trade stocks on the market once they have been emitted, any more than it benefits GM if you opt to buy a second hand chevrolet.

So the support is symbolic only.

From my point of view, the advantage of those blog platforms is that I don't have to build and maintain my own set of bookmarks. I'm happy to delegate that to the recommendation system.

Match what's been reported by some Bataclan attack survivors: not only you had to play dead, but your phone had to play dead too.

Quite commonly required by law in Europe; but often times not implemented very seriously by hosting providers, but Germany seems to be an exception.

I remember a time in France for instance, about 15years ago, it was mandatory to provide your ID when bying a mere prepaid sim card. No seller would actually check, and a coworker of mine who used to work for one of the largest french telcos at the time told me that once they ran some stats over the customer database and noticed that most names where from popular comics and TV show. They laughted and moved on. These days, the seller would at least ask for some ID.

aka circling the cattle.

Yes there is some bureaucratic paper churn to deal with them, but it's a one time cost. I did it once probably more than 10 years ago. Since then, login to the website takes me <10s (with OTP) every couple of days and then finding what I'm looking for in the web UI or the API doc is usualy just 3 or 4 clicks away (their website is a bit messy).

Compare that with AWS, where login is slow and unreliable (anyone else got an error message after every login and has to refresh to get in?), the website is a giant mess collapsing under its own weight, and slow like it's still running websphere.

Over the last 10 years, I've certainly lost way more time working through aws paperless bureaucracy than complying with Hetzner paper bureaucracy. And I'm not even using aws for that long.

A well needed counterbalance when so much in tech is just a popularity contest.

Could it be that "America" and "Americans" are two related but different things, and that what's good for the one may not always be the best for the other?

You don't have to scan my private messages to know that i will oppose any war propaganda.

If private classified negotiations between state actors would be done away with, and past such "private" communications published, most wars would be impossible.

They did publish all secret diplomacy after the tsarist regime collapsed and that stopped WWI and probably prevented other wars (see for instance https://www.jstor.org/stable/2189254)

So we need the exact opposite of chat control.

Came here to say that. I've lived a long time in both Amsteram and Paris, and seeing those two cities close in that ranking call the whole thing into question. For sure, cities couldn't game the metrics used by tha ranking, but I'm sure the metrics definitions have been gamed to make some cities look better.

"Usage and Reach" is ranked better for Paris than Amsterdam? But in Amsterdam I can safely and efficiently bicycle from anywhere to anywhere, including across the rings, to the countryside and even to the sea, with the kids, and no fear. In Paris, I would not dare to venture outside of the touristic city center, and even there I would keep an eye on kids.

I don't know why you single out memories.

Certainly, if some mad scientist were to stimulate via an electrode some parts of your brain to make you experience pain, you will remember it. Also, it's not unreasonable to assume that it would be equally feasible to create fake memories by stimulating other parts.

If there is a hard problem, memory is not it.

It's some of the lower hanging fruit that is complex enough that we don't understand, but we don't have to question thoughts, or consciousness.

What I'm saying isn't that if you stimulate pain, you won't remember it.

False memories would be a challenge. How would you input a memory of going up a tree to rescue a cat. Where would you even begin?

Granted, memory is certainly more complex than basic feelings and can probably not be generated on demand by stimulating a few neurons in a single place. We are certainly far from being able to create memories by electric stimulations, but I see no reason to believe it's impossible. Therefore invoking "memory" (or any other complex though, really) does not refute "[the mind] is the sum of electrical and chemical network activity in the brain".

Anyway, I suspect in those discussions more time is spent disagreeing on the meaning of words than on the core concepts.