I mostly stopped daydreaming at some point in my 20s too, after a fairly intense daydreaming life until then. Oh, and no kids yet :) so it could just be "life"
An ambiguous metric that's been (ab)used quite a lot by human fundamentalists to try to draw a line between what we can do and what machines can do, in order to feel better about themselves.
My understanding was that it was more that words can be concatenated into new words in German which is not so much a stereotype as more a misunderstanding of fact. I.e. You wouldn't think much about something like enjoyable-comuppence but schadenfreude looks more impressive without the hyphen.
I would argue it's not the exact same thing. Sure, when overdone then you would get the same. But the way it is, commonly used concatenated words are words, not just hyphenated words. They are used as words and without an extra though people don't parse them into separate parts, unlike they do with a list of words with hyphens.
E.g. you don't think of firefighter as fire-fighter in ordinary usage.
There's also the other implication that the (East) Germans were Soviet just 35 years ago.
But yes. We Americans know Germans more for their silly big words. But statements like that can be misinterpreted as the German perspective of themselves doesn't quite match the American stereotypes.
> red is for people who live in this world and accept it
Red is for people who don't think beyond the end of their nose. Okay, you're very smart and understand statistics, but what about the following groups: friends, family, spouses? If they don't pick red, and they die, would you say life is completely fine because there's less "dumb" people or would you possibly think: "hmm, it kinda sucks that they died, maybe I should've picked blue?"
GP is correct that red is the anti-social / myopic option.
Because most people have empathy and collective consciousness. Apart from ultra-capitalist individualists, most people choose trust and cooperations, because we're hard-wired for that and that's how species develop and thrive (see also, science).
> plus, if you see somebody stealing food, no, you didn't
Don't tell me, in your view the cost of shoplifting is begrudgingly covered by those evil rich people who own everything, right? It's not passed down to customers, and therefore affects those who obey rules, and especially those who are in a precarious financial situation to begin with, right?
By everyone who uses any tool invented in human history. You are drawing an arbitrary line at self checkouts for some reason, but I am sure you have no problem with the millions of other ways automation has benefited you, obviously including using a computer to express your ideas on a forum hosted by a business that invests in other businesses that use automation as their springboard to success.
But let's see if I can explain it in a capitalism friendly way, I guess.
I have a preference for cashiers checking my stuff out for me, so that's how I select. Partly because I like the convenience, partly because I like knowing more people are having jobs.
And here's the important part; I personally actually have significant control over this, which makes it different from your silly argument.
GuinansEyebrows's opinion was that businesses are wrong for implementing self checkouts. Presumably, ryandrake agreed with GuinansEyebrows.
I do not think that a business's decision to use self checkouts is wrong, and in fact the business is consistent with all of us, as we all choose to use automation/technology how we see fit.
Maybe it is suboptimal for some people, but why would a business be wrong for trying something that reduces their costs? I try to reduce my costs all the time. For example, I like restaurants where you order at the counter or on a device and self bus. I don't like waiting for a waiter. Is that business wrong?
I've heard this argument, and I just don't get it. I've never heard anyone complain about having to push their own shopping carts. No one pays you to push the cart. Should they? If you want the cart pushed, you push the cart. If you want to check out, you check out. If either one of those is a hardship for you, go elsewhere.
This was an actual thing (complaining about this) when super-markets started to take over from general stores and butcher shops et c. Having to go get your bag of sugar off the warehouse shelf yourself rather than a clerk fetching it for you is unpaid labor on the part of the shopper (and is also not automation).
Oregon recently eliminated their mandatory gas station pump attendants. It seems most people considered that a good thing. For those that prefer the premium experience of having a human cashier, it seems that for now, they're still easy to find. For establishments that regularly expect to have large orders with dozens of items, they'll probably continue. It seems there's less to gain for large complicated orders.
Or perhaps it will go the way of smoking in restaurants. Some people definitely preferred it, but in the US anyway, it's pretty hard to find, if it's even legal anywhere.
I've always felt this is an absurd statement. Yes customers are paying the wages of the people working at the store, that's literally how basic exchange of goods and services has worked forever.
Like what is the alternative? Businesses sell things they sell those things for more than they make and then they use that money to pay people to work for them. People agree to work for them expecting they will be paid primarily from the money made by the business saling things to customers.
Like what is the alternative businesses pay their employees from some magic pool of money that you get the key too when you file articles of incorporation?
At the end of the day the customer is always paying the wages of the employees, that's literally how it worked since ever. Which is honestly an improvement where the local lord would take 30% of whatever you grew and in exchange would give you diddly and squat.
Two thousand years ago, most authors didn't know how to read or write. The erudite author would dictate their words verbally to a scribe, who had learned these specialized skills. Then other scribes and copyists could copy out the manuscript. When Gutenberg made the printing press, more specialized skills emerged: that of typesetting and publishing and printing and all that.
These separations endured well into the 1960s, as secretaries were trained women who could type and take dictation, and their bosses would generally shout into their ears and/or a tape recording device to get their work done. "Diane, take a letter!" was a common trope in the office of yesterday.
When home computing, personal word-processing, and desktop publishing came on the scene, suddenly we had to learn how to type. Suddenly every high school student who needed to write a paper, we all needed to know how to type in order to produce research papers. This was unprecedented. Then with word processing and WYSIWYG, we needed to know fonts, and bold/underline/italic conventions, and this was also unprecdented, because previously this was done for us, behind the scenes, by professionals.
Ultimately all that page layout, and design and visual aesthetics, even finding clipart and adding it appropriately and tastefully, all of that skilled knowledge and labor fell upon the shoulders of the one who was writing a newsletter for a non-profit, or writing technical documentation, or designing an album/CD cover or something.
Eventually those specializations and skills became so democratized that everyone knew them but we all knew them badly. We could do a half-assed job of desktop publishing, whereas a Gutenberg publication in the 18th century could have been a true work of art that was replicated many times.
Now even the em-dash is vilified as a signifier of low-skill slop, when some of us actually took the time to read manuals of style and understand when/how to properly use hyphens, en-dash, and em-dash. But never mind that; elegant grammar and perfect spelling are now the hallmarks of a shitty LLM prompt and HN commenters can just tear down any article by falsely claiming it was AI-written, and you can sic your fake "AI-writing detectors" on anything and 99% tear it down because of your stupid faulty em-dash hueristics.
I’m not sure whether this is a bit of a joke about the broader thrust of my post, but I actually do think tons of the “automation” computers have given us is fake, for many of the reasons you suggest. I think it’s part of why the benefits of all this alleged automation have been more muted than one might expect (though not trivial, to be clear) and that it’s imposed costs in a bunch of ways that aren’t tracked on a P&L sheet but do make life less pleasant.
> I just don't find these arguments convincing after watching my friend spend cumulative hours upon hours jumping between pirate streaming services trying to find a stable feed for every game.
Then you haven't been through enough cycles of subscribing to a service, using it for a while, then wanting to cancel and realising that the only way to do so is through some baroque direct interaction with someone whose job it is to stop you from doing so, instead of it just being a single "cancel" button. I still pay for things, but I 100% understand why some are unwilling to have to both pay, and then put in the same amount of effort they'd put otherwise, just to stop paying.
Not to mention the bundling. For example, if I only want to watch climbing competitions in the UK, the only legal way is through a £34 per month subscription to a service that offers every sport under the sun. Even though climbing-wise you might have 4 events that month (sometimes fewer). So yeah, f whoever devised the model :)
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