BraveSirZaphod

You should know that on Instacart, workers can see your tip before accepting the order. It’s functionally a bid, not a tip. I’m sure they have some algorithm for what value they recommend, but to some extent, this is the workers setting the price of their own labor. If you tip too low, you run the risk of the order not being accepted.

The fundamental situation is that delivery work is not actually that cheap, and especially given that these are lower paid workers, they’re also more sensitive to inflation and so you’d expect their cost to rise more steeply than other things.

Violent revolution because of an operating system is genuinely one of the most terminally online ideas I think I’ve ever read in my life.

I think it’s more that Fahrenheit captures the range of temperatures that humans experience from “very cold” to “very hot” in a rough 0-100 scale, whereas Celsius’s 0-100 is instead based on the phase changes of water, which doesn’t actually overlap with weather temperatures very well, being “decently cold” to “you are basically a burning corpse”.

It’s not that genuine passion and altruism isn’t acknowledged; the entire open source software world is a testament to that.

You asked for an explanation as to why Free modern hardware hasn’t been developed yet. The simple answer is that passion and altruism has not yet been a strong enough incentive to motivate anyone to do it. He’s not accusing you of being lazy or hypocritical. The reason why you haven’t done it yet is the exact same reason why anyone else who could do it also hasn’t done it yet. It’s very very hard, and passion doesn’t pay the bills or feed you. Limited to a hobby, it’s simply more work than most people could ever hope to achieve in their spare time.

It’s more complicated than sheer greed.

The fact of the matter is that actually producing any modern technology takes a massive amount of work, and up til this point, no one has gathered enough motivation and free time to do it all for any modern hardware just out of pure altruism. There’s a reason why companies have to pay hundreds of engineers a huge amount of money to get anything developed; those people are not going to do this incredibly difficult work just for fun and moral satisfaction. It’s easy to point the finger at corporate greed for some things being locked down, and to be clear, there’s plenty of valid criticism to go around, but it has to be at least considered that most of this stuff would never have been developed in the first place if it wasn’t for those same companies. Your average person is not going to assemble a motherboard from parts and schematics.

Wouldn’t anyone just be curious to figure out how stuff works?

To this point, quite frankly, no. Average people simply do not care about this very much. They want to just turn on their magic internet box, get their work done, play their games, consume their media, and move on without any further fuss. The fact of the matter is that most people have no clue what a BIOS is, could not care less if it was proprietary or not, and have zero interest in learning about flashing them or why they would ever want to do that.

I’m speaking solely to the facts on the ground.

Regardless of anyone’s thoughts on the matter, Israel does hold all the guns here. Rights and privileges mean as much as the paper they’re printed on. In a perfect world, Israel and Palestine would exist side by side as peaceful partners, each with fully fledged institutions and militaries and all that jazz. But unless Israel is confident that a Palestinian military won’t have its destruction as its primary goal, it will not allow that to happen, no matter how much pontificating about rights and narratives and double standards anyone does. I’m not trying to talk about who’s “right”, whatever that even means. I’m talking about the actual situation and what will actually happen, regardless of anyone’s opinions on the matter.

When a country has such a consistent history, it’s rational to believe that they will continue annexing Palestinian lands

And an Israeli would say that Palestinians have a consistent history of attempting to murder Israeli civilians and so it is rational to never allow them to build up any military power, and thus the circus goes round. My point is that no amount of moral superiority means very much if you don’t have actual power to go along with it, and Palestinians simply do not. If the goal is actually to develop a real peace rather than avenge any sins of the past, both sides will have to give up on prior grievances and decide that they care more about the lives of their children than their own pride. It’s hard to imagine the situation being much worse than it already is (though I’m sure it’ll find a way)

it’s not impossible that Jordan, Egypt, and neighboring countries would gang up on Israel.

This has literally already happened. Israel beat them all in six days.

For sure, I’m not at all trying to portray Israel as blameless here, because they are not.

I think the blockade does have some basic level of merit, at least in principle (it can’t really be doubted that Hamas does import weapons and materials with Iranian backing), but it’s critical that those kinds of controls only go as far as they’re needed and no further. However, the Israeli government has never really cared about not going to far, so Palestinians have no real reason to trust that they’re being treated in good faith, violence comes to feel like the only real option, and onwards the mess rolls along.

Along with Palestinians needing to accept that Israel is going to exist in some capacity and that it will not accept any deal that doesn’t ensure its security, Israelis need to accept that if they don’t take every step towards keeping peaceful paths available and fruitful, then people will turn to violent ones. Israel can of course easily win a conflict of violence, but it doesn’t have to be this way

Maybe if it was the 1940s this would be a bit more accurate, but at this point, we’re a couple generations removed from the original mass displacements. Most Israelis today were born there.

Like I said, the way towards progress lies with both sides finding a way to get over historical grievances of who started what and who’s to blame for this and that and instead accepting the fact that they’re both here now and need to find a way to exist with each other.

They’re saying that Arab nations have a legitimate reason to be concerned about allowing in Palestinian refugees, given that every time a nation has done it, it’s sparked civil war, and that this point has not received a satisfying response.

I’m gonna guess English isn’t their native language, but luckily, I majored in linguistics.

Within Israel, the vast majority of people don’t particularly care about any kind of manifest destiny style reclamation of the West Bank or Gaza, and if that were the only issue, I genuinely don’t think there would be a significant problem.

What essentially everyone does care about, however, is repeatedly having rockets lobbed at them. When people feel under threat, reason starts to fall away, people begin dehumanizing the “other”, and you get the massive mess we have today. The fact of the matter is that Israel will never accept any situation where its people are under threat. No matter what you think about what acts are or aren’t justified or your opinion on how various parts of the history played out, none of that changes this basic reality.

Palestine is not going to be able to militarily eradicate Israel. There is precisely zero chance that Israelis allow themselves to be subjected to a second diaspora and they’ll fight to the death to prevent this, and that’s to say nothing of external players like the United States. Again, whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing, it is a true thing.

On the flip side, Israel is perfectly capable of essentially eradicating the Palestinians, though this would subject it to massive international condemnation that would also have huge economic impacts. You’re already beginning to see whispers of this as the world increasingly sees Israel’s response in Gaza as being excessively harsh. The most they could do is a slow and steady degradation of Palestinian society while encouraging them to “voluntarily” leave, which is arguably what the strategy has essentially been under Likud with settlements and the like.

So, what’s required for a peaceful co-existence? Firstly, you need a mutual acknowledgement from both leaders (and also, a legitimate Palestinian leadership in the first place) that the other side exists and has a right to do so, ie, Palestinians giving up on the idea of eradicating Israel and Israelis giving up on the idea of fully annexing and ethnically cleaning Palestinian lands. This is not a trivial thing. The Israeli far-right, though they’re not dominant, are growing and believe they have a divine right to the West Bank, with the Arabs being seen as little more than animals in the way. The extreme Palestinian side is that all Israelis are essentially foreign invaders and should be forcibly removed or killed. Both of these positions must be completely taken off the table.

Secondly, Israel will not engage unless it is confident that its security will not be threatened, which will in practice mean that Palestinian authorities must be de-militarized beyond what’s necessary for basic local law enforcement. Again, this might seem unfair, and hell, it probably is. But the fact of the matter remains that Israel is the side holding the guns here, so you either play by their rules and try to find some positive outcome, or you flip the table and enjoy the complete loss, but with some moral satisfaction. Similarly, there would probably need to be some kind of border controls for imports that Israeli authorities can inspect for covert weapons shipments, since it’s a known thing that Iran does regularly try to bring weapons into Gaza. Ideally, this would be some kind of bi-national force with Palestinian cooperation.

If you reach these points, then you still have other very big questions to deal with, like precise borders, land swaps, the question of Jerusalem, how to connect Gaza and the West Bank, any right of return for displaced Palestinians both recently and during the Nakba, and plenty of other things I’m sure I’m forgetting about. But ultimately, if you have a Palestinian and Israeli leadership that are actually interested in peace and accept the existence of the other, and both agree to cooperate on matters of security and prioritizing that peace above and past grievances, no matter how legitimate, that gives you a real foundation you can build from.

I wouldn’t get my hopes up though.

It’s very funny how effectively you can turn “a statistically average person” into some ominous sounding elite other by just dressing it up in class language.

Flying is also dramatically cheaper and more accessible today than it used to be.

If you want the fancy treatment from back then, pay the prices people paid back then and buy first class.

That you’re being strongly downvoted for properly analyzing an unpopular perspective is disappointing but not remotely surprising here.

So you have evidence of bribes?

That’s cool. Please share with the class.

If this is the level of maturity that’s going to represent the Fediverse, I’m almost inclined to believe they actually do have pure intentions, because there’s no way this shit is financially valuable.

Are you truly incapable of imagining that someone might have a different opinion than you without being bribed?

“Everyone who disagrees with me must be getting paid” is not the mature take you think it is.

This perspective of “Either you agree with me or you’re complicit in a conspiracy against me” is incredibly childish and immature.

Sometimes people have different opinions than you. Try to find a way to deal with it.

Some context is that this is Spotify’s first profitable quarter in quite a while. Also, there are 11 million artists on Spotify. I won’t pretend to have any data on listening distribution, but even naively and stupidly going with a uniform split, that’s of course $5 per artist if you eliminated Spotify’s profit entirely. In reality, most of those will have next to no listeners, and the vast majority of streams are going to the top several thousand.

The deeper question to ask is where all the streaming revenue is actually going, and the answer to that isn’t to line Spotify’s pockets; it’s to the labels.

Take the old adage “treat others how you would want to be treated” - is that something you believe because you’ve just been told that for so long? Or is that something you intrinsically believe in regardless of what others have said?

For what it’s worth, this is essentially the “tit-for-tat” strategy from game theory, and you can rigorously prove it to be a superior cooperative strategy in many situations. Essentially, cooperation with others enables greater community success than everyone going alone, but trusting others always exposes you to selfish people that will take advantage of you. The optimal strategy is to cooperate by default, but if someone reveals themselves to be untrustworthy, stop cooperating and ideally work with others to punish them.

You actually see this bear out in nature in other animals as well. Vampire bats will share blood with other vampire bats that didn’t successfully feed, but they also keep track of individual contributions, and if they identify that a bat is freeloading, they’ll stop feeding it. By default, they cooperate to help each other, but if a selfish actor is identified, they stop helping it.

In the abstract, so long as most actors aren’t selfish and the cost of being betrayed isn’t too high, tit-for-tat is the optimal strategy.