Visiting another city is not in any way comparable to living there. Or would you defer to the opinion of some tourist who visited NYC for a random weekend?
I haven't owned a car in the past decade, but the last car I did own was an Audi S5 and I thought it was pretty nearly perfect. Manual transmission, naturally aspirated V8, 4 wheel drive, but also all the electronic toys like lane sensors and physical buttons that were designed to give satisfying tactile feedback. Also just a beautiful car inside and out. I thought this was some kind of a high water mark for car design. You can't get a manual transmission anymore, they replaced the V8 with a V6 turbo, added weird lines all over the car that ruined the aesthetic. The new models are better on paper but feel twitchy and nervous to me. I haven't seen the latest ones, but I would not be surprised if they'd made everything touch-screen controlled as the trend in the industry has been.
But anyway, c'est la vie, it was the end of an era and life moves on. We'd be better off with fewer cars, and with people thinking of them more like washing machines and focusing their attention elsewhere.
Hyperbolically, you could just round up to "all major changes in day to day general human behavior since 1890, except indoor plumbing, vitamin supplementation, and vaccination" and be within shouting distance.
Thats entirely depended on the context and assumes some other safeguards exist. Outlawing alone can be utterly horrific, there are quite a few examples of child labor unions (as in working children) fighting such laws. Its no surprise seeing as when there are no social safety nets they are at real direct threat of starvation once they loose their jobs.
This sometimes being seen as an acceptable cost to not have to look at working children gets us into the very much evil category. Its quite gut wrenching how often such distanced simplified signaling results in horrific situations for the people on the ground, even without bad intentions.
Indeed. As I recall about 80% of pharmaceutical profits are made in the United States, while these same drugs are sold in other countries at much lower negotiated prices.
I don't think things are nearly as "broken" as these types of alarmist takes make it out to be. Quite the contrary I think FOSS is a model that other industries would do well to adopt.
People talk about companies "free riding" on FOSS, but the corollary to that is that this allows an individual developer to be massively more productive, justifying the high salaries we see. To obtain value from just about any open source project, companies need to hire developers, individual developers are in a position to benefit as the gatekeepers to all this "free" value.
Everyone is benefiting from this. Free is absolutely essential to making this work. Free is frictionless, free is equalizing. I'm not choosing between Redux over Mobx based on price, I'm choosing purely of intrinsic merits and community.
It is always easy enough to find problems, but looking over the past couple of decades, I don't think you can argue but that things keep getting better.
On the contrary, SaaS company are advantaged at exploiting FOSS and this is creating increasing inequality in access to software, hardware, knowledge/skill, markets and capital.
In short, FAANGs and SaaS take all.
There's a reason why progressive taxation and public funding has been invented: infrastructure that benefits everybody need to be paid according to income.
Wow, this is fantastic. I like to work on my balcony, but there are constantly trucks parking below, with poorly maintained engines left to idle for hours a day, spewing fumes that leave a layer of grime coating everything (and send me back inside).
