The Constitution and the principles of my country are perfectly aligned with adults entering into a mutually agreed business transaction. They’re aligned with a company offering to sell me a service with a given price, and where part of their upside is retaining data about me.
autoexec’s reply in a parallel thread is a strong case for why somebody might view the impact of that data retention as too costly to be worth using such a service. And that’s why nobody is forced to hire data-collecting robot movers. But under the principles and freedoms of my county, companies are allowed to make the offer.
A good removalist will come and quote and figure it all out. They'll discuss what you need to do to protect things and who will do it. You pay on delivery so at least there is the option to not pay.
Any company that subcontracts as a surprise is shit. My MO now is if I get a surprise subby for any job, from coding to paving to moving I am going to tell them to fuck off. It ain't a good sign.
At least here in italy subcontracting has worse conditions than the regular workers as well, both for wage and safety. We're having a referendum where that, if passed, could make the parent company liable if they subcontract and a worker gets injured. It absolutely makes sense to me to hold a company accountable if it knowingly subcontracts to shady shell companies so they don't have to care about safety and can pay workers less
I agree and definitely makes things easier. The other way is like in England where it's common for the entire chain to exchange contracts on moving day. Means anything can go wrong right up until the last minute, but if it does at least you still have your things in your house. Maybe the US is more like Scotland where contracts are exchanged ahead of time.
We sucked up an extra month's rent to have overlap on our move just across a small metro area to the older house we'd bought, and it was worth every penny - we had time to repaint some walls and refinish the living room floor before our furniture was moved in (local moving services in Germany are quite different from the nightmares I'm hearing about here)
Eh, they’ll do that, and then they’ll decide that they can make more by just stealing all of your stuff and selling it overseas anyway.
Happened to me 20 years ago. They vanished off the face of the earth - I only figured out what happened because I found the motorbike on a Dutch auction site. The rest of it - furniture that had been in the family since the 1700s, etc., just gone.
Tracked down their lawyer, who informed me that they had burned him too.
Never got any of it back.
Now, I just rent a truck and do it myself, as it seems that pretty much all removers are charlatans and crooks.
A house is way more durable. My house is older than all software and I expect it to outlive most software written (either today or ever). Except voyager perhaps!
This writer doesn't look obnoxious to me they make good points. Of course they make good points only for their use case. I'd rather keep computers as a thing and have all the medical advances, plane safety, science advances we have seen. I also couldn't do what I first did on a computer with a pencil: program an automaton. But it is worth reading other points of view and seeing their side.
I am sympathetic with his message today, when I would have been dismissive of it in 1987. I also realize that I shouldn't have been dismissive of it in 1987. Even though the industry of today is far more damaging than it was then, it is only because there were so many benefits yet-to-reap. The industry itself was just as manipulative and just as greedy. While most of the old empires have fallen, new ones have taken their place.
That said, I think his tone was a mistake. It is not that technology is inherently good or bad. The fault is in how we fail to examine the role it should play. Each of the nine criteria that he lays out could have been met, but as individuals and society we have decided upon a different path.
His points flat suck and they aren't well thought out at all.
Right of the bat "the new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces" On what basis is this even defensible? Even if you just follow this single rule we'd all still be hunter-gatherers
And the last one his mask slips "It should not replace...anything...". Why privilege what already exists over what doesn't? It had it's time.
You somehow can't apply logical statements to what we choose to kill and eat. Cultures differ on their opinions here. But at some extreme we should all be vegan.
No. Dogs also taste good but they are way less convenient to raise per kilogram of meat then cows. That's one of the main reasons we rather eat cows, pigs and poultry than dogs, dolphins, squirrels or guinea pigs.
People do a lot of expensive and wasteful things just because they are convenient in many domains of life.
Meat isn't tasty. If it was you wouldn't always eat it fried almost to a char with salt and spices. Tasty things you can just eat straight up. Meat is easy. It's easier to keep some cows on grassy hill then kill them, than to create and maintain a field there.
Meat is also easy to cook and eat. It digests nicely. It can be used in mono diet with no immediate ill effects. It's a no-brainer food even an idiot can use to sustain themselves. It's hard to poison yourself with it because if it's not fresh it stinks like hell.
Do they taste great? Or does the fatty salt taste great? Have you ever tried them without salt? Because salt or sugar can make anything fatty taste great.
Yes they taste great even without salt. I’m getting the impression you have never eaten a cow before. Maybe try some time before you say such things. I bet you’ll love it!
I'm eating steaks seared/fried on a pan almost weekly for few years now. I landed on a combination of herbs and spices to make them actually tasty (rosemary, black pepper, sweet paprika and of course plenty of salt). But still they are nowhere near the tastiest of the foods that I've eaten. I eat them because they are easily (and slowly) digestible, and rich in nutrients. I don't really have to think about the rest of my diet and I can eat whatever I have a craving for without risking some serious deficiency as long as I eat occasional steak and keep an eye on my weight.
I've also been to some steakhouses few times and what they serve ranges between terrible and passable.
You never eaten a steak from a pan? Or you just never used any additional fat under the steak, which technically makes it grilling? Sorry, I'm not a native speaker and I thought frying is anything you do on a pan with no cover. I guess there's also searing but I thought it was kind of frying.
I've tried a lot of different fake meats, and real meat tasted better to me. Sure, meat requires special cooking to taste good. That doesn't mean meat as a whole tastes bad. When other things are cooked the same as meat, they don't taste as good to me as meat.
>Dogs also taste good but they are way less convenient to raise per kilogram of meat then cows.
I'm not saying that meat producers don't optimize their production to lower prices. I'm saying that despite their optimizations, vegetarian foods are cheaper to produce than meat.
>It's easier to keep some cows on grassy hill then kill them, than to create and maintain a field there.
Look at the price of beef vs the price of vegetarian foods. Beef costs more. Also look at the carbon footprint of beef vs vegetarian foods. Beef production produces more carbon.
>Meat is also easy to cook and eat. It digests nicely. It can be used in mono diet with no immediate ill effects. It's a no-brainer food even an idiot can use to sustain themselves. It's hard to poison yourself with it because if it's not fresh it stinks like hell.
I don't think any of those are the main reason people eat meat. In a different comment you say rice, potatoes or lentils are easier to cook such they taste good. I don't think meat is easier to cook than other foods.
Buy your steak, toss in a pot of unsalted water. Cook for a while to make it edible. Eat it when hungry. Tell me again how tasty the meat is.
Do the same with rice, potatoes or lentils and you'll have completely different experience. Pick any fruit. There's even no need to boil. Tasty from the get go.
True. Habits also play an unconscious role and tradition a conscious one. To demonstrate the former: bellow two studies on cats exposed pre, peri and post natal with a specific aroma. From the first abstract:
> We conclude that long-term chemosensory and dietary preferences of cats are influenced by prenatal and early (nursing) postnatal experience, supporting a natural and biologically relevant mechanism for the safe transmission of diet from mother to young.
I'll add that habits and taste can change later in the life voluntary or involuntary: There's plenty of people that "learn" to like something they didn't in their youth for many reason: new cultural environment, health, curiosity...
Religions can be inconvenient. I'd still argue that source of some of their bans was convenience that just got frozen in time and kept alive way after its utility ended.
I think in case of meat bans it was a deeper convenience. Something like that it's not convenient to avoid pork, but it's convenient to not get sick from low quality pork or the process of raising this specific animal. It might have been quite convenient rule of thumb two thousand years ago.
Does the state have any power. In Australia I think the state has power to generally zone things e.g. near a train station is high density and it is out of councils hands much to their chagrin.
States generally set the regulations that cities must follow. So they can constrain cities or choose not to.
For instance Washington State forces cities to make zoning plans that align with state housing needs. Similarly they set rules near public transit in some cases.
