Simpsons did it first. Homer had an illegal bar set up in the tree house and when it started burning he told the patrons “By leaving the premises you agree not to sue!”
> Part of it is due to monetary incentives of businesses that now own the media outlets. Part of it is due to what the general public has interest in and will pay for.
This should be an entire discussion thread. Even scrupulous journalistic outlets have to stay competitive on the business side. And people don’t want facts, they want a story; something to spawn feeling instead of thought.
Books sales are sales of anything with an ISBN. This includes adult colouring books, which I’ve heard is responsible for possibly all the sales increases in the past few years.
After a flurry of activity in the last decade, I haven't heard anyone mention adult coloring books even once in the past two or three years. As long as we're all baselessly speculating, I will baselessly speculate that they were just an ordinary fad. My own anecdote is that disillusionment with internet content and electronic consumption in general has caused me to buy and read more books recently than at any point in my life.
X is like trying to fly modern rockets with Apollo-era computers. The computers will work, until they don’t. In which case the only people able to fix them are retired and you have to salvage parts from aerospace museums. Over the years the cruft of replacement parts has accumulated and no one person can really understand the whole thing anymore, and entire sections are not understood and nobody remembers why they’re there or really what they do (but if you get too close to it the lights go off in certain important corner cases).
Wayland is the shiny new SpaceX module that brings a lot of improvements but needs to have its toilet fixed.
> X is like trying to fly modern rockets with Apollo-era computers. The computers will work, until they don’t. In which case the only people able to fix them are retired and you have to salvage parts from aerospace museums. Over the years the cruft of replacement parts has accumulated and no one person can really understand the whole thing anymore, and entire sections are not understood and nobody remembers why they’re there or really what they do (but if you get too close to it the lights go off in certain important corner cases).
And often the response to that it to rewrite it in something "modern," like Electron.
I feel the appropriate response to a situation like you describe is put in the work to figure the existing thing out rather throw it away and put the work to building and debugging a replacement. It's less sexy, but it's the right thing to do.
Now it would be an entirely different matter if the old system could not longer provide adequate performance, etc. I'm only addressing the "it's old and only understood by olds, therefore replace" thought process.
The problem is that X was created over decades for very different eras of computers and it doesn’t really make sense to keep modifying it — there are design limitations to it, and the accumulated complexity has made it unmaintainable. X maintainers have abandoned it and told people to migrate to Wayland. Sometimes you just need a clean slate.
Most people who criticise X like you have no idea what they're talking about. The parallels you're drawing are childish and indicate an extremely shallow understanding of the issues at hand.
Well you don’t have to listen to me, the X maintainers have said Wayland is the way forward and they’ve stopped developing X as of several years ago. It’s silly this is still an issue.
That’s just bullshit. X is architecturally bad, which makes sense considering that it came from a time when there were no goddamn GPUs at all!
Wayland is closer to the hardware what we actually use, so an implementation can actually be more lightweight, and it cuts out all the legacy shit from X and starts from a sane abstraction.
As an actual X maintainer put it: “ You can only apply so much thrust to the pig before you question why you're trying to make it fly at all”
that wouldn't be strange. I remember a friend telling me about scientists who visited a remote place twice and seeing fungus-caused dieoffs the second time and he immediately claimed that it was global warming. My first thought was "those bastard scientists brought the fungus in" (I've hiked through remote endemic-plant forests and they tell you to scrub yourself vigorously on your way in to prevent tracking non-native plant seeds)
>That family edutainment goal affected a lot of the show’s writing. Pyle didn’t want kids to see their family members as evil, ecologically speaking. “That’s one of the reasons we made the bad guys and their plans so ridiculous,” she explained, “We tried to point the finger at behaviors rather than industries. That way, no child would go home and say, ‘Oh, daddy, you’re in a blah blah business.’ It would be horrible for some child to see their family member as a Captain Planet villain.”
I do not see why it would be terrible for a kid to see the ramifications of their future due to their current lifestyle of a 2k+ sq ft detached single family house with an SUV and pickup truck and flights to Disney world as a villain.
Good goooood... and then we have left them most vulnerable and depressed and upset the foundation of the family, we will cut to commercials rife with aspirational advertising!
Perhaps the child pressures the parent to change careers. Perhaps the parent pressures the child to “stop watching that stupid show” and Captain Planet’s audience shrinks. I know which one I’d bet on.
My kids bring things up sometimes. We have a discussion about them, about our role in society, etc. But a good portion of the time the discussion becomes a lesson in critical thinking and not taking over-simplified idealistic pleas from randos on the Internet at face value.
You're not putting that on the child, you're putting it on the parent. The children will put pressure on them without being hurt in the process. I've seen similar things with smoking - children are taught smoking is very dangerous and they start asking their parents why they smoke. "Are you going to get lung cancer too, dad? Please quit!" I know of several cases where the parents quit smoking in part because of their children. The children felt really proud of themselves, which is great.
I mean, the child is still the agent of change in that scenario— and it's perfectly possible for it to go the other way too, where no change occurs and the parent and child end up resenting each other over it.
I don't know if I'm necessarily making a value judgment either way here, but I don't think "get to them through their young kids" should be considered a general-purpose strategy for effecting societal change... and fear of this kind of thing is exactly what breeds mistrust in public education, parents pulling their kids out of sex ed, etc etc.
It's true, but the opposite strategy - sugarcoat the truth to avoid raising uncomfortable questions about the status quo - also breeds mistrust in education and institutions. All we can really try to do is present our best view of the truth, with all the uncertainties around that. Does smoking cause lung cancer? That certainly appears to be where the weight of evidence sits, and it would be a lie of omission to avoid saying so. Should you quit smoking? That's up to you.
That's true. The alternative is a bland world of platitudes where no one ever says anything and all the conflicts are fully made up (as in the case of over-the-top villains for a cartoon purportedly about being good stewards of the environment).
> "Are you going to get lung cancer too, dad? Please quit!"
This would definitely have a negative impact on a child growing up- feeling like I had to worry about my parents' health when I was ~12 definitely did.
I once donated a few Bitcoin to a free software project. At the time 1BTC cost about one tank of gas. I sold the remainder when I doubled my investment and thought I walked away lucky. Now 1BTC costs more than the car I’m putting the gas in. Oh well.
Well, it required people like you actually using it to have any value in the start didn’t it? There had to be “losers” for there to ever be winners. But you’re not a loser because you still came out ahead.
I’m not an economist or even an intelligent person, so this could be a terrible assessment of the situation.
It accrues value specifically because people don't use it.
Currencies don't skyrocket in value because it cripples the economy if that happens. In currency terms, it would yield a deflationary spiral. What happens is people save their currency instead of spending it, which causes retailers to lower the prices to incentivize spending. This in turn means they have less money to pay their workers, and they have to cut their pay and lay them off. This means the workers have less money to spend and the cycle continues.
Even without a deflationary spiral, there's something called the paradox of thrift. [1]
Something like 80% of Bitcoin hasn't moved in the last year.
If we set aside the influence of USDT, the narrative you're pointing to would be that people are valuing Bitcoin more highly because of its utility as some form of currency - maybe, one day. In reality, due to its fundamental limitations and incentive structures (2-3 tx/sec), it cannot be a currency. It will always be the currency of the future, forever.
