Hand restoring cream only works if you once had a hand.

Wild to think that a sentient anything would relate to something else on the basis of how it derives energy more than on the basis of how it personally experiences the world.

is there any particular reason you’re saying that besides cynicism? I am having trouble finding specifics, but there’s a lot of reporting that the MTA is expecting to raise $15 billion from congestion tolling to fund public transportation repairs and improvements and pretty much all of the proposals for this in the past required all of the revenues to be earmarked for use by the MTA

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

The irony is, I like proton because I don’t think you should trust literally any business to behave altruistically, including proton. By structuring the business in the manner that they have, I don’t just have to trust them. I just have to trust that the people in charge don’t want to go to jail or get fined, which is literally not true for any business owned by private individuals.

First of all, I did not say that proton is opposing capitalism. I said that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise. As in, you can be opposed to an economy comprised primarily of capitalist institutions without being opposed to the concept of free enterprise. Proton is simply an example of such a business, which can be used as evidence for the fact that it is entirely possible to start businesses in a free market economy which are actually interested in solving problems as opposed to using the existence of problems as a vehicle to enrich a class of shareholders.

Second of all, “it’s filling a niche created by other companies’ poor privacy policies” is essentially nothing more than a restatement of the second sentence I wrote, which I will repeat here: “I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share.”. You’re right that them adopting a nonprofit structure doesn’t change that, but it does change their ability to sell out their customers at the discretion of a class of shareholders, unlike any business which is owned by private individuals.

I remember one time I criticized proton for positioning itself as community oriented while still being a for-profit corporation. I pointed out that as long as it’s a for-profit corporation, it would have not have any financial or legal incentive to continue pursuing its mission if it ever achieved a certain level of market share. But then several months later, they actually announced that they were going to put their money where their mouth is, and transition to a nonprofit structure.

I think that proton is perhaps the greatest example at the moment that to oppose capitalism does not mean you have to be opposed to free enterprise, and people should always think about this sort of thing when they listen to any kind of business leader try to convince them that it’s actually really important that they be allowed to cash out whenever they want.

I can’t imagine that their set up is perfect, but I definitely am going to have to give this offer serious consideration.

Scranton was an industrial manufacturing powerhouse in the first half of the 20th century and still had a population of like 120,000 people by the time Joe Biden and his family moved away in 1953

I think it’s wild how much job security professors often have and yet they let themselves get dicked around like this constantly

Because telling people capitalism began in the 16th century creates a confused and misinformed understanding of history that makes it more difficult for people to reason about the world.

Capitalism began in the 18th century, not the 16th century

my hypothesis for why this association exists is because I imagine that meat consumption promotes a gut microbiome high in putrefactive bacteria that produce a lot of toxic waste.

Maybe somebody should make the argument that random businesses benefiting from prison labor is not only unethical for the prisoner, but also for the people that they owe restitution to.

In my experience, every time there’s been a new model I’m pretty astonished by its capabilities for mathematics and programming. But every single time it seems to rapidly regress to worse than it was before the new model was released. I’m guessing that there is some kind of loss leader thing going on where they support the model with a completely unsustainable level of compute to hook you and then throttle it somehow to improve the economics for the business.

so like I am not making any comment on anything but the legal system here. but it’s absolutely the case that you can win a lawsuit on purely circumstantial evidence if the defense is unable to produce a compelling alternative set of circumstances which can lead to the same outcome.

in civil matters, the burden of proof is actually usually just preponderance of evidence and not beyond a reasonable doubt. in other words to win a lawsuit, you only need to have more compelling evidence than the other person.

Mozilla could solicit donations for the development of Firefox while also still being able to rely on commercial funding sources if they restructured the Firefox project so that the core technologies underlying it (stuff like Gecko and SpiderMonkey) were actually developed by the Foundation instead of the Corporation, while the Corporation could package all of those pieces together into a complete software product with branding. The way things are now, though the entire browser is developed by the Mozilla Corporation and so its development can only be financially supported by Mozilla Corporation selling products or engaging in business deals.

I was just thinking to myself this morning how comically low 2000s pants were

Let’s just suppose for a second that this really was unnecessary. is it the patient’s fault or the doctor’s? Truly the most insane thing in all of this is this expectation that the patient should be on the hook for unnecessary medical expenses when they quite literally are the least informed of all the parties in the situation.

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