Yes, there’s that, but it’s also just straight up gaslighting as a means to bully sovereign countries and further brainwash people into whatever reality the administration dictates. Next time, it’ll be an executive order to have Greenland renamed, etc. The pen truely is mightier than the sword.

Controversial opinion time: no matter your stance on DEI, it was doomed from the start, because it’s too easy to be perceived as unfair discrimination.

6, 7, 8, 9 is the golden age of the series. I have a favourite among those four, but let’s leave it at that.

The electorate is the final check on power. The electorate failed their responsibility. The electorate now has to suffer the consequences of their actions.

Trump’s power is not derived from a piece of paper. That was the Democrats mistake.

Trump’s power comes directly from the people. In a democracy, ultimately the people get the last say.

The transactions are far from over. There are many more transactions to come. From as little as continuing to support Trump-freindly representatives, all the way up to not actively rebelling against his administration.

All people deserve the fruits of their labour. But not all labour bears fruit worth harvesting.

And I say that fully in support of the idea that unchecked capitalism doesn’t have all the solutions to properly recognizing the value of toilet plunging.

Honestly, UBI probably cuts through all those problems, including the elephant in the room which is the march of automation continues to devalue more and more and more labour.

If we don’t learn, then WTF are we doing with ourselves. The human existence is the pursuit of knowledge. The only depressing thing here, IMO, is the idea that living out a life as grazing cattle, concerned with nothing more than gorging oneself with the next meal is the only reason to live.

Comfortable? Sure. Self-actualized? Not a chance. There’s more to life than living out only the most basic biological needs.

No one, either in comments, nor in article, actually touches on form factor. The fact is that sedans are only good for moving people, but there’s better options for that: like cycling or train. The real benefit of an SUV’s form factor (or pickup, or station wagon, or hatchback) is that you can move cargo with it, the kind of stuff that you can’t move with efficient people movers.

Counter argument: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle

Not all jobs are measured by time spent on the clock, so no it doesn’t have to be that way. Many jobs can and should be measured by simply meeting productivity requirements. A parking attendants job is being present on shift because that is a requirement of that job. But a programmer’s job is to create software that performs a certain way. There is no time requirement of the product there.

Just cause you suffered your way through it doesn’t mean you should encourage others to do the same.

You are not wrong about the lack of corporate culture. But at the end of the day, is that worth giving up family time, company of your pets, a corner office of your choosing, with access to your own fridge and amenities, being able to receive people at the door at reasonable hours, and not having to commute asinine hours?

Many people will reject that notion.

But here’s the kicker: companies don’t care about your well being. They only care about the bottom line. What incentive do they have to cater to your needs? None, other than the minimum for employee retention.

This idea of “team building” is just smoke and mirrors. An excuse to not have to admit the real reason: adapting away from buts-in-seats as a performance measure is hard.

problem seems to be […] intertwined language with culture

You lost the argument right here. Language is as fundamental to culture as the sky is blue.

The rest of your post amounts to “communication is important to function” and you are not wrong on that front. But you put no weight on the importance of culture too.

Consider this your wakeup call, that just because you don’t personally care about society having an identity doesn’t mean the rest of us don’t.

You’ve got bigger problems than labour relations when “having a pleasant feminine voice” is the success criteria you use to measure the performance of a reporter.

I dunno, this logic sounds exactly like the fucked up logic that went on in the conference room that dreamed up this shitty idea only to have it face reality and be pulled on day one.

It’s faster until you need the human operator to keep coming over because the anti-theft sensors keep getting tripped up by false positive readings. Or you need to find some vegetable code that a normal cashier has memorized.

Self checkout is great when it’s done well, and total shit when poorly executed. And unfortunately, it’s not always just a matter of technology (which normally keeps improving); it’s often a matter of business model: sometimes customer convenience is really important, other times loss prevention (which creates frustration) is more important.

I’ve seen countless good self-checkout experiences backslide into crap experience because the business felt that a controlled client is more profitable than a convenienced client.

Just ask if they are law enforcement. If they say no or say nothing, then assume they are just some creepy citizen and stay away. If they say yes but can’t produce a badge, they have instantly committed impersonation.

Law enforcement has to identify itself in an official capacity if you are being detained or questioned. This should be obvious. Policing powers are only given to police officers, so it behooves the police to be very clear that they are the police.

Because many people don’t see it that way. Many people see this more as a “stop defending yourself” statement.

In reality, this is a very difficult situation for everyone that can only end in one of two ways: listening to grievances on ALL sides and finding compromise (which usually results in no one getting what they want), or more bloodshed.

On a side note, I smell the implication that internal debate within a party, or changing policy in response to public sentiment is some kind of weakness. In reality, this is the healthiest manifestation of democracy. If someone can’t respect that, then all I can say is they have no business calling themselves Canadian.

The carbon sequestered in the earth in the form of coal, oil and gas hasn’t always been in the earth. After all, hydro carbons are in fact hundreds of millions of years of dead trees buried under mud sequestering atmospheric CO2. Which implies there was a time with all that CO2 in the air yet still trees to capture it. By releasing it all, we reset the biosphere’s clock to about a time when earth supported a different kind of life (one without us in it), but life nonetheless.

Frankly, the comparisons to Mars and Venus seem a bit overblown.

Driving off with the rental car is a fine analogy if we were comparing this to not returning a DVD you rented.

But this is not that. And that is kind of the point.

Piracy is a breach of contract for sure. The point the author is trying to make is that our current licensing contracts around media are out of touch with the social contract (you pay for something, you get it).

Hence the moral hazard. So companies will flaunt the social contract (like in the case of Sony) with impunity but will get rightous as soon as people flaunt the legal contract. It’s a double standard, where all the power is in the hands of those with the biggest legal department.

You can’t define “theft” untill you first define justice. And if consumers and media holders can’t even agree to a just system, then why bother categorizing anything as theft at all?

Cataloging individual DNA data casually at a massive scale opens the door for massive genetic discrimination of all kinds, from discriminatory health insurance premiums and hiring discrimination to aparthied, eugenics, and genocide. “Don’t be silly that’ll never happen here.” Is the height of affluent arrogance.

Humans have proven themselves to be fully capable of these horrors, it is just a matter of time until it happens again, and when we create tools of consolidated power-- just like IBM created machines that enabled Nazi concentration camps–we only increase the chance of enabling some deranged element of society oto repeat these catastrophic horrors.

All that downside just so we can consume 15 minutes of dopamine.

This is a defining problem within all types of representative democracies: you only get to vote on a one-size-fits-all platform, not individual aspects of a platform.