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Does he really believe it or is it his job to say he really believes it?

As an ex-employee of Flock, if he doesn't really believe it he is an amazing actor. He talks of a very Minority Report-esque future, where there is literally zero crime, and it's because of Flock.

Flock's stats are very misleading too. If there was a Flock query in the course of investigating a crime, even if it leads nowhere or isn't relevant to the arrest or conviction, still, Flock was queried, so "Flock solved a crime".

It was sad. I had significant ethical questions when I joined, but all through recruitment and week one, everything was all about controls and restraints and auditing and ethics. After that, nope, a free for all. Selling our products in states that don't allow the use of certain functionality? Not our problem. We're not disabling it. That's up to you to decide whether you're using it or not.


Could he tell the difference?

Anyone can tell whether they believe what they're saying. If you pay me enough to lie, I'll lie, but of course I won't believe it.

Everyone learns different, but there is something universal in music that is essential to mastering an instrument. You should be able to hear something in your head and then play it. The goal is there is no barrier between your thoughts and actions. Learning to play by ear like that is the best way to get there in pretty much all instances. Looking up tabs is still great, and you can learn a ton from that (huh? another song with G, C, and D, I wonder why? Is it similar to the C, F, and G songs I'm playing?) but if you want to get next level that is the best way. I am a guitar play and I was in a band with another guitar player. I had a music minor, thousands of hours of practice and knew my theory inside and out. The other guitar player barely knew any theory but was way better than me and one of the best guitar players I've ever heard. He could just play. He didn't need to know the theory, he could hear it in his head.

I agree. However, you get insane push back the second you start to mention veganism. And yes, that is a luxury and there large parts of the world where that's not an option, but if you're reading this comment you probably could survive without eating meat.

Yep. Another great example of this is any discussion where datacenter resource usage gets brought up. Mention how much water someone's ChatGPT queries takes and people will generally agree it's a problem. Mention how much water their burger takes and at best you'll get people hemming and hawing about protein or indigenous cultures or their cousin's friend who went vegan and got really sick.

Also, I personally think framing it as a binary or quasi religious decision is counterproductive.

I was vegetarian for some years, before ultimately deciding I just run better on an omnivore diet. But for environmental and ethical reasons I decided to make meat more of a side dish vs the center of the meal, and to mostly eat chicken vs more high environmental impact animal proteins like beef.

I think a lot of people that would never go full vegan can do well on this sort of less meat middle road.


Hot take: people get angry about veganism because they suspect, deep down, that vegans are right and feel guilty about eating meat. (Not taking the moral high ground here - I have put approximately zero effort into reducing meat intake at all.)

Vegas are objectively right. I eat mostly vegan but still eat other stuff from time to time. I look at those times as me being selfish. I am an imperfect person and the vegans are right.

I kinda feel like vegetarians are right but consuming animal derived products is fine.

So long as they're humanely harvested? Some argue that cows are mistreated when kept producing milk as much as they are, but I haven't looked into it because I'm selfish too.

Cows are mammals. They produce milk for their young for a period after giving birth then stop, just like a human woman. Which means that for us to take their milk we have to keep them constantly pregnant.

Ask a woman (or think about it if you are one) how they would like being forcefully impregnated then having their tits constantly milked, year after year. As a bonus, the born kids are separated into girls to be milked in the same cycle and boys to be killed and eaten.


Agree if the animals are treated well; but I have a very high bar for that. I would also accept eating animals which died of old age if it could be done safely. It's easier to just round this to "vegan."


The real problem with veganism is that you are a social outcast around normies. That was the biggest problem that I had. Also, veganism is essentially a "fundamentalist" way of thinking -- all or nothing. Now, I advocate for people to experiment with eating less meat and animal products, not zero. Even if people cut the amount of meat they ate by 20%, it would have a huge environmental impact. Also, the type of meat you eat also has a large environmental impact: Consider beef vs chicken.

Agree. Everything else is easy: taste, nutrition, cheap shopping... but if you decide to exclude animal products, prepare to face ostracism and you'll need to learn to cope with that. A simple and effective way is to ignore the blames and regards, let them flow to the ground without catching them.

Some people will get angry at you because you tried to do something good to much:

   - not trying: that's ok, everybody is free to keep his life as-is
   - trying 0-90%: that's ok, everybody is free to try doing some good
   - trying 90-100%: you're a fundamentalist, you can't change the world
My advice: don't argue:

   - "that's extremist" / "that's not natural" / [...] => That's an opinion, you won't change it. Smile and route to another subject.
   - "why are you [an extremist/unnatural/priest/...]?" => Question. Don't try to rant the full manifesto, you won't change their opinion neither. But if you feel confortable you may clarify a few inches of incomprehension :
      - Have you heard of vegansociety's definition[0]? I don't consider myself as an extremist.
      - I find Tofu very tasty!
      - I won't try to change your habits, just doing thinks the way I like them better.
Golden rule: don't get upset. You're always free to not being confortable discussing your choices.

0: https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism


Hard disagree. People care about animals because they have faces that trigger their empathy. Plant life is still life. The destruction of plants to feed people is no more moral than the slaughter of an animal. The cutting of a redwood to make a desk is not moral. Many people also lack any kind of principle and make stuff up as they go. They get angry at killing a butterfly, but they don't care at all about killing a wasp. Likewise, people get upset about a pig, but they don't care about carrots. The carrots lack a face, and the wasp lacks pretty wings.

The carrot lacks a brain that can experience pain, fear and depression, that's why nobody cares about carrots.

I am not an expert in plant neurobiology, but:

https://nautil.us/plants-feel-pain-and-might-even-see-238257


Rats are intelligent social mammals. They teach by actions. Imagine training a dog. You have two dogs, one trained and one not. You say "sit" and the trained dog sits and you give it a treat. The non-trained dog will quickly pick up on that.

Starting from the first test pilots, a lot of people died for us to get to the point to launch that flight. So while no one died on the flight, lots of people died just getting us there. If I recall, in The Right Stuff, it's mentioned that those early test pilots had something like a 25% mortality rate.

The early jet age was pretty nuts. Check the Wikipedia page for a random fighter from the era and you'll see figures like, 1,300 built, 50 lost in combat, 1,100 lost in accidents. And that's operational aircraft. Test pilots were in even more danger.

Some were pretty bad, but none were nearly that bad. The B-58 Hustler lost 22% of its airframes, the F7U Cutlass 25%, the F-104 Starfighter in German service lost 33%. And those were outliers.

You're right, those numbers are from the F-8 but include non-total-loss accidents.

I don't think the numbers you quoted are outliers, though. The F-100 lost ~900 out of 2,300. The F-106 lost ~120/342. That's a pretty big list of planes with a 1/5-1/3 loss rate.


You should go back even a little further, the USPS air mail service lost 31 of the first 40 pilots.

Back in the days where the plan was "So we've built literal signal fires and giant concrete arrows and well, good luck, it won't help"

Have you ever listened to Robert Calvert's "Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters"?

Think about the "failure mode" of the aircraft that won World War II, the Supermarine Spitfire.

There was a fuel tank mounted between the engine and cockpit so if it took enough of a hit to puncture right through (not hard, in practice) the failure mode was that the cockpit was now full of a 350mph jet of burning petrol.

Still, it did the job.


>The world is full of people that confuse contrarianism for intelligence.

I've been shouting this from the roof tops for years now and it's one of the biggest problems we face today. I live in a rural area and 100% of the Joe Rogan-ified men I know are mindless reactionaries. They aren't educated, they don't read books, they don't travel, heck, they barely leave the county. They think they're so smart because they say no to everything anyone else says. They never offer solutions. They never try to fix things. They barely even vote. If you say the sky is blue they will say it's green because they're just oh so smart. It's a massive massive problem.


As opposed to this, you have the mindless non-contrarians who unquestioningly believe any assertion by academia or authority, which is a problem too.

I feel like you're completely proving my point here.

Well I have a PhD and have published lots of papers, so I like to think I am educated lol.

And I should unquestioningly believe you? :P

I mean, from a position of critiquing non-contrarians you shouldn’t in general. But me specifically, everyone should believe me lol.

>They have some types of tickets, which can technically be handed over to others and abused. Think weekend ticket, where you hand the tickets to someone else for them to use on Sunday, or tickets that can be converted to season passes, if you do it the same day.

This is not abuse. If they sell a ticket for days worth of resources and you use two days of resources it's not abuse at all. That is a very consumer hostile attitude. If their business model relies on you not using what you paid for then they need a new business model.


The ticket is for “two days of resources that you personally can use”, not “two days of resources that can be used by any number of ticket-holders.”

It’s like the “free as in beer” explanation, I can’t pull up to my local bar running a promotion and fill up a tanker truck. Maybe they’re being hostile to me, a would-be customer, for that, but it’s simply not what’s being offered up.


Being advocate of the devil here.

Would you allow doing the same for gym memberships?


Using an example with even more shady pricing practices isn't going to help much here.

The first few chapters of that book are some of the coolest I've ever read. I agree it really drops off in the second half, but would still recommend it to people.

The US doesn't hold itself to the conventions, why should the country it started a war of aggression with?

If you throw away your principles because you are fighting an unprincipled enemy, you are no better than them.

That's a lovely thing to say, but if your existence is being threatened by an aggressor, I wouldn't blame you for throwing out the rulebook.

In my view, if someone invades your territory and starts attacking you, you have no obligation to follow any sort of "principles" or "rules" when it comes to how you fight back. Anything you need to do to the attackers in order to defend yourself and your people is, by definition, morally defensible.

(Do note that I said "need". Doing arbitrary messed-up things that don't actually further the goal of driving back the attackers is not ok.)


FWIW, during the Iran-Iraq war (where Iraq invaded Iran), Iran used a bunch of pretty questionable tactics like suicide squads of child soldiers.

It’s such a shock to the system to realise that “unprincipled enemy” referenced here is the US.

And it seems interesting a lot of people seem to be completely oblivious to it.

There is no if. We've already done that. So yes, we are no better than them. So answer the question. Why would Iran follow conventions it's enemy that started a war of aggression is not following?

Becaus two wrongs don't make right. If they are smart they will stick to the convention.

They tried restraint and proportionality for decades and where did that get them? 47 years of non-stop aggression, espionage, sanctions and the mass deaths of Iranian civilians.

America has never played by the rules.

US exceptionalism is a prominent feature of every republican and democratic president since decades.

It's sad, because if US did, and led by example, it could've pulled serious weight internationally on plenty of matters.

Instead it can only do so by economic or military leverage, which, at the end of the day is not enough of a leverage to avoid confrontation.


The article does talk about guides deliberately adding stuff to people's food to make them sick. It goes a bit beyond that.

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