So by saving the 10% of the cost of the clothing, you end up wasting way more in labor and transport and inventory costs. All of which ends up way worse for the environment than had you just shredded it and treated it as compost.

Of course, the kind of investments that might succeed and pay for themselves may not necessarily be the kind that is most beneficial to the public at large - but the same applies to the patron.

So - in order for you to build that train - you'd need to wait for industries to set up to build every single component up to local standards. And if nobody sets these industries up to manufacture the components you need, you'll have to build it yourself, somehow.

You'd rightfully call this out as protectionism. And the worst part is not even the protectionism - the worst part is that you'll likely get no trains, because in practice nobody except a huge incumbent company can build all the components they need themselves, and huge incumbent companies often have no incentive or no agility to do so.

The reason is two-fold: US is subsidizing the rest of the world's medical research, and US healthcare bureaucracy is among the worst in the world.

Replace phone ownership with race or social-economic status and it should be obvious why profiling shouldn't be done.

You have, objectively, less money than before. Ergo, tipping is self-harm.

> And the US is full of Christo-fascists who believe they have a religious duty to "defend" Israel by any means necessary.

How do you even begin to equivocate this? One wants to destroy a country, one wants to protect it from destruction.

> How do you think Palestinians sleep at night? With the threat of Israel, funded by the largest military in the world, looming over them every night?

Israel has never actually wanted to end the lives of every Palestinian - and they've had ample capacity to do. The reverse can't be said to be true. If there's a button that the Iraqi or Palestinian leadership that can press that would wipe out the state of Israel and everyone in it, do you think that they won't press it as fast as they can?

If nothing else, the opportunity cost of a few hundred billion saved eventually, even if it's just a small fraction of US total government spending, can be used to save or improve many many many lives.

Hyperbole like "yeah murder more people its good because I can't tell what is good or bad" doesn't help.

It's the exact same thing as "defund the police" except applied to the entire government. If policing is net negative, reducing it will save lives. If this government program is inefficient / worthless / net negative, cutting it or disrupting it will save lives.

Breaking it down, trans has two parts to it. The smaller part is simply describing those who are going through transition. There's no identity requirement here, though most people would consider themselves trans if they're going through transition.

But on the other hand, you can also be trans if you...simply identify as such, even if you make no effort to socially or medically transition, with or without a formal diagnosis.

The flip side is, you also can suffer from dysphoria and wish you were born as the opposite sex and still be cisgender, as long as you don't actively want to identify as transgender for whatever reason.

So I'd say a large part of it is identity based. If (say in a survey) we let people classify themselves into short/medium/tall and it was self-reported like gender was, we'd probably use "survey respondents who identify as being tall" or "tall-identifying people" too.

> A few days ago, Paul Graham published an essay on “Wokeness”. I skimmed it. I couldn’t finish reading it, it made me too upset...I’ve been feeling quite anxious ever since. It feels like the world is crumbling around me.

...as if this sort of mental fragility is something normal. This is the sort of mentality I've come to associate with woke and prig culture.

In my experience, the more "woke" a community is, the more these sort of hysterics are accepted, normalized, even celebrated - to the point of caricature. Part of it is that in those communities, the more "oppressed" you are, the higher status you are accorded, and the subconscious status-seeking primate part of your brain notices this, and molds your thoughts and feelings accordingly. While those on the right also play up their victimhood, it's not held in high status in their communities. You'd get outrage and compassion playing up victimhood in right-leaning communities, but in left-leaning communities you also get more moral weight when you're upset.

The result, I think, is that the American left is genuinely less happy with the world, and more likely to echo doomer sentiments.

Also every second character is LGBT, which was deeply distracting when reading it because of how much it's emphasized. I'm normally not be bothered by such things but APGtE did it especially badly.

In this context, they're just making sure the answer isn't "no, it's not encrypted". Sure, you can lie, and that would fool them. But your answer will be cross-checked with other employees, maybe with other documentation if those exists.

And sure, you can forge all of those as well, as Marsalek did with his bank statements. But these sort of verification significantly raises the bar to how difficult it is to commit fraud: you now need to get several people into the conspiracy to forge those documents and audit trail. Your average employee isn't willing to lie for their company for no good reason and risk prosecution, and may very well whistle-blow on you.

Because if you cry wolf too many times about trivial innocuous issues, nobody will believe you when companies are actively being evil? My default assumption on seeing this sort of headline is already "outrage bait".

In practice personally auditing the installation script for every program you're going to use and the installation script for every update is grossly impractical, for the same reason nobody reads EULAs. In the end it still boils down to trust.