If you don’t have price controls, it’s easy to run up a bill.

If no single person had the responsibility to check the cost, then no one actually failed at their assigned job. So you either fix the system or fire everyone involved in the decision.

What you’re doing now is looking a scapegoat to beat up. You’re angry and you’re going to make someone pay for pissing you off.

And that’s where the problem is: a quick google search. Laughably trivial for technical users. Non-trivial for the majority of the population.

I love Linux and it is completely viable as a desktop operating system, but it’s far from ready for mainstream without better support.

For a rough analogy, I’d compare it to an old car before electronics. An old car is easy to work on and reliable if you do the maintenance. But an old car wouldn’t be reliable for somebody who doesn’t do any work on a car and outsources the maintenance.

Linux excels when things go right. The failure modes are substantially worse and far more likely to occur. It doesn’t matter if they’re rare. They’re not rare enough. And there isn’t support when things go wrong.

For example: It’s difficult to make the macOS UI fail to start through configuration. You never need to directly touch configuration. (And you can’t modify or delete macOS system files.)

With Linux, some normal problems just have to be solved in the terminal. This allows you to put the system into a configuration where the GUI does not start.

I’ve also had it fail to respond in long chats but I thought it was a network error despite having no error messages.

It seems to degenerate into the same patterns. It’s like context blurs and it begins to value training data more than context.

The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.

But if you wanna look externally, you can’t rule out Israel. They have intentionally bombed a school to kill children in the past, well before Gaza.

Before you take out your pitch fork, remember what the US did in Vietnam. Ugly stuff happens in ideological wars. It is not controversial to say Israel has done similar things.

Also, someone in our very pro-Israel administration claimed they got us into this war. Israel manipulating an ally is completely unsurprising.

But it doesn’t stop at Israel. I think every single ally we have in the Middle East would do the same thing. Everyone they’re fighting already does.

I was hoping things might be a little bit more advanced elsewhere. It hurts my soul to see people print a document to fax it before throwing it away.

I was going to say it would be nice if you would just choose a fax machine from the print dialogue. You can… if it’s set up. Sigh.

It’s a lot less paper to have a pdf of the fax emailed.

If you look at it this way: they’re trying to identify somebody, and they don’t want to do a massive amount of work in house. Do you go to a company that verifies identity? Or… you can use credit cards as a proxy for identity. Most of your users already have them.

Credit cards require no additional infrastructure, no additional corporate approval, no additional expenses, and no additional auditing. It’s good enough for the company and who cares if it’s good enough for the users.

Corporate greed is a massive problem, but you’re giving people too much credit to assume they have some kind of grand conspiracy for every decision. That requires far too much intelligence.

Corporate laziness is a far better explanation for this one.

Source: Mentour Pilot. https://www.youtube.com/live/Bb4CcoK0KLM

Yes, there are mitigations, but that doesn’t change how fundamentally dangerous they are. Gas tanks do not spontaneously ignite if punctured. Gas is easily cleaned up. Batteries become permanently unsafe and can catastrophically fail at any time with no warning.

There are other storage options, but they require even more space than batteries.

Oil and gasoline require very little space, have easy to handle failure modes, and aren’t that expensive to operate. Not expensive enough to justify changing nationwide logistics and support.

It’s also far cheaper to keep using fossil fuels for a year than build out entirely new infrastructure.

Yup. Got plaster walls, vinyl flooring, narrow room, different sizes of rattling single-pane windows…

Neighbors with leaf blowers…

I really like my noise canceling headphones. :)

It doesn’t need to even be that old. I’ve got stuff from small musicians and they don’t have the equipment to make perfect recordings. You can’t tell with good headphones, but you put it through an amazing pair of speakers and it gets fuzzy.

My entire life it’s been about nothing more than domination of the “immoral” and the end justifies any means when the alternative is someone else winning the vote.

They are the people the phrase “there is no hate like Christian love” is referring to.

But I'd hesitate to say that is conclusive without seeing how it is across other professions as well.

I suspect it's more strong correlation than strong causation without more data to the contrary.