BraveSirZaphod

I mean, it’s both, among other things.

Target would absolutely love to charge $1000 for a carton of eggs, and would if they could, but they can’t. There has always been some ceiling price past which most consumers will simply walk away and go somewhere else. What exactly that number is depends firstly on the actual cost of getting the item in the first place, since no store will sell an item at a loss (unless they expect that to drive greater returns elsewhere), but then on how much money people actually have available to spend, and that very much is influenced by how much money the Fed is printing, among plenty of other things.

My point here isn’t that corporate greed isn’t a factor, but it’s not a new factor. It’s not like corporations were feeling generous in 2019 and then got in a greedy mood in 2021. They always have and always will charge as much as people are willing to pay, so any changes to what they’re charging should be examined by looking at what other factors might be at play. In this case, they’ve probably realized that they’ve gotten past the point of driving too many customers away.

Obviously corporate PR will never come out and say “We’re being greedy because fuck you, but we got a little too greedy so please come back”, but that is and always has been the dynamic.

That’s what’s always a bit maddening about these conversations. It’s not like companies are just shredding plastic into the atmosphere because they’re cartoon villains who love evil.

They’re making cheap plastic shit because we love cheap plastic shit. They’re making this stuff in response to explicit consumer prioritization of low costs above all other factors. If consumers broadly demanded soda in glass bottles and expressed a willingness to pay the extra cost that this entails, every soda company would use glass.

I’m not saying that you individually should be blamed for all environmental pollution, but we have to realize that companies are responding to the exact same incentives that we do. They’re obviously operating at a much larger scale, but they use cheap plastic shit for the exact same reason we do. If you’re looking for policy solutions, a great option would be to introduce an externality tax on plastic so that this environmental cost is actually factored into the production and end price and can fund remediate the damage, similar to carbon taxes. Of course though, the moment you say the word ‘tax’ people’s brains completely shut off, so this is probably a non-starter.

I mean, it’s a plant. You can grow it, and plenty of it is grown. It is objectively more sustainable than, say, coal or helium.

Speaking strictly legally, Yale and any other private university have a non-trivial amount of authority to regulate the use of their own private spaces, and even ignoring that, the right to protest is not unlimited, particularly when it starts to impede the ability of others to conduct their own legal activities. Yale claims that the trespassing decision was made due to the protests blocking the ability of faculty and staff to access their facilities.

There’s also reports of one student being stabbed in the eye with a flag pole, and fundamentally, the Constitution does not give anyone the right to camp and protest on private land. Students were warned multiple times before police were finally moved in. Part of civil disobedience is accepting the consequences of said disobedience. Those arrested knew what would happen and chose accordingly. I won’t fault them for that.

That is not at all what right to work means.

I get the frustration, but if you’re going to criticize a thing, it’s a lot more effective if you actually know what the thing is.

Austerity does not tend to foster economic growth

I mean, that’s precisely the point. Growth isn’t really the priority right now, because that also tends to increase inflation. The loose aim of Milei’s plan is to return things to an actually accurate economic baseline by cutting extremely distortionary government spending and subsidies and allowing the peso to fall to its true actual value, and only then pivoting to focus on real and sustainable growth that’s actually backed by legitimate increases in efficiency and production rather than government money printers and IMF loans that only make the problem worse.

I won’t pretend that this approach doesn’t have some harsh consequences on people that will be disproportionately born by the poor or that there aren’t any other options, but there is a legitimate economic basis for the idea. Whether it’s worth it or is fair and just is another question.

I can imagine a non-zero amount of people would consent to a deep-fake porn video of themselves having sex with some generic hot woman, just as one example.

That’s proven to be both unpopular and often having unintended side effects.

PPP loans were meant to be forgiven so long as they were spent properly on payroll. So long as those politicians followed the rules of the loans, any hypocrisy on the side scummy, but not criminal.

The biggest issue involves the logistics on the ground, and in places with extremely high food insecurity, there tends to be little to no legitimate government, and so getting anything done involves dealing with local gangs and warlords. It doesn’t matter how much money you have if every shipment you send will just be stolen at gunpoint and sold to fund the local thug’s next golden toilet. This is not a problem that can really be solved by throwing money at it.

This guy’s inability to fathom that there exists music outside of Rock is bordering on hilarious. Not to even mention the entire world of music before Rock, which is especially hilarious given him citing musical history. Does he think Nat King Cole or Ella Fitzgerald wrote their own music?

Whelp, I had a large response typed up that I lost by accidentally swiping back, so I’ll just say that if you’re going to call Beyonce a terrible person, I probably wouldn’t cite rock stars as paragons of morality, or shall we ask Cynthia Lennon how nice John was to her? I hardly need to bring up Michael Jackson. Of course, that has absolutely nothing to do with whether they wrote their songs or not, which is the actual topic, so I’m not sure why you bring that up at all.

Genres have obviously shifted, but if you compare pop musicians of today to the pop musicians of the 70s and 80s, yes, there is absolutely more songwriting today by the artists. Rock is a very different genre with its own traditions and tends to be based around groups rather than solo artists, so it’s not a very apt comparison. Not to mention, it’s not like rock artists back then weren’t shitting on disco groups for this exact reason back in the day. The Village People weren’t exactly prolific songwriters.

It almost feels like your real issue is that rock is dead, and sure, that’s unfortunate. But luckily for you, rumor has it that Beyonce’s next album will be based in rock.

It’s not like back in the day when an artist got big by their own merit

Sorry, when, exactly, are you talking about? Frank Sinatra didn’t write any of his major songs. Elvis Presley literally didn’t write anything. Madonna didn’t write most of her biggest early hits, though she did get much more involved in writing after the 80s. Plenty of Rhianna’s big songs weren’t written by her. Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Celine Dion aren’t songwriters. Meat Loaf didn’t write a single song on ‘Bat Out of Hell’.

So, what is this time period where every artist got by solely by their own unassisted talent? Because I could also point to Taylor Swift today, who’s been heavily involved in the writing of every song she’s ever made. Lady Gaga’s writing influence is all over everything she’s done. Zoomer superstar Olivia Rodrigo wrote every song on her latest album.

Just looking at some top albums from 2023:

• SOS by SZA - She’s credited on every song.
• Midnights by Taylor Swift - She wrote everything.
• One Thing at a Time by Morgan Wallen - Writing credits on roughly half the tracks
• Did You Know There’s a Tunnel under Ocean Blvd by Lana del Rey - Primary credits on all tracks

The funny thing is that, compared to most of pop music history, it’s actually far more common for artists to be involved in songwriting that it was in the past. Up until relatively recently, singers were mostly seen as just that - singers - and there was no real expectation for them to be writers as well, since the songs would be supplied by the large team assembled by the label.

So again, I ask, what was this golden age where all artists wrote everything they performed, and when did it end?

Just for the sake of completeness, the actual history here is that Ancient Greek has the latter Phi Φ which, during the classical Greek era of around the 5th century BC, was pronounced as a particularly strong /p/ sound that produced a noticeable puff of air, as opposed to the letter Pi π which was a weaker /p/ sound. It’s the exact same story with Greek Theta θ vs Greek Tau Τ and Greek Chi Χ vs Greek Kappa Κ. This distinction is called ‘aspiration’.

The Romans obviously had quite a lot of contact with the Greeks and took a lot of Greek words into Latin. However, the issues is that Latin did not have these aspirated sounds natively, and so they didn’t have an simple way to transliterate those letters into the Latin alphabet. The clever solution they came up with was to add an \ after the aspirated sounds to represent that characteristic puff of air. So, they could easily transcribe the distinction between πι and φι as “pi” and “phi”. Thus begins a long tradition of transcribing these Greek letters as ‘Ph’, ‘Th’ and ‘Ch’.

The awkward issue is that languages tend to change over time, and by the 4th century AD or so, the pronunciation of all the aspirated consonants had dramatically shifted, with Phi Φ becoming /f/, Theta θ becoming the English \ sound, and Chi Χ becoming something like the \ of German or Scottish “Loch”. This was generally noticed by the rest of Europe, and other European languages tended to adopt these new pronunciations to the extent that their languages allowed, though some languages also changed the spelling (see French ‘phonétique’ vs Spanish ‘fonético’). Plenty of languages kept the original Latin transcription spellings though, and thus we have the kinda goofy situation of ‘ph’ being a regular spelling of the /f/ sound in English.

So, tl;dr: Ph was just a clever transcription of a unique Greek sound that basically was a P plus an H. Then the Greeks started pronouncing it as an F, and so did everyone else, but we kept the original spelling.

Who is ‘they’?

You’re acting like there exists some single high council of concerned people who have unilaterally decided to pin all childhood woes on the phones, when this is a single article primarily about a particular group of UK parents who’ve focused on this issue and who presumably were never in contact with this American psychologist.

How do you know that these parents haven’t also considered helicopter parenting and free play? Do you know them?

Your average pseudoscience obsessed health hobbyist is never going to notice that particular detail though.

Well, on the plus side, now you know to actually read contracts before you choose to sign them.

In the meantime, enjoy your iPhone.

If the cost of not voluntarily choosing to get myself into bad contracts is being a smug asshole, so be it.

If the phone costs $500, they simply increase your monthly bill by $500 / 24 months = $20 a month.

It’s a bit more complicated than this, and they’ll likely have some interest built in as well, but functionally, it’s no different than being given a loan to buy the phone and then paying the loan off over the two years. That’s why carriers often require a credit check before doing this.

I’ve personally clicked on Instagram ads and made purchases from them. This has pretty much always been for various events, and I don’t really have any regrets there. I’ve seen some cool plays and gone to parties that I’d never have known about otherwise.

I can’t imagine what would ever drive someone to click on a random banner ad though.