That’s definitely true, but the question is do the execs really care? I think that for a lot of these people, the only thing that matters is whether they can keep pulling those sweet sweet cash-outs. Just look at the absurd bonuses musk was promised from tesla recently. If he really cared about the success of the company, he wouldn’t take those, he would take a fair paycheque and allow the company to reinvest the rest of the money. Instead, he requires massive bonuses to keep working. We’re talking about the kind of money that could fund the entire educational sector in a small country for many years. He’s taking that out as a personal bonus, to the detriment of the company.

That kind of thing makes me believe that he doesn’t really care about the long-term success of the company. What he really cares about is squeezing out cash from the company for as long as possible. If the company fails, he has enough money to buy up something else that he can squeeze cash out of. The modus operandi is basically

1. Be rich
2. Buy some company
3. Wave your arms and wag your tung to get investor money into the company
4. Cash out bonuses
5. Go to step 3 until your cash-out has surpassed the investment cost
6. Either sell out of company (if it’s been run to the ground), or go to step 3 until it has been.

I honestly think a lot of the people pushing this stuff know very well that they don’t need it to succeed. They don’t really care if the general public hates it, and it flops. As long as they can convince investors, they’re pulling yearly paycheques and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. If it flops, some thousand employees (thralls) will be layed off. If it fails catastrophically, they might need to step down themselves, and move to a different company that “appreciates their ability to be a visionary”.

These people are only capable of failing upwards, and they know it. The name of the game for them is waving their arms and blabbering about something to draw in investor money.

I think it makes sense to be flexible: In a table, or other bureaucratic contexts, it makes sense to put the family name first. In daily speech, it’s rather common that I’m in contact with family members (even more so historically), and it makes most sense to use the distinguishing name (first name) first.

If I’m with a group that includes siblings or parents/children, I can usually distinguish everyone by first name, while many people share last names.

You may be right, but as with the trucks, I would expect a much less sharp minima: Smartphone and instant messaging adoption didn’t happen all at once, but from this graph we see that we’re going from a substantial year-on-year decrease directly to a large year-on-year increase. A change that is gradually adopted over the course of several years can’t really cause that kind of effect.

The minima at 2009-2010 is absurdly clear though. You undid 20 years of progress in about 10 years. I’m honestly shocked - what happened in 2009 to cause this? I would think increasing truck sizes would cause a much more shallow minima, since truck sizes don’t suddenly increase from one year to the next.

This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. You can confirm the structural integrity of the wings with a rather simple visual inspection. Same goes for the windows and landing gear.

Try confirming the integrity of (tens- or hundreds of) thousands of lines of code with a similar kind of inspection…

While I see what you’re getting at, I still like this XKCD. I work as a developer, and have also worked in more “handy” fields. The thing with planes, elevators, and basically all other physical things is that they’re limited by physics. A steel beam can’t suddenly decide to spontaneously fail or disappear.

With code, that can feel pretty different. With experience, I’ve basically learned to assume that there is always some edge-case I haven’t considered, that could trigger a bug. In a building, you can have redundant bolts, and over-dimensioned supports. A small mistake somewhere, a single missing bolt, won’t cause a catastrophic failure. With code, it’s different: A tiny, hard to notice mistake, can bring the whole think crashing down. Imagine if a plane could crash because the paint had a slightly non-uniform thickness…

This is the issue you’ll never get completely around with autonomous systems. A soldier can always figure something out, whether that is simply clearing their weapon, completely disassembling it to repair it, finding a new weapon on the battlefield or getting a buddies side-arm. An autonomous system will never be as versatile and capable of adapting to stuff breaking as a human soldier.

The major advantage with autonomous systems is that you can accept that they break and become dysfunctional in the field. You can always manufacture more, and none of your guys die when one of these fails.

With all that said, I would think you could get pretty far by just adding some arm that can slide back the bolt to clear/reload the weapon when you get a jam. Like 90+ % of the jams I experienced with the MG3 and HK416 were cleared by just doing that.

Horses are social animals that enjoy being active. I don’t know where animal cruelty was mentioned here?

This is why people like him hate/fear regulation. Regulating this is the people’s way (in a functioning democracy) to put hard barriers on what these people are permitted to do in order to squeeze out another dime.

In that case, ok I guess?

To be clear, your post reads like a legitimate question, especially considering the community you’ve posted to. I appreciate a good shitpost, but I tend to interpret questions on asklemmy and nostupidquestions as serious.

I love ASOIAF, and honestly think GRRM is one of the (if not the) greatest fantasy writers of all time. He owes us nothing. He has created this fantastic universe, and a fantastic story. If anyone wants him to finish his life’s work, his epos, it’s him.

This kind of mentality that he somehow owes you to finish this story, and isn’t doing it because he “can’t be assed” is just so egocentric I don’t have words to describe it. Yes, I want him to finish it, probably just as much or more than you do. I also recognise that the man owes me nothing at all. He’s already given most of his life to this, and I’m enormously thankful for the universe, stories, and characters he’s already given us.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about. I’m sorry for the crap you experienced, and I think it’s good of you to be able to recognise the naive and/or positively loaded presuppositions people have for what they are. Honestly, I think it’s way too common that people will interpret others in the worst possible way, and see slights where none was intended. It looks like you’ve been able to do the opposite, and interpret others in the best possible way, and I think that makes the world a far better place!

First of all, to be perfectly clear, I have no intention of defending this person. As far as I can tell from your description, they’re probably a raging racist.

Regardless, I think the discussion around where the line between stupidity and racism goes is an interesting one. In my mind, racism requires malice: It requires that you actually see some group as less worth than others, or otherwise dislike or hate them. The counter-example (which I’ve actually met in the wild once) is a person that genuinely believes that some group is less adept in some way, but that still argues that they have the same inherent worth as others.

To put it bluntly, it’s not controversial to say that some people are smarter/taller/stronger/faster etc. than others, while still acknowledging that all human life has the same inherent value. Does it make someone a racist if they hold that stance, combined with a belief that <insert group> is less adept at <insert skill/property>? I would argue not, because (as previously stated) in my mind racism implies that you believe some people are inherently worth more than others, and that belief is not really tied to any measurable property. Basically, I think a true racist uses “they don’t have a soul/ are less intelligent / etc.” as a post-hoc justification for a hatred they already hold.

On one hand, I think what makes it so deeply racist is how genuine it is. It doesn’t sound like he’s saying it with an explicit intention to hurt, but just as a “matter of fact” that he thinks this.

On the other hand, that could also be a bit redeeming: If he honestly believes what he said (I can’t even make myself repeat it), but doesn’t hate black people for it, is he then truly racist or just deeply misinformed? To be fair, there’s a decent overlap between the two. I’m arguing from a “don’t attribute to malice what can accurately be explained by stupidity” standpoint.

This really makes me wonder what would make a black person want to join the Mormon church. Like… these people had to be pressured for decades into accepting that you even have a soul… and you what to join them?

While I get the joke, I feel obliged to point out that the military is one of the very few places this could potentially makes sense (not saying it does in this case): You can basically decide that the warehouse is responsible for holding emergency stock, not ordering materiel that is produced on-demand for daily use. Essentially, if it’s produced on-demand, why would you want to go via to warehouse to get it? There are plenty of reasons you could want that of course, but if we ignore those, then the rationale can make sense.

I was initially talking about the total amount earned throughout a career. As a student I lived off roughly 10k USD/year (in Norway). Today I spend quite a bit more, but if my goal in life was to “get rich”, let’s say I could live off 20 k per year. Making ≈200k and paying 40 % tax (the ceiling in Norway is around there), I would still net 140k/yr after “cost of living”, which would bring me to around 5.6 mill (net) throughout a career.

Speaking from Norway: I can agree that order-of-magnitude 10 million USD is earnable in a lifetime. A wage of 100 k USD / yr isn’t absurdly high, and after 45 years that brings you to 4.5 million. So getting to like 10-30 million in a lifetime is still within what I would consider reasonably possible. At 100 mill. it’s getting pretty absurd though.

The right to be a pacifist is upheld by the people willing to use violence to uphold it.

Pacifism, in its most extreme form, is simply an unsustainable ideology, because you cannot oppose an adversary that is committed to subduing you with violence unless you are willing to use violence to stop them.