The UK wanted it the opposite way. They wanted full access to the EU market but forbid the movement of people because they wanted to get rid of the Poles. The EU would never agree to that and rightly so.
Meh, it is the sacred text of Scientology. Mostly pseudo scientific made up bullshit, wrapped in the buzzwords of the day and conveying little actual information. Just like opus 5.
Yes, propaganda is increasingly not about what you say on a topic but what topics are being talked about.
Decades of loose policy around financial regulation and ZIRP made living unaffordable for most western citizens but politicians rediscovered the eternal scapegoat in the shape of immigrants. This way they don't have to answer for their failures. They just made one up.
It's tragic how gullible the public is. This scam worked in Britain, USA and is likely going to work in Germany, Poland etc if the polls are to be believed.
So with #2 they are betting that the future models will be able to reign in the mess that the current generation leaves in its wake. It's a bold bet but not an outrageous one either.
I need something basic to keep track of swimming pool laps. Is there a simple fitbit that can do it reliably and holds a charge for at least a couple of weeks?
I'm going to post something that contradicts this outpouring of fondness for the late Dvorak. While I did enjoy his friendly curmudgeon act in the days of TWiT, I was very dismayed by him jumping in bed with that paranoid crackpot and I blame him for a lot of toxic ideas that he helped spread in his No Agenda show years. Maybe his earlier act was the mask and the latter John C Dvorak was the real persona. Or maybe the other way around. I'll never know. But I can't celebrate his life because of what he decided to do with it in his latter years.
Over the years I heard so many people online mentioning how they liked No Agenda that I tried it 3-4 times and every single time they were talking about some racist or conspiracy theory garbage. Maybe I just happened to randomly pick the only 3-4 times they did that but that was enough for me.
No, it's been consistently like that. I sampled their episodes over a number of years and the theme was the same. It was sad to see Dvorak gradually adopt the same views after a while. At first he would attempt some mild pushback but later he embraced that nonsense full steam. You truly become the average of the people you most surround yourself with.
Sadly, that is true. I went through Dvorak's twitter feed and didn't even get to July 1st before I was exhausted by how much racist stuff he was retweeting.
Thank you. I had to scroll past way too many unqualified references to No Agenda before seeing this. That show is hot garbage and would not be out of place on (the old) InfoWars.com.
Wow, some people really dislike any inconvenience in your lives, don't you?
What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be.
Technology has already removed a huge amount of inconveniences from our lives that we take for granted, such as not having to engage in backbreaking subsistence agriculture to survive. Why do you draw the line at a robot doing dishes but not a tractor plowing a field?
By your logic, why shouldn't I get rid of my dishwasher and laundry machine?
Some things are necessary for survival and flourishing while others merely remove inconvenience from our lives.
Agricultural technology feeds the people we have around the globe (arguably we have too many people for the planet's capacity but that's a separate topic). Meanwhile some technologies just feed the hedonistic instinct.
Of course the line is blurry in places but cleaning up your messes is definitely the top end of the hedonism treadmill.
I may be radical in my views here as I consider a personal automobile one such hedonistic luxury that the society would be better off without. Consider the Netherlands here. By just about any metric you care to measure it's one of the best flourishing societies in the world handily beating the US and Canada on an array of well being stats. Yet they are actively shunning cars and pushing their society towards the "inconvenience" of walking, cycling and public transport. Their society as a whole benefits in many ways.
Most of the world (with the USA leading the pack) is conveniencing itself into an early grave.
Thanks for taking the time to explain your point of view here.
I think what I'm struggling with is what criteria (or who) determines which inconveniences are acceptable to remove and which ones aren't. For example, why is a standard kitchen dishwasher acceptable but a robot that saves you 5-10 minutes a day of loading/unloading the dishwasher not? Is a regular Kenmore dishwasher acceptable, or does it push too far towards the top of the hedonism treadmill, and people should have to do dishes by hand?
> What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be.
I actually agree with you here. Judging by how most people spend their time, the majority will fill 10 minutes of toil saved with Youtube shorts and Instagram, but there are still a minority of people who will put that time normally spent on toil towards higher aims.
For the former category, if they were just doing mindless toil anyway, what does it really matter if they waste that time some other way?
Because doing chores is not a complete waste of time. It's a mild physical activity and at the very least some rest for the brain and they eyes from the glowing screen.
As for who decides what is hedonism and what is a necessity? I think the society does - in a soft way. When people see others adopt more discipline and shun convenient doodads for slightly more physical work the society as a whole becomes a bit more badass.
I personally would rather bike and walk everywhere. Even if it takes longer and exerts more effort. If some day the majority sees it my way the society as a whole starts to soft push in that direction by altering the city infrastructure to be friendlier to bikes and pedestrians and less accommodating to cars. That's just one example.
Doing your dishes in the sink may feel like a terrible chore if you grew up with a dishwasher. I did not. I can live without one just fine. The benefit is that you get a bit of zen time away from the screen and there is no dishwasher to break and leak every few years.
I totally agree with your point of view. There is a big difference between automating laundry that would otherwise take hours of hard manual labor every week and automating 15 minutes of light house chores. If you remove all chores and minor inconveniences from your life then what remains? Tik Tok scrolling? Reddit posting? Most of us don’t have creative passions that occupy their entire days. Those little tasks are the time for resting your eyes and brain, interacting with your family, reflecting on your life. I’d never want to have my entire life completely automated from me. AI chatbots for thinking my thoughts, maid robots for living my life.
If I save 15 minutes of household chores, then that is 15 minutes worth of reclaimed labor to rearrange my Windows desktop, review all security settings, tweak my router and switch's network settings and configuration, clean up & organize my cloud storage, organize several hundred credential records in my password managers, read some changelogs: you know, the usual kind of DevOps shit I shouldn't need to care about, as an end-user.
In the age of LLMs and A.I., the real travesty is that computers must be manually controlled at all times, and we must invest manual labor into configuring them, as monkeys at the keyboard, and we must be denied any sort of orchestration or automation that would be available at the enterprise level.
And you think you are the one who should be making that decision for me? You are allowed to decide what types of labor I am allowed or not allowed to engage in?
> There is a big difference between automating laundry that would otherwise take hours of hard manual labor every week and automating 15 minutes of light house chores.
It's only a difference of degrees, not kinds. What if the robot only shaved 5 minutes off that 15 minutes? Would that acceptable or not?
Thanks for replying, I really appreciate your perspective here.
To offer some more of my own perspective, I find certain chores like dishes and laundry absolutely unbearable, and would love the choice to have those done automatically so I can spend my time on other things that I actually find enjoyment and satisfaction in. For example, doing dishes and cleaning up after cooking takes up a substantial amount of time, and I've love if I could spend that time doing more productive things in the kitchen instead. I would much more frequently make more elaborate and high-quality meals in my kitchen if I knew I wasn't on the hook for cleaning everything up afterwards. I have an endless amount of lawn and garden work too (much of which I enjoy doing it), so that's another thing that a robotic dishwasher could free me up to do. I'd love the choice to choose the toil that I find more satisfaction in.
I don't want to be held back just because some people will be using the time saved on Instagram. Scrollers going to scroll. It's inevitable that some people will get "filtered" by technology.
> For example, doing dishes and cleaning up after cooking takes up a substantial amount of time
You’re supposed to clean as you cook. Every little spill or splat gets wiped immediately. There is no cleaning afterwards.
Dirty dishes don’t go into the sink but directly into a dish washer. The only chore that remains is unloading clean dishes in preparation for the next dirty load. It’s all about organization and planning. It all fits together.
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