> You can't have a liberal attitude toward sex and a puritanical attitude toward sex at the same time.
Sure you can, they are both matters of degree and scope, but I do think going to the extent of weaponizing either is at odds with the other.
For example, I don't try to act against anyone's personal sexual or romantic inclinations, and don't think it's the place for government or anyone else, that's a freedom we all should have and defend, but that doesn't mean there aren't societal or personal limits. If any of my friends were polyamorous or in a thrupple or open relationship or anything like that, it's not necessarily my business unless it's presenting problems that visibly affect their life or mine. My acceptance of that is independent of the fact that I'm only interested in a long-term monogamous romantic and sexual relationship at the moment, which has in some cases seemed more conservative. If my romantic partner decided she wanted something else, she's of course welcome to explore that on her own terms by ending our romantic relationship.
I guess the nuance really comes down to where the aspect of "morality" comes in, where it's directed, and whether that's fundamentally at odds with a sense of true liberalism.
In one instance for example, I found myself prompted to defend monogamy in opposition to someone who would clearly think of themselves as a progressive, and might arguably be liberal in disposition, but was railing against monogamy because she'd had bad experiences with the people she ended up with in those relationships. She was making a grand moral argument, and I responded with a contrary argument, but I don't think that's incongruent with either of us being liberal.
Nothing about what you just described is puritanical or illiberal. You can have conservative personal behavior without attempting to exert undue control over the behavior of others.
I don't do drugs or want other people to do drugs, but still don't think it's my or the government's business if people do so. That's a textbook liberal position on the issue.
That's why I qualified puritanical and liberal with matters of degree, rather than being diametrically opposed. Having a large scope liberal attitude towards sex enables my inward facing, relatively puritan(ical) disposition to be a choice rather than mandatory and I don't care to demand that of others. I could very well be someone else with a different strict set of moral standards for me and my immediates with a slightly different scope and still be liberal. It seems to me that only when one weaponizes it does it become puritanical and illiberal; you want the same strict moral guidelines for everyone else that you impose on yourself.
But they are diametrically opposed. It's not puritanical that I don't do drugs or that you're monogamous. What's puritanical is trying to impose those personal choices upon others.
It would be equally illiberal to mandate that everyone do drugs or be polygamous. The illiberality is the imposition itself, not the quality of the imposition.
This ideal seems like it works, up until you see the actual actions and effects of conservative parties within politics. Then you realise that actually, only a minority have that position, the vast majority of conservative parties are authoritarian and LOVE sticking their hands in peoples' business.
Whether the ideal works and the extent to which it's commonly held are two different issues. My view is that both major parties in the US are somewhat illiberal, but average out to a moderately liberal status quo.
Despite many flaws, e.g. the Wars on Drugs and Prostitutes, the US is arguably still the world's greatest stronghold of liberalism (for the moment).
The War on Drugs is actually a perfect microcosm of how illiberal policy doesn't work. Instead of learning our lesson from the War on Alcohol, we doubled down and funneled untold billions of dollars into Mexican drug cartels via US markets — funding the very problem we wanted to solve. By contrast, our more liberal tobacco policy has been a huge success.
> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables?
Seems like it's more a matter of conveniently waiting until it's clearly some kind of explicit competitive disadvantage not to switch, or otherwise have their hand forced, rather than making their products worse.
That said, Apple makes their products worse all the time for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be so hard to believe, and they also let their products stagnate until they may as well be discontinued, like someone who stops engaging in a relationship until you eventually break up with them.
> How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?
A lot. I'd wager somewhere in the realm of a % of hundreds of billions
The world is messy for all sorts of reasons, that may not be the way anyone would like it to be but it's the way it is, and imo it's best to learn it when the stakes are low rather than when they're later voting against other classes because they were never exposed to people from them early on, or they're being taken advantage of at work or in an adult relationship.
I wouldn't fault someone for wanting to situate their kids among peers and adults that help them grow at a similar level rather than hinder it, but I think it's also best to be a guiding hand rather than a applicant tracking system when it comes to the non-academic side
> If you think homeschooling makes kids grow up to be prejudiced, you should just say that, instead of insinuating it.
Absolutely not what I was insinuating.
I was suggesting that explicit isolation from potential peers that come from different levels of wealth or backgrounds based on pre-existing prejudice has the potential to reinforce those prejudices. I'd wager this would overwhelmingly come from private schools and suburbs, not homeschooling, but it's more of a matter of where the desire to control the exposure comes from if that's part of the reason.
So no, I was making no direct association between homeschooling and prejudice.
Worth what? I probably agree, the greenfield rote mechanical tasks of putting together something like a basic interface, somewhat thorough unit tests, or a basic state container that maps to a complicated typed endpoint are things I'd procrastinate on or would otherwise drain my energy before I get started.
But that real tangible value does need to have an agreeable *price* and *cost* depending on the context. For me, that price ceiling depends on how often and to what extent it's able to contribute to generating maximum overall value, but in terms of personal economic value (the proportion of my fixed time I'm spending on which work), if it's on an upward trend of practical utility, that means I'm actually increasing the proportion of dull tasks I'm spending my time on... potentially.
Kind of like how having a car makes it so comfortable and easy and ostensibly fast to get somewhere for an individual—theoretically freeing up time to do all kinds of other activities—that some people justify endless amounts of debt to acquire them, allowing the parameters of where they're willing to live to shift further and further to the point where nearly all of their free time, energy, and money is spent on driving, all of their kids depend on driving, and society accepts it as an unavoidable necessity; all the deaths, environmental damage, side-effects of decreased physical activity and increased stress along for the ride. Likewise how various chat platforms tried to make communication so friction-less that I actually now want to exchange messages with people far less than ever before, effectively a foot gun
Maybe America is once again demolishing its cities so they can plow through a freeway, and before we know it, every city will be Dallas, and every road will be like commuting between San Jose to anywhere else—metaphorically of course, but also literally in the case of infrastructure build— when will it be too late to realize that we should have just accepted the tiny bit of hardship of walking to the grocery store.
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All of that might be a bit excessive lol, but I guess we'll find out
Outlook is not better in ways that email or gmail users necessarily care about, and in my experience gets in the way more than it helps with productivity or anything it tries to be good at. I've used it in office settings because it's the default, but never in my life have I considered using it by choice. If it's better, it might not matter.
> The consumption of "stuff" contributes to GDP, which is one of the first things people use to correlate to quality of life.
It's one of the first things governments use to correlate to quality of life, and imo it's a good way to get away with papering over inequality. A country's GDP can be stable or slowly growing and it won't be in recession, and yet much of that GDP can be produced by one generation of people who are in a class that's multiple orders of magnitude wealthier because the newest generation of people has to pay them to have a roof over their head and subsidize their retirement. The GDP comes from the appreciation of their property value and the rental income, while a massive proportion of working age people are just able to consume and work, largely for those same people. Very wildly different qualities of life even below what Mag World would consider Rich, maybe not in the moment when someone can but themselves some literal or metaphorical candy, but in terms of viable upward mobility and precariousness long-term.
In order to buy the house I live in the basement of, not even owned by a much older generation person in this case (seemingly a single mom, but an investment banker afaik), I would need to be able to sustain a $2m+ mortgage and come up with a $400k+ down payment, it will never be possible, and even though I never wanted that for my future, it's depressing that it's just laughably and insanely out of reach, GDP kind of hides that this is the case for many.
Agreed. I know GDP is not the strongest signal for high quality of life, but its easy to calculate. My point wasn't that a high GDP means that the people there will have a high quality of life; it is easily manipulated with rents like you bring up. Thank you for adding the nuance that I did not include.
Huge corporations are in the business of manufacturing boring things at scale, throwing money into pits, and moving slowly, it's just what they do, at least after they're initial rise. It seems cynical, but I think only a rare person at a rare company might disagree. As soon as you have dominance, you want to protect that dominance rather try something categorically industry changing. Even if you did, it wouldn't be surprising enough to get much attention unless what it was completely upended your own product line.
Eh, probably overthinking it, let it matter if it matters, if it's your liability, but otherwise take the opportunity for what it is. Focus on what you're there to do. The purpose of any of it is to bring money in, and if that happens.
Early on in my career I was hyper-fixated on building features correctly at this particular company, according to what I thought was a proper way to build websites. I was probably right, but my job wasn't to be right, my job was to get things done in a certain period of time according to whatever people who controlled the money at the company thought was important, not what a nerd would necessarily care about.
When you're in school or just graduated, you're basically qualified to start learning (outside academia) and it's important to pay attention to what other people value, then do your best within that until you have the power to determine what's worth valuing.
They came uninitialized, but yeah it could be worthwhile to actually zero and fully format them. They are decently fast at 275 MB/s but even that's 16 hours to do one pass. Maybe let it run over the weekend
16 hours isn't that bad. I recently had to zero my old 2tb Time Capsule and just let it run overnight and during work, wasn't so bad. You'd also get to detect bad sectors, figure out how good the drive is in terms of what % of the drive is actually usable for large sequential writes
Sure you can, they are both matters of degree and scope, but I do think going to the extent of weaponizing either is at odds with the other.
For example, I don't try to act against anyone's personal sexual or romantic inclinations, and don't think it's the place for government or anyone else, that's a freedom we all should have and defend, but that doesn't mean there aren't societal or personal limits. If any of my friends were polyamorous or in a thrupple or open relationship or anything like that, it's not necessarily my business unless it's presenting problems that visibly affect their life or mine. My acceptance of that is independent of the fact that I'm only interested in a long-term monogamous romantic and sexual relationship at the moment, which has in some cases seemed more conservative. If my romantic partner decided she wanted something else, she's of course welcome to explore that on her own terms by ending our romantic relationship.
I guess the nuance really comes down to where the aspect of "morality" comes in, where it's directed, and whether that's fundamentally at odds with a sense of true liberalism.
In one instance for example, I found myself prompted to defend monogamy in opposition to someone who would clearly think of themselves as a progressive, and might arguably be liberal in disposition, but was railing against monogamy because she'd had bad experiences with the people she ended up with in those relationships. She was making a grand moral argument, and I responded with a contrary argument, but I don't think that's incongruent with either of us being liberal.
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