You think the allure of being fully independent and having your own instance would be right up their alley given how they value independence, but nope.

Because it’s not about freedom of speech for them, it’s about freedom to force people to listen. Having their own server where they can shout at each other all day doesn’t serve their purpose. Their panties get wet by forcing others to listen.

Even books read for pleasure shouldn’t have to dumb down their grammar and writing style. There are plenty of comic books/graphic novels with better writing than the Twilight Saga (for example). By “learning something” I don’t mean you have to read non-fiction books to learn about history and what not. But books like Twilight, which are written with no sense of story structure, word usage, or proper grammar in some places, are beyond harmful.

She’s a shit writer whose style appeals to people who people who can’t tell the difference because they barely paid attention in English class and don’t care to.

If you want an example of the other direction, Harry Potter is a series that appeals to young people, but are well written and actually inspire kids to read because it challenges them to get better at handling good writing.

I’m not “gate keeping” anything. I’m saying the writer has an obligation to enrich people, regardless of whether it’s reading for fun or reading for learning.

Fucking hell, I hate having to upvote this…so much…

Twilight is everything that is wrong with modern literature. It’s dumbing down your art in order to cater to a population whose reading levels have declined to the low grade school level over the years.

Good books increase your literacy. You learn new things from reading them; new words, new phrases, etc… an author is supposed to add to the collective intelligence of the world, not debase themselves to write at a fourth grade level so that their books are more popular to incurious illiterates.

• Children of Men

• Gattaca

Both feel like extremely realistic portrayals of possible near futures.

Wouldn’t even know where to begin. Suffice it to say I have a long history of seeing how Apple does things via selling their products in various places.

I pronounce it “Phil”. And he would appreciate it if you would stop staring at his missing eye.

I’ve always just used the same ones that I use for performers because I’m poor.

If possible, make sure there’s no recognizable voices or anything like that because the tone will be repeated through the scene, so any voices are going to repeat as well. So when you’re doing it, tell your actors/crew to be quiet.

One of the biggest things that most amateur filmmakers or video makers make is not getting sufficient tone.

Before shooting, record a fairly long stretch of just the ambient sound in the area where you’re filming so that when you are editing, it can be laid under the audio tracks and help to smooth out the jumps in audio from different clips.

Apple will keep charging whatever their marketing department can convince idiots to pay.

Their profit margin has zero basis in the reality of how much it costs to design, build, and market a particular product and is instead a function of how high they can push it until their customer says no.

That’s why they have the spare cash to produce goddamn television shows… That they THEN make you pay to watch!

IPhone users have already paid for appleTV a thousand times over. But hey, gotta look cool in front of your coworkers I guess.

I’ve solved that problem by buying two bags. One to eat all at once. And one to spread out over the rest of the day.

It is indeed dangerous to rely on any one country for too much

Cries in Canadian

The U.S. is like any other country; it has its share of assholes. But I generally avoid painting everyone of however many million people with the same broad brush.

There is a somewhat obnoxious level of patriotism to Americans in general that comes from simply being the biggest economy and a net cultural exporter to the rest of the world; think blue jeans and coca-cola, metaphorically. (I’m sorry, Americans, but it’s true. Put on your big boy pants and deal with the criticism like adults, please.)

But it only rises to the level of arrogance in those people who think that the rest of the world only exists because of them and should behave as some sort of client state to American hegemony.

That’s not all Americans. Heck, I’d say it’s not even most Americans. But they’re just really really loud and drown out everything else.

What happens when I ignore the cookie preference dialogue on websites?

You get stuck with the leftovers; which is usually the maple flavour or those really really dry shortbread cookies that feel like dust in your mouth. And you’re not allowed a drink of milk to wash it down.

It helps to get in line early for your cookie preferences.

What? … Wrong cookies?

Sorry about that. I stand by what I said however.

Okay, to put it another way:

Once the child is born, it stops being literally a part of its mother and instead becomes an individual.

but it’s not like any sudden development occurs at the moment of birth.

You mean other than breathing its own air and no longer being physically connected to its mother’s womb? I’d call that pretty significant. I would argue that the moment it breaths its first breath on its own rather than as a part of its mother’s uterus, it becomes a murder victim, not an abortion.

You are absolutely correct regarding AI. I hadn’t considered that. It gives me something to think about. Thanks!

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I lean pretty hard left who is also pro death-penalty (IN VERY SPECIFIC CIRCUMSTANCES)

• If the case has absolutely been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

• All appeals have been exhausted.

• Proof is absolutely undeniable.

• Guilty party shows no remorse.

• Crime is suffiently heinous (mass murder, child killing, serial killers, etc…)

• A legitimate psychiatric board has deemed that there is little to no chance at rehabilitation nor does the guilty party show any inclination to want to rehabilitate.

if ALL those things are true, (plus some that I haven’t even considered) then I would rather execute them than pay for their living expenses for the rest of their natural life, or worse see them released at the end of their sentance absolutely knowing that they’ll do it again.

It might be his best book since Name of the Rose

My personal favourite is The Island of the Day Before. Though I haven’t read either in years and it might be nostalgia because that was my first introduction to Eco.

Marketing.

Convincing stupid people that their self-worth is based on how much they spend.

Not a thing that is exclusive to Apple, of course. It’s how society has been since the 80s and Reaganomics, with Nike and other running shoes being the first really noticeable marketing push in that regard.

Where Apple paved the way is that, even back then, a company would make a product, assign a profit margin to it (traditionally about 30-40%), and sell it at that price…

Apple came along and said, “the only limit to a profit margin is how much you can convince stupid people to pay. We’ll use billions of dollars in advertising to convince people that they’re sub-human if they don’t agree with it. If the consumer is dumb enough to pay 250% profit margin for a phone device that costs us literally a couple hundred bucks to make…than that’s on them and their own stupidity.”

So in short, profit margin is no longer a relatively stable number dictated by market forces and the relative strength of the economy, and (thanks to Apple) instead has become a function of marketing. How much can you convince suckers to spend.