There are absolutely very important reasons to still vote for Biden, but you can’t rely on millions of people to all do the right thing just because it’s logical. The person who’s running for office ultimately has the responsibility to ensure people want to vote for them. It’s just not really useful to blame millions of people when you know that there are statistically for sure going to be disaffected people out of those who need to be motivated. It doesn’t even matter whether most voters who would vote for Biden turn out to vote for him - they almost certainly will - because this fight is at the margins, and to win, you have to capture the irresponsible and unreliable people too.

Yeah, I could imagine that, if we’re just counting the baseline minimum of what that production would cost. I think for the most popular podcasts they could easily afford it, though. It would certainly cost much less than what they’re paying Joe Rogan.

There’s something about driving that innately dehumanizes - I swear I’ve actually seen studies about this. When people are behind the wheel, they don’t relate to the world around them as personally, empathy kind of disappears, it all becomes something like a game, and everything between them and their destination is just an obstacle to be overcome.

I assume they can power the train AI by pantograph or third rail - no reason to have nuclear powered trains, this isn’t Factorio.

How many people did the Fukushima incident actually kill? Meanwhile people are actively being killed by air pollution and climate change caused by fossil fuel energy. Nuclear energy incidents seem worse because they happen over a short period of time, but it’s just like with airplanes - plane crashes are horrific and disastrous, but statistically airplanes are massively safer than even rail and especially road transport.

It requires good governance and adherence to safety standards and upkeep to be safe, but we’ve shown that we can reasonably do that for the most part.

Renewables should of course be the first priority, though lithium mining is also a significant health hazard - but really when you compare everything statistically and not just by the significance of individual events, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be trying to eliminate fossil fuels by any feasible means, and that includes nuclear power.

They just saw that video on Roblox and said “yeah that sounds great, let’s do that”

They’re active in comments, but they’re also a small minority

I can understand that but at the same time, it can also counteract a lot of localized perverse incentives. The majority of people might want more housing, but then at the same time there’s a significant part of the voting population (especially at a municipal level) that doesn’t want it in their community because of unfounded fears of higher density, so everybody wants it somewhere else and it doesn’t get done. Well, if you go up a level of government, it’s going to get done everywhere fairly, and people finally realize that it won’t be a problem.

You could argue that for major languages, where the translations would drive revenue, they should prefer to hire people to do the translations from within the target market - it would create some amount of economic opportunity rather than just being another way for the developed countries to suck up money on services from developing ones in particular.

Linux, if we’re counting the entire userland and typical components rather than just the kernel and its interface, definitely has worse (binary) compatibility than Windows, and potentially even Mac OS. The only saving grace is things like Flatpak which bundle the entire system tree they need with them and therefore have pretty long-lasting binary compatibility. But it’s quite normal to have to recompile some old software from scratch when some common system libraries get updated, really only core things like glibc have long-lasting binary compatibility, and you can’t even guarantee that compatible system libraries still exist even when compiling from source sometimes, because every project has a different approach to backward compatibility.

Now, to be honest, things are much better with containerization (like flatpak/snap/docker/etc.), but that doesn’t really help you much for software that’s older than those unless someone bothers to try to figure out all of the dependencies and package them up and it still works. The only reason why it seems to be okay is that Linux distributions recompile all of the deps for you every time something changes and you get everything all at once, so you rarely see any of that all break. But if you have anything compiled from source, and you didn’t statically link the whole thing, you’ll see the problem.

I mean those are pretty major things, especially if you’re part of one of the affected minorities. If I were trans I wouldn’t really want to work with a coworker who insists on misgendering me and makes a fuss out of me using the right bathroom.

If it doesn’t come up, it doesn’t come up. People can agree to disagree, also. But there are also cases where the disagreement is so fundamental that it makes it pretty hard to respect someone or even want to be in the same room as them.

I do but only with people I’ve actually made friends with who I’m pretty sure will either agree with me or at least respect my point of view. I’ll share mildly political articles in discussion groups for those specific things at work sometimes, but those are places where people have specifically opted in to hearing about them and are interested in the topics.

Well, Labour is legitimately sliding right, and it’s become somewhat common among the so-called “left” in the UK to make a scapegoat out of trans people - it really wouldn’t surprise me that an older, liberal woman in the UK would have some right-wing things to say.

Well, extrajudicial would imply not legal. What you’re really pointing to is that when white supremacists are involved, somehow the government suddenly cares about due process and civil rights.

Sounds more like the Rules of Acquisition to me.

Yeah. “One more lane” is something that a lot of people unironically think, it’s not just a meme, so trying to ensure that everybody knows how silly that is and how much harm it causes is one of the main ways that that line of thinking can be destroyed

Yeah, exactly. It’s the same reason why punishment is only a deterrent to crime to certain extent, and it doesn’t work absolutely.

You could make the punishment for shoplifting be summary execution, and it would still happen on a regular basis. Because people think they won’t get caught, even with evidence of lots of people having been caught before.

You have to design around stupid, because this is the real world. People can only expected to be rational sometimes, and in aggregate, you need systems that expect people to take whatever is the most obvious or easy choice available to them, whether it’s actually a good idea or not.

I have serious doubts those folks are any more of a danger to anyone than the average driver or the average tired or emotional driver.

I think I agree with that except that I think that that is equally a problem. I don’t think people should be trusted to drive, en masse, out of necessity. There are too many things that make it dangerous when people really don’t have a lot of choice in the matter, and may have to drive when they’re not actually feeling up to it.

People can enjoy a drink responsibly, but you shouldn’t drive even if you’ve only had a couple of drinks. Even a small amount of impairment is unacceptable when you’re controlling a machine that could easily kill other people by mistake.