Earlier quoted context omitted.
50,000 people died by suicide in the USA in 2023. 12.8 million thought about it. 3.7 made a plan for it. 1.5 million attempted it. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html 105,000 people died by overdose in the USA in 2023. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd... In 2023 the average daily incarceration population in the USA was 664,000. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-…
What did Churchill say about Democracy? It's the worst except all the others? Yea. I'll take all this government mismanagement and markets over Communism and Socialism. The State is never good at managing the means of production.
The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
791–800 of 824 posts
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#792"Following his reasoning, it cannot be stated in absolute terms that an iPhone 15 is of “better quality” than a 2003 Nokia." This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense. I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that c…
There is a fetishistic cult surrounding the N900.
Mainly comprised of people who were too young or broke to own one.
I am an old man who owned an N900.
Simply and concisely: the N900 was a half-baked, poorly thought out, frustrating piece of "exercise in box-ticking" junk.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#793Earlier quoted context omitted.
It boils down to what people are willing to pay for. How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one? And if your product isn't the cheapest one, what are you going to do about it?
Buy the Dyson version at 4x the price, avoid thinking about the money and concentrate on the fact that it's not crap (yet). We can expect the Dyson brand to go through the same quality arc in twenty years, but for now, I'm happy with the times I have splurged for their products. The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products. If I buy a product and am happy with it in t…
The actual quality is debatable and varies.
Do not get any of their fans. They are designed to fail.
They use a wimpy brushless motor mounted vertically and then shove a impeller on the top of it to move air. The problem is, they don't balance the impeller. And when I saw the motor is wimpy, I mean it's shaft is barely a 1/4". The motor shaft ends up destroying the bearings within a year or two due to the unbalanced impeller load. You will be annoyed to fuck by the high pitched noises it starts making from shot bearings.the bearings are integrated into the motor assembly so you can't just replace them. You have to replace the entire motor and do this basically every year or two because it's not a motor defect, it's a design defect.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#794Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you propose to get enough uranium and thorium to match the power output of the entire sun for longer than five milliseconds?
I feel like we're talking past each other. If we are to get back on a steady growth rate in energy/person, solar on earth is a great short-term part of that, fission is required for continuing it in the medium term until we figure out something else (fusion, but then whatever we might unlock down the road). You're globalizing what I said about having enough uranium and thorium in known deposits and at current power u…
We've actually seen a decline in energy-per-utility ratios. We've got a lot more people and (apparently) a lot more utility per person, so we're still using more energy in total, but if we held those constant for the past several decades we'd actually be using a lot less energy per person and in total. It's not at all inevitable that energy/person/time only goes up. The Jevons paradox eventually maxxes out - if we could teleport anywhere instantly for free, we'd still only be making a finite number of teleportation trips each day. The crew of the Enterprise replicate a finite amount of food, and so on.
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Possibly, nuclear could have been a better intermediate energy source for the past 50-60 years than the fossil fuels we did use. In countries that did adopt nuclear energy (like France) it did seem to work out that way.
Now, in the present, which is when we are making decisions, it's time to go all in on renewables (and long-term infrastructure, much more generally). This brings some challenges, but not insurmountable ones. We'll probably need more load shifting, more cross-border power trading, and more batteries. (Hydropower is also renewable and works at all times of day, but it's not available in all locations, which brings us back to cross-border trading).
I don't see why you'd need nuclear power for high-density areas, or "unlit areas". High-density areas are full of all sorts of stuff, including power cables which can import power from the surrounding countryside - there is absolutely no need to build a fleet of nuclear reactors in the middle of New York City. Even with the substantially-lower-than-Chernobyl risk levels assumed by nuclear proponents, I think the idea of building a fleet of them in the middle of NYC should still be concerning to them. And for "unlit areas" - I assume this means extremely rural villages or whatever - you know a medium-size solar farm, a couple of wind turbines, or even a small diesel plant, takes a shitload less maintenance than a nuclear reactor, right? You're not importing nuclear technicians to permanently work in the middle of the Sahara or the Amazon - you're either connecting them to the grid properly, or you're giving them something set-and-forget that can hum away in the corner for years on end.
Big batteries coupled to diesel generators will remain a great local backup source for critical systems for the foreseeable future - if I was world dictator, I wouldn't ban them outright. Somewhat interestingly, the opposite is already also true: battery-buffered solar power is used in remote sites where you might expect to need the reliability a diesel generator, because a small chance of the thing being down outweighs having to keep it refueled.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#795Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's well sourced. The people who seem to hate/misrepresent him tend to be capitalists, philosophers, religious types, and generally egotistical "individualist" types.
What is his source for the definition of free will? Fairy tales?
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#796Earlier quoted context omitted.
Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and social healthcare. Glad to know you'll take it though, because it looks like lot's of Americans are 'taking it', in a pretty brutal and ugly way. FYI American police kill more people than any other country at 1100 people a year. Guess that's also 'democracy' and not, you know, just America: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/
Yea still better than Communism or Socialism. I don't care about criticisms about America. They're not interesting or relevant. Democracy and markets are superior to state owned means of production. > Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and social healthcare. Well it had those but in the case of housing it was primarily private (as it should be) and in the case of healthcare running a healthcare syste…
"state owned is not communism or socialism"
Ok then.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#797Earlier quoted context omitted.
The link isn't something people buying work pants would buy. 22oz Selvedge has its issues, and under heavy use would last 4 or 5 years given societal constraints (i.e. you don't walk around in stinky clothes multiple days in a row). At ~$124 + tariff, we're looking at significantly more for a five year period or a comparable minimum of $40/yr replacement. Comparable products can be found with a replacement every year…
Nice ChatGPT response.
Sigh. Unfortunately, this has become the de-facto response to intelligent debate and conversation, where the person who says it, was being disingenuous from the start and where they can poke no holes in what was being said.
Its a capitulation and worse instead of saying "I disagree", and walking away in good faith, the person refuses to recognize the other person's humanity, and uses this more like an invective under social coercion and mental compulsion, in other words a false accusation with no proof, as a bully; and you won't find proof because what I said is organic, and the reasoning is sound.
I'm a person, and your absurd reality is not my monkey or circus.
That behavior is at the level of a toddler throwing a tantrum when play-acting fails. Overall, its quite a twisted and evil thing to do when you are not a toddler.
Personally, I don't get the impetus to do this because it doesn't matter that you are wrong in a conversation, or hold a different opinion; the simple saying speaks volumes about the person saying it.
You should be aware that making the choice and taking the action, towards willful blindness of evil acts, is how people become evil people.
They self-violate themselves repeatedly through fallacy (wrath), and other deadly sins (sloth=complacency ...), eventually accepting evil into their hearts themselves, where they no longer resist such choices and repeat such actions until someone stops them.
Denial of existence is an evil thing to do. Its what gaslighters, psychopaths, and worse engage in regularly, and they victimize others through such bullying/coercion. When you do such things, you communicate to everyone "I'm part of that group".
Ultimately, it shows a core weakness of a destructive person, just waiting for the right opportunity and circumstance to harm others, with the convenient willful lie "oh I didn't know", you didn't bother to know; and lip service matters not.
Its sad when people do this, because they don't realize what they are actually communicating by doing it; the accusation is easily proven false, because chain of reasoning isn't good enough, and any middle school student can understand reading comprehension, and quirks of writing competently, enough to see the human reasoning followed consistently.
Something AI doesn't "delve" to do. /s
I would say/warn that you might consider the specific things that action says about you, and where your behavior leads you; hopefully before the next time you think about throwing that around as an invective, but I doubt you will, if your previous pattern of behavior is an indicator.
Objective measure trumps subjective every time a conflict arises, and you seem to have lost yourself in subjective experience, which coupled with AI use leads to dangerous delusion given the right time, and circumstance.
As an important parallel, you might consider why doctor's or psychiatrists ask certain questions like what year is it, who is the president etc, and what it means when your answer doesn't match objective reality in such cases.
The professionals do this to check your mental status, when they suspect dementia, alzheimers, schizophrenia and other cognitive limiting issues may be present.
If you use AI regularly, you might want to think about dialing it back. Its cooking your brain.
If you told those professional's in response, "Nice chat-GPT response", the assumption would be they commit you to a facility or hold for observation.
Who would be around to listen, or want to listen to what someone who needs to be at those places has to say. Not the general public certainly, the people who are in those places don't have a firm grip on reality.
The phrase speaks most about the person saying it when it is false, and it is false here, and the fact that you don't have sufficient reading comprehension, or have conflated good writing skills to AI, enough to realize that, is why experts on AI worry about people using and being exposed to AI.
You might find the follow of value, especially the discussion about AI and reality in the latter.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/ai-therapy-bots-fuel-delu...
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#798Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yea still better than Communism or Socialism. I don't care about criticisms about America. They're not interesting or relevant. Democracy and markets are superior to state owned means of production. > Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and social healthcare. Well it had those but in the case of housing it was primarily private (as it should be) and in the case of healthcare running a healthcare syste…
"better than state owned" "state owned is not communism or socialism" Ok then.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#799Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also thought that HDMI has many problems, like you have, too. My idea is: video and audio and other stuff are separate cables. The video cable will only be sending the digital RGB video data, with the wires for the pixel data and pixel clock, as well as power and ground and vsync. I think it is helpful for the video signal to be digital, but it does not need to be as complicated as HDMI. (The audio cable can be bal…
Why two cables if it can be done with one? From the consumer perspective, two cables are more complicated.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#800Earlier quoted context omitted.
China is a developed country! This dialogue about Chinese people and clean water is bizarre
Fair point, I ought have made that clear. There are many ways in which Chinese people have it better than Americans these days, if my eyes are to be believed.