Well, you asked if I was arguing against improving safety when compared to fatality rates for any activity.

But for me to have made that argument, I’d have to have said that there is no rate of fatality that would justify improving safety. So, I was asking if you think that’s true:

Does no threshold for the rate of any cause of death justify improving safety?

But I sucked at wording it clearly. That’s on me.

In short, no, I’m not arguing that. Really, I was just clarifying what the person you responded to was saying. I’m not making an argument either way.

Does no threshold for the rate of any cause of death justify improving safety?

Well, nothing is 100% safe, and we allow plenty of things that are demonstrably unsafe to continue. So if you compare bike-car collisions against say, firearm suicides in the US, you’ll see that bike-car collisions aren’t that bad.

The fundamental argument is that nothing is totally safe, but some things are safer than others.

More like if you contextualize the incidents of bicycles and pedestrians with cars, you might realize they’re safer than you think. This is absolutely false for cars and pedestrians though in America at least.

Exactly

What’s particularly strange about it is that it doesn’t really serve any purpose for a vast majority of people aside from a government-approved official statement that someone finds their in-laws unbearable.

That’s a pretty good purpose. Everybody can save face by taking part in bureaucracy. That sounds like I’m being facetious, but I’m serious. Think about the alternative: avoiding them awkwardly all the time or telling them to screw themselves directly, which will engender negative feelings. At least with the bureaucracy, the sentiment gets filtered through a impartial, uncaring medium.

I’ve had this! Idk why they’d call it the exploding head syndrome, but it sounded like a door shutting really loudly

That’s still more wealth spread than now

Uhh they’ve accumulated over the years and I don’t bother closing them. The amount of the credit lines together help keep my credit utilization low.

I have loads of credit cards with only one or two that ever have a balance on them though…

I find Vimium better for a mouse-free Firefox experience.

Just use regular chatgpt. It’s the same thing without the Microsoft integration…

“It lifted astoundingly quickly. And along that line we were suddenly able to see Germans doing exactly the same thing all out in the open. And we just looked at each other for some time and then one or two soldiers went towards them. They met, they shook hands, they swapped cigarettes. They got talking. The war, for that moment, came to a standstill.” General Walter Congreve, who led the Rifles Brigade, wrote to his wife on Christmas Day, describing the ceasefire as “an extraordinary state of affairs”. Because the trenches were so close, soldiers were able to shout greetings to each other, initiating conversations. “A German shouted out that they wanted a day’s truce and would one come out if he did,” wrote the general. “Very cautiously one of our men lifted himself above the parapet and saw a German doing the same. Both got out, then more… they have been walking about together all day giving each other cigars and singing songs.”

I don’t get this. This sounds like people were there for a job, but otherwise harbored no ill will towards the enemy. Or maybe they did, but it being Christmas and all, they really just wanted to carol and smoke cigars? What was the point of going back to the war with someone you just sang carols and smoked with?

I think, like Obsidian, it stores them as markdown files.

Then Logseq. It’s an outliner (each line can be it’s own…thing…), but it’s open source and a direct competitor of Obsidian. In fact, I was ambivalent between the two when I first started with online note-taking.

Among respondents who own luxury brands that they themselves bought (e.g., Gucci, Versace, Rolex), 44% prefer to live in a world without any of those brands altogether. Among respondents not owning such brands, the fraction preferring to live in a world without them is 69%.

That's interesting.

Actually, this is kinda like using fossil fuels. If we didn't have fossil fuels our lives would be miserable. And while using them adds some utility, burning fossil fuels still leaves us miserable, particularly as climate change grows worse.And so, even though I use fossil fuels to fuel my car, heat my home, and cook my food, I'd still prefer to live in a world where its significantly reduced to phased out altogether.

Can you see bot accounts? You might have a bot message for some reason that isn't showing.

Claude.ai. I took the transcript of the video and asked for an outline using a prompt I usually use for outlining textbook chapters lol.

Here’s an AI outline because this was actually a good talk:

• How Platforms Die

  • The speaker introduces the concept of platform decay or “enshittification” and how it leads to the death of internet platforms.
    • He defines platforms as firms like Uber, Amazon, and Facebook that connect users and business customers.
  • He outlines a 3-stage process called enshittification where platforms:
    • Are initially good to users
    • Abuse users to benefit business customers
    • Eventually abuse business customers to only benefit shareholders
  • This results in the platform becoming a “pile of shit” that dies.

• Facebook Case Study

  • He uses Facebook as a case study of enshittification’s 3 stages:
    • Initially attracted users by promising privacy protections and custom feeds
    • Then broke promises and sold user data to advertisers and flooded feeds with publisher content
    • Finally, reduced value to users and fees for publishers to extract all value for shareholders
      • This led to an angry user base and brittle equilibrium

• Causes of Enshittification

  • Lack of Competition
    • Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed consolidation across industries
    • Companies can use predatory pricing to undercut competitors
    • Mergers eliminate competition
      • Example: Google relying on acquisitions rather than in-house innovation
  • Unrestricted “Backend Tweaking”
    • Tech platforms control the algorithms and systems behind their products
    • They can arbitrarily change these to alter user experiences
      • e.g. Facebook reducing visibility of publisher content in feeds
    • Done without transparency, oversight or accountability
  • Bans on Reverse Engineering
    • Laws like DMCA 1201 and CFAA criminalize circumventing DRM and terms of service
    • Makes it illegal to reverse engineer platforms to enable interoperability
    • Tech companies use IP laws to prevent modding and adversarial interoperability
      • e.g. Apple using IP laws to prevent iOS modding

• Solutions

  • Strengthen Antitrust Enforcement
    • Block anti-competitive mergers
    • Break up existing tech giants
  • Pass Privacy, Labor and Consumer Protection Laws
    • Comprehensive federal privacy laws with private right of action
    • End worker misclassification through gig economy
    • Apply consumer protection standards to platforms
  • Allow Adversarial Interoperability
    • Roll back laws criminalizing modding, reverse engineering
    • Use government procurement to incentivize open ecosystems
    • Appoint special masters to oversee platform legal threats
  • Keep Interoperators in Check
    • Bind interoperators to the same privacy, fair trading and labor laws
    • Determined through democratic process vs corporate policy

• Conclusion

  • We need to prepare and spread these policy ideas to capitalize on the next crisis
  • Efforts are underway to enable a better internet through this approach

This is just standard (and good) criticism of capitalism. “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” as they saying goes.

But there’s the question of whether the mass murder in Myanmar would have happened without Facebook. That’s impossible to know for sure, admittedly, but I still believe it’s possible to think about it meaningfully. Because my answer is mass murder would have probably happened without Facebook.

The core of my argument is that technology merely allows humans to act more effectively and amplifies what we already do. What humanity does is not fundamentally changed by technology in most cases. And Facebook is one of the cases where the previously existing social division was amplified, where bad faith actors could act more effectively. Yes, Facebook had an important role to play by trying to make the platform addictive via algorithms that emotional content could hijack and spread like wildfire. However, while that doesn’t absolve Facebook’s instrumentality to mass murder altogether, it contextualizes it enough for me to treat it as any tool.

In other words, a murder-shovel digs just as effectively as a non-murder-shovel, and I don’t really see an intrinsic problem with using the murder-shovel.

The analogy of the tool fails when it comes to Zuckerberg’s role in directing Facebook to act as it did. A shovel doesn’t have a CEO dedicated to digging as much as possible; Facebook does have a CEO dedicated to making the platform addictive, the mechanism by which social divisions were amplified. I think his responsibility is complex…but he absolutely shares some responsibility for the tragedy.

And so, that’s why I believe your post is a good, moralistic criticism of capitalism: it demonstrates how market relations obfuscate moral responsibility. Facebook mediates and helps satisfy our social needs while allowing us to ignore our role, however small it is, in perpetuating the means by which others can influence others to commit tragedies.