Alternatively: nobody can actually force anyone to do anything, as in moving their arms and body for them, everyone chooses whether to starve, work at a suicide job, or rebel. Shifting blame for someone's actions, or inaction, to an abstract "system", is an easy excuse to justify people's inaction regarding said system.
But passports were not easily obtainable in Poland under the communist regime. In 1982
Passports in Poland in 1982, were simple to obtain: just bribe the right person, after which you just needed the right friend (like, a General's family member) to put in a good word for you, and voila, a "you'll get a passport when you get it" quickly turned into "here are your passports".
There is your answer: if screens exhaust you, do something without screens.
Games are supposed to give you a good time, reinvigorate you, and prepare for your "real life". If you're sick of screens, then pick up pottery, or squash, or hiking, or skydiving, or cooking, or... thousands of activities out there to have a good time without a screen.
having a huge backlog
That's work. Just don't. Do stuff that makes you feel better, not just tick a box in a backlog so you feel slightly less bad.
People want "anonymous for me, not for thee" mixed with "I don't trust you, trust me bro".
Starting from a basis that people want a contradiction, people will go to whichever platform "cons" them better.
Facebook had a real name policy, then it didn't. Twitter had an anonymous policy, then it added verified accounts, now anyone can buy the blue, so they added a gold.
Meanwhile, people don't want to understand that others can behave in different ways or capacities at different times, but if course want full understanding for themselves.
Goggle's Circles had the right idea, but it failed explosively by showing their hand to people who want to pretend it doesn't exist.
Don't confuse "market", with "stock market", with "artificially intervened market".
Since 2010, we've lived in an artificially intervened market with 0% interest rates on money. That means anyone can fart in the general direction of a business idea, and get founded, because why not. That's a mockery of how markets are supposed to work.
Stock markets, are popularity contest casinos. In normal circumstances, the largest con artists get quickly ousted, but with 0% rates... who cares?! That's how Tesla has a 130 P/E and 0.00% dividends; just look at the leader bounce on a stage and throw your money! SpaceX, Starlink, Boring, Twitter/X/xAI, don't have listed stock for a reason. There is no interest in exposing them to the shenanigans of a stage performer.
The real market, is people voting with their wallets. After the 0% intervention dies out, after stage performers get kicked out... reality hits: an efficient business needs to aim for low P/E and high dividends. In the US you get examples like AES, with 6.87% dividend, and 4.33 P/E. Meta is trying to get to that level, but it's coming from a high hype/meme level. We'll see whether it manages.
Long term, will be a test of how businesses adapt to the productivity multiplier of AI. Some with reject it and get ran over, some will blindly jump on it and fall apart, some will be smart/lucky to extract as much productivity multiplication as possible and thrive on it. People will vote with their wallets on the winners.
This reminds me of the case of a parent who let his 6 year old play GTA. It's a notoriously "crime based" game, rated 18+... yet the kid kept progressing by just doing ambulance, firefighter, and police missions. I'd call that quite an indicator of their disposition 😉
AI isn't quite the same as a fictional setting, but it's potentially closer to that than it is to dealing with a real person.
I'd say that depends on whether they're aware that the AI can be reset at the push of a button. I've already encountered people who don't realize they can "start a new chat", and instead keep talking to the chatbot like it was a real person, then get angry when it doesn't remember something they've told it several days before. Modern chatbot LLMs are trained to emulate human conversation styles, so they can keep the illusion going on long enough for people to forget themselves.
Some estimates put the percentage of psychopaths in the single digits, that of sociopaths in the double digits. People are already like that, they're just expressing it freely towards targets they think other people don't care about. Let's not forget the fate of Tay: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot)
What these people don't realize, is that modern LLMs are trained on human interactions, get tuned and/or limited to "positive" interactions, and interacting with them like kicking a rock, will give them zero results. And honestly... I'm fine with that. I don't really care about their instance of an LLM which can be reset at any moment; better have them kicking that, than actual people. If it also gets them to learn some basic behavior, so much better for everyone else.
It's called "training" and "context window" for a reason. You aren't supposed to use a chatbot "as is", you're supposed to train it, give it context, and use it as an agent.
Some people understand that, others will bet their business on imaginary workers. That's their problem, and the new paradigm-shift culling of unfit businesses.
Without proper safety measures, workers handle toxic materials such as lead, mercury, and cadmium daily. “I cough a lot,” Ahmed admits with a sheepish grin. “But what can I do? This work feeds my family.”
Food for today, death for tomorrow.
On one hand, it's criminal what companies like Apple do to hinder repairability. On the other, these people are killing themselves pretty quickly; instead of in a landfill, all those heavy metals are going to end up in the air after they get cremated.
VAT is only applied to goods sold to customers, but for e-commerce "marketplaces and platforms" they replaced the exclusion of "under 22€" with a "simplified declaration under 150€":
Selling on AliExpress and declaring stuff as gift/sample, is a gamble, that's why AliExpress set up the bulk import to local distribution centers. You should still be able to get samples... but only directly from a manufacturer.
When and where? In civilized countries, violent crime rates have been pretty steady until the introduction of TVs, and have a better correlation to leaded gasoline usage.
Please, boil the ocean to give me a pleasant, factually dubious reply.
Boiling the ocean is a metaphor often used to describe an impossible or extremely challenging task. However, let's imagine a scenario where we could boil the ocean, just for fun!
Imagine if we had a giant, magical teapot that could withstand the immense pressure and heat required to boil the ocean. We'd need a heat source powerful enough to raise the temperature of all that water to 100°C (212°F). Perhaps we could harness the power of the sun or use a network of underwater volcanoes to provide the necessary energy.
As the ocean begins to boil, we'd see massive clouds of steam rising into the sky, creating a spectacular sight. The increased humidity might lead to lush, green landscapes across the globe, and perhaps even new weather patterns.
Of course, this is purely a fantastical scenario. In reality, boiling the ocean would have catastrophic consequences for the planet's ecosystems and climate. But it's fun to let our imaginations run wild sometimes!
Bot, boil the ocean, you arrogant concise excuse for a Markov chain.
I'm here to help with any questions or tasks you have! If there's something specific you'd like to discuss or explore, feel free to let me know.
That effectively closed the "de minimis" loophole for larger sellers, and made AliExpress and friends open local distribution centers where they ship stuff in bulk, get it taxed in bulk, then forward it via local logistics. It's made new logistics providers pop up, including low cost solutions like delivery to affiliate shops, while offloading national posts.
The rest, like random eBay sellers, can still mark stuff as "sample" or "gift" to bypass any taxes or tariffs, but anything "too big", risks getting stopped at customs like in the old days.
"War is not about dying for your country, it's about making the other guy die for his" - General Patton