It seems to me that if being bright white was a form of camouflage, it would be a common feature of nocturnal predatory birds, and it’s not. There are many other bird species with bright plumage and my understanding is that it’s usually for attracting mates. Has that been ruled out in this case?

Eh, if those things start launching then you’re probably as good as dead anyway.

Although the law does not define what a reasonable policy should look like, it says the companies should not deactivate drivers for failing to drive enough hours, falling below a minimum customer rating or turning down ride offers and deactivation should not be based on the results of a background check or driver record, except in egregious circumstances.

Source.

Wait what? This sounds rather extreme. I suppose Uber could have some sort of mechanism for evaluating driver performance other than customer ratings, but I’m not sure what that could be in practice.

Oh, also this movie was Orson Welles’ last acting role before he, ahem, proceeded on his way to oblivion. As he put it,

You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I’m destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen.

When I watched the movie, I thought Unicron sounded amazing. I suppose this is why.

People being shot with bullets -> inappropriate.

Robots being shot with lasers  -> appropriate.

There are no other relevant factors.

That movie has many more disturbing scenes than I expected from a toy commercial. Even this one includes talk of ripping out “optics”.

Following Pythagoreanism and believing irrational numbers to be blasphemous. They’re represented by being struck down by the gods.

…you don’t cash out your entire retirement accounts but when you retire.

No but you might move your money to a different, lower-risk investment. With that said, my post was poorly-written and the part about retirement was extraneous. I should have just said

with the assumption that there wasn’t a job tying me to any particular location

The point isn’t that you should feel sorry for him. It’s that he didn’t pay the tax but did take his money elsewhere. I don’t think California benefits when that happens.

most people behave themselves in public

I used to live in Texas in the 90’s and in my experience people weren’t usually that shallow. They could often genuinely like someone they knew personally even if they voted against the interests of the group that person was a member of. I was an atheist with a strong foreign accent but I only ever experienced friendly curiosity. The caveat to that is that I did live in a nice suburb.

Texas isn’t Florida and also maybe things are different now. 2024 Republicans aren’t 1996 Republicans.

the yearly stress of property damage

That’s a good point. My friends’ house is a concrete bunker with tiny windows, but they still worry about having their roof ripped off and insurance is very expensive.

Why even bother making that comment?

I made that comment because I had expected my friend to be uncomfortable in Florida since he isn’t white. He was often uncomfortable living in a more liberal but very racially homogeneous state because people would stare. I was surprised when he said that he was fine, and his comment about class signifiers being more important than race was new information to me.

People should be free to be themselves, and that attitude is part of why LGBT people are afraid.

I don’t know what attitude you’re referring to because I didn’t make any normative statements about how LGBT people ought to be treated. I just meant that I would think twice about moving to Florida (except to a big city) if I were an LGBT person myself.

If you bothered to look through my comment history

That would be quite time-consuming if I did it every time I wanted to ask someone a question, and it usually wouldn’t answer my question. Also I think it would be a little creepy.

But floating-point notation also can’t precisely represent irrational numbers…

I’m proud in a way of how much I pay in taxes. It makes me feel like more of a productive member of society. However, if there was something completely legal and relatively easy which I could do to reduce the amount of taxes I paid, I don’t think doing it would be contrary to the notion of paying my fair share. Washington gets to set its tax policy, and I get to choose where I live. IMO, leaving Washington because of its tax policy has no moral implications. It’s no different than leaving because I don’t like the weather.

I mention that at the very start of my post, where he’s talking about having more money.

(Also, I don’t think he’d need to be upper middle class, although if he wasn’t then he probably wouldn’t live so close to a beach.)

I suppose the court wants to avoid a scenario in which the current president of the US would be the defendant in a state-level criminal trial. That would be a ridiculous scenario. What exactly would Georgia do if there was a trial and Trump just said he was too busy to show up?

Impeachment is the only remedy for presidential wrongdoing, and it has already been tried.

Well yeah, that’s what I explicitly talk about.

I’ll never return to Florida

May I ask why?

My upper-middle-class friends in Florida live in a picture-perfect suburb within walking distance of a beautiful beach, and their house was quite affordable by my NYC standards. They vote for Democrats but they don’t appear to be personally affected by the fact that Florida is a Republican state much more than they would be if they didn’t live in Florida. They have a group of friends who aren’t Trump supporters, and the few Trump supporters I had casual conversations with when I visited were nice in-person. My friend says that people look much more at class signifiers than at race. He’s clearly a white-collar family man and he has not had any problems despite being a dark-skinned immigrant.

I get why the people targeted by Florida Republicans wouldn’t want to live in Florida, but you’re talking about earning more money. My impression is that you would be fine if you earned enough to live a middle-class lifestyle unless your appearance clearly violated the social norms. Some people will think that I’m callously ignoring the plight of poorer Floridians, but in NYC I callously ignore people who are even worse-off all the time. (I don’t think a person who isn’t a charity worker can realistically spend much time in Manhattan without learning to pretend that homeless people aren’t there.) I don’t think my plight-ignoring would be substantially worse if I moved to Florida.

Washington … recently enacted a 7% levy on long-term capital gains of more than $250,000

I wonder how many people are actually going to stay in Washington state and pay this. I would definitely move if I were Bezos, and probably even if I had the $250,000 minimum (with the assumption that I was cashing out since I was retiring and so there wasn’t a job tying me to any particular location).

Separating the trimmings from the rest of the waste isn’t the only thing that requires effort. I presume that the management doesn’t want to give ordinary employees the authority to just give stuff away, which makes sense. Even if it isn’t a problem in this specific case, it can be a problem because employees won’t always be knowledgeable or honest. Having management review what is being given away involves overhead, and deciding how much to charge you because of that overhead involves more overhead. I probably wouldn’t bother with all that if I ran the supermarket unless I really hated throwing things out, because I would assume you won’t be willing to pay enough to make it worth my time.

Why would this sort of fundraising quadruple from 2023 to 2024 when the big spike in prices due to inflation happened in 2001 and 2002? 2024 isn’t so dramatically worse than 2023 by any metric.

The article does state that

price growth actually spiked again in November, indicating that efforts to combat increasing day-to-day expenses for American households has stalled

but this corresponds to things not getting better as opposed to things getting worse.

I suspect that part of the explanation involves GoFundMe becoming more popular (maybe in general or maybe just with people fundraising for essentials) rather than any larger economic trend. The article doesn’t include enough information to know.

One time on Reddit, a mod of /r/askhistorians described some of the content of this sort that he had seen, and he wasn’t as dispassionate about it as this article is. Just his verbal description is both disturbing and difficult to forget, so I can believe that these employees are traumatized.

With that said, what about other careers that expose people to disturbing things? I used to know a pathologist who once told me that she had a bad day because two infants died during childbirth at the hospital where she worked. She had to autopsy them. I didn’t know her well at the time so of course I assumed that she was upset for the same reason that such direct exposure to the death of babies would upset most people, but I was wrong. She was upset because she had to work late.

Why can pathologists do their job without being traumatized? Maybe the difference is that pathology isn’t something that a guy off the street just gets hired to do one day. The people who end up being pathologists usually have other options, and they choose pathology because it doesn’t particularly bother them for whatever reason. Meanwhile these moderators are immediately dumped into the deep end, so to speak, and they may not be financially secure enough to leave the job even after they experience what it is.

Can content moderation be done without traumatizing people? It isn’t a high-skilled, well-paid job so I don’t think filtering candidates the way that pathologist are filtered is practical. Not having content moderators also isn’t practical.

(I’m using pathology as an example because that’s what I know a little about, but I think my statements are probably valid for other careers, like homicide detective, which also involve regular exposure to disturbing things.)