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ArbitraryValue

@ ArbitraryValue @sh.itjust.works

Posts
8
Comments
1790
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Glad she found the right people to love her 🥹

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  • My dog had been returned to the shelter because the folks who adopted him wanted him to stay in their yard most of the time and he kept digging out and escaping. That's ok for some dogs but he was a dog who slept in my bed after having me tuck him in.

  • Make up your damn mind, Texas

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  • Texas became its own country after independence from Mexico only because the USA initially wouldn't let it join. The overall preference for being a member of a larger nation where descendants of English immigrants held power and were allowed to own slaves was stable over time.

  • Corporate Media Advances Conservative Narrative About Minnesota Fraud - The American Prospect

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  • I don't see anything in there that substantially challenges the facts presented in the New York Times coverage being criticized.

  • Accurate description of me

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  • How are you opening IE? I needed to run an old project of mine that uses Silverlight and discovered that in the years since I ran it last, Microsoft has deliberately and irreversibly broken the ability to launch IE directly in Windows 10. I had to set up a Windows 8 VM.

  • Vietnam Bans Unskippable Ads, Requires Skip Button to Appear After 5 Seconds - Saigoneer

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  • I'm glad that at least one government is stepping in to protect the helpless public from the menace of, uh, ads over five seconds long. Disaster averted.

  • Move children! Vámanos!

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  • Some hound breeds are pretty creepy.

  • Volkswagen shifts back to physical buttons on dashboards

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  • Really? I wonder what model year will have cars available without it. I was thinking of buying a new car but I can wait.

  • Volkswagen shifts back to physical buttons on dashboards

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  • I'm used to driving a car from 2008, but I borrowed a friend's 2021 Subaru Forester and there the engine just shuts off after the car is stopped for a few seconds, even without any sort of cruise control. The engine turns back on when I let go of the brake, but I find the noise, the vibration, and the delay of the startups irritating. There's no way to get the feature to stay off - it defaults to on every time the car starts and it will eventually turn back on while you're driving even after you've pressed the button to turn it off temporarily. I find that especially irritating. (IMO it's simply not OK for a car to do something after I've pressed the button telling it not to do that.)

  • Volkswagen shifts back to physical buttons on dashboards

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  • If they're undoing changes that customers hate, maybe they'll get rid of automatic stop-start too?

  • Uber rewrites contracts with drivers to avoid paying UK’s new ‘taxi tax’

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  • Are you arguing that it isn’t a scam?

    Generally a scam is something done in secret, and if the government finds out exactly what the scammer is doing then the scammer can get in legal trouble. Here Uber is acting entirely out in the open, the government clearly wants to stop Uber, but writing a law that restricts Uber in the intended way appears to be difficult. (Maybe a law written strictly enough that Uber couldn't work around it would also impact others that the government doesn't want to target?) So I would argue that this is against the spirit of the law but it isn't a scam.

  • Uber rewrites contracts with drivers to avoid paying UK’s new ‘taxi tax’

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  • I suppose I don't give "loophole" the same moral weight that you do. Even if this was not intended to be legal, if the law as written permits it then the blame is on the government for passing a law other than the one intended to pass, not on Uber for taking action in accordance with the law.

    (Moral obligations can exist without being legally required, but taxes are a legal construct and there is no such moral obligation to pay them which extends beyond the legal one.)

  • Uber rewrites contracts with drivers to avoid paying UK’s new ‘taxi tax’

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  • I'm not saying that taxes are bad. I'm saying that if the government says "there's a new tax you have to pay if you do that" and you say "ok, then I won't do that," you have done nothing wrong. You have a duty to obey the law, but no duty to maximize government revenue.

  • Uber rewrites contracts with drivers to avoid paying UK’s new ‘taxi tax’

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  • Do you just voluntarily give the government money that you aren't legally required to pay?

  • Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore

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  • Windows is transitioning from being software you run to being an experience that Microsoft provides to you. The pattern of pushing new features to users unpredictably and without the option to refuse is clearly inappropriate in the first model but natural in the second. As a power user I strongly prefer the first model, but I recognize that most people these days might be ok with having their computer work like a website they access or an app they run on their phone - something they have no control over the state of.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Price is what people are willing to pay, so I'm not sympathetic to your idea that the higher price that people are willing to pay to avoid needing a loyalty card is in any sense illegitimate. It might be a different matter if there was simply no option to buy groceries without a loyalty card, but many stores don't have cards and even the ones with cards often have close substitutes for products that are on sale, so that if you want to you can limit yourself to buying only those products for which the price without a card is not higher.

    My more general opinion is that people who want to legally prohibit things that they can freely choose not to participate in, so that their own behavior won't have to change but no one else will be allowed to do the thing they don't like, are displaying an authoritarian impulse.

  • Tough economic times ahead

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  • That sort of evolutionary-biology approach can explain why men are all attracted to women of the same age, but it fails to explain why women aren't all attracted to men of the same age. Even if women don't have to be as selective with regard to age because men's fertility doesn't decline the way that women's does, there should still be an absolute ideal age at which a man is most capable of being a good mate.

  • Tough economic times ahead

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  • I'm not saying I want a relationship with a twenty year old or that women older than that are categorically unattractive, but as far as looks alone go, when I started puberty at 11, I thought women around 20 were the best-looking. When I was 20, I thought women around 20 were the best looking. And now that I'm 40, I still think women around 20 are the best-looking. Maybe I'll change my mind as I keep getting older but I doubt it. Having to accept this is simply part of having to accept the more general pattern of physical decline produced by aging - I don't look bad and women my age don't look bad, but both they and I don't look as good as we used to.

  • Tough economic times ahead

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  • Neither men nor women get better looking with age, so I'm not sure what the women are thinking.

  • Quick war in Russia, in and out, what could go wrong?

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  • Technically not the right flag, unless Russia is a ship.