I was saying that and agree to disagree. I don't think that cell phones are "all convenience" without any negatives what-so-ever. They add weight. They are expensive to lose and get stolen. They are often not very user-friendly (typing on a phone is difficult for me, I dislike the small screen sizes, my wife often complains that her fingers don't even register on touch screens for some reason). More of life's basic services are starting to assume that you have and / or would like to use a phone to do things like access your banking, read a menu at the restaurant, unlock hotel room doors etc. which causes you to feel like you *must* keep it with you at all times, which is inconvenient. Batteries die or the phone crashes when you need it most. They are susceptible to malware and this is all just off of the top of my head. I'm sure I could come up with more if I thought more about it.

That's not to say they are "all bad" either. I gave reasons why I like them. They have cut down on land-line interruptions and telemarketing calls dramatically and have been a godsend for me, as I suffer from misophonia. But I think it's just as naive to believe that they have presented people with no inconveniences what-so-ever.

Just about everyone I knew did that in the 90s. It was called "call screening." Before "voice mail", physical answering machines would play the message aloud while it recorded. Many people would wait to listen for the person leaving the message and if they wanted to talk to them would pick up. Then caller ID became a thing and people started screening more that way. However, before answering machines and caller ID you're correct ... people would likely pick up unless they didn't want to talk to anyone.

That also reminds me: physically unplugging the phone, or leaving it "off the hook" to stop all calls when you didn't want to be interrupted by the phone ringing was also very common.

Anyway I don't disagree with you that times have changed and we have different ways of solving these problems today thanks to mobile phones.

Even though I'm not in any way "addicted" to my phone (I often forget it at home, or don't know where I left it ... I'm not attached to it AT ALL), I found that my mental health and sanity improved substantially when mobile phones became a thing because it stopped the phone ringing when I didn't want it to (that's redundant because I never wanted it to, but disconnecting wasn't an option because of the rare family phoning for something important etc.). Mobile phones can do something that traditional phones couldn't: you can set your default ring tone to silence and then give people in your contact list custom ring tones in order to "white list" callers. That one feature of smart phones makes me like them even though I hardly use mine.

There were solutions to that problem, but one no longer exists and the other would be weird today. If the person could still be reached at home then pay phones were very commonly used. Otherwise sometimes you could call the venue to leave a message for the person you had to cancel last minute on.

Of course this is all in support of the thesis: times have changed, for better or worse (arguably both... it's all trade offs).

To say that the "publication claims" is to say that the issue is asserted as editorial policy. That didn't happen anymore than "goto considered harmful". It's a scholarly publication that publishes scholarly articles without editorial endorsement.

"Blood on its hands": you can neither spend nor give away a billion dollars without ending a human life by commission or omission. Big numbers always mean somebody gets hurt. So anything or anyone on that scale has blood on their hands one way or the other.

Social media: it's almost exclusively antisocial media. You can dismiss the 90% of the content generated by bots because it's modeled to fit in with and pass for human generated content of the worst sort, amplifying disinformation and bitterness. So what's left? Organic content posted by narcissists that is hateful, vile, despicable and violent. In short, we suck. We are the problem.

Sigh. We don't teach history anymore.

Those Great Plains you refer to were called the Dust Bowl a century ago.

Not gonna cry for US owners of oceanfront property. Sorry not sorry. You fenced off the ocean.

Dozens of feet? What will we do without Florida? Oh, yeah. Florida swampland has been a real estate joke since the 1920's. You can't be affected unless you spent your life accelerating climate change. I'm sure it will make a nice SCUBA park.

Other countries where they park their slums on the beach I might worry about. If the land goes down and the ocean goes up it's important to teach your children how to swim.

I want to elect representatives who favour a policy of leaving me the hell alone. So there is no "lesser" evil here for me. I know people have very strong opinions about political issues that matter to them, and for me to suggest that robo-calling (or even knocking on my door, which is just as bad to me) is somehow on par with "major issue X" will obviously not sit well with a lot of people. Just try to understand that whatever you feel most strongly about, I feel the same way about random unsolicited interruptions and, more broadly and abstractly, a government that thinks that it has a claim on my time and my life.

So if a candidate demonstrates that they're unwilling to leave me alone and stick to unobtrusive forms of getting their message out, I don't care about any other position or policy because that is the most important issue for me. Not to say I don't care about other issues or that your "major issue X or Y" is not important to me. Just that such a candidate has lost any confidence in me that they will represent my position on what government should be.

The specific statements I was responding to were the claims that "inclusiveness", within the context of E3, means that there was a "non inclusive, prior version" of E3 where the primary demographic marketed to was "socially awkward straight white males with misogynistic tendencies" and the corollary that anyone who enjoyed the cancelled elements (such as booth babes) are the aforementioned ad hominem.

I don't think "wokeness" killed E3, but holy shit are there ever a lot of unintended implications in what you wrote. I also don't know what skin colour has to do with anything. I had assumed you were trolling but you got up-modded so I think what you're suggesting needs to be prodded at a bit for logic's sake.

So, first question: do LGBT+ women not enjoy looking at attractive women?

Is it "misogyny" that women's fashion magazines, targeted at women, feature models?

If yes, then why did Victoria's Secret recently reverse their decision to drop the "Angels" (source: https://www.cnn.com/style/why-victorias-secret-is-bringing-sexy-back-bof/index.html). Are you suggesting that it's primarily men that buy women's lingerie?

Since you brought heterosexuality, masculinity and skin colour (of all things) into the fold, are you suggesting that minorities don't like sex?

Are you suggesting that women don't like sex? That "sex sells" means "sex sells, but only to men" ?

Is celebrating the disappearance of 'booth babes', by extension, not also celebrating that certain women were put out of work? Just sayin' ... if it's fair to take the leap of assuming that people who enjoy certain aesthetics of being socially awkward misogynists then I think it's fair to raise this point.

I'm all for expanding markets and appealing to the widest possible audience, but we're all human, most humans enjoy "sex, drugs & violence" in our fiction ... and it's probably a *really* bad idea to try and expand your audience by accusing your existing market of being bigots because of a narrow, sex-negative world view.

I operated a well trafficked website for nearly 20 years (about 500k visitors per day). I shut it down in 2022, and over the past few years of its life the rate of users using ad blockers hovered consistently around 50%. For what it's worth, it was not a website targeting geeks/nerds/engineers.

Ad blockers recently came up at work as well because for some reason we're using Pendo to drive certain "new feature" dialogues, and there was concern raised from Product claiming that these "features" weren't working with ad blockers. Of course we engineers said "that's a feature, not a bug!" but I digress.

Point being, the data that I've been exposed to suggests that a good amount of people outside of "geekdom" uses ad blockers as well. The web is virtually unusable these days without one.

I agree with you to a point. Trust is hard earned and easily lost. He lost it. I think it makes sense for his pilot's license to be suspended as part of his conviction.

For how long, and under what circumstances he could earn back the public's trust is the question.

We agree 100% that safety is the primary concern. Heck, even when it comes to prison my personal views are not steeped in rehabilitation vs punishment but public safety. I don't want murderers and predators roaming the streets. I don't concern myself with "punishing" them and I don't know if "rehabilitation" is possible. And of course, as a corollary that means I consider prison to be a "remedy" for very serious crimes only where safety of persons is at stake (or possibly if there are patterns of repeat behaviour where there were already financial remedies to compensate victims in past convictions and the offender continues to demonstrate that they pose an ongoing risk to property; the principle is that it is not to "punish" or "rehabilitate" them, it is to prevent repeat offences since they have demonstrated that they will re-offend).

What this idiot did was very unsafe and cost a lot of trust. That said he has many years ahead of him and people can change, learn and grow. And so given a good amount of time, strict observation + scrutiny and entirely at his own expense I would be open to allowing him an opportunity to re-earn the public's trust at some point in the distant future.

I feel the same way, but I do think there is likely a market for this.

If the band is retired and doesn't tour any more, or is dead, then a certain demographic might go for the nostalgia and spectacle, as long as the price is reasonable (by which I mean lower than what it would have cost to see the band live, inflation adjusted). While I don't know a lot of people who enjoy an arena full of strangers, a lot of people like to go do activities with other people they know. So there would undoubtedly be a social element to it as well. Dinner and a show as an outing.

Where it would [possibly] fail is if positioned as an alternative to seeing a live band that is currently touring. Unless it was *way* less expensive and filled a different niche. It certainly couldn't be advertised as "seeing your favourite band in concert." It's a show, and might be fun, but it's not "seeing a band in concert." It's something else.

I can't see it being my cup of tea, but if a show is a show and if people are willing to pay for it...

IDE users spend weekend actually, you know, getting some coding accomplished

Because of this article I just logged into the gmail account associated with the Google account that I use for YouTube. I don't use that email address for pretty much anything at all, except if there's some action I need to take on a couple of rarely updated YouTube channels that I have.

Lo and behold, I had an email from a recruiter sent to that address recently. Again, I never use that email address for anything, personal or work related. So I've certainly never provided that address on LinkedIn, or used it for job hunting etc. at any point, ever. They just figured that sending an email to first initial + last name @ gmail.com would be worth a shot when trying to contact me I guess. Or, more likely, they have software that auto-blasts common variations of peoples' names that they're trying to contact and don't have contact information for.

Not to mention that the USA is the ONLY country in the history of the world to be founded upon the ideas of individual liberty. Even if it's imperfect, even if some can argue that it is "less free" than it once was, it was and remains THE symbol for "free country."