Right, so banning guns won't make us magically safer if people want to and are motivated to do crime. I mean, that was literally the point being made about Prohibition. The government tried to outright ban something and wound up creating a highly lucrative and highly violent black market for the very thing they sought ban. The government has tried to ban drugs, going so far as to declare it a "War on Drugs". What have we got to show for it? A highly lucrative and highly violent black market for drugs that has become exponentially more deadly with the rise of Fentanyl as a cheap alternative (or additive) to coke, heroin, crack, meth, and everything in between. The government has had a ban in place on the private ownership of fully automatic weapons without the appropriate stamp of approval from the ATF, yet we still had one of the most violent shootouts in police history in spite of that ban.

There's a recurring theme here. Can you spot it? It's almost like if you try to ban something, irrespective of your good intentions, you end up doing the exact opposite of what you intended and on a much more destructive scale.

We're all pretty familiar with the thing called "work from home" and it's the best thing that could have happened for the tech sector. I'm exceedingly grateful that my morning commute consists of walking across the hall to my home office instead of being stuck in traffic on clogged freeways or having to ride public transit that reeks of urine and feces so I can sit in a cube farm all day.

If that means entire swaths of San Francisco's downtown district wither and die, then so be it. The dinosaurs were also kings of their paradigms, but as it turns out giant things that consume vast amounts of resources yet only produce massive piles of shit aren't meant to withstand the test of time. Offices are the dinosaurs. They had their time in the sun. Now it's time to die so that something better can replace them.

If you live in a world with competing social and ideological structures and you want yours to withstand the test of time, then it is prudent to contain those structures that are in direct opposition to yours by reducing their ability to expand and spread their influence. Ignoring your adversaries and allowing them unchecked expansion and exertion of their influence usually ends with your invasion and removal from the world stage.

Morality is irrelevant because war is an inherently immoral thing, with each side in any given conflict believing that theirs is the morally superior position. I mean, the Nazi Wehrmacht uniform had "Gott mit uns" ("God with us") emblazoned on the belt buckle and we all know the details of the aftermath of World War 2.
Survival is the only relevant question on the table, and we seem to be moving rapidly toward the point where we have to ask ourselves what a Russian victory in Ukraine will mean for our survival. Don't think for a moment that Russia isn't also asking themselves what their chances of survival looks like if they aren't able to achieve victory in Ukraine. We're now at what...year three of this "special military operation", and a supposedly fearsome and powerful military force hasn't been able to achieve complete victory against a much smaller force of a much smaller nation?

I was initially baffled as to why we would need yet another law on the books to ban wearing a VR headset while driving. Because who in their right mind thinks it is a smart idea to put on what amounts to an opaque device over the eyes before driving off?

Then I remembered that there is a preponderance of evidence that indicates a significant number of the population hail from the shallow end of the intellectual gene pool. And they will argue in court that because a law did not specifically define in exacting detail that wearing VR headsets while driving is illegal, they have not actually done anything wrong.

These are the same types of morons who have been caught on video napping in their Teslas while on autopilot, catching some Zeds while cruising down the road. I mean, it is autopilot, right? You can totally sleep at the wheel and the infallible Tesla autopilot will definitely not need your input because it can account for every possible outcome of any situation in a split second.

So yes, we do need laws like this. Because otherwise some idiot is going to don his VR headset and drive off into the wild blue yonder and kill someone because playing Superhot VR was more important than paying attention while driving.

Hate to break it to you, but Safari on iOS is already capable providing an ad-free browsing experience via support for content blockers. The App Store has an array of different ad blocking plugins that work directly with Safari. I already have an ad-free experience without needing to "upgrade" to Android so I can install Firefox just so i can use uBlock Origin.

Define irony. Suggest that iPhone users "upgrade" to a phone with an OS that is developed by an advertising company so they can have fewer ads.

I like moneyâ¦

You are conflating owning a a vehicle with driving a vehicle. One does not imply the other. Lots of people own cars that they do not drive, and lots of people drive cars they do not actually own. Moreover, it is also entirely possible to legally drive a vehicle that you own without a license, insurance, or valid registration. You do it on a track, or closed course, or on your own private property and there is literally nothing anyone can say or do about it.

Interestingly enough, this is also the same thing that went down with producers of leaded gasoline back in the late 50s. Tetraethyllead was known to be toxic to humans, yet profits trumped people and the lead additive industry fought hard to keep the money rolling in.

Thanks to a scientist named Clair Cameron Patterson, we eventually got rid of lead additives in ICE cars: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...

Because nothing bad could ever possibly happen by dipping your pen in company ink and relationships born from drunken office parties always stand the test of time, right? Please tell me that you just overlooked adding the "/s" for sarcasm to your post and that you're not really suggesting people shit where they eat.

I used to work for a small company where a manager had a problem with alcohol and banging her subordinates. She'd get plastered at company parties and literally take her subordinates home with her for the night. In some cases, they never even made it out of the parking lot. We had a lot of turnover in her department as a result, due to her coming up with creative ways to get rid of her regrets.

I worked at another company where a coworker had one of his best friends also working there. We had one of those retarded open office layouts and they sat next to each other. The coworker in question got involved in a serious relationship with a woman in some other department and they wound up getting married. His best friend was his best man at the wedding. A few months after the marriage, the coworker vanished. We found out later that he had crawled into a bottle because he had come home and found his best friend railing his wife. Apparently she had been cheating on him months before their marriage and it just kept going.

At another company I worked for, we used to start our support shift early in the morning so our eastern seaboard clients had access to phone support Our office building had a gym with large bathrooms that had showers and if you got to the building early enough, you would be greeted by the sound of 80's rock music blasting in the bathroom along with some other...sounds. You haven't heard anything yet until you've heard what sounds like ten pound hams being dropped onto a wet tile floor to the beat of Billy Idol's "White Wedding", mixed in with the less musical vocals of the couple going at it. I was out sick on the day that the guy's wife, who had learned of her husbands steamy affair with one of his young employees, came into the office next to ours for a showdown but I was told that hell really does have no fury like a woman scorned.

I could go on with other sordid tales I've witnessed during my tenure at these vaunted offices that the dinosaurs are so anxious to force us back to. For every fairytale relationship that started between two people at the same employer, I bet there's at least a half a dozen others that involve jilted lovers, favoritism, sexual harassment claims, tawdry love triangles, execs having sex romps with their subordinates, and everything in between. The juice isn't worth the squeeze and gambling your career in a game of relationship Russian roulette is a great way to find out just what people mean when they say "the house always wins".

I own two cars that are both capable of more than doubling California's 70mph speed limit with ease. One car is just shy of 700HP and the other is just a bit over 600HP. They're not even the fastest cars on the road and would be considered "entry level" numbers in terms of power output in some circles. The last speeding ticket I got was more than a decade ago and I wasn't even driving a car when I got it. It may come as a complete surprise to you, but it is possible to responsibly drive cars like this without the Nanny State's "help".

One would think that with a deficit of somewhere between multi-billion dollar deficit, rampant crime, and the homeless problems, Sacramento would have more important things to worry about. But in a state run by people who have a creepy, authoritarian obsession with controlling every aspect of their citizens lives, I'm hardly surprised.

Spoken like someone who has no idea what someone else does for a living and operates off of assumptions. Here's some free education for you. Your company longevity is only as good as your written documentation.

During my tenure at one employer, my documentation was actually published as the manual on how to install and configure our software product. It shipped with the software because I wrote it in exacting specificity. At another company, I wrote the documentation on how to set up and configure a piece of IBM's bloatware in our environment in such detail that the CEO himself, with minimal technical competence, could install the software. Every single dialog box, option, checkbox, and button is explained. With screenshots, no less. In code, everything I write has detailed code comments so that anyone coming in behind me knows exactly what that piece of code does and why it was written that way.

My bar for success in my work is such that I literally try to write myself out of a job, either through automation or with documentation, because I know full well what could happen to the company if I got hit by a bus. If you are dumb enough to base the longevity of your company on the impermanence of your workers, then you have no business being in business. There is no replacement anywhere for clear, comprehensive, documentation. There is no excuse for failing to demand that of the people that are working for you. If you have a problem of knowledge silos, then you have a corporate culture issue that you have failed to address and no amount of energy hogging office space you throw at it is going to correct that problem.

Lastly, in my line of work, I don't deal with the company's clients. My clients are the other developers in the company. The area I specialize in is highly regulated by an array of both domestic and foreign regulatory agencies. Security requirements are literally baked into the job by virtue of the laws that have to be met just to continue operations. Secrecy and confidentiality are absolutes that exist irrespective of whether there's an office and a commute or if I work from home.

There is absolutely nothing you've brought up that suggests wasteful commutes to archaic offices is better than working from home in my line of work.

Ah yes, the new fear of AI trope that keeps getting trotted out as if it's universally relevant to all jobs...

So I actually use AI here at home. As in, I actually have a far bit of hardware in a rack here and I run a few LLMs locally, along with Stable Diffusion. AI is not a danger to highly specialized fields because it's not context aware. Sure, you can tell it to write some bit of code, but it's not smart enough to determine suitability for your particular needs. By the time we get to a point where AI does pose a significant threat to me, or my job, I will have long since retired and the issue would be irrelevant anyway. Really hate to burst the AI fear mongering bubble, but it really is just a tool at this point in time and will remain so for a quite a while before it stands any chance of replacing jobs much higher than the bottom few links of the chain. You may want to spend a little less time focusing in the Intelligence part of AI and start looking at the Artifical side.

Also, working from home does not mean I'm isolated. My coworkers range from across the united states to a few in Europe and the Middle East. We all work just fine together with the tools available to us.

Someone else not being able to do their job correctly is not my problem, nor is it one I created by virtue of me not being in an office to coddle them. If you cannot do your job correctly, then you are incompetent and should be fired because you obviously lied on your resume and in your interviews when you told the company you could do what they needed you to do when you really could not.

What you're really advocating for is incompetent workers having the opportunity to socialize their failures. That's why you want people in an office, because working from home doesn't give you the environment you need to suck at your job.

I don't care about the alleged "social impact" of not going into the office because it is of zero relevance to my job function. My job description says I am supposed to write code. It does not say that I have to provide vicarious social fulfillment to coworkers who feel that the office is a place for socializing. It does not say that I have to provide validation for otherwise worthless mid level management who are only able to justify their paychecks when they have a captive audience trapped in a board room.

If someone cannot get their social needs met on their own time and on their own dime, outside of work, then that is a personality flaw on their part and I am in no way obligated to be the substitution.

This is actually what should happen, and it would largely solve the debate over alternative app stores. All manufacturers of phones should be required to allow installation of whatever OS the end user wants.

If people want Alternative App Store X, they can uninstall iOS and install an operating system that lets them do that. Apple is off the hook for providing support, much in the same way HP or Dell would be off the hook for providing software support on their systems if you removed the preinstalled Windows OS from your PC and installed Ubuntu.