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).

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...

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."

It baffles me how firmly people tend to think in "either / or" propositions.

I don't know of anyone that argues that originality and creativity do not build on top of previous ideas. To state otherwise is to straw-man so spectacularly that the conversation has gone completely off of the rails.

The premise being discussed is simply this: Is there such a thing as "original thought" ?

The reason this question goes off the rails so quickly is because it is philosophical. It is very hard to bring that into pure objective measurement. And so it tends to bring out the people think that free will exists vs the people that think that free will is an illusion. And yes, it boils down to free will because in order to have "true" original thought, you need the element of free will. The "free will is an illusion" hypothesis boils down to the idea that your brain is a type of machine controlled by various inputs / external stimuli and that you have no control over thoughts that enter your mind. There are some interesting studies that get cited that support this hypothesis. The counter argument from the "free will exists" point of view is that while you might not able to control random thoughts that enter your mind, you can still choose which thoughts to focus on and to act upon.

Therefore, the logical refutation to your straw-man is that while iterative creations build upon previous ideas by definition, they still require some element of "newness" to be a "creation." This newness may be combining and mixing various previous elements together (which is often an argument made by the "there is no such thing as genuine original thought" hypothesis since their claim is that ALL creation is the combination of previous ideas), but that "newness" could also, hypothetically, include an element of something entirely unthought of previously.

You don't need to disprove that creation is iterative in order to prove that it is possible for someone to have a genuinely original idea. But to muddy the water further into philosophical musing, could it not be argued that thinking to combine elements of previous ideas that no one had ever thought to combine before IS a genuinely "original" idea? If our brains are just machines that take inputs, combine them and return outputs, then why isn't EVERYONE creating "new" inventions all the time? Why do we recognize that "some" people have a creative gift while others do not? Why is "exceptionalism" widely recognized in creative endeavours if it doesn't exist?

There is sprawl, though. I live in a medium sized city where 5 years ago housing prices were still sane. But because they got insane in the major cities, people started selling their homes in the major cities for stupid amounts, and moving here where they could retire like kings and queens. Only now the housing prices are getting stupid here too. Crime is also going up because of rapid population growth. This used to be one of the safest cities in Canada, where homicide and firearms crimes were virtually unheard of, but now it feels like we hear about another shooting every single week. And now there's very few places for the people who grew up here to go. Even rural areas around here are seeing houses go for way more than a young couple could possibly dream of affording.

I bought my house in 2016 for $141k. Houses on my street are now selling for $500k - $600k. My daughter could have saved to put a downpayment on this house at $141k. At half a million the dream of home ownership is dead.

Typo correction: I meant to say "Nun on a motorcycle*"

My wife and I really enjoyed Mrs. Davis and hope it gets a 2nd season. I jokingly say that it should have been called "Nun on a bicycle." It's fun, it has a dose of sci-fi in a tongue-in-cheek / doesn't take itself too seriously style and it's different. I can't think of anything like it on TV or in film at the moment.

We're also magicians and so it has some overlap in subject matter for us there. Teller was apparently a consultant on the show and it shows in that there were a few scenes where what the character was doing was legitimate sleight of hand.