To clarify, my comment refers not to the freeloader/customer distinction but to the exorbitant cost of paid YouTube and the fact that they are trying to artificially increase its consumer value by making free YouTube a shittier experience.

Isn't there something faintly disgusting about a company capturing as much value as they can from a service, to the extent that it's barely providing any value to the consumer?

I'm a big fan of capitalism, but I'm concerned that clever firms are sucking the joy out of life.

For example, if a ride company figures out the maximum I'd pay for a ride and charges that amount, there's no good for me in that transaction. The company added and took in equal measure.

Yep, eyes and ears and control mechanisms they guide.

The auditory signals bypass the traffic lights entirely and go to the sensor networks that normally respond to traffic light signals.

Yeah, I'd rather be warned privately that my code likely has some issues than have it pointed out publicly! Of course for educational purposes some people need to make public mistakes, but it need not be as many as are doing it now.

Your conclusion does not follow. I think you accurately described LLMs as far as my layman's sense goes, but you need to understand agency to understand what is or is not an agent. Hint: nobody understands what makes various kinds of agents, except moral agents, because that's not actually about agency.

If you consider that this was a scenario where stopping was impossible, it's actually extremely rare. I've never even heard gossip about someone striking a pedestrian crossing the street, nor about a pedestrian being struck. (Bikers, yes, but that's a different scenario.)

You've been trained for it but you've never encountered it, and you don't know whether your reflexes are good enough.

Btw, I don't appreciate being put on the side of pimps and organized crime. But it's such BS when people read a report like this and go on to write horrifying stuff that's actually not implied by the report.

You're right, my comment was totally out of line. I'm so used to seeing "yeah but what about X" (where X is some sort of trap) that I didn't pay attention to the context of your comment

And thank you for providing the data. It appears their definitions don't agree with yours. Your statement says "unwilling", but the paper you cited says monetary exchange with no other ethical beach is sufficient to meet the definition of "trafficking". My read is that you described a scenario that is not implied by the evidence.

Isn't a lot of that just the consequence of communication? Where do we draw the line about blaming the tool versus the content?

(Yes, this is the Section 230 argument again.)

"what about us?" is the worst response to atrocity. That justifies it. Just don't do it. Don't justify atrocity.

If you insist on bringing up other issues, please frame it differently: "yes, but please don't forget about these other issues we should be fighting".

And really? Tens of thousands? So there are like a thousand enslaved women per state? I know this actually happens but did you get that number from a political ad or is it actually from credible sociological research?

You're referring to her taking advantage of social services, right? I don't think that's indicative of her values. Her values would be found in whether she votes for those social services to exist. But as long as they do, I wouldn't expect her to deprive herself. "Be the change you want to see in the world" is a nice motivational phrase, but it's not rational. A rational person would first change the world, and second, live in it. (I don't think people should be purely rational, but I don't knock them for it.)

For example if you vote for a candidate that promises higher taxes (on purpose, because you think it will work better), do you need to actually volunteer extra tax? I don't think anyone would call you a hypocrite in that circumstance.

Nah. The paper says it's first absorbed, then the filter media is defluorinated with heat in the presence of calcium carbonate, and the fluorine compounds break down and form CaF2, which is a harmless salt. (It wouldn't be great to eat a lot of, but fluoride salts are what we use in dental treatments.)

I wonder if it's a problem that the defluorination was done in under argon? That doesn't seem like something that would be done at a water treatment plant.

I take your point, but I want to mention that this is the opposite of costly signalling. It's like taking a dump then calling that a costly contribution to the municipal sewage system.

On the contrary, Ayn Rand can't even imagine a working economy in her fiction, let alone creating ideas that work in the real world.