JasonFruit

Let me put it in a less-fun way: "high reactance" is in this context just another way of saying "values freedom". Describing it using a wording that expresses psychologically-educated disapproval verbally pathologizes that preference, but it doesn't constitute a supported value judgment. In neither of your comments have you offered any support, so just like my "loves freedom", it remains an empty weasel-word.

I would pay for that feature. With AI scanning the paragraph text, we might even be able to get relevant illumination images generated on the fly. I want this now, whereas five minutes ago I had never thought of it.

You say "loves freedom" like it's a bad thing.

In my experience, what they oppose isn't unions as such, but compulsory union membership. They consider that a union should arise from the expression of worker needs, and a union that they are forced to join and that exists whether they want it or not might lack incentives to represent their needs instead of the needs of the union. It's kind of like the saying about organizations in general: eventually they come to serve the needs of the organization instead of the purpose for which they were originally created.

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No thank you. I'm sure it's a wonderful app, but I've been burned so many times that falling for it again would be firmly into "shame on me" territory. No more trusting online services for me — I'm in data-hoarder mode now.

Is there any reason to believe this was done on behalf of the Chinese government, rather than out of personal feeling? I'm not saying it's a right way to act, but absent government encouragement, it doesn't seem very interesting.

Note that I said 'trivially'. The structure and meaning of an 'unless' construction is the same as 'if', adding or removing only a negation. Using 'while' and a jump to construct a loop is much more expressively distant from 'for'.

You've demonstrated that it is trivially replaced by 'if' and negation. I think that's almost the definition of inelegant.

I feel the need to point out that it's a long road from steer to hot dog, and you don't usually get them from a rancher.

The lists in that article are absurdly tendentious. Except for Berlusconi, there's very little reason given to justify inclusion.

You're missing an important distinction that I may not have made clear: a lot of activities that can be harmful to children can also be valuable. There's a lot of harmless fun on television, walking alone to the park or a neighbor's house fosters a healthy sense of independence, weight training done safely can help build strength and confidence and sugary caffeinated sodas in moderation are… tasty? (Not sure about the benefit on that last one.)

Like these activities, social media can have their benefits even for young people: contact with friends and family far away, connection with others with similar interests, and a broader view of the world, among others. With guidance, kids can experience those benefits without too much of the harm.

In most of the cases you point out — drinking, driving, buying firearms, and sharing pornographic pictures of themselves — any good there may be is vastly outweighed by the dangers. I don't believe the harm so disproportionate with social media, but I suppose others might disagree.

That may well be. I was trying to illustrate the broad range of activities in which we accept some risk to children, and may have been ambitious beyond my knowledge.

I agree with the premise of this bill — that social media are harmful to young people — but disagree with the conclusion that therefore there must be a law. There are lots of things that can be harmful to children, like television, busy streets, caffeinated sugary sodas, and weight training, and we trust parents and other adults to guide children through those dangers, teaching them wise self-restraint along the way. I don't see that social media belong to a different category of danger that requires legislation.

Parenting is hard, and not everyone succeeds, but that doesn't mean that we need to legislate away all danger, especially at the cost of privacy and potentially beneficial engagement with friends and family.

Leaving aside for a moment who is and is not civilized, there's at least one point where a person's self interest and their government's interest in secrecy might align in suicide: when the agent is faced with torture. The agent would want to avoid serious pain that might end in their being killed anyway, and the government would like to keep what secrets they might reveal. Without fanaticism, there is pain I would die to avoid.

As far as the West being an enlightened civilization, Alberto Gonzalez' defense of U.S. torture relevantly suggests to me that civilization only goes so far.

Pointing out that Duolingo has taken an old website and turned its content into a marketing gimmick/"museum" before it's even had time to grow cold isn't really "self-centered snobbery," "bringing misery onto others" because "the world… revolve[s] around you." I can't help but feel like your response evinces a worse attitude than the one you're responding to.

I might go with "precision and panache," though.

If you run an ISP, chances are 100% that people will use it to feed their pornography and gambling addictions. That ISP will be in the business of ruining lives. Does that make running an ISP am immoral occupation?

Enlightenment may consist in rejecting exactly that.

Why should we care what ChatGPT says?

Would you be more satisfied with, "Only the tiniest fraction of corporate media's output has intellectual value?" People often make statements that make what is approximately true absolute, for simplicity of expression or for style: "Nobody should be out in this kind of weather!" "The oboe is an ill woodwind that nobody blows good."

Where did I say we would or could decide against it collectively? Individual people can decide for themselves not to engage with harmful technologies in the future, just as many do today with cell phones, computers, television, etc. Not everything has to be done by governments.

We can also, you know, just decide we won't do that.

Please stop using the phrase "extremely cringe", and you will immediately be better at writing.

I get sick of that kind of clever that consists only of playing with language. I know The New Yorker is known for this sort of thing, but I expect more of them; they are, when at their best, both clever and thoughtful. This particular piece is insufferable.

We raised chickens when I was a kid, and I still raise meat animals today. When I was quite young, meaning no harm, I wrote the name of one of the chickens on the package, to the horror of my sisters. They promptly wrote the same name on all the packages. I've since learned a little more sympathy for people who fall more on the friend side of the friend/food continuum.

I'm assuming you mean fried chicken: you should only eat food chicken, not friend chicken.

What a writer! You can tell he wrote the style section of Strunk and White's. He manages an informal style without falling into the high-school yearbook style he parodies so memorably in that work.

I lived in Akron for several years, and though I wouldn't say people were vile — that's pretty strong — I would say it's one of the places in the Midwest where I observed the least concern for one another. It ranked low on the "do people put away their shopping carts" scale. Of course, I couldn't really afford to live in the better parts of town. (I don't mean to say everyone was a self-absorbed jerk, though; I had some really good neighbors.)

No experience with Oklahoma.

It is possible that we're both right. Do you mind sharing where in the Midwest you have experience?

I think you're describing the Midwest. People clear sidewalks and driveways for each other after a snow, unasked and uncompensated. People let each other off public transportation before crowding on. And... there are drunks everywhere. So two out of three.

But what I'm aiming at is this: in less urbanized areas of the United States, the sort of shared ideas that allow successful coexistence exist. It's largely the major cities where you cannot find it.