temporaryvector

I think people conflate two different technologies when talking about self-driving vehicles.

First, there's the self-driving car for the dense urban environment, which is basically a robo-taxi. You don't buy or own these cars, you hail them and they take you where you need to go. Basically mass transit with the option to go wherever you need instead of pre-defined stops, combining the best aspects of a taxi and a bus. There's no reason these need to be cars at all, aside from the fact that we have all the infrastructure for cars. They could just as well be small trains/"horizontal elevators", the tubes from Futurama, or whatever else your local sci-fi author can come up with. These types of vehicles could be centrally controlled and you could indeed replace complex AI with expensive infrastructure, but that is something we'd like to avoid (who knows if it's even politically possible), hence the push for using existing infrastructure. As an added bonus, these types of fully self-driving vehicles can take over tasks like delivery.

The second type of self-driving car is the car for every other environment, basically the same cars we have now with an autopilot add-on. These vehicle would be for people who live in small towns, suburbs, rural areas or in general travel outside of dense cities. It makes more sense to own vehicles like these, but they must cope with a larger variety of environments. Personally, I would never buy a car that does not have some form of manual override so I could drive it myself. If the AI is advanced enough this manual override doesn't have to be a steering wheel, but for a car I own, having the ability to violate the law, crash it or tell it to go someplace it doesn't want to (or, god-forbid, run someone over intentionally) is essential. I suspect that making an AI that can cope with all kinds of driving conditions in the country is a task so monumentally complex that cars (the kind you own) without manual override mode will basically never be a thing, both because it would be expensive and because I don't think the kind of people who would need to buy a car to own would accept not having full control. A couple of instances of the AI failing in some basic way (failure to drive into a small garage, for example) would be enough to convince people that a manual mode is essential.

What percentage of cars in the future will be of the first type and which will be of the second type is up for debate, but regardless I think the second type of car will be something you buy out of necessity or a luxury good, and overall car ownership will go down.

However, with technologies like self-driving electric delivery vans, telepresence, improved solar power and battery storage as well as better internet coverage, it's not obvious to me that the future lies in dense cities. I speculate that a certain tipping point will come in the near future where less and less people will need to live in a large city for work and migrate to small and medium sized cities for better living conditions and larger homes. As technology advances, it will become more and more comfortable (and possible) to live in a less dense environment and population will spread out. I'll admit that this involves a bit of wishful thinking since I hate big cities, but the alternative where population keeps concentrating in urban areas seems like a terrible dystopia to me.

Sure, but while I have not done the research to back it up, I have the general feeling that a lot of religious prohibitions and traditions can have their origins traced back to rules from antiquity that made sense back then (stuff like not eating shellfish, for example) which were presented with a religious veneer to make them more memorable/enforceable. Over time these prohibitions got entrenched, extended, distorted because of misunderstandings, blind faith or more cynically, desire for control and power, and the original motivations were forgotten. This is, of course, a conclusion I came to without a lot of research so I'd love to take the time to look for evidence either way.

If this is true, it would also follow that more fundamentalist regions would have stricter interpretations of those rules. I does not take much imagination to come up with a version of the US where religious fundamentalism leads to "No Hand Holding" signs, and I'm sure at least some people living in the US right now would approve of such controls (thankfully they are not the majority).

Are you sure you don't have the causation backwards? Speaking from personal experience, stress with life and relationships and depression leads to porn, not the other way around.

I used to buy into the whole "porn addiction" idea and though I was, but when I dropped it cold turkey back in college I just found other unhealthy coping mechanisms. Until I went to a professional and got on track towards fixing my health issues, then my "porn addiction", "video game addiction", "work addiction" or "browsing memes/hn addiction" or whatever else I had just went away, and I can now do all those things without overdoing them and without damaging other aspects of my life.

As such, I don't think any kind of porn addiction is the source of problems, but more of a symptom. I think this is generally true with any kind of addiction, but substance abuse has a harsher physical component to it with withdrawal. All the other "addictions" without a physical element are rooted in attempts to get some form of pleasure (dopamine, etc.) because of other problems (stress, depression, anxiety, loneliness), and once those other problems are solved the "addiction" tends to go away on it's own, unlike with substance abuse.

The reason I don't like 'right to be forgotten' laws because it feels like it's using the law as a blunt instrument to solve a problem that is cultural in nature.

The reason such a law is required is often stated as "What if I, a changed person, am still haunted by something I did 20 years ago?" which to me seems more of a problem with our culture failing to adapt to new technologies. The world changed too rapidly and the culture is too emotion-driven these days, making 'right to be forgotten' laws seem necessary when the problem should, ideally, be solved by education.

I don't have the time right now to go into in depth about my thoughts, but I think there needs to be a distinction between 'right to be forgotten' as a cultural value and 'right to be forgotten' as law, the same way there's a distinction between 'freedom of speech' as a value ("I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it") and 'freedom of speech' as law as in the First Amendment. I'm not entirely sure where the line should be drawn, though, that is up for discussion.

My thoughts on the matter can be summed up as follows: Blocking some speech from your private website or publishing old racist tweets on your private website should fall in the same category (roughly) as eating an entire birthday cake: Something that shouldn't be illegal but something that should not be seen as good, people who do it should be made aware that what they're doing is not good but that it is their right to do so.

The recent controversy about Carson King (the viral Busch Light man) and his old racist tweets and the public reaction to all that come to mind as an example.

Wouldn't it be more correct to say that any sanctions and regulations that result from this are unlikely to kill off Juul since it's pretty large already and partially owned by the incumbents and instead would make any new competition have a harder time breaking in into the market?

This seems to me the same kind of thing as Facebook and Google supporting privacy regulations.

Not that regulation is inherently bad, but this kind of thing seems to be a theme lately. Well, I say lately, but reading up some history, this kind of thing does tend to happen. This is, of course, still not enough of an argument against regulation, but it does tend to temper any optimism I have about regulations that I would be in favor of.

Reminds me of an old youtube video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRlBtabKRFM

Anyway, the article made a point how they're "combating deforestation," but is that really true? I always thought that clearing land for farming and cattle was the main cause of deforestation by far, followed by construction and furniture, and that the paper industry tended to plant tree farms since they don't really require old-growth hardwoods, which is why I always opposed recycling paper. Was I wrong in my belief?

Additionally, it feels to me like this is more of a cynical attempt to capitalize on the eco-hippy market rather than any actual concern for the environment. All the people I've talked with who are concerned with environment and waste seem to be moving to bidets to minimize toilet paper use, and intuitively this makes sense to me, though I admit that I haven't done any research on the topic.

RTS as a genre has always favored aggressive play. Even in games that tried to favor defense, like SupCom, turtlers are stills not welcome, and higher level players start aggression quite early. Rarely will a rush downright end the game, but pulling one off correctly will generally put you ahead.

I don't think any RTS game will be able to deal with this naturally, only by adding rules like NR20 or even NR40 can you avoid early aggression and turtle in peace, and even then the winning strategy will always be to expand as aggressively as possible and to defend with units instead of static defenses.

I would agree that Classic is a decent experience compared to modern MMOs, even if it's not the style of MMO I prefer.

That said, I kinda understand how Blizzard got to where it is with modern WoW. Blizzard has always been known for taking existing ideas and streamlining them and polishing them as much as possible. That, and not gameplay innovation, has always been their forte. In a way they're analogous to Apple, they take ideas that have been tried by others and combine them into a single polished experience.

Since polishing and streamlining is what they know best, and since it has always brought them success (even the original WoW was very polished and streamlined, or if put less charitably, dumbed down, when compared to other MMOs of the time), it's understandable that when faced with a declining player base they'd continue doing what they know best. Big corporations like that don't really have a good mechanism for changing course and trying something else, so they keep doubling down on their old ways and hoping it keeps working until a breaking point is reached, and then they do stuff like re-release their old games hoping to cash in on the nostalgia.

I think this is a common enough sentiment. Your first games leave more of an impact and that feeling is often not really related to how good the game is. Just like comfort food, they're comfort games.

I never player Railroad Tycoon, my first in that genre was Transport Tycoon Deluxe, but I feel pretty much the same way about it, and I'm pretty lucky that OpenTTD exists.

Similarly there's a game called Star Reach (also known as Space Federation) that was the first strategy game I played. In retrospect, it was pretty bad, but sometimes I want to play a space game and not even much superior games like Masters of Orion or more modern games like Sins of a Solar Empire will satisfy the particular craving like Star Reach.

>Blizzard went off the rails by dumbing down WoW [...], appealing to the lowest common demoninator. [...] WoW is boring, unchallenging, and appears designed to provoke the least amount of whining by a vocal but dispassionate player base.

I was around the MMO scene back when Blizzard was developing WoW, and this was the general sentiment around the community even at the time, it was seen as the care-bearest of the all the care-bear MMOs (which is what people at the time called MMOs that weren't hardcore enough for them, particularly in the PvP area). A lot of people that WoW was a step backwards for MMORPGs. At the time MMO developers were doing a lot of interesting things with games like DAoC, Star Wars: Galaxies, Anarchy Online, etc. There was something for all tastes, in particular games like SWG were starting to feature persistent player-build towns, non-combat focused professions that actually made sense to use, interesting skill systems and a more social experience.

At the time WoW felt like a return to the old days of Everquest, only even more simplified and polished (which makes sense since some of the same people were involved). There was even a sort of a competition (more of a shouting match) between Everquest II fans and WoW fans before either game got released as to which would be the future of MMO games. We all know how that fight went.

What I and many MMO fans at the time failed to understand is that WoW wasn't for us. It was for people who had never player a MMO game before. It wasn't an attempt to get MMO fans invested in Warcraft, it was a brilliant move to introduce all the Warcraft fans to MMOs (and the marketing material at the time was very clear about it). It was all designed from the ground up for people who had never even known that MMOs existed, since the MMO market was pretty small back then, and what little there was was pretty divided.

This is also why many people these days have fondness for "Classic WoW," because it was their first, and you never forget your first. Incidentally my first was a pretty shit game called The 4th Coming and I still remember it fondly, while ignoring most of its faults (what kind of casual needs an interactive map anyway, just look at this still picture that roughly resembles the world and navigate using landmarks, much more immersive that way). This is also the reason why all the WoW clones never caught on. The people making them (or changing their game to be more like WoW, looking at you New Game Experience) failed to realize that most WoW players don't really like MMOs, they like WoW, specifically.

Writing this has made me feel pretty old, but I very clearly remember scoffing at WoW players as casuals and their game as an Everquest clone. Here I was playing much better games like UO and SWG and they didn't even know better. Well, time passed and now I'm the one that didn't know better, but I'm still kinda bitter that the success of WoW massively contributed to the death of the type of MMO I liked, and even if it looks like WoWs influence over the newer MMOs is slowly fading, I don't think I'll ever get to enjoy any new MMO the same way I enjoyed the originals.

My take on this is that RTSs are generally unpopular because of their long feedback loop. In an FPS game, or even a modern MOBA, the decisions you take result in an almost immediate death (yours or the opponent's). If you're doing something wrong, you'll know pretty much immediately, rarely will you have to wait more than a minute between doing something wrong and getting punished for it. This also means that you tend to know what exactly you did wrong, maybe you shot too soon, maybe you aimed wrong, maybe you didn't jump enough, etc. In most game genres you go through encounters quickly: spawn, die, repeat until you get good.

RTSs are almost unique among game genres in that you're forced to make decisions quickly but the results of those decisions don't become apparent for anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour. A single "encounter" takes a good chunk of your time and your reward for that time can often be that you get to watch for 10 to 15 minutes as your best laid plans are ripped apart and everything you've built up is methodically destroyed, and at the end of it all, you can't even be sure what is it that you did wrong because you made so many decisions without seeing their immediate result. Add to that the fact that most RTSs are pretty unbalanced at any level above absolute beginner. So in the end, you're left wondering if the other guy won because you built too many kbot factories too early, or because you didn't scout enough, or because he rushed you with Flashes and those are overpowered? Did the map favor him? How do you counter a Flash rush? All those questions crop up and are really hard to answer. This makes for a frustrating experience for new and medium-skill players alike.

That said, I don't think RTSs got less popular with time in an absolute sense, I think they only got relatively less popular because gaming itself has become more mainstream. It is my belief that it takes a certain kind of personality to enjoy RTS games, which represents a certain percentage of the total human population, which is much less than the percentage of the population that can enjoy video games in general. As gaming became mainstream, the number of people enjoying RTSs stayed roughly constant, but as a percentage of all games it became smaller and smaller, thus it made no sense to keep developing RTSs. Multiplayer RTS has always been a niche genre that few people enjoyed, but when gaming was also niche it still made sense to make RTS games.

Now, when it comes to the question posed in the article, why did Blizzard's RTSs, Brood War and later WC3, got popular and stayed popular? Some people will say is that it's because it's balanced, quick and varied, but Starcraft didn't start out balanced, and it didn't get balanced until map makers learned to make balanced maps. In a sense, Starcraft is still not really balanced because you can easily make a map where one race will dominate (just try to find an Island game anywhere on ladder and you'll see what I mean, for example).

My theory for why Starcraft (and later WC3) succeeded where the others failed comes down to two things: Use Map Settings and Battle.net. I said earlier that few people enjoy multiplayer RTSs and I stand-by that, and if you spent any time on Battle.net in the early 2000s, you would see that most people didn't play Starcraft the way it was intended. UMS always had a lot more games going than regular Melee, and a large percentage of regular Melee was 7v1 computer or Faster Map Ever, No Rush 20 minutes or other things that changed the base mechanics of the game to make it a lot more forgiving. The amount of people playing actual, competitive 1v1s or 2v2s was tiny in comparison. So why didn't all those people who didn't really like RTS stuck around in an RTS game? Well because their friends were there, and all the other UMS maps were fun, if you got stomped in a bunch of 1v1s and got frustrated, you could go play some Bounds, or a Cannon Defense. Maybe an RPG or an Open RPG map, maybe The Thing, maybe Aeon of Strife for that early MOBA experience. Everything was available within that same game, and the best part was that all your friends were just an /f m away, later on even if they were playing Diablo 2 or WC3. It was pretty seamless, and other gaming services couldn't really compare until things like Steam and Xbox Live came about. You could stay in the game without ever touching the RTS portion of it, and I know a lot of people who did, and you could meet people and become friends without ever needing another method of communication besides Battle.net, all from within Starcraft (unlike most other gaming services of the time). Somewhat ironically, what made Starcraft (and later WC3) so popular are all the parts that weren't an RTS, it was a do-everything game that had a little something for everyone. All the balancing and the e-sports came later, after Starcraft had already gotten big enough and gained enough of an audience for people to learn to make balanced maps. Brood War was released in 1998, and the patches where they finally nailed the current balance came somewhere around 2001 (1.08), and by that time it was already pretty popular. I'm not sure Starcraft would have ever gotten to 1.08 without UMS and Battle.net.

This got a little long-winded, because I've spent considerable time thinking about this very topic, but my main point is that RTS (particularly the competitive multiplayer kind) as a genre has always been niche and will remain a niche genre, and the wild success of Starcraft and its successors is specifically due to the fact that it had a lot more to offer than just RTS.

This is a bit of a tangent, but sometimes I get confused by the US definition of "conservative."

It seems to me that someone who is conservative would be against something like the prohibition both because it changes the status quo and because it results in regulation and a bigger government.

Has this always been the case in the US or has the word conservative changed meaning at some point in history? Did the people who vote for the Prohibition back at the turn of the 20th century identify themselves as conservative? Were they identified as conservative by others around them?

In essence, you are agreeing with me. "Fist of the North Star" is more a direct translation than a localization and most people, even fans, don't really care about that. When people say localization they mean something close to your first example, changing names, introducing local memes, etc. More to the point, people who dislike localizations tend to have objections to changing the games' content (particularly when it's controversial) like changing blood to green or people to robots, removing Nazi or Communist symbols, or in the case of Japanese games like some recent Fire Emblems or other, more risque titles, removing or changing "questionable" content.

I don't really have a horse in this race either way, but I do have friends who are quite invested and I can see their point when they prefer fan translations to first party localizations in some cases.

>A full localization is always preferable

You'll quickly find this not to be the case for everyone if you hang around fans of Japanese games or cartoons, or really any non-casual fans of foreign media. A lot of those people prefer the translation to be as direct as possible and for the translators to do little to no localization for various reasons. The reasons are varied but include things like preserving the artist's original intent, preserving cultural nuance, fear of censorship, changes to the story lines to match local cultural sensitivities, inclusion of local cultural references that get outdated fast and many more. Some of these reasons are more valid that others, but in general localization is seen as damaging to the original work in favor of getting more sales.

Taken to the extreme this results in people doing things like learning Japanese to enjoy the originals or learning Russian to read Dostoevsky.

There is a trick to having just the right amount of localization to make the work attractive to a new audience without alienating the existing fans, and it's by no means trivial.

For the kind of people who emulate games or play fan translations, a complete localization would not be a selling point and a more direct (even if flawed) translations could be preferable, particularly because overtime these people get used to interpreting the original intent as they become familiar with the culture surrounding the games, even if they don't speak the language.

>Considering the level of psychological analysis that goes into products like this and others

Don't need to do any analysis or anything. The mere fact that the message doesn't go away is enough to push a lot of people towards getting an authorized repair. If this truly was for consumer protection against bad batteries, they could have implemented a "Check my battery" button which returns the same message instead of having an always-on message.

I specifically avoided mentioning anything about people doing repairs themselves because that's not the most important consequence of right-to-repair.

Also, good luck finding an Apple store or getting your battery replaced in reasonable time anywhere outside the major cities, and especially anywhere outside the US.

>Would you want to know if the home you were buying was wired by a licensed electrician

No, not really. I'd want it inspected, of course, but that's about it. Same with buying used cars. If the house wiring or my used car fucks ups, I'm safe in the knowledge that I can just hire someone to fix it for a reasonable price, and I can be reasonably confident that they'll do a decent job because the knowledge and the parts to fix it are freely available to anyone.

>designed by a licensed engineer, etc?

Maybe, but then designing a product is different than repairing an already designed product. We also have regulations for that kind of thing, so even if I have no idea who designed the house, I can be fairly confident that it's going to be fine because the house was built in the first place, and as before, I can also have it inspected and repaired if something is wrong.

Nothing of this is new, people have been going through the same shit for a couple of centuries now, we went through it with cars and appliances earlier in the last century. Don't let Apple and other electronic manufactures convince you that they're somehow special or different. It's not arcane magic and these problems are not unsolvable. They're just not willing to solve them in a way that's not user-hostile because they have not real incentive to do so.

Corporations are optimization machines, they optimize for short-term profits, greed is no the correct term to use here.

There are two ways competitors are incentivized to copy Apple, the first one is because of Apple's mind-share and "fashionable" status, they might be convinced that by copying some of the features they will be able to ride on coattails of Apple's success to get some success of their own. Combined with the fact that purchasing decisions are not entirely rational and there's a lot of emotion involved, Apple and other large corporations are in a position to convince people to accept compromises that have larger effects (sacrifice repairability for slimness, sacrifice freedom for "security", sacrifice gas mileage for a bigger, more comfortable SUV, etc.). The second way is that Apple, by virtue of their mind-share and position as leader, can get away with changes that other companies would want to make but couldn't. If Apple hadn't removed the headphone jack from their iPhones, there's no way Samsung or Google would be able to get away with removing the headphone jack from their flagship phones, even if all three companies want to remove the headphone jack equally, but once Apple moves the overton window, the competitors can jump onboard with the change and implement it into their own product line. Apple has earned themselves enough of a reputation and enough of a fanatical userbase that they're able to get away with these changes because by-and-large their bad changes were balanced out by their good changes, the question is whether this reputation will last for the current Apple.

>Isn't the drop in repairability of electronics being pushed more by the shrinking of components than by the assumption of corporate greed?

Absolutely not. Shrinking components have made it possible to make more integrated ICs, but those were never user serviceable, but replacing a monolithic IC with a spare part, even with unfriendly packages like BGA, is not impossible to do for a decently equipped repair shop, and the cost of that equipment is going to likely be less than whatever car mechanics or small machine shops spend on their equipment.

For what it's worth, I don't think Apple or any other company are sitting in their board rooms wringing their hands and coming up with dastardly plans to fuck over the third-party repair shop. Third-party repair is simply not a priority for them, thus when the time comes to cut costs or to optimize the design for sleekness or profit, repairability goes out the window first. Contrast that with more professional equipment where servicing is an important consideration and you'll see design optimization producing different results.

I agree that Apple is not the only culprit and their competitors should be equally derided, and in fact they often are. The Surface Laptop is the only laptop on ifixit with a repairability score of 0, after all.

But it's still pretty clear that Apple should get a lot of flak because they are frequently the first one to market with anti-repair features, they're pioneers in pushing design features that make repair harder, they sell products at a premium price but their first party support is often pretty bad and expensive and they have a lot of mind-share and they use that mind-share to push the "electronics are hard to repair" myth.

When it comes to bad repairability, Apple leads the way and the rest of the manufacturers follow after seeing what Apple can get away with. In general this is true for a lot of user-hostile design. On the flip-side, their position as leader does allow them to push some aspects of the industry forward, but they haven't been doing much of that lately, and when they do it's usually flawed in some way (their early push for USB-C comes to mind).

So I don't think its unfair for Apple to be the punching bag in this case. They put themselves in that position by grabbing so much mind-share and positioning themselves as leaders to be emulated by their competitors.

We already went through all of this with cars and car mechanics. The only difference with electronics is that people have been convinced that their smartphone, laptop and electronics in general are somehow arcane magic. Nowadays, car manufacturers also seem keen to jump on this bandwagon, since it would also benefit their bottom line to keep third party mechanics from touching their cars.

Fact is, if Apple can fix their devices, then so can a third party without much problem, it's not that hard and most of it doesn't really take any skilled labor. Apple would be better served by releasing repair manuals and selling parts (like car manufacturers have been doing) if they're afraid of having their reputation ruined by third party repairmen. That, of course, is not their concern, a third party repairman ruining someone iPhone in no way affects Apple's reputation, and it's better for Apple's business since it helps their propaganda efforts against third-party repair. Apple and other electronics manufacturers of course are not going to spend any effort supporting third-party repair until they're forced to by legislation.

For what it's worth, I think the right to repair side needs to do a better job of delivering their message. While focusing dispelling the notion that electronics repair is hard is pretty important to undo decades of propaganda on the matter, currently the environment is the hot button issue, and throwing away repairable objects isn't all that great, particularly if it's an easy fix like changing a battery. Repair needs to be included explicitly into the 3 R's somehow, either by making it into 4 R's (Reduce, Repair, Reuse, Recycle, for example) or by including Repair into the umbrella of Reduce.

While that's true for people who have a traditional education from a good university, an established network or live in a tech hub or have the ability to travel to one, having an online presence is very helpful as an alternative to real-life networking for people who lack those things.

For someone from a developing country, changing careers or looking for remote work, an online presence can provide them with opportunities they would not otherwise be able to get. Of course, that online presence should actually have something substantial and probably shouldn't take the form of yet another basic tutorial blog post.

Also, there's no reason why a programmer's online presence should be only about side-projects or programming. Running a website related to one of your other hobbies is a perfectly acceptable way to provide a conversation starter (which is all an online presence is doing most of the time, anyway).

I don't think that's why you see more ads targeted at children.

I don't have any data to back it up, but intuitively I think ads targeted at children are the most cost effective kinds of ads nowadays and as generations grow up this will become more true and true. Kids have a lot of influence over their parent's purchasing decisions when it comes to relatively cheap things (I'd guess that threshold is around $500 dollars since that is what video game consoles tend to cost) and children have not yet developed critical thinking to see through an ad's lies. It's a lot easier for an ad to convince a child that he wants something than to convince an adult or even a teenager, and usually you don't even have to bother with making a good product (think back to all the toy commercials that sold cheap plastic things that broke after a couple of uses), the child can then go on to convince their parent to purchase the thing.

As more generations grow up getting used to ads, eventually only young children will be the only demographic not immune to ads, thus you will see more ads targeted at children just because they're the only direct ads that work, while ads for adults will move to different formats such as native advertising, paid reviews, product placement, etc.

I don't have a specific question, but can you recommend a good, authoritative resource on learning to work with household electrical installations correctly, both theory and actual installation? Something like The Art of Electronics and Learning the Art of Electronics, but for general household electrical.

I do quite a bit of DIY electrical in my home, both because I enjoy tinkering and because I live in a developing country where most of the electricians you can hire is better described as "practiced amateur" rather than "professional," and I've gotten by with online resources (and the fact that my house is made from non-combustible materials) but as you point out in that post, there's a lot of conflicting or downright wrong information.

I don't want to become an actual electrician, but aside from just being interested in the topic, I'd at least want to know for sure that what I'm doing is safe and to be able to check the work of anyone I hire for obvious faults. I'm planning a solar installation in the near future, so I'd like to be well informed on how everything is supposed to work.

It's interesting to me that you bring up abortion, since to me, as an outsider (I'm not from the US), the mainstream US debates about abortion and about guns have a lot of parallels. The "against" side tends to paint their proposals as "reasonable, common-sense regulations" but their more extreme arguments tend to be full of misinformation, misunderstandings and emotional pleas to the sanctity of life. On the other hand, the "pro" side either believes that all those "reasonable regulations" are just a transparent attempt by the other side to get their foot in the door, to move the overton window a little bit, so they can enact harsher regulations later, or that those regulations are not reasonable at all and will never be implement correctly.

For example, whenever the pro-choice side hears someone from the other side propose regulations about requiring permits for clinics that perform abortions (something that in principle they might agree to), they fear that the person proposing the regulations isn't really pro-choice but only says that because outright banning abortion would not be politically feasible, thus they fear (rightfully so, since it has happened) those regulations will be so onerous or badly implemented that it will result in a de-facto ban on abortion, maybe those permits will be very hard to get or maybe the organization handing them out will be understaffed and underfunded (or both). Similarly, whenever someone who is pro-guns hears someone talking about mental health checks before owning guns (also something they might agree with in principle), for example, what they fear is that this system will be abused to deprive as many individuals as possible of their rights without due process.

Thus, in this situation, neither debate will move forward because pro side does not believe that the anti side is proposing any legislation in good faith, and the reason they believe so is that in many cases that has blatantly been the case, leading to farther spreading of the divide.

Additionally, as you say, someone might be both pro-choice and pro-guns but the political situation is such that they have to choose one or the other, and thus they choose the one they hold dearer to them, usually one that affects them more personally. Unfortunately for the pro-choice crowd, gun control laws seem to personally affect more people in the US than abortion laws.

I think you're confusing safety with self-defense. The argument isn't that guns make you safer, it's that they give you the ability to defend yourself if you are already in an unsafe situation. On average, most people will never be in a situation where they need to defend themselves, thus getting a gun will increase their risk of a self-inflicted wound. Accidents of all kind (not just guns) are much more frequent than violent altercations. But the crux of the matter is not that, the question that needs answering is "If you are already in a situation where your life is at risk from another human being, does having a gun make it better or worse?" We don't actually know the answer to that question, since statistics on defensive usage of guns are pretty bad.

Another point to make is that there's an undercurrent of personal responsibility. The danger presented by having a gun in your home is something that can be managed if you are a responsible gun owner, but the risk of violence against your self is not something you can easily control. This is the important part, owning a gun for self defense is not about making you safer, it's about transferring the risk from something you have no control over to something you have some measure of control over.

Thus, arguing that owning guns increase your risk of dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wounds holds no weight with people who want to own guns, since it's a fundamental misunderstanding of why one would want to own a gun for self defense.

>If 90% who survived suicide did not attempt suicide again it sort of does suggest that had more people survived their suicide impulses they would also be one-timers.

It might also suggest that those who survived a suicide attempt used half-hearted measures because it was an impulsive act, while at least some (though we'll likely never know that actual proportion) of those who did not survive their attempt went to greater lengths to ensure their death because their act was more premeditated and planned out than impulsive.

What about the other 10%? Was there a second impulse, then a third one? Sad as it may be to contemplate, not all suicide is a spur-of-the-moment thing, some people will go to great lengths to get their affairs in order and ensure their own death.

This is a very well done and pretty comprehensive tutorial.

However, there are plenty of pretty good basic web development tutorials out there, and few, if any of them address what I think is crucial. Once you have all your HTML and CSS and JavaScript all ready to go, how do you actually got about putting that webpage online the right way for the modern internet, including basic security best practices.

As the website name says "interneting is hard," but I think the hardest part for an absolute beginner isn't throwing some HTML but actually getting it online. Googling around will present one with a lot of choices and advice for what to do, at various levels of complexity and it's not at all clear what applies to their particular case. Questions that often need answers are things like:

- What's a domain and how to get one? - What kind of hosting solutions are there and how do I decide which is right for me? - How do I point my domain to my server? - What's a certificate, do I need one and how do I set one up? - How do I make sure I don't get hacked by a script kiddie?

For an absolute beginner web developer, learning HTML and CSS is pretty accessible, they can write, test and iterate on their machine and they can pretty much figure what questions to ask of google and quickly see if the answer works, but when it comes to actually hosting their site, it can be hard to even know what kind of questions to google, much less how to choose the correct answer.

If someone were to ask me to recommend then a tutorial for making a website, I'd probably link to this or one of the other similar tutorials online, but at this point I'm not sure if there's a similar authoritative, modern "How to get your website online" tutorial, although I admit I haven't looked all that hard.

Yes I do, even when I know when I'll get home, plans can change.

A timer also can't tell me if my AC is actually on, may fail in the case of a power outage or I may forget to set it, as such using a timer doesn't provide a meaningful improvement over just turning on the AC when I get home and tolerating the heat for half and hour or so.

In the end, a timer has no feedback, so a closed loop system will always be better. I've been burned numerous times by open-loop systems in home automation, so I don't do that anymore. That's the second reason why I spend a lot more effort and money on sensors rather than actuators (the first reason being that graphs are fun).

I look at it as something that's not really a necessity, but has the potential to improve my quality of life. Unfortunately, most current implementations of the idea are pretty bad. Having to take out my phone or speaking to a voice assistant to turn my lights off or on isn't all that useful.

Where IoT really comes into it's own is either doing stuff automatically or doing stuff without requiring my presence (remotely). By far my favorite application of this so far has been the ability to turn my air conditioning on or off remotely, that way I can turn it on about an hour or two before coming home to a comfortably cool room. This increases my quality of life without increasing my electricity bill too much. Other things like opening the blinds in the morning a bit before my alarm and either disabling or lowering the volume of my doorbell are pretty good too. Other useful for me applications (that I'm in the process of implementing) would include monitoring water levels, flow, temperature and pressure to control pumps, heaters (I don't use hot water during the day so turning off the heater would make sense until I'm ready to go to bed, for example), detecting leaks and maybe automatically shutting the water/gas supply. Things like automatically watering the garden if needed, smart reminders (remind me to do something only if I forgot about it, keep silent if I already did it), home security (doors, cameras, alarms), etc. are also things that would benefit from IoT integration.

The problem I have right now with most things IoT is that a lot of them are doing their own thing, connecting to their own servers, using their own apps, have different behaviors in the event of power outage and who knows if they'll continue working after the company moves on to newer products, goes bankrupt or gets sold. A lot of modern things you can buy are also pretty trivial in their functionality and don't offer much their regular, manual counterparts. This results in a lot of expensive hardware that's tedious to interact with for little benefit. Someone who actually wants to get a lot out of their smart things (like me), in the current world, can't really go buy off the shelf solutions or even pay someone else to design a solution for them, they have to be technically competent so they can hack existing stuff together, make their own smart things, fix stuff that breaks or stops working, etc. Smart homes are still pretty much the realm of the DIY hobbyist, there's little on the market today that can compete with what a halfway competent hobbyist with some time and money on their hands can cobble together for themselves, particularly with the prevalence of cheap and easy to use hardware platforms (NodeMCU, Arduino, RPi), open source projects in the sphere, cheap and widely available sensors and actuators, good community support, etc.

If IoT wants to move away from the current status as expensive, unreliable gimmicks, companies need to stop focusing on the idea of separate smart things and start thinking in terms of smart homes (like the kind we used to see in old sci-fi talking about the futuristic year 2000). There has always been a push in that direction, but it's never been too successful. What needs to happen is that people need to drop the idea of smart things as hardware and start thinking of them as peripherals. Just like your house now has a breaker panel, a hypothetical smart home should have a house computer, running a "House OS" to which all kinds of sensors, actuators and devices can connect through a universal house bus, pretty much the same way you connect a mouse or a camera to your computer today. This would let device makers focus on their devices and the "House OS" maker focus on other issues like remote access, scriptability, security, etc. When I buy a mouse I'm not worried about it working with my computer, I'm not worried that it'll stop working if Logitech goes out of business, I don't need to worry about it catching malware and DDoSing some website or phoning home with all my mousing data. Why should it be any different if I buy a smart light bulb or a smart air conditioner?

There are numerous projects working in that direction like this one from Mozilla, HomeKit and whatever else, and DIY solutions almost always have a centralized home server for all that stuff too, so I think we will eventually get there, but for now the modern smart home feels very similar to the way the earliest micro computers were in the late 70s and early 80s.

In part it might be where the salary is coming from, but even when someone personally hires a personal assistant, it doesn't have the same connotation as personal servant.

I think the main implication is that a personal assistant is a qualified, educated person who is well positioned to find another job, while a personal servant evokes images of someone less well off and more at the mercy of the employer. There is a second implication as well: you hire a personal assistant to help you with your job, to be more productive and get more done, but you hire a personal servant to help you with your personal life, so you can get more leisure time and be more lazy.

In some ways, there might not be much practical difference between a personal assistant and a personal servant, but the words have different connotations. There are some questions that I think are relevant to ask oneself: Do you have the same reaction to the word "personal servant" and the words "butler," "housekeeper," "majordomo," etc? When you think of the word "personal servant," is the first image that comes to your mind that of a maid, a footman, a housekeeper or a butler, or something else?

Also, I'm not American so I can't comment on this point, but it may also be that the word "servant" is uncomfortably close to the word "slave".