There are plenty of other products that literally ruin people's lives: alcohol, tobacco, sugar, pharmaceuticals, credit cards, firearms, timeshares, junk food. Society has them all on very different parts of a stigma spectrum.
Honest question: why is this line so clear for you?
There is a stigma with all of those things except maybe pharmaceuticals (unless you are selling opioids), sugar and junk food (because of their ubiquity).
The line is clear for some people right away. Other people have to see the effects first hand. When I was younger, I worked in a gas station, and the never-ending line of obviously poor people dropping nearly their entire paychecks on scratchoffs, then buying a case of beer was a formative memory for me. It most states, the lottery is just subsidizing the cost of education on the backs of the poor and uneducated and gambling-addicted so that they don't have to raise property taxes. And that's if the money actually gets spent on education. Sometimes they just turn into slushfunds for pet projects. It's gross.
"Built to make people's lives worse" is an opinion. There are people who gamble without getting addicted and treat it as good fun. Why shouldn't I be able to bet a small amount on a team I like in Fantasy Football? I've never gambled more than I could afford to lose nor have I felt the need to do it habitually. I get that there are some people who are not like me, but you seem to think that there are only people who are not like me that use these types of services.
There's a difference between betting between your friends on FF versus creating a system of gambling that takes advantage of the least fortunate among us.
This is the same thinking that governments are justify the age verification and ID tracking: the system makes an opportunity for old people to get scammed, so everyone needs to give up their privacy.
Okay sounds like we agree that sugar and junk food should be on the wrong side of the line, but turns out those industries have very little stigma. Who is standing outside the school gates protesting against big cola? My point is it's complicated, ambiguous, sometimes hypocritical, differs by jurisdiction and so on. None of it is clear.
There have been pushes to remove soda from school vending machines, limit the size / add extra taxes on bigger soda containers, etc. But it's often "crazy California" doing it, so a whole chunk of the country writes it off as political or something, or it doesn't get passed due to lobbying, etc. But it's not true that no one is trying to stop it.
As much as I like a cold Coke (Coke >>> Pepsi :-) on a hot day, I also realize it's bad for me, and I'm drinking a lot more Spindrift these days. And despite the fact that I rarely drink more than say, 2 cans a day (i.e. I can generally control it), I would still vote to limit the amount of sugar in any beverage to like 1/10 that of Coke, just for general health reasons. Of course, then stores will probably see an uptick in sugar cube sales or something.. Gotta feed the addiction.
This is not the first time I’ve seen this, and it’s misleading. Your brain needs glucose, as does the rest of your body. You do not need to eat glucose, your body can synthesize it from non-glucose sources. You can absolutely survive on a diet with 0 glucose.
I don’t have an issue with people eating sugar, but it is not a necessary nutrient.
Does your brain necessarily *need* HFCS/sucrose, or will it work with wholegrain diet, fruits, vegetables, legumes?
It just seems that you're arguing that without added, pure sugar in drinks/foods your body and brain would break down, but that would be factually incorrect*
*unless you're also suffering from some exceedingly rare genetic conditions affecting certain metabolic paths but it's unlikely you'd live to tell the story.
when people talk about sugar in the unhealthy context, they are referring to things like how a single can of dr. pepper has 40-50 grams of sugar in it.
I know plenty of folks who enjoy a little gambling without letting it get them into trouble, so the product couldn't be "built to make people's lives worse". Why should they have something taken away just because some other people can't control themselves?
You're trying to make ad absurdum but this been in effect decriminalised in many countries.
In the UK for example the police got so defunded, damaged and wrecked, that they will straight out do their best to refuse investigating most crimes, eg robbery, burglary, assault, theft, even if you literally hand them evidence ("I saw my neighbour Tim doing that and I have CCTV", "my stolen bike is literally in that garage, I have tracker and I made it make a sound").
Police is so defunded and demoralised that they focus on arresting disabled and pensioners for opposing genocide and throw people into the jail for having a peaceful protest planning zoom call - for longer they would serve for rape.
So you tried to joke but in fact many crimes have been decriminalised.
I think it's like this in most countries - the police will only care about protecting the elite class. Sometimes the elite class feel threatened by high crime levels so the police will crack down on petty crime, but it's always in a way that makes the numbers look good, not a way that keeps people safe. They'll investigate the crimes that are easiest to prosecute.
Half of the list by GP shares these same characteristics, unfortunately. The only one that is slowly - but not even steadily - going towards the same stigma is tobacco.
> We're talking about a product built to make people's lives worse while extracting wealth from them that get them addicted as well.
That's most of the products being sold today, you think the most for-profit companies sell things and services in order to improve the world? They're selling stuff because they want to make money, if they can make someone addicted + extract wealth from them, then in their world that's a no-brainer.
That's just not true at all. The fruit I buy is designed to make my life worse? The vacuum cleaner? The lawn mower? The workout equipment? The standing desk for my office? The clothing I buy?
Yes, literally all those things are decreasing in quality because the companies producing and selling these want higher margins. Have you not noticed the sharp drop in quality and durability in made stuff compared to 20-30 years ago? Almost all those things are worse and lasts less today than they used to.
If you claim you can get "any fruit anytime in the year and it seems fine", it's probably because you'd inky ever had supermarket fruit-like products which are about as similar to the proper ones as McDonald's Big Mac is similar to the proper burger.
Go to the actual farm in strawberries season next time, get yourself some, and you'll get that. And it's like this with almost every single fruit.
Electronics are more likely to be obsolete for technical reasons, but - for example - modern dishwashers and dryers are far more likely to have cheap plastic parts that fail more quickly. Even for brands with premium price tags.
With clothes, fast fashion is designed down to a budget and up to a price. For consumer brands, the more expensive something is the more disposable it is and the shorter its working life.
Not the original person you replied to, but as far as I'm concerned there are a few questions that could very easily indicate which side of the line is something.
E.g.
- Is it addictive?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives?
- Does it have the potential to destroy lives in seconds?
- Does it have a strong lobbying mechanism behind it? (n.b. things that are good and nice rarely need someone to bribe people to accept them)
or simply:
- Would you be worried if your child did it?
I think the number of "yes" that you get draws a very clear line.
He's obviously talking about alcohol (it takes seconds to consume an amount of alcohol that can result in death, yours or someone else's from a fight or car crash) and firearms (should be obvious).
Sounds like you're implying some sort of mischaracterization of sugar here which minimizes the former in a weird way.
I wanted to draw the distinction between something that destroys lives over a longer period of time (smoking) VS something like gambling where you could lose your life's savings in seconds.
The alcohol mentioned in a sibling comment also ticks the box.
For the sugar, I'd say yes, no, no, yes and "not too much, but I'm keeping an eye out".
Maybe I haven't seen enough of his videos. They seem generally informative? Perhaps a bit depressing but I wouldn't say that watching a Tim Snyder video can ruin your life like gambling can.
Ok, so add "is it easy / quick / cheap to acquire?". Performance cars (I take measured risks at the race track) and track days / race tires aren't cheap. Not in any sense of the word.
Unsafe driving in ANY car? Yes - but that's already illegal.
Performance cars are very cheap to acquire temporarily.
I can literally book right now, for 4 long laps, for £99 any of the following (and that's a a very small subset of 30 similar cars): Lotus Evora / GTR 1200bhp / Lamborghini Gallardo / Dodge Viper SRT VX / Huracan... Unless you'd say these are not performance cars?
Not sure if the history lessons are a joke, but sugar is rightfully taxed or otherwise disincentivized in many countries, because it is highly harmful to society as a whole. Sports cars definitely get some yes answers, and are also rightfully taxed in several countries.
Military technology may be an exception as "necessary evil", but also is a bad example because it id not consumer-oriented.
Just because there's a spectrum doesn't mean that everything on it is indistinguishable. Everybody draws their own lines, some people count more or fewer things as stigmata, some people's lines are fuzzier than others.
No single person can draw that line, that's what Courts and Laws are for. And some of the industries play more dirty and try to manipulate that due process, others failed.
But that's what we have, it's never black & white. Always a process and always evolving.
Watch the video if you believe it's worth being clear. The credits are perfectly visible on both the LaserDisc AND the CED. Approx 22:00-24:00 is the laser disc and 25:00 onwards is the CED. Enjoy.
And to support your point even further, in the video he captures the credits off a disc with constant angular velocity, but he _also_ completely lucks out and captures an image from a disc with constant linear velocity.
I'm so sick of this negative attitude. I get it when it comes to politics or more complex systems or conceptual ideas. But holy hell, we're talking about a "money shot" to get people interested in the subject.
Ugh, I'm pretty sure it's Big CED deceptively here to muddy the waters and obfuscate superior LaserDisc Technology. Perhaps flag the post so the moderators can see it and make sure we root Big CED out of these forums and out of our lives for good.
It says its tailored for beginners, but I don't know what kind of beginner can parse multiple paragraphs like this:
"How wrong was the prediction? We need a single number that captures "the model thought the correct answer was unlikely." If the model assigns probability 0.9 to the correct next token, the loss is low (0.1). If it assigns probability 0.01, the loss is high (4.6). The formula is
−
log
(
�
)
−log(p) where
�
p is the probability the model assigned to the correct token. This is called cross-entropy loss."
I see. The problem with me writing these is even though I'm not an expert, I do have a bit of knowledge on certain things so I'm prone to say things that make sense to me but not to beginners. I'll rethink it
One of the downsides of using an expert LLM to write for you is that they know all that perfectly well, even if you don't, and aren't too bothered by such a chunk. It's like reading any Wikipedia article on mathematics... This is the kind of thing that people are documenting in the LLM-user literature in creating an illusion of expertise (or 'illusion of transparency'). Because the LLM explains it so fluently, you feel like you understand, even though you don't. Hence new phrases like 'cognitive debt' to try to deal with it.
You claim to cite 'technologies' but include a few brands and companies for some reason.
The one you keep citing, here and in the article, Quibi, lives on in technology-form (the spirit of your article we must presume) as an 8 billion dollar business in China and is rapidly upending every Hollywood film studio.
So, arguments about substantiation or even 'this time' fall flat in the face of not even understanding your own message.
Glad to see this here, Balearic slinging has a rich and impactful history. But sadly this is not much appreciated today on the islands.
The Federation hosts open days where only a handful of people show up. Top slingers from the islands are treated with great acclaim when they travel to international competitions but at home few know who they are. The Balearic Government and local councils show little interest in supporting or promoting this activity.
I can't help feel it could and should be much more popular, with an injection of support and enthusiasm, especially as the islands try to rediscover a post-tourism identity.
But I don't see any evidence of this yet. I continue to do my little part in telling everyone I know how fascinating this sport is.
And yes, how incredibly difficult! I had probably 50 attempts before I hit a large target just 7 or 8 metres away.
I'll try to make one of the events if I'm in the islands, I saw they do a yearly competition in Ibiza around October, my parents live there now so it's convenient.
As with anything non-tourism related, it's can be a bit hard to find these events when the only advertising might in the town hall website (if that!) and sometimes instagram
I was specifically thinking of the "Metric Martyrs" who were jailed over refusing to display weights and measures in metric.
The law requiring metric didn't actually come into force until 2000, these cases were early 2000s. Note that the law to this day still allows for imperial measurements to also be displayed, but they wanted to display in solely imperial.
Honest question: why is this line so clear for you?
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