I got excited until I saw they cost $600? Once in a while I'm reminded we exist in very different universes. Still trying to justify splurging on common projects 2 years later.
in my experience as a tech guy who got into fashion and then after several years went back to not caring: Sneakers are the product category with the least differentiation in value-for-money between the high end (especially designer, but also not-designer-but-still-expensive like common projects) both in terms of aesthetics and quality/durability. You're paying $300 more for a 10% better product. Jeans, outerwear, knits, boots, you can more easily justify that cost
As a tech guy who found an interest in design and ancillary fields recently, I am curious to know more. I assume leather, merino wool, cashmere do provide extra value. But other than that I have no knowledge. Eg why would 500 pants be better?
Material is not just about quality, but rarity or uniqueness. For example, japanese denim can get very expensive in part because it's very low volume. For dress pants, it might be a particularly interesting fabric.
A lot of more expensive pants also have interesting designs or proportions that are very unique or hard to find elsewhere. There is a lot of cool stuff you can get for under $500 USD though, that is still pretty expensive.
I have 2 pairs of pants that cost over $500. Both of them use technical fabrics (Schoeller Dryskin and Stotz EtaProof), have complex patterns (asymmetrical, articulated, etc.), lots of hardware (Riri zippers, magnetic pocket closures, Cobrax snaps), and can be ordered in custom sizing. They also have no text / logos anywhere on the pants. One pair is garment dyed as a complete unit after sewing to give a unique effect that's more interesting and has more "depth" compared to a flat, consistent color.
It’s rare to find a CEO who is willing to go down with the ship. Most are just posturing for the board and engineering a huge payout if they are forced to leave.
I still remember last year when all the bad news about Intel was coming out and Pat Gelsinger was just tweeting bible verses. He must have been going through it
I got a heat pump with a backup gas furnace this year. A heat pump just felt like a no-brainer of I was going to get an AC anyway. But gas in PA tends to be cheaper, so the system will use gas at a certain point. The problem is I couldn't have picked a whose installer if I was throwing darts at the wall, but that's another story.
The government(and taxpayers I assume) actually made out pretty well on the bailout loans. Considering the government still owns 99% of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, after retaining billions in profits over the last decade and a half.
Yes, US Treasury has gotten profit from Fannie/Freddie. However, there is concern from OMB that risk is not properly being calculated and thus in event of small housing crisis, US Government would have to back stop them again and possibly wipe out any profits gained.
Funny seeing this here at the exact moment my frustration has boiled over with windows. I'm just completely baffled at the hostility and disdain Microsoft is showing it's customers. These issues are on top of just the disregard that people actually use these products for work and business so force-updating and breaking them so often, just so they can re-force you to accept their surveillance bloatware. My feeling today has been that we're going to look back at this moment as the straw that broke the camel's back.
The camel's back is already broken, it just so happens that changing OSs is very hard. MSFT has a leak; once they lose a customer, and that customer has figured out alternatives, they are never getting them back.
They are on a slow death spiral. Their solution to raise revenue when their marketshare goes down is to squeeze harder. So they lose more users and the vicious cycle continues. In 10-15 years, they'll dip below 50% of marketshare, at which point there will be various alternatives which will accelerate their downfall. This already happened in tablets/phones.
It might also happen faster since they have a stronghold in Asia and China is now looking to accelerate the building of alternatives.
Freedom will not ever be finally settled in this life. Laws can be changed, constitutions amended, and of course the law is only as good as willingness to enforce it. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, as nice as it would be if that wasn't so.
Speech is restricted the world over for things (fraud, threats, libel/slander, secrets, and more), and we're almost universally in favour of that.
It's a balancing act, and the point where we set the balance is difficult, and constantly changing (should we allow speech that encourages the persecution of other people, sometimes called "hate speech" or should people be allowed to advocate for the murder/rape/extermination of other human beings because of the way they look)
I'm not sure that's relevant to Chat Control. What's at stake here is not a definition of 'acceptable communication' in public, but the possibility of all private communication being scanned.
That's not to say that private communication can't already be illegal; mere 'conspiracy' is a crime in many places. Yet the level of surveillance that would be enabled by legislation like Chat Control is greater than any other in history. Even notorious agencies like the Stasi had to pick and choose their targets based on prior suspicion, simply because of the logistics involved in traditional surveillance.
We don't fully know what effects this kind of unceasing, universal monitoring would have on society, and what little historical precedent exists doesn't bode well. Restrictions on public speech however are pretty well understood; we've had censorship in various forms pretty much everywhere in the world at one point or another. We can look to history for lessons about what happens, and can properly discuss (even if not agree!) about when censorship is good or bad for society.
My comment is 100% relevant to the comment I was replying to. (Sometimes I do wish people who down vote were forced to comment why they were making such erroneous decisions)
And again with the passive aggressive "downvote because you have no ability to explain your disagreement"
Edit: To anyone reading and thinking of joining in to any of the discussions, the message is clear - Facebook or Reddit level of inanity is all you will find here.
I don't think that this is really relevant to my point. My point is not that the proposed EU laws are good or bad (frankly, I don't know anything about them and I'm not in the EU so it's not my business), but that this topic can't be definitely settled for all time. No matter what resolution is reached in the EU today, in 5 years' time someone will be fighting to change it. That's just how it goes.
I expect it to become settled, just not in the way we want it.
Sure, there is the rollercoaster, ups and downs, small wins and losses going on all the time. But look at the general trends - these freedoms that we enjoyed are by and large being chipped away, it's all trending down, worldwide. It's two steps back, one step forward. Maybe CC doesn't get put in place this particular time, but they will ram it through eventually, at some point the right angle will be found to make the right people vote for it. Then the battleground will move onto something even more egregious, and so on. I'm not seeing why there would be a sudden reversal of this trend in the coming decades.
From a non-EU perspective, it seems like the EU tries to push something akin to this every couple of years. So I guess it’s settled for at least a few years…?
Chat control very likely violates at least german law, if not EU law too already. As experts as well as the ministry of justice of the previous government in germany have pointed out time and time again.
Yet still that was never enough for a clear and definitive "no".
It is very likely that the people in favor of this would still try to push it through, or let that happen. They know that the legal battle afterwards to determine its unlawfulness would take years.
And during that time it could already be put it place. And once the legal battle is over (and likely won) severe damage is done and they could still adapt the law or just offer companies to continue doing this "voluntarily". And personally I wouldn't count on Apple, Google, or Facebook to roll this back quickly in that case once they've put it into place.
Laws can be changed, can be reinterpreted, there are no absolutes. What matters is who is in power, and how powers are kept in check. There is no finality to any of that. It’s a constant process of keeping things up, or failing to keep things up.
This is actually one of my own fears for efficient organization at state level and above:
- any new technology, any new opportunity either has checks and balances or gets exploited by smart optimizers with no regards for the commons or human flourishing
- checks and balances are as you say a constant drain on public attention and resources: you need smart people doing the checking (finite resource), and receptive eyeballs (finite also)
- it is thus an optimization problem. attack_surface - check_capacity = societal_explots
I worry that the check_capacity term is constrained, but that the attack_surface keeps aexpanding with new technologies. At some point, we started playing whack a mole, frantically jumping from one check to another, and we're holding the fray stochastically. but at some point it's going to become extremely adversarial.
It's difficult to entrench things. In the UK they have often said "one Parliament can't bind another Parliament", and in the U.S. it's also sometimes said "one Congress can't bind another Congress".
The most obvious mechanism is a constitutional amendment, but in the U.S. the only amendment to be drafted and adopted in modern times is the 26th amendment (1971), 54 years ago. (The 27th amendment had a weird status where it was belatedly adopted with a 200-year delay.) It's hard to imagine many constitutional amendments actually being passed now because it's been challenging to find consensus on many things within U.S. politics lately.
I don't know that the EU at a supranational level has any mechanism at all to ban future EU directives. Maybe they could decide to remove something from the list of areas of competence of the EU? But Chat Control is under the "Area of Freedom, Security and Justice" and I can't imagine the EU deciding that that should be abandoned as an area of Union competence.
Edit: The international human rights treaties, at least in regulating law enforcement, have tended not to follow the idea that some kind of regulation or law enforcement power is completely off-limits, but just that they need procedural safeguards -- especially for surveillance and investigatory powers. In this case, Chat Control opponents (including me) would like it to be completely off-limits, but the human rights instruments arguments might more naturally go into "did they create enough surrounding rules and mechanisms about how it's used and how it's regulated?" rather than "can we just say governments just can't make this rule?".
Given that freedom can mean different things even to the same society at different times and in different circumstances, such a law would essentially have to be sentient.
I mean, the right to privacy is already enshrined in the EU's human rights. The courts would likely strike Chat Control down if it were to pass. But I wish there was a way to prevent our politicians from even trying this shit.
Other things are enshrined in the EU human rights as well, many of them ultimately contradicting each other if you follow them to their logical conclusion.
It's the task of parliaments, governments, and courts to reevaluate and resolve all these contradictions over and over again. It's tedious and takes a lot of resources, but that's the price for democracy.
> I mean, the right to privacy is already enshrined in the EU's human rights.
The constitution of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (i.e. North Korea) famously guarantees freedom of expression as a fundamental right for the people. That hasn't stopped the government from trampling all over freedom of expression, though. The EU is of course nowhere near North Korea in terms of what is considered acceptable, but don't ever trust that the words in the constitution will be enough to keep the government from doing something.
Just imagine some other people will carry the burden and mentally distance yourself from it to relax from it wearing you out. You can take up the burden again later once you've recovered and others are worn out
