Yeah it pisses me off the way people are like “tech bros ruined the internet”. No, users ruined it! There was no reason to stop self-hosting webpages, forums and IRC servers. Users switched to Facebook instead because they preferred it and didn’t care about the downsides. There’s an alternative to every website and app which respects privacy, serves no ads, and has no algorithm to farm your outrage. Users refuse to use them because they aren’t cool enough.

Is this part of a series or something? I have no idea what any part of it means

All the answers you got show why this conversation goes badly. No one can come up with an actual problem that data collection causes, it’s all silly comparisons to giving people your credit card number or shitting in front of them.

For me, having my data collected is like having CCTV cameras in stores. Yeah, technically someone is filming everything I do. Yeah it would be bad if a private individual was filming me for nefarious reasons. But no one actually uses that data for anything bad, and it doesn’t actually cause any problems.

All that happens is I get more relevant ads.

This is the only reason why anyone wears any particular type of clothing. There is no style of clothing that it objectively makes sense to wear.

I suspect a lot of “breakages” were failed pacman updates due to signing issues, before pacman knew to update arch-keyring first. I know one person who moved to another distro when that happened.

Do you have any cases you can point out?

I can’t find it now either, but I’ve read about a German doctor convicted as a serial killer solely because she was present at the deaths of too many patients. In that case she was present at the death of every patient for like 3 months, which sounds like strong evidence against her. Until you think about it and realize that if she murdered them, that means no one died of natural causes for 3 months. Also in that case the number of deaths on the ward actually went up after she was arrested.

Similar but not to do with doctors, Sally Clarke was wrongly convicted of killing her children, purely because both of them had died of SIDS. The prosecution said SIDS is rare and so it happening twice was impossible. What’s worrying about that case is, everyone now says the miscarriage of justice was that the prosecutor incorrectly calculated the chances of two children dying of SIDS, when the actual fallacy was using the statistics as evidence at all. 1 in 73 million is the chance that one specific child will die of SIDS. The chance that any child will die of SIDS is 100%! 200 die in the UK every year! You can’t just go around arresting every parent on the basis that they were unlucky!

What’s really missing in everything I’ve seen is an actual statistical analysis. Everything I’ve seen is just “She was present at 20 deaths, when her colleagues were only present at 10”. Yeah, but how unlikely is that? How many nurses per year will be in exactly the same situation in the UK, or in the world? How unusual was the number of deaths in that hospital while there was supposedly a serial killer operating, versus a normal year?

Sure, the chances of her specifically being that unlucky are astronomical. But the chances that somebody out of the 9 billion people on earth will be that unlucky are pretty good.

if I take a hoop/window and place it quickly over an object

Then the velocity of the object relative to the “exit” of the hoop would be the same as the velocity of the object relative to the “entrance” of the hoop, which is option B.

In your analogy, option A would mean the object has a relative velocity of entering the hoop but suddenly no relative velocity exiting it, so the object magically starts following the hoop.

We might still be wrong about her.

Honestly this looks like one of those statistical murder convictions. Random chance means that every few years, somewhere in the world, some medical professional will be present at a series of unusual deaths. They end up in prison even though there’s no other evidence.

I’m trying to find out what the actual evidence against Letby was, but so far I can only find one scribbled post it note written during a mental breakdown after being arrested. Which, she could have just been writing down things people were saying about her.

Honestly I think Beyond Meat/Impossible style burgers are aimed at meat eaters who want to reduce animal cruelty/their carbon footprint. It’s actually kind of annoying they’re so popular now, as restaurants that used to have creative vegan options now sell Beyond Meat as the only choice.

Vegans don’t tend to care if a veggie burger is “realistic”. Some find the idea of meat gross and don’t want to roleplay eating it (my wife says they make her feel sick). Even if you don’t mind, the longer you give up meat the less interesting it is as a flavor. I’d take one of those shitty frozen veggie burgers that are 90% potato over an Impossible burger.

In a mastodon thread this week we estimated that banning private jet usage globally would save about 100 million tonnes of CO2, while normal Americans would save 4.5 billion tonnes by reducing their consumption to global average levels.

Disproportionate harms are annoying but a tiny minority acting disproportionately still matters way less than how normal people act. Banning private jets is pointless if nothing else changes.

So if billionaires put out a statement that they will never stop private flights, and governments announce that they won’t legislate on it, what’s your plan? Destroy the planet out of spite?