Also, Americans use the word “political” to mean ethical nowadays.

A certain segment of our population has been told to equate words like “political” and “woke” with “That person is saying or doing something that might influence someone about something I’ve been told to disagree with”.

It’s incredibly horrifying how quickly this same segment of the population has been conditioned to view the rest as “weak, sensitive, entitled weirdos who can’t handle even the slightest criticism without seeing it as a existential threat” while simultaneously being conditioned to throw a tantrum when anyone takes an action to support something they’ve been told they should disagree with.

My interpretation of this might be different, but I agree wholeheartedly with my interpretation.

Being morally just doesn’t just mean “not causing harm” directly. It means striving to not cause harm both directly and indirectly. As someone who lives in the USA, our entire society is built off of exploitation. The less expensive something is, the more heavy the exploitation likely is. The cheapest manufacturing is done in countries where labor is exploited or even enslaved, where the manufacturing process can pollute and poison the area with little consequence (to the manufacturer), and where the powerful can force deals on the government to let them extract valuable resources and pay a fraction of its value - depriving the locals and nation prosperity. Even when buying US food products, the food industry mostly relies on extremely poor conditions for the animals it keeps, taking advantage of farmers it buys from or employs, and may even employ migrant children for dangerous slaughterhouse labor.

Avoiding these kinds of practices throughout most supply chains is sometimes impossible and usually more expensive the more thoroughly you manage to avoid the practices. Even then someone has to check in and constantly verify that the practices are legitimately avoided and not just greenwashing or fraudulent.

It’s really quite depressing.

Their Dogs Were Astronauts - Progressive, Djenty. Hard to pick a favorite track or album.

Opeth - Started as progressive death metal but they have gotten more chill and progressive and experimental over time. Favorites for me are Blackwater Park (on the harsher end of the spectrum), Windowpane (chill end of the spectrum), Reverie / Harlequin Forest.

Really, he should be wiping off the fake tan…

When I was a kid my mother’s boyfriend bragged of doing exactly this. He heard them having a conversation in another language at a gas station, approached them, and started speaking to them in German. When they were confused he allegedly said exactly the phrase. You are in America, speak English. He thought it was hysterical.

He may have been full of shit, but the fact that he felt it worth bragging about said enough about him.

Don’t know about getting money back, but it is something of a coop. My link includes a recommendation to vote “withhold” in the current election, why they recommend the action, and how to do so.

REI. Just another corporation in a “Good Guy” costume. https://www.ourrei.com/2025-rei-board-elections

Union busting, problematic supply chains, pulling PPE from staff. Hell, officially supporting Trump’s pick for Secretary of the Interior because I guess they can’t help themselves.

Pet ownership is inherently selfish and self-deluded,

I can see that perspective and I don’t totally disagree. Dogs and cats (which are devastating to local ecosystems), seeming to be explicitly domesticated animals with no place in the wild, are potential special cases. The only alternative in my mind would be to neuter/spay the lot of them and that seems just as fucked up as owning them… so that’s honestly not really something I care to get into. I haven’t spent much time thinking about that topic.

pet owners cannot be expected to be responsible.

That’s a statement with insanely broad implications. Replace pet owners with “gun owners” or “drivers of cars” or “airline pilots”. It’s a subset of people that are not so special that they cannot be made responsible. Anyone with the capacity to understand and who is of sound mind can be expected to be responsible if society holds them to that standard.

Unless your point is to reiterate your objection to having a pet being irresponsible, in which case… ok.

WE LICENSE THOSE ACTIVITIES

Honestly, I’d be perfectly fine with more strict licensing of pets. Technically, my region does license dogs but it’s more of a system to make sure you vaccinate them and a fee to help fund pet-related efforts like animal and rabies control.

My only concern is that the licensing body needs to be robust and funded well enough to not pass an unreasonable cost onto applicants… which I feel applies to pretty much any licensing system.

Two of my friends that ended up with rescues that were mostly pitbull had to go through a whole process with several visits and interviews and a follow up some time after the rescue was placed in their custody. That was the rescue agency though not a licensing body.

Even if they were psychologically identical to every other dog

That’s literally my point - they basically are. I won’t argue that pitbulls are more capable of harming someone due to their physical characteristics. That’s just physics.

Horses are also large, powerful animals and they cause at least a few deaths every year by trampling or kicking humans when provoked, spooked, startled, or whatever - I’m not really a horse person. Obviously, large powerful animals can absolutely cause more damage than lap-sized animals. That doesn’t mean they are the equivalent of a monster from a horror movie that could rip someone to shreds at any moment with no provocation. Not does it mean that anyone who owns one is an irresponsible, naive threat to society.

If you are a responsible owner, the dog or horse isn’t an unreasonable danger.

Sorry you feel personally attacked when someone says pitbulls are dangerous.

I don’t feel personally attacked, but many other people feel personally attacked when someone questions their opinion on pitbulls. I just feel bad for the animals.

Ah yes, I see. You have made assertions that align with the typical narrative and stereotype around a breed of dogs, then demonstrated the assertion’s validity by stating it is a belief held in your neighborhood.

I have completely changed my mind and will now ignore all of my own experiences and knowledge on the topic because a random person asserted a stereotype and stated that people believe and act on a stereotype. I guess that’s it. Debate over.

I’m not an owner I’m but someone with a lot of friends that own pitbulls. Pitbulls aren’t some magically special, dangerous breed that is prone to random acts of violence.

The only AI company that responded to Ars’ request to comment was OpenAI, whose spokesperson confirmed that OpenAI is already working on a way to fight tarpitting.

Ah yes. It’s extremely common for one of the top companies in an industry to spitefully expend resources fighting the irrelevant efforts of…

One or two people

Please, continue to grace us with you unbiased wisdom. Clearly you’ve read the article and aren’t just trying to simp for AI or start flame wars like a petulant child.

Enthusiastically in agreement that funding of school districts and regional equity is a major problem. Funding is likely problem #1, but I think the problems with funding are more complex than just property taxes.

Concentrating poverty also creates poor areas and exacerbates the problem. It’s so frustrating that there are so many NIMBY assholes that don’t want affordable housing near them.

Bill Gates fucked the public school systems pretty hard.

Something I think is extremely fucked up in general is that if you have millions to throw at a pet cause, you will disproportionately benefit your cause over other causes in a non-democratic manner. That means that every individual and organization involved in fields related to your pet projects are incentivized to focus on your pet projects over others. Because you have so much money, you basically individually shape public policy.

Look at the WHO (source):

…over 80 per cent of WHO’s funding relies on “voluntary contributions,” meaning any amount of money given freely by donors, whether member states, NGOs, philanthropic organisations or other private entities.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone is responsible for over 88 per cent of the total amount donated by philanthropic foundations to the WHO. Other contributors include the Bloomberg Family Foundation (3.5 per cent), the Wellcome Trust (1.1 per cent) and the Rockefeller Foundation (0.8 per cent).

So yeah, it’s great that they donate so much… but that also means they can stop donating… so they have control.

Adam Conover makes some good points on this topic.

My mother’s life insurance policies, many of which she’s had for decades, are actually bleeding her dry with premium increases. I’m hoping seeing an accountant can convince her to drop at least some of them. She’s so obsessed with “leaving me something” when she dies that she’s going into debt to pay for it…

Edit: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking to get anything from her and I’ve told her so repeatedly.

You know how in many industries there is a standard amount of time something takes and that determines the standard cost? Like it takes .5 work hours to change your oil so they charge .5 of labor + cost? Well, as I understand it, the plan was to limit the amount of anesthesia they’d cover based on the standard/expected time a medical procedure would take.

“In other words, if a procedure takes longer than expected, patients may wake up to an unexpected bill.” https://www.prevention.com/health/a63104965/blue-cross-blue-shield-anthem-insurance-anesthesia-time-limit/

You don’t even need bribery. You can just throw money at something and make things happen.

If you think something is true, you can pay the world to prioritize things as if it were true.

If you think vaccines cause autism and you are rich, you can create massive “education” campaigns and the like to convince people its true. You can buy ads telling people its true. You can amass an enormous following of people who believe you and change policy without bribery.

the same process

It doesn’t necessarily involve the middle man, who is ultimately the bigger fish that enshittifiers are looking to land. I think that’s relevant. Enshittification’s process involves capturing both a “retail” user base and a business user base and then squeezing both.

Edit. Enshittification is layered and more specific to industries and markets that are not inherently profitable. It starts with seed money being burned for that initial user base and fucks over everyone up and down the chain because the business is not really profitable otherwise. Skimp/shrinkflation is more about squeezing more profit than you are already making.

I’ve see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.

1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

A word that includes the word “shit” in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.

Edit: As per Wikipedia’s Shrinkflation Entry:

Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.

I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per “smoothie” is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original “smoothie” formula per bottle.