Google makes money from me, and is thoroughly enshittified. The goal of business is state-backed monopoly and extraction, which is not always aligned with or predicated on user value.
I generally find superior value from sources that are less singularly profit motivated such as worker-owned organizations or public goods providers
I don't think someone trying to be totally healthy is going to be drinking Soda or any of these juices with their ridiculously high sugar content anyway.
1. Lots of drinks come in metal cans with BPA lining on the inside.
2. You can absolutely be reasonably healthy and drink some of these drinks, including the variants that are not sugar-free. I don’t think most people try to be perfectionistically healthy. But I think PFAs are not anywhere closer “reasonably healthy” to consume.
It's kinda like saying people can be reasonably healthy and still smoke some cigarettes. True enough, but if someone is trying to be healthy that's a pretty obvious change to make.
Wine would be a better analogy. It contains a large amount of a known carcinogen (alcohol), but plenty of people who try to be healthy don't feel particularly guilty about drinking some wine every now and then.
I don't know if it's a better analogy, but I agree that it's a good one. There are tons of things that won't outright kill you on first exposure, but are good candidates for minimizing if you want to improve your health.
I don't think I ever considered drinking from cans healthy, it is just a desperate move if no better option is present. Same beer tastes significantly worse compared to glass (but if you drink cheapest crap you probably don't notice nor care).
We went to the moon in 1969. The last moon landing was 1973.
The world population in 1969 was 3,625,680,627 [0]
The world population in 2020 was 2020 7,794,798,739 [0]
Today's world population is 8,029,731,569 [1]
We've more than doubled the world population in the 50 years since the last moon landing and no country has ever yet made it back.
Using your argument, I can unequivocally say that more people is bad.
In 1969, there were 324.23 ppm carbon in the atmosphere. Today, there are 416.43 ppm carbon in the atmosphere. [1] This does not even count species mass extinction, other pollution, etc. Even in 1969, there were sufficiently massive real environmental damage concerns to create the EPA within the same presidential administration.
This also does not even mention the massive resource constraints and conflicts that inevitably arise with overpopulation. this includes oil, water, lithium, rare-earth minerals, and possibly most important, phosphorus, which is rapidly running out, and when it does, the entire agriculture industry that feeds the current overpopulation will crash, along with the human population.
Humans would thrive with something like 1/8 of the population, especially with the level of technology, and will continue to advance.
Just consider that a miniscule 6.7% of people have a college degree [2]. That provides something resembling an upper limit on the set of people actively contributing to technological advancement. Interestingly enough, double that is about 1/8 of the population.
The view that "some is good, more is better" is just... to be kind, massively simplistic and wrong.
> Just consider that a miniscule 6.7% of people have a college degree [2]. That provides something resembling an upper limit on the set of people actively contributing to technological advancement.
Isn't that a bit like wanting to only take in high skilled immigrants without wondering where they're going to get their favourite food from home (which as a high skilled immigrant, I can tell you, food is immensely important to us).
We don't do this stuff alone, we need haircuts, streets cleaned, trains to run, people to make and deliver food etc. We all contribute.
Yes, I understand all types of people create valuable things, and I absolutely do not mean to imply that just because someone is not highly educated,they cannot provide something amazingly worthwhile. I also very much enjoy food from other cultures, and would not want it to disappear.
So, let's take a look at food - and some data.
Only 150 years ago, it required over 70% of the population to produce enough food for 100% of the population. Today, it is under 5% in rich countries, and about 65% in poor countries [0].
Obviously, given the uneven distribution of technology and knowledge, those people are today contributing to society.
But it is also true that fully distributing modern agricultural technology will make entirely redundant (to the maintenance of a technologically advanced society) something like half of the world's population.
And that is just an example from one industry.
The point is that declining replacement population does NOT automatically mean that the technological level of society will decline.
Correlation is not causation.
If anything, population increased as a result of technological advance — ability to generate more food, better shelter, better medicine — technology was not the result of greater population. Once we have the technology, evenly distributing it will require far fewer people to build and maintain it.
Let's take it a step further, and say we want to avoid using massive amounts of fertilizer and pesticides common in modern agriculture. That will STILL not require the same amount of people slaving in the fields. The technology that will enable scaled-up organic farming is also massively labor-saving — agricultural robotics, not only planting and picking, but most critically monitoring for and eliminating weeds and pests [1,2].
Yes, there will be a greater need for people fabricating and maintaining agricultural robots, but that will be dwarfed by the number today's slaving-in-the-fields-jobs that will disappear in a near future decade. If they do not reproduce at full replacement rates, we will still have a society that has both technological workers, and others who contribute much more to the culture, including authentic cuisine.
Everything exists within the boundary conditions of its environment. Humans, just like any other organism, can strip their environment of resources faster than they can figure out how to escape the environment or build a new one or whatever.
It's also worth pointing out that, so far, this is not the case. It may be prudent to be, well, prudent, but we're at an all time high in population and an all time low in absolute poverty. It's possible that more people is a factor in this, not less, and that those boundary conditions are never met.
Well, I'd say everyone with more than 250k deposit didn't do their due diligence. And they might have asked the question, why the SVB-conditions were better than elsewhere. I would argue that's the idea of a free market, no?
I don't want to live in a world where I have to track down and personally inspect the factories and farms that produce my food.
If I deposit cash at a member bank that the government says is compliant with their rules and regulations, that should not imply any risk taking on my side.
If I use a payroll provider like rippling that uses SVB as their payment rails, I shouldn't have to worry about that.
If I use a service that goes under because they can't fund payroll because of a banking supply chain issue, that seems rather hard to due diligence.
If you honestly hold that position, I suggest you get a little bit of empathy for decision-makers. It will make you a better member of society.
And yes, to add insult to injury there is people offering the service of splitting up your cash between banks in a way which should give every startup enough leeway to "make payroll" for some months (https://twitter.com/ddayen/status/1634925784271036417)... It just doesn't work with monopolistic structures and you can't bankrun it, when you feel like it, so maybe not as en vogue with our hosts?
It is an incremental increase in performance compared to the last incremental release. Performance increases should get larger and larger, and more and more frequently, that is how computing technology advances, along a logarithmic curve yet bounded by Moore's Law and the limits of what can be done with the technology of the hour. But there was never once a 100% increase in performance or even a 50% increase in performance between one model and its immediate next revision. And that many seem to be expecting this is tremendously unrealistic.
A consistent 10% improvement at a regular cadence is already exponential growth. Ever-increasing improvements at an ever-increasing frequency would look exponential on a log plot. I don't know how you could possibly expect that and then complain that other people are crazy for expecting exponential growth.
For the last 5 years and the next 5, I expect less than 30% performance increases from one gen model to the next. But it took 20 years to get to that level. A decade ago it was 15% increases in performance between gens.
