My Canadian girlfriend.

In establishing universal healthcare and universal basic income, we will do more to solve violence problems than any gun-centric approach ever could.

Aircraft turned away from you while climbing away, making it appear stationary. Kick on some afterburners, and it’ll take off like a bat out of hell in front of a 200’ flame.

Government is also the entity that will be prosecuting/persecuting you when they don’t like what you have to say.

Not with that attitude.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

They don’t need the cooperation of telecom providers. They receive the same signal you send to the cell tower. Even if the signal is encrypted so they can’t see what you are sending, they can identify that you are sending.

With enough receivers listening, they can identify your location to a pretty high accuracy.

Privacy policies are irrelevant here. They are picking up unique data as your phone communicates with a cell tower. You can do it with a $15 RTL-SDR receiver.

Get a hundred receivers and you can pinpoint anybody in a city.

So are most people.

Reviews are one of the things that online storefront platforms consider in their algorithms. More reviews means their algorithm pushes my listings in front of a few more faces, and I get to make a little more money.

I don’t ask for reviews myself. The people who do are trying to game their platform’s algorithms.

Blocked.

Indeed.

Unfortunately, no matter how well you tune your carburetor, just a change in atmospheric temperature is enough to throw off your mixture.

The only feasible way to adjust it fast enough to keep up with atmospheric changes is with some kind of fuel injection, an ECM, and an O2 sensor to provide the feedback needed for closed-loop mixture control.

Fortunately: https://speeduino.com/

Lean burning increases mileage, but produces nitrous oxides.

Rich burning produces carbon monoxide, which eventually converts to CO2 in the atmosphere.

Unit for unit, NOx emissions are 265 times as damaging as CO/CO2.

https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-climate-works/some-greenhouse-gases-are-stronger-others

To successfully convert NOx, catalytic converters need a stoichiometric or slightly rich fuel/air mixture to the engine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter

and part of that is that adults absolutely do buy stupid status symbols to flex on each other.

Exactly. And when they do, we don’t say “Well, that’s just what humanity does”.

We say “Despise these covetous pricks”.

I use “philosophy” to mean one’s individual, personal relationship with reality: how they choose to interact with the world around them. I understand this is a somewhat atypical use. There is probably a better word for that concept. It eludes me at this time.

As I used the term, “Christian teachings” (etc.) would only qualify as a philosophy if the individual actually adheres to those tenets. If not, those teachings are just a work of fiction.

There certainly are “striking similarities” throughout the the populace and time. My point is that we don’t need to accept, excuse, explain, or tolerate those widespread behaviors simply because they are widespread. As I see it, “Human nature” is a slightly more egalitarian synonym for “boys will be boys”.

What’s the culture where people don’t covet meaningless status symbols?

While there are numerous examples of such philosophies and cultures around the globe, I don’t actually need to identify such a culture to demonstrate my point.

If one can remain human without engaging in this behavior, this behavior is not a characteristic of the human condition.

The question before you is whether the members of such a hypothetical culture are inhuman specifically because they do not engage in that covetous behavior.

The abhorrent behaviors being described are conditions of ideas held by certain members of the species. The species is not lessened by the rejection of such ideas. The “certain members” are lessened by their adherence to those ideas.

Don’t pretend we’ve ever been better than that as a species.

Will you make the argument that people who refuse to follow such fashion trends are somehow inhuman?

If you are unwilling to make such an argument, I will not accept your premise that this is a trait of the “species”.

What you (and the parent comment) are describing is a characteristic of certain childish behaviors, philosophies and cultures.

The sophomoric behavior of these geriatric children is not an indictment of humanity in general.

Those aren’t adults. Those are geriatric children.

Yes. The relevant metric:

99.55% of posts are on a single instance. That is not “federated” in any meaningful sense.

I’m home now, but if someone is going to give me a 10 minute warning, I won’t be when they get here.

I’ve tried this repeatedly. I’ve answered “No” to their upsale. I’ve sat there in silence, waiting for it to time out. I’ve asked for a human. Every time the AI takes my order, it adds nacho fries that I didn’t order and specifically rejected.

The problem isn’t that I need a human to fix it. The problem is that the AI is specifically programmed to ignore a rejected upsale. Their AI is smart enough to recognize the rest of my complicated order, but it can’t understand “No”? Horseshit. They are using this fraudulent programming to increase their upsale metrics, expecting us to docilely accept the sale rather than raise a fuss.

Drive-offs are another of the metrics they look at. Since I’ve communicated with nobody but the AI, they have nobody but the AI to blame for the drive-off. They don’t get to blame a human for failing to remediate the problem.