Your sleep paralysis demon should send their resume to a few Hollywood producers if they ever get bored of only traumatizing one human at a time. A+ storytelling.

The anti-gun crowd is also ignorant of the practicalities of automatic vs semiautomatic. What they mean is "civilians shouldn't have mostly unrestricted access to firearms, especially ones with no use for hunting" and getting hung up on technical minutia misses the point entirely.

Yeah and a motorcycle is almost as heavy as a car... if you compare a Honda Goldwing (379 kg) to a Citroën 2CV (475 kg).

I didn't say anything useful, but we sure cherry-picked ourselves out of the general statement that cars 5-10 times heavier than motorcycles!

Because Paris is its own jurisdiction.

Paris' mayor, Anne Hidalgo, is incredibly unpopular in the rest of the Parisian Metropolitan Area (whose government is right-wing under Valérie Pécresse). Much of these areas are still car-dependent beyond belief with bad-to-awful public transit, meaning they are progressively getting cut-off from car-hostile Paris. Paris is completely unaffordable to live in, so it is normal for the working class to have a 1h+ commute into Paris.

This understandably breeds resentment from most people who have never heard of the term "induced demand" or think that the lack of rail transit it Hidalgo's fault.

If all you care about is functionality, a $50 casio with a resin casing will have more complications than most expensive watches, be hundreds of times more precise, will last you decades and you will spend less time and money in maintenance over your lifetime than you would for one revision of a mechanical watch. They're practically superior in literally every way to a $30,000 watch.

But that's not my point, I'm specifically talking about art. $200+ watches are art for its own sake, arguing on the basis of quality/reliability is nonsensical. The only things that matter is esthetics and even more importantly for mechanical watches, the appreciation for the incredible history and intricacy of a well-built movement. There is a lot of craftsmanship to be appreciated there.

And it's fine if you don't care or can't justify the expense (I don't own a mechanical watch myself though I probably will at some point), but the original meme completely disregards the artistry and craftsmanship going into expensive watches and I am trying to expose the glaring cognitive dissonance of the consensus that "quartz watches better" but "AI PFP evil". Both are responsible for the collapse of an industry, so if you think there is a meaningful moral difference there please tell me.

Here's my take: the mechanical watch industry already collapsed, and the "small commission PFP art" hasn't fully yet. We should preserve as much of these artists' livelihoods as we can to soften the blow until a new equilibrium is reached where – just like with mechanical watches – only those with a real appreciation for art or a want for a status symbol will commission a real artist for their PFP. But that's a very different discourse from what I hear which is typically "AI PFP poopoo evil, if you get one you're worse than Hitler".

Someone please tell me what the difference is between this sentiment and "I'll get an AI-generated PFP because it's cheaper". As far as I'm concerned either way it's " expensive traditional art" vs "mass-manufactured knockoff".

Do people have no respect for jewelers or not understand the work that goes into a good timepiece? Or is it that art is contempt-worthy when is used as a status symbol (in which case what about a $500 timepiece?)

Business hours is no more or less of a social construct than DST or the 24 hour clock.

The only difference is that we have a shot at making everyone agree on a timezone shift or permanent DST, but absolutely NO SHOT at getting every business to switch to an 8-4 schedule. None. It'd be a nice sentiment. But it's not happening, and I don't care what the number says on the clock when I leave work as long as it's sunny outside.

Why is it so important that the sun reaches its zenith at noon anyway? Do you often get confused while looking at your antique sundial?

My country made it illegal to sell at a loss (for that exact reason) and IIRC wish and/or temu got in some kind of legal trouble for it. So did IKEA when they tried to use their restaurant as a loss leader - illegal here!

Then there's the matter of shipping subsidies from the PRC, ain't no way cross-continent shipping is 0.02 € on a 5 € item for which the last mile is handled by the national postal service which I know for a fact charges anyone more than one euro for delivering a damn envelope.

and set earlier in the summer*

I hate it. I fucking hate it. With every fiber of my being. I spend every winter counting the days until the sun stops setting before I stop working. Our entire lives are scheduled so we are inside under neon light from 9-6, why are we trying to maximize how much of that is during daytime?

On the day that we go back to permanent ST I will turn to hard drugs to make up for the dopamine deficiency. No joke very few things in my life fill me with more dread than having to suffer early evenings for the rest of my life.

oh believe me I am very much into that urbanism shit, but we have to admit that "pure" urbanism isn't as visually evocative to those not in-the-know (though it is true that before/after pictures of rehabilitation projects are nice to look at)

i will also say that greenery on buildings is just a facet of beautiful architecture which is wildly overlooked as a necessary part of sustainable cities. beyond the practical purpose of summer heat management for greenery specifically (and other practical aspects of non-minimalist architecture such as the water stains that appear on "minimalist" architectural designs which forego overhangs), there are psychological and cultural effects to good looking, distinct architecture. used well and especially in poorer areas it also has ripple socioeconomic effects. it's the reciprocal of brutalist architecture in social housing which had its own devastating effect on quality of life by virtue of ugliness alone.

we aren't robots or numbers on an excel sheet, and by god if prehistoric nomadic human tribes had time to make art while hunting woolly mammoths, we can afford to put a some plants on public buildings. i have a dream, and that dream is a city skyline that isn't blue-gray but a vibrant green.

thank you for coming to my tedx

The children yearn for the mines, for only the mines make them worthy of a hearty meal.

Also thank you for addressing the "but the bible is progressive akshully" bullshit. No it's not. Never has been. The new testament is less backwards, but to dismiss the old testament entirely is hypocritical and maybe even heretical. The bible is problematic if you look at it objectively, as is any form of moral prescriptivism from millennia ago.

Reddit has had extremely spotty reliability forever. It got better in recent years, but still came down every few weeks, or would just randomly say "you broke reddit!". Circa 2015 every evening it would just randomly return 50x errors a good chunk of the time because it was always overloaded.

Backend reliability mustn't be very high up their priority list. Well, neither is UX (old OR new reddit), and let's not pretend that they've been masterminds when it comes to ad placement either, so the real question is what do the higher ups want, and why can't they achieve it?