There ARE people in the world who say, “it’s awful that the only way to make x happen involves suffering. I’ll be respectful of that suffering and try to eventually remove it and minimize other suffering in the process too.”
We just also need to remember that there are also people who say, “If we wanted to be seen as good, we wouldn’t do x in the first place. The fact that y and z causes suffering too is negligible.”
Another thing to remember is that capitalism self-selects for the second type.
Genuinely curious:
Is the author saying that ACO and VBC were decent ideas that got UHG’s fingers grafted into the legal structure, or are they just saying that ACO and VBC are bad in general?
And I knew that we had some awful structures within our healthcare system, but I LOATHE UHG and didn’t realize that they OWN our medical system. Disgusting.
For those looking for more. Fez is a delight and a classic in the genre. The very last puzzle is more interesting from a community lore standpoint than actually being a decent puzzle, though. So be kind to yourself on that one.
I use “Observational Maintenance” all the time:
When you ask someone to look at a problem and it’s fixed by the time they do.
A friend showed me an issue they’d been having for over a YEAR. I did almost NOTHING and it was working by the time I looked at it.
More often than not it’s me that looks dumb, though.p
For me, my “misery is the point” game was This War of Mine. I got it just before Ukraine, but still couldn’t stomach it. My first character had a kid that was constantly crying and whimpering and I just couldn’t do it. I was bad at it—if you can be good. I couldn’t help others in the ways that I wanted to. I couldn’t stop the whimpering. Then I went out as someone else and came back and the dad and kid left. And I had to stop there for a bit.
I set it down to come back later, then Ukraine happened. Where it was hard to stomach while I knew this was hypothetical and the Euro-setting was pretty abstracted from the current reality there—though still very present elsewhere—knowing that people on the ground were looking and sounding similar to what was happening in game and seeing that in news daily just cut off any desire I had to play. It’s powerful and DEEPLY empathetic, but that spiral of misery and failure was the point and it made it in spades.
I’m watching this now because we’re about to do the same in October or whenever that turns back on. We’re even having to return the Pell grant credit from being that close to paying everything off.
I just want to be done with it all, there’s no political will for it. The excuses are constant. The Supreme Court majority would call an Apple a banana if it meant they could deliver something miserable to their very politically defined opponents by legislating from the bench.
I think the only thing going through is if you’ve been paying for more than 20 years. It’ll be a LONG time before that happens for us, so we just want to send it all back.
I’m curious if anyone else knows more though.
That’s definitely my hope.
It’s less the repaired retail market (which they control on Amazon at least) and more the “I could repair this for cheaper than half of a new phone” lost sales. They’ve been quietly letting that group slip by for years of progressively more expensive to “repair” (read, “swap modules”) while people who could get a basic repair done for cheap are pushed to buy new phones instead.
What are the holes that can be poked into this as written? I firmly believe Apple is still against repair that would eat into their new sales. So where does this, as written, give them the room to keep that going?
Is it just that they can continue to make their “screen issue = replace whole top shell of laptop” and similar the default and draw the line there, standardizing high-cost repairs even if it’s just a wire or small component replacement? If they don’t allow ANY standard repairs more granular than swap module for module, they don’t have to provide more granular resources than that. I’m not fully up on what repairs Apple authorizes.
This is definitely a win to some degree, though. But when your opponent goes to your side and draws a line, that always gives me the chills.
This is a gross overreach. Just stop.
I feel like the sci-fi trope of an ai that chews through everything in its way to achieve a single goal with no consideration for complexity or other factors isn’t sci-fi, but it also isn’t the ai that’s doing it. There are groups like the ESRB who simply want to reduce their job to a single goal with no consideration for complexity or other factors likely these children’s privacy (which should be one of ESRB’s goals, arguably).
Just like in those stories, these groups are chewing through other aspects of life that are absolutely significant in order to optimize a single metric to the exclusion of all else.
There’s a reality here where someone saw this as a no-lose situation. Either:
A. We get some improvement, but it doesn’t reach their claims so we don’t go forward.
Or
B. We get the promised improvement and it’s actually worth it.
They missed a few obvious issues in that the cars may become safe or get worse longevity from the experiment. That and the contract process took time and money if they had a reasonable expectation of failure.
Still, it’s not entirely stupid and so long as Mullen got NOTHING besides a scam record, this could be a win.
Nice! I read another of her’s without realizing it: The Loom saga. I enjoyed it and would read more. It seemed a lot less YA, though. So if it lines up to get it again, I’ll see how she handles that audience.
And perfect timing, it’s been a few since I checked on Lemmy.