> Flights from sfo to Frankfurt bolt upright sound unpleasant
Same flight with someone's seat resting on your knees is downright painful.
> when my wife was pregnant
Imagine if she was a bit taller and someone reclined the seat all the way over her.
> The recline button is there for your use
You're right, like any shared resource, "space" is there for you to use. It doesn't mean you have to use it, you could try to be aware of your surroundings and assess whether your small comfort should come at the cost of someone else's extreme discomfort. And if you use the button others are also free, and probably correct, to call you a dick. Like a guy who empties the bowl of complimentary candy someone offers to all customers.
You shouldn't need physical blocks or laws to define your own common sense and decency.
I'm 185cm and I couldn't imagine having to endure a long haul flight without reclining.
I never get these discussions. It's only ever online that I see complaints. Almost everyone reclines on long flights. It's normal. It's expected. If it makes you uncomfortable that's a you problem, everyone else seems fine with it. If it makes you physically uncomfortable, pay for extra leg room. Don't make your problem the problem of another passenger.
Anecdotal, but I'm 193cm, take a few 12+ hour flights per year, and have no problem not reclining. For what it's worth, I feel like I've experienced people on my shorter, domestic flights reclining their seats more often than on my longer, international flights.
> I never get these discussions. It's only ever online that I see complaints. everyone else seems fine with it
That's a skewed conclusion you're drawing. Are you really surprised that people aren't willing to risk escalating the situation on a plane, arguing with what's likely the very inconsiderate person in front of them? Most people have an aversion to conflict. It doesn't mean "they're fine with it". You probably don’t advertise in real life how much you lean back and not care who’s behind you out of fear that people will change your opinion of you. Real life is a harsh mistress.
I've bumped into people and they said "sorry", do you think they wanted me to bump into them, liked it, and actually believed it was their mistake? No, I just tower at close to 2m so they didn't want to escalate the situation.
P.S. I always look at who sits behind me, if they're "space constrained" or not, and almost always ask if I can recline. Sometimes I don't bother, clearly the person will suffer. Sometimes they said "I'd rather not, thank you". Many times they said "fine". I used to fly a lot and my experience was very clearly not that "everyone is fine". I was never fine even if I didn't start arguing. So how would you have known?
I've literally never been on a 5+ hour flight where anyone in the row in front of me didn't recline at some point.
I've discussed this with various people IRL. No one, including taller people than me, ever complained about people being inconsiderate for reclining. Every tall person complains about leg room.
The vast majority of people do not think it's inconsiderate to recline. They think it's normal and that the function is there for a reason.
I actually think it's inconsiderate to complain to the person in front if they want to recline. The only time that is acceptable is when meals are served.
You're tall so you can't sit upright? :P Do you need to lean backwards when you work too? I think you are wrong and a lot of people are not fine with it. I don't need a closeup view of someone's bald spot while trying to eat shitty airplane food.
I still see ashtrays on older plans, trains, and boats. Sometimes older stuff is left there because it's not financially advantageous to replace it. You can use the recline button to your liking, but it can be inconsiderate to do it. Traveler discretion is advised.
A question you can always ask yourself is "should I do it just because I can do it?". It will stop you from being needlessly inconsiderate many times, and maybe even make you a better person.
Mainly because they were introduced when the seats were set farther apart. Now companies squeeze more rows and keep the same seats.
But also because with any shared resource there's an expectation of decency involved. Some people just betray that expectation. They're the ones with the mentality that "they shouldn't have served alcohol if they didn't want me to get insufferably drunk", "they shouldn't have put the candy out if they didn't want me to take all of it", "why is the swing there in the park if not for my kids to use them continuously to the disappointment of other kids".
When your wife was pregnant someone probably let her go ahead in a queue, have her some priority for something, etc. That was a person with common sense and decency, not asking "why do queues exist", who doesn't do something only if there's a law about it.
I’m several inches over 6’ and if I don’t get a fire exit seat I’m highly likely to get seated behind someone who will call me “extremely rude” for wrangling uncomfortably and bumping their seat uncontrollably when they inevitably decide that extra 6 degrees of recline is worth more than my knee cartilage.
People generally didn’t even offer her a seat on the metro. And letting other people decide whether you should be permitted to use the functionality the airline has given you is dysfunctional people pleasing.
Your "dysfunctional people pleasing" is someone else's "not being a total dick". As I said, there's no law against it. It's all about character and education (or lack thereof). Some people even think they must brag about it because why else would they have a mouth and keyboard.
> This "random output machine" is already in large use in medicine
By doctors. It's like handling dangerous chemicals. If you know what you're doing you get some good results, otherwise you just melt your face off.
> Should I trust the young doctor fresh out of the Uni
You trust the process that got the doctor there. The knowledge they absorbed, the checks they passed. The doctor doesn't operate in a vacuum, there's a structure in place to validate critical decisions. Anyway you won't blindly trust one young doctor, if it's important you get a second opinion from another qualified doctor.
In the fields I know a lot about, LLMs fail spectacularly so, so often. Having that experience and knowing how badly they fail, I have no reason to trust them in any critical field where I cannot personally verify the output. A medical AI could enhance a trained doctor, or give false confidence to an inexperienced one, but on its own it's just dangerous.
But the article isn't saying it's surprising that you gain weight when you stop the treatment, the surprise is how fast you regain it compared to other treatments.
The conclusion isn't at all obvious so there's no "duh" moment. Why would you gain back the weight that much faster if you lost it with this pill vs. that pill?
They don't develop this equilibrium "instinctively" (something exclusively inside them) but they do "naturally" (helped by the environment). Now the reindeer weren't really in their natural environment, they were put in very constrained, special conditions, with little flexibility, little time to adapt, and no ability to shape that environment. The environment forced them to adapt and lower the numbers, and eventually wiped them out with what was also probably a fluke. They were still 50% more individuals than when they arrived but no viable reproduction path ahead.
This was an extreme example. Put humans on this type of island and you'll probably end up with them dying out just the same, despite our tendence to radically change the environment to survive. After all that's why the reindeer were there, so humans can survive absent a constant lifeline from civilization.
Humans, and viruses to a degree, are much better at shaping their environment and adapting faster to what's thrown at them to compensate. The instinct is to change whatever possible of the surroundings to survive and thrive.
Much like Musk, any "organism" that reaches a certain level of power and influence becomes decadent and eventually gets to the point where it stops caring what others think, even for appearances.
Enough people were not enjoying the results of the country's global power that an increasingly irrelevant political party was able to convert generalized angst into effective anti-establishment (anything status quo, doesn't matter what) populist platform. The unreasonable people are enjoying that the correct people are being hurt and that we are belligerently projecting what global power we have left, while "reasonable" people are having every Trumpian move sanewashed through the media they choose to consume. Everyone else (more than half, I suppose) is anywhere from concerned to terrified.
> “There was an aspect of, like, ‘Fuck the system,’” Masad said. “‘We need to remake civilization.’”
No matter what the political views, running into "real" money radicalizes most people and gives them the impression that they reached a superior evolutionary stage that uniquely entitles them... no, demands from them that they bend society and human civilization to their will, reshape it in their image, make it better because they are better. A sort of messianic complex.
This is the famous horseshoe paradox that says extremes are closer to each other than to the center. They might look completely different in their views but in reality they're back to back in the same place. 2 sides of the same coin. Different imprint, same value.
> cue tired analogies with knife makers not responsible for stabbings
The knife maker will be in hot water if you ask them for a knife and you're very specific about how you'll break the law with it, and they just give it to you and do nothing else about it (equivalent to the prompt telling the LLM exactly the illegal thing you want).
Even more if the knife they made is illegal, an automatic knife or a dagger (equivalent to the model containing the necessary information to create CSAM).
> but on a universal level, we're missing a cohesive master plan, in which a user, a human, need not undertake endless and repeated manual fend-off of the devil
This is a very good way of stating the problem in terms anyone can relate to.
> I had one brow raised, a little suspicious, but not very much to initiate a full-scale defense
This on the other hand seems overly superficial. You get your eMarketplace account hacked, then your Twitter account, and you're just "a little suspicious"? My eyebrows would raise all the way to the back of my head after this. Not sure I'd know where to start but I'd be very concerned.
> A few days later, the same thing happened with my TikTok and Reddit accounts. I repeated the previous steps now that I had gotten used to them. This time I raised two of my brows with a little more suspicion. Still not quite there, though.
I mean... This is an incredibly high threshold for getting concerned. The kind that lowers the bar to getting hacked.
Totally on point. I should've taken it more seriously in the first incident. That way, I could've kept my TikTok and X accounts. But the damage is done, and it has been a good lesson to me. Hopefully my post could be as much of a "lesson" to those reading, without getting compromised as I was.
> It was simple - I priced it properly, and I didn't have to pay another year of taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, and worry, only to have to lower the price anyway to get rid of it. A couple of the other homeowners were angry with me about that, but that was their problem.
I think you just explained partly the reason behind why a small number of owners can drive the prices up. But these are usually private owners. Whenever I see bank sales, they're more like flash sale and done.
Those who can afford to sit on the property trying to obtain a higher price will do it. Other owners will look at that and try to keep the price high with the illusory hope that they can also make that much money. Individual owners can suffer from FOMO and are influenced by success stories, so ask a high price hoping to capture as much of the value as possible.
I saw it in action when I bought my house. The seller saw his neighbor selling the house a year earlier for [princely sum] so he jumped to put his house on the market for [princely sum +20%]. The whole neighborhood was following the same playbook, looking at who sold and raising the bar. After a year with that house on the market I became interested and in a 6 month process I ended up buying the house for [princely sum -20%].
None of the neighbors know how much he got, only know how much he asked. A similar house 50m away is still up for sale for even higher price than than the listed price for mine. They can afford to sit on it for a while because the extra money they hope for covers the taxes and upkeep tenfold or more.
"None of the neighbors know how much he got, only know how much he asked. A similar house 50m away is still up for sale for even higher price than than the listed price for mine. They can afford to sit on it for a while because the extra money they hope for covers the taxes and upkeep tenfold or more."
At least where I live, real estate sales are public and you can easily find the sale price at the county assessor's website.
You're either generalizing or just making a mistake stating so definitively that sitting on an asset means being stupid with investments. You know your house and situation but that's far from representative. Sitting on it might turn out to be the stupidest or the smartest decision you can make. If you take the hard stance that it can only mean one thing, you're just being stupid with investments in all the "other" cases.
I am surrounded by people who sat on houses for a decade only to triple their money after inflation adjustment when they sold. We're talking 7 figure profits. Trying to sound smarter than everyone else sometimes backfires.
Same flight with someone's seat resting on your knees is downright painful.
> when my wife was pregnant
Imagine if she was a bit taller and someone reclined the seat all the way over her.
> The recline button is there for your use
You're right, like any shared resource, "space" is there for you to use. It doesn't mean you have to use it, you could try to be aware of your surroundings and assess whether your small comfort should come at the cost of someone else's extreme discomfort. And if you use the button others are also free, and probably correct, to call you a dick. Like a guy who empties the bowl of complimentary candy someone offers to all customers.
You shouldn't need physical blocks or laws to define your own common sense and decency.
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