masto

I think you missed the point.

Why is that safer/better? That binary can do anything a shell script can, and it’s a lot harder to inspect.

How Flint is doing is irrelevant to what I said, the same as me picking on a polluted city in Canada doesn't change the fact that Canada generally has safe drinking water.

The comment I responded to made it sound like US tap water is mostly not safe to drink. That's demonstrably untrue. I'm not defending the horrors of industrial capitalism or condoning environmental destruction, I'm merely pointing out that the US does in fact have standards, regulation, and enforcement for drinking water quality. This does not mean it's perfect, but it does mean that in general you can drink the water out of the tap, like I do every day.

I hate that we live in a world where only extreme viewpoints are allowed. Either the USA is the greatest country in the world or it's a complete shithole, anything else is just shouted down. I still make the stupid mistake of caring about what's real rather than what makes a good soundbite on social media.

"Drinking water quality in the United States is generally safe. In 2016, over 90 percent of the nation's community water systems were in compliance with all published U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) standards. Over 286 million Americans get their tap water from a community water system. Eight percent of the community water systems—large municipal water systems—provide water to 82 percent of the US population."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water_quality_in_the_United_States

I don’t know where you got that idea, but public tap water is federally regulated in the US (at least for now). Bottled water is popular because of marketing, not because tap water is unsafe.

Admitting you were wrong/made a mistake/can’t do something.

Related: changing your mind. The one thing that can still destroy any politician is the dreaded “flip-flop”. Yet the thing we most need them to do is to revise their position in the face of new information.

I think most of the problems in the world come down to some sort of bullshit posturing that (especially male) humans seem to be compelled to engage in.

There’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed over the past few years where people refuse to read anything longer than a handful of words. In fact, it’s often lobbied as an insult toward the writer: “not gonna read that, bro” has a similar connotation as “what have you got there, nerd, a math book?” combined with “I guess I triggered you so bad you had to provide supporting detail for your ideas, ha ha!”

I think there’s a self reinforcing loop where we’ve all moved to mobile devices where it’s tedious and annoying to type anything, so we’ve gotten more used to shorter and shorter messages, making anything longer look old fashioned and out of touch. People who grew up with phones now feel like it’s tedious and annoying to even read a full paragraph (or watch a non-short video), let alone expend the extra energy required to decode handwriting and figure out a scribbled word from context. It’s easier just to say “not gonna read ur wall”, and reinforce that it’s now shameful to write a comment as long as this one.

Just saw another one this morning.

Maybe Pac-Man. Wandering around a maze eating all day isn’t that different from my current life.

A return is what you file. The money you get back for overpayment is a refund.

Sorry, pet peeve of mine that comes up every tax season.

You might assume that, but in fact the ADA is one of the places where the US was ahead of the game in protecting people’s rights. It wasn’t always like it is now.

It’s reminding me that most people don’t see the forest for the trees.

Spindrift ruined it for me.

For me, this is a feature. The last thing I want is celebrities and news outlets clogging up my feed of nice people’s sandwiches and cat pictures.

Virtually every app collects crash reports and anonymized analytics. Better for them to tell you about it than not.