31098347's comments

> And commercial food producers make their products more addictive too... How about the tobacco industry? How about illicit drugs? Porn?

How about them? They also designed their products to be addictive.

“Personal Responsibility” is just the shield that powerful companies use to avoid being regulated.

Shift the blame to the exploited and make it clear that their problems stem from their moral deficiency. Pretty convenient all told —- the personal responsibility of the architects of these systems and products somehow evaporates.

Personal responsibility cannot overcome AI designed to addict you. These services are not your friends. You are not the customer or the product. Your future behavior is the product. The only way to win is not to play.

The naïveté of this take is astounding for someone who frequents a technology message board. You’re just going to ignore the part where these services employ A/B tests to make their services more addictive? You’re going to ignore the countless stories about how Facebook knew that the content they boost is bad for mental health and is addictive but they did it anyway? You’re going to ignore .. the entire surveillance capitalism aspect where an entire industry is predicated upon keeping people engaged?

Have a feeling you’d get a long with the Sackler family famously. Christ.

>This. These services aren't toxic if you don't follow toxic accounts.

Your ability to moderate your usage of these services doesn’t make them not toxic. Your statement is victim blaming.

These services are still major proprietors of surveillance capitalism. They sell your future behavior to the highest bidder. This is toxic in itself.

Beyond which, your participation in these services is a signal to those who trust you that these services are safe for them to use. They are not, because they are not safe for anyone to use. That you have mitigated the harm through devoting even more of your attention to them doesn’t change that.

There's a few different things to unpack with this feature.

(1) It would be useful in the context of a general style guide, like a white-label Grammarly. Corporations could set their own prompts for words, phrases, and structures. This would make documentation more consistent.

(2) This is dystopian as fuck. Google has the ability to see, aggregate, and now influence what you write in Google docs and Gmail. Who is making the decision on what to "correct"? Is this algorithm explainable?

Bias: I already disagree with Grammarly as an entire category of product.

I wish they’d let me give back the ones I have. They can give them out to someone else

MacKenzie Scott has been giving away a ton of money recently. Don't know if that puts her in a better category.

The massive information asymmetry involved in the student loan system means these kind of black and white judgements not particularly useful.

>Maybe we shouldn't call it a direct punishment, but they're certainly coming out of the scenario worse off than their counterpart.

It's hard for me not to sound flippant when I say this, but -- this is life. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who has the means to pay off their student loans themselves practically won the lottery and they should be thankful they're not totally fucked like those who need the forgiveness.

There's an ugly, underlying impression I get from this discussion that is oddly reminiscent of the "welfare queen" stereotype.

>In fact, a hypothetical student debt forgiveness event like GP was discussing would punish those who responsibly paid off their student debts relative to similar-earning classmates who did not.

Punish how? This word keeps being used but it does not fit any definition of punish I'm familiar with. I'm not being obtuse.

Some background of where I'm coming from: Worked 40+hrs/week for $7.25 to $10/hr from 2005 to 2009 to get a four year degree from a state school. Graduated with $35,000 in student loan debt myself and about $20,000 in debt through Parent Plus loans. My parents sent me some money for rent on occasion, but overall -- that's how I di it.

I also paid off all my student loans, and my parent plus loans.

If someone graduated with $100,000 debt because they partied all the time, didn't work, and tomorrow Biden just gave them a tax-free forgiveness....

I am not punished by this. At all. It has no impact on my life whatsoever. I made the best choice I could make with my circumstances, and I paid off my loans because at the time that was the best way to secure my future. The day before the party-guy got his $100k write-off and the day after, I wake up in the same house, with the same car, with the same job, with the same spouse. My life doesn't change at all.

People who have paid their student loan debt are in exactly the same situation they were after this forgiveness than they were before: that is, they have no student loan debt.

People in the US are not punished for being financially responsible. They are rewarded for taking risks, but not punished for being responsible. Very different.