barsoap

Nope they're boys with pubes. Pubes don't make you a man, strength of character does.

Should you really be working when you’re claiming retirement checks from your union?

As a carpenter? Yes and no. It shouldn't compete with what union people are by and large doing for their steady bread and butter but completely outlawing earning any money is cruel to the type of busy-bees that many tradespeople are. Hand-craft chessboards or something, anything where skill and mastery is eclipsing the industrial aspect. Also teaching, training, and consulting. Retirement should be a role-change (if desired), not a kick to the curb. Also, accommodate for half-retirement: Half the cheque, half the jobs kind of situation.

When you adjust the rules of the game to not define a set number of interactions with each player

Then being nasty wins out, no matter the length of the game as long as it's known (or at least an upper bound is known) But that's not the case in practice so it's irrelevant which is why I specified (yes I mentioned it) infinite or unknown amount of iterations.

That mark. That thing we consider good. The innate sense, what pretty much everyone agrees on. It is there because our ancestors were successful because all that game theory stuff happens to apply. If it didn't, then we would consider defecting good, not, to sum it up neatly, "never start a fight but always end it".

That simple thought experiment incentivizes bad actions from time to time.

The optimal strategy, in theory and practice, for the iterated prisoner's dilemma (unknown or infinite amounts of iterations) is some version of tit for tat, details depending on the exact rules (such as low information reliability needing increased forgiveness). The strategy involves punishing the other player for defecting but it will never defect first so two tit-for-tat players will play 100% cooperatively and the knives stay where they belong, behind their backs. Holistically speaking choosing to punish is not bad because it incentivise the other player to play cooperatively, leading to overall greater results for both.

Evolutionarily speaking: If cooperation did not give advantages, why the fuck did we become a social species? Going for anti-cooperative strategies only ever makes sense in zero-sum games and practically nothing in life is.

You have more to gain by acting selfishly.

That's capitalist propaganda with no basis in game theory.

Not every choice is a conscious decision in my eyes, but the vast majority are.

Oh my sweet summer child.

Still makes sense in places with tight housing markets, though. Triply and quadruply so if it's infested by speculative investment. Then make sure that short-term rentals require a hotel license if it even smells of being a commercial short-term rental (couch surfing is completely fine, doesn't take up a housing unit) and last, but not least: Public housing. Look at Vienna as to how to do it but that can literally take the better part of a century to do because land. Specifically in the US, you also need to build tons of public transit don't worry even if you make your metro free at the point of use it's cheaper than road/sewer upkeep in suburbia. Suburbia is a financial graveyard for municipalities, they just don't generate enough tax revenue for the infrastructure they demand.

Homes where noone wants to live don't count towards relief for a shortage unless you can figure out how to make those places at least baseline attractive to people. Jobs, schools, parks, a sportsball team, all that stuff.

Middle class is, mostly, simply the newfangled term for that portion of the proletariat which isn't lumpen which is now called the precariat. Low-rank petite bourgeois also counts as the same class as it's actually an economical one (petit bourgeois get shafted amply by capital), not political (what with their penchant for temporarily embarrassed millionaire narratives and support of "business-friendly" policies). That worker / petit bourgeois distinction has always been fuzzy and awkward I mean it's not like there's not workers who think like that.

But for myself, the world and humanity was created with free will and it’s up to us to choose good vs evil.

That's a terrible take: It implies that if you see something that you consider evil, you attribute it to choice, whereas the opposite is generally the case -- once individuals have waded through layers of shit conditioning they are able to make choices that are actually attributable to them and not to society, upbringing, etc, and they very much do not choose evil. They might choose things that are inconvenient to others, or short-sighted, or unwise, but evil? That's not just a different ballpark that's a different game:

There can be no good without evil.

As a mark is not set up for the sake of missing the aim, so neither does the nature of evil exist in the world.

In other words: Noone, willingly, chooses imperfection. Minds, life, that would do so, would use its degrees of freedoms like that, would long have went the way of the dodo.

It's not a blob the client is definitely open source, not sure about the server software but you're not running that. It's an extension like any other, just that it comes bundled with the default install and doesn't use the usual extension enable/disable UI: Go to about:config, set extensions.pocket.enabled to false. It's going to stay that way, this isn't microsoft which likes to "fix" your settings.

There's a subscription if you want and they're also earning some money off referrals. In 2022 they made ~80m dollars off all those side hustles, should probably be 100m by now. Selling the default search engine spot is still the biggest number, about 500m. And they have a piggy bank of over a billion.

During the google money years the ROI on Firefox was so mind-bogglingly high it would've been insanity to drop it all into the browser: It couldn't possibly have soaked up the sheer amount of resources.

Meanwhile, yes they did sink a large amount of resources into it in a way a profit-driven company never would have: They designed a whole fucking new programming language to get proper concurrency into the thing. Rust is, in a very real way, a language to write browsers in. That's its purpose. And then they set the language free because, among other things, you can't make money with it.

Sure, lots of those investments tanked. But OTOH you have stuff like pocket which makes money and could probably keep the lights on by itself. If everything but pocket were to fail Mozilla absolutely would have to downsize, would definitely have to scale back its charity spending, rely more on the FLOSS community to actually write code, but it'd continue with the same kind of force as say Blender, which wouldn't be what it is without its paid staff (both coders and artists) and sidle-hustles (commercial support, training, and cloud services, mostly. Oh, t-shirts and mugs. Don't forget t-shirts and mugs).

I guess overall the gripe I have with the "Mozilla should invest more in Firefox" chorus is that it implies "Do you want Mozilla to be way smaller and less capable of shaping the web than it currently is". People have no sense of the scale of Mozilla, think that it's running on donations etc.

Servo isn't dead it's just on slow burn. Also, under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation Europe. As far as Mozilla is concerned it has served its purpose: Prototype stuff that then got included in Firefox to get rid of a quite large amount of technical debt.

The long and short of it is: Firefox is supposed to make money for Mozilla's charitable causes. It's not an end in itself, but a means to an end.