Might be a joke?

He was a piece of shit. In his final moments, he was comforted by his kin.

Right, Trump’s fragile ego voted him into office 🤨

There are a lot of contributing factors. Obama making fun of him might have seen him run for office, but without all the enablers along the way carrying him on he would have collapsed a few steps in, fucked off to go eat a gourmet Happy Meal and told himself (and anyone in earshot) how brave and strong he is for running in the first place.

Ridicule may have lit the fuse, but the powder was there long before.

Get me riled up and I can be quite fiendish

The more workers you attract, the higher your standards for hiring can be. That goes for any job, including jobs of passion. If you need to fill three positions and get three applicants willing to do them for shit pay… odds are your applicants are shit too, or they’d be going for better paid positions.

If you offer more, people with better qualifications will be interested more. You get more applicants and can be picky who you want.

As a bonus: better paid employees have more incentive to stay and do a good job to ensure they keep their position.

Complacency is Complicity

‘hunter-gathering was the peak of human society’

I love perpetually balancing on the edge of subsistence, one step below the agrarian societies that drove me out to the marginal lands unfit for more efficient cultivation! I want to be stuck in a loop of raiding other tribes in the attempt to drive them out of their hunting grounds, then having them raid mine in turn in an eternal struggle to get away from the precipice of doom!

I think it’s really hard from a modern perspective to gauge just how unpleasant life was. Nothing about low-tech farming is simple.

No, only some are on the other side. The rest stay out of it - even though they really shouldn’t: Complacency is Complicity.

What’s on the playlist? Trivium - Insurrection, Bad Omens - Dethrone, what else?

The willingness to be responsible for consequences does factor in. If you round the corner and crash into someone, you probably didn’t intend to, but whether you’ll be an ass about it and yell at the other person or whether you’ll apologise and check they’re alright makes a difference.

In a perfect-information-setting, intent equals result: If I know what my actions will cause and continue to carry them out, the difference between “primary objective” and “accepted side-effect” becomes academic. But in most cases, we don’t have perfect information.

I feel like the intent-approach better accounts for the blind spots and unknowns. I’ll try to construct two examples to illustrate my reeasoning. Consider them moral dilemmas, as in: arguing around them “out of the box” misses the point.

Ex. 1:
A person is trying to dislodge a stone from their shoe, and in doing so leans on a transformator box to shake it out. You see them leaning on a trafo and shaking and suspect that they might be under electric shock, so you try to save them by grabbing a nearby piece of wood and knocking them away from the box. They lose balance, fall over and get a concussion.
Are you to blame for their concussion, because you knocked them over without need, despite your (misplaced) intention to save them?

Ex. 2:
You try to kill someone by shooting them with a handgun. The bullet misses all critical organs, they’re rushed to a hospital and in the process of scanning for bullet fragments to remove, a cancer in the earliest stages is discovered and subsequently removed. The rest of the treatment goes without complications and they make a speedy and full recovery.
Does that make you their saviour, despite your intent to kill them?

In both cases, missing information and unpredictable variables are at play. In the first, you didn’t know they weren’t actually in danger and couldn’t predict they’d get hurt so badly. In the second, you probably didn’t know about the tumor and couldn’t predict that your shot would fail to kill them. In both cases, I’d argue that it’s your intent that matters for moral judgement, while the outcome is due to (bad) “luck” in the sense of “circumstances beyond human control coinciding”. You aren’t responsible for the concussion, nor are you to credit with saving that life.

So if YouTube provided an RSS feed for its channels, all videos would be podcasts because they can be processed as audio-only and are distributed via RSS?

I was responding to the “Look, they’re all nice people” defense you quoted, not contradicting you. I agree with you in principle.

I don’t consider “misguided” a valid defence.

My view of morality is largely centered on intent, so “I thought it would be a good thing” is a valid defence (though there is also a degree of responsibility to check assumptions; if you never made any effort to check if it actually is a good thing, that’s negligence)

So it’s hard to be good when your salary depends on you being bad.

…and by extension, when your livelihood depends on you being bad, yes. Not everyone’s livelihood depends on their salary, but for many people it does. If it’s hard to find a job that can pay the bills, I don’t fault people for the human reflex of justifying bad things to yourself in the name of survival.

(But if they do have a choice and choose to enrich themselves at the expense of others, they’re obviously pricks - just saying this might not apply to all the devs involved here).

You can be a great person and still write garbage software. Whether you’re just doing it because you need money or whether you’re misguided and think it’s actually good, that doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person (and remember: It’s hard to get someone to understand something when their salary depends on not understanding it).

Doesn’t make the software less garbage.

What exactly makes a podcast then?

Probably because there are no sanctions against them that his government is cracking down on? I don’t think he wants to get involved in politics so much as stay out of prison.

Even if it was true, I wouldn’t consider incontinence a disqualifier for public office. If it doesn’t impair their ability to genuinely consult experts, I don’t think physical issues should matter.

He has far worse problems.

I mean, if you asked me something like that about our system’s sales, I’d have an answer for you in a few minutes. But then, I’m BI and not Accounting, so I’m probably more proficient at pulling aggregated data straight from the archive DB.

I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D

I mean, your counterexample is already the epitome of exploitation, so I’m not sure citing it would exonerate Paradox here :D

Yeah, you’re right. I got hit on a sore spot, responded impulsively and was a dick about it.