FaceDeer

I think the monkey’s paw isn’t done with Putin on this one yet, though. Trump’s antics are cratering oil prices, which Russia absolutely depends on for survival. A drop in oil prices is one of the precipitating events for the end of the Soviet Union.

And just generally, Trump is random chaos, a monster that lots of people thought they could control but turns out to be unmanageable. He bites everyone around him eventually. Helping Trump get elected may have wrecked America but that’s not going to save Russia.

I don’t know of any “men only” instances, the fact that it’s gender-specific is niche rather than the specific gender.

That conundrum already exists with the current system, though.

All well and good until my mom’s wifi printer stops working again and I need to fix it over the phone. I’d rather like to have an AI agent figure that out for her and fix it itself.

Google recently opened their ecosystem up to find-my-device tags like this, they’re available from providers like Chipolo. Last I heard they weren’t very good yet because despite there being tons of Android phones around for them to work with they’d put some restrictions on them that made them ping less frequently.

They’re also not GPS tags, they ping nearby Android phones via Bluetooth and the Android phones report their location to Google. But if you’re worried about a bag being stolen (as opposed to, for example, being located if you’re lost in the wilderness) then that might be enough.

Yeah. It’s disheartening when obvious jokes like that are missed by so many.

No, he didn’t. He said, effectively, that “second amendment freaks are Walking Dead fans.” That does not imply the reverse, that “Walking Dead fans are second amendment freaks.”

All pines are trees. Are all trees pines?

Think of all the astronomers he put out of work. :(

It’s possible for multiple different groups of people to be fans of the same thing for different reasons.

Those aren’t exclusive or contradictory to each other.

Amazing Grace is always a good one. The story behind it helps with the impact, IMO; it was written by a former slave trader who had an epiphany and realized just how irredeemably evil he was, and was doing his best to turn it around.

I’m also a big enjoyer of Simple Gifts. It’s a Shaker song and I find it very soothing.

It is possible to dislike something without believing it should be erased from existence. This is really extreme black-and-white thinking that isn’t remotely realistic.

There was another comment in this thread about exactly that situation, a female police officer that noticed a creepy guy following her around during her patrol. But there’s lots of other potential negatives to having open immediate police comms, like criminals monitoring to see whether there are police around before doing whatever criminality they were planning on doing.

Same goal of body cameras, but we all see how that turned out.

Sounds like “we tried it once and it didn’t work, therefore we should never try again.” Instead, we should take into account how the body camera situation has failed and modify the approach to account for it.

Mandate that the buffer be operated by an independent body the police have no control over, for example.

Same here. There have been tons of technologies coming out recently where my main reaction is “awesome, I can’t wait to use the heck out of that.” If anything my biggest sigh comes from “but I bet the comment threads are going to be littered with tedious doomers moaning about how it’s going to enable the awful stuff they’re imagining instead.”

The issue I’m taking is with:

Louis doesn’t want to improve the show, they want something else entirely.

I don’t think he’s trying to “improve the show.” He’s saying the same thing you are, that he just doesn’t think Black Mirror is a good show.

One possible compromise that leaps to mind is to have the radios be encrypted, but they all feed into a several-hours-long buffer and get automatically decrypted and published after that delay. You wouldn’t be able to stalk police or whatever, but they wouldn’t be able to hide malfeasance or incompetence from the public.

It’s not perfect, there are still good transparency reasons for knowing what the police are doing right now, but it might be a good enough balance.

Saying “those are just mercenaries, we didn’t send them” would have also been a perfectly fine response by China. But then I suppose that would be admitting that there are Chinese people that the CCP can’t control.

There’s been plenty of negative portrayals of new technology throughout the history of sci-fi. Heck, the very first one is usually considered to be “Frankenstein”, and it’s all about how new technology can backfire spectacularly.

I think the problem is not the existence of negative portrayals, but the absence of positive ones. There aren’t a lot of shows for folks who want to see a positive view of the future, where technology solves problems rather than always being the source of them. That used to be the domain of things like Star Trek but modern Star Trek is a pale shadow that no longer paints a particularly rosy view of humanity’s future. The Orville took up that mantle, I suppose, but it’s stretched pretty thin.

It doesn’t “show the future”, though. This is exactly what frustrates me so much about online discourse and shows like Black Mirror, some new technology comes along and people go “that’s a terrible idea, haven’t you seen Black Mirror?” As if Black Mirror was some kind of rigorous scientific study that shows the One True Way that the future will unfold.

It’s an entertainment show. Its purpose is to draw in viewers and keep them watching. You don’t do that with episodes that show a new technology coming out and everything turning out fine, you do it by presenting a scary, compelling narrative.

We don’t get freaked out in real life by summer camps and restrict the availability of machetes and other bladed instruments near them because of what happened in that documentary series “Friday the 13th.” It’s fiction. Plot trumps realism.

I don’t think he’s proposing changing Black Mirror itself, he’s saying the same thing you’re saying - that it’s just not a good show.

Like, if I was writing an article criticizing the prevalence of torture porn in modern entertainment, I wouldn’t say “they should release a Saw movie where Jigsaw forces his victims to undergo nonviolent counselling.” That wouldn’t be a Saw movie, it’d be a weird parody of one. I’d just say “Saw is an example of the sort of thing I’m complaining about.”