Can we make the New York post just… Go away? They’re a net negative on society

You shouldn’t be allowed to own that much stuff. Simple solution.

Good. Break them up. Criminally charge their leadership.

I’ve had a conversation with several coworkers trying to get them to connect the dots between “you get paid by the hour” - “if you produce more per hour, you don’t get paid more” - “the owners keep the profits” - “they’ll never let you just work less”

Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about these people. Calls them “Business Idiots”

I mean, I would not be surprised if we learned they had already started mass murdering the people ICE abducts.

What do you call the action of putting their grades together like this, without the sentences you put after it? (this is the most important question of this comment).

Why are you stuck on “cannot” when the point of the idiom is about the (repeat pun) fruitlessness of comparing things by inappropriate standards?

You clearly can come up with a way to score a math test by the standards of an art class, but that is not typically a useful endeavor.

I’ve never heard that expression before, but that’s pretty good.

Are you confusing “can’t” and “can, but is fruitless” (pun intended)?

Like, if someone says to you “you can’t put nails in with a screwdriver”, are you going to say “You totally can. Just whack the nail with the handle. I don’t see the problem”.

Or, like, “You can’t eat crayons” do you respond “sure you can. chew it up and eat it. i don’t see the problem. it’s just like a cookie”

“This orange sucks. I can’t just bite into it and enjoy it like an apple.” That’s not a sensible assessment of the orange. That’s applying the desired attributes of an apple to an orange.

The most reasonable interpretation is that you cannot use the standards of apples on oranges, nor the other way around.

You wouldn’t fault an apple because it doesn’t have a thick skin that needs peeling.

Many people are sad, cruel, little monsters that are happy those people are being hurt.

It’s really hard to change people like that so they’re better. You gotta get them to see you as in-group, and slowly re-socialize them. Lot of work. Might not even succeed. But it’s also apparently a whole bunch of crimes to round up the maga-hats and lock them in an underground vault somewhere.

Microsoft will continue on inertia for years. but it’s basically a walking corpse full of parasites at this point.

Fine. Consider your point made. I’ll use some other metaphor or allusion to express “don’t willy-nilly change systems you don’t understand”. Many people just do that, out of ignorance, stupidity, or hubris. I’ve seen a lot of software people delete “useless” code that caused problems later.

I assumed it was a counter to the implicit idea that Israel is eternal and timeless and just a fact of life, rather than something that started in living memory

I’m reminded of that meme of the cartoon girl going “this sign won’t stop me because I can’t read”

I’ve had coworkers that changed some code, then just deleted the tests that started failing. Then they get annoyed their PR is blocked by more attentive coworkers.

If we switch the argument to being about diverting a watercourse, or regrading land, it suddenly falls apart because it becomes clear that these things do not exist for intelligent reasons.

This is not a compelling analogy. Many things in nature may not exist for an intelligent reason, but their presence matters in ways that may not be obvious. Diverting a waterway may cause tremendous damage to the ecosystem and other downstream (pun intended) things. That is an excellent example of why you should understand the current system before attempting to change it.

I don’t think it’s a bad idea to try and understand the world or to mitigate risks when making changes. I think chesterton’s fence is a shite argument because it implies that everything which exists has a planned purpose and favours the status quo which may be intoler

I don’t think the implied plan purpose is necessary for the argument to make sense. The point of the story is it’s not always clear what things are load bearing, nor what loads they bear.

If the chesteron origin is distracting to you, let’s discard it. I think we agree that changing a complex system without attempting to understand it first is foolish.

It’s not a bad argument to try to understand an existing system before changing it.

I’ve seen a lot of “why is this like this? I’m changing it” blow up in software. The clearest memory was not realizing that user names could be null, even though that looked impossible by tracing the registration route. Turns out there was another, stupider, way of registering.

It’s especially a good argument when the person evaluating the system has no domain knowledge or expertise.

One should keep Chesterton’s Fence in mind.

Idiots like Musk will see a system they don’t understand and tear it down, and then people die.

I think one of the reasons some of the little kids in my life like me is I try to give them honest explanations. They don’t always fully understand, but I think they appreciate getting answers. And probably appreciate the occasional “I don’t know, actually. Let’s look it up”