I have no problem with them going around me when space opens up; I have a problem with them doing unsafe things, such as tailgating me until space opens up to pass me and then rushing past with narrow margins, especially when the result is that they only gain a couple of car lengths and just end up tailgating the car in front of me instead.

I do use adaptive cruise control. Mysteriously, this does not cause the car in front of me to drive any faster.

Sure, but either you can pass, in which case you should do that, or you cannot; in either case, tailgating doesn’t help.

I regularly have people tailgate me when I am driving only 75 mph in a 65 mph area, despite the fact that the person ahead of me is driving the same speed as me so I could not drive any faster even if I wanted to. Fortunately the situation is usually resolved as soon as enough space opens up in the neighboring lane that they can dart past me and tailgate the car in front of me instead.

Generally when one refers to a country as being “occupied”, the implication is that the people there are poor off as a result, especially relative to a neighboring country whose land is presumably being considered occupied, which in this case is implicitly North Korea due to the history of how the two countries split. It is therefore not in bad faith to directly ask whether the people there are better or worse off as a result.

You also seem to be hyper-fixated on one possible meaning of prosperous, which is “wealth and GDP”, when there are lots of other means related to flourishing in general. The original commenter was perfectly free to provide an answer along the lines of, “North Korea is the more prosperous country because X.” where X is a list of ways in which the people there are flourishing, and this would have been a valid answer (if not necessarily a correct one).

Alternatively, if they think that South Korea is better off but this does not matter because it is still less ethical than North Korea, then they could have taken the opportunity to be up front about that.

So in short, this question could have been used in all sorts of ways to provide an answer that clarified the commenter’s position. It is a shame that we never heard from them exactly what their thoughts were.

If it makes you feel better, you are emphatically not my enemy. 😀

I didn’t say the people of South Korea are being subjugated.

Quote the comment that started all of this:

Is anyone really surprised one of the biggest companies in occupied korea would do this??

I acknowledge that this is not your comment, but you stepped in and answered a question directed at this person, so you should not act so surprised that you have become associated with their position, especially since you continue to work really hard to do everything except actually state your own opinion, except insofar that “everything is too complicated for anyone to have an opinion” counts as an opinion.

I will take from your attempt to throw a “Gotchya!” at me that you acknowledge that you are unwilling to state your own opinion on the matter.

If you don’t feel like stating your opinion on which country is better off and why, then you could just say that outright or say nothing. You really don’t have to go to all of this trouble to pontificate about how it is unreasonable to even consider the matter. 😜

Do I need to explain to you what that means, or do you have a clue about South Korean history and US foreign policy?

I appreciate you showing me how not to make a point in “a pointlessly hostile and asshole way”!

I appreciate your honesty in admitting that you consider human well-being to be irrelevant!

As the world outside increasingly turns into a social and ecological hellscape, people will want to look at it less and less, and the time spent peering through windows will diminish. Eventually, the existence of a portal to a realm outside their bleak cave will be forgotten to time and memory, leaving behind only pale indoor light and stale indoor air.

I appreciated this insightful essay for explaining where each side is coming from, why being different is okay, and how this ties in to a bigger picture, rather than being a standard opinionated rant.

Not minimalist enough: it actually runs NetBSD.

The votes needed for removal is actually 66%, which is even harder, but otherwise I concur.

But then again, what’s the purpose of being alive?

Apparently dragging people from peaceful nonexistence into existence without their consent so that during their lifetime they will endure a lot of suffering, admittedly experiencing some transient joys along the way but doomed to one day have to undergo the agony of getting sick and dying, after which everything that happened during their life will have been meaningless, given that one day (in the near or far future) there will be no humans left and so even how their life affected other people will have been for naught?

I mean, that does not seem like a great life purpose to me, but you do you I guess?

My interpretation of this comic was that it is making fun of the parts of having a kid that they don’t tell you about, not that it was being judgemental towards anyone.

Sure, it is being hyperbolic, but hyperbole is common feature of humor.

The companies that win won’t be those with the most or even the best features. AI will democratize those. The winners will be built on a data model that captures something true about their market, which in turn creates compounding advantages competitors can’t replicate.

If AI is really so good that it will democratize writing code to implement features, then why won’t it also democratize the ability to come up with the correct data model? What makes that one task so special?

Were I to conjecture as to the answer, I would say that business types seem to have a blind spot where they think that every role will be commodified except their own, which is somehow special.

No point in putting the lit torch away when you can use it to roast meanwhile!

I don’t actually care about functional programming, but someone told me that they were handing out burritos over here?