Look, I’m basically a communist most of the time, but I don’t think this is a good take. I’ll admit I don’t actually know the numbers but I know air travel is expensive and not great for the planet.

It could be better, sure, but I would argue that cramming people in and offering the barest of amenities is a good thing when it comes to air travel. Yes, it sucks to be in a plane but it sucks to pollute the air too. It’s good that more people have more travel options now, and it’s good that we can get more people to more places with less fuel than ever before. We shouldn’t bitch about that, we should accept it as a necessity for getting what we want: to arrive someplace far away in an amazingly short period of time, allowing us to see more of the planet than any of our ancestors, while minimizing the harm as much as we can.

I think people are placing too much on this. Being registered is just sending a piece of mail with a checkbox checked, I think. You don’t even have to donate or anything. I registered as a Republican to vote in their primaries a long time ago, and I have literally never voted for a Republican candidate for any office.

Why pre-wipe? This feels like washing your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.

They already remade Little Mermaid too recently. Terry Crews as Rapunzel, though, is still on the table.

And then interrupting that hold music at seemingly random intervals to tell you that they care about you, or to tell you that you could do this faster on their website.

I had to call Assurant recently because their website literally threw an error and told me to call in and wouldn’t let me proceed. I was told by the automated messages no less than 4 unstoppable times that the website is faster, and then after explaining the situation to the person she told me that the website is faster.

She was clearly reading the script and it’s not her fault so I kept quiet, but I have rarely felt such extreme rage in my life.

It’s not entirely unlike my plan: No more externalities. That’s the big problem with the environment and with a bunch of other things. Economists call it an “externality” when the things you’re doing have side effects that you don’t have to account for, such as pollution.

The thing is, we let industry and capital get away with it for a long time. And there’s no doubt that fixing it would also impact people. If the cost of properly disposing of a tire was built into the price of the tire, it would be passed along to customers. But it’s the only way to rehabilitate ANY system that uses currency.

A compiler that uses an LLM to function mostly off of vibes. That’s… An idea you’ve had, for sure.