What books are you curious for that you're unable to find? I'm really curious about this as I, an avid horror book reader, have never had significant trouble even when buying very niche/indie work.
Texts on typography, history, and folklore for various research efforts.
It's not that I can't find them, it's that a couple were available locally, but aren't currently (due to being discarded) and the nearest copies are in the Library of Congress (which does not lend), requiring a drive. Mostly I've been buying them.
> Not enough (LE|DA|jail) funding or staffing or space.
How is it possible that there isn't enough funding/staffing? Budgets have increased, ballooned beyond inflation in many cases they are the biggest line item in a city's budget.
I am perfectly for less job stability in the US but only if it comes with a strong safety net. Losing your job after a year or six months is whatever broski if you have robust healthcare and are unlikely to go homeless. I see SpaceX and Anthropic aiming for IPOs in the trillion range of valuation and all I can see is, how come these companies are benefitting from the "increased efficiency" but the regular guys are not feeling the same kind of optimism? I wanna cheer for them because a rising tide lifts all boats. Instead I feel less and less secure while I have anonymous online people "well actually"ing me about how broadly my life is supposedly better in aggregate average. The cognitive dissonance makes no sense to me.
This may sound condescending but: you sound young, not disabled, and extremely sheltered from being exposed to disabled people.
I am in a position to be intimately familiar with illness. I will say that health is a spectrum and the mind is incredibly resilient. You will surprise yourself as you inevitably age how much your mind will adapt to always hurting. There is more to life than body discomfort. This patient sounds like he has his faculties and is making an informed decision to continue living, because his life is worth the discomfort he is going through. I am reminded of a line along the lines of every day you experience, no matter how terrible, is very likely a day that someone else yesterday would have desperately wanted.
There has been recent attention on what treatments oncologists choose for themselves when diagnosed with terminal illnesses—having seen firsthand what happens to quality of life for their patients—and what members of the general population choose.
Doctors tend to choose the treatments that bias quality of life over quantity of life. That’s all I’m getting at here. I personally hope that if it ever comes to it, I will have the strength to choose something like three months of high QoL over one year of grinding daily misery as I have personally seen others do.
Having your skin fail to regenerate, bleeding everywhere, and having skin that looks like you’ve had aqua regia poured over it seems to me like a poor quality of life. It sounded like a life of pain and one in which it would be difficult to do a lot of the things that bring me joy. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it sounds, and this is a poor example of it. I’m not judging this guy for his choices; they’re his to make. And maybe I’ve overestimated the amount of pain he’s in. But from the description above, it sounded awful.
I find both the honesty and tact of your comment a generous gift. After watching the Sasse interview, reading the parent comment and reading your comment, I’m reminded abstractly how much of the emotional and psychological work of reconciling biological mortality is built on personal cognitive context that a mind-body builds over its cycles living in the world. So much about mortality is shared. But so much of the context for interpreting mortality is radically personal.
Why do you feel the need to attack the person character by stating he is probably young and/or has not dealt with disability in his social circle? This is needlessly aggravating and actually pissed me of when reading it.
The fundamental problem with this of course is that every human being is likely more niche and more advanced at the LLM in the things that they find most important, and this realization sours the average user's impression of LLM usefulness. For example, an LLM cannot reasonably find me alternatives to specific tea regional vendors because the LLM does not know enough about tea to be able to say "this tea is half the price for 80% of the qualities of tea you're looking for". Instead I have to build my own mental knowledge base of careful trying and tasting and recalling which an LLM would maybe only have if I personally wrote every single tea session I have ever had in my life for it as context.
But hunting for a new tea to try is something I do regularly and something I would likely try with an LLM only to come away deeply disappointed with the results. And then I just wouldn't have much faith in it after that for things I don't have much knowledge about, like looking for a gift idea for one of the hobbies of a friend.
> Rising productivity would have reduced the average work week regardless.
Do you have evidence of this?
> consider that the benefits package routinely offered to employees is worth around 40% of their pay
Please define "routinely" and "employees". Part-time employees do not get benefits packages, much less benefits packages worth 40% of their pay. PTO, Sick time, family leave, and other "benefits" are actually legally mandated and I do not see any evidence that companies would offer this if they were not mandated to do so.
Google sez: "Total compensation generally exceeds base salary by 30% to 50% for many roles, meaning salary often represents only 60% to 70% of an employee's total worth to the company."
Google sez total compensation includes bonuses, commission, stock options, employer-paid insurance (health, life, disability), retirement contributions, paid time off, tuition reimbursement, student loan assistance, gym memberships, employee discounts, Childcare assistance, commuter benefits, and relocation expenses.
In my impression the billionaire worship is just another form of fundamental respect and enforcement of hierarchy that has been part of conservative politics forever. We are back to transparently the "right" leaning being wanting to keep the absolute monarchy.
I'm a bit confused by claiming that this is confidential information. I thought contract awards were public? Would someone who is more in this space be willing to explain what actually was leaked here?
Disabled people exist, even temporarily so (e.g. pregnant with a craving, broken ankle and can't drive, etc)!
Also, sometimes some meals are arguably not worth the labor of cooking. Making proper pho takes at least a whole day. Pad Thai really doesn't function without the kind of intense heat of specific equipment. Etc etc.
I certainly eat at restaurants. In general I find there are enough compromises associated with delivered food that it's not worth it. You're basically reheating lukewarm food whatever the packaging. (And I don't live in a city anyway.)
Extremely weird cover selection. Books like Stag Dance, Project: Hail Mary, The Emperor of Gladness, etc. None of them have that. Some of the books listed there are several years old (The Death of Vivek Oji was published in 2020). A Map Is Only One Story isn't even fiction?? I think its very cherrypicked of a complaint. Not to mention the author doesn't talk at all about the rise of romantasy and finding bets like Alchemised and Fourth Wing (neither of which have these covers complained about).
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