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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2025

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  • If I understand your response correctly, you’re arguing that the glasses themselves aren’t the issue, it’s the shifts that come with accepting the glasses.

    They may ironically have the reverse effect. I guarantee that corporations are already cataloging your facial expressions. Between Ring, Flock, Apple, Google, Netflix, Samsung, etc. there are many pictures of all our faces with rich annotation. Currently most people don’t even think about how thoroughly they’re being watched. These douchy glasses may actually draw attention to the matter.


  • I dislike Facebook and deleted my account even before they changed to “Meta”. I also value privacy.

    But what privacy violations do “smart glasses” provide that weren’t already trivially available? Tiny cameras are insanely cheap. A reasonably handy person could hide several on their person and there are plenty of “spy shops” that sell actual wearable hidden cameras.

    The “I love ICE” kid was wearing Meta Ray Bans but the first video I saw of it was from someone else’ camera. I can’t leave the house without getting filmed from multiple angles. The only thing those glasses do is make it really obvious that the wearer is a dumbass.








  • I’m willing to give the news some benefit of the doubt here because there actually are rational and non-evil reasons to do this.

    Socially, we have at least two related, but distinct forms of sexual atrocity.

    One is sex with children. There’s extensive evidence that sex before puberty leads to all kinds of long term negative effects for the victim.

    The other is non-consent. No matter what the age of the people involved, non-consent has serious negative consequences for the victim.

    The Epstein victims all seem to be extremely young post-adolescents. We generally wouldn’t care at all if they were getting it on with their high-school sweethearts.

    The problem with the Epstein victims was primarily one of consent. There was a vast human trafficking network and many of our leaders were active participants. The whole thing was so horrible that normal people are sickened by it happening to anyone, not just children.

    The reason we may want to be sticklers on this point is that this form of abuse is extremely common and really needs a spotlight on it. We don’t want people to come out the other end of this thing and think, “Sure pedophilia is bad but this guy is just pressuring his 18 year old secretary into sex and then making money passing her around to his buddies.”








  • Are you actually confused about the information asymmetry in video game purchases? Given your weird movie references I assumed you were just trying to change the topic.

    I’ll try to use small words. Before you play a game, you don’t know if it’s goo;, just as used car buyers don’t know if the used car is a lemon. Without a buyer protections that drags the price of good games down just as lemons drag down the price of used cars. Akerlof goes into the proof for the car part of this in his paper.

    “Lemon laws” mostly solve that problem for cars. Steam mostly solves that problem for video games. That requires trust. You may not trust Steam but millions of people do. They’ve repeatedly made decisions that benefit gamers so gamers flock to them. Thats why they buy so many games from Steam even when they’re available elsewhere. If they broke that trust they’d probably never get it back but, until then, their net effect is to increase revenue for studios by providing a market where people are comfortable enough to spend more money.