That sounds like something a guesser would say. I'm only going to ask for something I'm already likely to get (going back to the original MetaFilter thread).
I don’t think this will be a significant issue because I’m willing to bet the vast majority of people would rather spend their weekend doing something else.
I think that's fine. If 20% of the emails from some company (let's say Paypal) are spam, then all email providers (especially Gmail, the largest provider) should mark ALL of their emails as spam by default until they stop spending spam. If they want to keep spamming, they can at least humiliate themselves by telling people to check their spam folders for their emails.
If you lose an account due to negligence, it's on you, not the service provider.
Spam/junk folder is not "ignore" folder. You need to periodically check the contents of the spam/junk folder to see if any legitimate emails fell into that waste basket.
That "Mark as Spam" facility not only moves the offending message into Jink/Spam folder, it also allows the Email Service provider to identify that type of email as spam, so future incoming messages that match that may criteria can be categorized as spam, so they'll go into spam folder automatically, rather than into the Inbox. You can find them in the Jink/Spam folder.
However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox.
So you need to be careful what you "Report as Spam". It is different action from "Mark as Spam".
"Report as Spam" may also prompt the user to "Block sender", so one must be careful not to block legitimate senders, though this action can usually be undone, as the Mailbox Settings will track the blocked senders so that lost can be corrected by the user if needed.
Gmail has a good trick that most users don't know or notice: In the Spam folder, the user can see a warning at the top of each email that explains why Gmail sent it to Spam.
So user can figure out why legitimate emails got wrongly flagged as Spam, and can prevent such future legitimate emails from falling into Spam folder: User can do this either by adding the sender to Contacts list (Emails from known Contacts are auto-dumped into Spam folder), or by creating a filter to identify and action that message (flag it as Important, or label it with a custom category label, or move it to a specific subfolder, or forward it to another email ID).
>However, if thousands of users report same domain or sender as spam, then the email service provider may take stern action, including blocking the sender email id or domain at the server level, so their messages will never reach your mailbox.
This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer, even if you also happen to send legitimate emails. If anything, it should be applied more broadly. When companies like Walmart or Paypal or LinkedIn or Comcast or whoever spam thousands or millions of people, if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.
> This is a good thing. If you spam thousands of users, you are a spammer
Or you got hacked by a spammer.
> even if you also happen to send legitimate emails.
And also a bad thing. E.g. for the user losing a critical legit email.
> if Gmail marked all their emails as spam until they stopped, that would be a major quality of life improvement for everyone.
Sorry absolutely not for everyone. To me, receiving legit PayPal email is far more important than being protected from PayPal spam, prevented from employing my own protection.
And it uses automated mechanisms to read every Gmail email, so it can train its AI LLMs and to serve more focused ads to its users.
So if a user receives PayPal emails and doesn't mark them as Spam or block them, I'm pretty sure Google interprets that as a user who uses eCommerce websites, and a good target for ada related to that market.
Sure, you can manually unmark them as spam, and gmail should respect that preference as well. But for the rest of us, it would be an improvement if Paypal was sent to spam by default until they were forced to stop sending spam.
I mean if said company first spammed you and you marked them as spam, then it is on them. No different than if someone sent you a bunch of unwanted letters and you threw them out, but one of them happened to be relevant. It's on the organization sending you junk.
Right, and I think that if they send spam, all email providers (especially gmail, the largest provider) should mark all their emails as spam by default. They are doing what is described above at a large scale, so large-scale reactions are needed.
Of course, if you manually mark them as not-spam, then gmail should respect your choice as a user.
> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?
How is it different? It’s different because people do stop voting for right-leaning Democrats who are all talk, and then they lose and Republicans win, and then the Republican voters get exactly what they voted for (and everyone else gets it too).
Republicans control the government, what on Earth do Republican voters have to complain about? They got what they voted for.
If they’re unhappy with the government they should complain to the mirror.
>How is it different? It’s different because people do stop voting for right-leaning Democrats who are all talk, and then they lose and Republicans win, and then the Republican voters get exactly what they voted for (and everyone else gets it too).
Is there any indication this doesn't happen for Republicans? Around a decade ago there was a huge shift in the Republican party from being pro-globalization to protectionist.
I only watched the first few seasons of IASIP, but I don’t remember them being sympathetic characters at all. The whole concept, and what made it funny, I thought, is that they really are all terrible people who just drag each other down.
Yeah, the conceit of Seinfeld was that the characters were crappy, but you liked them because they were funny. But they didn't actually lean into that as hard as, say, the finale would suggest. All of the characters have something sympathetic that you can like about them, even if you can buy the thesis that they are unsympathetic broadly.
The genius of IASIP is to just lean all the way into this trope. The characters are never sympathetic and never redeem themselves. It's almost an experiment in whether you can make people feel sympathetic toward awful (but entertaining) characters just through long familiarity with them. (Yes.)
They were more human and relatable in the very early seasons. It was just a bunch of people dicking around trying to run a bar (for the most part).
As time went on, they become more and more awful.
I'd say it has a pretty decent parallel with Breaking Bad. In season 1 almost anyone can relate to and cheers for Walter. By the last season, you hate him and are happy he dies.
They were committing various felonies in the first season, if I recall. It couldn’t have been more clear that these characters are bad people who will do almost anything to get what they want. The humor lies in the arbitrary and inconsistent boundaries they set for themselves and each other.
Contrast with the initial good intentions of Walt in Breaking Bad. The IASIP characters never had good intentions.
Walt never really had a good intentions. That is what first season done - he had an out and legal access to money. But he was likable and all of the consequences were not yet known.
No way. Everyone hates Walter at the end. If he had plausibly maintained the "I was doing it for my family" pose, then maybe, yeah. But the whole point of the last season was putting that idea to bed, demonstrating that it was always destructive selfishness.
It's just not gonna generate a lot of discussion to say "the intended interpretation of the character is correct". The reason Skylar gets a lot of discussion is that there's a lot of disagreement on the interpretation of that character.
On that topic, I think the perspective you're replying to is cope. It would have been better for everyone (else) involved if he took the money from his smarmy friend, took the abuse from his dick boss at his second job, took the abuse from his asshole rich student, took the subtle jabs from his family. Generally, if he swallowed his pride.
Of course, the whole reason the show had a plot is that he was too proud, too toxically masculine, to go that route. And I think the show's implicit thesis is that self-immolating as Walter did was preferable to enduring the indignity of his life. Certainly, it was more fun for the audience.
This is contrary to you and GP, making the (what I observe to be) common assertion that the show is a parable about the danger of toxic masculinity, and anyone who doesn't believe this is too stupid, sexist, or both to "get it" (parenthetically, where you differ I agree with you - people who think Walter is cool and Skylar annoying are legion). The reason I'm calling this "cope" is that reading the show as a morality play condemning toxic masculinity allows one to enjoy it without guilt. This is moral art! If only all that human filth on the internet were smart enough to realize it!
I just don't buy it, though. I think the show is about how being a monster is cooler than being responsible, in large part because all the people who depend on you to be responsible are so damn annoying.
It's not about masculinity at all, it's just "pride comes before the fall". That is not gendered. Both men and women are entirely capable of being destructively prideful. The reason Walter is a villain is that his prideful destruction isn't merely a self-destruction. He also tears apart a bunch of other lives, including those of his wife and children. Again, I'm sorry, but gender isn't the issue with this, if it were a woman who carved a path of destruction through her family and community, she would also be a villain. (And of course these stories exist too.)
The binary options you've proposed to somewhat vindicate Walter's choices were not the only options available to him. The whole point is that he's so brilliant that he can take over a whole regional drug trade in like a year. Well I'm sorry, but if he could do that, he could also have put his brilliance toward some other wildly successful business venture that would not have required blowing people up and putting his family in danger from like three different gangs of violent criminals. There were other options besides eating shit from his rich friend and boss.
He did what he did because he liked it, and he's responsible for the damage that did to the people around him.
I'll admit I gendered it because that's the discourse I always see.
But anyway - you're speaking to whether Walter's actions were moral. I'm more interested in what is the show's attitude towards his actions. Is the show condemning, or glorifying. I think it's closer to the latter, regardless of how poorly things went for Walter in the end.
> The whole point is that he's so brilliant that he can take over a whole regional drug trade in like a year. Well I'm sorry, but if he could do that, he could also have put his brilliance toward some other wildly successful business venture that would not have required blowing people up and putting his family in danger from like three different gangs of violent criminals.
Sure. But, again, I think this is just another implicit thesis of the show. It's easier and more fun to be an amoral asshole without regard for any of your obligations to anyone else.
Right, the show's position is that he took the "easier and more fun" way, because of his selfish pride, and ended up hurting everyone he cared about, which is why he's the villain. It's very clear about this!
Does he do evil, despicable things? Absolutely. Are most of those things done because of jealousy, rage, or a failure to bother to understand the context in which he's operating? Definitely. But, like, unless you've never been jealous, blindingly angry, foolish, or far too hasty, you can see where (assuming turning yourself in to the cops isn't an option [0]) you might end up making similar choices. [1]
Is he prideful, wrathful, did he do many evil things? Yes, yes, and yes. It's not unreasonable to call his (in)actions -on balance- monstrous. But he's also relatable/understandable in a -er- "Greek tragedy" sort of way. He's a blunderer and a wrecker who probably deserved far worse than he got, but I find it dreadfully difficult to hate him when I consider the entire story.
[0] Which it pretty much immediately absolutely was not. Even at the start, all the money he made would have been forfeit and (because the USian "Drug War" is batshit crazy) prosecutors probably would have found a way to take the house and cars, leaving his family way worse off than if he'd done nothing at all.
[1] Having said that, there are so many points of decision that the odds that you'd walk his path exactly are approximately zero.
This was my screensaver for several years starting in maybe 2001. It felt really cool as a 12 year old to be contributing to the project in some small way.
For a long time I would periodically check on the screen saver in case there would be some big message saying my computer found aliens or something. Never did though :)
I remember seeing a prank program years ago that showed the SETI@home screensaver for a bit, then popped up an alert box saying "Alien Life Found!" with options to submit or cancel(!).
If you tried to submit it would spend a while with a really slow progress bar, and then say it failed to submit and asked you to contact SETI directly. I wonder if anyone actually did....
My dad did a similar thing with a bunch of computers at his store. It made way more sense back when processors didn't clock down efficiently so there was such a thing as 'wasted/excess clock cycles' you could donate to a distributed computing project. Now though processors shut off cores, reduce their clock speed etc so there's a lot less spare processing power you can siphon off without increasing power draw.
True but it was much cheaper when a computer you might have on for other reasons wouldn't consume noticeably more power for your donation, eg computer lab admins which I think made up some of the top contenders of the leader boards. There were definitely groups that would run clusters of computers just for the donation (my dad was one of those too, there was no other reason to run those PCs other than Seti@Home) but for the average home user it was spare cycles that were low cost to free.
I am here to inform you that people were doing this for a variety of reasons, and one of those absolutely was because the cycles were free and going to waste.
Wow! My screensaver was some guy's project to invent running and walking creatures from leverages and wheels via genetic algorithms. I can't remember project name neither .edu domain connected to it.
> May told the publisher, Maxton Books for Little People, that he couldn’t agree to a publishing deal because he didn’t own the copyright in the story he had written.
> Apparently, that state of affairs didn’t sit well with those in charge at Montgomery Ward and the president of the company, Sewall Avery, gave May back the copyright in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. The book was published on October 4, 1947.
Seems hard to believe it was truly that simple, I wonder what additional nuance there might be to it.
Though I have no idea where I'd even begin to research that besides random web searches.
Simple is more likely than complicated, I would think. Given no law suites were involved.
It probably isn't a coincidence that a goodwill gesture was made in the context of a good corporate Christmas story already, around the generation of a new Christmas story. The company's story behind the story got better, while no doubt feeling like a genuine act of good by the decision maker.
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