It was so fucking funny. I wonder what the engineer thought, who had to issue the SQL query which added Bono to literally everyone's collection. Like, I'm not surprised that management was so out of touch, but I'd expect the engineers to have a bit of common sense...
"We wanted to deliver a pint of milk to people's front porches, but in a few cases it ended up in their fridge, on their cereal. People were like, 'I'm dairy-free.'" -Bono
Literally imagining the milk man bursting in to dump a gallon of milk on some poor sod's cereal this morning.
Not only that, but the milk man also acts like he did them a huge favor. And hides his huge fortune in a tax haven, while relentlessly campaigning for the government to increase the tax burden on those who actually pay taxes.
>Despite being well known for his extensive charity work, Bono has previously faced backlash over his tax dealings, with critics claiming that he could have helped to eliminate poverty if U2’s tax base remained based in Ireland.
>Instead, it previously transpired that U2 often put their money through the Netherlands, where tax rates have reportedly resulted in increased profits for the Irish rock icons.
>Two years ago, Bono dismissed the criticism as “just some smart people we have working for us trying to be sensible about the way we’re taxed. And that’s just one of our companies, by the way. There’s loads of companies”.
I feel like that's the kind of thing it's easy to not recognise as a terrible idea until after it's done, because so much of what makes it a bad idea is a consequence of the rest of the system.
Imagine if everything else surrounding the Apple ecosystem worked better. Imagine if people who don't actively use Apple Music never experienced Apple Music starting to play music by itself. Imagine if people who do use Apple Music never had an album play without being actively interacted with. Imagine if the album cover wasn't low-key softcore gay porn. Imagine if you could "uninstall" an album you own, like how you can uninstall an app you own and never ever see it again unless you actively go out of your way to search for it on the App Store.
Would it still have been a violation of consent? Sure, yeah it would. But almost everything people complain about is related to how it starts to play when they don't want to (an issue with iOS/macOS and Apple Music that would be annoying regardless), or how the album cover sometimes unintentionally pops up on your screen (such as when you hit the play/pause button on Mac when macOS doesn't think that there's any active paused media, so macOS opens Apple Music), or how there is no way for them to get rid of the album once they own it. These things are pretty large problems regardless of Songs of Innocence.
I can sort of understand an engineer thinking that surely there can't be any major downsides to just giving away a digital good. And if the rest of iOS, macOS's, Apple Music and the album itself didn't have all these issues, it wouldn't have been much of an issue. Again, it would've been a consent violation, but developers at tech companies aren't exactly known for valuing consent anyway and everyone would've certainly forgot it by now.
> Imagine if people who don't actively use Apple Music never experienced Apple Music starting to play music by itself.
Nice dream. My wireless headphones act like in the manual when paired with my phone, but the buttons on them always start apple music when paired with my laptop instead of muting or controlling noise canceling.
>> I feel like that's the kind of thing it's easy to not recognise as a terrible idea until after it's done
I don't even think it was a terrible idea. It was just one of those things lots of people irrationally hooked on to. "We're giving you all a free record". Enough people made it 'bad' because people like to make a fuss. The only real issue with it was the inability to remove it which they later rectified.
Eh no, sorry. The practical result is that a ton of people who have absolutely no interest in U2 has Songs of Innocence start playing when they don't want it. It plays when people turn on their cars. It plays when people connect to Bluetooth speakers. It plays when people want to resume Spotify playback but Spotify got killed in the background. It plays when people want to resume the YouTube video they were watching but macOS lost track of what's paused. It's a truly terrible idea in practice.
Apple didn't really rectify the inability to remove it. They released a removal tool, but that tool is long defunct. The only way to remove it these days is to contact Apple Support, from what I can tell on the web.
Is there any reasonable situation where you'd be confusing a vector with an interval? Having done mathematical writing and grading of tests using both styles of notation (simply adapting to what was used at the institution), I can't say that I ever noticed any practical difference between them.
Why was your mom your last resort? And why did you lie to her?
Is this that American thing, where kids move to a different city at 18 and only visit their parents once a year for Thanksgiving?
I'm in pretty much daily contact with my parents and siblings. They always know what I'm up to, what my financial situation is, and they would be my first contact in case of any difficulties.
Stupidly, yes, with carpet bombing. Practically, no, that would be horrible. More horrible, possibly, than taking out the power and water infrastructure.
We can't carpet bomb to regime change. But we can probably depopulate critical areas around the coasts while ships transit. It's stupidly expensive, both in materiel and collateral cost. But it's feasible. Whether we have the bomb-production is a separate question to which I don't have the answer.
> probably depopulate critical areas around the coasts while ships transit.
(looks at map) the city of Bandar Abbas, population ~500k? It's already being hit as it contains the Iranian Navy HQ, but actually depopulating it is a much bigger project.
Depopulation won't stop the IRGC from digging up a Shahed buried in the sand and launching it. The range is so great you would have to pacify the entire east of Iran, an absolutely impossible task.
> Depopulation won't stop the IRGC from digging up a Shahed buried in the sand
Carpet bombing. You don’t get to bury things in the sand, much less unbury them. It’s an old tactic—shaping movement with artillery—except done with remote pieces.
> range is so great you would have to pacify the entire east of Iran
West. Also, I don’t think so. Just critical zones. Worst case, only U.S. escorted and Iran toll-paying ships get through. (Worst case for the world. Not the belligerents. Which…that might be the solution.)
“Operation Crimp began on January 7, 1966, with B-52 bombers dropping 30-ton loads of high explosive onto the region of Củ Chi, effectively turning the once lush jungle into a pockmarked moonscape. Eight thousand troops from the U.S. 1st Infantry Division, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team (including an artillery battery of the Royal Regiment of New Zealand Artillery), and the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment combed the region looking for any clues of PLAF activity.
The operation did not bring about the desired success.
[…]
By 1969, B-52s were freed from bombing North Vietnam and started "carpet bombing" Củ Chi and the rest of the Iron Triangle. Towards the end of the war, some of the tunnels were so heavily bombed that some portions actually caved in, and other sections were exposed. But the bombings were not able to destroy most parts of those tunnels.”
Carpet bombing doesn't cover a large area. Besides which there is nowhere to stage so an enormous campaign that isn't also in reach of one way drones.
The vast areas in the East are where you can strike shipping. You would only strike the West if your intention was to kill Iranians rather than end the war.
Nor did WW2 England. Look, Churchill had like 24 approval rate after Dunkerque, and the 'british Hitler' had 18%. Bombing London moved those percentages _very_ fast. 'do nothing, win' people have a point most of the time.
Trump casually talks about destroying the energy infrastructure, power plants, desalination plants etc. This is one of the most controversial things that the Russians do in Ukraine - attack the grid when it's cold to try and freeze people to death. To willingly deprive a country of 100,000,000 people of water and power coming into summer would surely be a war-crime.
Different goals. Carpet bombing to deny Iran access to its coast is maneouvre warfare. It’s tactical. Carpet bombing to force Kyiv to capitulate is strategic bombing. It has never worked.
You can't deny access to a coast that large with carpet bombing, especially in a mountainous terrain. It has never worked. You'd need tens to hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground to do that.
If you wanted to try it with bombs, it would take continual re-dropping of hundreds of thousands of bombs every few hours to cover (1600km * 8km) to keep people out, even assuming they have 0 shelter or cover.
> can't deny access to a coast that large with carpet bombing, especially in a mountainous terrain. It has never worked. You'd need tens to hundreds of thousands of boots on the ground to do that
I think this is more an open question than “it has never worked.” Nobody has tried to area deny FPV-drone navigators. Bases on lines of sight and line channels, one could probably back out from transit paths to the places one would need to be to hit that target, and then ensure anything there is turned from psychology to biology before a critical moment. You couldn’t do this with smart munitions, and couldn’t along the entire Hormuz coast. But for critical junctures that our closest allies (minus Kuwait) need to export? The math seems feasible, if fundamentally untackled.
> I think this is more an open question than “it has never worked.”
I don't think so – we were talking about continually carpet bombing Iran to continually deny them access to a 1600km-long coastline. That simply has never worked. Not in Iran, not elsewhere to my knowledge.
> Bases on lines of sight and line channels, one could probably back out from transit paths to the places one would need to be to hit that target
That describes pretty much anywhere in the 7000+ square kilometers we're talking about. A drone doesn't need a runway. Anywhere you can fit a large pickup truck, you can launch a Shaheed drone.
> Nobody has tried to area deny FPV-drone navigators.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Deny the area to Iran's FPV drones? If so, how? Use FPV drones to deny the area? If so, how? We're talking about continually patrolling 7,000+ square kilometers. The USA has never fielded such a system, and has no publicly known capabilities to do so.
I don’t see how they’ll have different results, just because the aim is different. You just… take cover. Then come back once the planes fly away and continue what you were doing.
Iran already had severe water problems. Attacking the water infrastructure would definitely cause huge civilian casualties. Israel is used to that. Not clear whether America is ready to go into the midterms with an official policy of US-flagged genocide.
There has been (I think) relatively minor hits. And Iran has retaliated in kind (see the latest hit on Kuwaiti desalination plant).
The thing is that while Iran's water infrastructure is vulnerable, the Gulf states are much more reliant on desalination ... and hitting them hard there would be a total disaster ... which Iran is capable of doing, but has so far refrained.
> Attacking the water infrastructure would definitely cause huge civilian casualties
I personally think there is a wide barrier between electrical and water infrastructure. But given water infra has allegedly been hit already, it doesn’t feel like it’s off the table for both sides the way it once was.
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