Wow, a Lain meme was not something I was expecting.

I should watch that show again sometime, I still have the DVDs somewhere I think.

But that’s exactly what they just said isn’t UBI, with UBI you’d get to keep the money while working if you wanted to. “Universal” means everyone gets it, not just people who “claim to be uncomfortable working”.

For those wondering, this is from “Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness”, by the inestimable Zach Weinersmith.

I mean, the linked Wikipedia article literally describes for many of them who coined the terms and, in some cases, why. “The Greatest Generation” is the title of a contemporary book about the people who fought in World War 2 (and their cohort), and the name became popular as a way to describe people of that cohort.

I’m always keen to shit on Google, but, this is about “having search terms in the query string” and “having links that take you directly to the thing you clicked on without any redirect dance to obfuscate the Referer header”. With all the other shit to legitimately complain about from Google, this seems so silly to focus on. Google isn’t even the one that sent the Referer header, that would be your browser (which, Chrome didn’t exist yet at the time). RFC1945, from 1996, for HTTP 1.0, even explicitly stated that any application that communicates over HTTP (i.e. a web browser) should offer the user a configuration option to disable sending Referer headers.

Edit: slight clarification, Chrome did exist during part of the time period that the lawsuit covers, though it only started to pick up serious market share towards the end of the relevant time period.

Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick at 44 minutes, or their A Passion Play at 45 (each was an entire vinyl album on both sides for a single song, though some CD/mp3 re-releases later split them into multiple chunks for easier navigation).

There are times when it’s useful to engage these people, though never for the purpose of convincing them. Sometimes, there’s an opportunity to provide a counterpoint for anyone else “listening” who hasn’t yet been sucked into crazy-town, to help keep them away from that path.

I like to put it that “science education isn’t a cure, it’s a vaccine”; you can’t realistically change the mind of someone (especially of a stranger) who’s already bought in to a mindset like this; but in some cases, you can help prevent it from spreading.

That said, if you’re not particularly good at e.g. public speaking, or science outreach, or whatever, you can end up playing into a troll’s hands (assuming you’re interacting with an intentional troll and not just a deluded person). So it can be tricky, and personally I’m not very good at it.