I virtue signaled over a decade ago.

Depends on the person. It sometimes gets into the negative double digits F where I live. Its forecasted to snow around Christmas and I’m hyped as fuck.

To me this smells of typical subsidizing of a product to capture market share then lock in that market share. Anything I’m missing?

That’s exactly it.

From their email:

What you get:

2,000 code suggestions a month: Get context-aware suggestions tailored to your VS Code workspace and GitHub projects.

50 Copilot Chat messages a month: Use Copilot Chat in VS Code and on GitHub to ask questions and refactor, debug, document, and explain code.

Choose your AI model: You can select between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI’s GPT 4o.

Render edits across multiple files: Use Copilot Edits to make changes to multiple files you’re working with.

Access the Copilot Extensions ecosystem: Use third-party agents to conduct web searches via Perplexity, access information from Stack Overflow, and more.

So it’s just a rate limited thing meant to get you signed up and then cut you off right when you get used to it. I get access through work and well, it just sucks.

Class war is war.

The US has literally bombed its citizens on 2 occasions because of class resistance. The military has literally taken up arms against the citizens it swore to protect over class differences. We describe violent clashes between workers and the bourgeoisie as “battles.”

Just because we’ve experienced a period of unprecedented peace doesn’t mean class conflict is over–it will not be over until class is abolished.

Also, revolutions, civil war, and war in general are most often illegal.

The state has convicted and executed innocent people. The average criminal subject to capital punishment has killed an order (or several) of magnitudes fewer people than the health insurance industry.

As a country we seem to weigh more heavily acts of individual violence than those of systemic violence or violence borne of policy even when the latter 2 have far more impactful and wide spread negative results. It’s completely logical to draw a distinction between the 2 circumstances.

I’m not saying all vigilante justice is good, and I wouldn’t necessarily be against the state holding to account executives who have produced systems and policies that result in the harm or death of the state’s citizens, but in the current system justice is rare and in this act millions of people received justice.

When I was about 10 a kid on my block only found out that Santa wasn’t real when he was 13. This sent some ripples through the neighborhood families cause he was now also doubting God. So all the good little Christian parents sat down their kids and reassured them that Santa was fake but Jesus was real. 20 years later I’m an agnostic atheist.

I’ve received gift cards to liquor stores before.

Housed people buy drugs and alcohol. Unhoused people buy drugs and alcohol.

Why is it so much more evil for the latter?

Yes, if you have the means.

I work with a mutual aid group that engages in street outreach. I experience a lot of different cases and pretty much all of them would be benefitted by having more money.

Some people have a job, but not a home, and are trying to get housed

Some people have a home, but not a job and are trying to stay housed

Some people have neither and are trying to stay alive

Some people have both, but are so underpaid for the area they are in and are trying to stay housed

Some people are migrants and it is 100% illegal for them to work in the US and their only source of aid is through asking the community

Not one of them enjoys the situation they are in nor has made an explicit choice to be or stay homeless.

A lot of people who panhandle stay in encampments. These provide a small community with a lot of support structures for those there. There’s often someone who knows how to cook anything with any source of heat, someone who knows how to treat wounds, someone who knows what each person in the camp needs, and someone who’s plugged into the broader community and can get things for those who can’t (not all food pantries or lines are accommodating for wheelchair users and those with mobility issues can have trouble waiting for hours for food or even getting there). My point being that even if your contribution doesn’t help the person asking directly, it likely helps someone they know.

And if you’re worried about the whole “they’ll just spend it on drugs” thing, I honestly wouldn’t. Among the people I work with maybe 1/3 of them use drugs and very very few use anything other than weed. Employed and housed people use weed to unwind, why is it so much more evil if you don’t have a house? And if you’re working with the 2/3 of people that don’t use drugs than it’s not really a concern. I do realize that those numbers might be vastly different in areas that were more harshly hit by opioid issues.