I spend a huge amount of time working with Python and regularly do things like refactoring and do not run into all of this pain that supposedly exists, and never have. I think that you should stop speaking on behalf of "everyone".
It is worth mentioning that the artist still draws silly comics that are not about politics; they just aren't the ones that get posted here very often.
I think that is a bit of a misleading way of putting it because the feeling being a "self" that is in charge of the body is an experience that is contained within consciousness rather than the essential nature of it; in principle, one could imagine having consciousness without any feeling of being a "self" at all.
If I had to define the nature of consciousness, I would say that it is essentially an internal simulation that the brain creates in order to aggregate information from various sources in order to facilitate processing and decision making. Just to be clear, this is not my own original idea, and more importantly I do not think that it is a particularly clever or deep way of thinking about consciousness, but rather the inevitable conclusion one reaches when one plays around with one's own attention and awareness and sees what happens; the trick is just to do it like a scientist and be constantly challenging one's own conclusions, rather than to invent one's own version of chakras. I find it especially enlightening to watch what the mind does when one tries not to steer it into doing anything; with some practice, it is possible to watch the "self" pretend to be in charge while simultaneously realizing it is not, and this experience can be helpful (though frustratingly I have not found it to be as immediately life-changing as I might have hoped).
That's fair, but my understanding is that Los Angeles is an extreme case rather than a representative example of a typical American city, in part because of its unfortunate location in a valley and in part because of its sprawl. The fact that pollution is particularly hard to control there is why California is legally uniquely able to apply for its own set of automobile pollution regulations that are stricter than the rest of the country.
Sure, but the point is that he was supposedly paying AWS to have multiple backups in multiple regions, which he very carefully set up to maximize redundancy. If, at the end of the day, there is no actual redundancy because AWS itself is actually malicious insofar that it will delete all of your data for no good reason at all and then blame it on you, then they are being very dishonest about their product.
All of the diligence in the world on your end does not matter if, on the AWS end, the employees can and do delete all of your data via fat-fingering without involving you at all, which is what happened here.
I suspect that if this person had known that using AWS was putting all of their data within one wrong key press of being completely deleted without recovery, then they would have reconsidered using AWS.
I spend a huge amount of time working with Python and regularly do things like refactoring and do not run into all of this pain that supposedly exists, and never have. I think that you should stop speaking on behalf of "everyone".