As you know, this is a subjective take. (I enjoy my experience there more now, for example, with less social politics in my feed.)

And their head of product claimed that X only has around 30 FT employees apparently working on it, so it's much more than 80% since then.

https://www.ndtv.com/feature/x-head-of-product-claims-compan...

Just because you agree with the social politics the algorithm is throwing out now vs. before doesn't mean it's not political

Experience is usually a subjective thing. But it seems pretty clear to me. I’m was huge advocate of free speech and a political moderate but X made me question my priors on content moderation. There was genuinely heinous shit on my feed and i had no good way to filter it.

There was? It's full of nazi shit now? What was it before?

I used was because I no longer have an account

I don't use that site much nowadays, but every time I do, I am shocked at just how many fucking bugs there are. This idea that they laid off whatever percentage of their workforce with no impact to the quality of the software is not based in reality whatsoever.

And don't get me started on the UX. Fucking dumpster fire of an experience. But network effects gonna network effect.

It has 30 FT people working on the core product. That isn't counting infra/ai/ads/legal/ etc.

I logged into xitter recently after a long time, and my feed was cluttered with anti immigrant scare stories, western values under threat etc. that I got really scared thinking what the future holds if people are getting brain washed to this extent. It was things I never followed anywhere, so Elon is literally stuffing this crap down everyone's throat. Vibes of invention of radio and television powering the Holocaust.

yeah super great now that you can have gork put kids in bikinis

Would nuclear energy research be a good analogy then? Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons. So we got the weapons but not the humanity saving parts (infinite clean energy)

Nuclear advancements slowed down due to PR problems from clear and sometimes catastrophic failure of commercial power plants (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima) and the vastly higher costs associated with building safer plants.

If anything the weapons kept the industry trucking on - if you want to develop and maintain a nuclear weapons arsenal then a commercial nuclear power industry is very helpful.

Nuclear energy hasn't been slowed down much, let alone stopped. China has been building new reactors every year for more than a decade and there are >30 ones under construction.

The same will go with AI, btw. Westerners' pearl clenching about AI guardrails won't stop China from doing anything.

They copied LLMs from the west. the more the west does the more they have.

> Seems like a path we should have kept running down, but stopped bc of the weapons.

you mean like the tens of billions poured into fusion research?

It's a path we should have never started going down.

I’m married to a Brit and she is constantly in awe of how much better our healthcare is here in the US. And she paid for private insurance there too.

Quality of facilities, low wait times, quality of staff interactions, organization, etc.

She even freaks out about how we have free parking at our doctors and hospitals here!

We’re on corporate insurance.

So why are so many of your citizens without even basic affordable healthcare?

Define "so many". Most people have health insurance through their job, which translates to them having basic affordable healthcare. Not everyone has this, so I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's not some abysmal state of affairs where most of the country is suffering.

They aren't. Anyone can go to the ER, and if you're poor it'll be billed through Medicaid. When I was young and poor, I had a multi-day hospital stay and multiple surgeries that totaled to $3.50 out of pocket. Urgent cares are everywhere and affordable.

I had a cholecystectomy a few years ago and had a complication that caused a gallstone to get lodged in my common bile duct after removal. Three days after surgery I was in the ER, I let them know I was in debilitating pain and that I just had surgery. They made me sit in the waiting room for 8 hours and only took me back when a doctor walked passed and noticed I was jaundiced. After his shift ended, the nurse who was watching me overnight while I waited to have an emergency surgery (because the surgeon had already gone home for the day by the time I got triaged) was told to keep an eye on me and do blood draws hourly. I didn't get seen once and by morning my liver enzymes were so high they were off the testing scale.

Sure you can go to the ER. The level of treatment you get heavily depends on luck

That's a ER triage complaint, not a financing complaint.

ER isn't the only part of healthcare that matters. Most things can be prevented with easy access to GP level care.

ER is for accidents and when health problems get out of hand. If you end up at ER with a preventable problem the system has already failed you.

Only having free access to ER doesn't constitute healthcare.

> Anyone can go to the ER

They'll treat you if you have a heart attack and make it in alive. They won't put you on blood thinners or statins 10 years before that to keep you out of the ER in the first place.

I don't think ERs do chemotherapy either.

Yup, ERs are not a replacement for actual medical care.

Their only goal/duty is to stabilize you during an acute medical emergency so you don't immediately die.

>> so many of your citizens without even basic affordable healthcare

> They aren't. Anyone can go to the ER, and if you're poor it'll be billed through Medicaid.

You guys are both wrong, and arguing with broad brushes about something that's complicated and subtle.

Health insurance is available to everyone in the country, but it's expensive and extremely complicated (among other things: you don't "bill through" Medicaid and lots of folks who qualify aren't on it because they can't figure it out).

It's true that the pre-ACA world where getting sick without employer-provided insurance means dying poor is gone. Almost everyone who needs serious care in the US gets it in some form, but lots of care is delayed because people aren't covered, as getting covered is "affordable" but extremely expensive (unsubsidized family plans run $20k/year and up!). It's much better than it used to be but not a great system.

The flip side is that it's also true that the large-payer corporate insurance system provides "better" care in the sense of access and outcomes[1] than the state-run systems in Europe. It's extremely rare in the US to hear the "on a waiting list" stories about elective care that you hear especially in regard to the NHS.

It's complicated, basically, and not well-suited to yelling on the internet.

[1] Obviously the system pays for this with much (and I mean much) higher service rates than the rest of the world extracts for the same care. US doctors and health systems do very well.

What do you do to address health concerns before they become ER-level?

Medicaid or ACA subsidized insurance

It’s good if you’re rich I assume

Not "rich", but "employed by a major corporation". Large-payer private insurance in the US is fine and produces outcomes at or above the level you see in the rest of the industrialized world. All the yelling is about ACA plans and subsidy programs.

Healthcare trilemma

US healthcare is excellent – if you can afford it.

Yeah that's the crux isn't it? Either you provide healthcare for everyone and thus have to ration it or you make it unavailable for the poors.

What is the 'INSERTNAME' law that explains how all conversations on HN, which is ostensibly focused on tech, devolve (evolve) into the realm of the humanities?

Seems like a corollary of Godwin’s Law.

UK isn't EU, especially when it comes to health system. I lived in the US for quite some time (from Fr), the healthcare is great... if you can afford an expensive health insurance AND pay some extra money when required. The avg US people can not pay and when you can not pay the experience is just far worth than terrible.

I think the consensus is the biggest danger of a nuclear weapon being used is that it will result in way more nuclear weapons being used.

The specific damage of a single nuclear weapon is far outweighed by thousands of them hitting population centers in an escalation of force

They have worked recently to implement a self-hosted tax submission system and given their rate of return while there may be some mismanagement it is one of the most provably efficient organizations in the government netting 415$ for every dollar of funding in 2024.

Isn’t that a completely bizarre metric though in this instance??! It is specifically the revenue generating arm of the government. If it wasn’t running at a “surplus” that would be very concerning indeed.

No the point is that if the IRS was at maximum efficiency, more funding wouldn't increase revenues because tax law is tax law: you can't market it or expand the customer base.

But if every new dollar currently produces much more then a dollar in returns, it means it's underfunded because taxes that should be collected, that by legal analysis would be planned for in budgeting, aren't.

And that matters for a great many things, but one reason is that if you pay taxes and want a tax cut then one reason you're not getting it is because actual revenues are lower then they should be due to uncollected taxes.

AKA tax fraud steals from the honest tax payer.

Most law enforcement related entities end up being a money sink while enforcing our laws - the IRS actually runs a substantial profit while enforcing laws and additional funding would increase that funding. This also isn't a case like asset forfeiture where the money being collected is arguably unwarranted and shouldn't be taken from citizens. The IRS's "profit" ends up coming purely from catching people trying to commit fraud and enforcing the laws as written.

I did no verification on whether that metric is correct or not, but I would suspect the metric would be only measuring the amount of revenue the IRS "generated" from doing manual work like audits. The regular, I owe 1,000 in taxes, and I paid 1,000 in taxes. Wouldn't be considered +1,000 in that case, it would be excluded from the metric altogether. Only the additional "findings" from audits would be counted.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have an IRS, and I think IRS agents are probably one of the best ROI gov't employees possible, but 8,500 IT engineers and managers (who I have heard literally didn't even know how to code) makes no sense at all

I don't work in the IRS so I'm not certain what all of that is doing - but here we've got an organization that is highly efficient that's being targeted and downsized for political reasons. If we want to discuss wasteful government spending we need look no further than the DoD which still hasn't passed an internal audit for the past eight consecutive years. I don't know how the DoD is spending its money - that's fair, I'm just a rando... but the DoD doesn't know how the DoD is spending its money and that's purely absurd. The scales of budgets are also astronomically different - the DoD has a projected budget of 961 billion this year while the IRS has a projected budget of 11.9 billion - and that 11.9 billion ends up producing a large amount of excess revenue for the government.

I'm sure there's waste in the IRS - but these budget cuts are not being done in good faith.

They built IRS Direct File which was a huge improvement. Then the administration killed it to serve tax prep companies.

The tax code is complex and Direct File isnt the only IRS digital service. It was built by F18 and USDS. You should inform yourself instead of being hysterical about numbers. If you inform yourself the numbers aren’t so scary.

> I'd be more impressed we got rid of income tax on salaried people ...

All amazing ideas (I mean that seriously) but unfortunately not within the IRS's power to make happen.

You know FreeTaxUSA uses Direct File on the backend, right?

They have 150 million paying "customers" (not including businesses) and bring in $5 trillion+ yearly.

Consider that many millions of those "customers" need to hire a professional for hundreds/thousands of dollars to properly interact with the IRS.

That's not the IT department's problem. Well, they'll get blamed, but that's pretty on-brand for IT departments.

It's not the IT department's fault, but it makes one wonder if the IT department needs to actually be that large, since customers need to do so much on their own.

Per capita the UK has 2.5x the IT workers in tax collection compared to the US (~25 IT per million vs 65 IT per million). But, those tax collection IT workers help create a system which means UK citizens don't spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year just to file their taxes.

I don't think this is the current administration to fix the IRS, given the whole Social Security scam SNAFU.

The public sector is where you need 12 people (and a project manager) to build an Access database.

And the private sector is how the US has arrived at a miserable, unworkable healthcare system and an out of control carceral system.

Today's Health insurance and health care is entirely a product of government intervention on multiple layers.

Health insurance being tied to employment benefits is because the IRS taxes money, but not benefits, for example.

Is there a single private sector more removed from market incentives than healthcare?

And yet all countries with socialized systems pay less per capita for healthcare than we do and pretty much all have better health outcomes. Further privatizing our system will only make it more dis-functional. Healthcare isn't a normal marketplace. * When you really need it, you can't shop around. * There is a knowledge asymmetry built in. * A civilized society can't just let poor children die of preventable causes.

> I call in about an issue and he charges me $75 for telehealth. Then he wants me to come in to run labs for the telehealth call. Another $75 at least.

I live in EU country with public universal healthcare and healthcare over here looks exactly the same. These cunts travel to US on holidays and as kickbacks, and salivate at how the American healthcare is "organized".

I loved it when I got an $80k bill because the provider was playing chicken with insurance. It's a terrible system.

Is that very different from what Joe Gebbia is doing now as chief design officer? Seems to be largely a rebranding of 18F's mission with different people and prioritization

I am so confused when I read things like this because my Tesla model 3 is effectively self driving for me for months now. Hundreds of miles without intervention. No other car I can buy can do this yet

That’s irresponsible at best give it doesn’t support full self driving. I never understood why end users are allowed to just beta test a car on public roads.

Is it responsible to let users do auto speed and auto lane on a high speed highway without other autopilot features ?

Rollout both technologies at scale , and try to guess with one will cause more harm giving th fact there will be users in both cars trying to put legs on a steering wheel :

A stupid tech that will not even try to do safe things

Or software that is let’s say 4x less safe vs avg human but still very capable of doing maneuvering without hitting obvious walls etc ?

Giving people more ways to shut themselves in the foot does not improve the safety. I find the entire thing a kind of dark pattern as the system along with misleading marketing makes you lax over time just to catch you off guard.

You get used with the system to work correctly and then when you expect less it does the unthinkable and the whole world blames you for not supervising a beta software product on the road on day 300 with the same rigour you did on day one.

I can see a very direct correlation with LLM systems. Claude has been working great for me until one day when it git reset the entire repo and I’ve lost two days work because it couldn’t revert a file it corrupted . This happened because I just supervised it just like you would supervise a FSD car with “bypass” mode. Fortunately it didn’t kill anyone , just two days of work lost. If there was the risk of someone being killed I would never allow a bypass /fsd/supervise mode regardless of how unlikely this is to happen.

they have very good guardrails to prevent you that, unlike autolane etc.

Teslas has sensors , eye trackers etc is it possible to shoot yourself in the leg, sure. But not in any different way vs human doing irrational things in the car, make up, arguing , love etc.

Human-being is an irrational create that should not drive except for fun in isolated environment. Tesla or Waymo or anyone else.... It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.

>> It is good to remove human from the road, the faster the better.

I’m all for this but not to replace dumb people with dumb software. I think the FSD should be treated more like the airplane safety. We have the opportunity to do this right not just what’s the cheapest way we can get away with it.

well, if you don't read news that try to panic about everything new, that's +- exactly how people currently use FSD.

When I'm driving FSD If i want to drink, eat, etc, instead of doing weird one hand tricks every driver did, i just turn FSD and let it drive. When I'm tired , I'm doing the same. Again , attention control works really good, it doesn't let you sit on the phone etc. unlike many other cars with less advanced features. You can't be on FSD + Phone but you can easily be on the phone + lane control in other car.

Phone is by far the biggest real killer of people, and no body is trying to create a campaign against phone mounts, etc.

The fact other cars are less safe doesn’t automatically make yours safe.

Legally Teslas are Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, while Waymos for example are Automated Driving Systems.

If you're driving a vehicle in the former category, you'll be on the hook for reckless driving if you aren't fully supervising the vehicle.

I'm pretty sure the original commenter was supervising the driving, though.

Except for their limited Robotaxi service. They have recently ditched their safety driver as well, so there is truly no one "driving" the car.

Well, I didn’t say that they did it well

Based on the self driving trials in my Model Y, I find it terrifying that anyone trusts it to drive them around. It required multiple interventions in a single 10-minute drive last time I tried it.

I'm using FSD for 100% of my driving and only need to intervene maybe once a week. It's usually because the car is not confident of too slow, not because it's doing something dangerous. Two years ago it was very different where almost every trip I needed to intervene to avoid crash. The progress they have made is truly amazing.

Would you use FSD with your children in the car? I sure as hell wouldn’t. Progress is not safety.

Yes I do in fact use FSD with my children in the car.

I pray for you and them. You need it

Oh well that's because you aren't using V18.58259a, I follow Elon's X and he said FSD is solved in that update. Clearly user error.

How long ago was that? I doubt it was the v14 software. The software has become scary good in the last few weeks, in my own subjective experience.

This exact sentence (minus the specific version) is claimed every single week.

No, you do not "become scary good" every single week the past 10 years and yet still not be able to drive coast to coast all by itself (which Elon promised it would do a decade ago)

You are just human and bad at evaluating it. You might even be experiencing literal statistical noise.

I have not been proclaiming scary good every week for the last 10 years. In fact, I have cancelled my subscription at least two times, once on v13 and once on v14, with the reason ‘not good enough yet.’ I am telling you that for me personally it has crossed a threshold very recently.

It certainly wasn't in the past few weeks, but I've been hearing about how good it's gotten for years. Certainly not planning to pay to find out if it's true now, but I'll give it another try next free trial!

Make sure you are on AI4 hardware when you do. If you buy FSD on AI3 you’ll be limited to v13, which is is terrible. I have used both and they are in different leagues altogether.

You need only look at Tesla's attempts to compete with Waymo to see that you are just wrong. They tried to actually deploy fully autonomous Teslas, and it doesn't really work, it requires a human supervisor per car.

They are behind Waymo but they are getting there. They started giving fully autonomous drives since last month without safety driver in Austin. Tesla chose a harder camera-only approach but it's more scalable once it works.

Waymo can go camera-only in the future too by training a camera-only model alongside their camera+lidar model.

They'll probably get there faster too because the decisions the camera+lidar model makes can be used to automatically evaluate the camera-only model.

Clearly at this point the camera-only thing is the ego of Musk getting in the way of the business, because any rational executive would have slapped a LIDAR there long ago.

Why is it more scalable? LIDAR is cheap now.

>more scalable

It's cheaper, that's all it is.

Which using a five-dollar word to describe a one-cent fact.

Scalability is usually about O(n²) vs O(n log n) or something, not a smaller constant that's significant but not a game changer.

Not if they have to have remote drivers ready to help out with the "autonomous" system.

...if it works.

Tesla have recently started introducing unsupervised cars cars as well.

Yes, they moved the "safety driver" into a chase car.

And the results speak for themselves.

https://www.gurufocus.com/news/8623960/tesla-tsla-robotaxi-c...

And seemingly only along one stretch of road? Like, this happened in Dublin in 2018: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/driverles... - going up and down a stretch of road is about as easy as it gets.

> Mr Keegan said he was “pretty confident” that in “the next five to 10 years” driverless vehicles would “make a major contribution in terms of sustainable transport” on Dublin’s streets.

As always, people were overoptimistic back then, too. There are currently no driverless vehicles in Dublin at all, with none expected anytime soon unless you count the metro system (strictly speaking driverless, but clearly not what he was talking about).

A bus crashing into a stationary Tesla counts as a crash for Tesla? What in the world is this metric?

Ask Musk why he refuses to provide details of accidents so we can make a judgment.

Tesla’s own Vehicle Safety Report claims that the average US driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles, meaning the robotaxi fleet is crashing four times more often even by the company’s own benchmark.

https://www.automotiveworld.com/news/tesla-robotaxis-reporti...

I don't see how we could know the rate of US driver minor collisions like that. No way most people reporting 1-4mph "collisions" with things like this.

You don't have to know. You can fully remove the few "minor" accidents (that a self driving car shouldn't be doing ever anyway) and the Tesla still comes out worse than a statistical bucket that includes a staggering number of people who are currently driving drunk or high or reading a book

The car cannot be drunk or high. It can't be sleepy. It can't be distracted. It can't be worse at driving than any of the other cars. It can't get road rage. So why is it running into a stationary object at 17mph?

Worse, it's very very easy to take a human that crashes a lot and say "You actually shouldn't be on the road anymore" or at least their insurance becomes expensive. The system in all of these cars is identical. If one is hitting parked objects at 17mph, they would almost all do it.

You and I must not drive the same Tesla brand then because my Model Y is a terrifying experience when “self-driving” anywhere besides on highways.

I do wonder if folks who say Tesla’s FSD works well and safely are simply lacking a self-preservation instinct.

Even on highways I've had to intervene maybe once every 50 miles as it will often miss exits for me. This is a 2025 Model 3 with the latest 14.2 update in a major US metro.

Hundreds of miles is not an appropriate sample size for the technology's intended scale.

See this related article and discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051546

"No other car I can buy can do this yet"

How many have you tested in your day to day life?

"dude trust me"

Can you watch a Netflix and have a beer while it's driving? No? Then it's not self driving.

The data from their self driving pilots disagrees even if it works for you. Its simply not read to be a taxi that makes money by itself.

It might a nice feature for your car to have. But most people aren't paying for it, the conversion rate is very low.

So they are not making money from taxis and not making much money from software sales.

So does it matter that for you personally it drives you around sometimes?

Even if you price in a 4x increase in FSD buy conversion ratio, you can't explain the stock price.

And I say this as a former Tesla investor who assumed that conversion ratio would be better then it is. But for that reason (and many others) I couldn't justify the valuation and dropped the stock.

It's a very capable L2 system, it's just that it's been a very capable L2 system for a while now, and it still seems far away from reaching L4.

And of course, Musk's insistence that they don't need other sensor types like lidar or radar definitely looks like it's getting in the way.

Because if you get in an accident you personally not Tesla are liable. Soon as I’m not liable for an accident when the computer is driving I’d sell my other cars and put my family in pink PT Cruisers if those were the only cars offering that

Ask those who were killed while using FSD for their opinion on it before forming your own ;)

I am confused as to why you think no interventions in "hundreds of miles" is good enough. It has to be no interventions for hundreds of thousands of miles WITH THE CAR BEING EMPTY to be good enough.

Months where you’re still required to be paying attention. Meanwhile 2 years ago Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot a level 3 system let you sit and watch a movie without paying attention to the road.

Personally that’s way more useful for me even if they didn’t let you turn it on at highway speeds.

Actually Mercedes killed their Drive Pilot for now https://insideevs.com/news/784404/mercedes-level-3-drive-pil...

They canceled it because of poor adoption rather than any technical issues.

Which if anything looks worse for Tesla long term. If luxury car owners aren’t willing to pay 200$/month for self driving then trying to up charge people buying used model 3 and Y’s after canceling the S and X looks dubious. Which means that 100$/month subscription likely loses them money vs an 8k purchase.

Mercedes system was pretty useless because you could only use it in very limited conditions (specific freeways, only following another car). Nobody wants to pay $200/month to use it for 5% of their driving. Tesla FSD drives for you end-to-end.

Most people have a rather consistent commute, so the Mercedes was a more like a 0% or 80% kind of thing. The issue was adding more roads wasn’t going to help, the underlying benefit to attention free driving just wasn’t that valuable even to customers who could use the system regularly.

They are looking to reintroduce it with a much higher top of 81MPH which might help, but agin my issue isn’t with the particular system but the underlying assumption of how much people value attention free driving.

People need to stop with this. The MB system was level 3 on like 0.1% of roads only in 5% of cases when you actually where on that road.

That's kind of like saying 'look this algorithm is awesome' if we feed it all the data in the optimal order.

The new robot demos from Unitree make me wonder how many classes of unskilled labor are about to be automated (garbage collection, laundry & dishes, pothole repairs, last mile delivery, simple food preparation…)

Skilled labor still has some legs.

I don't see any humanoid robots around at the moment, whereas a huge number of knowledge based workplaces use non-embodied AI now every day.

Can't wait for silent robots to collect the garbage, human ones seem to enjoy making as much racket as they can.

There are already human-operated robots that collect garbage. Things like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pl9vRCC6V0. If the automated robots end up being anything like that, I wouldn't expect them to be silent.

The set of people who believe the automobile (or the Internet) are net negatives taken as a whole for society is extremely small, for good reason

Is it? Do you include everyone that’s died or lost a loved one due to personal automobiles in that assessment?

We are so far post automobile that it’s hard to compare, but many of the benefits are illusionary when you consider how society has evolved with them as commutes for example used to be shorter. Similarly the air used to be far cleaner and that’s after we got rid of leaded gas and required catalytic converters decades ago.

How many people have lived or had a loved one saved due to automobiles?

We have the benefit of hindsight but we're also making judgment calls looking back on fuzzy recollections, forgetting just how the past used to be before an innovation came along.

I agree it’s difficult to do these calculations as society evolves with technology. Trains enable long distance evacuation from hurricanes. Street cars and subways allow for medical transportation but it looks very different than an ambulance. Similarly do we exclude helicopters assuming cars were simply banned rather than our failing to design IC engines or whatever.

That said, there are modern enclaves without cars mostly on islands or in very remote locations. They make due just fine without cars, it’s the low population density that’s at issue for medical care.

Let's refine terms - internal combustion engine driven automobiles have lead to lead poisoning, air pollution, and CO2 emissions.

The automobile on its own was actually far less polluting than the horse wrt. air quality. It's just that there's a whole lot more of the former than there ever was of the latter. Even wrt. climate change, it turns out that horses produce methane emissions which are far worse for the climate than carbon dioxide.

You are immensely discounting induced demand though.

induced demand is a good thing - it means there is more utility going around.

I would like to get actual numbers.

1. how many people died because of lead poisoning, air pollution?

2. how many people were saved and had qualitatively better lives because of automobiles?

1. Is a very hard question to answer, airborne lead pollution isn't fatal, but it does impact cognition. Perhaps ask yourself how many people lead lower quality lives because of it, and the flow-on effects from that lower cognition.

The people who did Freakonomics claimed that the drop in violent crime in the US in the 90s could be correlated to the phasing out of leaded fuel, but I'm not a statistician so can't speak to the accuracy of that correlation.

2. How would you even measure that? How would you define a better life thanks to a vehicle?

I feel like you're ice skating uphill a little given the deleterious effects of leaded fuels are well studied, but the question you're asking isn't.

That reason is along the lines of, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Coal miners will fight for coal mines, the oil industry will fight for dependence on oil, and so on. Sometimes they’re aware of what they’re doing, but in the case of a comment like the above, apparently not so much.

Well you could not sue the video-editing software for someone making child pornography with it. You would, quite sanely, go after the pedophiles themselves.