You used their project to self-promote your site, in a way that someone perceived as violating their AI policy, and now you're using that trivial slight to cry here for attention so that you can further try to self-promote your site, using the account that you use solely to self-promote your site. You seemingly posted multiple blog posts about this non-incident, also to try to self-promote your site.
Please consider that other people are human beings and not just NPCs that exist to help you make money.
Many working novelists have described being pressured by their publishers to write whatever the publisher believes will sell, and many have given in to the pressure because ultimately they need to eat. Arthur Conan Doyle famously kept writing Sherlock Holmes stories despite hating it, because the public and his publishers demanded it. The foreword to Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard Of Earthsea talks about how she was convinced to write a children's/YA book despite not really wanting to.
The post you're replying to maybe overstated things, but was much closer to reality than your post.
"Hating", no. He wanted to write books like The White Company. He could have done! But Holmes was more popular, so he asked a higher price, got paid, and continued with the Holmes. This is like a dialog with the public. It's not that he had instructions such as now make Holmes a vampire and was compelled to obey. The level of his obedience to the public was modulated by his level of liking money. Less money and more freedom was an option. I can't find the Le Guin foreword, but I wonder in what way she was convinced.
But anyway, no, you are not on rails in your creative "job", and it is self-directed, unless you think you're compelled to make X amount of money and thus have no choice but to write loathed vampire books, without even the option to go and work more happily in a factory.
I mean it literally starts with "What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea", and later calls them a "bagbiter". If you were responsible for the change, you would feel insulted. His basic point seems valid, but this is not a great way to present it.
Marc was an old school hacker, so bagbiter is a term of endearment, completely sanitized. "Chomp chomp!"
bagbiter /bag'bi:t-*r/ n.
1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!" 2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: loser, cretin, chomper. 3. `bite the bag' vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag."
The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we have reports of "Bite the douche bag!" being used as a taunt at MIT 1970-1976, and we have another report that "Bite the bag!" was in common use at least as early as 1965), but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized.
ITS's lexiphage program was the first and to date only known example of a program intended to be a bagbiter.
chomp: vi.
1. To lose; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth.
2. To bite the bag; See bagbiter.
A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the four fingers together and place the thumb against their tips. Now open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means ‘chomp chomp’ (see Verb Doubling in the Jargon Construction section of the Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to a person is equivalent to saying “You chomper!” If you point the gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated it.
Marc also wrote RFC #748 documenting the Telnet Randomly-Lose Option on April 1, 1978:
IAC WILL RANDOMLY-LOSE
The sender of this command REQUESTS permission to, or confirms
that it will, randomly lose.
IAC WON'T RANDOMLY-LOSE
The sender of this command REFUSES to randomly lose.
IAC DO RANDOMLY-LOSE
The sender of this command REQUESTS that the receiver, or grants
the receiver permission to, randomly lose.
IAC DON'T RANDOMLY-LOSE
The command sender DEMANDS that the receiver not randomly lose.
Many fireworks are designed to explode at altitude. The biggest risk is probably if the firework is ingested into an engine (also a major risk for bird strikes).
Given the sheer quantity of energy that's already being continuously released in an engine would a small firework actually pose more danger than a bird? There's no bones in a firework after all.
Even small bird strikes are usually a non-event, as the engines are designed to withstand them (there's a very well-known YouTube video of frozen chickens being fired into one, and those are already a lot bigger and harder than most birds they'll encounter.) It's the big ones that make the news.
I'm not aware of any organization that has the same requirements to fund its future pension obligations that the USPS has. That requirement was created by Congress as part of a sustained campaign to damage the USPS.
It seems like your argument is actually that Congress should rescind that requirement, so that USPS can afford to better service urban customers while continuing to be a critical lifeline to rural areas.
USPS is also not paying for the pensions that they already incurred, and those are actually even larger ($20bn/yr).
Anyway, Congress did already rescind the requirement that USPS prefund the pensions (a 57bn debt forgiveness), but this is all just hiding the ball, the 9bn in pension liabilities being incurred now are real. Even if you don't prefund them now, an honest accounting says that these are part of your costs today.
A privatized USPS would likely get rid of pensions entirely.
Well, if postal services were provided by normal private companies, then there would be none (or less) of that kind of political interference you are complaining about here.
Curly braces are a very uncommon piece of punctuation outside of math and programming. If you picked a person at random, they will find "curly brace" (and indeed, "square bracket") much clearer and less ambiguous. Doubly so when accounting for variations between British and American English.
That's not what the post you're replying to said, at all.
I'm not in a position to evaluate whether they were right, but you've presented this as if it proves them wrong when it's barely related to what they said.
Please consider that other people are human beings and not just NPCs that exist to help you make money.
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