> As a benign example, eating food with your hands rather than utensils. In some cultures this is rarely ever tolerated, in others it depends on the food item, and in others still you might always eat with your hands.

I know there are some strange people who eat pizza with a fork, but is there actually anyone who does that with say hamburgers?

Yes, there are people who eat burgers with utensils. It's more common in quasi-formal settings like business-organized dinners where people don't want to appear messy from my experience.

I thought that was only the top <very few>, and most just made pocket change?

Well, the enforcement mechanism for manners.

> For billionaires shame makes no sense. They will never have to confront the people that they abuse.

This sounds like you're agreeing with the article about consequentialism / "optimization culture" being the cause.

For me the reason is economic.

> What you experience is a cultural difference.

In that not all cultures recognize causing negative externalities as a bad thing?

Negative externalities is culturally dependent. The Japanese consider the sight of a person eating while walking to be a negative externality. Are we going to start complaining here on HN about people doing it? No, we recognize that those taboos vary across time and space.

The difference is some taboos are just based on tradition, and others are based on actual damage. Nobody is hurt by seeing someone walking and eating -- they can just not look at them and the problem is solved. You can't not just hear the noise people inconsiderate not to use headphones make.

In cultures where the sight of certain things is taboo, telling a local person that they have to direct their gaze elsewhere feels as much of a rude imposition as someone's phone audio reaching your ears. Please try to step beyond your own cultural upbringing and realize how arbitrary and mutable all these things are.

Well at least they need it until they get back a success response from the bank/payment processor/whoever.

I do not see the term "euphemism treadmill" in this anywhere. This is talking about the same thing, so I'd think the common term for it would at least be mentioned.

I'd think copper would mean ferric chloride, which isn't that bad.

Oh fun, we have used it in school to etch PCBs. Right outside of the class room with no protective equipment of course. It was in a bucket.

> want to be coddled and always want to feel like they are the king of the world. Greeters at Walmart, cashiers not being allowed to sit but have to stand for "respect",

I thought the greeters were an anti-shoplifting technique, "hello someone saw you here" kind of thing.

And putting a seat in the checkout station means they can't be packed quite as closely and also gets in the way when someone else needs to tag in to ring up booze or whatever.

> What I’m particularly curious about is what the “endgame” of this looks like.

A higher fraction of money going into the system is lost to navigating adversarial processes. And probably the occasional person getting in legal trouble for not validating their LLM output before feeding it to a formal process.

For customer-funded things (eg home insurance), this means higher prices for the same in-practice benefits (as distinct from nominal benefits; any gap between nominal and actual benefits will probably end up smaller).

For publicly-funded things (government benefits), this could show as increased budgets for the same result or decreased results on the same budget.

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> So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.

Well, maybe standardization of how employers or doctors or whoever are required to report things to the government.

It can also be a way for the public to force the government to perform better, thus lowering the cost of services. For example, the school district in my city is going through a financial crisis of its own making. The public is the only thing holding the district and board of the district accountable, to prevent them from wasting money and creating legal liabilities. AI has been instrumental in allowing the public to better understand the technical financial documents and situations the district is in.

Oh boy, time to Put everyone's job loss, home loss, death, and herpes diagnosis on the blockchain. NFTs anyone? Prediction markets!??

Sure but is that the end game? Systems can respond with things like higher deductible insurance options and graduated assistance based on tax filing which may benefit people who wouldn't file before and also won't use AI for this but were already paying costs of others getting more benefits.