In this case, the question is informative and stimulating because it challenges the assumption that human interaction has a different dynamic to animal interaction.
Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.
The reason I’m posting that here is because for many years I don’t drink it. I was so used to hydrating from soda and other beverages advertised on TV I completely lost touch with plain old H2O.
Then one day I rediscovered its pure refreshing goodness. What a surprise! I savoured it and marvelled at the pureness of the way it quenched my thirst.
Water! Quenching thirst since before the dinosaurs.
Affordable. Convenient if you have a tap. Amazing on a hot day if you have a fridge and a pitcher.
You're not stuck in some evil country. You have Mozilla. If you want to improve it, you can submit code to it. Or start a new browser project by rounding up a dozen friends who feel the same way you do and going for it. If you're not a software engineer, you can be an evangelist who inspires software engineers. What is stopping you from working towards your own ideals?
Nobody is forcing us to use browsers from google or Mozilla.
We are all free to implement our own UA. The specs are all open standards.
What stops us from writing browsers is the sheer volume of time and effort required - hundreds of thousands of hours of highly skilled work. That is all.
In the absence of such an effort, we would be left high and dry, with no way to experience the web.
Fortunately, that isn’t the case, because some others have done the work and allow us to use their browsers.
For that, we might feel grateful.
We might also be wary, and try to be aware of any adverse consequences of using someone else’s thing. That’s common sense, but it is still not a case of being at someone’s mercy. That situation loomed when one company sought to control the standards for the web as well as the implementation, but what we have today is different to that.
Amber is heterogeneous in composition, but consists of several resinous bodies more or less soluble in alcohol, ether and chloroform, associated with an insoluble bituminous substance. Amber is a macromolecule by free radical polymerization of several precursors in the labdane family, e.g. communic acid, cummunol, and biformene. These labdanes are diterpenes (C20H32) and trienes, equipping the organic skeleton with three alkene groups for polymerization. As amber matures over the years, more polymerization takes place as well as isomerization reactions, crosslinking and cyclization.
A corporation is a shield behind which humans plot and practice their most deliberate, libidinous schemes of avarice, moderated not by morality or community, but only by laws and markets. And for that, corporations have lawyers, resumes and advertising.
It is a rare corporation that retains a soul for longer than its founders presence, because lawyers, resumes and advertising cannot sense what founders could: a creative future.
> It seems impossible for me to recommend someone do this stuff without having that lifelong level of understanding and context and passion.
Your lifelong learning and passion are a key part of your identify, and most probably the reason why your friends respect you and trust you enough to approach you about software.
Unless your friends are trying to replicate you, it won't be necessary for them to develop the same lifelong understanding as you. If all they want to do is to learn about software, they could just learn a little bit about it, or as much as they can given their late start. That might still satisfy them.
If you want to be a good friend, it's important for you to distinguish between their ambitions and your passion. Try to see things from their point of view, and only share as much information as is necessary for them to be able to see the next step of the big picture.
For example, if they don't already know any programming languages, you could just tell them that there are different languages that suit different applications, and ask them what they are interested to work on. Don't talk in detail about the merits of particular languages because they won't be able to grasp these details yet.
If they say they just want to be able to program Excel, or to write an app to help their grandmother remember something, then you just need to tell them about the tools that exist for those applications.
Don't tell them too much. Just point them towards the right starting point, and tell them they are welcome to bring more questions to you as they arise. That will keep the conversation relevant to them, and avoid the difficulty of having you talk for too long about things they can't understand or appreciate yet.
Bringing this question to conscious awareness is a different category of social discourse to “What is the meaning of life”, which is not really a social question at all.