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CockneyRebel replaced the avater of the helmeted soldier and left me a little unrecognizable.

Yes but it warns me that it can't be trusted to get it right every time, and tells me to check it out if it's important. So StartPage is some kind of way of doing that if I can be bothered at all.

It's another world mate innit

AI? Yes it is. Imagine if real people told the impartial truth all the time and admitted they could make mistakes and advised you to check what they were saying against other sources. There'd be no politicians and hardly any priests. And imagine if real people had no ego to flatter and bruise, so you could just say what you thought to them and they'd take it calmly without throwing a strop. And imagine if real people didn't get tired, so you could ask them questions forever and they'd just answer them, and never accuse you of taking the mickey or trying to catch them out.

You know, I don't think I've seen rain for months.

I saw it in Arkansas last night, complete with thunderbolts, and a tornado scare that didn't happen.

I'm a big beliver that there's always two sides to one story. And our biases leads us to one of them. But a lot of the time there's truth and fiction in both sides of the story.

I wonder, is withholding information a lie? A lie is when you intentionally speak a false fact. When withholding the truth is not speaking at all even if someone intentionally skips details to better their argument.

^
"Lying by omission, also known as a continuing misrepresentation or quote mining, occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. Lying by omission includes the failure to correct pre-existing misconceptions. For example, when the seller of a car declares it has been serviced regularly, but does not mention that a fault was reported during the last service, the seller lies by omission. It may be compared to dissimulation. An omission is when a person tells most of the truth, but leaves out a few key facts that therefore, completely obscures the truth."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie

So in that context, withholding information could be construed a lie. But it might get rather blurred in cases where it's debatable whether or not the information was omitted deliberately to cause a false impression. We can't read other people's minds so we can never be sure, and all we can do is suspend judgement or go on what the balance of probabilities seems to be at the time.

Another possible case would be when somebody knows something that they're aware could be helpful to somebody else, when it would be easy and safe for them to divulge. I would say that's not exactly a lie, although it might be irresponsible and selfish, and the "victim" could get very cross about it.

Beyond those special kinds of instances, I wouldn't class omissions as lying at all.

I suppose this question has more legal complications than I originally thought.
In the car dealer case they could very well state that they had no due diligence to report the fault since the client didn't ask. I'm not a lawyer but I assume still the case would go against him. It may extend the proceedings though.

Ah well, there's the legal angle, the technical angle, and the moral angle. I tend to see things in technical terms when I have any choice, because I'm strangely welded to practicality and I think science is the angle that stands the least chance of having its head up its bum.

What about broken promises? People say they will do this and that, but it's obvious that it usually depends on them not unexpectedly dying in the meantime, and probably on a number of other things. Can anybody guarantee any future event, or are all promises nonsense? Are we expected to take their promises as implying that kind of thing, or should we take them literally? And what about less obvious cases, for example when circumstances change unexpectedly since the promise but they don't render keeping the promise impossible, they just make it so that it'll cost more, or won't be so important?

For some reason I've found walking over a forklift quite enjoyable

Do you mean on the forks

^ aye

I know what you mean in that case

Bloody window was open
That's why I was getting a draft