I disconnected On-Star from my GM Vehicle and odd things started happening, the most annoying of which was the cruise control would randomly stop working. The dealership plugged the On-Star module back in and voila everything worked fine again. They will integrate these systems so that you will not be able to unplug them.
I also have a mixed household. But I'd drop all the Amazon devices if Home Minis had an audio out jack. Every Echo Dot I have is hooked up to real speakers. My Mini just sits sadly alone. It controls a Chromecast, but the TV's speakers are still crap and not worth using for music.
The Google device just responds to voices better. It's Windows whereas Alexa is DOS. Alexa works fine, but you have to know the command you want. I've had to repeat commands in 4 different ways before Alexa figured out what I wanted. Many times with Alexa, I end up getting out my phone and using the app to do what I want because I can't figure out the voice command that she wants to hear. Compare that with the Google device that is far more general purpose, uses the data Google already has from me in my calendar, maps, and other services, and has a memory of what prior commands were so you can do followup questions. And the thing is just smarter. It's a freaking Google search that can access the breadth of knowledge online where Alexa is an Amazon search. It's limited to a small sector of the internet.
That's my beef with the Google Home Mini... Why not an audio jack Google? $45 on a Black Friday deal to get the same functionality as I can get with an Echo Dot for the non-sale price. Why the hell would you limit it to Bluetooth audio? Just so frustrating because the Google device is far better than Amazon's, but since I use most of mine for playing music, I'm going to go with the crappier device that works with every speaker in existence without an adapter.
The vast majority of major newspapers, newsmagazines, and TV news organizations do not, in fact, "sell out their objectivity for political gains."
[Citation Needed] Fox News and MSNBC might be the most overt about their bias, but CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, and pretty much every major media outlet has bias and they don't even attempt to remain objective anymore. You can see it in their programming, their headlines, their interviews, and most importantly in their corporate and private contributions from employees to political campaigns and PACs. If you can't see it, you are either not looking or are blind.
There are few news programs which are light on bias and stay mostly objective. 60 Minutes is one, Sunday Morning is one, PBS News Hour is one. But most of the nightly news is mildly biased and every 24 hour news network is severely biased.
And the media can't understand why Russian trolls are able to spread lies on social media. The Russians learned how to write headlines from 24 hour news networks. We wouldn't have a fake news epidemic if major news outlets (on all fronts) didn't sell out their objectivity for political gains.
And for the winter Olympics it's even worse. At least in the summer Olympics any poor kid in the savanna can run and run and run to train. There aren't any of those sports in the winter... Good luck having a shot in hell at competing if you didn't grow up fabulously wealthy vacationing at ski resorts and spending hefty sums at training facilities from a young age. I mean unless you want to make a great movie... Then the Cool Runnings method works great!
I'm pretty far libertarian, but there are things that should be public goods. Transportation and communication methods are some of those. They need to be legislated to remain freely accessible so that corporations can't intrude upon the natural freedom to communicate and travel freely. "It's not censorship if it's a company doing it" is a poor excuse if a company is the only way to communicate using the current communication technology.
Also, GPS was done by the government and look at the explosion of innovation and technology since it was made available to all. One of the few things government has done that has been well managed and worth it.
So you're suggesting I buy a $300 device to control new multi-hundred dollar wifi or bluetooth enabled speakers to replace my perfectly good stereo instead of a $30 Echo dot with an audio out jack? Yeah, you know how to make things future proof. One of the stereos I am using was manufactured before I was born and still works great. Apple doesn't often support devices longer than 5 years or so.
We have 3 Echo devices and 1 Google device in the house. They are all the dot/mini versions. The Echos are in the kitchen, garage, and bathroom and the Google device is in the bedroom. The Echo is a great companion in the kitchen for setting timers, doing unit conversions, and getting basic info from calendars and the weather. In the bathroom and garage it's just a nice way to control music hands free. The Google device is far more capable and I'd swap them all to Google except the three Amazon ones are plugged into real speakers via the headphone jack whereas the Google one stupidly leaves out this feature. As such we mostly just use the Google one to control the Chromecast plugged into the TV and occasionally for calendar/weather/traffic functions.
As far as capabilities, using Alexa is like using DOS. Totally useless unless you know the right commands. Google's is like a voice search engine. You can ask it the most random of questions and it never ceases to amaze me in the answers it comes up with. It "understands" general questions better and allows you to refine and build upon previous queries. As far as the devices listening to bedroom activities (Google) and bathroom activities (Amazon), I could care less. Amazon can listen to me shit all day and I don't care and Google has far more embarrassing stuff on me in gmail and search history than any sounds I make in bed.
Counterpoint... Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The direction of that movie was to intentionally piss off a lot of the fans of Star Wars. Maybe it broadened the audience, maybe it didn't.
One of my complaints about Google is that they don't have a headphone or audio out jack on the Home Mini. I have Echo dots hooked up to speakers around my house and would love to replace all of them with Google's product, but having to deal with Bluetooth audio adapters to use the speakers I already have is not worth it.
"government was basically powerless" doesn't describe a Libertarian government as most people would categorize it. Most mainstream Libertarians espouse a strong but limited central government. A powerless government and private security describes anarchy.
...in the long term (hundreds/thousands of years), once the pace of change has settled down, some (mostly higher) latitudes will likely be significantly better off. However lower latitudes will likely be significantly worse off...
Looking at a globe, there appears to be far more landmass at higher latitudes than lower latitudes... So what you are saying is that despite a potentially better off climate in the long term for our species, you'd rather sacrifice the long term benefits for a short term gain. Maybe instead of spending money to stop CO2 emissions and to build taller levees on the coasts, we spend those emissions and resources to relocate and focus future building in areas that will benefit from climate change? Nahh, people love the short term benefits. Build those beach houses on an atoll barely above sea level in a hurricane prone area. When it gets wiped out, you'll have a nice sob story so the person with a house on the side of a mountain in Colorado will pay taxes and donate money to help you rebuild.
I'll support immigration reform (plenty of land to benefit from climate change in Alaska...) and tax benefits to relocate away from the coasts over building ever higher walls to save New Orleans and many other coastal cities from the inevitable.
I think the problem with our discussion is we are talking about two different things. I am talking about economic and human costs of power generation in the United States and you are talking about the entire world. The United States is not subsidizing fossil fuels, even considering the cost of externalities. Some industrially developing nations may be.
Yes, worldwide fossil fuel usage causes a lot of air pollution and deaths as a result. I mean China and India have horrible air quality and the US has historically. According to the WHO: "Some 88% of those premature deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries, and the greatest number in the WHO Western Pacific and South-East Asia regions." (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs313/en/) It's just not happening in modern times with modern particulate regulations. In fact, I would argue even with the high amounts of air pollution and the increased number of deaths due to it, the quality and length of life for those people has been improved by using fossil fuel energy despite the negative externalities. The life expectancy in those southeast countries with high air pollution is remarkably still going up and the mortality rates going down... (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=2015&locations=CN&start=1960&view=chart)
And all of this is meaningless compared to the original discussion about climate change. CO2 isn't even listed in the WHO outdoor air quality concerns...
Considering the equivalent intelligence of a computer, mis-identifying a gorilla and a black person based on facial features alone isn't half bad... It's exactly something you'd expect from a low intelligence entity with little experience and limited comprehension of the ramifications of the identification. Similar to a toddler, don't be surprised when computers start thinking all fat people are going to have a baby just because they have been told that there is a baby inside a big belly.
It's pattern recognition. The computers are seeing a pattern, but it's incomplete and thus wrong. It's not like the computer was programmed to be offensive...
Literal trillions of dollars as calculated by whom? You magnify the "subsidies" of fossil fuels while handwaving over alternatives. Creating lakes DOES cause earthquakes and historically a lot more damage and death than any quakes directly attributable to fracking or disposal wells (which has a whopping 0 deaths attributed to it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I happen to be a fan of the fossil fuel industry and would like to point out that I am aware of the externalities you point out, but I believe many of the estimates are highly inflated based on the assumed cost of "climate change" which is attributed to only negative events and not positive ones. You also continue to gloss over entirely the externalities of the alternatives. You also lump coal and oil together even though coal is far more polluting and far more deadly to extract than oil. I am all for phasing out coal and it is being done (primarily being replaced by natural gas thanks to fracking). Oil is here to stay for quite a long time though despite the external costs.
I have admitted my bias and I try to be as objective as I can. My problem is blanket assumptions of assigning blame and cost to fossil fuels based on complex events where a direct causal link is fuzzy at best.
The idea that the odd of a hydro dam creating a lake that causes an earthquake is a thing that's both as likely to happen and even remotely as costly as hundreds of millions in healthcare costs is a farcical argument and reeks of desperation
Desperation is dismissing a counter argument without doing a basic Google search to see if the counter argument might be valid... In fact, you completely dismissed the idea that shifting around a huge mass on the crust by creating a reservoir might have massive implications to the surrounding area and consequently everything downstream. Did you count the cost of the evacuation below the Oroville dam last year in your "subsidy" of the hydropower industry?
Slashdot Mirror
I disconnected On-Star from my GM Vehicle and odd things started happening, the most annoying of which was the cruise control would randomly stop working. The dealership plugged the On-Star module back in and voila everything worked fine again. They will integrate these systems so that you will not be able to unplug them.
I also have a mixed household. But I'd drop all the Amazon devices if Home Minis had an audio out jack. Every Echo Dot I have is hooked up to real speakers. My Mini just sits sadly alone. It controls a Chromecast, but the TV's speakers are still crap and not worth using for music.
The Google device just responds to voices better. It's Windows whereas Alexa is DOS. Alexa works fine, but you have to know the command you want. I've had to repeat commands in 4 different ways before Alexa figured out what I wanted. Many times with Alexa, I end up getting out my phone and using the app to do what I want because I can't figure out the voice command that she wants to hear. Compare that with the Google device that is far more general purpose, uses the data Google already has from me in my calendar, maps, and other services, and has a memory of what prior commands were so you can do followup questions. And the thing is just smarter. It's a freaking Google search that can access the breadth of knowledge online where Alexa is an Amazon search. It's limited to a small sector of the internet.
That's my beef with the Google Home Mini... Why not an audio jack Google? $45 on a Black Friday deal to get the same functionality as I can get with an Echo Dot for the non-sale price. Why the hell would you limit it to Bluetooth audio? Just so frustrating because the Google device is far better than Amazon's, but since I use most of mine for playing music, I'm going to go with the crappier device that works with every speaker in existence without an adapter.
The vast majority of major newspapers, newsmagazines, and TV news organizations do not, in fact, "sell out their objectivity for political gains."
[Citation Needed] Fox News and MSNBC might be the most overt about their bias, but CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, the NYT, WaPo, HuffPo, and pretty much every major media outlet has bias and they don't even attempt to remain objective anymore. You can see it in their programming, their headlines, their interviews, and most importantly in their corporate and private contributions from employees to political campaigns and PACs. If you can't see it, you are either not looking or are blind.
There are few news programs which are light on bias and stay mostly objective. 60 Minutes is one, Sunday Morning is one, PBS News Hour is one. But most of the nightly news is mildly biased and every 24 hour news network is severely biased.
Agreed. I don't know why the assholes at newspapers looked at the billing model for Comcast and said, "That's what customers want!."
And the media can't understand why Russian trolls are able to spread lies on social media. The Russians learned how to write headlines from 24 hour news networks. We wouldn't have a fake news epidemic if major news outlets (on all fronts) didn't sell out their objectivity for political gains.
And for the winter Olympics it's even worse. At least in the summer Olympics any poor kid in the savanna can run and run and run to train. There aren't any of those sports in the winter... Good luck having a shot in hell at competing if you didn't grow up fabulously wealthy vacationing at ski resorts and spending hefty sums at training facilities from a young age. I mean unless you want to make a great movie... Then the Cool Runnings method works great!
You had a rainy day fund. You had a whole year's worth of rain in that day...
I'm pretty far libertarian, but there are things that should be public goods. Transportation and communication methods are some of those. They need to be legislated to remain freely accessible so that corporations can't intrude upon the natural freedom to communicate and travel freely. "It's not censorship if it's a company doing it" is a poor excuse if a company is the only way to communicate using the current communication technology.
Also, GPS was done by the government and look at the explosion of innovation and technology since it was made available to all. One of the few things government has done that has been well managed and worth it.
So you're suggesting I buy a $300 device to control new multi-hundred dollar wifi or bluetooth enabled speakers to replace my perfectly good stereo instead of a $30 Echo dot with an audio out jack? Yeah, you know how to make things future proof. One of the stereos I am using was manufactured before I was born and still works great. Apple doesn't often support devices longer than 5 years or so.
Machines are companions. Companion's definitions can include non-intelligent things. Heck a book can be a companion, a stuffed animal, etc...
Yep, I was against a national 5G network when it was suggested, but if Ajit says it's a bad idea, I'm all for it. Fuck that guy.
We have 3 Echo devices and 1 Google device in the house. They are all the dot/mini versions. The Echos are in the kitchen, garage, and bathroom and the Google device is in the bedroom. The Echo is a great companion in the kitchen for setting timers, doing unit conversions, and getting basic info from calendars and the weather. In the bathroom and garage it's just a nice way to control music hands free. The Google device is far more capable and I'd swap them all to Google except the three Amazon ones are plugged into real speakers via the headphone jack whereas the Google one stupidly leaves out this feature. As such we mostly just use the Google one to control the Chromecast plugged into the TV and occasionally for calendar/weather/traffic functions.
As far as capabilities, using Alexa is like using DOS. Totally useless unless you know the right commands. Google's is like a voice search engine. You can ask it the most random of questions and it never ceases to amaze me in the answers it comes up with. It "understands" general questions better and allows you to refine and build upon previous queries. As far as the devices listening to bedroom activities (Google) and bathroom activities (Amazon), I could care less. Amazon can listen to me shit all day and I don't care and Google has far more embarrassing stuff on me in gmail and search history than any sounds I make in bed.
Counterpoint... Star Wars: The Last Jedi. The direction of that movie was to intentionally piss off a lot of the fans of Star Wars. Maybe it broadened the audience, maybe it didn't.
I'd say mod this up, but how this site handles unicode would probably fÿÜ{ that up too...
I just hope during a phone upgrade they don't lose the keys to the back door...
One of my complaints about Google is that they don't have a headphone or audio out jack on the Home Mini. I have Echo dots hooked up to speakers around my house and would love to replace all of them with Google's product, but having to deal with Bluetooth audio adapters to use the speakers I already have is not worth it.
As communism is socialism brought to it's logical conclusion? And an oligarchy is the logical conclusion of democracy?
That is by definition the slippery slope fallacy. That if you are for a small government, then logically the ideal would be no government?
"government was basically powerless" doesn't describe a Libertarian government as most people would categorize it. Most mainstream Libertarians espouse a strong but limited central government. A powerless government and private security describes anarchy.
Explain to me when a "Libertarian" government has actually existed and people got away with no responsibility for wrongdoing...
/me waits for Somalia to be dropped.
Yep, and with the wonderful world of gerrymandering, you don't get to vote for your candidate, your candidate decides if you get to vote for them!
...in the long term (hundreds/thousands of years), once the pace of change has settled down, some (mostly higher) latitudes will likely be significantly better off. However lower latitudes will likely be significantly worse off...
Looking at a globe, there appears to be far more landmass at higher latitudes than lower latitudes... So what you are saying is that despite a potentially better off climate in the long term for our species, you'd rather sacrifice the long term benefits for a short term gain. Maybe instead of spending money to stop CO2 emissions and to build taller levees on the coasts, we spend those emissions and resources to relocate and focus future building in areas that will benefit from climate change? Nahh, people love the short term benefits. Build those beach houses on an atoll barely above sea level in a hurricane prone area. When it gets wiped out, you'll have a nice sob story so the person with a house on the side of a mountain in Colorado will pay taxes and donate money to help you rebuild.
I'll support immigration reform (plenty of land to benefit from climate change in Alaska...) and tax benefits to relocate away from the coasts over building ever higher walls to save New Orleans and many other coastal cities from the inevitable.
I think the problem with our discussion is we are talking about two different things. I am talking about economic and human costs of power generation in the United States and you are talking about the entire world. The United States is not subsidizing fossil fuels, even considering the cost of externalities. Some industrially developing nations may be.
Yes, worldwide fossil fuel usage causes a lot of air pollution and deaths as a result. I mean China and India have horrible air quality and the US has historically. According to the WHO: "Some 88% of those premature deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries, and the greatest number in the WHO Western Pacific and South-East Asia regions." (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs313/en/) It's just not happening in modern times with modern particulate regulations. In fact, I would argue even with the high amounts of air pollution and the increased number of deaths due to it, the quality and length of life for those people has been improved by using fossil fuel energy despite the negative externalities. The life expectancy in those southeast countries with high air pollution is remarkably still going up and the mortality rates going down... (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?end=2015&locations=CN&start=1960&view=chart)
And all of this is meaningless compared to the original discussion about climate change. CO2 isn't even listed in the WHO outdoor air quality concerns...
Considering the equivalent intelligence of a computer, mis-identifying a gorilla and a black person based on facial features alone isn't half bad... It's exactly something you'd expect from a low intelligence entity with little experience and limited comprehension of the ramifications of the identification. Similar to a toddler, don't be surprised when computers start thinking all fat people are going to have a baby just because they have been told that there is a baby inside a big belly.
It's pattern recognition. The computers are seeing a pattern, but it's incomplete and thus wrong. It's not like the computer was programmed to be offensive...
Literal trillions of dollars as calculated by whom? You magnify the "subsidies" of fossil fuels while handwaving over alternatives. Creating lakes DOES cause earthquakes and historically a lot more damage and death than any quakes directly attributable to fracking or disposal wells (which has a whopping 0 deaths attributed to it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I happen to be a fan of the fossil fuel industry and would like to point out that I am aware of the externalities you point out, but I believe many of the estimates are highly inflated based on the assumed cost of "climate change" which is attributed to only negative events and not positive ones. You also continue to gloss over entirely the externalities of the alternatives. You also lump coal and oil together even though coal is far more polluting and far more deadly to extract than oil. I am all for phasing out coal and it is being done (primarily being replaced by natural gas thanks to fracking). Oil is here to stay for quite a long time though despite the external costs.
I have admitted my bias and I try to be as objective as I can. My problem is blanket assumptions of assigning blame and cost to fossil fuels based on complex events where a direct causal link is fuzzy at best.
The idea that the odd of a hydro dam creating a lake that causes an earthquake is a thing that's both as likely to happen and even remotely as costly as hundreds of millions in healthcare costs is a farcical argument and reeks of desperation
Desperation is dismissing a counter argument without doing a basic Google search to see if the counter argument might be valid... In fact, you completely dismissed the idea that shifting around a huge mass on the crust by creating a reservoir might have massive implications to the surrounding area and consequently everything downstream. Did you count the cost of the evacuation below the Oroville dam last year in your "subsidy" of the hydropower industry?