This is just another brazen example of a company who is privatizing profit and socializing risk. In a normal free economy (low supply + high demand = higher cost), if there's a scarcity of qualified employers, then the employee either needs to raise salaries, or train under-qualified employees. But Amazon prefers to put that cost on the state of Virginia. Virginia will artificially inflate their CS grads, with the cost of both modifying their educational resources and reducing labor pools that may be better suited or in greater demand elsewhere. All the while, Amazon saves on the cost of training, keeping more profit, rather than invest in their company and their employees.
And the moment Virginia reneges on their agreement, or fails to deliver on continued demands that will undoubtedly continue to flow from Amazon corporate in the subsequent years, becomes the moment where Amazon closes up shop and moves elsewhere. There is no loyalty or community to this agreement, only corporate demand and political capitulation.
Intel, circa 2017: "We cannot figure out how to successfully engineer 10nm wafers. Our tick-tock strategy is stalled, and we cannot design chips that are any faster. What should we do?" Intel Solution: "MORE CORES!"
Intel, circa 2018: "AMD just released Ryzen, and it's destroying us in benchmarks. Anyone figure out that 10nm thingie yet?" Intel Solution: "Nope. But we did add MORE CORES!"
I'll preface this by saying that I've made a number of critical comments about Elon Musk's ideas and actions in the past, and more often then not, they are modded down. I don't understand why, as I see Musk to be a good idea-man and a brilliant marketer, but he spends too much time inflating the brilliancy of his ideas before anything even gets off the drawing board.
So, I'll try a different approach. I read the article, and I watched the tweeted tunnel video. And I saw an accelerated recording of passing through a tunnel. Nothing looks at all like what I saw here. It looks like a tunnel, a boring tunnel constructed by The Boring Company. So allow me to pose a question instead. What makes this short tunnel so worthy of praise?
And how long out are we until cars can get transported through it, like in the YouTube video?
Then they'll just stop updating them. Heck, that's what Apple did with the iPhone 1 and the 3G, where each respective last-supported iOS version was released about 2 1/2 years after that iPhone's debut date. Certainly a safer alternative than getting sued for maintaining older hardware, and it still encourages consumers to replace their phones.
Stood outside for about half an hour, and I counted five. One was a long streak, and my favorite was one that flashed as brightly as a star, but only for a very faint second.
It's not as active as others that I've watched, and it's quite a chilly night, but I don't ever tire from staring at the stars. It's easy to look at them briefly and just picture yourself staring at a picture above your head. But once you realize that you are literally standing on a rock passing through the vastness of space, and you are not even a speck of dust in comparison, it's both fascinating and humbling.
Talk about hyperbole. But you sound pretty serious about your feelings, so let me address each of your points one at a time.
1) We've been evolving into omnivores for at least a million years.
Not quite. Homo sapiens has been evolving for about 250,000 years, give or take. And we evolved into omnivores mostly because gathering plants and fruits was easier, safer, more reliable, and a more dependable source of food. Meat from hunting was a high-risk-high-reward method of feeding oneself; while more caloric-dense, hunting took days, risks, and many people to do, and many times the hunters came back empty-handed. Evolving into omnivores allowed us to diversify our diets, giving us a greater chance of survival.
2) You can't just decide you're going to be strict vegetarian and not expect to have health problems related to that.
Says who? There's plenty of researchsupporting the benefits of vegan diets. As long as people watch what they eat to make sure they're consuming appropriate amounts of vitamins, proteins, and lipids, it really doesn't matter what diet they consume.
3) How about instead of screwing with people's diets, we create a timeline to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, and stick to it?
5) And start controlling our population growth, seeing as how the planet can clearly and objectively only support so many humans at once?
Well, good luck convincing everyone on the planet to stop procreating. Though, in a pure sense of supply-and-demand economics, it's our ability to improve agriculture production that allows us to sustain our population. After all, humans can't live if we can't grow food to feed them. Probably the most important man that nobody's ever heard of is Fritz Haber. It's his invention of the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer that allowed the population of the planet to quadruple in one hundred years.
6) Why do we need 10 BILLION people alive at the same time? Can we get the nutjob 'quiverfull' religious types to knock it the hell off?
Now that I've addressed your points, I'll take just a moment to make a few of my own. We eat far more than we need to. Given how many resources it consumes, as the parent article references, reducing our meat intake is not a bad t
Eight years ago, when Apple debuted the iPhone 4, they re-engineered the antenna, making it into a stainless steel band running around the edge of the phone. But the antenna was actually two separate antennas, with a very narrow gap between them. If anything, including your hand, created enough of a conducting pathway between the two separate antennas, reception and 3G data quality reduced terribly. As this Anandtech article explained, "Anything conductive which bridges the gap in the bottom left couples the antennas together, detuning the precisely engineered antennas. It's a problem of impedance matching with the body as an antenna, and the additional antenna that becomes part of the equation when you touch the bottom left.
And so, when asked about the problem, Steve Jobs famously said, "Just avoid holding it in that way."
If I get modded down as a troll, so be it, but I feel it needs to be said.
Not everything that shows up on The Verge needs to be a headline on Slashdot. Especially an article tries to make a $3 markup on a headphone adapter sound like an assault on consumers.
Let me know when you find an article analyzing the circuitry of these headphone adapters and explains exactly how modifying something as simple as a headphone adapter can extend battery life by 38%.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. -- Sir Francis Bacon
I believe literature is having less of an impact, and the answer as to why can be found in the article, but not the summary:
Less than four hundred years ago—barely a century and a half after Gutenberg—John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind. When I was in college, a friend and I worked on a short film, never finished, in which Milton somehow found himself brought forward in time to lower Manhattan’s Strand bookstore, where the sheer volume of titles (“18 Miles of Books” is the store’s slogan) provoked a kind of mental overload, causing him to run screaming from the store out into Broadway, only to be struck down by a New York City bus.
If Milton were to have a mental overload standing in Manhattan's Strand bookstore, his mind would probably explode at the sheer volume of works to be found online. There's so much information, we become conditioned to nibble everything we find, but digest nothing. How can we appreciate a novel when the fickle nature of the internet leaves everything feeling trite?
"Whatever the Navy ends up doing, this will only be the first of many nuclear-powered carrier disposals."
Good. So, spend the billion dollars to dismantle the first one, figure out the steps, construct the necessary infrastructure, and then economies of scale suggest that the subsequent ones will be much cheaper to dismantle.
When I was in college, I did a semester abroad trip to Greece and Italy. One of the Greek guides explained that contractors dig up ruins all the time in Athens; it's impossible to dig a metro line without it happening. (Here's one example of a metro line running right through ruins of Ancient Athens.)
The guide told us that Greek law requires that contractors notify the Ministry of Culture immediately when ruins are found. They then come out, inspect the site, and after a couple years, either give the contractor a waver to remove the ruins or provide them an alternative plan for building around them. Contractors will often collect the ruins they find and keep them at their private residences, because it takes way too much time to let the Ministry of Culture to have their way.
The world owes it a collective thank you for its App Store. It inspired other companies, such as Google with Android and Microsoft with Windows 8/10, to adopt the same app concepts.
Yes, Microsoft owes Apple a big huge thanks, because until the App Store, Microsoft had never ever previously considered creating an operating system architecture that allowed end-users to download and install their own applications onto it.
Gather around, kids, it's time to hear about the good ol' days from your grand-pappy. Before apps, we had something else called an application. They were kinda like apps, but they ran on these big old things called personal computers, you had to go to this thing called a store to buy them, and they came on these things called floppy disks. Then Apple invented the iPhone and App Store, and we all could finally emerge from our caves.
It should help make supersonic flight more economical.
Supersonic flight still will not be more economical. As this video by Wendover Productions explains, the biggest cost of supersonic flights is the fuel. The Concorde flies 14 miles per gallon of fuel, while the Boeing 787 flies 104 miles per gallon. Also consider the Concorde only carried 128 passengers, while the 787-9 can carry 290. Doing the math, on a 3,470 mile flight from New York to London, a Concorde would consume 1.936 gallons of fuel per passenger, while a 787-9 would consume only 0.115 gallons per customer. That's almost 17 times greater fuel efficiency.
And that's not even beginning to mention the much higher building and maintenance costs of supersonic planes and engines.
Permitting cross-continental flights with a supersonic plane isn't going to matter one bit in the economics of supersonic flight.
"If you don't want to live under a particular government," she said, "people will be able to just take their house and float away to another island."
I think this organization does not quite understand the primary purpose of government: to provide protection of life, liberty, and property. Does this self-governing island have that ability? Who will citizens turn to if someone is murdered on their island? Or if someone invades their island? Or sinks it? Or if power fails? Food supplies fail? Water supplies fail? Currency becomes destabilized?
I think I'll stick with my own home country, thank-you-very-much. Sure, they're far from perfect, but at least I know they can provide for me the securities I need.
Slashdot Mirror
How about Amazon just pay their employees more?
This is just another brazen example of a company who is privatizing profit and socializing risk. In a normal free economy (low supply + high demand = higher cost), if there's a scarcity of qualified employers, then the employee either needs to raise salaries, or train under-qualified employees. But Amazon prefers to put that cost on the state of Virginia. Virginia will artificially inflate their CS grads, with the cost of both modifying their educational resources and reducing labor pools that may be better suited or in greater demand elsewhere. All the while, Amazon saves on the cost of training, keeping more profit, rather than invest in their company and their employees.
And the moment Virginia reneges on their agreement, or fails to deliver on continued demands that will undoubtedly continue to flow from Amazon corporate in the subsequent years, becomes the moment where Amazon closes up shop and moves elsewhere. There is no loyalty or community to this agreement, only corporate demand and political capitulation.
When engineering, sometimes you have to trade efficiency for efficacy.
Intel, circa 2017: "We cannot figure out how to successfully engineer 10nm wafers. Our tick-tock strategy is stalled, and we cannot design chips that are any faster. What should we do?"
Intel Solution: "MORE CORES!"
Intel, circa 2018: "AMD just released Ryzen, and it's destroying us in benchmarks. Anyone figure out that 10nm thingie yet?"
Intel Solution: "Nope. But we did add MORE CORES!"
Now must be a great time to be an Intel engineer.
I'll preface this by saying that I've made a number of critical comments about Elon Musk's ideas and actions in the past, and more often then not, they are modded down. I don't understand why, as I see Musk to be a good idea-man and a brilliant marketer, but he spends too much time inflating the brilliancy of his ideas before anything even gets off the drawing board.
So, I'll try a different approach. I read the article, and I watched the tweeted tunnel video. And I saw an accelerated recording of passing through a tunnel. Nothing looks at all like what I saw here. It looks like a tunnel, a boring tunnel constructed by The Boring Company. So allow me to pose a question instead. What makes this short tunnel so worthy of praise?
And how long out are we until cars can get transported through it, like in the YouTube video?
I know everyone is joking about trees, but a much more effective way, according to many researchers including this guy, are by restoring grasslands.
Then they'll just stop updating them. Heck, that's what Apple did with the iPhone 1 and the 3G, where each respective last-supported iOS version was released about 2 1/2 years after that iPhone's debut date. Certainly a safer alternative than getting sued for maintaining older hardware, and it still encourages consumers to replace their phones.
Stood outside for about half an hour, and I counted five. One was a long streak, and my favorite was one that flashed as brightly as a star, but only for a very faint second.
It's not as active as others that I've watched, and it's quite a chilly night, but I don't ever tire from staring at the stars. It's easy to look at them briefly and just picture yourself staring at a picture above your head. But once you realize that you are literally standing on a rock passing through the vastness of space, and you are not even a speck of dust in comparison, it's both fascinating and humbling.
It's called PeerTube.
That means it's really fast, but also that it has a very difficult time penetrating obstacles, like a wall.
Or a giant sack of water, otherwise known as a human.
Talk about hyperbole. But you sound pretty serious about your feelings, so let me address each of your points one at a time.
1) We've been evolving into omnivores for at least a million years.
Not quite. Homo sapiens has been evolving for about 250,000 years, give or take. And we evolved into omnivores mostly because gathering plants and fruits was easier, safer, more reliable, and a more dependable source of food. Meat from hunting was a high-risk-high-reward method of feeding oneself; while more caloric-dense, hunting took days, risks, and many people to do, and many times the hunters came back empty-handed. Evolving into omnivores allowed us to diversify our diets, giving us a greater chance of survival.
2) You can't just decide you're going to be strict vegetarian and not expect to have health problems related to that.
Says who? There's plenty of research supporting the benefits of vegan diets. As long as people watch what they eat to make sure they're consuming appropriate amounts of vitamins, proteins, and lipids, it really doesn't matter what diet they consume.
3) How about instead of screwing with people's diets, we create a timeline to eliminate fossil fuel use entirely, and stick to it?
No complaints. Maybe eliminating fossil fuel use entirely is a bit of a stretch, especially given our dependence on plastics and petro-chemicals, but a significant reduction needs to start now. But when thirty-six percent of the food we grow is fed to livestock, you're fooling yourself if you think that you can do that while advocating for meat consumption.
4) Also how about we stop destroying existing forests and start re-planting them?
Great idea. But then, where will we get the farmland for animal feed?
5) And start controlling our population growth, seeing as how the planet can clearly and objectively only support so many humans at once?
Well, good luck convincing everyone on the planet to stop procreating. Though, in a pure sense of supply-and-demand economics, it's our ability to improve agriculture production that allows us to sustain our population. After all, humans can't live if we can't grow food to feed them. Probably the most important man that nobody's ever heard of is Fritz Haber. It's his invention of the industrial production of nitrogen fertilizer that allowed the population of the planet to quadruple in one hundred years.
6) Why do we need 10 BILLION people alive at the same time? Can we get the nutjob 'quiverfull' religious types to knock it the hell off?
While -some- religious groups have population growth greater than average, most do not. The most influential variables in the United States are youth, fertility, and immigration. So, feel free to complain about the Mexicans, but the religious nutjobs, not so much.
Now that I've addressed your points, I'll take just a moment to make a few of my own. We eat far more than we need to. Given how many resources it consumes, as the parent article references, reducing our meat intake is not a bad t
Years later, this Dorkly video continues to get it right.
Eight years ago, when Apple debuted the iPhone 4, they re-engineered the antenna, making it into a stainless steel band running around the edge of the phone. But the antenna was actually two separate antennas, with a very narrow gap between them. If anything, including your hand, created enough of a conducting pathway between the two separate antennas, reception and 3G data quality reduced terribly. As this Anandtech article explained, "Anything conductive which bridges the gap in the bottom left couples the antennas together, detuning the precisely engineered antennas. It's a problem of impedance matching with the body as an antenna, and the additional antenna that becomes part of the equation when you touch the bottom left.
And so, when asked about the problem, Steve Jobs famously said, "Just avoid holding it in that way."
Then stop working. Then, Uber's revenue stream trickles to a halt, they'll figure out a solution. I guarantee it.
Seriously, if your employer misses payment on payday, would you keep coming to work?
"Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it." - Publius Syrus
When many want to buy crypto-currency, and few are willing to sell, price goes up. We saw that.
When few want to buy crypto-currency, while many are looking to sell, price goes down. Now, we're seeing this.
If I get modded down as a troll, so be it, but I feel it needs to be said.
Not everything that shows up on The Verge needs to be a headline on Slashdot. Especially an article tries to make a $3 markup on a headphone adapter sound like an assault on consumers.
Let me know when you find an article analyzing the circuitry of these headphone adapters and explains exactly how modifying something as simple as a headphone adapter can extend battery life by 38%.
Maybe from here.
Course, knowing where it is is one thing. Knowing how to extract it efficiently is quite another.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. -- Sir Francis Bacon
I believe literature is having less of an impact, and the answer as to why can be found in the article, but not the summary:
Less than four hundred years ago—barely a century and a half after Gutenberg—John Milton could still pride himself without exaggeration on having read every book then available, the entire history of written thought accessible to a single mind. When I was in college, a friend and I worked on a short film, never finished, in which Milton somehow found himself brought forward in time to lower Manhattan’s Strand bookstore, where the sheer volume of titles (“18 Miles of Books” is the store’s slogan) provoked a kind of mental overload, causing him to run screaming from the store out into Broadway, only to be struck down by a New York City bus.
If Milton were to have a mental overload standing in Manhattan's Strand bookstore, his mind would probably explode at the sheer volume of works to be found online. There's so much information, we become conditioned to nibble everything we find, but digest nothing. How can we appreciate a novel when the fickle nature of the internet leaves everything feeling trite?
"Whatever the Navy ends up doing, this will only be the first of many nuclear-powered carrier disposals."
Good. So, spend the billion dollars to dismantle the first one, figure out the steps, construct the necessary infrastructure, and then economies of scale suggest that the subsequent ones will be much cheaper to dismantle.
Facebook is a corporation. They care about money.
Our humanity? Only as far as it makes them money.
Ethics? Only the minimum necessary to keep making money.
What ever happened to separation of powers between the three branches of government?
Sometimes, I think the White House stocks toilet paper with text of the Constitution printed on it, for the president's private use.
When I was in college, I did a semester abroad trip to Greece and Italy. One of the Greek guides explained that contractors dig up ruins all the time in Athens; it's impossible to dig a metro line without it happening. (Here's one example of a metro line running right through ruins of Ancient Athens.)
The guide told us that Greek law requires that contractors notify the Ministry of Culture immediately when ruins are found. They then come out, inspect the site, and after a couple years, either give the contractor a waver to remove the ruins or provide them an alternative plan for building around them. Contractors will often collect the ruins they find and keep them at their private residences, because it takes way too much time to let the Ministry of Culture to have their way.
Can someone please buy the DNS googlegooglego.com, and redirect it to duckduckgo.com?
The world owes it a collective thank you for its App Store. It inspired other companies, such as Google with Android and Microsoft with Windows 8/10, to adopt the same app concepts.
Yes, Microsoft owes Apple a big huge thanks, because until the App Store, Microsoft had never ever previously considered creating an operating system architecture that allowed end-users to download and install their own applications onto it.
Gather around, kids, it's time to hear about the good ol' days from your grand-pappy. Before apps, we had something else called an application. They were kinda like apps, but they ran on these big old things called personal computers, you had to go to this thing called a store to buy them, and they came on these things called floppy disks. Then Apple invented the iPhone and App Store, and we all could finally emerge from our caves.
It should help make supersonic flight more economical.
Supersonic flight still will not be more economical. As this video by Wendover Productions explains, the biggest cost of supersonic flights is the fuel. The Concorde flies 14 miles per gallon of fuel, while the Boeing 787 flies 104 miles per gallon. Also consider the Concorde only carried 128 passengers, while the 787-9 can carry 290. Doing the math, on a 3,470 mile flight from New York to London, a Concorde would consume 1.936 gallons of fuel per passenger, while a 787-9 would consume only 0.115 gallons per customer. That's almost 17 times greater fuel efficiency.
And that's not even beginning to mention the much higher building and maintenance costs of supersonic planes and engines.
Permitting cross-continental flights with a supersonic plane isn't going to matter one bit in the economics of supersonic flight.
"If you don't want to live under a particular government," she said, "people will be able to just take their house and float away to another island."
I think this organization does not quite understand the primary purpose of government: to provide protection of life, liberty, and property. Does this self-governing island have that ability? Who will citizens turn to if someone is murdered on their island? Or if someone invades their island? Or sinks it? Or if power fails? Food supplies fail? Water supplies fail? Currency becomes destabilized?
I think I'll stick with my own home country, thank-you-very-much. Sure, they're far from perfect, but at least I know they can provide for me the securities I need.