So where would you draw the line? It seems pretty generally accepted that child-porn is beyond the pale. Indeed there are laws in place against it. When you have a company in a competitive market with a global "image" to maintain, at what point do you say, "Sorry, I can get along without your business" -- especially in the wake of a domestic terror attack on a crowd of protesters?
I don't know if Google was right or wrong in this case, but I would guess they gave it some thought before pulling the trigger on this move. It's a free market and a (mostly) free country... Google has rolled the dice on this. Time will tell if they made the right bet or not.
The other links are actually informative. Why throw out the good with the bad? You might choose to do it otherwise, but I chose to do it this way. Have a nice day.
Well, I was going to mod you up +1 Informative, but then I notice the goatse link... Now, since I'm writing this, I can't mod you down either. But at least I can warn others to check the links before clicking. (Note: The rest of the links appear to be legit.)
But if you emphasize credentials at the expense of experience and managerial competence, it could significantly hurt the end results. Expert test takers are rarely the best managers, even in China. But I guess ingrained cultural habits are a difficult wall to penetrate.
Yes, but this has always been a problem for China (and other Asian cultures): "expert test-taker" has been the main qualification for a government gig since the days of Confucius. Somehow they seem to muddle through. I suspect they will end up with a mix of mostly native talent with as many 'heavy hitters' from abroad as they can get. They'll put in some crusty old fossil from the days of Mao as titular head of the Institution, and fill in the rest with a mixture of foreign and native recruits.
Something I should have said in my original post: Although they have a strong bias toward 'on-paper' credentials, in the end, they will take who they can get and call it good. They need this program up and running (like their space program) -- even if it isn't ideal at first, as long as it's working well and not generating bad press, they'll be happy to let it flourish for a few years. Given the investment involved, I reckon it will exist for at least 10 or 15 years before getting shut down, even if not a single "qualified" person applies from abroad. (That would be a loss of face, and they will almost never allow that.) In the meantime, they have plenty of time... recruit whoever you can, domestically or otherwise, get the thing up and running, and see what happens.
With such a large instrument, there's a good chance that even "local rookies" could make some interesting discoveries and publish papers in some prestigious journals. That's all that matters to the Party Leaders.
A couple of things... First, Neil de Grasse Tyson mentioned this telescope, and its prospects for drawing talent, in a recent interview. (Might be this one, I don't have time to check.) Basically, he was talking about how the US was losing its leadership in science, citing the cancellation of the Superconducting Super-Collider back in the 90's. He mentioned this radio-telescope project in China as being a major draw for "talent" from the scientific community.
The second thing is about China itself. Culturally, they have a strong bias in favor of 'credentials' and 'certifications' as well as experience. They also put a lot of importance on 'face' or prestige. They want to attract some heavy hitters to bring attention and status to their program. The Party Leaders didn't allocate funds for this telescope because they give a shit about astronomy, they did it to establish their country as a central player in that field, just as Switzerland and Italy did by hosting the LHC. If you want to work with the largest radio-telescope in the world nowadays, you have to go to China.
1) we didn't invest in obtaining the right of ways years ago when it would have been cheaper
Actually, we had plenty of rights-of-way back in the day, but we gave them up in the post-war era as cars and interstate highways became ubiquitous. My parents grew up in Sterling, Nebraska in the 30s and 40s (population 1500 back then, more like 700 now), and they had regular, daily passenger rail service. Truman's famous whistle-stop campaign in 1948 would not have been possible otherwise.
In my home town, Cedar Falls, Iowa, there is an extra-wide street (Seerley Blvd.) which seems out of place in its residential neighborhood. Turns out, back in the day, there was a street-level tram which went from Cedar Falls to nearby Waterloo, about 10 miles away to the east. But that rail line was gone long before I was born.
Of course, none of this negates your point that serious passenger rail would require the purchase a lot of very expensive rights-of-way. But fortunately, I think the advent of self-driving cars will make this a moot point. When "Transportation as a Service" (TaaS) becomes available, point-to-point, even in tiny towns like Sterling, NE, the need for passenger rail goes away. Ditto for individual car ownership.
I was reminded of a slightly different cultural reference: GATTACA! GATTACA!
Seriously though, this is precisely the type of genetic augmentation that was at the heart of that excellent movie. One has to wonder how long it will be before this sort of thing is commonplace.
The question is: what percentage of the market will be put off by refueling time? Most people only gas-up a couple of times a week. And most of the time EV users simply charge overnight while the car is parked in the garage. Unless you're a field-rep or salesman, very few people have a frequent need to drive 500 miles in a day without taking an hour to recharge (both mentally and electrically).
In any case, what are the chances that they won't have ubiquitous availability of battery swap by 2030, or a new battery chemistry that allows super-fast charging? No one can predict the future, of course, but judging by the trends in the last 15~20 years, it's quite reasonable to expect the "refueling time" problem will have been solved by then.
And remember that self-driving cars will also have a huge impact on the market. Car ownership is already declining, among millennials in particular. The average car sits parked 94% of the time. An entire "fleet of major assets with a six-percent utilization rate is a technology disruption waiting to happen." (Quoted from Tony Seba, in the video linked above, in my original post.)
Some analysts are already predicting that the car market will be 50% EV by the mid-2020s, and will "tip" rapidly thereafter. This trend is mostly driven by the cost of Li-ion batteries, which has been falling at about 15%/yr for the last couple of decades. When it becomes possible to buy an entry-level EV for $20k or less, why would you even want an ICE vehicle?
The "fuel" price for EVs is a fraction of that for ICE, as is the maintenance cost. EVs only have a couple-dozen moving parts, compared to thousands in an ICE car. Of course, there will still be "gas car" enthusiasts in 2040, just as there are hobbyists who still maintain antique steam-powered farm equipment. But even by 2030, there will no longer be a need for this law, because the market will already have flipped.
Ahh yes, the good old days... downloading 12 or 13 floppies at 28Kbps on dial-up. Doing battle with X-config, trying to get it to work with your graphics card (and hoping you don't fry your CRT in the process). And god-forbid you have a need for Asian language support... There has been enormous progress over the last couple of decades -- mostly that first decade, frankly. I haven't had any of those issues in a long time.
At first I maintained a dual-boot Windows partition, but I've been running pure Linux for at least 15 years now. But I must confess, I haven't even looked at Slackware in about the same amount of time. Nice to know they're still doing their good work.
Even though I disagree with the "theme" of your post, I would mod you up "+1 Funny" if I hadn't already commented in this thread. Made me LOL, thanks.;-)
Then again, if it was a private tweet from Trump... that would count as White House policy. As for the cost, you might well be off by a couple orders of magnitude. IIRC, Elon's original hyperloop white paper estimated the cost of the SF-to-LA 'loop at around six or eight billion. Add in your fudge factors for Elon's notorious optimism and turning it into a 'gubmint' project... and I still think you'd be in the tens of billions, rather than hundreds. FWIW...
Having just watched the interview, I can tell you one of the governors asked Elon that exact question. Gov. Doug Ducey (R-AZ) said (paraphrasing): If they discovered a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that could explode, people would say "Ban it!" but then we wouldn't have natural gas. How do we regulate something that doesn't even exist yet?
Elon's response: "Well, I think the first order of business would be to gain insight. Right now the government does not even have insight. I think the right order of business would be to stand up a regulatory agency. Initial goal: gain insight into the status of AI activity. Make sure the situation is understood. Once it is, then put regulations in place to ensure public safety. That's it."
If you assume that NASA continues its past trajectory of "cost-plus" contracting, of course the cost will be out of reach. But the economics of "launch" are rapidly changing, due to SpaceX and several other players such as Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, and MoonEx.
Given the Trump administration's (apparently) positive attitude toward space exploration, and "commercial space" in particular (led apparently more by Pence than Trump), I think there might be a re-assessment of this price tag in the next couple of years, especially as Boeing and SpaceX get their respective "Commercial Crew" vehicles tested and qualified for flight ops.
Something is going to need to be developed for quick charging (either battery pack swaps - which doesn't yet exist and there's no standard battery form for it to exist with any electric car that currently exist or is on the drawing board) or charging in pretty much every car park - and currently, there are no plans to add this.
On the contrary, battery swap was anticipated long ago, but the market doesn't seem to require it. Tesla's 'super-charger' network seems to be able to handle the load.
At the moment most BEV owners charge overnight at home, but where I live, less than 50% of the housing stock has off street parking. Currently, although my driving habits are otherwise perfect for owning a BEV, the fact I don't have off street parking is a complete show stopper. There's nowhere I could charge the vehicle.
As the market begins to flip, you'll see more and more opportunities to charge -- at work, at hotels, at shopping malls, etc. -- such places will offer free charging as an incentive to shop. It's probably a lot cheaper than traditional advertising.
There is also a recent startup that converts street-lamps into charging stations. Since a lot of cities are switching to LED lights, which save a lot of energy, but the power grid is set up to deliver the "old" energy requirement... there's a surplus of infrastructure available for charging. It might be a few years before this reaches your neighborhood, but it's coming, probably sooner than you expect.
It doesn't really matter, because ICE vehicles will be obsolete long before 2040 anyway. EVs are just better in every way that's important, in particular the cost of "fuel" and maintenance. At the moment, EVs are more expensive to buy, and take a bit longer to "refuel", but those disadvantages will disappear in the next few years. By the mid 2020s, it won't make economic sense to buy an ICE car anymore, and the entire market will switch with surprising rapidity.
Tony Seba predicts this will happen by 2030, but even if he's overly optimistic by a factor of two, the transition will still be complete before 2040.
Another aspect of this, noted by Bloomberg, is that long before this transition is complete, probably in the next 6 or 7 years, EVs will displace enough oil consumption to cause a crash in the oil price. That in turn will cause trillions($) of sunk capital to go belly-up. Fracked oil is barely profitable at $50/bbl. When the price goes to $30, the frackers won't even be able to service their debt at that price. Sayanora. And deep-water oil isn't far behind...
IIRC, Rocket Lab is also contracted to carry MoonEx's Google Lunar X-Prize (GLXP) mission later this year. All the more reason to wish them well on these upcoming flights.
It's starting to happen already, but it will take some time to get enough storage capacity installed to catch up with the amount of solar power already on the grid.
Yeah, I think we're on the same page here... my point is just that OSS is always going to keep getting better, and the price is going to keep it as a mainstay for newbies learning the ropes. Eventually I think we'll reach the point where OSS becomes the dominant paradigm. Will that be five years from now? Ten years? Who knows? But I think the economic 'forcing functions' are leading in that direction.
When was the last time you actually tried LibreOffice or KDEnlive or similar "equivalents" in OSS? Unless you\'re a "power user" in the commercial version and/or you're starting from scratch, you probably won't notice much difference.
I've been doing some at-home editing and proofreading for a local magazine for the last couple of years, and we've never had a problem interfacing between my Linux system and their Windows gear. I just save as.docx and everything seems to work fine.
I recently uploaded a series of videos on YouTube, and used KDEnlive to edit some of them. I was fairly new to NLE, but I found KDEnlive to be a very robust and well supported platform. The learning curve was no steeper than if I'd been using Maya or FinalCutPro.
It will take a while for this to sink in, world-wide, but the trend toward open source is inexorable.
Yes, that's the obvious counterpoint, but seriously... how many "regular" people are actually benefiting from Jamie Dimon's efforts? Precious few.
From the early 1800s to the 1970s, worker compensation increased apace with worker productivity, but ever since Reagan productivity has increased with no benefit to the worker. (This is not entirely Reagan's fault, the start of this trend predates his term of office, but he was quite happy to accelerate the process.)
More than half of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck, with only a few hundred bucks in the bank. Does that strike you as a "healthy" economy?
Since the crisis in 2008/09, 99% of all new income has gone to the top 1%. Does this serve the public good?
I'm too lazy (at this hour) to google the exact numbers, but something like 90% of all stocks and bonds are owned by less than 2% of the population. Thus, even legitimate financial wizardry has little benefit for the average Joe.
Interesting metric. But how exactly do you quantify the public good that Elon Musk has done?
Good points, but I wasn't proposing a metric, just a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the difference between actually building things vs. simply contriving some "genius" financial instruments that shave off a few basis points for the investors. I chose Musk as the example because he, more than most, has an explicit "mission" to help humanity with his companies -- cheaper access to space for SpaceX and accelerating the advent of EVs for Tesla.
It wasn't that long ago (a couple-hundred years) that corporations were required to state the public good they would serve in their charters. (Typically it would be something like building a bridge or some other public infrastructure.) Nowadays, a corporation's only responsibility is to its shareholders, with no explicit regard to the public good.
As for the "Musk" rule: Tesla's mission is to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles; SpaceX's mission is to reduce the cost of access to space, and thus to facilitate the colonization of Mars. Henry Ford's mission was to bring cheap transportation to the masses. Meanwhile, what has Jamie Dimon done for the public good lately? (Oh yeah, he helped to crash the global economy...)
My "Musk Rule" is simply a yardstick to measure which of these billionaires are actually "earning" their wealth by doing good for the public versus those who are simply skimming a percentage off the markets without actually "contributing" much to the public.
The "public good" is a difficult thing to quantify, as you make clear. But I think it's pretty easy to get a "gut" reaction to any enterprise, and determine whether you think they "deserve" their billions.
Few companies are as well resourced to help change the world as Apple but sadly Apple and Cook are doing little with that opportunity.
Sadly, our capitalist system is ill-suited to the kind of altruistic effort you describe. Fiduciary responsibility prevents most corporations from taking risks for the common good.
I have what I call the Elon Musk Rule for Billionaires: If you're doing even 1/10th of the public good as Elon does, then you deserve your billions. But if you're just another hedge-funder, sitting on your Smaug hoard, then you -- or rather the fact that you are a billionaire -- is not doing any good for the rest of us. Furthermore, the fact that you are keeping all that coin in your hoard, and out of circulation, is in fact a detriment to the rest of us. You are nothing more than a blood-sucking parasite with a fancy suit and a Ferrari.
It's worth noting that both SpaceX and Tesla were started as private companies (and SpaceX is still private) precisely because Elon knew he could never get away with such risky behavior as a public corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
So where would you draw the line? It seems pretty generally accepted that child-porn is beyond the pale. Indeed there are laws in place against it. When you have a company in a competitive market with a global "image" to maintain, at what point do you say, "Sorry, I can get along without your business" -- especially in the wake of a domestic terror attack on a crowd of protesters?
I don't know if Google was right or wrong in this case, but I would guess they gave it some thought before pulling the trigger on this move. It's a free market and a (mostly) free country... Google has rolled the dice on this. Time will tell if they made the right bet or not.
The other links are actually informative. Why throw out the good with the bad? You might choose to do it otherwise, but I chose to do it this way. Have a nice day.
Well, I was going to mod you up +1 Informative, but then I notice the goatse link... Now, since I'm writing this, I can't mod you down either. But at least I can warn others to check the links before clicking. (Note: The rest of the links appear to be legit.)
But if you emphasize credentials at the expense of experience and managerial competence, it could significantly hurt the end results. Expert test takers are rarely the best managers, even in China. But I guess ingrained cultural habits are a difficult wall to penetrate.
Yes, but this has always been a problem for China (and other Asian cultures): "expert test-taker" has been the main qualification for a government gig since the days of Confucius. Somehow they seem to muddle through. I suspect they will end up with a mix of mostly native talent with as many 'heavy hitters' from abroad as they can get. They'll put in some crusty old fossil from the days of Mao as titular head of the Institution, and fill in the rest with a mixture of foreign and native recruits.
Something I should have said in my original post: Although they have a strong bias toward 'on-paper' credentials, in the end, they will take who they can get and call it good. They need this program up and running (like their space program) -- even if it isn't ideal at first, as long as it's working well and not generating bad press, they'll be happy to let it flourish for a few years. Given the investment involved, I reckon it will exist for at least 10 or 15 years before getting shut down, even if not a single "qualified" person applies from abroad. (That would be a loss of face, and they will almost never allow that.) In the meantime, they have plenty of time... recruit whoever you can, domestically or otherwise, get the thing up and running, and see what happens.
With such a large instrument, there's a good chance that even "local rookies" could make some interesting discoveries and publish papers in some prestigious journals. That's all that matters to the Party Leaders.
A couple of things... First, Neil de Grasse Tyson mentioned this telescope, and its prospects for drawing talent, in a recent interview. (Might be this one, I don't have time to check.) Basically, he was talking about how the US was losing its leadership in science, citing the cancellation of the Superconducting Super-Collider back in the 90's. He mentioned this radio-telescope project in China as being a major draw for "talent" from the scientific community.
The second thing is about China itself. Culturally, they have a strong bias in favor of 'credentials' and 'certifications' as well as experience. They also put a lot of importance on 'face' or prestige. They want to attract some heavy hitters to bring attention and status to their program. The Party Leaders didn't allocate funds for this telescope because they give a shit about astronomy, they did it to establish their country as a central player in that field, just as Switzerland and Italy did by hosting the LHC. If you want to work with the largest radio-telescope in the world nowadays, you have to go to China.
1) we didn't invest in obtaining the right of ways years ago when it would have been cheaper
Actually, we had plenty of rights-of-way back in the day, but we gave them up in the post-war era as cars and interstate highways became ubiquitous. My parents grew up in Sterling, Nebraska in the 30s and 40s (population 1500 back then, more like 700 now), and they had regular, daily passenger rail service. Truman's famous whistle-stop campaign in 1948 would not have been possible otherwise.
In my home town, Cedar Falls, Iowa, there is an extra-wide street (Seerley Blvd.) which seems out of place in its residential neighborhood. Turns out, back in the day, there was a street-level tram which went from Cedar Falls to nearby Waterloo, about 10 miles away to the east. But that rail line was gone long before I was born.
Of course, none of this negates your point that serious passenger rail would require the purchase a lot of very expensive rights-of-way. But fortunately, I think the advent of self-driving cars will make this a moot point. When "Transportation as a Service" (TaaS) becomes available, point-to-point, even in tiny towns like Sterling, NE, the need for passenger rail goes away. Ditto for individual car ownership.
I was reminded of a slightly different cultural reference: GATTACA! GATTACA!
Seriously though, this is precisely the type of genetic augmentation that was at the heart of that excellent movie. One has to wonder how long it will be before this sort of thing is commonplace.
Umm... maybe that's because Lithium is an extremely light element, and only comprises a small fraction of the weight of the battery?
The question is: what percentage of the market will be put off by refueling time? Most people only gas-up a couple of times a week. And most of the time EV users simply charge overnight while the car is parked in the garage. Unless you're a field-rep or salesman, very few people have a frequent need to drive 500 miles in a day without taking an hour to recharge (both mentally and electrically).
In any case, what are the chances that they won't have ubiquitous availability of battery swap by 2030, or a new battery chemistry that allows super-fast charging? No one can predict the future, of course, but judging by the trends in the last 15~20 years, it's quite reasonable to expect the "refueling time" problem will have been solved by then.
And remember that self-driving cars will also have a huge impact on the market. Car ownership is already declining, among millennials in particular. The average car sits parked 94% of the time. An entire "fleet of major assets with a six-percent utilization rate is a technology disruption waiting to happen." (Quoted from Tony Seba, in the video linked above, in my original post.)
Some analysts are already predicting that the car market will be 50% EV by the mid-2020s, and will "tip" rapidly thereafter. This trend is mostly driven by the cost of Li-ion batteries, which has been falling at about 15%/yr for the last couple of decades. When it becomes possible to buy an entry-level EV for $20k or less, why would you even want an ICE vehicle?
The "fuel" price for EVs is a fraction of that for ICE, as is the maintenance cost. EVs only have a couple-dozen moving parts, compared to thousands in an ICE car. Of course, there will still be "gas car" enthusiasts in 2040, just as there are hobbyists who still maintain antique steam-powered farm equipment. But even by 2030, there will no longer be a need for this law, because the market will already have flipped.
Ahh yes, the good old days... downloading 12 or 13 floppies at 28Kbps on dial-up. Doing battle with X-config, trying to get it to work with your graphics card (and hoping you don't fry your CRT in the process). And god-forbid you have a need for Asian language support... There has been enormous progress over the last couple of decades -- mostly that first decade, frankly. I haven't had any of those issues in a long time.
At first I maintained a dual-boot Windows partition, but I've been running pure Linux for at least 15 years now. But I must confess, I haven't even looked at Slackware in about the same amount of time. Nice to know they're still doing their good work.
Even though I disagree with the "theme" of your post, I would mod you up "+1 Funny" if I hadn't already commented in this thread. Made me LOL, thanks. ;-)
Then again, if it was a private tweet from Trump... that would count as White House policy. As for the cost, you might well be off by a couple orders of magnitude. IIRC, Elon's original hyperloop white paper estimated the cost of the SF-to-LA 'loop at around six or eight billion. Add in your fudge factors for Elon's notorious optimism and turning it into a 'gubmint' project... and I still think you'd be in the tens of billions, rather than hundreds. FWIW...
Having just watched the interview, I can tell you one of the governors asked Elon that exact question. Gov. Doug Ducey (R-AZ) said (paraphrasing): If they discovered a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas that could explode, people would say "Ban it!" but then we wouldn't have natural gas. How do we regulate something that doesn't even exist yet?
Elon's response: "Well, I think the first order of business would be to gain insight. Right now the government does not even have insight. I think the right order of business would be to stand up a regulatory agency. Initial goal: gain insight into the status of AI activity. Make sure the situation is understood. Once it is, then put regulations in place to ensure public safety. That's it."
If you assume that NASA continues its past trajectory of "cost-plus" contracting, of course the cost will be out of reach. But the economics of "launch" are rapidly changing, due to SpaceX and several other players such as Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, and MoonEx.
Given the Trump administration's (apparently) positive attitude toward space exploration, and "commercial space" in particular (led apparently more by Pence than Trump), I think there might be a re-assessment of this price tag in the next couple of years, especially as Boeing and SpaceX get their respective "Commercial Crew" vehicles tested and qualified for flight ops.
My first impression was "Fractals all the way down."
Something is going to need to be developed for quick charging (either battery pack swaps - which doesn't yet exist and there's no standard battery form for it to exist with any electric car that currently exist or is on the drawing board) or charging in pretty much every car park - and currently, there are no plans to add this.
On the contrary, battery swap was anticipated long ago, but the market doesn't seem to require it. Tesla's 'super-charger' network seems to be able to handle the load.
At the moment most BEV owners charge overnight at home, but where I live, less than 50% of the housing stock has off street parking. Currently, although my driving habits are otherwise perfect for owning a BEV, the fact I don't have off street parking is a complete show stopper. There's nowhere I could charge the vehicle.
As the market begins to flip, you'll see more and more opportunities to charge -- at work, at hotels, at shopping malls, etc. -- such places will offer free charging as an incentive to shop. It's probably a lot cheaper than traditional advertising.
There is also a recent startup that converts street-lamps into charging stations. Since a lot of cities are switching to LED lights, which save a lot of energy, but the power grid is set up to deliver the "old" energy requirement... there's a surplus of infrastructure available for charging. It might be a few years before this reaches your neighborhood, but it's coming, probably sooner than you expect.
It doesn't really matter, because ICE vehicles will be obsolete long before 2040 anyway. EVs are just better in every way that's important, in particular the cost of "fuel" and maintenance. At the moment, EVs are more expensive to buy, and take a bit longer to "refuel", but those disadvantages will disappear in the next few years. By the mid 2020s, it won't make economic sense to buy an ICE car anymore, and the entire market will switch with surprising rapidity.
Tony Seba predicts this will happen by 2030, but even if he's overly optimistic by a factor of two, the transition will still be complete before 2040.
Another aspect of this, noted by Bloomberg, is that long before this transition is complete, probably in the next 6 or 7 years, EVs will displace enough oil consumption to cause a crash in the oil price. That in turn will cause trillions($) of sunk capital to go belly-up. Fracked oil is barely profitable at $50/bbl. When the price goes to $30, the frackers won't even be able to service their debt at that price. Sayanora. And deep-water oil isn't far behind...
IIRC, Rocket Lab is also contracted to carry MoonEx's Google Lunar X-Prize (GLXP) mission later this year. All the more reason to wish them well on these upcoming flights.
It's starting to happen already, but it will take some time to get enough storage capacity installed to catch up with the amount of solar power already on the grid.
Yeah, I think we're on the same page here... my point is just that OSS is always going to keep getting better, and the price is going to keep it as a mainstay for newbies learning the ropes. Eventually I think we'll reach the point where OSS becomes the dominant paradigm. Will that be five years from now? Ten years? Who knows? But I think the economic 'forcing functions' are leading in that direction.
When was the last time you actually tried LibreOffice or KDEnlive or similar "equivalents" in OSS? Unless you\'re a "power user" in the commercial version and/or you're starting from scratch, you probably won't notice much difference.
I've been doing some at-home editing and proofreading for a local magazine for the last couple of years, and we've never had a problem interfacing between my Linux system and their Windows gear. I just save as .docx and everything seems to work fine.
I recently uploaded a series of videos on YouTube, and used KDEnlive to edit some of them. I was fairly new to NLE, but I found KDEnlive to be a very robust and well supported platform. The learning curve was no steeper than if I'd been using Maya or FinalCutPro.
It will take a while for this to sink in, world-wide, but the trend toward open source is inexorable.
Yes, that's the obvious counterpoint, but seriously... how many "regular" people are actually benefiting from Jamie Dimon's efforts? Precious few.
From the early 1800s to the 1970s, worker compensation increased apace with worker productivity, but ever since Reagan productivity has increased with no benefit to the worker. (This is not entirely Reagan's fault, the start of this trend predates his term of office, but he was quite happy to accelerate the process.)
More than half of Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck, with only a few hundred bucks in the bank. Does that strike you as a "healthy" economy?
Since the crisis in 2008/09, 99% of all new income has gone to the top 1%. Does this serve the public good?
I'm too lazy (at this hour) to google the exact numbers, but something like 90% of all stocks and bonds are owned by less than 2% of the population. Thus, even legitimate financial wizardry has little benefit for the average Joe.
Interesting metric. But how exactly do you quantify the public good that Elon Musk has done?
Good points, but I wasn't proposing a metric, just a rhetorical flourish to emphasize the difference between actually building things vs. simply contriving some "genius" financial instruments that shave off a few basis points for the investors. I chose Musk as the example because he, more than most, has an explicit "mission" to help humanity with his companies -- cheaper access to space for SpaceX and accelerating the advent of EVs for Tesla.
It wasn't that long ago (a couple-hundred years) that corporations were required to state the public good they would serve in their charters. (Typically it would be something like building a bridge or some other public infrastructure.) Nowadays, a corporation's only responsibility is to its shareholders, with no explicit regard to the public good.
As for the "Musk" rule: Tesla's mission is to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles; SpaceX's mission is to reduce the cost of access to space, and thus to facilitate the colonization of Mars. Henry Ford's mission was to bring cheap transportation to the masses. Meanwhile, what has Jamie Dimon done for the public good lately? (Oh yeah, he helped to crash the global economy...)
My "Musk Rule" is simply a yardstick to measure which of these billionaires are actually "earning" their wealth by doing good for the public versus those who are simply skimming a percentage off the markets without actually "contributing" much to the public.
The "public good" is a difficult thing to quantify, as you make clear. But I think it's pretty easy to get a "gut" reaction to any enterprise, and determine whether you think they "deserve" their billions.
Few companies are as well resourced to help change the world as Apple but sadly Apple and Cook are doing little with that opportunity.
Sadly, our capitalist system is ill-suited to the kind of altruistic effort you describe. Fiduciary responsibility prevents most corporations from taking risks for the common good.
I have what I call the Elon Musk Rule for Billionaires: If you're doing even 1/10th of the public good as Elon does, then you deserve your billions. But if you're just another hedge-funder, sitting on your Smaug hoard, then you -- or rather the fact that you are a billionaire -- is not doing any good for the rest of us. Furthermore, the fact that you are keeping all that coin in your hoard, and out of circulation, is in fact a detriment to the rest of us. You are nothing more than a blood-sucking parasite with a fancy suit and a Ferrari.
It's worth noting that both SpaceX and Tesla were started as private companies (and SpaceX is still private) precisely because Elon knew he could never get away with such risky behavior as a public corporation.