As a secular Muslim who grew up pretty orthodox, it's the same thing. Lots of day to day details. Have to sit down to pee. I got some good beats for standing and peeing. Which foot to enter the washroom with. What to say before each and every activity...
There's a million different sects and everyone kind of follows their own leader who makes whatever ruling they see fit.
There is definite pride is following more rules.
I'm not here to say these are bad. In some ways, it is very practical. It kind of forces the community to support itself. I know we've always bought halal meat from our own community butcher. And even now as it gets into regular stores, there's still a Muslim supplier/authenticators.
I suspect the same is true of Judaism as you keep that same community and supply chain strong.
Even very secular Muslims will often stick to halal meat when at home.
I definitely suspect some major sects to claim this lab meat is not-halal. There is a prayer that must be done on the 'animals' in addition to the slaughtering method.
I was using my bluetooth headset for a while at work. I recently switched to a regular 3.5mm headset.
Battery life was a concern, but not the major one. My main one was switching between devices at work.
I have to attend conference calls, so I want the headset paired with my phone. Then, I watch a training video and I want it paired with my laptop.
I know it's possible to switch what the headset is paired to. I've done it, but dammit if every time it's like I'm playing a game. Enabling and Disabling devices and pairings. Whatever I have to do, nothing is easier than just swapping the jack.
Wired headset is just easier. Do I care if it's USB-C or 3.5mm Audio? Only to the extent it works. I doubt my laptop will come with a USB-C port anytime soon, but it has that trusty 3.5mm jack.
Same. I've never had a spinning HD just die. They always 'act' funny for a while.
Then again, I've kind of stopped worrying about harddrives dying. Ever since I started working, it's been RAID 1 with two harddrives. One starts going bad, I swap it out.
Then I have a NAS with RAID as well. Samething there.
I'm in Canada, and I think like most of the world, public transit is subsidized. Whatever the number is. 30%-70% is covered by general taxation.
It's really not unthinkable to just make it free since you're already paying almost half the cost anyways. If a city is already subsidizing transit by $1 billion, and can make it free for $2 billion, it doesn't seem that crazy.
Then of course, there's the saving in terms of payment systems, inspectors, fares, security systems... whatever that works out to be. Probably like 5-15% of the fare cost.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if some routes do in fact cost more to collect in fares. Obviously not the major busy routes.
As far as government spending goes, this wouldn't be a crazy waste of money. I know in Canada, Calgary has a fare free zone, where you basically don't pay fares within the downtown core. Plus you can reduce traffic, drinking and driving, better for the environment...
My workplace does a pretty good job of protecting people, sometimes too good a job. It checks URLs, validates links sent via emails... It's not perfect, but it works pretty darn well.
There is little reason the major ISPs, browsers, and/or email systems shouldn't have similar kinds of protections. Yes, you should be able to call them to turn it off if you like to browse unsafely.
Similarly, the entire online payment industry could use some work. It's actually been a long time since I just typed in my credit card info into a random website. Most things are available on Amazon and i go there. I also tend to use paypal. Is paypal super secure? I don't know, probably not. But it's better than typing all my info into some random website. Some kind of digital ID/payment systems would go along way.
Basically, i'm not saying anything here is perfect, but there's a crap load that we could do to make things better. Yes, the internet is open and 'free', but at lease in Canada, most people are with a handful of big ISPs and most people use a handful of browsers and email servers. Most people use a handful of banks. We could definitely lock that down real quick so most people are not impacted most of the time even with their 'user stupidity'
Go outside the nice playpen and you could get dangerous real quick.
This is pretty much the same as any service/contractor. Surely you've tried to hire someone for a home renovation or tried to find a good mechanic.
It's mainly by reputation.
Any service can screw you over. Either unintentionally in that they can't diagnose the problem correct. Every had a mystery car problem? They literally just try telling you to swap out parts until it is fixed.
Now try telling any service person to 'fix' or 'workon' a botched job that someone else setup. That's even worse. That's the vast majority of IT though.
So find someone good based on reputation in the domain they know. Beyond that, it's the same as anything else.
The vast majority of editors out there are made to work with the storage being in the 'cloud'.
Google docs: you keep the file in Google Drive. Confluence: you edit in confluence
That's the direction most apps are going. Are the current exceptions? Of course there are. Picture editors tend to work like how they describe in the article with the upload/edit/download phase. But some of these are even moving to cloud platforms.
I can personally think of a much safer/1st draft solution that solves 99% of the headaches that I have when encountering local files.
The problem is when you download a file, it doesn't know where it was on your local PC, so you have to navigate and that is annoying.
So you could have a simple mechanism 1. For the file upload dialog, the browser can pass the local file location to the website.
2. Upon download, the website passes this location back to the browser, so the browser can open the save dialog to that location.
This way the user is still involved at every step, just as they are now. Things like autosave are of course not availalbe, but for websites, this solves the major problem for most files. Mult-file edit problem are another story which can happen, but I think this 1st simple case solves most of it.
The obvious security hole here is the local file location being passed to the website. You wouldn't want that for every file upload, so a new component with security permissions would have to be created. But at least... even if it is compromised, it is not the worst thing. Just a file location.
You could complicate it by having this mechanism be local to the browser. So instead of passing the actual local file location, the browsers stores that in local storage, and passes some token value to the website. When the website passes this back to the browser, the browser does a lookup and starts the file download to that location.
Well, in general no, but when you get into 'monopoly' law then it can become a yes.
This is not a new area of law here. Whenever you have a monopoly, you need to handle it to have an open market. They had a lot of caselaw back in the day on rail road monopolies. Would you want a rail road operator preventing certain goods from being shipped? If I'm a railway company and I also own an apply farm, is it right for me to not ship apples from other companies? That's an abuse of monopoly. Network system, especially infrastructure are especially prone to such abuse.
Build your own railroad is not a 'good' answer to apple farmers. Digital networks/monopolies are more interesting because it is theoretically easier to build a competing product, but in practice it's very similar to railroads. It's not hard to build a google competitor, but it is much harder to get all the users google has.
If google, being the top search engine is classified as being in a monopoly position, then it is reasonable to have measures in place to make sure they don't unfairly mistreat competitors or trump up their own services too much.
The details can work themselves out in the courts and lawyers, but it's a pretty reasonable ask.
Practically, it is a problem with software. All industries have some kind way of getting you to rebuy their product or get continuous money. Planned obsolescence is just a thing in every industry where they cannot keep charging money.
In the physical world, they will design a gear out of plasitc knowing it will fail sooner than a metal one or whatever... even though the cost of a metal gear is so minimal.
Or if they can make you buy refillable items or service contracts...
Software has had a few ways to do this (a planned obsolescence). Software doesn't magically degrade forcing you to buy a new one, so they have to invent ways. The line between a valid case and a case of forced obsolescence is a fine one. Can you 'prove' the company that made a blender with a plastic gear did so just to make you buy a new one in 3 says, as opposed to a valid lower price point choice? Same with software. Can you prove they moved to a server model just to keep you paying as opposed to valid reasons (multiplayer, infrastructure...)
1. Version incompatibility. Sure... you can use your old word processor, but if people are exchanging documents that can't be read by your old version, you will be highly encouraged to upgrade. Sometimes they can make version incompatible on purpose.
2. Server component. Some kind of server component that needs a paid subscription.
It would be nice of things could work forever. But as someone who works in the field, we all need to be paid. How the business folks get the money in the company to pay our salaries is kind of an important point beyond me building a good product that will last you forever.
Every industry serves society, but also serves itself. Software is one that actually is harder on itself than most industries. Doctors serve society... they also make sure to serve themselves quite well. So do nurses, lawyers, teachers..
I used to a lot of embedded programming. As part of the job, we often had to write quick front ends or utilities for our customers. I used a lot of visual basic 6 there.
That actually was a time saver. It was just easy to get something basic out. Way quicker than i could have done it in VC++ or anything like that. Good IDE, debugging... (for a script language of course)
The problem that I have with a lot of this is many scripting languages aren't easy to get into.
Javascript for example is just not easier. Just for starters, an asynchronous event queue system within a webbrowser/server environment is actually a friggin complex programming system on its own.
You start throwing in package management to do anything useful of many script languages and it all gets confusing fast.
I love scripting languages myself. It's just crazy how hard and complex the ones we speak of are.
I've worked long enough to know that you don't need to know the domain to be a leader in it.
What you do need is the trust of key technical people. It's why you often see an executive take a position and then bring over a lot of staff from the old company. He knows them. He trusts them. He can get to work.
Having a good background in the domain can help; especially in a new situation to know if someone is 'legit'. But as long as he surrounds himself and trusts good technical people, it is a non issue.
Basically the EU court ruled that France can keep it's horse betting monopoly because it claims it is to prevent gambling problems.
So my question is why can't that apply to mobile payments for Hungary? Could Hungary not keep it's mobile payment monopoly to prevent financial problems (fraud, theft. terrorism...whatever else it can claim as the general economic interest)
Because surely France could also legislate and regulate an open market of horse gambling in the same way as Hungary can legislate and regulate an open market for mobile payments.
Of course it could just be that France is bigger power and the EU is more timid towards them. Yet, assuming the EU court is trying to be fair, I'm trying to figure out the rule and the difference.
The article is pretty sparse, but I'm curious. There isn't much of a ruling here.
I'm in Canada. We have universal healthcare and we FORBID the private sector from operating a competing health care system.
Would this kind of situation be forbidden by the EU? My hunch says no because Healthcare! But I ask myself from a legal perspective, why can't a country make a case that payments go through it's national system for whatever reasons that constitute the general economic interest?
I've googled a fair bit for some legal analysis, but it's sparse. The court basically says they should have done it through legislation/standardization....
But I'm trying to figure out how this works with all other kinds of state monopolies be it in healthcare, transit, roads, utilities...
The other thing is incentives are complex. There's direct incentives. Like here Company, we give you 1 billion dollars and you build a plant and employ X workers...
There's also incentives which really don't cost the state much.
For example, if a state says Company we exempt you from paying property taxes for 10 years as a value of 1 billion dollars. That might not cost the state much. At worst you can think of in a big city like New York, where property is expensive, sure you can definitely get a more tangible cost of lost revenue... as you could theoretically have that space used by another company who would pay property tax. But for say Wisconsin, there might not be another company who would pay that much property tax, so it's not like the state would have 1 billion in property tax revenue otherwise.
The other more real costs like roads/infrastructure that would otherwise not need to be built.
Then you consider the plus side of workers and additional tax revenue they bring (income/property/sales...)
It's a crazy equation on if it's a good deal or not. It's just rarely as simple as thinking the government is handing foxconn 3 billion dollars.
While you got down voted, I tend to agree that people need to contribute; both for their own sanity... and the sanity of everyone else.
I don't come it from a Christian angle, just a life angle.
Where we are on the line of capitalism or socialism, I don't know, but I'd much rather see guaranteed jobs than guaranteed income.
Even in the foreseeable future, do people think there are no jobs that people need to do to contribute to society? We'd rather give out free money than have people clean up parks, assist the elderly... do whatever.
Sure the day robots can do literally 100% of all jobs, we can maybe approach the utopia UBI folks advocate. Until that time, I say put people to work. Heck, I just took my kid to the park and there were plastic bottles everywhere. If we have the money for the UBI, pay someone 1k/month to clean up the park in their community.
Or better still, what is wrong with not having kids?
Japan seems to be coping as well if not better with it's low birth rate than other Western nations.
They're pursuing automation and robotics instead of mass immigration. That seems a little more in line with where technology seems to be going anyways and they get to side step all the issues around mass immigration.
We should also remember that not having kids saves the government a lot of money. Education, crime...
I'm not trying to paint an ideal picture of Japan. Quite the contrary, they have a whole host of problems. Yet, so does every country.
It's just they seem to be working through it like everyone else.
Just because you have a low birth rate does not mean you automatically jump to solve it by reducing your work culture and bringing in mass immigration. That's one tactic, but there's a whole host of others that a society can do.
I agree that a lot of regulation will come after. We have no idea what protections will need to be in place to make it safe. There's going to be some trial and error.
I suspect I big part of the lack of regulation is that the government doesn't know how to regulate it properly. That is to say, when the government designs the test, people are rightly or wrongly going to assume that it is safe. They can put whatever disclaimers they want on it, that will be the perception of people and companies. Companies will also view the government test as the testing they need to do.
On the surface, I fully agree that there is a lack of government testing. Just grab a few of these cars. drive around some small test track. Throw in obstacles. Pedestrian crossing illegally. Construction changes to road patterns. Rapid breaking... whatever. It can act as a good baseline for testing. But since no one knows what testing is 'good enough', the government isn't going to do that because then it's testing will be taken as bible.
It's a human behavioral problem and once you get the government tests, many people will view that as THE TEST of safety. It's unfortunate, but that's life. I've worked in enough industries to know that's the case.
It's actually really hard for any group to criticize the angry part of their group.
Jordan Peterson really hits on something when he says, we have finally reached a state where we draw a line on the right. Anyone who speaks on superiority of people just on the basis of their race... has crossed that line and must be publicly denounced. We really do forget that globally, people cross that line all the time.
It's actually very unique for a group to criticize it's 'crazies'. The reason is simply their crazies do the dirty work.
I grew up Muslim. Whenever you get free speech issues, like say the cartoon thing. The vast majority of my family in Canada (and we're like 2nd/3rd pretty moderate generation) will say something like the following. Killing people is wrong, but they shouldn't be saying stuff about Islam anyways. Or you have like my family in the UK, where the crazies are one's who try to get rid of various ethnicities in their neighborhood. Now, no moderate person would voice their support of it, but they're just glad the community is now safer and better.
You had the same thing with the KKK back in the day. Not every white person liked the KKK or wanted the violence, but the KKK did the job they wanted. They kept blacks out of the neighborhood. They were on 'your' side. So most white people wouldn't go out there and really take on the KKK. It really took a lot to push that fight.
The far left isn't going to do it either. They enjoy that the threat of punch a Nazi or shame you out of the job keeps people in line. They will throw the same token rejection of violence or whatever that every other group days... while letting their crazies do their thing because it benefits them.
Blacks won't do it either. They will never fight black extremists because they're on their side. You see it happening in South Africa today. The government working alongside what is the black equivalent of the KKK, led by Julius Malema. It's really strange just to see the language and how the groups work. The ANC says it's not racist... but really can't go against the black KKK. Coded threats. Outright violence. All the while, the government sits backs and says: what's the problem, we're not racist. Let's just work it all out, while they work with people who openly chant kill whites, kill farmers.
Anyways, the long and short of it is. Very few people actually take on their crazies of their group that fights for them and their interests. Probably because no one is playing to lose. The weird line the West drew so cohesively and broadly against Nazis is actually kind of unique. Everywhere else in the world, the alt-right or whatever is pretty much regular behavior.
Hopefully this conversation stays in these bounds. But I really like how Jordan Peterson puts it in his Maps of Meaning Havard lectures. I'll paraphrase it.
"Your culture protects you and allows you to operate within those bounds. Remove the protections of that culture, and you don't know who you'd be"
I grew up in Africa. I'm of Indian background. Life was far more dangerous. I wasn't protected. I did ignore/not help someone who looked injured on the side of the road. It could be a scam to rob/hurt me. I did avoid certain people/areas about of pure fear of what can happen. Mainly because I personally knew people who had really bad things happen to them... and had some happen to me. I obeyed a lot of rules to keep my self safe... never wear jewelry in public. Don't display any sign of wealth...
I now live in Canada with ample protection. To the point where here, I'm seen as the altruistic brave person. I was on the subway a while back and a thuggish person had fallen asleep/or drunk at the end of the line. Everyone was too scared to wake him up. To me, it was just easy. I had literally no fear of this 'Canadian thug'. I woke em up, got thanked by the other people on the subway...
The point here is not to pump me up, but to put it in perspective. These people who had so much fear, they couldn't wake up a sleeping thug on the subway in Toronto were really no different than me back in Africa. It's just a matter of perspective. I had seen 'real' danger and 'real' random violence. I am not risking that. For whatever reason, the culture in Canada has largely protected me. I don't really have that random violence fear. Canada is not utopia people, violence and gangs and murders happen here, but generally if you mind your business, people don't bother you. At least that is how I've felt in Canadian culture. It never crossed my mind once that the sleeping thug would have any reason to attack me.
On the one hand, these millennials seem naive. They've been raised in a culture that tells them what their rights are and about the goodness of people. By in large you can go through the first 25 years of life living very well protected by that culture. You'll probably get to see more goodness in people than I would. Take a step back for a second. Why should they not expect to walk down the street naked at 3 am? Because danger you say? Any less danger than me just walking down the street. Because when I was an Africa I literally had the fear just walking down various street in places I had to go. Yet, we've managed to create a culture in North America where in general, you can walk around without general fear.
Why can't we create a culture where it is safe to walk around naked at 3 am in general?
I of course have my doubts and my mind is much more like yours in terms of safety, but I also can't help but see so much of it is just culture. I can tell you for sure that the millennial guys for example are much kinder and more tame than the guys when I went to school with and much much much more tame than the guys in Africa. I've never been to Sweden so maybe this is a gross naive stereotype, but let's imagine sweden without immigration for a second. Everyone there educated and protected by Swedish culture for generations. Would you think it strange to think a Swedish person could walk out at 3 am naked and have the general expectation to be safe? Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Of course this leads to a huge mismatch if you ever encounter people outside the protected millennial culture, but it is interesting nonetheless. But I see that as far less a problem, given we all take the protection of our culture for granted. We all appear from the cabbage patch from a different perspective.
Driver cost is a very large expense. "Here, there are several reasons, one of which is labor; the biggest single cost on buses is the driver, who is paid by the hour. (The other major costs are fuel consumption and maintenance.) "
I think it has a lot to do with what your primary value is. Let me try and articulate it.
Let's establish from the start that there is an idealized leader. Someone who is technically brilliant, socially and emotionally strong, a mentor, assertive, strong, constructive...
The problem is that person is so rare. It is something we all aim for and good on Linus for trying to improve his social skills to reach this ideal.
But for all of us imperfect humans, the real question comes what do you do when push comes to shove in the day to day grind. Time is limited. Mental energy is limited. Emotional energy is limited. I think it is an absolutely legitimate worry to be concerned that Linus or anyone else for that matter will be able to maintain quality, while doing all the rest.
It's one of the reasons in most companies, there are a variety of jobs. When I first graduated from university, I didn't like being placed in a box 'developer/engineer'. I enjoyed talking to customer, gathering requirements, mentoring, leading.. little bits of everything.
The more I got into my career though, the more I realized I can't do everything. The more I realized the trade offs and skills that are lacking. The more I realized, the more I strengthen some areas, the weaker I get in others. Heck, I used to know C and C++ and Java so in depth, it was scary. I just don't know it that well anymore. I'm out of practice. The more I moved into management, the more I time and energy I spent just dealing with social games. The games of power are ridiculous in a corporation. I realized that is not for me. I now don't even look for technical skill in a manager. I realized, I am perfectly capable of communicating technical issues to a manager and they get it. What I can't do is play those games. I want someone there to offload that work. I literally walk up to my manager and tell him, this department/person is being difficult, go yell at them... and they go handle that.
I really do think it is a valid worry if Linus will be able to do both. Let's face it, if Linux was a normal company, senior technology people wouldn't be able to just say things in public. They'd have various PR and communication people as a buffer. Heck, even in a strictly technical role, if I really have a problem with the way someone is doing something and I can't just explain to them technically and they accept it, I go to my manager and explain. They handle that person part of dealing with the person.
Again, kudos to Linus for trying to improve his leadership skills. However, I don't think we can simply dismiss worries that the quality bar will not be moved. It's a very hard job to do everything. If he can do it, he'd be that one in a million leader.
I was also born in the developing world. In Africa specifically.
People don't need to be shit or evil for programs to fail. Though that is a very valid worry.
For whatever reason all these basic income trials seem to focus on giving money to poor or unemployed people. At least that was the case in Ontario, and this one as well.
That's fine if the question you have is what do you have to do to quell unrest of the poor or see if the poor won't work.
In my view that's only half the question. Quite frankly, I can almost see the logic in just paying people to not have civil unrest or massive poverty. I really don't care if they play video games and smoke weed all day. It's probably cheaper than paying for a lot of police and health care...
A far better question is what do you do long term about the willingness of people to actually work. I'm talking middle class jobs or even upper class jobs. We already know Canadians and Americans... even if they're poor won't do low wage hard work (farming...).
Will people continue to want to be doctors, engineers, teachers, miners, sales people... assuming they could get a living wage. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure many people will still want to work in nice jobs or the nice parts of their job. For example, I love technology, I'd probably still develop software just out of interest. But would I want to be pulled into an emergency situation or fix some shitty boring enterprise system? Probably not. A person might love being a family doctor. Do they want to be an ER doctor on the midnight shift?
People have an innate sense of fairness, as they do an innate sense of charity and other things. If you look around and see people just chilling... you tend to think why don't you just chill.
I say it's very hard to build a society when that mindset gets there. You see that in Venezuela where people see working as pointless due to the currency and other mindset. I've seen it in my life too.
I think most of these people thinking of the UBI just assume the middle and upper class folks will just keep working the same with the exact same values. That in my view is really the key question.
Anyone who wants the UBI should really take a trip to a developing nation and see how badly they want to attract professionals and others. It's not that the people in those countries aren't capable of doing those jobs. Its just the ones that are often leave for richer pastures. Or they know it's just not worth it (currency, taxes...)
I'm not a UBI downer at all here. I just really think people take a lot for granted and just assume people will keep working with the same drive and ambition as they always have. That's a pretty big and in my view... not very likely assumption.
I'd worry a lot less about whether or not some unemployed teenager plays video games and smokes weed or day or scrabbles to be a server. Society largely functions fine without him involved.
I'd worry much more about whether you can keep the rest of society working as hard.
Honest question, how to theaters pay for the right to show a movie?
Do they pay a fix cost? Like AMC pays 20 million to the movie company to air a movie? Do they give a share of ticket sales? Like AMC pays $5 of every ticket sale to the movie company. Do they pay each time their air a movie? Like each showing, AMC has to pay the movie company $500.
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As a secular Muslim who grew up pretty orthodox, it's the same thing. Lots of day to day details. Have to sit down to pee. I got some good beats for standing and peeing. Which foot to enter the washroom with. What to say before each and every activity...
There's a million different sects and everyone kind of follows their own leader who makes whatever ruling they see fit.
There is definite pride is following more rules.
I'm not here to say these are bad. In some ways, it is very practical. It kind of forces the community to support itself. I know we've always bought halal meat from our own community butcher. And even now as it gets into regular stores, there's still a Muslim supplier/authenticators.
I suspect the same is true of Judaism as you keep that same community and supply chain strong.
Even very secular Muslims will often stick to halal meat when at home.
I definitely suspect some major sects to claim this lab meat is not-halal. There is a prayer that must be done on the 'animals' in addition to the slaughtering method.
Others will be okay with it.
Just to tag on.
I was using my bluetooth headset for a while at work.
I recently switched to a regular 3.5mm headset.
Battery life was a concern, but not the major one.
My main one was switching between devices at work.
I have to attend conference calls, so I want the headset paired with my phone. Then, I watch a training video and I want it paired with my laptop.
I know it's possible to switch what the headset is paired to. I've done it, but dammit if every time it's like I'm playing a game. Enabling and Disabling devices and pairings. Whatever I have to do, nothing is easier than just swapping the jack.
Wired headset is just easier. Do I care if it's USB-C or 3.5mm Audio? Only to the extent it works. I doubt my laptop will come with a USB-C port anytime soon, but it has that trusty 3.5mm jack.
Same. I've never had a spinning HD just die. They always 'act' funny for a while.
Then again, I've kind of stopped worrying about harddrives dying. Ever since I started working, it's been RAID 1 with two harddrives.
One starts going bad, I swap it out.
Then I have a NAS with RAID as well. Samething there.
I've been running for a while without worries.
I didn't even know youtube had a paid version.
My brother sent me a youtube link the other day on some documentary about chimp memory vs human memory and our evolution. Really interesting stuff.
I see it is only episode 1. Episode 2 must be worth a watch. I click episode 2, and you have to have youtube premium. I didn't even know it existed.
Much less how I'd find this kind of full programming vs all the other random youtube stuff.
That will definitely be a challenge for youtube.
It's actually not that strange.
I'm in Canada, and I think like most of the world, public transit is subsidized. Whatever the number is. 30%-70% is covered by general taxation.
It's really not unthinkable to just make it free since you're already paying almost half the cost anyways. If a city is already subsidizing transit by $1 billion, and can make it free for $2 billion, it doesn't seem that crazy.
Then of course, there's the saving in terms of payment systems, inspectors, fares, security systems... whatever that works out to be. Probably like 5-15% of the fare cost.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if some routes do in fact cost more to collect in fares. Obviously not the major busy routes.
As far as government spending goes, this wouldn't be a crazy waste of money. I know in Canada, Calgary has a fare free zone, where you basically don't pay fares within the downtown core. Plus you can reduce traffic, drinking and driving, better for the environment...
meh, there's a look we can do.
My workplace does a pretty good job of protecting people, sometimes too good a job. It checks URLs, validates links sent via emails... It's not perfect, but it works pretty darn well.
There is little reason the major ISPs, browsers, and/or email systems shouldn't have similar kinds of protections. Yes, you should be able to call them to turn it off if you like to browse unsafely.
Similarly, the entire online payment industry could use some work. It's actually been a long time since I just typed in my credit card info into a random website. Most things are available on Amazon and i go there. I also tend to use paypal. Is paypal super secure? I don't know, probably not. But it's better than typing all my info into some random website. Some kind of digital ID/payment systems would go along way.
Basically, i'm not saying anything here is perfect, but there's a crap load that we could do to make things better. Yes, the internet is open and 'free', but at lease in Canada, most people are with a handful of big ISPs and most people use a handful of browsers and email servers. Most people use a handful of banks. We could definitely lock that down real quick so most people are not impacted most of the time even with their 'user stupidity'
Go outside the nice playpen and you could get dangerous real quick.
This is pretty much the same as any service/contractor.
Surely you've tried to hire someone for a home renovation or tried to find a good mechanic.
It's mainly by reputation.
Any service can screw you over. Either unintentionally in that they can't diagnose the problem correct. Every had a mystery car problem? They literally just try telling you to swap out parts until it is fixed.
Now try telling any service person to 'fix' or 'workon' a botched job that someone else setup. That's even worse. That's the vast majority of IT though.
So find someone good based on reputation in the domain they know. Beyond that, it's the same as anything else.
Just what is the real practical use case here?
The vast majority of editors out there are made to work with the storage being in the 'cloud'.
Google docs: you keep the file in Google Drive.
Confluence: you edit in confluence
That's the direction most apps are going. Are the current exceptions? Of course there are. Picture editors tend to work like how they describe in the article with the upload/edit/download phase. But some of these are even moving to cloud platforms.
I can personally think of a much safer/1st draft solution that solves 99% of the headaches that I have when encountering local files.
The problem is when you download a file, it doesn't know where it was on your local PC, so you have to navigate and that is annoying.
So you could have a simple mechanism
1. For the file upload dialog, the browser can pass the local file location to the website.
2. Upon download, the website passes this location back to the browser, so the browser can open the save dialog to that location.
This way the user is still involved at every step, just as they are now. Things like autosave are of course not availalbe, but for websites, this solves the major problem for most files. Mult-file edit problem are another story which can happen, but I think this 1st simple case solves most of it.
The obvious security hole here is the local file location being passed to the website. You wouldn't want that for every file upload, so a new component with security permissions would have to be created. But at least... even if it is compromised, it is not the worst thing. Just a file location.
You could complicate it by having this mechanism be local to the browser. So instead of passing the actual local file location, the browsers stores that in local storage, and passes some token value to the website. When the website passes this back to the browser, the browser does a lookup and starts the file download to that location.
Well, in general no, but when you get into 'monopoly' law then it can become a yes.
This is not a new area of law here. Whenever you have a monopoly, you need to handle it to have an open market. They had a lot of caselaw back in the day on rail road monopolies. Would you want a rail road operator preventing certain goods from being shipped? If I'm a railway company and I also own an apply farm, is it right for me to not ship apples from other companies? That's an abuse of monopoly. Network system, especially infrastructure are especially prone to such abuse.
Build your own railroad is not a 'good' answer to apple farmers.
Digital networks/monopolies are more interesting because it is theoretically easier to build a competing product, but in practice it's very similar to railroads. It's not hard to build a google competitor, but it is much harder to get all the users google has.
If google, being the top search engine is classified as being in a monopoly position, then it is reasonable to have measures in place to make sure they don't unfairly mistreat competitors or trump up their own services too much.
The details can work themselves out in the courts and lawyers, but it's a pretty reasonable ask.
Practically, it is a problem with software. All industries have some kind way of getting you to rebuy their product or get continuous money. Planned obsolescence is just a thing in every industry where they cannot keep charging money.
In the physical world, they will design a gear out of plasitc knowing it will fail sooner than a metal one or whatever... even though the cost of a metal gear is so minimal.
Or if they can make you buy refillable items or service contracts...
Software has had a few ways to do this (a planned obsolescence). Software doesn't magically degrade forcing you to buy a new one, so they have to invent ways. The line between a valid case and a case of forced obsolescence is a fine one. Can you 'prove' the company that made a blender with a plastic gear did so just to make you buy a new one in 3 says, as opposed to a valid lower price point choice? Same with software. Can you prove they moved to a server model just to keep you paying as opposed to valid reasons (multiplayer, infrastructure...)
1. Version incompatibility. Sure... you can use your old word processor, but if people are exchanging documents that can't be read by your old version, you will be highly encouraged to upgrade. Sometimes they can make version incompatible on purpose.
2. Server component. Some kind of server component that needs a paid subscription.
It would be nice of things could work forever. But as someone who works in the field, we all need to be paid. How the business folks get the money in the company to pay our salaries is kind of an important point beyond me building a good product that will last you forever.
Every industry serves society, but also serves itself. Software is one that actually is harder on itself than most industries. Doctors serve society... they also make sure to serve themselves quite well. So do nurses, lawyers, teachers..
I used to a lot of embedded programming. As part of the job, we often had to write quick front ends or utilities for our customers. I used a lot of visual basic 6 there.
That actually was a time saver. It was just easy to get something basic out. Way quicker than i could have done it in VC++ or anything like that. Good IDE, debugging... (for a script language of course)
The problem that I have with a lot of this is many scripting languages aren't easy to get into.
Javascript for example is just not easier. Just for starters, an asynchronous event queue system within a webbrowser/server environment is actually a friggin complex programming system on its own.
You start throwing in package management to do anything useful of many script languages and it all gets confusing fast.
I love scripting languages myself. It's just crazy how hard and complex the ones we speak of are.
That's really looking at the problem in retrospect. We have dealt with quality of infrastructure for a long time in the developed world.
What you need are licensed people for such areas; especially things that are open to the public.
You're not building a bridge without a proper license. ...
You're not building a high rise without a proper license.
Sure, you can do some stuff on your own with basic home repair or a shed.
With licensing, then you have a case for negligence.
Yes, I really do think you should need a license to put up a public website that holds personally data.
You got a little downvoted, but you're right.
I've worked long enough to know that you don't need to know the domain to be a leader in it.
What you do need is the trust of key technical people. It's why you often see an executive take a position and then bring over a lot of staff from the old company. He knows them. He trusts them. He can get to work.
Having a good background in the domain can help; especially in a new situation to know if someone is 'legit'. But as long as he surrounds himself and trusts good technical people, it is a non issue.
I understand the nuances of the world and the diversity of systems. I'm more interested in figuring out the EU courts position on things.
For example, I found this article.
https://www.reuters.com/articl...
Basically the EU court ruled that France can keep it's horse betting monopoly because it claims it is to prevent gambling problems.
So my question is why can't that apply to mobile payments for Hungary?
Could Hungary not keep it's mobile payment monopoly to prevent financial problems (fraud, theft. terrorism...whatever else it can claim as the general economic interest)
Because surely France could also legislate and regulate an open market of horse gambling in the same way as Hungary can legislate and regulate an open market for mobile payments.
Of course it could just be that France is bigger power and the EU is more timid towards them. Yet, assuming the EU court is trying to be fair, I'm trying to figure out the rule and the difference.
The article is pretty sparse, but I'm curious.
There isn't much of a ruling here.
I'm in Canada. We have universal healthcare and we FORBID the private sector from operating a competing health care system.
Would this kind of situation be forbidden by the EU? My hunch says no because Healthcare! But I ask myself from a legal perspective, why can't a country make a case that payments go through it's national system for whatever reasons that constitute the general economic interest?
I've googled a fair bit for some legal analysis, but it's sparse. The court basically says they should have done it through legislation/standardization....
But I'm trying to figure out how this works with all other kinds of state monopolies be it in healthcare, transit, roads, utilities...
The other thing is incentives are complex.
There's direct incentives. Like here Company, we give you 1 billion dollars and you build a plant and employ X workers...
There's also incentives which really don't cost the state much.
For example, if a state says Company we exempt you from paying property taxes for 10 years as a value of 1 billion dollars. That might not cost the state much. At worst you can think of in a big city like New York, where property is expensive, sure you can definitely get a more tangible cost of lost revenue... as you could theoretically have that space used by another company who would pay property tax. But for say Wisconsin, there might not be another company who would pay that much property tax, so it's not like the state would have 1 billion in property tax revenue otherwise.
The other more real costs like roads/infrastructure that would otherwise not need to be built.
Then you consider the plus side of workers and additional tax revenue they bring (income/property/sales...)
It's a crazy equation on if it's a good deal or not.
It's just rarely as simple as thinking the government is handing foxconn 3 billion dollars.
While you got down voted, I tend to agree that people need to contribute; both for their own sanity... and the sanity of everyone else.
I don't come it from a Christian angle, just a life angle.
Where we are on the line of capitalism or socialism, I don't know, but I'd much rather see guaranteed jobs than guaranteed income.
Even in the foreseeable future, do people think there are no jobs that people need to do to contribute to society? We'd rather give out free money than have people clean up parks, assist the elderly... do whatever.
Sure the day robots can do literally 100% of all jobs, we can maybe approach the utopia UBI folks advocate. Until that time, I say put people to work. Heck, I just took my kid to the park and there were plastic bottles everywhere. If we have the money for the UBI, pay someone 1k/month to clean up the park in their community.
Or better still, what is wrong with not having kids?
Japan seems to be coping as well if not better with it's low birth rate than other Western nations.
They're pursuing automation and robotics instead of mass immigration. That seems a little more in line with where technology seems to be going anyways and they get to side step all the issues around mass immigration.
We should also remember that not having kids saves the government a lot of money. Education, crime...
I'm not trying to paint an ideal picture of Japan. Quite the contrary, they have a whole host of problems. Yet, so does every country.
It's just they seem to be working through it like everyone else.
Just because you have a low birth rate does not mean you automatically jump to solve it by reducing your work culture and bringing in mass immigration. That's one tactic, but there's a whole host of others that a society can do.
Only time will tell which is best.
I agree that a lot of regulation will come after. We have no idea what protections will need to be in place to make it safe. There's going to be some trial and error.
I suspect I big part of the lack of regulation is that the government doesn't know how to regulate it properly. That is to say, when the government designs the test, people are rightly or wrongly going to assume that it is safe. They can put whatever disclaimers they want on it, that will be the perception of people and companies. Companies will also view the government test as the testing they need to do.
On the surface, I fully agree that there is a lack of government testing. Just grab a few of these cars. drive around some small test track. Throw in obstacles. Pedestrian crossing illegally. Construction changes to road patterns. Rapid breaking... whatever. It can act as a good baseline for testing. But since no one knows what testing is 'good enough', the government isn't going to do that because then it's testing will be taken as bible.
It's a human behavioral problem and once you get the government tests, many people will view that as THE TEST of safety. It's unfortunate, but that's life. I've worked in enough industries to know that's the case.
It's actually really hard for any group to criticize the angry part of their group.
Jordan Peterson really hits on something when he says, we have finally reached a state where we draw a line on the right. Anyone who speaks on superiority of people just on the basis of their race... has crossed that line and must be publicly denounced. We really do forget that globally, people cross that line all the time.
It's actually very unique for a group to criticize it's 'crazies'. The reason is simply their crazies do the dirty work.
I grew up Muslim. Whenever you get free speech issues, like say the cartoon thing. The vast majority of my family in Canada (and we're like 2nd/3rd pretty moderate generation) will say something like the following. Killing people is wrong, but they shouldn't be saying stuff about Islam anyways. Or you have like my family in the UK, where the crazies are one's who try to get rid of various ethnicities in their neighborhood. Now, no moderate person would voice their support of it, but they're just glad the community is now safer and better.
You had the same thing with the KKK back in the day. Not every white person liked the KKK or wanted the violence, but the KKK did the job they wanted. They kept blacks out of the neighborhood. They were on 'your' side. So most white people wouldn't go out there and really take on the KKK. It really took a lot to push that fight.
The far left isn't going to do it either. They enjoy that the threat of punch a Nazi or shame you out of the job keeps people in line. They will throw the same token rejection of violence or whatever that every other group days... while letting their crazies do their thing because it benefits them.
Blacks won't do it either. They will never fight black extremists because they're on their side. You see it happening in South Africa today. The government working alongside what is the black equivalent of the KKK, led by Julius Malema. It's really strange just to see the language and how the groups work. The ANC says it's not racist... but really can't go against the black KKK. Coded threats. Outright violence. All the while, the government sits backs and says: what's the problem, we're not racist. Let's just work it all out, while they work with people who openly chant kill whites, kill farmers.
Anyways, the long and short of it is. Very few people actually take on their crazies of their group that fights for them and their interests. Probably because no one is playing to lose. The weird line the West drew so cohesively and broadly against Nazis is actually kind of unique. Everywhere else in the world, the alt-right or whatever is pretty much regular behavior.
Hopefully this conversation stays in these bounds. But I really like how Jordan Peterson puts it in his Maps of Meaning Havard lectures. I'll paraphrase it.
"Your culture protects you and allows you to operate within those bounds. Remove the protections of that culture, and you don't know who you'd be"
I grew up in Africa. I'm of Indian background. Life was far more dangerous. I wasn't protected. I did ignore/not help someone who looked injured on the side of the road. It could be a scam to rob/hurt me. I did avoid certain people/areas about of pure fear of what can happen. Mainly because I personally knew people who had really bad things happen to them... and had some happen to me. I obeyed a lot of rules to keep my self safe... never wear jewelry in public. Don't display any sign of wealth...
I now live in Canada with ample protection. To the point where here, I'm seen as the altruistic brave person. I was on the subway a while back and a thuggish person had fallen asleep/or drunk at the end of the line. Everyone was too scared to wake him up. To me, it was just easy. I had literally no fear of this 'Canadian thug'. I woke em up, got thanked by the other people on the subway...
The point here is not to pump me up, but to put it in perspective. These people who had so much fear, they couldn't wake up a sleeping thug on the subway in Toronto were really no different than me back in Africa. It's just a matter of perspective. I had seen 'real' danger and 'real' random violence. I am not risking that. For whatever reason, the culture in Canada has largely protected me. I don't really have that random violence fear. Canada is not utopia people, violence and gangs and murders happen here, but generally if you mind your business, people don't bother you. At least that is how I've felt in Canadian culture. It never crossed my mind once that the sleeping thug would have any reason to attack me.
On the one hand, these millennials seem naive. They've been raised in a culture that tells them what their rights are and about the goodness of people. By in large you can go through the first 25 years of life living very well protected by that culture. You'll probably get to see more goodness in people than I would. Take a step back for a second. Why should they not expect to walk down the street naked at 3 am? Because danger you say? Any less danger than me just walking down the street. Because when I was an Africa I literally had the fear just walking down various street in places I had to go. Yet, we've managed to create a culture in North America where in general, you can walk around without general fear.
Why can't we create a culture where it is safe to walk around naked at 3 am in general?
I of course have my doubts and my mind is much more like yours in terms of safety, but I also can't help but see so much of it is just culture. I can tell you for sure that the millennial guys for example are much kinder and more tame than the guys when I went to school with and much much much more tame than the guys in Africa. I've never been to Sweden so maybe this is a gross naive stereotype, but let's imagine sweden without immigration for a second. Everyone there educated and protected by Swedish culture for generations. Would you think it strange to think a Swedish person could walk out at 3 am naked and have the general expectation to be safe? Doesn't sound unreasonable to me.
Of course this leads to a huge mismatch if you ever encounter people outside the protected millennial culture, but it is interesting nonetheless. But I see that as far less a problem, given we all take the protection of our culture for granted. We all appear from the cabbage patch from a different perspective.
Serious question. why would you say driver's wages are not that significant? They have to do shifts, vacations, covering, redundancy, overtime...
I would imagine they'd be among the largest operational costs of running the transit. What else is there? fuel?
Capital and Maintenance costs would be there as well.
I just did a quick google.
https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/3...
https://www4.uwm.edu/cuts/utp/...
Driver cost is a very large expense.
"Here, there are several reasons, one of which is labor; the biggest single cost on buses is the driver, who is paid by the hour. (The other major costs are fuel consumption and maintenance.) "
I think it has a lot to do with what your primary value is. Let me try and articulate it.
Let's establish from the start that there is an idealized leader. Someone who is technically brilliant, socially and emotionally strong, a mentor, assertive, strong, constructive...
The problem is that person is so rare. It is something we all aim for and good on Linus for trying to improve his social skills to reach this ideal.
But for all of us imperfect humans, the real question comes what do you do when push comes to shove in the day to day grind. Time is limited. Mental energy is limited. Emotional energy is limited. I think it is an absolutely legitimate worry to be concerned that Linus or anyone else for that matter will be able to maintain quality, while doing all the rest.
It's one of the reasons in most companies, there are a variety of jobs. When I first graduated from university, I didn't like being placed in a box 'developer/engineer'. I enjoyed talking to customer, gathering requirements, mentoring, leading.. little bits of everything.
The more I got into my career though, the more I realized I can't do everything. The more I realized the trade offs and skills that are lacking. The more I realized, the more I strengthen some areas, the weaker I get in others. Heck, I used to know C and C++ and Java so in depth, it was scary. I just don't know it that well anymore. I'm out of practice. The more I moved into management, the more I time and energy I spent just dealing with social games. The games of power are ridiculous in a corporation. I realized that is not for me. I now don't even look for technical skill in a manager. I realized, I am perfectly capable of communicating technical issues to a manager and they get it. What I can't do is play those games. I want someone there to offload that work. I literally walk up to my manager and tell him, this department/person is being difficult, go yell at them... and they go handle that.
I really do think it is a valid worry if Linus will be able to do both. Let's face it, if Linux was a normal company, senior technology people wouldn't be able to just say things in public. They'd have various PR and communication people as a buffer. Heck, even in a strictly technical role, if I really have a problem with the way someone is doing something and I can't just explain to them technically and they accept it, I go to my manager and explain. They handle that person part of dealing with the person.
Again, kudos to Linus for trying to improve his leadership skills. However, I don't think we can simply dismiss worries that the quality bar will not be moved. It's a very hard job to do everything. If he can do it, he'd be that one in a million leader.
I was also born in the developing world. In Africa specifically.
People don't need to be shit or evil for programs to fail. Though that is a very valid worry.
For whatever reason all these basic income trials seem to focus on giving money to poor or unemployed people. At least that was the case in Ontario, and this one as well.
That's fine if the question you have is what do you have to do to quell unrest of the poor or see if the poor won't work.
In my view that's only half the question. Quite frankly, I can almost see the logic in just paying people to not have civil unrest or massive poverty. I really don't care if they play video games and smoke weed all day. It's probably cheaper than paying for a lot of police and health care...
A far better question is what do you do long term about the willingness of people to actually work. I'm talking middle class jobs or even upper class jobs. We already know Canadians and Americans... even if they're poor won't do low wage hard work (farming...).
Will people continue to want to be doctors, engineers, teachers, miners, sales people... assuming they could get a living wage. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure many people will still want to work in nice jobs or the nice parts of their job. For example, I love technology, I'd probably still develop software just out of interest. But would I want to be pulled into an emergency situation or fix some shitty boring enterprise system? Probably not. A person might love being a family doctor. Do they want to be an ER doctor on the midnight shift?
People have an innate sense of fairness, as they do an innate sense of charity and other things. If you look around and see people just chilling... you tend to think why don't you just chill.
I say it's very hard to build a society when that mindset gets there. You see that in Venezuela where people see working as pointless due to the currency and other mindset. I've seen it in my life too.
I think most of these people thinking of the UBI just assume the middle and upper class folks will just keep working the same with the exact same values. That in my view is really the key question.
Anyone who wants the UBI should really take a trip to a developing nation and see how badly they want to attract professionals and others. It's not that the people in those countries aren't capable of doing those jobs. Its just the ones that are often leave for richer pastures. Or they know it's just not worth it (currency, taxes...)
I'm not a UBI downer at all here. I just really think people take a lot for granted and just assume people will keep working with the same drive and ambition as they always have. That's a pretty big and in my view... not very likely assumption.
I'd worry a lot less about whether or not some unemployed teenager plays video games and smokes weed or day or scrabbles to be a server. Society largely functions fine without him involved.
I'd worry much more about whether you can keep the rest of society working as hard.
Honest question, how to theaters pay for the right to show a movie?
Do they pay a fix cost? Like AMC pays 20 million to the movie company to air a movie?
Do they give a share of ticket sales? Like AMC pays $5 of every ticket sale to the movie company.
Do they pay each time their air a movie? Like each showing, AMC has to pay the movie company $500.