Socialism IS an economic model; it IS either-or with capitalism. That's why the Nordic model is actually a capitalist economy with a strong social safety net.
That's simply false, and provably so. You can blend socialism to any degree with capitalism, from 0% to 100%. You do this by socializing any subset of the total industries out there, from 0% to 100%, according to some set of rules. For example, in the United States, we have socialist electrical power distribution, fire protection, police protection, education, roads, public libraries, military, prisons (mostly), etc.
A socialist economy CANNOT exist with capitalism, they are at odds with each other. And socialist countries always end up in ruthless dictatorships - it is almost required to make it work with human nature.
You are simply incorrect, and objectively so. This isn't a matter of opinion at all. You are simply wrong. Socialism isn't just an economic system. It is also a political system that implements aspects of that economic system. All functioning governments employ a blend of socialism and capitalism, taking the best parts of both approaches and applying them when appropriate.
For example, road construction is paid for by the government (socialism), but taxed according to use (capitalism), and contracted out to companies that do the actual use for a profit (capitalism). That's an example of socialism and capitalism coexisting even in a single, narrow industry.
The only way you can possibly conclude that the two economic theories cannot coexist is if you arbitrarily redefine socialism as describing only a purely 100% socialist economy/government. Obviously a 100% socialist economy, by definition, contains no capitalism, so you are technically correct — the best kind of correct — but only because you have arbitrarily redefined "socialism" in a ridiculously narrow way to suit your political agenda, rather than actually using the word in the way that everyone else on the planet uses it.
Approximately no one on Earth wants a purely socialist economy or a purely capitalist economy, including Democrat and Republican politicians. Any implication to the contrary is disingenuous to the point of being a bald-faced lie. Where the two parties disagree is in where the balancing point should be set. Democrats tend to think we should have more socialism, and Republicans tend to think we should have less.
But more importantly, using the unavoidable failure of pure socialism as a means to scare people into avoiding even tiny steps in that direction is a clear example of a slippery slope fallacy, which makes you look like you don't have any idea what you're talking about, at least among educated people. Please stop making arguments that can only sway the uneducated, and start making arguments that actually show that you're thinking about the problems that we're facing as a society and looking for other ways to solve them besides those based on socialism.
That is from Time's 1939 Man of the Year [time.com] for Hitler. Compare that to the current "socialist" mantra of the Democrat party: ownership of companies, restriction on profits, nationalization of industries, wealth taxes. The Democrat party is literally the party of Nazism, and Hitler's platform is enshrined in their own platform, just with different names.
*blink*
I'm not sure if you are misusing the word "literally" or you just have no clue what the Nazi party stood for. The main thing the Nazis were known for is blaming immigrants for the country's problems and then using that as an excuse to try to eradicate the Jewish people. If any party is even approaching being literal Nazis, well let's just say that there's only one party in the United States whose leader has ever suggested that illegal immigrants are the cause of our crime problems and that we should ban people from entering this country based on their religion, and it ain't the Democrats.
But ignoring the Elephant in the room, the biggest thing you're completely missing is any sense of nuance. You talk about socialism and capitalism as though it's an either-or situation. That couldn't be farther from the truth. No economic system in its purest form works, period. All economically viable countries involve a combination of economic systems. They combine some aspects of socialism (e.g. public healthcare, public schools, public roads and freeways, etc.) with some aspects of capitalism (publicly and privately owned businesses in competition with one another, wealth accumulation, etc.). Government inherently is a balancing act between those two forces. Any government that goes too far in either direction will fail. Every. Single. Time.
Anybody saying that socialism is bad or equating it with Nazism or claiming that it can't work is wrong — not just subjectively wrong, but objectively, provably wrong. Every country requires some amount of socialism, because capitalism run amok results in erosion of the middle class and eventual devolution to a servant class and an aristocrat class. Similarly, every country requires some amount of capitalism, because socialism run amok results in no incentives to innovate, create, or improve the state of the world.
Take the arts, for example. There are two things that increase artistic output: Providing funds to pay artists enough money that they can create without having to "sell out" (this is socialism) and providing laws that guarantee that artists' creations cannot be freely copied without their permission (this is capitalism). The two exist in balance.
Or take our system of roads. Businesses and individuals alike depend on these roads. They are, by nature, socialist. However, there is a secondary capitalistic aspect to them in that taxes are charged based on road use to prevent the tragedy of the commons. So although the benefit is provided to all, those who benefit more also pay more.
Compare that to the current "socialist" mantra of the Democrat party: ownership of companies, restriction on profits, nationalization of industries, wealth taxes
In order:
Nobody is proposing that the government take over businesses en masse. At times, governments do have to buy out companies for various reasons, usually involving keeping them in business. What's wrong with that?
Nobody is proposing restriction on profits by businesses. The Democrats do, however, want companies to pay their fair share of taxes on those profits. What's wrong with that?
Nationalization of industries: See above.
Finally, what's your objection to wealth taxes? There are people who earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year or more. Surely two or three million is enough. It has been proven time and time again that the joy derived from making more money does not continue to increase much at all after your needs are met. Yet many people earn far more than is necessary to m
People can't give reasonable consent to use their data for personalization, because they can't know how their data will be used. It will always be an abusive power relationship.
If they know that their data is being used solely to chose which ads to show, then I would argue that they know exactly how their data will be used. I think what you're really arguing here is that the average person doesn't understand the tech, and can't give informed consent because they don't understand what data is being used/stored and why. That's a very different issue.
And to that end, I would argue that the right solution is a set of laws that clearly spell out what types of personal data can be stored without consent, the extent to which it should be anonymized, the extent to which individuals have the right to inspect and correct data about themselves, the extent to which that data must be kept secure, the financial penalties for failing to do so, the maximum period of time that personal data can be retained, possibly a requirement that the user be allowed to control that time period, etc.
The only people that like it are those selling the tech.
Nope. People who work at websites and newspapers and TV stations and radio stations that make their profits through advertising like it, too. My undergrad degree was a double-major in communications (broadcasting) and CS, so I'm fairly well attuned to what's happening with journalism these days. Without advertising, a decent percentage of my friends would not be employed.
I understand why you don't like advertising. Nobody really likes it. But as yet, nobody has come up with a viable alternative that is practical. Everybody wants their content for free, and nobody is willing to pay for it (with few exceptions), and as a result, the only means to cover the cost of creating that content is through advertising.
So if you hate advertising and wish it would go away, please come up with a viable alternative. Until you do, the best we can hope for is that advertising will become less intrusive, and will become targeted at least enough to ensure that folks aren't bombarded with ads for stuff that they wouldn't buy in a million years. Because you're right. Ads are annoying, and ads for uninteresting things doubly so.
That's logical, but it's the opposite of what we see in reality. Targeting is obviously better than in the past, even if the advertisers are over-estimating the reliability of it, but the volume of advertising has exploded, demonstrating that the strategy is clearly quantity and not quality, and giving the industry their own tragedy of the commons problem, but at a cost to me in time and opportunity.
Actually, I don't think it's a strategy so much as a desperation move. Companies are finding it harder and harder to subsist on declining revenues from ads, and the main reason for the decline is that more and more companies don't think ads (particularly on the web) are cost-effective. And so you're seeing each ad being worth less money, and ad-supported websites throwing more ad space onto every page to make up the difference.
And I'm not convinced that targeting really is all that good yet. As others have noted elsewhere, probably 75% of the ads I see that are targeted at me (as opposed to ads based on the site I'm visiting) seem to be ads for things that I just bought and am no longer interested in. And I tried using ad targeting a couple of years ago, and I was very unimpressed by the lack of sufficiently narrow categorization, the low rate of click-throughs, and the poor cost-benefit ratio. It really seems like ad targeting is in its infancy.
Either way, this is obviously just my current theory. There's a decent chance that I'm completely wrong. But we're still a long way from being able to meaningfully evaluate whether I'm right or not. Until targeting a user is dramatically better than merely targeting specific websites that cover particular interests (by several orders of magnitude), we're all basically just trying to find a tiny signal in a huge pile of noise, which means it's still anybody's guess whether targeting really will reduce the number of ads, increase it, or have no effect.:-)
Why would we see fewer ads if they were targetted? Why would a network not sell every second of ad time it can?
Because advertising has diminishing returns. The more ads you see, the more you ignore them. So the more ads you sell, the less valuable each ad is.
If they sold fewer ads, they would need more content to fill thirty minute time slots, which costs money.
Broadcast and cable TV are basically walking dead anyway. In fifty years, nobody will believe that anybody actually watched content that way. And for streaming, it doesn't matter if the show is 30 minutes or 26 or 23 1/2. It ends when it ends. So those artificial restrictions are at best temporary.
That said, I think the trend is towards less ad-supported video and more subscription video, and for good reason. There's no way for a video ad to not be intrusive. It is inherent in the very concept. For everything I said above, you should assume that I'm speaking solely about text-based ads, banner ads, and other similar ads on web content, and not about ads injected into the middle of TV shows or other similar content.
Please tell me then, o wise one, how Netflix suggesting shows you might like is exploitative. Please explain to me how not showing tampon ads to men is exploitative? And so on.
The problem is not that you don't like personalization of ads. The problem is that you don't like ads. And that's certainly a reasonable opinion, but it has nothing to do with whether the personalization itself is moral or immoral.
In all seriousness, 100% of people do not want to see ads that are not targeting them.
Exactly. The reality is that you can create any results you want if you word the poll in a way that leads the pollee in the direction you want.
Ask the public if they want their private personal information used to target ads, and almost everyone who doesn't understand the technology will say no, because it sounds scary.
Ask the public if they want to prevent porn site ads from showing up on their children's computers, and almost everyone will say yes, because that is scary.
Now obviously that second one is an extreme example, because porn ads are legally restricted in most jurisdictions, and thus are unlikely to show up on children's computers. But substitute something like condom ads, and you'll get mostly the same results. When you ask people whether they want to avoid specific types of advertising that horrify them or want to see more ads about products that interest them, they overwhelmingly say yes, even though that reality would be impossible without personalized targeting.
The main problem with surveys like this is that only a tiny percentage of the general public has the slightest concept of how computers work, and as a result, if you want to learn the public's opinion of tech issues, you have to ask questions in ways that are likely to produce meaningful insight into what specific things they want and don't want. If you ask broad questions that assume even the most basic understanding of the technology, you will learn nothing whatsoever.
For example, almost half of people in these countries said that they couldn't imagine an example where a company using their personal info would be ethical. But your purchasing history is considered personal information. Can you imagine if Amazon didn't tell you that you already bought that movie? Can you imagine if you couldn't see your purchase history to do returns online or buy a product again? Can you imagine if Google couldn't show your search history? If your web browser couldn't show your browsing history?
The ethical uses of personal data are mind-bogglingly common and obvious to anyone who actually understands how computers work and what the industry means when we say "personal information". But your average person probably doesn't even think of 99.999% of those things as personal info even though they are. And that's why there's such a huge disconnect between what people say their opinion is about personal data and ad targeting versus what their behavior indicates.
Most people simply have no real grasp of what tech industry people mean about when we say "personalized ad targeting". To your average person, it's just some vague, scary, nebulous concept, and they assume that you're talking about showing ads for condoms because you sent a dirty email to your significant other last night.
But as soon as you start putting it in concrete terms that they understand — whether ad vendors should be allowed to show iPhone owners more ads about iPhone apps and fewer ads about Android apps, whether they should show tampon ads only to women, whether they should show condom ads only to people over 18, etc. — you get a much better picture of what people do and don't want.
This poll obviously did not do that. If it had done so, it could not possibly have gotten such patently nonsensical results. I guarantee if you asked people in Europe whether it is ethical for Amazon to tell you that you already bought a DVD, you would not get 55% of them saying no. They literally cannot possibly have asked reasonable questions and gotten the numbers that they got.
I find 'personalized' adverts to be morally wrong, profoundly so.
Then, with all due respect, you are uninformed, and profoundly so.
Want to know why? Because all advertising has always been targeted. From the dawn of advertising. Don't believe me? Take a look at the types of ads that they run on any TV show. If a show demographically skews to younger women, they show tampon ads. If a show demographically skews to elderly men, they show Viagra ads. I guarantee you if they reversed this, people would scream that the ads aren't targeted enough.
Where the web becomes a problem is that websites tend not to skew strongly to any given demographic, so personalization has to be done in some other way.
Aside from violating my dignity as an individual who can make my own choices, the sheer volume of advertising guarantees that I will block them out, either mentally or technologically, which means they are misrepresenting the value of the services to the businesses buying the advertising.
You see, this is where your argument goes fundamentally off the rails. The sheer volume of advertising exists primarily because the overwhelming majority of advertising is not targeted well enough. If advertisers knew that everyone seeing an ad had a 50% chance of being interested in that product, the ads would cost a lot more money, they would be a lot more effective, and you would see a heck of a lot fewer ads.
So you're really arguing for more personalization, not less. The alternative to ad targeting is for the number of ads you see to increase fairly dramatically.
But more often than not I am finding them to be factually wrong, in the sense that whatever guess their algorithm is making about me is wildly inaccurate.
This is a sign that ads should be personalized better, not that they should be personalized less. It is also a good argument that you should be able to correct those inferred interests. And at least for Google, you can do just that. And Facebook has that feature, too.
For example a few Google searches for the price of an object is far more likely to mean that I have made a purchase of one than it is that I will be highly motivated to make new purchases daily for the following six months.
Often, that is true. This is why you'd be better off if your purchasing history were part of the data feeding into those advertising engines, so that they could see that you already bought it.
That said, even if they knew you had bought the product, that still wouldn't be the whole story. Say you've been searching for information about a Tesla Model X. At some point, you've probably stopped planning to buy one, and you probably own one. But there are hundreds of companies out there making products specifically designed to work well with that Tesla, and those are much more likely to be of interest to you than, for example, products designed to work well with a Ford Model T.
Or their inference is so exact and narrow as to be transparently absurd. E.g. Local women seeking 53-year-old!
And then there's the ones where I try to find a restaurant in a city I'm going to visit and I can't block out adverts for restaurants for the area where I live (you know, the one place I'm guaranteed not to physically be in any time I travel).
All of these things are, indeed, problems, but none of them make targeted advertising morally wrong. If you got advertisements for restaurants in the area where you were planning to visit, at a bare minimum, you wouldn't find the targeting to be useless then. The only reason you're annoyed is because the targeting is suboptimal. Again, this is an argument for more targeting and better targeting, not less.
Nope. They are two entirely separate computers. The MCU (Media Control Unit) is a physical computer that controls the main screen. I think it also controls the small dashboard screen, but I'm not 100% certain. In MCU1 cars, they are based on NVIDIA Tegra. In MCU2 cars, they're Intel-based.
The autopilot computer is an entirely separate piece of hardware. In AP1 systems (all MCU1), the AP computer was built by MobileEye. In AP2 setups hardware (all MCU1), they are based on NVIDIA Tegra. In AP2.5 cars (MCU1 or MCU2), they are still based on NVIDIA Tegra, but with more GPUs. In AP HW3 (MCU2 or retrofitted with MCU1), the AP computer will contain custom Tesla tensor processing hardware; the SoC is unknown, as far as I'm aware.
They do share a network, though, so ostensibly you could compromise the AP hardware from the MCU, though why anybody in his/her right mind would want to mess with the self-driving hardware (beyond, perhaps, to tap/record the camera feeds, which you might be able to pull from the MCU anyway) is beyond me.
Actually, it's funny that your signature mentions puppies. Dogs are known to spread metastatic cancer through sex. In theory, there's no reason this couldn't also occur in humans. After all, HIV (another blood-borne illness) can spread in this way. Of course, the lack of actual incidences of this suggests that it is fairly unlikely, presumably because most healthy immune systems would destroy metastases from other people.
Similarly, at least in theory, there's nothing preventing IV drug use with shared needles from spreading metastatic cancer, either. The number of IV drug users with cancer sharing needles with other IV drug users is, of course, fairly low, which makes this pretty unlikely, but not impossible.
So I would prefer saying that cancer appears to be orders of magnitude less communicable than AIDS, but can theoretically spread through the same mechanisms, for the same reasons. But it is not communicable through anything remotely resembling casual contact.
In fact, the death rate from measles in 1960 was only 2-3 cases per million.
That's completely false. Throughout that period, the case fatality rate was one per 1,000 reported cases, or about one per 10,000 total cases, which is two orders of magnitude higher than your claim.
Also, measles resulted in hospitalization for about one out of every 1,000 minors per year. That's not one out of every 1,000 cases. That's one out of every thousand people under 18. IIRC, about one in ten of those had encephalitis as a result, and a quarter of those likely suffered permanent brain damage. Imagine one person getting brain damage per 40,000 kids, and you'll begin to understand just how wrong you are about the severity of measles.
Death from measles can occasionally occur but the scary statistics reported in the US and EU about the measles deaths never point out that child mortality is directly proportional to nutritional status and the lack of adequate vitamin C and vitamin A.
So you're saying that it's okay for kids to die or suffer brain damage, just as long as they're poor people's kids? There's medication for that sort of thinking, you know.
Besides, you're also factually wrong. Even though the anti-vaxxers tend to be wealthy, and their kids have better nutrition than average, the current U.S. case fatality rate in the U.S. is even higher than it was in the 1960s, at 3 per thousand. Why? Because the other people who aren't vaccinated besudes the anti-vaxxers' kids are all the people who, for health reasons, legitimately cannot tolerate an attenuated virus. So no, skipping the measles vaccine isn't killing people who don't take their vitamins. Rather, it is killing people who through no fault of their own are immunocompromised.
So although it is pedantically true that case fatality rates much higher (up to one in four) occur in underdeveloped nations, this is also true for pretty much any illness. And measles is still a really bad illness even in developed countries, even today.
And what price are you going to put on the price of a death caused by them not vaccinating their child(ren)?
From a health insurance perspective, IMO, the cost should be the cost of the failed attempt to keep the kid alive, because that's what the health insurance company will end up paying. Basically, parents would have two choices:
Liability-only policy — covers the added risk to other people's kids. Using measles as an example, if we assume that it kills one in a thousand reported cases and has a three in a hundred chance of an infected person infecting someone who is vaccinated (to an extent that would result in it being reported), then the cost would be 3/100,000 times a week in the hospital at $2,000 a day ($14k total), which comes to about $0.42 over the expected period between when the patient is born and when that person is likely to get exposed to the illness in question (likely less than five years from the start of schooling) times the number of children that the kid could expose on an average day. So maybe 30 x.42 / 5, or $2.52 per year, per vaccine. However, in the event that the kid whose parents choose this policy gets sick enough to require hospitalization, the parents must pay the entire cost of medical care themselves.
Full coverage policy — covers the added risk to the kid him/herself. With the previous numbers, that would be $14 over those same five years. So probably ~$2.80 more per year per vaccine, plus an extra $2.52 per vaccine to cover the liability part.
So basically, an extra $38 per year should roughly cover parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids. Of course, the parents of the kid who died, assuming they know that an anti-vaxxer kid was involved in spreading it, could easily sue the parents of that kid for negligent homicide. And there's no limit to that liability. Ostensibly, the health insurance companies could require the parents to carry extra liability insurance for fear of getting caught in the middle of such a fight, in which case they might consider the risk to be 3/100,000 times a million dollars over five years, or an extra $6 per year times 30 kids, or $180 a year.
So my guess is that it would all end up being a couple of $200 to $250 dollars more per kid per year (let's call that 5%). Or if the parents are willing to let their own kid die without hospitalization in the event that he or she gets sick, it would be slightly less.
However, there's also a secondary risk that has to be factored in. The reason those rates are so low is because vaccination rates are so high. Back when vaccination rates were zero, Measles hospitalized about 1/1000 children in the U.S. every year, by my math (48,000 hospitalizations out of about 47 million people under 18). So that raises it to $14 per year per kid plus that $180 legal liability, times seven vaccines, or just shy of $1400 per year.
Still not nearly as high as I would have expected. But yeah, not vaccinating your kids is seriously expensive to society. If the anti-vaxxers had to pay a 25% premium on their health insurance per kid, they might think twice about how seriously they value their right to opt out. And this was using measles as a metric. Some diseases like mumps and rubella would likely cost less, but polio is enough more expensive to make up for those and then some.
Actually, that's not true. People who have had cancer are prohibited from giving blood, because under the right circumstances, it *is* contagious. Metastasis is, by its very nature, exactly that — a tumor releasing cells into the bloodstream in such a way that they spread into other parts of the body. The only reason cancer is only slightly contagious is that we don't typically share blood.
Sounds like the problem is the sealant that the contractor used, then. Either that or they underestimated how much roadwork would involve grinding off an inch or more of asphalt in freeze-thaw territory.
Hence the next paragraph.:-) I think it's more competing against their actual cable offerings than their VoD offerings, which tend to not have that much overlap with Netflix (e.g. the cable companies' VoD services tend to offer recent movie releases, where Netflix tends to favor TV shows). But either way, yes, exactly.
Actually, the GP is exactly right in this case. All you have to do is have some minimally organized structure of documents with some sort of basic linking to the home page, organized into one page per year (or month, or even week if it's a busy court system), with links containing the name of the case. Put that on a web server with adequate capacity, and submit it to various search engines to spider the contents. Google and other search engines will figure out the rest of the indexing, searching, etc. for you.
Okay, so technically you also need backups, a way for people to contact you if corrections need to be made, etc., but that's all basically noise in the grand scheme of things. The bulk of the effort is in converting the documents into machine-searchable electronic form in the first place. Once you have that, there's essentially zero effort required to keep static text content available indefinitely.
That's the nice thing about electronic public records. The hard part — finding the needle in the haystack — is already basically a solved problem. For private records, like medical records, it's still a hard problem, because you can't take advantage of any of the existing expert systems and machine learning. But for public documents, nothing beats a plain, old, ordinary page of HTML (or even a text file) on a web server.
For that matter, these days, all you have to do is scan typewritten documents and slap the PDF up there in graphical format. I'm pretty sure all the major search engines will OCR it for you. There's simply so much that happens automatically that the entire notion of charging for access to electronic documents is laughable. The only possible purpose is to discourage public review of the proceedings, which has a certain degree of smell to it, in my opinion.
Exactly. This matches my opinion as well. But to that, I would add that QoS only works to prevent failures in the presence of inconsistent traffic levels.
Certain types of traffic inherently must be prioritized to prevent them from failing (VoIP, video chat, gaming). This works as long as the pipes are only occasionally completely full, because sending those packets earlier by a matter of milliseconds matters to those types of traffic, but doesn't make any difference over the long run to bulk traffic like downloads or video streaming.
If the pipes stay full, though, even QoS approaches break down, because other things like streaming video start to fail, and then your customers set the building on fire.
Either way, as you said, none of this allows wiggle room for one company to pay for prioritization over any other company. In fact, the proposed change effectively reverses the entire purpose of net neutrality, which is to prevent ISPs who also provide VoD services from having an unfair competitive advantage over third parties unless they pay them a prioritization fee. These companies are, in effect, saying "We don't want net neutrality, but we'll be okay with it if you just use the name "net neutrality" while letting us continue to abuse consumers in exactly the same way we have been doing it before." The result is no longer net neutrality at that point, in any meaningful sense of the word.
The not-so-hidden goal of these companies, of course, is to shift the burden for Internet service onto companies like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc. so that those companies have to raise their fees and the ISPs can keep their fees lower. This effectively raises the cost of almost everyone's Internet service (because nearly everybody uses at least one service that would be affected), but hides the cost from consumers, so that they can say, "See, we're providing better service now that net neutrality is gone, and we haven't raised your cable rates" even though the net effect to consumers is almost identical.
Moreover, by raising the cost of those video-on-demand services, it makes them less attractive when compared with cable TV service, which discourages cable cutting, and makes the ISPs (most of whom are cable companies) more money.
In other words, this is 100% anticompetitive behavior by cable companies right here, and anybody who can't see that is likely being paid by a cable company to not see that. For that reason, I pledge to vote against any politician that supports this, regardless of political party affiliation, and I encourage others to do likewise.
As all available bandwidth is used as demand grows, Netflix and the like will be forced to pay in order to keep their business viable.
Even if that didn't happen, paid prioritization would still be inherently anti-consumer, because it means that companies with more money get prioritization over companies with less money, which fundamentally distorts the free flow of information that has made it possible for so many Internet companies to get off the ground.
That, in turn, means that fewer new services will start up, which means less consumer choice, which means consumers get screwed. It really is that simple.
There is no form of paid prioritization that can ever be for the public benefit, because the very nature of paid prioritization is fundamentally anticompetitive. Anyone arguing otherwise is someone who benefits financially from that market distortion.
That's the part I don't understand, once you've trenched through the asphalt, digging a few more inches isn't that hard, they probably could have buried it 8" down with little additional cost.
From what I'm reading, it sounds like the did it the way you lay the sensor loop wires for a traffic light. You don't trench at all. Rather, you use a circular saw and cut a straight line two inches deep. Then, you shove the wire down into the resulting gap and put tar on top of it.
It works for sensor wire, because it doesn't flex much, it is laid down in a small area, and the asphalt is usually brand new and soft when they put it down, so it squeezes together a bit anyway. I'm not too surprised that it doesn't work for fiber, though. For long runs, it's better to knife-trench the dirt beside the road, and bore under roads, sidewalks, and driveways — more expensive, mind you, but it avoids problems like this.
Wait a sec. I just reread the summary They were dong it in asphalt? Yeah, that won't work. You can't press the dirt back together if you do that. You have to bore under asphalt (or trench and repave).
Actually, it surprises me. In areas where you don't have deep freezing, laying utilities a couple of inches down normally works fine; it's actually the normal way of doing installation in much of the Tennessee Valley area. Of course, it might not work if you have very sandy soil, but AFAIK, Louisville is clay soil, much like where I used to live, so I would expect it to work just fine.
For example, they laid the cable TV lines in my parents' neighborhood in Tennessee with shallow trenching, and they've been down for twenty or thirty years. It's how they ran a replacement phone line and a replacement cable line from the boxes by the street out their house last year after rodent damage (mice like the taste of the wires, apparently). And so on.
This story makes me wonder if their contractors did the shallow trenching wrong. IIRC, you're supposed to A. do it during wet months so that the ground is soft (or add enough water to make it soft) and B. have somebody going along behind, pressing the ground back together so that the cable can't come back up. If you don't do either of those things, you're going to have a bad time, particularly when the ground shrinks as it dries or thaws. I've heard stories of such botched installations, though I've never actually seen one.
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That's simply false, and provably so. You can blend socialism to any degree with capitalism, from 0% to 100%. You do this by socializing any subset of the total industries out there, from 0% to 100%, according to some set of rules. For example, in the United States, we have socialist electrical power distribution, fire protection, police protection, education, roads, public libraries, military, prisons (mostly), etc.
You are simply incorrect, and objectively so. This isn't a matter of opinion at all. You are simply wrong. Socialism isn't just an economic system. It is also a political system that implements aspects of that economic system. All functioning governments employ a blend of socialism and capitalism, taking the best parts of both approaches and applying them when appropriate. For example, road construction is paid for by the government (socialism), but taxed according to use (capitalism), and contracted out to companies that do the actual use for a profit (capitalism). That's an example of socialism and capitalism coexisting even in a single, narrow industry.
The only way you can possibly conclude that the two economic theories cannot coexist is if you arbitrarily redefine socialism as describing only a purely 100% socialist economy/government. Obviously a 100% socialist economy, by definition, contains no capitalism, so you are technically correct — the best kind of correct — but only because you have arbitrarily redefined "socialism" in a ridiculously narrow way to suit your political agenda, rather than actually using the word in the way that everyone else on the planet uses it.
Approximately no one on Earth wants a purely socialist economy or a purely capitalist economy, including Democrat and Republican politicians. Any implication to the contrary is disingenuous to the point of being a bald-faced lie. Where the two parties disagree is in where the balancing point should be set. Democrats tend to think we should have more socialism, and Republicans tend to think we should have less.
But more importantly, using the unavoidable failure of pure socialism as a means to scare people into avoiding even tiny steps in that direction is a clear example of a slippery slope fallacy, which makes you look like you don't have any idea what you're talking about, at least among educated people. Please stop making arguments that can only sway the uneducated, and start making arguments that actually show that you're thinking about the problems that we're facing as a society and looking for other ways to solve them besides those based on socialism.
*blink*
I'm not sure if you are misusing the word "literally" or you just have no clue what the Nazi party stood for. The main thing the Nazis were known for is blaming immigrants for the country's problems and then using that as an excuse to try to eradicate the Jewish people. If any party is even approaching being literal Nazis, well let's just say that there's only one party in the United States whose leader has ever suggested that illegal immigrants are the cause of our crime problems and that we should ban people from entering this country based on their religion, and it ain't the Democrats.
But ignoring the Elephant in the room, the biggest thing you're completely missing is any sense of nuance. You talk about socialism and capitalism as though it's an either-or situation. That couldn't be farther from the truth. No economic system in its purest form works, period. All economically viable countries involve a combination of economic systems. They combine some aspects of socialism (e.g. public healthcare, public schools, public roads and freeways, etc.) with some aspects of capitalism (publicly and privately owned businesses in competition with one another, wealth accumulation, etc.). Government inherently is a balancing act between those two forces. Any government that goes too far in either direction will fail. Every. Single. Time.
Anybody saying that socialism is bad or equating it with Nazism or claiming that it can't work is wrong — not just subjectively wrong, but objectively, provably wrong. Every country requires some amount of socialism, because capitalism run amok results in erosion of the middle class and eventual devolution to a servant class and an aristocrat class. Similarly, every country requires some amount of capitalism, because socialism run amok results in no incentives to innovate, create, or improve the state of the world.
Take the arts, for example. There are two things that increase artistic output: Providing funds to pay artists enough money that they can create without having to "sell out" (this is socialism) and providing laws that guarantee that artists' creations cannot be freely copied without their permission (this is capitalism). The two exist in balance.
Or take our system of roads. Businesses and individuals alike depend on these roads. They are, by nature, socialist. However, there is a secondary capitalistic aspect to them in that taxes are charged based on road use to prevent the tragedy of the commons. So although the benefit is provided to all, those who benefit more also pay more.
In order:
Nobody is proposing that the government take over businesses en masse. At times, governments do have to buy out companies for various reasons, usually involving keeping them in business. What's wrong with that?
Nobody is proposing restriction on profits by businesses. The Democrats do, however, want companies to pay their fair share of taxes on those profits. What's wrong with that?
Nationalization of industries: See above.
Finally, what's your objection to wealth taxes? There are people who earn hundreds of millions of dollars per year or more. Surely two or three million is enough. It has been proven time and time again that the joy derived from making more money does not continue to increase much at all after your needs are met. Yet many people earn far more than is necessary to m
If they know that their data is being used solely to chose which ads to show, then I would argue that they know exactly how their data will be used. I think what you're really arguing here is that the average person doesn't understand the tech, and can't give informed consent because they don't understand what data is being used/stored and why. That's a very different issue.
And to that end, I would argue that the right solution is a set of laws that clearly spell out what types of personal data can be stored without consent, the extent to which it should be anonymized, the extent to which individuals have the right to inspect and correct data about themselves, the extent to which that data must be kept secure, the financial penalties for failing to do so, the maximum period of time that personal data can be retained, possibly a requirement that the user be allowed to control that time period, etc.
Seem reasonable?
Nope. People who work at websites and newspapers and TV stations and radio stations that make their profits through advertising like it, too. My undergrad degree was a double-major in communications (broadcasting) and CS, so I'm fairly well attuned to what's happening with journalism these days. Without advertising, a decent percentage of my friends would not be employed.
I understand why you don't like advertising. Nobody really likes it. But as yet, nobody has come up with a viable alternative that is practical. Everybody wants their content for free, and nobody is willing to pay for it (with few exceptions), and as a result, the only means to cover the cost of creating that content is through advertising.
So if you hate advertising and wish it would go away, please come up with a viable alternative. Until you do, the best we can hope for is that advertising will become less intrusive, and will become targeted at least enough to ensure that folks aren't bombarded with ads for stuff that they wouldn't buy in a million years. Because you're right. Ads are annoying, and ads for uninteresting things doubly so.
Yes, they do. Sections with names like "Because you watched [show/movie]" appear in Netflix all the time.
Actually, I don't think it's a strategy so much as a desperation move. Companies are finding it harder and harder to subsist on declining revenues from ads, and the main reason for the decline is that more and more companies don't think ads (particularly on the web) are cost-effective. And so you're seeing each ad being worth less money, and ad-supported websites throwing more ad space onto every page to make up the difference.
And I'm not convinced that targeting really is all that good yet. As others have noted elsewhere, probably 75% of the ads I see that are targeted at me (as opposed to ads based on the site I'm visiting) seem to be ads for things that I just bought and am no longer interested in. And I tried using ad targeting a couple of years ago, and I was very unimpressed by the lack of sufficiently narrow categorization, the low rate of click-throughs, and the poor cost-benefit ratio. It really seems like ad targeting is in its infancy.
Either way, this is obviously just my current theory. There's a decent chance that I'm completely wrong. But we're still a long way from being able to meaningfully evaluate whether I'm right or not. Until targeting a user is dramatically better than merely targeting specific websites that cover particular interests (by several orders of magnitude), we're all basically just trying to find a tiny signal in a huge pile of noise, which means it's still anybody's guess whether targeting really will reduce the number of ads, increase it, or have no effect. :-)
Because advertising has diminishing returns. The more ads you see, the more you ignore them. So the more ads you sell, the less valuable each ad is.
Broadcast and cable TV are basically walking dead anyway. In fifty years, nobody will believe that anybody actually watched content that way. And for streaming, it doesn't matter if the show is 30 minutes or 26 or 23 1/2. It ends when it ends. So those artificial restrictions are at best temporary.
That said, I think the trend is towards less ad-supported video and more subscription video, and for good reason. There's no way for a video ad to not be intrusive. It is inherent in the very concept. For everything I said above, you should assume that I'm speaking solely about text-based ads, banner ads, and other similar ads on web content, and not about ads injected into the middle of TV shows or other similar content.
Please tell me then, o wise one, how Netflix suggesting shows you might like is exploitative. Please explain to me how not showing tampon ads to men is exploitative? And so on.
The problem is not that you don't like personalization of ads. The problem is that you don't like ads. And that's certainly a reasonable opinion, but it has nothing to do with whether the personalization itself is moral or immoral.
Exactly. The reality is that you can create any results you want if you word the poll in a way that leads the pollee in the direction you want.
Now obviously that second one is an extreme example, because porn ads are legally restricted in most jurisdictions, and thus are unlikely to show up on children's computers. But substitute something like condom ads, and you'll get mostly the same results. When you ask people whether they want to avoid specific types of advertising that horrify them or want to see more ads about products that interest them, they overwhelmingly say yes, even though that reality would be impossible without personalized targeting.
The main problem with surveys like this is that only a tiny percentage of the general public has the slightest concept of how computers work, and as a result, if you want to learn the public's opinion of tech issues, you have to ask questions in ways that are likely to produce meaningful insight into what specific things they want and don't want. If you ask broad questions that assume even the most basic understanding of the technology, you will learn nothing whatsoever.
For example, almost half of people in these countries said that they couldn't imagine an example where a company using their personal info would be ethical. But your purchasing history is considered personal information. Can you imagine if Amazon didn't tell you that you already bought that movie? Can you imagine if you couldn't see your purchase history to do returns online or buy a product again? Can you imagine if Google couldn't show your search history? If your web browser couldn't show your browsing history?
The ethical uses of personal data are mind-bogglingly common and obvious to anyone who actually understands how computers work and what the industry means when we say "personal information". But your average person probably doesn't even think of 99.999% of those things as personal info even though they are. And that's why there's such a huge disconnect between what people say their opinion is about personal data and ad targeting versus what their behavior indicates.
Most people simply have no real grasp of what tech industry people mean about when we say "personalized ad targeting". To your average person, it's just some vague, scary, nebulous concept, and they assume that you're talking about showing ads for condoms because you sent a dirty email to your significant other last night.
But as soon as you start putting it in concrete terms that they understand — whether ad vendors should be allowed to show iPhone owners more ads about iPhone apps and fewer ads about Android apps, whether they should show tampon ads only to women, whether they should show condom ads only to people over 18, etc. — you get a much better picture of what people do and don't want.
This poll obviously did not do that. If it had done so, it could not possibly have gotten such patently nonsensical results. I guarantee if you asked people in Europe whether it is ethical for Amazon to tell you that you already bought a DVD, you would not get 55% of them saying no. They literally cannot possibly have asked reasonable questions and gotten the numbers that they got.
I find 'personalized' adverts to be morally wrong, profoundly so.
Then, with all due respect, you are uninformed, and profoundly so.
Want to know why? Because all advertising has always been targeted. From the dawn of advertising. Don't believe me? Take a look at the types of ads that they run on any TV show. If a show demographically skews to younger women, they show tampon ads. If a show demographically skews to elderly men, they show Viagra ads. I guarantee you if they reversed this, people would scream that the ads aren't targeted enough.
Where the web becomes a problem is that websites tend not to skew strongly to any given demographic, so personalization has to be done in some other way.
Aside from violating my dignity as an individual who can make my own choices, the sheer volume of advertising guarantees that I will block them out, either mentally or technologically, which means they are misrepresenting the value of the services to the businesses buying the advertising.
You see, this is where your argument goes fundamentally off the rails. The sheer volume of advertising exists primarily because the overwhelming majority of advertising is not targeted well enough. If advertisers knew that everyone seeing an ad had a 50% chance of being interested in that product, the ads would cost a lot more money, they would be a lot more effective, and you would see a heck of a lot fewer ads.
So you're really arguing for more personalization, not less. The alternative to ad targeting is for the number of ads you see to increase fairly dramatically.
But more often than not I am finding them to be factually wrong, in the sense that whatever guess their algorithm is making about me is wildly inaccurate.
This is a sign that ads should be personalized better, not that they should be personalized less. It is also a good argument that you should be able to correct those inferred interests. And at least for Google, you can do just that. And Facebook has that feature, too.
For example a few Google searches for the price of an object is far more likely to mean that I have made a purchase of one than it is that I will be highly motivated to make new purchases daily for the following six months.
Often, that is true. This is why you'd be better off if your purchasing history were part of the data feeding into those advertising engines, so that they could see that you already bought it.
That said, even if they knew you had bought the product, that still wouldn't be the whole story. Say you've been searching for information about a Tesla Model X. At some point, you've probably stopped planning to buy one, and you probably own one. But there are hundreds of companies out there making products specifically designed to work well with that Tesla, and those are much more likely to be of interest to you than, for example, products designed to work well with a Ford Model T.
Or their inference is so exact and narrow as to be transparently absurd. E.g. Local women seeking 53-year-old!
And then there's the ones where I try to find a restaurant in a city I'm going to visit and I can't block out adverts for restaurants for the area where I live (you know, the one place I'm guaranteed not to physically be in any time I travel).
All of these things are, indeed, problems, but none of them make targeted advertising morally wrong. If you got advertisements for restaurants in the area where you were planning to visit, at a bare minimum, you wouldn't find the targeting to be useless then. The only reason you're annoyed is because the targeting is suboptimal. Again, this is an argument for more targeting and better targeting, not less.
Nope. They are two entirely separate computers. The MCU (Media Control Unit) is a physical computer that controls the main screen. I think it also controls the small dashboard screen, but I'm not 100% certain. In MCU1 cars, they are based on NVIDIA Tegra. In MCU2 cars, they're Intel-based.
The autopilot computer is an entirely separate piece of hardware. In AP1 systems (all MCU1), the AP computer was built by MobileEye. In AP2 setups hardware (all MCU1), they are based on NVIDIA Tegra. In AP2.5 cars (MCU1 or MCU2), they are still based on NVIDIA Tegra, but with more GPUs. In AP HW3 (MCU2 or retrofitted with MCU1), the AP computer will contain custom Tesla tensor processing hardware; the SoC is unknown, as far as I'm aware.
They do share a network, though, so ostensibly you could compromise the AP hardware from the MCU, though why anybody in his/her right mind would want to mess with the self-driving hardware (beyond, perhaps, to tap/record the camera feeds, which you might be able to pull from the MCU anyway) is beyond me.
Actually, it's funny that your signature mentions puppies. Dogs are known to spread metastatic cancer through sex. In theory, there's no reason this couldn't also occur in humans. After all, HIV (another blood-borne illness) can spread in this way. Of course, the lack of actual incidences of this suggests that it is fairly unlikely, presumably because most healthy immune systems would destroy metastases from other people.
Similarly, at least in theory, there's nothing preventing IV drug use with shared needles from spreading metastatic cancer, either. The number of IV drug users with cancer sharing needles with other IV drug users is, of course, fairly low, which makes this pretty unlikely, but not impossible.
So I would prefer saying that cancer appears to be orders of magnitude less communicable than AIDS, but can theoretically spread through the same mechanisms, for the same reasons. But it is not communicable through anything remotely resembling casual contact.
That's completely false. Throughout that period, the case fatality rate was one per 1,000 reported cases, or about one per 10,000 total cases, which is two orders of magnitude higher than your claim.
Also, measles resulted in hospitalization for about one out of every 1,000 minors per year. That's not one out of every 1,000 cases. That's one out of every thousand people under 18. IIRC, about one in ten of those had encephalitis as a result, and a quarter of those likely suffered permanent brain damage. Imagine one person getting brain damage per 40,000 kids, and you'll begin to understand just how wrong you are about the severity of measles.
So you're saying that it's okay for kids to die or suffer brain damage, just as long as they're poor people's kids? There's medication for that sort of thinking, you know.
Besides, you're also factually wrong. Even though the anti-vaxxers tend to be wealthy, and their kids have better nutrition than average, the current U.S. case fatality rate in the U.S. is even higher than it was in the 1960s, at 3 per thousand. Why? Because the other people who aren't vaccinated besudes the anti-vaxxers' kids are all the people who, for health reasons, legitimately cannot tolerate an attenuated virus. So no, skipping the measles vaccine isn't killing people who don't take their vitamins. Rather, it is killing people who through no fault of their own are immunocompromised.
So although it is pedantically true that case fatality rates much higher (up to one in four) occur in underdeveloped nations, this is also true for pretty much any illness. And measles is still a really bad illness even in developed countries, even today.
From a health insurance perspective, IMO, the cost should be the cost of the failed attempt to keep the kid alive, because that's what the health insurance company will end up paying. Basically, parents would have two choices:
So basically, an extra $38 per year should roughly cover parents who choose not to vaccinate their kids. Of course, the parents of the kid who died, assuming they know that an anti-vaxxer kid was involved in spreading it, could easily sue the parents of that kid for negligent homicide. And there's no limit to that liability. Ostensibly, the health insurance companies could require the parents to carry extra liability insurance for fear of getting caught in the middle of such a fight, in which case they might consider the risk to be 3/100,000 times a million dollars over five years, or an extra $6 per year times 30 kids, or $180 a year.
So my guess is that it would all end up being a couple of $200 to $250 dollars more per kid per year (let's call that 5%). Or if the parents are willing to let their own kid die without hospitalization in the event that he or she gets sick, it would be slightly less.
However, there's also a secondary risk that has to be factored in. The reason those rates are so low is because vaccination rates are so high. Back when vaccination rates were zero, Measles hospitalized about 1/1000 children in the U.S. every year, by my math (48,000 hospitalizations out of about 47 million people under 18). So that raises it to $14 per year per kid plus that $180 legal liability, times seven vaccines, or just shy of $1400 per year.
Still not nearly as high as I would have expected. But yeah, not vaccinating your kids is seriously expensive to society. If the anti-vaxxers had to pay a 25% premium on their health insurance per kid, they might think twice about how seriously they value their right to opt out. And this was using measles as a metric. Some diseases like mumps and rubella would likely cost less, but polio is enough more expensive to make up for those and then some.
Actually, that's not true. People who have had cancer are prohibited from giving blood, because under the right circumstances, it *is* contagious. Metastasis is, by its very nature, exactly that — a tumor releasing cells into the bloodstream in such a way that they spread into other parts of the body. The only reason cancer is only slightly contagious is that we don't typically share blood.
Sounds like the problem is the sealant that the contractor used, then. Either that or they underestimated how much roadwork would involve grinding off an inch or more of asphalt in freeze-thaw territory.
ROFL. Down in the ground, without coming back up out of it like a zombie.
Hence the next paragraph. :-) I think it's more competing against their actual cable offerings than their VoD offerings, which tend to not have that much overlap with Netflix (e.g. the cable companies' VoD services tend to offer recent movie releases, where Netflix tends to favor TV shows). But either way, yes, exactly.
Most of it already cross-licensed to Apple, I think. :-D
Actually, the GP is exactly right in this case. All you have to do is have some minimally organized structure of documents with some sort of basic linking to the home page, organized into one page per year (or month, or even week if it's a busy court system), with links containing the name of the case. Put that on a web server with adequate capacity, and submit it to various search engines to spider the contents. Google and other search engines will figure out the rest of the indexing, searching, etc. for you.
Okay, so technically you also need backups, a way for people to contact you if corrections need to be made, etc., but that's all basically noise in the grand scheme of things. The bulk of the effort is in converting the documents into machine-searchable electronic form in the first place. Once you have that, there's essentially zero effort required to keep static text content available indefinitely.
That's the nice thing about electronic public records. The hard part — finding the needle in the haystack — is already basically a solved problem. For private records, like medical records, it's still a hard problem, because you can't take advantage of any of the existing expert systems and machine learning. But for public documents, nothing beats a plain, old, ordinary page of HTML (or even a text file) on a web server.
For that matter, these days, all you have to do is scan typewritten documents and slap the PDF up there in graphical format. I'm pretty sure all the major search engines will OCR it for you. There's simply so much that happens automatically that the entire notion of charging for access to electronic documents is laughable. The only possible purpose is to discourage public review of the proceedings, which has a certain degree of smell to it, in my opinion.
Exactly. This matches my opinion as well. But to that, I would add that QoS only works to prevent failures in the presence of inconsistent traffic levels.
Certain types of traffic inherently must be prioritized to prevent them from failing (VoIP, video chat, gaming). This works as long as the pipes are only occasionally completely full, because sending those packets earlier by a matter of milliseconds matters to those types of traffic, but doesn't make any difference over the long run to bulk traffic like downloads or video streaming.
If the pipes stay full, though, even QoS approaches break down, because other things like streaming video start to fail, and then your customers set the building on fire.
Either way, as you said, none of this allows wiggle room for one company to pay for prioritization over any other company. In fact, the proposed change effectively reverses the entire purpose of net neutrality, which is to prevent ISPs who also provide VoD services from having an unfair competitive advantage over third parties unless they pay them a prioritization fee. These companies are, in effect, saying "We don't want net neutrality, but we'll be okay with it if you just use the name "net neutrality" while letting us continue to abuse consumers in exactly the same way we have been doing it before." The result is no longer net neutrality at that point, in any meaningful sense of the word.
The not-so-hidden goal of these companies, of course, is to shift the burden for Internet service onto companies like Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc. so that those companies have to raise their fees and the ISPs can keep their fees lower. This effectively raises the cost of almost everyone's Internet service (because nearly everybody uses at least one service that would be affected), but hides the cost from consumers, so that they can say, "See, we're providing better service now that net neutrality is gone, and we haven't raised your cable rates" even though the net effect to consumers is almost identical.
Moreover, by raising the cost of those video-on-demand services, it makes them less attractive when compared with cable TV service, which discourages cable cutting, and makes the ISPs (most of whom are cable companies) more money.
In other words, this is 100% anticompetitive behavior by cable companies right here, and anybody who can't see that is likely being paid by a cable company to not see that. For that reason, I pledge to vote against any politician that supports this, regardless of political party affiliation, and I encourage others to do likewise.
Even if that didn't happen, paid prioritization would still be inherently anti-consumer, because it means that companies with more money get prioritization over companies with less money, which fundamentally distorts the free flow of information that has made it possible for so many Internet companies to get off the ground.
That, in turn, means that fewer new services will start up, which means less consumer choice, which means consumers get screwed. It really is that simple.
There is no form of paid prioritization that can ever be for the public benefit, because the very nature of paid prioritization is fundamentally anticompetitive. Anyone arguing otherwise is someone who benefits financially from that market distortion.
From what I'm reading, it sounds like the did it the way you lay the sensor loop wires for a traffic light. You don't trench at all. Rather, you use a circular saw and cut a straight line two inches deep. Then, you shove the wire down into the resulting gap and put tar on top of it.
It works for sensor wire, because it doesn't flex much, it is laid down in a small area, and the asphalt is usually brand new and soft when they put it down, so it squeezes together a bit anyway. I'm not too surprised that it doesn't work for fiber, though. For long runs, it's better to knife-trench the dirt beside the road, and bore under roads, sidewalks, and driveways — more expensive, mind you, but it avoids problems like this.
Wait a sec. I just reread the summary They were dong it in asphalt? Yeah, that won't work. You can't press the dirt back together if you do that. You have to bore under asphalt (or trench and repave).
Actually, it surprises me. In areas where you don't have deep freezing, laying utilities a couple of inches down normally works fine; it's actually the normal way of doing installation in much of the Tennessee Valley area. Of course, it might not work if you have very sandy soil, but AFAIK, Louisville is clay soil, much like where I used to live, so I would expect it to work just fine.
For example, they laid the cable TV lines in my parents' neighborhood in Tennessee with shallow trenching, and they've been down for twenty or thirty years. It's how they ran a replacement phone line and a replacement cable line from the boxes by the street out their house last year after rodent damage (mice like the taste of the wires, apparently). And so on.
This story makes me wonder if their contractors did the shallow trenching wrong. IIRC, you're supposed to A. do it during wet months so that the ground is soft (or add enough water to make it soft) and B. have somebody going along behind, pressing the ground back together so that the cable can't come back up. If you don't do either of those things, you're going to have a bad time, particularly when the ground shrinks as it dries or thaws. I've heard stories of such botched installations, though I've never actually seen one.