You can see you living room from your front door? Bad feng shui, man. My first apartment was set up that way - never did like that, so never lived in a place with that sort of setup again. But, yeah, I couldn't see myself using this service if I did - maybe with a folding screen to block LOS?
Sophisticated criminals with fancy plans like casing a house before robbing it (as opposed to smash-and-grab every door in an Apartment building) operate in nice neighborhoods. The overlap between that and people who have packages stolen off their front porch is very small.
The problem I see with this service is that the people who have a need for it (packages not safe on the porch) probably live in apartments, and so will have difficulty in changing the lock in this way.
Amazon engineers live in safe upper class White communities,
If by that you mean "cheapest apartment in Seattle, mostly East-Asian communities", then sure. Seattle's not as bad as SF for rents, but it's getting there, forcing junior engineers near the bottom of the market, and like most West-coast tech employers, the plurality of engineers are from India. Still, probably pretty safe.
There are something like 25x the number of PhDs graduating than there are slots for new people in academia. Having as a goal becoming a tenured professor has become like having as a goal becoming a professional athlete: don't plan on it (which doesn't mean don't try).
If your goal is a job in industry then a graduate degree can help with some jobs
If your goal is a green card, then a masters degree is a definite win. Why is anyone surprised than most people getting masters degrees are prospective immigrants?
As opposed to the right who haven't had any ideas since Reagan.
Not true at all: what's missing is a Republican leader who is as good at articulating the ideas of the right as Reagan was. This is because the GOP stopped being conservative a couple decades ago (except on meaningless distraction-devices like gay marriage), so thoughtful people on the right aren't interested in the GOP.
Trump is trying to appeal to where conservatives are now, but he's sort of an idiot and neither understands the ideology nor can he articulate much of anything.
Meanwhile Clinton-style Dems and Bush-style Republicans are the same in all but a few donors. Both parties have wandered fairly far from their base, and the cracks are showing on both sides.
You have the most bizarre take on such a straightforward document. His points were:
* Men and women, as groups, as statistically different psychologically * The way Google recruits and approaches problems is biased towards men, because it's focused on a narrow aspect of the job that men are more likely to be interested in * Google should fix that, as a better way to improve the gender ratio than what they do now
Seems like a legitimate topic for discussion on a mailing list about inclusion.
When I interviewed at Google it was the least social interview experience I've had (or at least tied with Facebook). No soft skill or team fit type questions at all. No leadership skills probing questions at all. Purely design and coding questions, and in those questions, the interviewer was the least interactive of any place I've interviewed (and I've interviewed at a lot of places including 4 of the Big 5).
Do you see the problem there? Solving purely abstract technical problems with no social interaction is less than half the job at any development shop I've worked at. It's an important skill set to interview for, to be sure, but it's far from the whole picture, and statistically it's biased towards men.
. Google is in the business of providing access and providing services.
Google is an advertising company. It's most of their revenue. You are their product, not their customer. They're in the business of selling your data to their customers, albeit indirectly by knowing every detail about you to target ads. Google needs to know your race, age, sex, religion, address, shopping habits, sexual preference, where you work, how much you make, how many kids you have and where they go to school, and so on. And unless you've been very careful, they know all of these things exactly, because they read all your documents and track all your online activities. It's what they do, and it's creepy as fuck.
It's far to early for government intervention. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTune dominate the market, but as of yet there's no evidence that competitors can't grow. It's legitimate to rant at these companies for abusing their near-monopoly power to push their political agendas, however - it especially pisses me off as an (indirect) stockholder.
The right answer is to support any credible competition that doesn't seem to be pushing a political agenda (or, failing that, an opposing bias, but really, can't we just have a company that values profit over politics please?).
Then maybe they should go get themselves a real job
If you work a full week in order to produce content, how is that not a real job? If you employ a staff, and are actually running a small business, how are these not real jobs?
They are new kinds of jobs, but real jobs nonetheless.
or set up their own video service if they're not happy with YouTube
Oh, everyone is very aware that YouTube is not their friend at this point. The problem is, most of the alternatives have either been scammers, or poor re-implementations of YouTube with all the same issues. None of them, for example, allow role-based administration of a channel (needed as soon as you grow beyond a 1-man shop).
Everyone I follow with a larger following is Patreon-funded now, but you have to build your channel to that point, and you need an established service to build that following.
No one's forcing these people to use YouTube.
It's the only realistic option today. Sure, Google may "owe them" nothing.. nothing that is beyond not being a dick to your fellow man (aka: don't be evil).
Anyone who follows any sort of weapons or gaming or political channel on YouTube knows just how over-aggressive the Google's flagging bots can be. Very bland content now routinely gets flagged for no apparent reason and must be manually appealed. Sure, the bots are intended to do something Google actually wants: demonitize genuinely offensive content so that advertizers aren't embarassed, but that's not what the bots actually do. The collateral damage seems to be 10x the intended effect, with real harm done to people earning their living as vloggers.
I'm betting this is just more of the same. Google has some stuff they legitimately want to ban (e.g., sharing pirated content form you Google drive), but then the bots are badly written and poorly tested, and wreak havoc.
I'd call it poor customer service, but of course we know we're not Google's customers - only their ad buyers are their customers. Still, seems a bad way to treat your product.
Also seems unlikely - Amazon is smaller than Walmart, and something less than 10% of retail. It's a big player, to be sure, but even if it doubled a couple of times would be far from a monopoly.
Nothing lasts forever, but customer service is central to Amazon corporate culture, so all the senior management would need to change. If you follow the stock, you know Bezos only barely cares about keeping the stockholders happy by being profitable. Sure, one day, maybe, but worse than Walmart? Seems unlikely.
Let me add asshole that one day this company might have too much control if it doesn't already. They will be able to do whatever the fuck they want if they don't already. Does this make your cheap ass concerned?
Amazon has better customer service than any place I shop in person, at least when Amazon is the seller (dodgy 3rd-party sellers are a problem, though). Why would I be concerned about that?
I also wonder if Amazon is going to find a way to jettison its low-margin retail business and concentrate on AWS.
That sure happened a lot right before the dot-com bust. Most companies that jettisoned a cash cow to focus on Growth! went under, but most of the cash cows survived. (My favorite, Agilent, is now worth twice what it was worth when HP dumped it, while HP swirls the drain). The only smart one was AOL, who used their over-valued junk stock to buy a cash cow.
The Amazon leadership was around for the dot bust. They all saw that stuff happen. Seems unlikely they'll repeat that particular mistake. In fact, they seem to have just bought another large retail business. Funny, that.
What do you think Amazon will have a monopoly on one day? It's about the same size as Walmart in retail, and far better to have 2 such beasts than one!
Governments started pushing back against single inheritor schemes around the 1600s IIRC. It has had quite a positive effect, though it gets blurred with those newly rich during the industrial revolution.
In modern America, it's quite rare for anyone who is well know for his wealth to leave a big chunk of it to his kids (Walton was an exception, but evem then he split it 3 ways IIRC). But there are extremely wealthy families in the US who do much to stay unknown, and do keep their wealth concentrated over the generations. Perhaps politically impossible to fix, though, as those families are quite politically powerful.
The first-generation wealthy (sucessful CEOs etc) seem to be the target for new taxation, and maybe that would do little harm, but it's unlikely to actually help much.
The primary form of wealth distribution for centuries has been at death - especially preventing all the wealth from being handed down to one inheritor, who can then continue to grow his share. It's not obvious that taking wealth from the living is required to prevent excessive concentration of wealth (a few like Bill/Bezos/Buffet are still small in the scheme of things).
It's also important not to confuse redistribution of wealth with redistribution of income. The two problems may be related, but their solutions aren't.
The only good solution for lack of income is enabling everyone to earn a living. This is a very hard problem, but it doesn't seem like an impossible problem. Wealth is a harder problem though, since giving people money rarely has any effect on wealth (it certainly has a measured negative effect on the wealth of lottery winners). Wealth is a matter of habit as much as income, and that's a cultural problem.
I guess they are tied together in one way: the best way to provide income for the elderly is for the elderly to be living off of wealth accumulated in their lifetimes (but not unbounded across ancestor's lifetimes).
We have no idea how dark matter interacts with anything, but annihilation is one possibility (a bit remote though - it would mean particularly odd physics). All of the anti-matter annihilating with dark matter would leave all of the matter and most of the dark matter, so that could work, far-fetched though that reaction would be. Interacting in some other way, where they react to form some other kind of dark matter, is also possible, and perhaps less fanciful.
It's all a reach though, since we know so little about dark matter you can invent all sorts of crazy theories about it, and that doesn't mean much.
People talk about it like that's when "the universe began", but it's really just "when the universe AS WE KNOW IT began". It says nothing about what was happening before that time because the answer is that we have no idea. Maybe it was always here. It's possible new universes are formed inside of black holes and that our universe was formed in just such a manner.
I rather like Penrose's ideas about this. When the energy density is high enough, effectively everything becomes massless and moves at the speed of light. In such a case, the universe ceases to have time and distance scales - when nothing in the universe experiences time or distance, the concepts become meaningless. General relativity still works just fine in such conditions, as it's fundamentally scale-invariant, so this doesn't break established physics.
Under that interpretation, the big bang isn't when the universe began, but when time (and space) began. What was there "before" was all the same stuff, just in a state where time and distance don't happen.
It's not clear to me how that's any different that the argument that we're living in a simulation. Interesting idea, but what novel, testable predictions does it make?
Slashdot Mirror
You can see you living room from your front door? Bad feng shui, man. My first apartment was set up that way - never did like that, so never lived in a place with that sort of setup again. But, yeah, I couldn't see myself using this service if I did - maybe with a folding screen to block LOS?
Sophisticated criminals with fancy plans like casing a house before robbing it (as opposed to smash-and-grab every door in an Apartment building) operate in nice neighborhoods. The overlap between that and people who have packages stolen off their front porch is very small.
The problem I see with this service is that the people who have a need for it (packages not safe on the porch) probably live in apartments, and so will have difficulty in changing the lock in this way.
Civilization requires garages. Living packed so tightly together like farm animals that you don't need a car is far from civilized.
Amazon engineers live in safe upper class White communities,
If by that you mean "cheapest apartment in Seattle, mostly East-Asian communities", then sure. Seattle's not as bad as SF for rents, but it's getting there, forcing junior engineers near the bottom of the market, and like most West-coast tech employers, the plurality of engineers are from India. Still, probably pretty safe.
Your neighborhood is so bad that you can't leave packages outside, yet you're fine with having a delivery person just let themselves in.
That delivery person has a job. That culls like 95% of theft right there. It's not 100%, but it's not stupid.
Somewhere I actually have a pair of directional Monster cables, as evidenced by the arrows printed on them. Not sure where they came from.
There are something like 25x the number of PhDs graduating than there are slots for new people in academia. Having as a goal becoming a tenured professor has become like having as a goal becoming a professional athlete: don't plan on it (which doesn't mean don't try).
If your goal is a job in industry then a graduate degree can help with some jobs
If your goal is a green card, then a masters degree is a definite win. Why is anyone surprised than most people getting masters degrees are prospective immigrants?
Does it matter whether Google is selling your information to a third party? They're already the creepy guy you don't want having your info.
And do you disagree they know everything about you? Or do you not see the problem with e.g. Google having a database of all Muslims in the US?
As opposed to the right who haven't had any ideas since Reagan.
Not true at all: what's missing is a Republican leader who is as good at articulating the ideas of the right as Reagan was. This is because the GOP stopped being conservative a couple decades ago (except on meaningless distraction-devices like gay marriage), so thoughtful people on the right aren't interested in the GOP.
Trump is trying to appeal to where conservatives are now, but he's sort of an idiot and neither understands the ideology nor can he articulate much of anything.
Meanwhile Clinton-style Dems and Bush-style Republicans are the same in all but a few donors. Both parties have wandered fairly far from their base, and the cracks are showing on both sides.
You have the most bizarre take on such a straightforward document. His points were:
* Men and women, as groups, as statistically different psychologically
* The way Google recruits and approaches problems is biased towards men, because it's focused on a narrow aspect of the job that men are more likely to be interested in
* Google should fix that, as a better way to improve the gender ratio than what they do now
Seems like a legitimate topic for discussion on a mailing list about inclusion.
When I interviewed at Google it was the least social interview experience I've had (or at least tied with Facebook). No soft skill or team fit type questions at all. No leadership skills probing questions at all. Purely design and coding questions, and in those questions, the interviewer was the least interactive of any place I've interviewed (and I've interviewed at a lot of places including 4 of the Big 5).
Do you see the problem there? Solving purely abstract technical problems with no social interaction is less than half the job at any development shop I've worked at. It's an important skill set to interview for, to be sure, but it's far from the whole picture, and statistically it's biased towards men.
. Google is in the business of providing access and providing services.
Google is an advertising company. It's most of their revenue. You are their product, not their customer. They're in the business of selling your data to their customers, albeit indirectly by knowing every detail about you to target ads. Google needs to know your race, age, sex, religion, address, shopping habits, sexual preference, where you work, how much you make, how many kids you have and where they go to school, and so on. And unless you've been very careful, they know all of these things exactly, because they read all your documents and track all your online activities. It's what they do, and it's creepy as fuck.
It's far to early for government intervention. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTune dominate the market, but as of yet there's no evidence that competitors can't grow. It's legitimate to rant at these companies for abusing their near-monopoly power to push their political agendas, however - it especially pisses me off as an (indirect) stockholder.
The right answer is to support any credible competition that doesn't seem to be pushing a political agenda (or, failing that, an opposing bias, but really, can't we just have a company that values profit over politics please?).
"Gaming" is hardly fringe these days. It's a bigger business than the movies. Is your mind still in the 90s?
Then maybe they should go get themselves a real job
If you work a full week in order to produce content, how is that not a real job? If you employ a staff, and are actually running a small business, how are these not real jobs?
They are new kinds of jobs, but real jobs nonetheless.
or set up their own video service if they're not happy with YouTube
Oh, everyone is very aware that YouTube is not their friend at this point. The problem is, most of the alternatives have either been scammers, or poor re-implementations of YouTube with all the same issues. None of them, for example, allow role-based administration of a channel (needed as soon as you grow beyond a 1-man shop).
Everyone I follow with a larger following is Patreon-funded now, but you have to build your channel to that point, and you need an established service to build that following.
No one's forcing these people to use YouTube.
It's the only realistic option today. Sure, Google may "owe them" nothing .. nothing that is beyond not being a dick to your fellow man (aka: don't be evil).
Anyone who follows any sort of weapons or gaming or political channel on YouTube knows just how over-aggressive the Google's flagging bots can be. Very bland content now routinely gets flagged for no apparent reason and must be manually appealed. Sure, the bots are intended to do something Google actually wants: demonitize genuinely offensive content so that advertizers aren't embarassed, but that's not what the bots actually do. The collateral damage seems to be 10x the intended effect, with real harm done to people earning their living as vloggers.
I'm betting this is just more of the same. Google has some stuff they legitimately want to ban (e.g., sharing pirated content form you Google drive), but then the bots are badly written and poorly tested, and wreak havoc.
I'd call it poor customer service, but of course we know we're not Google's customers - only their ad buyers are their customers. Still, seems a bad way to treat your product.
But by then, the competition will be long gone.
Also seems unlikely - Amazon is smaller than Walmart, and something less than 10% of retail. It's a big player, to be sure, but even if it doubled a couple of times would be far from a monopoly.
Nothing lasts forever, but customer service is central to Amazon corporate culture, so all the senior management would need to change. If you follow the stock, you know Bezos only barely cares about keeping the stockholders happy by being profitable. Sure, one day, maybe, but worse than Walmart? Seems unlikely.
Let me add asshole that one day this company might have too much control if it doesn't already. They will be able to do whatever the fuck they want if they don't already. Does this make your cheap ass concerned?
Amazon has better customer service than any place I shop in person, at least when Amazon is the seller (dodgy 3rd-party sellers are a problem, though). Why would I be concerned about that?
I also wonder if Amazon is going to find a way to jettison its low-margin retail business and concentrate on AWS.
That sure happened a lot right before the dot-com bust. Most companies that jettisoned a cash cow to focus on Growth! went under, but most of the cash cows survived. (My favorite, Agilent, is now worth twice what it was worth when HP dumped it, while HP swirls the drain). The only smart one was AOL, who used their over-valued junk stock to buy a cash cow.
The Amazon leadership was around for the dot bust. They all saw that stuff happen. Seems unlikely they'll repeat that particular mistake. In fact, they seem to have just bought another large retail business. Funny, that.
What do you think Amazon will have a monopoly on one day? It's about the same size as Walmart in retail, and far better to have 2 such beasts than one!
Governments started pushing back against single inheritor schemes around the 1600s IIRC. It has had quite a positive effect, though it gets blurred with those newly rich during the industrial revolution.
In modern America, it's quite rare for anyone who is well know for his wealth to leave a big chunk of it to his kids (Walton was an exception, but evem then he split it 3 ways IIRC). But there are extremely wealthy families in the US who do much to stay unknown, and do keep their wealth concentrated over the generations. Perhaps politically impossible to fix, though, as those families are quite politically powerful.
The first-generation wealthy (sucessful CEOs etc) seem to be the target for new taxation, and maybe that would do little harm, but it's unlikely to actually help much.
The primary form of wealth distribution for centuries has been at death - especially preventing all the wealth from being handed down to one inheritor, who can then continue to grow his share. It's not obvious that taking wealth from the living is required to prevent excessive concentration of wealth (a few like Bill/Bezos/Buffet are still small in the scheme of things).
It's also important not to confuse redistribution of wealth with redistribution of income. The two problems may be related, but their solutions aren't.
The only good solution for lack of income is enabling everyone to earn a living. This is a very hard problem, but it doesn't seem like an impossible problem. Wealth is a harder problem though, since giving people money rarely has any effect on wealth (it certainly has a measured negative effect on the wealth of lottery winners). Wealth is a matter of habit as much as income, and that's a cultural problem.
I guess they are tied together in one way: the best way to provide income for the elderly is for the elderly to be living off of wealth accumulated in their lifetimes (but not unbounded across ancestor's lifetimes).
We have no idea how dark matter interacts with anything, but annihilation is one possibility (a bit remote though - it would mean particularly odd physics). All of the anti-matter annihilating with dark matter would leave all of the matter and most of the dark matter, so that could work, far-fetched though that reaction would be. Interacting in some other way, where they react to form some other kind of dark matter, is also possible, and perhaps less fanciful.
It's all a reach though, since we know so little about dark matter you can invent all sorts of crazy theories about it, and that doesn't mean much.
People talk about it like that's when "the universe began", but it's really just "when the universe AS WE KNOW IT began". It says nothing about what was happening before that time because the answer is that we have no idea. Maybe it was always here. It's possible new universes are formed inside of black holes and that our universe was formed in just such a manner.
I rather like Penrose's ideas about this. When the energy density is high enough, effectively everything becomes massless and moves at the speed of light. In such a case, the universe ceases to have time and distance scales - when nothing in the universe experiences time or distance, the concepts become meaningless. General relativity still works just fine in such conditions, as it's fundamentally scale-invariant, so this doesn't break established physics.
Under that interpretation, the big bang isn't when the universe began, but when time (and space) began. What was there "before" was all the same stuff, just in a state where time and distance don't happen.
It's not clear to me how that's any different that the argument that we're living in a simulation. Interesting idea, but what novel, testable predictions does it make?