In the case of astronauts, you're also dealing with a bunch of guys who are in relatively good shape - you've already weeded out the morbidly obese, drug addiction, etc.
THIS. It's probably an even more significant issue in terms of mortality stats. We're not just dealing with "Average Joe" here -- these guys were generally chosen because they were in top physical and mental condition... physically probably in the top 5% of the population, if not higher. It shouldn't be surprising at all that most of them live to their mid-80s or more.
In addition to "patterns," both TFS and the people interviewed seem to have embraced the art of NON-patterned word salad... or maybe they just don't have a clue about what they are talking about.
'There's this logical positivist mindset that the only things that have value are those things that can be measured and can empirically be shown to be true, and while that has its merits it also takes us down a pretty dark place,' said digital product designer Cennydd Bowles, who is researching ethical design. 'We start to look at ethics as pure utilitarianism, whatever benefits the most people. Yikes, it has problems.'
What the heck is this supposed to have to do with anything?? First off, logical positivism is an early to mid 20th-century philosophical movement that embraced the idea of verification as the basis of truth. There are all sorts of things we could say about this philosophical movement, but I have no clue what it could possibly have to do with "Dark Patterns" or immoral web design. There's no reason verificationism inevitably leads one to a "dark place," whatever that means.
Yet we then jump to this idea of utilitarianism, yet another philosophical term that seems out of place. Yes, the stereotype of extreme utilitarians is that they will justify all sorts of weird ethically questionable behavior "for the sake of the greater good," like the doctor who would kill the live healthy dude who wanders into the hospital if he could save five other dying people with the organs. Most utilitarians aren't that crazy.
But again, I'm not sure what this has to do with "dark patterns" or web design, because it's pretty clear that these things probably DON'T do "the greatest good for the most people" -- in fact, they are ways of stealing wealth from large amounts of stupid people (who probably don't have that much money to spare, on average) and concentrating it among a few people. That's actually pretty much the opposite of utilitarian reasoning.
And I still have no clue what utilitarianism (an ethical philosophy) has to do with logical positivism (which has to do with epistemology, or the basis of knowledge). It would be quite possible to subscribe to one and not the other, or neither, or whatever -- they simply have little to do with each other. I'm not sure how empirical verification of stuff to determine truth inevitably leads to a MORAL argument around utilitarianism (which isn't usually something "verifiable" in the normal scientific sense)... and neither of these seem to have anything to do with "evil" web design.
The only thing I can figure is that this person is some sort of anti-science religious nutjob who thinks that dependence on scientific reasoning leads to moral decay or something, and they're just using "utilitarian" as a code word for "bad moral system."
This is one of the most muddled things I've seen in a Slashdot summary recently (and that's saying something)... and this person is supposedly "researching" ethical web design?? I think you might want to learn English first or some basic logic before you start throwing around irrelevant philosophical terms.
Getty would do well to quickly offer up a very reasonable/rationa settlement - such as repaying every customer who paid for images they didn't have the right to sell and making a sizable donation to some art charity/foundation. Anything else, and they undermind the very laws that provide for their business model and very existence.
Not enough, sorry. Not when we have court judgments standing against ordinary citizens for non-commercial infringement of over $10,000 per violation.
The $1 billion would be a bargain for them to get off so easy, compared to how Getty and similar companies have treated individuals. Frankly, if I were Ms. Highsmith, I'd take the billion dollars and track down every individual non-commercial "infringer" she can find who has been the victim of such lawsuits and use the money from the lawsuit to pay them back. If there was any money left over, I'd create a victims defense fund for people who are sued for ridiculous amounts for non-commercial infringement.
It's not that I'm pro-piracy. I'm not. But I think non-commercial copyright infringement with no intent to cause harm (and sometimes unknowing infringement, in the case of photos just grabbed over the internet) shouldn't be putting individuals in the poorhouse. If the infringing fees were more reasonable (particularly for first-time offenders), that'd be one thing... but they're not. I'd be all in favor of an escalating set of penalties for repeat offenders, even.... but suing for thousands of dollars over a single violation?
Hardly notice a billion dollars? How big is Getty, really? That's a fucking lot of money.
Not that big. Just a few years ago the company was sold for $3.3 billion. I don't know what their current estimated worth is, but I definitely imagine a billion-dollar loss would be noticeable.
It's brand product models that are being compared here. If you read the summary they mention Toyota Corolla and not all Toyota cars, for example. Now you could pit the Samsung Galaxy vs the Apple iPhone and that would be a reasonable comparison.
It also depends on what the goal of the metric is. What is the goal of the comparison? Anyhow who knows basic stats or deals with data regularly understands that you can arbitrarily create all sorts of categories. But do those categories get at something meaningful? By choosing the wrong categories, you can also end up causing all sorts of statistical ghosts, making it look like trends are the opposite of what they "really" are (in terms of the most practical interpretations) or other weird stuff.
Toyota has for many years had the best selling car in America, the Toyota Camry. Would you argue that Ford has the best selling car because it has sold more cars overall than the Camry? Again, apples and oranges comparison.
Well, again, we need to consider the purpose of the metric. Do we care most about proving what single "product" is the most popular (even if the boundaries around that "product" may be arbitrarily defined by a company), or are we trying to measure which company's product lines in general are the most popular?
I think what this thread is about is that people are trying to point out that phones are the sort of thing that the average person has one of at a time. (Or, they may have a business phone and a personal phone, but they usually only tend to choose their personal one.)
And therefore it's not like they are going to go out and buy 3 or 4 different Nokia or Samsung model phones for use at the same time (or an iPhone AND an Android phone or whatever). They make a choice to buy ONE phone. For some people, they may specifically desire the iPhone models, and they want that SPECIFIC phone over others. For other people, the choice is more broad -- do I want Apple or do I want Android? Or do I want Apple vs. Nokia vs. Samsung. Again, most people are going to end up choosing one product here at a time.
And that means in terms of "popularity" it may or may not be meaningful to compare only models of phones. Perhaps more people are making a choice more like "Apple vs. Android" first, and then once they've decided Android, they narrow it down further. In that case, if the total number of Android phones is greater (regardless of who makes them), there's a case to be made that Android is "more popular."
Most people I know seem to have relatively little brand loyalty these days. They'll happily switch to another Android company as long as the interface is somewhat similar (whereas switching to an iPhone is a lot more work). So the big categorical divide may not be around individual products but elsewhere... and that's why you may need to think about what it means to look at "popularity."
What's rather disturbing about your comment is that you obviously don't realize that these same words in the Constitution were consistently interpreted in a much more narrow way for the first 150 years or so of the U.S. It was only the in late 1930s (after the switch in time that saved nine) that the federal government assumed more-or-less plenary power with no constraints.
Maybe if you had read the Constitution you wouldn't be spouting such crap. The power starts in the Preamble:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
As noted repeatedly by the Supreme Court, the preamble of the Constitution does NOT grant any powers which are not explicitly already mentioned elsewhere in the Constitution. See, for example, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905): " Although that Preamble indicates the general purposes for which the people ordained and established the Constitution, it has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or on any of its Departments."
In other words, Congress has been granted the power to pass legislation of any kind, which includes regulating things.
False. And there's nothing in Section 1 which implies that. Instead, Section 8 clearly enumerates the exact powers granted to Congress, while the 10th Amendment makes clear (which the Founders already intended, even without the Bill of Rights) that all others not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution are granted to the states or to the people.
Again, Congress passes legislation and the President approves or vetoes it. This includes regulating things.
I don't see any mention of a plenary power to "regulate" anything, especially not in Section 7, which is just about legislative process. What are you talking about??
Article 1, Section 8:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
The general welfare. In other words, the power to use taxes to inform people of the crap their ingesting or smoking to let them make an informed decision. It's also called regulation.
Uh, again, please note that this clause was significantly more restricted in interpretation before 1937 or so. It was generally accepted only as a power to tax, and there was great debate in the 1800s over whether it allowed taxation beyond the enumerated powers or only directly in relation to the enumerated powers. Eventually, it was interpreted more broadly, but still ONLY as an ability to TAX for "general welfare." Hence, for example, in the early 1900s alcohol couldn't be regulated or prohibited generally without a Constitutional amendment. But the federal government nevertheless attempted to tax it in various ways, e.g., the Harrison Act as a proxy for more general regulation. Anyhow, the "general welfare" clause here only relates to taxation (and has always been interpreted as such), not a broad power to regulate generally.
The last sentence of Section 8:
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the go
And this is what we get when somebody tries to use a word processor for complex document layout. This is what's behind all the bloat in Word: people using the wrong tool for the job.
I know people do it all the time, but that doesn't mean it ever made sense. Typesetting and layout should be mostly independent of content creation. When you try to combine the two dynamically, this kind of crap is just bound to happen.
You want to do layout and actual decent typography? Use a tool designed for it. InDesign works. LaTeX is good.
Or heck, learn how to use styles and proper global formatting settings in Word, rather than direct formatting hacks everywhere... And suddenly a lot of this crap won't happen.
(P.S. I hate Word with a passion and rarely use it except when forced to. And Word is buggy. But if this stuff happens too often, it's likely also because you're trying to do things like you're still using a typewriter instead of the right features or even the right software application.)
It's too expensive, too crowded, and I don't want to watch 15 minutes of product endorsements followed by 20 minutes of spoilers for upcoming films before they get around to showing the feature.
Agreed. I have no problem with them showing ads and trailers, but they should be legally obligated to provide the actual starting time of the feature film as well -- so if I don't want to see that stuff, I can come 25 minutes "late" or whatever.
It wasn't bad when it used to just be 2 or 3 trailers and some little intro video saying, "And now for our feature presentation..." But it's really out of hand. Imagine if you went to an opera and the actor from next season came out beforehand and performed a 20-second clip from an aria from a different show.... followed by 10 more ridiculous "previews." Or if you went to the theatre and some guy came out and did a "To be or not to be" soliloquy before Romeo and Juliet started, just to get you set for "the coming attractions." Or maybe you go to a baseball game and before the Star-Spangled Banner, a dozen football players come out into the middle of the baseball field and run a play -- just so you can get ready to see what's "Coming this fall...."
It would all be silly. But they expect people to put up with 20+ minutes of that interspersed with commercials? There's a reason I got rid of cable TV too. Movie theaters are eventually going to realize the ad revenue is no longer going to support them either if they have no actual customers.
No , the link says the Netherlands uses ounces (I.e. "ons" in Dutch) instead of the proper metric term of hectogram. The term "pond" (pound) is still around for half a kilo too in casual contexts, which approximates the size of the historical pound. The point is that even when the sizes of metric units have been adopted, people frequently keep using the old terms, which obscures the "simple" conversions that are the whole point of metric.
Once at night on German TV they had news from 30 years ago. Amazing how nothing has really changed. The names have, but it was basically identical to what is going on now.
From that moment on, I decided not to watch news anymore. Just not worth my time.
The "news" is really just entertainment. It is packaged and sold as entertainment (which means it often is really just selling advertisements).
Typical American news broadcast -- teaser all evening, "This common household item could KILL you! News at 11!" So you watch a bunch of commercials waiting for the news to start... finally... "Our top story is a new expose of X... but first, some breaking news...." More delaying tactics, more hints of fear, more commercials... finally about 15 minutes in you get to the piece on X, which of course isn't as horrifying as expected. Oh, and you get teasers for sports and weather throughout, but they aren't put on until the very end, because they know that few viewers would bother to watch the rest of the news (and the ADS!) unless they were waiting around for what most viewers actually care about... sports and weather.
The news is a combination of entertainment, scare tactics, and delaying tactics to get you to watch ads. And the vast majority of it is ephemera that is either (1) on-going stories that change little day-to-day, so you don't need a daily update, let alone an hourly one on CNN or whatever, or (2) random crap that no one will care about two days from now.
As you say, go look at a newspaper from a few decades ago and see what percentage of it was actually worthwhile to care about enough to read it for the long-term.
I stopped watching the news/reading the newspaper almost 20 years ago, and I haven't missed it a bit. What I do watch or read, I recognize it mostly for entertainment, not "being informed." Instead, I spend about 3 minutes/day checking the big headlines online (just to be sure I don't miss something that everyone will be talking about), and instead spend time reading/researching topics that interest me in-depth.
That's really the biggest problem with the news -- it makes us dumb. (Seriously, there was a book that came out maybe 15 years ago called How the News Makes Us Dumb, and it was quite insightful.) It turns every issue and event into a 30-second segment or a 3-paragraph story, which is bound to lead to oversimplifications and ignore nuance. In the long-term, that actually conditions us not to think too deeply about anything... everything in the world is just a 30-second blurb, and then we move on.
What bothers me the most are people who think watching the news daily "keeps them informed." No -- if you actually want to be informed, take those 30 minutes per day and read a couple in-depth articles about a current topic that show some nuance. At least then you'll be "informed" about SOMETHING, rather than drowning in a morass of shallow ephemera.
You can't compare the average hours per user for cable and netflix. They aren't equal... At best you can compare the cost per person. The number of hours is highly variable, and not to mention it doesn't change the monthly cost anyways...
I agree that there are a lot of issues with this comparison. BUT I think there is at least some validity to this approach, Anecdotally, the people I know who still have cable AND have Netflix tend to still watch a lot more cable TV than streaming Netflix. There's something different about the user experience of cable TV that causes people to "channel surf" more and hooks you in... even if the programming is less desirable than choosing something specific you want to watch on Netflix. I've seen lots of other people do this, and I did too until I "cut the cord" some years ago. (I also stopped watching as much TV in general and had more "directed" viewing for things I actually wanted to watch, rather than just "channel surfing" and getting hooked watching something mindless.)
Anyhow, for those reasons I don't think a per-user cost is entirely a good metric either. People may actually use these services differently, which affects how many hours on average they use them.
It also does not count for the time you are spending watching ads.
That's true. The vast majority of people don't really want to pay for commercials. Cable TV has now on average gone above the 25% mark for amount of ads per unit time (more than 15 minutes per hour), which would increase the effective "cost" of cable programming by 33% to around 82 cents/hour.
For some cable channels, the percentage of ads has grown to over 1/3 of all programming time, making the cost of cable programming 50% more than the 61 cents quoted (around 93 cents/hour).
These are pretty significant differences when you're comparing to Netflix. And if you're paying nearly $1/hour for content on some cable channels (not counting commercials), you quickly begin to realize that cable may not be a good deal at all. For example, there are thousands and thousands of movie titles you could rent instantly on Amazon for $2.99 or so. For a 2-hour+ movie, you're basically not paying much more than you might be for your cable content... except a streaming movie from Amazon (or wherever) is ad-free and delivered to you exactly when you want it.
Also keep in mind the assumptions here, which was that the average cable subscriber watches over 5 hours of TV per day. I don't have cable TV, but even if I did, there's no way I'd ever watch that much TV. I have better things to do with my life (like waste time making comments on Slashdot?). If you only watch an hour or two of TV per day, the cost of cable is significantly higher and you'd probably get a better deal by cancelling cable and paying for streaming content (or physical media, if you prefer) as needed.
That is, of course, unless you NEED to watch whatever new episode of whatever IMMEDIATELY when it comes out and that content is only on cable. But I think people need to ask themselves how much they're actually paying in a premium to get that one or two hours of new content per week.
The real reason for extremely high top salaries is to save money on mid level manager salaries and promote 'no holds barred' competitiveness. Mid level managers see the only path to "good" pay as being to win in a cut-throat game of mid-manager shuffle. The result is that only the most vicious rise to the top and reap the big rewards, instead of equitable sharing.
This is part of the story, but I think we need to take the reasoning a step further and realize that those who get promoted from mid-level management are those who show the most extreme positive results. The American business model these days no longer just demands "steady income" -- it demands "constant growth," preferably at as fast a rate as possible.
This attitude implicitly encourages more extreme and more risky decisions to get ahead. The results are guaranteed to be more volatile, with some reaping huge returns and others bombing miserably -- that's all just assuming luck and chance.
But we promote those people who took the greatest risks, often regardless of whether the results were due to a savvy decision at the right moment or were just a risky gamble that paid off. Which means that those who get to the CEO seat are disproportionately composed of people who will take bigger gambles. That's just the nature of American corporate culture.
More importantly, it means that those who come into a CEO position with the seemingly "best" previous record are often those who were luckiest. They not only "beat the market," but they frequently took excessive risks beyond what perhaps could be rationally justified. But even in a randomized group of middle-management decisions, there will be a few who "win big" just by chance.
And that may be one explanation for this study's results. The CEOs with the highest pay probably had the "best" previous record in terms of financial returns. But in the erratic world of business and economics, there's too many random factors that can contribute to success, so a large number of people with the best returns got them mostly just by being more risky and irrational than other people (rather than talent or rational decision-making).
When you put that group of CEOs in a new position, you're bound to see more "regression to the mean," because those with previous good records are probably going to generate the most volatile results. Whereas the "B-level" CEOs who didn't have such extreme returns previously might depend less on risk and luck and therefore are more likely to have "steady" positive results. (I believe I've seen a similar study that basically showed this somehow -- CEOs with the highest performance in a previous position were more likely to regress to the mean or actually make a company worse.)
It's kind of like always picking the best performing stock on a given day to invest in the next day -- sometimes it works well, but almost as often the highest gaining stocks are the most volatile ones and you're likely to lose almost as much as you gain. Whereas if you look for stocks with a longer track record of positive (though more moderate) performance, you might be somewhat more likely to see continued growth. CEO fluctuations in "value" aren't perhaps as volatile as stocks, but they -- like stocks -- have to perform in an ever-changing economic environment with a lot of randomness. A large number of ones who seem to be short-term "outliers" are therefore likely to become so by chance and aren't necessarily good long-term bets.
I always wondered how everyone understood measurements given by the UK show Top Gear when they talk about miles, miles per hour and horsepower. Not to mention pints.
Well, basically it's a complete myth that everywhere but the U.S. converted to metric in everyday life. The UK has "officially" been using metric for 50 years, but imperial units are EVERYWHERE in common circumstances if you bother to look for them. (For a full explanation, you might look at this report from the UK Metric Association which seeks to promote literacy in metric.
There are obvious situations from everyday life where UK folks still use imperial units -- most prefer "stone" (or "pounds/ounces" for babies) for human weight, for example. But other units crop up all the time. Celsius is standard for weather forecasts, except when it gets really hot, in which case broadcasters love to point out it might get to "100 degrees!" Watts are the SI unit, but you get engines measured in HP and heating systems measured in BTUs. Clothing sizes are still commonly in inches. Road signs still commonly give distances in miles (or yards, for shorter distances and feet and inches for height restrictions). Paper is mostly metric, but photos are still standard 4"x6". Refrigerators are often still sold with volume given in cu. ft. House/apartment sizes are often still described by agents in sq. ft. Small grocers often still advertise in imperial units of weight or volume.
Etc., etc. There are also plenty of cases where more obscure units are still used in various skilled trades.
Most countries that claim to be "fully metric" have similar issues. This list is a bit old, but it shows how old non-metric units continue to be used in random places throughout Europe, even in countries that "converted" more than a century ago.
After reading a lot about this, my conclusion was that the most successful countries that really made a break with older measures did so by simply redefining their older units. Hence, the French still order a "pound loaf" of bread, but it's actually 500 grams -- they simply redefined the livre (pound) in the 1800s to be exactly half a kilo. Given the way that all the old imperial units have now been so precisely defined, it's no longer really feasible to do that anymore.
So most countries are stuck with weird hybrids, where officially everyone is supposed to use metric, but you get old units cropping up in all sorts of everyday places where they are useful.
I'm a big fan of the metric system and wish that everyone would adopt a standard measurement system -- but these residual units in most countries go to show how little utility the supposed "simplicity" of the metric system actually has for everyday life. People have a sense of how big a "X cu. ft." refrigerator is, and they can use it to compare when they buy a new one. The average person never really cares about the conversion of that unit to anything else -- they don't care that there are 1728 cu. in. in a cu. ft. and they'll basically never need to know that or do such a conversion. They just want to know how big their refrigerator is and how it compares to the new one they might buy. The units might as well be "7.2 standard refrigerator units" for all people care... and that's why these old units stick around. Very few circumstances demand conversion of units for everyday people in everyday life, so the "easiness" of the metric system means nothing to them. If they want to buy pants, they know the number that fits them -- it doesn't matter is it is centimeters or inches or cubits or furlongs.
I know it's mostly not Netflix fault their movie selection is crap. But honestly I'd probably pay twice as much if I had a real selection of movies where I had a reasonably good chance that the movie I wanted to see was included.
Uh, your wish is already granted by Netflix -- pay "twice as much" and subscribe to their DVD plan and get access to roughly 100,000 titles.
I know that's not the answer you want, but if you're willing to wait just a couple days rather than demanding instant gratification when you decide you "need to watch movie X right now!" you might find there are options available. (Admittedly, if you just want the most popular and recent titles unavailable on Netflix streaming, there are better alternatives... if you want to rent old Soviet films or obscure silent flicks, there aren't that many alternatives.)
But I know DVDs and mail are so "old school" these days. Perhaps hipsters will bring them back in a couple years.
Incidentally, Bitcoin probably can't be considered legal tender - it would violate the Constitution, which allows only Congress to print money and denies states the right to have their own currency. It does fall into a category not thought of by the founding fathers, though, which is non-printed money (so Bitcoin basically is a loophole).
There's always a lot of confusion when the term "legal tender" comes up. "Legal tender" is NOT the same as "valid money" or "valid currency" or whatever. "Legal tender" in the U.S. means precisely one thing -- it must be accepted for all debts, public or private.
And what that means is -- if you incur debt to someone, they must accept "legal tender" to repay that debt. If you don't pay and they sue you, the court can order payment -- and they must accept dollars.
Things "legal tender" is NOT: (1) "Legal tender" is NOT necessarily the only possible thing you can use to pay for something. A purchase contract can specify that you give me lunch in exchange for two goats. That doesn't make goats "money" or "legal tender." (2) "Legal tender" does NOT have to be accepted as payment for a debt not yet incurred, which means no business has to accept legal tender for a purchase for example. A business in the U.S. can legally say it will only take credit, no cash please. Or they can say "we only accept goats for purchases."
There are plenty of examples in normal life of "substitute currencies" or "substitute money" created and perfectly legal. If you go to a casino and they give you a stack of chips that are required to be used for betting or for paying for services within the casino, they are creating a de facto "in-house currency" that is perfectly legal. If you go to a county fair, and they insist you pay for rides and food or whatever in "tickets" rather than cash, they have also created "de facto money" to be used at that event. It serves as a standard medium of exchange for transactions.
States can also create money in a "workaround" by issuing currency through banks, and many states did that for the first 75 years or so of the U.S. Any private entity can do so.
Anyhow, here's the problem with all alternative currencies in the U.S. -- you have to pay the IRS in dollars. That effectively makes any alternative currency a pain to use except in limited short-term circumstances (like casino betting or fair tickets). Why? Because all alternative currencies -- whether coins or paper or goats -- are ultimately taxable property. And if you actually use an alternative currency that "catches on" and is used widely, you'll have to report any profits and pay taxes in dollars to the IRS.
So if you accept only goats as payment, you'll need to assess the value of those goats. Once you and all the towns in your area start using goats, they are bound to fluctuate in value, so you need to start keeping track of capital gains (in dollars!) that occur between transactions and pay taxes to the IRS. If you're printing your own money, you can get around this problem by tying the value to the U.S. dollar (thus ensuring no changes in value for taxable purposes), but then there's little justification for your alternative currency.... except in circumscribed venues for convenience. (The fair tickets simplify things -- all the stands and ride operators don't have to have a lot of cash on hand to make change, people don't waste time making change for each small transaction, etc.)
So, in sum -- yes, it's true that Bitcoin probably can't be "legal tender" under the Constitution (which only means stuff like you can't force your bank to accept Bitcoin for your mortgage payments). It may in fact be used as "money" or "currency" in other circumstances, but it probably doesn't fit the vague legal definition of "money" in "money laundering" laws (which tends to be focused on standard currencies).
I think part of this trend has to do with the desire to eventually turn a "side-gig" into a job that can offer full financial support, and the Internet has made it possible for a lot of people to at least make a fair shot at doing that.
I really don't think "the Internet" has a lot to do with this, nor do I think it's a "trend." Everybody acts like entrepreneurship was invented in the past couple decades. But how do you think people "got ahead" in previous centuries? How do you think we had a "rise of the middle class" that moved us out of the dark ages of feudalism, then led the charge for the Industrial Revolution, etc.?
A lot of those people were folks with ideas about what they'd prefer to do, and they kept working at a day job to make money to fund what might start as a "hobby" but then lead to a new business or a new invention or whatever. By the 20th century, big business had grown to the point that more people were employed in large corporations, so this idea of "hobbies" or "side jobs" leading to lead to bettering your life shifted instead to "night school" and credentialing/formal study on the side to convince an employer that you're qualified for something better.
The only thing the internet has done is "disrupt" some large corporations and their control in certain sectors, which perhaps makes it a little more likely for an individual to take the "hobby" route instead of the "night school" route again. But let's not kid ourselves -- the number of such people who eventually convert some online hobby to dayjob may be larger than similar entrepreneurs of the past couple generations, but as a percentage of people who dream of doing so... it's vanishingly small.
Everybody needs a hobby, is what this article boils down to. For the people in question, part time job is hobby.
Actually, it's about more than "hobbies." Basically, TFA is about conflating a bunch of things that used to have different terms and corralling them under a new fancy appellation, i.e., "side hustle," which sounds like a really stupid dance people do at weddings.
A few things that are conflated here and had perfectly good terms before:
(1) "Hobbies" -- these are things that basically make you no money. Nominally, they might bring in a little income, but it's so small you don't really pay attention to it at all. You're more interested in the activity than the income. You might only sell some of your work to try to make the expenses "balance out" a little, not really to make a profit.
(2) "Dream jobs" -- these are things that people would like to do with their lives, but they can't "make a living" at it. So they have what used to be called a "day job," and then they work as a musician some evenings or on the weekends. It's more than a "hobby," because they actually would prefer a job as a musician, but the income isn't enough to make it work.
(3) "Second jobs" -- these are what poor people do to survive (i.e., put food on the table and make rent), and what middle-class people do to afford some desirable luxury or send their kids to a nicer private school. (The latter sometimes use the word "side job" too, avoiding the "electric slide" and the "side hustle.") Often they are menial part-time gigs, but they are distinct from the above categories because people generally would prefer NOT to do them.
The author of TFA seems to confuse all of these categories, which used to be straightforward in previous generations. Moreover, he adds his extra "first world problems" twist to his examples:
Maybe that's because many people assume the side hustle is just financially oriented, simply another adaptive response to recession-era economics. Google "side hustle" and you will find thousands of stories, but they are all focused on the how. As in, Dear internet, how can I make another $200 a month to cover my Verizon bill?
If you are struggling financially because of your Verizon bill, maybe your financial priorities are a little screwed up.
Last year, writing for the internet earned me a grand total of $415 before taxes, or about the price of two hotel nights on the outskirts of Manhattan or San Francisco. To say I'm not in it for the money would be understatement. Not because I'm above such earthly considerations. There's just very little money in it to be for.
The side hustle offers something worth much more than money: A hedge against feeling stuck and dull and cheated by life. In fact, given all the hours I've devoted to it, there's no question in my mind that I've lost more than I've made, if only in terms of my Starbucks spend.
If your metric for your side job is that you're spending more money than you're making at Starbucks, you don't have a "side job" or even a "side hustle." You have a hobby. And you have enough disposable income to not give a crap that you're spending that much money on coffee. Good job! Now stop meditating on your first-world problems and trying to conflate them with things real people do to survive or to get things that will really make their lives better.
If your writing hobby gives your life meaning, by all means, keep doing it. But please stop acting like most other people who have to work a second job on the side might also just throw away all their proceeds at Starbucks. Or... well, is that really what a "millennial" budget looks like these days? $200/month Verizon bill, $100/month coffee bill... but can't make rent or afford a car so you still live with your parents?
I really don't want to give into Millennial stereotypes (which I think are often inaccurate), but TFA is just BEGGING for it.
I think that is political BS. IF I understand things correctly each project is usually a different corporation. Different investors for different projects, one failed project won't impact other projects, a failure doesn't impact anyone personally, etc. Basically look up all the reasons you want an S-Corp or LLC rather than a sole proprietorship for your own business. I think his bankruptcies are several of these projects failing. If only several projects failed out of dozens he's doing pretty well.
All of that said, if Trump had merely cashed out his portion of his father's inheritance in the mid-1970s and invested it in index funds, he'd have more money today.
This isn't surprising as most CEOs (and even most fund managers) have trouble beating the market consistently. But still -- Trump's amount of business success is hardly noteworthy, given the assets and company already put in place that he inherited. He could have had more money if he just sat back and did nothing for the past 40 years.
Maybe I'm also making the incorrect assumptions about the inlet temperature (the paper doesn't make it clear)
The paper gives detailed tables showing the inlet temp, the chamber temp, and the outlet temp for every trial. Inlet temp varied between 51 and 73 C for the trials, though those that used a lower inlet temp seemed less effective for extending shelf life.
Is it really something new or noteworthy?
I am not sure about the US but here in Europe ESL milk (PDF) is a pretty standard thing: it has a shelf life of 3-4 weeks and it is of course chemical-free.
I put a much longer explanation in a post above based on the actual scientific study. But from reading your ESL link, it seems there are a couple differences: the ESL process seems to be a variant on the UHT process with slightly lower temperature (but still way above normal pasteurization). Your link says that additional losses in nutrients and quality are minimal, but they do exist.
This process is essentially an "add-on" to a normal pasteurization process which happens for a fraction of a second around normal pasteurization temperatures (ca. 70-80 C). Since the temperature increase is very small, it doesn't require additional heat energy from outside the pasteurization system and likely would suffer even less quality/nutrient loss compared to the ESL process.
At least that's what I got from reading the actual study.
Is it really that god damn difficult for you high UID monkeys to use a bit of simple logic? Do you really need literally everything spoon-fed to you?
Are you seriously going to chastise someone when you didn't even bother to try to figure out what the hell is going on yourself? It's pretty obvious from TFS (which is admittedly poorly written, based on a poorly written TFA, based almost directly on a completely ignorant university press release linked in TFS) that the milk is still pasteurized and this is an ADDITIONAL step. So the "temperature" we're raising by "10 degrees" is completely confusing in all of these sources.
SLASHDOT EDITORS: STOP PUTTING UP CRAP ARTICLES WITHOUT A LINK TO THE ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC SOURCE!!!
This is the kind of stupid ignorant discussions we get without the actual scientific source, which can be found here.
Now everyone go read actually what this study did. Most stuff in TFS is confused if not downright wrong. Let me explain the basics of this process, based on the actual scientific study:
(1) Pasteurization is good, but it only results in limited shelf life. Other techniques used for increasing shelf life (ultra-high temp or UHT pasteurization, low-temperature long time or LTLT pasteurization) produce undesirable effects on flavor and/or nutrients, etc.
(2) This process is what the authors describe as "low temperature, short time (LTST) amendment for pasteurization" which could be added after normal pasteurization to increase shelf life dramatically without some of the negative effects described above.
(3) The statement from TFS "The technology they've developed involves increasing the temperature of milk by just 10 degrees for less than a second, which is well below the 70-degree Celsius threshold needed for pasteurization" is complete BS. I don't know what it's supposed to mean. If you go to the actual scientific study, you'll find the temperatures in the chamber for the 5 trials varied between 64.8 C and 83.8 C. In general, chamber temperatures in the trials below 70 C seemed to be much less effective at increasing shelf life and weren't recommended. So TFS -- and the university press it's based on -- are completely wrong.
(4) What is the process really? Well, just after pasteurization (which occurs at or above 72.7C), the milk is reheated in a special chamber and dispersed in droplets. The reheating step only raises the temperature of the milk by 1 to 10C over what it was before (in the words of the authors "at or below pasteurization temperatures" of less than or equal to 72.7C) for 0.02 seconds. As I noted above, the actual temperature achieved in the chamber seems important (definitely above 70 C seems desirable), with higher temperatures being more effective at increasing shelf life.
(5) The process is potentially an improvement over other proposals to increase shelf-life for a number of reasons:
-- No significant loss in nutrients compared with standard pasteurization.
-- No significant taste difference or perceived quality difference among tasters with this additional step.
-- The minimal heat energy required for this step could be incorporated into a standard pasteurization process setting to siphon off heat energy already present from the pasteurization tube, so this wouldn't necessarily require additional energy (and is thus very efficient).
OK? That's what's actually going on here. Now that we know what the original science is actually about, please continue your random Slashdot insults and debates.... perhaps slightly more informed.
The problem with the "autopilot" is it essentially allows the AI to do all of the driving, meaning the human invariably stops paying attention
Invariably? Really?
Actually, yes -- pretty much. Or rather, I wouldn't say "stops paying attention" -- more like "reduces attention to driving and redirects significant attention toward secondary tasks." There are a number of studies out there which show this already happens even with basic cruise control and has been measured in a lot of different ways (attention to other tasks, increased reaction time, etc.). Now introduce a system where even less attention is required, and the vast majority of people will significantly reduce their attention.
I know the Tesla and AI defenders out there don't want this to be true, but it is. The only safe AI "autopilot" for the general public is going to be one that has complete control and NEVER requires a human to take over... And we're a LONG way from that.
How does an ISP $2 dollar charge make a news item worth of slashdot? Heck most of us have been fighting miscellaneous carrier fees for years.. Call Verizon and complain...
Nothing to see here.
First off, it's $2.80/month + taxes and fees, so probably at least $40/year or so. A single year of this fee would thus be equal to the cost of a cheap router, probably less at the manufacturer's cost Verizon probably pays for them.
And the issue -- at least from my perspective -- is that they apparently are charging general fees to people for "maintenance" just because they have old equipment, rather than simply... well, charging for maintenance calls when necessary to deal with support. If they want to tell you: "You own old equipment which we no longer support fully -- any future troubleshooting calls may incur an extra X dollar fee," that seems perfectly reasonable. Or if they are really upgrading for their own convenience, why not offer a FREE equipment upgrade to customers? Routers aren't that expensive, considering the price most people pay for cable and internet per month. (One month of fees for most people likely exceeds their cost for a router.)
Instead, Verizon is punishing its most loyal customers who have been around long enough for their equipment to become out-of-date by pushing nonsense fees. Are these fees a lot compared to most random cable fees? No -- but the whole thing is in fact a bit ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case of astronauts, you're also dealing with a bunch of guys who are in relatively good shape - you've already weeded out the morbidly obese, drug addiction, etc.
THIS. It's probably an even more significant issue in terms of mortality stats. We're not just dealing with "Average Joe" here -- these guys were generally chosen because they were in top physical and mental condition... physically probably in the top 5% of the population, if not higher. It shouldn't be surprising at all that most of them live to their mid-80s or more.
'There's this logical positivist mindset that the only things that have value are those things that can be measured and can empirically be shown to be true, and while that has its merits it also takes us down a pretty dark place,' said digital product designer Cennydd Bowles, who is researching ethical design. 'We start to look at ethics as pure utilitarianism, whatever benefits the most people. Yikes, it has problems.'
What the heck is this supposed to have to do with anything?? First off, logical positivism is an early to mid 20th-century philosophical movement that embraced the idea of verification as the basis of truth. There are all sorts of things we could say about this philosophical movement, but I have no clue what it could possibly have to do with "Dark Patterns" or immoral web design. There's no reason verificationism inevitably leads one to a "dark place," whatever that means.
Yet we then jump to this idea of utilitarianism, yet another philosophical term that seems out of place. Yes, the stereotype of extreme utilitarians is that they will justify all sorts of weird ethically questionable behavior "for the sake of the greater good," like the doctor who would kill the live healthy dude who wanders into the hospital if he could save five other dying people with the organs. Most utilitarians aren't that crazy.
But again, I'm not sure what this has to do with "dark patterns" or web design, because it's pretty clear that these things probably DON'T do "the greatest good for the most people" -- in fact, they are ways of stealing wealth from large amounts of stupid people (who probably don't have that much money to spare, on average) and concentrating it among a few people. That's actually pretty much the opposite of utilitarian reasoning.
And I still have no clue what utilitarianism (an ethical philosophy) has to do with logical positivism (which has to do with epistemology, or the basis of knowledge). It would be quite possible to subscribe to one and not the other, or neither, or whatever -- they simply have little to do with each other. I'm not sure how empirical verification of stuff to determine truth inevitably leads to a MORAL argument around utilitarianism (which isn't usually something "verifiable" in the normal scientific sense)... and neither of these seem to have anything to do with "evil" web design.
The only thing I can figure is that this person is some sort of anti-science religious nutjob who thinks that dependence on scientific reasoning leads to moral decay or something, and they're just using "utilitarian" as a code word for "bad moral system."
This is one of the most muddled things I've seen in a Slashdot summary recently (and that's saying something)... and this person is supposedly "researching" ethical web design?? I think you might want to learn English first or some basic logic before you start throwing around irrelevant philosophical terms.
Getty would do well to quickly offer up a very reasonable/rationa settlement - such as repaying every customer who paid for images they didn't have the right to sell and making a sizable donation to some art charity/foundation. Anything else, and they undermind the very laws that provide for their business model and very existence.
Not enough, sorry. Not when we have court judgments standing against ordinary citizens for non-commercial infringement of over $10,000 per violation.
The $1 billion would be a bargain for them to get off so easy, compared to how Getty and similar companies have treated individuals. Frankly, if I were Ms. Highsmith, I'd take the billion dollars and track down every individual non-commercial "infringer" she can find who has been the victim of such lawsuits and use the money from the lawsuit to pay them back. If there was any money left over, I'd create a victims defense fund for people who are sued for ridiculous amounts for non-commercial infringement.
It's not that I'm pro-piracy. I'm not. But I think non-commercial copyright infringement with no intent to cause harm (and sometimes unknowing infringement, in the case of photos just grabbed over the internet) shouldn't be putting individuals in the poorhouse. If the infringing fees were more reasonable (particularly for first-time offenders), that'd be one thing... but they're not. I'd be all in favor of an escalating set of penalties for repeat offenders, even.... but suing for thousands of dollars over a single violation?
Hardly notice a billion dollars? How big is Getty, really? That's a fucking lot of money.
Not that big. Just a few years ago the company was sold for $3.3 billion. I don't know what their current estimated worth is, but I definitely imagine a billion-dollar loss would be noticeable.
It's brand product models that are being compared here. If you read the summary they mention Toyota Corolla and not all Toyota cars, for example. Now you could pit the Samsung Galaxy vs the Apple iPhone and that would be a reasonable comparison.
It also depends on what the goal of the metric is. What is the goal of the comparison? Anyhow who knows basic stats or deals with data regularly understands that you can arbitrarily create all sorts of categories. But do those categories get at something meaningful? By choosing the wrong categories, you can also end up causing all sorts of statistical ghosts, making it look like trends are the opposite of what they "really" are (in terms of the most practical interpretations) or other weird stuff.
Toyota has for many years had the best selling car in America, the Toyota Camry. Would you argue that Ford has the best selling car because it has sold more cars overall than the Camry? Again, apples and oranges comparison.
Well, again, we need to consider the purpose of the metric. Do we care most about proving what single "product" is the most popular (even if the boundaries around that "product" may be arbitrarily defined by a company), or are we trying to measure which company's product lines in general are the most popular?
I think what this thread is about is that people are trying to point out that phones are the sort of thing that the average person has one of at a time. (Or, they may have a business phone and a personal phone, but they usually only tend to choose their personal one.)
And therefore it's not like they are going to go out and buy 3 or 4 different Nokia or Samsung model phones for use at the same time (or an iPhone AND an Android phone or whatever). They make a choice to buy ONE phone. For some people, they may specifically desire the iPhone models, and they want that SPECIFIC phone over others. For other people, the choice is more broad -- do I want Apple or do I want Android? Or do I want Apple vs. Nokia vs. Samsung. Again, most people are going to end up choosing one product here at a time.
And that means in terms of "popularity" it may or may not be meaningful to compare only models of phones. Perhaps more people are making a choice more like "Apple vs. Android" first, and then once they've decided Android, they narrow it down further. In that case, if the total number of Android phones is greater (regardless of who makes them), there's a case to be made that Android is "more popular."
Most people I know seem to have relatively little brand loyalty these days. They'll happily switch to another Android company as long as the interface is somewhat similar (whereas switching to an iPhone is a lot more work). So the big categorical divide may not be around individual products but elsewhere... and that's why you may need to think about what it means to look at "popularity."
Maybe if you had read the Constitution you wouldn't be spouting such crap. The power starts in the Preamble:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
As noted repeatedly by the Supreme Court, the preamble of the Constitution does NOT grant any powers which are not explicitly already mentioned elsewhere in the Constitution. See, for example, Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905): " Although that Preamble indicates the general purposes for which the people ordained and established the Constitution, it has never been regarded as the source of any substantive power conferred on the Government of the United States or on any of its Departments."
In other words, Congress has been granted the power to pass legislation of any kind, which includes regulating things.
False. And there's nothing in Section 1 which implies that. Instead, Section 8 clearly enumerates the exact powers granted to Congress, while the 10th Amendment makes clear (which the Founders already intended, even without the Bill of Rights) that all others not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution are granted to the states or to the people.
Again, Congress passes legislation and the President approves or vetoes it. This includes regulating things.
I don't see any mention of a plenary power to "regulate" anything, especially not in Section 7, which is just about legislative process. What are you talking about??
Article 1, Section 8:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
The general welfare. In other words, the power to use taxes to inform people of the crap their ingesting or smoking to let them make an informed decision. It's also called regulation.
Uh, again, please note that this clause was significantly more restricted in interpretation before 1937 or so. It was generally accepted only as a power to tax, and there was great debate in the 1800s over whether it allowed taxation beyond the enumerated powers or only directly in relation to the enumerated powers. Eventually, it was interpreted more broadly, but still ONLY as an ability to TAX for "general welfare." Hence, for example, in the early 1900s alcohol couldn't be regulated or prohibited generally without a Constitutional amendment. But the federal government nevertheless attempted to tax it in various ways, e.g., the Harrison Act as a proxy for more general regulation. Anyhow, the "general welfare" clause here only relates to taxation (and has always been interpreted as such), not a broad power to regulate generally.
The last sentence of Section 8:
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the go
And this is what we get when somebody tries to use a word processor for complex document layout. This is what's behind all the bloat in Word: people using the wrong tool for the job.
I know people do it all the time, but that doesn't mean it ever made sense. Typesetting and layout should be mostly independent of content creation. When you try to combine the two dynamically, this kind of crap is just bound to happen.
You want to do layout and actual decent typography? Use a tool designed for it. InDesign works. LaTeX is good.
Or heck, learn how to use styles and proper global formatting settings in Word, rather than direct formatting hacks everywhere... And suddenly a lot of this crap won't happen.
(P.S. I hate Word with a passion and rarely use it except when forced to. And Word is buggy. But if this stuff happens too often, it's likely also because you're trying to do things like you're still using a typewriter instead of the right features or even the right software application.)
It's too expensive, too crowded, and I don't want to watch 15 minutes of product endorsements followed by 20 minutes of spoilers for upcoming films before they get around to showing the feature.
Agreed. I have no problem with them showing ads and trailers, but they should be legally obligated to provide the actual starting time of the feature film as well -- so if I don't want to see that stuff, I can come 25 minutes "late" or whatever.
It wasn't bad when it used to just be 2 or 3 trailers and some little intro video saying, "And now for our feature presentation..." But it's really out of hand. Imagine if you went to an opera and the actor from next season came out beforehand and performed a 20-second clip from an aria from a different show.... followed by 10 more ridiculous "previews." Or if you went to the theatre and some guy came out and did a "To be or not to be" soliloquy before Romeo and Juliet started, just to get you set for "the coming attractions." Or maybe you go to a baseball game and before the Star-Spangled Banner, a dozen football players come out into the middle of the baseball field and run a play -- just so you can get ready to see what's "Coming this fall...."
It would all be silly. But they expect people to put up with 20+ minutes of that interspersed with commercials? There's a reason I got rid of cable TV too. Movie theaters are eventually going to realize the ad revenue is no longer going to support them either if they have no actual customers.
No , the link says the Netherlands uses ounces (I.e. "ons" in Dutch) instead of the proper metric term of hectogram. The term "pond" (pound) is still around for half a kilo too in casual contexts, which approximates the size of the historical pound. The point is that even when the sizes of metric units have been adopted, people frequently keep using the old terms, which obscures the "simple" conversions that are the whole point of metric.
Once at night on German TV they had news from 30 years ago. Amazing how nothing has really changed. The names have, but it was basically identical to what is going on now.
From that moment on, I decided not to watch news anymore. Just not worth my time.
The "news" is really just entertainment. It is packaged and sold as entertainment (which means it often is really just selling advertisements).
Typical American news broadcast -- teaser all evening, "This common household item could KILL you! News at 11!" So you watch a bunch of commercials waiting for the news to start... finally... "Our top story is a new expose of X... but first, some breaking news...." More delaying tactics, more hints of fear, more commercials... finally about 15 minutes in you get to the piece on X, which of course isn't as horrifying as expected. Oh, and you get teasers for sports and weather throughout, but they aren't put on until the very end, because they know that few viewers would bother to watch the rest of the news (and the ADS!) unless they were waiting around for what most viewers actually care about... sports and weather.
The news is a combination of entertainment, scare tactics, and delaying tactics to get you to watch ads. And the vast majority of it is ephemera that is either (1) on-going stories that change little day-to-day, so you don't need a daily update, let alone an hourly one on CNN or whatever, or (2) random crap that no one will care about two days from now.
As you say, go look at a newspaper from a few decades ago and see what percentage of it was actually worthwhile to care about enough to read it for the long-term.
I stopped watching the news/reading the newspaper almost 20 years ago, and I haven't missed it a bit. What I do watch or read, I recognize it mostly for entertainment, not "being informed." Instead, I spend about 3 minutes/day checking the big headlines online (just to be sure I don't miss something that everyone will be talking about), and instead spend time reading/researching topics that interest me in-depth.
That's really the biggest problem with the news -- it makes us dumb. (Seriously, there was a book that came out maybe 15 years ago called How the News Makes Us Dumb, and it was quite insightful.) It turns every issue and event into a 30-second segment or a 3-paragraph story, which is bound to lead to oversimplifications and ignore nuance. In the long-term, that actually conditions us not to think too deeply about anything... everything in the world is just a 30-second blurb, and then we move on.
What bothers me the most are people who think watching the news daily "keeps them informed." No -- if you actually want to be informed, take those 30 minutes per day and read a couple in-depth articles about a current topic that show some nuance. At least then you'll be "informed" about SOMETHING, rather than drowning in a morass of shallow ephemera.
You can't compare the average hours per user for cable and netflix. They aren't equal... At best you can compare the cost per person. The number of hours is highly variable, and not to mention it doesn't change the monthly cost anyways...
I agree that there are a lot of issues with this comparison. BUT I think there is at least some validity to this approach, Anecdotally, the people I know who still have cable AND have Netflix tend to still watch a lot more cable TV than streaming Netflix. There's something different about the user experience of cable TV that causes people to "channel surf" more and hooks you in... even if the programming is less desirable than choosing something specific you want to watch on Netflix. I've seen lots of other people do this, and I did too until I "cut the cord" some years ago. (I also stopped watching as much TV in general and had more "directed" viewing for things I actually wanted to watch, rather than just "channel surfing" and getting hooked watching something mindless.)
Anyhow, for those reasons I don't think a per-user cost is entirely a good metric either. People may actually use these services differently, which affects how many hours on average they use them.
It also does not count for the time you are spending watching ads.
That's true. The vast majority of people don't really want to pay for commercials. Cable TV has now on average gone above the 25% mark for amount of ads per unit time (more than 15 minutes per hour), which would increase the effective "cost" of cable programming by 33% to around 82 cents/hour.
For some cable channels, the percentage of ads has grown to over 1/3 of all programming time, making the cost of cable programming 50% more than the 61 cents quoted (around 93 cents/hour).
These are pretty significant differences when you're comparing to Netflix. And if you're paying nearly $1/hour for content on some cable channels (not counting commercials), you quickly begin to realize that cable may not be a good deal at all. For example, there are thousands and thousands of movie titles you could rent instantly on Amazon for $2.99 or so. For a 2-hour+ movie, you're basically not paying much more than you might be for your cable content... except a streaming movie from Amazon (or wherever) is ad-free and delivered to you exactly when you want it.
Also keep in mind the assumptions here, which was that the average cable subscriber watches over 5 hours of TV per day. I don't have cable TV, but even if I did, there's no way I'd ever watch that much TV. I have better things to do with my life (like waste time making comments on Slashdot?). If you only watch an hour or two of TV per day, the cost of cable is significantly higher and you'd probably get a better deal by cancelling cable and paying for streaming content (or physical media, if you prefer) as needed.
That is, of course, unless you NEED to watch whatever new episode of whatever IMMEDIATELY when it comes out and that content is only on cable. But I think people need to ask themselves how much they're actually paying in a premium to get that one or two hours of new content per week.
The real reason for extremely high top salaries is to save money on mid level manager salaries and promote 'no holds barred' competitiveness. Mid level managers see the only path to "good" pay as being to win in a cut-throat game of mid-manager shuffle. The result is that only the most vicious rise to the top and reap the big rewards, instead of equitable sharing.
This is part of the story, but I think we need to take the reasoning a step further and realize that those who get promoted from mid-level management are those who show the most extreme positive results. The American business model these days no longer just demands "steady income" -- it demands "constant growth," preferably at as fast a rate as possible.
This attitude implicitly encourages more extreme and more risky decisions to get ahead. The results are guaranteed to be more volatile, with some reaping huge returns and others bombing miserably -- that's all just assuming luck and chance.
But we promote those people who took the greatest risks, often regardless of whether the results were due to a savvy decision at the right moment or were just a risky gamble that paid off. Which means that those who get to the CEO seat are disproportionately composed of people who will take bigger gambles. That's just the nature of American corporate culture.
More importantly, it means that those who come into a CEO position with the seemingly "best" previous record are often those who were luckiest. They not only "beat the market," but they frequently took excessive risks beyond what perhaps could be rationally justified. But even in a randomized group of middle-management decisions, there will be a few who "win big" just by chance.
And that may be one explanation for this study's results. The CEOs with the highest pay probably had the "best" previous record in terms of financial returns. But in the erratic world of business and economics, there's too many random factors that can contribute to success, so a large number of people with the best returns got them mostly just by being more risky and irrational than other people (rather than talent or rational decision-making).
When you put that group of CEOs in a new position, you're bound to see more "regression to the mean," because those with previous good records are probably going to generate the most volatile results. Whereas the "B-level" CEOs who didn't have such extreme returns previously might depend less on risk and luck and therefore are more likely to have "steady" positive results. (I believe I've seen a similar study that basically showed this somehow -- CEOs with the highest performance in a previous position were more likely to regress to the mean or actually make a company worse.)
It's kind of like always picking the best performing stock on a given day to invest in the next day -- sometimes it works well, but almost as often the highest gaining stocks are the most volatile ones and you're likely to lose almost as much as you gain. Whereas if you look for stocks with a longer track record of positive (though more moderate) performance, you might be somewhat more likely to see continued growth. CEO fluctuations in "value" aren't perhaps as volatile as stocks, but they -- like stocks -- have to perform in an ever-changing economic environment with a lot of randomness. A large number of ones who seem to be short-term "outliers" are therefore likely to become so by chance and aren't necessarily good long-term bets.
I always wondered how everyone understood measurements given by the UK show Top Gear when they talk about miles, miles per hour and horsepower. Not to mention pints.
Well, basically it's a complete myth that everywhere but the U.S. converted to metric in everyday life. The UK has "officially" been using metric for 50 years, but imperial units are EVERYWHERE in common circumstances if you bother to look for them. (For a full explanation, you might look at this report from the UK Metric Association which seeks to promote literacy in metric.
There are obvious situations from everyday life where UK folks still use imperial units -- most prefer "stone" (or "pounds/ounces" for babies) for human weight, for example. But other units crop up all the time. Celsius is standard for weather forecasts, except when it gets really hot, in which case broadcasters love to point out it might get to "100 degrees!" Watts are the SI unit, but you get engines measured in HP and heating systems measured in BTUs. Clothing sizes are still commonly in inches. Road signs still commonly give distances in miles (or yards, for shorter distances and feet and inches for height restrictions). Paper is mostly metric, but photos are still standard 4"x6". Refrigerators are often still sold with volume given in cu. ft. House/apartment sizes are often still described by agents in sq. ft. Small grocers often still advertise in imperial units of weight or volume.
Etc., etc. There are also plenty of cases where more obscure units are still used in various skilled trades.
Most countries that claim to be "fully metric" have similar issues. This list is a bit old, but it shows how old non-metric units continue to be used in random places throughout Europe, even in countries that "converted" more than a century ago.
After reading a lot about this, my conclusion was that the most successful countries that really made a break with older measures did so by simply redefining their older units. Hence, the French still order a "pound loaf" of bread, but it's actually 500 grams -- they simply redefined the livre (pound) in the 1800s to be exactly half a kilo. Given the way that all the old imperial units have now been so precisely defined, it's no longer really feasible to do that anymore.
So most countries are stuck with weird hybrids, where officially everyone is supposed to use metric, but you get old units cropping up in all sorts of everyday places where they are useful.
I'm a big fan of the metric system and wish that everyone would adopt a standard measurement system -- but these residual units in most countries go to show how little utility the supposed "simplicity" of the metric system actually has for everyday life. People have a sense of how big a "X cu. ft." refrigerator is, and they can use it to compare when they buy a new one. The average person never really cares about the conversion of that unit to anything else -- they don't care that there are 1728 cu. in. in a cu. ft. and they'll basically never need to know that or do such a conversion. They just want to know how big their refrigerator is and how it compares to the new one they might buy. The units might as well be "7.2 standard refrigerator units" for all people care... and that's why these old units stick around. Very few circumstances demand conversion of units for everyday people in everyday life, so the "easiness" of the metric system means nothing to them. If they want to buy pants, they know the number that fits them -- it doesn't matter is it is centimeters or inches or cubits or furlongs.
I know it's mostly not Netflix fault their movie selection is crap. But honestly I'd probably pay twice as much if I had a real selection of movies where I had a reasonably good chance that the movie I wanted to see was included.
Uh, your wish is already granted by Netflix -- pay "twice as much" and subscribe to their DVD plan and get access to roughly 100,000 titles.
I know that's not the answer you want, but if you're willing to wait just a couple days rather than demanding instant gratification when you decide you "need to watch movie X right now!" you might find there are options available. (Admittedly, if you just want the most popular and recent titles unavailable on Netflix streaming, there are better alternatives... if you want to rent old Soviet films or obscure silent flicks, there aren't that many alternatives.)
But I know DVDs and mail are so "old school" these days. Perhaps hipsters will bring them back in a couple years.
Incidentally, Bitcoin probably can't be considered legal tender - it would violate the Constitution, which allows only Congress to print money and denies states the right to have their own currency. It does fall into a category not thought of by the founding fathers, though, which is non-printed money (so Bitcoin basically is a loophole).
There's always a lot of confusion when the term "legal tender" comes up. "Legal tender" is NOT the same as "valid money" or "valid currency" or whatever. "Legal tender" in the U.S. means precisely one thing -- it must be accepted for all debts, public or private.
And what that means is -- if you incur debt to someone, they must accept "legal tender" to repay that debt. If you don't pay and they sue you, the court can order payment -- and they must accept dollars.
Things "legal tender" is NOT: (1) "Legal tender" is NOT necessarily the only possible thing you can use to pay for something. A purchase contract can specify that you give me lunch in exchange for two goats. That doesn't make goats "money" or "legal tender." (2) "Legal tender" does NOT have to be accepted as payment for a debt not yet incurred, which means no business has to accept legal tender for a purchase for example. A business in the U.S. can legally say it will only take credit, no cash please. Or they can say "we only accept goats for purchases."
There are plenty of examples in normal life of "substitute currencies" or "substitute money" created and perfectly legal. If you go to a casino and they give you a stack of chips that are required to be used for betting or for paying for services within the casino, they are creating a de facto "in-house currency" that is perfectly legal. If you go to a county fair, and they insist you pay for rides and food or whatever in "tickets" rather than cash, they have also created "de facto money" to be used at that event. It serves as a standard medium of exchange for transactions.
States can also create money in a "workaround" by issuing currency through banks, and many states did that for the first 75 years or so of the U.S. Any private entity can do so.
Anyhow, here's the problem with all alternative currencies in the U.S. -- you have to pay the IRS in dollars. That effectively makes any alternative currency a pain to use except in limited short-term circumstances (like casino betting or fair tickets). Why? Because all alternative currencies -- whether coins or paper or goats -- are ultimately taxable property. And if you actually use an alternative currency that "catches on" and is used widely, you'll have to report any profits and pay taxes in dollars to the IRS.
So if you accept only goats as payment, you'll need to assess the value of those goats. Once you and all the towns in your area start using goats, they are bound to fluctuate in value, so you need to start keeping track of capital gains (in dollars!) that occur between transactions and pay taxes to the IRS. If you're printing your own money, you can get around this problem by tying the value to the U.S. dollar (thus ensuring no changes in value for taxable purposes), but then there's little justification for your alternative currency.... except in circumscribed venues for convenience. (The fair tickets simplify things -- all the stands and ride operators don't have to have a lot of cash on hand to make change, people don't waste time making change for each small transaction, etc.)
So, in sum -- yes, it's true that Bitcoin probably can't be "legal tender" under the Constitution (which only means stuff like you can't force your bank to accept Bitcoin for your mortgage payments). It may in fact be used as "money" or "currency" in other circumstances, but it probably doesn't fit the vague legal definition of "money" in "money laundering" laws (which tends to be focused on standard currencies).
I think part of this trend has to do with the desire to eventually turn a "side-gig" into a job that can offer full financial support, and the Internet has made it possible for a lot of people to at least make a fair shot at doing that.
I really don't think "the Internet" has a lot to do with this, nor do I think it's a "trend." Everybody acts like entrepreneurship was invented in the past couple decades. But how do you think people "got ahead" in previous centuries? How do you think we had a "rise of the middle class" that moved us out of the dark ages of feudalism, then led the charge for the Industrial Revolution, etc.?
A lot of those people were folks with ideas about what they'd prefer to do, and they kept working at a day job to make money to fund what might start as a "hobby" but then lead to a new business or a new invention or whatever. By the 20th century, big business had grown to the point that more people were employed in large corporations, so this idea of "hobbies" or "side jobs" leading to lead to bettering your life shifted instead to "night school" and credentialing/formal study on the side to convince an employer that you're qualified for something better.
The only thing the internet has done is "disrupt" some large corporations and their control in certain sectors, which perhaps makes it a little more likely for an individual to take the "hobby" route instead of the "night school" route again. But let's not kid ourselves -- the number of such people who eventually convert some online hobby to dayjob may be larger than similar entrepreneurs of the past couple generations, but as a percentage of people who dream of doing so... it's vanishingly small.
Let me guess, majored in Medevil History?
Umm, "Med-evil History"? Is that where you learn about blood-letting, curses and their effects on the body, and misuses for leeches?
Everybody needs a hobby, is what this article boils down to. For the people in question, part time job is hobby.
Actually, it's about more than "hobbies." Basically, TFA is about conflating a bunch of things that used to have different terms and corralling them under a new fancy appellation, i.e., "side hustle," which sounds like a really stupid dance people do at weddings.
A few things that are conflated here and had perfectly good terms before:
(1) "Hobbies" -- these are things that basically make you no money. Nominally, they might bring in a little income, but it's so small you don't really pay attention to it at all. You're more interested in the activity than the income. You might only sell some of your work to try to make the expenses "balance out" a little, not really to make a profit.
(2) "Dream jobs" -- these are things that people would like to do with their lives, but they can't "make a living" at it. So they have what used to be called a "day job," and then they work as a musician some evenings or on the weekends. It's more than a "hobby," because they actually would prefer a job as a musician, but the income isn't enough to make it work.
(3) "Second jobs" -- these are what poor people do to survive (i.e., put food on the table and make rent), and what middle-class people do to afford some desirable luxury or send their kids to a nicer private school. (The latter sometimes use the word "side job" too, avoiding the "electric slide" and the "side hustle.") Often they are menial part-time gigs, but they are distinct from the above categories because people generally would prefer NOT to do them.
The author of TFA seems to confuse all of these categories, which used to be straightforward in previous generations. Moreover, he adds his extra "first world problems" twist to his examples:
Maybe that's because many people assume the side hustle is just financially oriented, simply another adaptive response to recession-era economics. Google "side hustle" and you will find thousands of stories, but they are all focused on the how. As in, Dear internet, how can I make another $200 a month to cover my Verizon bill?
If you are struggling financially because of your Verizon bill, maybe your financial priorities are a little screwed up.
Last year, writing for the internet earned me a grand total of $415 before taxes, or about the price of two hotel nights on the outskirts of Manhattan or San Francisco. To say I'm not in it for the money would be understatement. Not because I'm above such earthly considerations. There's just very little money in it to be for.
The side hustle offers something worth much more than money: A hedge against feeling stuck and dull and cheated by life. In fact, given all the hours I've devoted to it, there's no question in my mind that I've lost more than I've made, if only in terms of my Starbucks spend.
If your metric for your side job is that you're spending more money than you're making at Starbucks, you don't have a "side job" or even a "side hustle." You have a hobby. And you have enough disposable income to not give a crap that you're spending that much money on coffee. Good job! Now stop meditating on your first-world problems and trying to conflate them with things real people do to survive or to get things that will really make their lives better.
If your writing hobby gives your life meaning, by all means, keep doing it. But please stop acting like most other people who have to work a second job on the side might also just throw away all their proceeds at Starbucks. Or... well, is that really what a "millennial" budget looks like these days? $200/month Verizon bill, $100/month coffee bill... but can't make rent or afford a car so you still live with your parents?
I really don't want to give into Millennial stereotypes (which I think are often inaccurate), but TFA is just BEGGING for it.
Trump can't even run a business.
I think that is political BS. IF I understand things correctly each project is usually a different corporation. Different investors for different projects, one failed project won't impact other projects, a failure doesn't impact anyone personally, etc. Basically look up all the reasons you want an S-Corp or LLC rather than a sole proprietorship for your own business. I think his bankruptcies are several of these projects failing. If only several projects failed out of dozens he's doing pretty well.
All of that said, if Trump had merely cashed out his portion of his father's inheritance in the mid-1970s and invested it in index funds, he'd have more money today.
This isn't surprising as most CEOs (and even most fund managers) have trouble beating the market consistently. But still -- Trump's amount of business success is hardly noteworthy, given the assets and company already put in place that he inherited. He could have had more money if he just sat back and did nothing for the past 40 years.
Maybe I'm also making the incorrect assumptions about the inlet temperature (the paper doesn't make it clear)
The paper gives detailed tables showing the inlet temp, the chamber temp, and the outlet temp for every trial. Inlet temp varied between 51 and 73 C for the trials, though those that used a lower inlet temp seemed less effective for extending shelf life.
Is it really something new or noteworthy?
I am not sure about the US but here in Europe ESL milk (PDF) is a pretty standard thing: it has a shelf life of 3-4 weeks and it is of course chemical-free.
I put a much longer explanation in a post above based on the actual scientific study. But from reading your ESL link, it seems there are a couple differences: the ESL process seems to be a variant on the UHT process with slightly lower temperature (but still way above normal pasteurization). Your link says that additional losses in nutrients and quality are minimal, but they do exist.
This process is essentially an "add-on" to a normal pasteurization process which happens for a fraction of a second around normal pasteurization temperatures (ca. 70-80 C). Since the temperature increase is very small, it doesn't require additional heat energy from outside the pasteurization system and likely would suffer even less quality/nutrient loss compared to the ESL process.
At least that's what I got from reading the actual study.
38.6C, the temp it comes out of the cow.
Is it really that god damn difficult for you high UID monkeys to use a bit of simple logic? Do you really need literally everything spoon-fed to you?
Are you seriously going to chastise someone when you didn't even bother to try to figure out what the hell is going on yourself? It's pretty obvious from TFS (which is admittedly poorly written, based on a poorly written TFA, based almost directly on a completely ignorant university press release linked in TFS) that the milk is still pasteurized and this is an ADDITIONAL step. So the "temperature" we're raising by "10 degrees" is completely confusing in all of these sources.
SLASHDOT EDITORS: STOP PUTTING UP CRAP ARTICLES WITHOUT A LINK TO THE ORIGINAL SCIENTIFIC SOURCE!!!
This is the kind of stupid ignorant discussions we get without the actual scientific source, which can be found here.
Now everyone go read actually what this study did. Most stuff in TFS is confused if not downright wrong. Let me explain the basics of this process, based on the actual scientific study:
(1) Pasteurization is good, but it only results in limited shelf life. Other techniques used for increasing shelf life (ultra-high temp or UHT pasteurization, low-temperature long time or LTLT pasteurization) produce undesirable effects on flavor and/or nutrients, etc.
(2) This process is what the authors describe as "low temperature, short time (LTST) amendment for pasteurization" which could be added after normal pasteurization to increase shelf life dramatically without some of the negative effects described above.
(3) The statement from TFS "The technology they've developed involves increasing the temperature of milk by just 10 degrees for less than a second, which is well below the 70-degree Celsius threshold needed for pasteurization" is complete BS. I don't know what it's supposed to mean. If you go to the actual scientific study, you'll find the temperatures in the chamber for the 5 trials varied between 64.8 C and 83.8 C. In general, chamber temperatures in the trials below 70 C seemed to be much less effective at increasing shelf life and weren't recommended. So TFS -- and the university press it's based on -- are completely wrong.
(4) What is the process really? Well, just after pasteurization (which occurs at or above 72.7C), the milk is reheated in a special chamber and dispersed in droplets. The reheating step only raises the temperature of the milk by 1 to 10C over what it was before (in the words of the authors "at or below pasteurization temperatures" of less than or equal to 72.7C) for 0.02 seconds. As I noted above, the actual temperature achieved in the chamber seems important (definitely above 70 C seems desirable), with higher temperatures being more effective at increasing shelf life.
(5) The process is potentially an improvement over other proposals to increase shelf-life for a number of reasons:
-- No significant loss in nutrients compared with standard pasteurization.
-- No significant taste difference or perceived quality difference among tasters with this additional step.
-- The minimal heat energy required for this step could be incorporated into a standard pasteurization process setting to siphon off heat energy already present from the pasteurization tube, so this wouldn't necessarily require additional energy (and is thus very efficient).
OK? That's what's actually going on here. Now that we know what the original science is actually about, please continue your random Slashdot insults and debates.... perhaps slightly more informed.
The problem with the "autopilot" is it essentially allows the AI to do all of the driving, meaning the human invariably stops paying attention
Invariably? Really?
Actually, yes -- pretty much. Or rather, I wouldn't say "stops paying attention" -- more like "reduces attention to driving and redirects significant attention toward secondary tasks." There are a number of studies out there which show this already happens even with basic cruise control and has been measured in a lot of different ways (attention to other tasks, increased reaction time, etc.). Now introduce a system where even less attention is required, and the vast majority of people will significantly reduce their attention.
I know the Tesla and AI defenders out there don't want this to be true, but it is. The only safe AI "autopilot" for the general public is going to be one that has complete control and NEVER requires a human to take over... And we're a LONG way from that.
How does an ISP $2 dollar charge make a news item worth of slashdot? Heck most of us have been fighting miscellaneous carrier fees for years.. Call Verizon and complain...
Nothing to see here.
First off, it's $2.80/month + taxes and fees, so probably at least $40/year or so. A single year of this fee would thus be equal to the cost of a cheap router, probably less at the manufacturer's cost Verizon probably pays for them.
And the issue -- at least from my perspective -- is that they apparently are charging general fees to people for "maintenance" just because they have old equipment, rather than simply... well, charging for maintenance calls when necessary to deal with support. If they want to tell you: "You own old equipment which we no longer support fully -- any future troubleshooting calls may incur an extra X dollar fee," that seems perfectly reasonable. Or if they are really upgrading for their own convenience, why not offer a FREE equipment upgrade to customers? Routers aren't that expensive, considering the price most people pay for cable and internet per month. (One month of fees for most people likely exceeds their cost for a router.)
Instead, Verizon is punishing its most loyal customers who have been around long enough for their equipment to become out-of-date by pushing nonsense fees. Are these fees a lot compared to most random cable fees? No -- but the whole thing is in fact a bit ridiculous.