Considering that Amazon already allows Prime users to stream content to iOS devices, clearly the in-app purchases aren't a limiting factor. Besides, they can just get around these fees entirely, if they so choose, by forcing users to purchase their subscriptions over the web instead of using in-app purchases. Some content providers allow users to use in-app purchases, but increase the prices to make up for the 30% fee.
Amazon is free to produce their own app for Chromecast or Apple TV. This is probably more an issue where they want to push people into buying their own devices instead of Apple or Android devices.
Furthermore, Amazon does not have a fundamental right to refuse to sell anything it wants. Certain refusals similar to this one are outlawed (see here). According to the FTC's website there, if a company is refusing to provide a product in a strategy to acquire or maintain a monopoly, then it's illegal. I don't know whether this applies in this case (IANAL), but it certainly is a practice that harms consumers, and therefore should be outlawed.
Algae fuel is currently in production at a few companies. The cost isn't yet low enough for widespread production, but neither is it outlandish. Most of the cost barrier right now can be fixed through better economies of scale.
That's a good question. ChromeOS is a heck of a lot more convenient if all you want to do is use web apps (the nearly instant boot time is a big plus: Android devices can take more than a minute for a simple boot, and 45+ minutes for an OS update), but Android offers a much broader variety of functionality. Because of this, I suspect many people will continue to go for ChromeOS devices. I suspect this one is using Android primarily because it doubles as a tablet, and ChromeOS really isn't designed for that.
Prices are set by the overall money supply*. A UBI would have net zero impact on the overall money supply, and so wouldn't have much of an impact on prices. Some prices would change, due to the fact that different people would have the money with a UBI than without. But the overall impact would be pretty minimal.
* With some caveats related monetary velocity, but those aren't really relevant to the point at hand: inflation is actively managed by the Fed, and a UBI won't change that.
No, they don't do it just for the hell of it. They do it because they can, and because they're shitty people.
Many of the more successful companies (such as Google) go out of their way to make sure their employees' needs are taken care of, and that they have a decent work environment. There's a reason why this is a good strategy: happy, mentally healthy employees are more productive, and less likely to leave for another company (it takes time and money to train new employees).
And if you think that people can just walk away right now, clearly you think people can just stop eating and still be okay.
As for people not going to work anyway, a UBI won't ever be big enough for people to live well.
Well, if you want to get technical the best way to do public policy is to employ an experimental approach that compares outcomes to find the best solutions. I'd be perfectly fine with the implementation of a UBI following this kind of experimental approach. But I have a hard time seeing how it would be anything but massively beneficial.
For one, increasing the minimum wage doesn't increase everybody's wages, and overall inflation is fixed by Federal Reserve policy. So no, you won't have a situation where prices rise to compensate for the wage increase. Some prices will go up. Others will go down. Overall there will be very little average change.
Second, since the 1970's, hourly wages have been falling compared to productivity, and are now around half of what we would have expected given the productivity of the US economy. There has been massive redistribution of wealth away from workers and towards the rich. That needs to be reversed. Also, given that the period from about 1950-1980 had higher economic growth than any period since, there's good reason to believe that redistributing the income back to where it was back then (when you could support a family on a full-time minimum wage job) would help rather than hurt the overall economy.
Also, illegal immigration makes US citizens richer. It's high time we stopped abusing them for helping us.
And there is no job shortage? What rock have you been living under?
Getting unconditional basic income would be a huge boon for workers. If leaving work becomes a viable option for nearly everybody, then employers will no longer be able to abuse their employees. They'll actually have to offer decent working conditions, or the workers will just walk away. This should end bullshit practices like firing people for not working on holidays, or getting pregnant, or complaining about sexual harassment.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but a UBI would dramatically improve the employment marketplace for employees.
I doubt it. YouTube implemented skippable ads because they found that they work better (probably because they piss people off less). I also doubt that a significant fraction of YouTube users make use of the Chrome app.
Not necessarily just about care. Many people can get pretty bad anxiety about math due to the way they were taught. Especially if they just fall behind a little bit at one point, because math tends to build on previous things, it can become really difficult to catch up. All they need is one bad class and they may never make up for that deficit, with the way education in the US is currently structured.
Sort of. Many specific math classes aren't necessary, but most advanced programming has very close similarities to math. For example, graphs are used extensively in a wide variety of more involved coding, and graph manipulations are pretty mathematical. The thinking processes underlying most other algorithms are extremely closely-related to the thinking processes required for math.
Also, if you're going to be doing any sort of mathematical calculation using code, there's no way you're going to be capable of properly debugging the code if you don't understand the math.
I guess I like that she's saying that you can code even if math scares you, but all this says to me is that she had crap math teachers. If you can do a decent job of coding, you can learn math. It's just a question of finding the right learning methods.
Meh. I'm sure they use some kind of machine learning algorithm, and especially given the relatively small number of examples they have available to train such an algorithm, it's probably not terribly accurate so that they only let through the people whose queries are matched very strongly. After all, for privacy (and practicality) reasons they can't very well have a person actually look at the queries.
tl;dr: The algorithm probably misses lots of people who Google would otherwise consider good candidates.
Probably pretty similar. The problem is the proliferation of small, low-quality studies, and using a low bar for claiming statistical significance (usually 2-sigma, or 95% confidence).
I remember back when I was a grad student studying physics ~10 years ago, it seemed that the norm was such low-quality studies. Which makes sense, considering that low-quality studies are far faster and cheaper. For the most part, such studies were either ignored or considered no more than tantalizing hints. But yes, the hard sciences like physics also suffer from a problem of some low-quality studies sometimes becoming accepted, and much later turning out to be false.
The more sensational or sexy the result, the more likely it is to be completely false.
To add: there is a large CO2 impact for all animal production, and cattle is worse than poultry. So there is a significant GHG impact, but it's not from burps (or farts).
Methane may be a powerful greenhouse gas, but it doesn't last very long in the atmosphere. Within 10 years most of the methane emitted is gone (typically due to chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere). Carbon dioxide emissions, on the other hand, elevate atmospheric CO2 concentrations for hundreds of years.
So reduce the methane emissions permanently and you reduce the total greenhouse gas levels by a tiny amount: in 30 years, the effect will be the same as it will be in 5-10 years. Reduce CO2 emissions permanently, on the other hand, and the impact is cumulative: in 30 years the impact of the reduction will still be growing. In the long run, CO2 always wins out over methane as a greenhouse gas. The only way around this would be if there was a sudden large increase in methane emissions that triggered a positive feedback loop (this may occur from methane outgassing as the permafrost thaws in Siberia, but it won't occur due to cattle).
The "meridian points" are imaginary locations on the body that have literally zero basis in biology. There is no conceivable way that they'll have a statistically significant impact on any therapy compared to biologically-similar points elsewhere.
Passing electrical currents through living tissue has real biological effects. Sticking needles in people at random locations around the body does not (aside from the possibility of infection and other complications).
Real therapies that use electricity are Electroconvulsive Therapy and Electric Muscle Stimulation. There's no need to puncture the skin. These quacks are just adding some risk of infection to what would otherwise be an almost perfectly safe therapy.
At the company I work for, smart phone use at work is actively encouraged. A large part of this is because some of what my company does is develop smart phone apps, so we're encouraged to use the devices in order to be more familiar with them.
I love the website, and think it's far better than Facebook (both in terms of the behavior of the company and the product itself). But all of my friends spend the majority of their social network time on Facebook. So Facebook it is....
One idea would be to have a tax on ISP services that is paid out to websites in proportion to how much people use them. Presumably hours of engagement would be a decent metric.
But then, how can you be sure you're measuring what you think you're measuring? If I open up 10 tabs on my browser, do I get recorded as being active on all ten websites despite only paying attention to one of them? This would be a very difficult problem to solve. You could simply go by the number of packets transmitted, as that is much easier to measure, but then that would weight even more heavily towards video (YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu would take up most of the Internet's money), and then what would you do about peer-to-peer services?
Advertising is only important because of the way we've structured our economy. Yes, we need advertising for things like most of the Internet to exist. But that's only because we don't have an alternative model to pay for services designed for public consumption.
Also, advertising really doesn't have as strong a check as you imagine here. If a company advertises a product and makes it really really cool, despite the fact that it's pretty crappy, then many people may still buy it because they buy into the hype. Some of the worst examples here are medical advertisements: medicine is notoriously difficult for the person taking it to know how it effects them. Lots and lots of drugs on the market really don't have all that much benefit (industry studies tend to overestimate benefits), or no more benefit than much cheaper drugs. But if people are convinced by an ad that the drug is that much better, then they may be able to get their doctor to pay for it (note: in this case the even worse travesty is the fact that pharmaceutical companies essentially bribe doctors to prescribe their medications).
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Considering that Amazon already allows Prime users to stream content to iOS devices, clearly the in-app purchases aren't a limiting factor. Besides, they can just get around these fees entirely, if they so choose, by forcing users to purchase their subscriptions over the web instead of using in-app purchases. Some content providers allow users to use in-app purchases, but increase the prices to make up for the 30% fee.
They do, however, have very large market share for online sales.
Amazon is free to produce their own app for Chromecast or Apple TV. This is probably more an issue where they want to push people into buying their own devices instead of Apple or Android devices.
Furthermore, Amazon does not have a fundamental right to refuse to sell anything it wants. Certain refusals similar to this one are outlawed (see here). According to the FTC's website there, if a company is refusing to provide a product in a strategy to acquire or maintain a monopoly, then it's illegal. I don't know whether this applies in this case (IANAL), but it certainly is a practice that harms consumers, and therefore should be outlawed.
Algae fuel is currently in production at a few companies. The cost isn't yet low enough for widespread production, but neither is it outlandish. Most of the cost barrier right now can be fixed through better economies of scale.
Take a look at the Sony Xperia Z3. It may be a tiny bit bigger than you're looking for (5.2" display), but has the other stuff.
That's a good question. ChromeOS is a heck of a lot more convenient if all you want to do is use web apps (the nearly instant boot time is a big plus: Android devices can take more than a minute for a simple boot, and 45+ minutes for an OS update), but Android offers a much broader variety of functionality. Because of this, I suspect many people will continue to go for ChromeOS devices. I suspect this one is using Android primarily because it doubles as a tablet, and ChromeOS really isn't designed for that.
Prices are set by the overall money supply*. A UBI would have net zero impact on the overall money supply, and so wouldn't have much of an impact on prices. Some prices would change, due to the fact that different people would have the money with a UBI than without. But the overall impact would be pretty minimal.
* With some caveats related monetary velocity, but those aren't really relevant to the point at hand: inflation is actively managed by the Fed, and a UBI won't change that.
No, they don't do it just for the hell of it. They do it because they can, and because they're shitty people.
Many of the more successful companies (such as Google) go out of their way to make sure their employees' needs are taken care of, and that they have a decent work environment. There's a reason why this is a good strategy: happy, mentally healthy employees are more productive, and less likely to leave for another company (it takes time and money to train new employees).
And if you think that people can just walk away right now, clearly you think people can just stop eating and still be okay.
As for people not going to work anyway, a UBI won't ever be big enough for people to live well.
Well, if you want to get technical the best way to do public policy is to employ an experimental approach that compares outcomes to find the best solutions. I'd be perfectly fine with the implementation of a UBI following this kind of experimental approach. But I have a hard time seeing how it would be anything but massively beneficial.
So much wrong.
For one, increasing the minimum wage doesn't increase everybody's wages, and overall inflation is fixed by Federal Reserve policy. So no, you won't have a situation where prices rise to compensate for the wage increase. Some prices will go up. Others will go down. Overall there will be very little average change.
Second, since the 1970's, hourly wages have been falling compared to productivity, and are now around half of what we would have expected given the productivity of the US economy. There has been massive redistribution of wealth away from workers and towards the rich. That needs to be reversed. Also, given that the period from about 1950-1980 had higher economic growth than any period since, there's good reason to believe that redistributing the income back to where it was back then (when you could support a family on a full-time minimum wage job) would help rather than hurt the overall economy.
Also, illegal immigration makes US citizens richer. It's high time we stopped abusing them for helping us.
And there is no job shortage? What rock have you been living under?
Getting unconditional basic income would be a huge boon for workers. If leaving work becomes a viable option for nearly everybody, then employers will no longer be able to abuse their employees. They'll actually have to offer decent working conditions, or the workers will just walk away. This should end bullshit practices like firing people for not working on holidays, or getting pregnant, or complaining about sexual harassment.
It wouldn't happen immediately, but a UBI would dramatically improve the employment marketplace for employees.
I doubt it. YouTube implemented skippable ads because they found that they work better (probably because they piss people off less). I also doubt that a significant fraction of YouTube users make use of the Chrome app.
Not necessarily just about care. Many people can get pretty bad anxiety about math due to the way they were taught. Especially if they just fall behind a little bit at one point, because math tends to build on previous things, it can become really difficult to catch up. All they need is one bad class and they may never make up for that deficit, with the way education in the US is currently structured.
Sort of. Many specific math classes aren't necessary, but most advanced programming has very close similarities to math. For example, graphs are used extensively in a wide variety of more involved coding, and graph manipulations are pretty mathematical. The thinking processes underlying most other algorithms are extremely closely-related to the thinking processes required for math.
Also, if you're going to be doing any sort of mathematical calculation using code, there's no way you're going to be capable of properly debugging the code if you don't understand the math.
I guess I like that she's saying that you can code even if math scares you, but all this says to me is that she had crap math teachers. If you can do a decent job of coding, you can learn math. It's just a question of finding the right learning methods.
Meh. I'm sure they use some kind of machine learning algorithm, and especially given the relatively small number of examples they have available to train such an algorithm, it's probably not terribly accurate so that they only let through the people whose queries are matched very strongly. After all, for privacy (and practicality) reasons they can't very well have a person actually look at the queries.
tl;dr: The algorithm probably misses lots of people who Google would otherwise consider good candidates.
Probably pretty similar. The problem is the proliferation of small, low-quality studies, and using a low bar for claiming statistical significance (usually 2-sigma, or 95% confidence).
I remember back when I was a grad student studying physics ~10 years ago, it seemed that the norm was such low-quality studies. Which makes sense, considering that low-quality studies are far faster and cheaper. For the most part, such studies were either ignored or considered no more than tantalizing hints. But yes, the hard sciences like physics also suffer from a problem of some low-quality studies sometimes becoming accepted, and much later turning out to be false.
The more sensational or sexy the result, the more likely it is to be completely false.
To add: there is a large CO2 impact for all animal production, and cattle is worse than poultry. So there is a significant GHG impact, but it's not from burps (or farts).
Methane may be a powerful greenhouse gas, but it doesn't last very long in the atmosphere. Within 10 years most of the methane emitted is gone (typically due to chemical reactions in the upper atmosphere). Carbon dioxide emissions, on the other hand, elevate atmospheric CO2 concentrations for hundreds of years.
So reduce the methane emissions permanently and you reduce the total greenhouse gas levels by a tiny amount: in 30 years, the effect will be the same as it will be in 5-10 years. Reduce CO2 emissions permanently, on the other hand, and the impact is cumulative: in 30 years the impact of the reduction will still be growing. In the long run, CO2 always wins out over methane as a greenhouse gas. The only way around this would be if there was a sudden large increase in methane emissions that triggered a positive feedback loop (this may occur from methane outgassing as the permafrost thaws in Siberia, but it won't occur due to cattle).
Yeah, call me when the study is replicated. I guarantee you it won't be.
The "meridian points" are imaginary locations on the body that have literally zero basis in biology. There is no conceivable way that they'll have a statistically significant impact on any therapy compared to biologically-similar points elsewhere.
Passing electrical currents through living tissue has real biological effects. Sticking needles in people at random locations around the body does not (aside from the possibility of infection and other complications).
Real therapies that use electricity are Electroconvulsive Therapy and Electric Muscle Stimulation. There's no need to puncture the skin. These quacks are just adding some risk of infection to what would otherwise be an almost perfectly safe therapy.
At the company I work for, smart phone use at work is actively encouraged. A large part of this is because some of what my company does is develop smart phone apps, so we're encouraged to use the devices in order to be more familiar with them.
I love the website, and think it's far better than Facebook (both in terms of the behavior of the company and the product itself). But all of my friends spend the majority of their social network time on Facebook. So Facebook it is....
One idea would be to have a tax on ISP services that is paid out to websites in proportion to how much people use them. Presumably hours of engagement would be a decent metric.
But then, how can you be sure you're measuring what you think you're measuring? If I open up 10 tabs on my browser, do I get recorded as being active on all ten websites despite only paying attention to one of them? This would be a very difficult problem to solve. You could simply go by the number of packets transmitted, as that is much easier to measure, but then that would weight even more heavily towards video (YouTube, Netflix, and Hulu would take up most of the Internet's money), and then what would you do about peer-to-peer services?
Advertising is only important because of the way we've structured our economy. Yes, we need advertising for things like most of the Internet to exist. But that's only because we don't have an alternative model to pay for services designed for public consumption.
Also, advertising really doesn't have as strong a check as you imagine here. If a company advertises a product and makes it really really cool, despite the fact that it's pretty crappy, then many people may still buy it because they buy into the hype. Some of the worst examples here are medical advertisements: medicine is notoriously difficult for the person taking it to know how it effects them. Lots and lots of drugs on the market really don't have all that much benefit (industry studies tend to overestimate benefits), or no more benefit than much cheaper drugs. But if people are convinced by an ad that the drug is that much better, then they may be able to get their doctor to pay for it (note: in this case the even worse travesty is the fact that pharmaceutical companies essentially bribe doctors to prescribe their medications).