Delivering pre-packaged cans, bottles, and jars may indeed make sense, at some point - but I'd be leery about someone else picking my produce, eggs, perhaps even potato chips - unless there's a generous return policy.
Not just fragile, also variable. Is the avocado at the right left of ripeness for my use? Some like their bananas green. Some like them ripe. Maybe none of the bananas are to my liking but the peaches look good. The chicken breasts are priced well but there is too much fat for what I need them for. Maybe I will use fish instead.
I don't see how robotic or even human in the loop online grocery shopping can get consistently good results.
I get that robocalls with spoofed numbers is adding insult to injury but is there in any* case where a machine making a voice call to a human is not an unwelcome intrusion?
*OK, a wakeup call setup by the intended recipient is one but, really, who uses or needs a wakeup call these days?
This kind of thing was rather common until about 2000. Each process node was better in every way than the last. Big jumps in performance at each node advance. Power went down too. And, of course it was much cheaper per gate. You could get doubled performance and 1/4 the cost by just porting over the same design, trace for trace, to the next full node. These "die shrinks" were quite common. Through the 90's you got an extra bonus for new designs. That is because the industry was brimming with ideas that were known to work but were just not practical to implement because they took too much silicon area. First the idea spigot sputtered. The good mainframe ideas had already been implemented. It was longer clear what to do with all those gates. New ideas were tried. Some worked. Some didn't. Also, about this time, complexity started to threaten the ability to make chips that actually worked. Bugs became more common. Design progress slowed.
Then process starting acting up. Power scaling stopped. More transistors were available but if you used them, your chip consumed proportionally more power. Run the transistors faster and you had the same problem, only worse. A hot chip was no longer a marketing problem, it was a chip that would not work. More effort and more complexity were needed to tame power. A simple die shrink wouldn't do that much.
Then process started getting messier. The new nodes were not better in every way. Leakage current went up instead of down. Variability went up. Performance scaling slowed. Getting any improvement at all required more development time and money. Progress always slows when development time and cost rise.
Then 20nm planer came and it was awful. Terrible leakage. Required double patterning. Double patterning means more masks mean more expense up front and during manufacturing. It actually cost more per transistor than 28nm. What was the point, really?
That is pretty much the mess were are in now. Can't significantly increase clock rate. Can't throw gates at the problem and wouldn't really know what to do with the gates if we had them. Finfets temporarily tamed power but are only available in nodes hobbled by the need for multi-patterning.
People aren't testing knowledge, they are testing familiarity. Let's say I want to hire a sales rep for Portland.
Interviewer: "So you say you're from Portland?"
Interviewee: "Lived in Old China Town for 10 years until last year."
Interviewer: "Oh, isn't Rocking Frog Cafe near there?"
Interviewee: "No, you're probably thinking Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Rocking Frog is on the other side of the river."
Interviewer: "Thanks, you pass."
I don't care about coffee shops in Portland, I'm trying to see whether you are actually from around there as you claim. And if you can't answer that question, I'm going to try some others. If you can't answer any of them, I might start having my doubts about your claim that you're from Portland.
And what if the interviewee answered with: "Maybe? I don't drink coffee so I don't keep track of coffee shops" ?
A lot of interviewers think they are testing for general familiarity but they are really testing against their own biases.
umm wasnt this tried in the 90s and failed miserably?
Loop unbundling didn't fail at all. It was politically manoeuvred out of existence. The Baby Bells offered access to their loops to competitors in exchange for being permitted entry to the long distance telephone market. Once the agreement was signed, their lobbyists went to work progressively watering down the unbundling provision to the point where it could no longer provide meaningful competition.
Because if robots take up a lot of jobs, then ALL the workforce is going to be fighting for the remaining few jobs and the value of labor will tank!
We're in a market folks! If there are a bunch of unemployed people, an employer will be able to find someone willing to do YOUR job for less.
"Fortunately" industry has shown great reluctance to hire unemployed people so they won't directly weigh down salaries all that much. Of course, if you are already unemployed you are screwed and if those currently working are terrified of becoming unemployed that will certainly limit salaries.
If a robot ever replace my IT support job, I would have already moved on to something else. The days of spending 50 years in the same job to collect a pension and gold watch are long gone.
It isn't just the job you have that is at risk of being replaced by automation. It is also the jobs that you would move to. Further, if the trend is accelerating then the time between becoming adequately trained to do a job and when it becomes unavailable due to automation. At some point, this period may shrink to zero or even negative (The job disappears before you can obtain the skills necessary to perform it)
They looked at their C-level executives and said: hey, they don't do anything anyway, why bother.
Which is not all surprising given the business the company was in. When most of the employees are working at customer sites doing customers' bidding, the company structure isn't doing much. I don't know the details of how this particular Swedish company, but many consultancies here operate as little more than recruiting agencies. They hire and fire based on customer needs. They provide no internal training. The only people who come into the office on a regular basis are those that seek customers and those that recruit employees to meet that demand. With a total head count of forty, there might be only three or four people who truly work there and almost nothing that needs to be decided quickly has company wide effect. Those handful probably operate by consensus most of the time anyway. What's the point of a CEO?
Competition is quite a bit behind Intel at the moment, so no reason to move forward while they can milk this current generation. Once competition starts getting *near* 14nm.... Intel will nudge forward to keep a few steps ahead.
What's beyond 7nm though?
It's another confirmation that Moore's Law is dead. If Moore's Law were still in effect, Intel would make their new chips at smaller geometry regardless of competition because it would be cheaper to do so and that would make for fatter profits. Cost per transistor is the driver of Moore's Law. That stalled at 28nm because that was last node that could be made without resorting to multi-patterning. Scaling worked in the past because the cost to make a wafer was roughly constant. By making features smaller, you either got more chips or bigger chips for the same cost. Multi-patterning means the cost per wafer as you scale down is going up faster than the transistor count per wafer. Performance still increases but you have to have customers willing to pay more. If the cost delta is large enough, Intel my not jump to 10nm even if AMD catches up. Process performance isn't the only knob they can turn to improve performance.
TFA did not say, which is curious, because I would have thought that would be an important discovery. The body's occasional failure to distinguish cancer from non-cancer is pretty much the sole reason why cancer is even a problem.
The article did say that this variety of salmonella prefers a low oxygen environment but doesn't explain if that environment was unique to tumours or if it was sufficient to attract the bacteria.
If there's a booth babe wearing little compared to man wearing a suit and tie a few feet away.
[scans booth babe] "Hmm. Cold in here, isn't it?:-)"
Probably not the problem that you think, albeit not so pleasant for the booth babe. 'Ever stumble on one of those "out take" segments from swimsuit modelling? Complaining about the cold seems to be a common thing.
"Their meat and potatoes was in the server market"
I'm actually curious to what degree IBM's PowerPC engineering focus is/was on the server market, even at the time. Clearly the custom embedded stuff accounts for a lot more shipped units these days. With that said, I really have no idea who is using IBM PowerPC workstations/servers or for what or what so it's hard to guess what portion of the dollars are involved. IBM always seems to have a bunch of capacity-on-demand type offerings available and doing almost all of the design in-house is a way to make those cost-effective to provide.
I think it is more fair to say that IBM's meat and potatoes was not the laptop market. Apple was getting killed in the laptop market. They needed lower power processors but no one else was making PowerPC laptops and IBM was not inclined to make a special low power processor just for Apple. I think even embedded PowerPC's were generally hooked up to main power, not batteries. (Bear in mind that this was before power and heat became a significant problem for desktop PC's and servers)
And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
It wasn't really a battle of RISC vs CISC. It was a battle between incumbents and upstarts.
In the workstation arena, the CISC incumbent was Motorola with they 68k series. Despite being better CISC architecture than Intel, 68k lost to the RISC upstarts. Motorola had more resources than MIPS and Sun but not enough more and their customers were nimble enough to take advantage of the performance advantages the RISC upstarts offered.
Intel's had a much larger customer base and those customers were much more dependent on binary compatibility. It took a little while. Neither the 386 or 486 were a match for their RISC competitors. But Intel was able to outspend their RISC competitors on R&D, holding their ground until chips became complex enough that process and ISA independent features dominated. If Intel's architecture were also RISC, they would still have won, even sooner if the upstarts were CISC. Actually, with Intel RISC and CISC upstarts. there would not even have been a battle. Without a short term advantage to exploit, the upstarts would have not have gotten off the ground.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
I'd love to see someone come out with a cheap, trivial-to-use "WORM* USB stick" along with "plug and play" backup software.
You may be waiting a while. Flash isn't cheap enough and it has data retention problems. Phase change memories (of which 3D Crosspoint seem to be a variant) also have difficulties with long term retention. If you don't need it to be a USB stick, WORM behaviour is a commonly available in optical storage media, including Blu-Ray.
What happens if everybody has an education and is competing on the same level for "skilled" jobs and nobody wants to do the "unskilled" jobs?
Not to worry. More than enough educated people will find their skills in low demand and will work unskilled jobs in order to survive. Just as happens today. The danger comes when unskilled jobs are no longer available and the losers of the macabre game of musical chairs no longer have options.
I know they have concepts and maybe some engineering drawings but have they actually contracted out for the development of anything? There has to be some supporting equipment they could be accumulating right now, right?
Exactly. To meet the original schedule there would very soon be evidence of physical progress. Since they haven't done anything real, the schedule had to slip.
A possible solution is to not ban sales to bots per-se, but instead verify that the identity of the person redeeming the ticket at the door is the same as the person who purchased the ticket (via verifying CC details, or even something as basic as their name).
This runs into trouble with tickets purchased for other people, including gifts. It is also a problem if the purchaser is unable to attend. The ticket can not be given away and if the purchaser was buying for a group, the remaining group members will be unable to get in.
DNS is fine. Some applications, however, require an public domain on the Internet to have '.' inside... A regex that requires a '.'!
Most applications I've run across that do email validation are way too restrictive. If you have a 4 letter or longer top level domain, many will reject your email address and more exotics like a plus in your email, a percent in your email, etc... will almost certainly be rejected.
One of the most embarrassing of such cases is from Google themselves. For some time (it is fixed now), there was a bug in the job application form. If you used an email with more than two parts to the domain name (foo@bar.example.com), it would be flagged as invalid. I've seen other sites make this error too.
Bats also eat thousands and thousands of tons of insects that otherwise would wipe out our crops. They are extremely useful creatures. I think we can put up with the relatively insignificant annoyance of a few of them having rabies, especially in view of the fact that we have had a rabies vaccine since 1885.
We do not have an effective rabies vaccine for humans. For dogs and cats? Yes. For humans, the vaccine only buys you a week or two to reach a medical facility that can pump you up with gamma globulin. Skip that last step and nearly any human infected with rabies will die. Since there is no hope at all once symptoms appear, the only utility of the rabies vaccine is people in remote areas who may be too far to reach medical help otherwise. To add insult, the vaccine is expensive. Any one point in in time (the price fluctuates a lot), it can be $1000.
You can actually buy the NAND SSD's. Who knows when 3D-Xpoint will actually ship?
When it becomes available, 3DXpoint is expected to be faster than NAND Flash but also more expensive. To make use of that speed it needs a lower latency interface than PCIe. Unfortunately, it is not quite fast enough to comfortably mix with DRAM on the DDR bus. It remains to be seen how it will actually be connected.
If it works for the film maker it is only because few people will actually use this method. It is painful enough that only subordinates and those who absolutely must communicate with the film maker will hassle with listening to or sending voice memos. She is not overwhelmed because less is getting communicated.
I've had co-workers do that: require that communication with them only take place through some obscure channel that only they like to use. It cuts down the cruft all right. If you make it painful enough to communicate with you, people will not communicate when it is not important. Unfortunately, it also means you often don't get informed when it *is* important.
There's that, and I am curious how they're collecting sales taxes from Netflix given that Netflix likely doesn't have a presence there.
Most likely they are just making it the resident's responsibility to report that on their yearly taxes and pay it appropriately. Lots of states (like mine) are doing that with online shopping now too.
Yes, they do. California has had this since at least the 1990's. However, the only times I have heard of anyone actually complying is for business purchases. The Netflix tax would be easier to track since it is a fixed monthly charge that doesn't require collecting random receipts for a year. Still, I think it would be difficult to enforce and the default for most consumers would be to ignore the tax just like they do with California's use tax.
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Delivering pre-packaged cans, bottles, and jars may indeed make sense, at some point - but I'd be leery about someone else picking my produce, eggs, perhaps even potato chips - unless there's a generous return policy.
Not just fragile, also variable. Is the avocado at the right left of ripeness for my use? Some like their bananas green. Some like them ripe. Maybe none of the bananas are to my liking but the peaches look good. The chicken breasts are priced well but there is too much fat for what I need them for. Maybe I will use fish instead.
I don't see how robotic or even human in the loop online grocery shopping can get consistently good results.
I get that robocalls with spoofed numbers is adding insult to injury but is there in any* case where a machine making a voice call to a human is not an unwelcome intrusion?
*OK, a wakeup call setup by the intended recipient is one but, really, who uses or needs a wakeup call these days?
This kind of thing was rather common until about 2000. Each process node was better in every way than the last. Big jumps in performance at each node advance. Power went down too. And, of course it was much cheaper per gate. You could get doubled performance and 1/4 the cost by just porting over the same design, trace for trace, to the next full node. These "die shrinks" were quite common. Through the 90's you got an extra bonus for new designs. That is because the industry was brimming with ideas that were known to work but were just not practical to implement because they took too much silicon area.
First the idea spigot sputtered. The good mainframe ideas had already been implemented. It was longer clear what to do with all those gates. New ideas were tried. Some worked. Some didn't. Also, about this time, complexity started to threaten the ability to make chips that actually worked. Bugs became more common. Design progress slowed.
Then process starting acting up. Power scaling stopped. More transistors were available but if you used them, your chip consumed proportionally more power. Run the transistors faster and you had the same problem, only worse. A hot chip was no longer a marketing problem, it was a chip that would not work. More effort and more complexity were needed to tame power. A simple die shrink wouldn't do that much.
Then process started getting messier. The new nodes were not better in every way. Leakage current went up instead of down. Variability went up. Performance scaling slowed. Getting any improvement at all required more development time and money. Progress always slows when development time and cost rise.
Then 20nm planer came and it was awful. Terrible leakage. Required double patterning. Double patterning means more masks mean more expense up front and during manufacturing. It actually cost more per transistor than 28nm. What was the point, really?
That is pretty much the mess were are in now. Can't significantly increase clock rate. Can't throw gates at the problem and wouldn't really know what to do with the gates if we had them. Finfets temporarily tamed power but are only available in nodes hobbled by the need for multi-patterning.
People aren't testing knowledge, they are testing familiarity. Let's say I want to hire a sales rep for Portland.
Interviewer: "So you say you're from Portland?"
Interviewee: "Lived in Old China Town for 10 years until last year."
Interviewer: "Oh, isn't Rocking Frog Cafe near there?"
Interviewee: "No, you're probably thinking Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Rocking Frog is on the other side of the river."
Interviewer: "Thanks, you pass."
I don't care about coffee shops in Portland, I'm trying to see whether you are actually from around there as you claim. And if you can't answer that question, I'm going to try some others. If you can't answer any of them, I might start having my doubts about your claim that you're from Portland.
And what if the interviewee answered with: "Maybe? I don't drink coffee so I don't keep track of coffee shops" ?
A lot of interviewers think they are testing for general familiarity but they are really testing against their own biases.
umm wasnt this tried in the 90s and failed miserably?
Loop unbundling didn't fail at all. It was politically manoeuvred out of existence. The Baby Bells offered access to their loops to competitors in exchange for being permitted entry to the long distance telephone market. Once the agreement was signed, their lobbyists went to work progressively watering down the unbundling provision to the point where it could no longer provide meaningful competition.
Because if robots take up a lot of jobs, then ALL the workforce is going to be fighting for the remaining few jobs and the value of labor will tank!
We're in a market folks! If there are a bunch of unemployed people, an employer will be able to find someone willing to do YOUR job for less.
"Fortunately" industry has shown great reluctance to hire unemployed people so they won't directly weigh down salaries all that much. Of course, if you are already unemployed you are screwed and if those currently working are terrified of becoming unemployed that will certainly limit salaries.
If a robot ever replace my IT support job, I would have already moved on to something else. The days of spending 50 years in the same job to collect a pension and gold watch are long gone.
It isn't just the job you have that is at risk of being replaced by automation. It is also the jobs that you would move to. Further, if the trend is accelerating then the time between becoming adequately trained to do a job and when it becomes unavailable due to automation. At some point, this period may shrink to zero or even negative (The job disappears before you can obtain the skills necessary to perform it)
They looked at their C-level executives and said: hey, they don't do anything anyway, why bother.
Which is not all surprising given the business the company was in. When most of the employees are working at customer sites doing customers' bidding, the company structure isn't doing much. I don't know the details of how this particular Swedish company, but many consultancies here operate as little more than recruiting agencies. They hire and fire based on customer needs. They provide no internal training. The only people who come into the office on a regular basis are those that seek customers and those that recruit employees to meet that demand. With a total head count of forty, there might be only three or four people who truly work there and almost nothing that needs to be decided quickly has company wide effect. Those handful probably operate by consensus most of the time anyway. What's the point of a CEO?
Competition is quite a bit behind Intel at the moment, so no reason to move forward while they can milk this current generation. Once competition starts getting *near* 14nm.... Intel will nudge forward to keep a few steps ahead.
What's beyond 7nm though?
It's another confirmation that Moore's Law is dead. If Moore's Law were still in effect, Intel would make their new chips at smaller geometry regardless of competition because it would be cheaper to do so and that would make for fatter profits. Cost per transistor is the driver of Moore's Law. That stalled at 28nm because that was last node that could be made without resorting to multi-patterning. Scaling worked in the past because the cost to make a wafer was roughly constant. By making features smaller, you either got more chips or bigger chips for the same cost. Multi-patterning means the cost per wafer as you scale down is going up faster than the transistor count per wafer. Performance still increases but you have to have customers willing to pay more. If the cost delta is large enough, Intel my not jump to 10nm even if AMD catches up. Process performance isn't the only knob they can turn to improve performance.
TFA did not say, which is curious, because I would have thought that would be an important discovery. The body's occasional failure to distinguish cancer from non-cancer is pretty much the sole reason why cancer is even a problem.
The article did say that this variety of salmonella prefers a low oxygen environment but doesn't explain if that environment was unique to tumours or if it was sufficient to attract the bacteria.
If there's a booth babe wearing little compared to man wearing a suit and tie a few feet away.
[scans booth babe] "Hmm. Cold in here, isn't it? :-)"
Probably not the problem that you think, albeit not so pleasant for the booth babe. 'Ever stumble on one of those "out take" segments from swimsuit modelling? Complaining about the cold seems to be a common thing.
"Their meat and potatoes was in the server market"
I'm actually curious to what degree IBM's PowerPC engineering focus is/was on the server market, even at the time. Clearly the custom embedded stuff accounts for a lot more shipped units these days. With that said, I really have no idea who is using IBM PowerPC workstations/servers or for what or what so it's hard to guess what portion of the dollars are involved. IBM always seems to have a bunch of capacity-on-demand type offerings available and doing almost all of the design in-house is a way to make those cost-effective to provide.
I think it is more fair to say that IBM's meat and potatoes was not the laptop market. Apple was getting killed in the laptop market. They needed lower power processors but no one else was making PowerPC laptops and IBM was not inclined to make a special low power processor just for Apple. I think even embedded PowerPC's were generally hooked up to main power, not batteries. (Bear in mind that this was before power and heat became a significant problem for desktop PC's and servers)
And this battle - CISC (Intel) vs RISC (Alpha, MIPS, Sparc, Power, ARM) - has been fought before. Every time, CISC has come out the winner.
It wasn't really a battle of RISC vs CISC. It was a battle between incumbents and upstarts.
In the workstation arena, the CISC incumbent was Motorola with they 68k series. Despite being better CISC architecture than Intel, 68k lost to the RISC upstarts. Motorola had more resources than MIPS and Sun but not enough more and their customers were nimble enough to take advantage of the performance advantages the RISC upstarts offered.
Intel's had a much larger customer base and those customers were much more dependent on binary compatibility. It took a little while. Neither the 386 or 486 were a match for their RISC competitors. But Intel was able to outspend their RISC competitors on R&D, holding their ground until chips became complex enough that process and ISA independent features dominated. If Intel's architecture were also RISC, they would still have won, even sooner if the upstarts were CISC. Actually, with Intel RISC and CISC upstarts. there would not even have been a battle. Without a short term advantage to exploit, the upstarts would have not have gotten off the ground.
I can't see an Apple only processor wining over Intel, either. At minimum, Intel's process advantage would have to be nullified and I can't see that happening until scaling comes to a full stop.
I'd love to see someone come out with a cheap, trivial-to-use "WORM* USB stick" along with "plug and play" backup software.
You may be waiting a while. Flash isn't cheap enough and it has data retention problems. Phase change memories (of which 3D Crosspoint seem to be a variant) also have difficulties with long term retention. If you don't need it to be a USB stick, WORM behaviour is a commonly available in optical storage media, including Blu-Ray.
What happens if everybody has an education and is competing on the same level for "skilled" jobs and nobody wants to do the "unskilled" jobs?
Not to worry. More than enough educated people will find their skills in low demand and will work unskilled jobs in order to survive. Just as happens today. The danger comes when unskilled jobs are no longer available and the losers of the macabre game of musical chairs no longer have options.
I know they have concepts and maybe some engineering drawings but have they actually contracted out for the development of anything? There has to be some supporting equipment they could be accumulating right now, right?
Exactly. To meet the original schedule there would very soon be evidence of physical progress. Since they haven't done anything real, the schedule had to slip.
A possible solution is to not ban sales to bots per-se, but instead verify that the identity of the person redeeming the ticket at the door is the same as the person who purchased the ticket (via verifying CC details, or even something as basic as their name).
This runs into trouble with tickets purchased for other people, including gifts. It is also a problem if the purchaser is unable to attend. The ticket can not be given away and if the purchaser was buying for a group, the remaining group members will be unable to get in.
Reddit, Airbnb, and some other shit sites were affected.
No harm was done.
Indeed was affected. So, not just people messing around, but people looking for work.
DNS is fine. Some applications, however, require an public domain on the Internet to have '.' inside... A regex that requires a '.'!
Most applications I've run across that do email validation are way too restrictive. If you have a 4 letter or longer top level domain, many will reject your email address and more exotics like a plus in your email, a percent in your email, etc... will almost certainly be rejected.
One of the most embarrassing of such cases is from Google themselves. For some time (it is fixed now), there was a bug in the job application form. If you used an email with more than two parts to the domain name (foo@bar.example.com), it would be flagged as invalid. I've seen other sites make this error too.
So 54 people in the United States had the measles last year, but we're measles free because those people picked it up elsewhere?
It's worse than that. Measles is still being transmitted in the US. It is just not "endemic". The source of the outbreak is someone who contracted the virus outside the country who then goes on to spread it to those who stayed home.
Two things:
The expensive ass proprietary dongles are free and included with the phone.
The 1/8" stereo plug is over 50 fucking year old. I'm not sure this is the answer, but it's shitty technology
And the wheel is over 5000 years old. Do you have a better idea?
Just because a technology is old, doesn't mean it not still the right solution.
Bats also eat thousands and thousands of tons of insects that otherwise would wipe out our crops. They are extremely useful creatures. I think we can put up with the relatively insignificant annoyance of a few of them having rabies, especially in view of the fact that we have had a rabies vaccine since 1885.
We do not have an effective rabies vaccine for humans. For dogs and cats? Yes. For humans, the vaccine only buys you a week or two to reach a medical facility that can pump you up with gamma globulin. Skip that last step and nearly any human infected with rabies will die. Since there is no hope at all once symptoms appear, the only utility of the rabies vaccine is people in remote areas who may be too far to reach medical help otherwise. To add insult, the vaccine is expensive. Any one point in in time (the price fluctuates a lot), it can be $1000.
How does this compare to 3d-xpoint stuff?
You can actually buy the NAND SSD's. Who knows when 3D-Xpoint will actually ship?
When it becomes available, 3DXpoint is expected to be faster than NAND Flash but also more expensive. To make use of that speed it needs a lower latency interface than PCIe. Unfortunately, it is not quite fast enough to comfortably mix with DRAM on the DDR bus. It remains to be seen how it will actually be connected.
If it works for the film maker it is only because few people will actually use this method. It is painful enough that only subordinates and those who absolutely must communicate with the film maker will hassle with listening to or sending voice memos. She is not overwhelmed because less is getting communicated.
I've had co-workers do that: require that communication with them only take place through some obscure channel that only they like to use. It cuts down the cruft all right. If you make it painful enough to communicate with you, people will not communicate when it is not important. Unfortunately, it also means you often don't get informed when it *is* important.
There's that, and I am curious how they're collecting sales taxes from Netflix given that Netflix likely doesn't have a presence there.
Most likely they are just making it the resident's responsibility to report that on their yearly taxes and pay it appropriately. Lots of states (like mine) are doing that with online shopping now too.
Yes, they do. California has had this since at least the 1990's. However, the only times I have heard of anyone actually complying is for business purchases. The Netflix tax would be easier to track since it is a fixed monthly charge that doesn't require collecting random receipts for a year. Still, I think it would be difficult to enforce and the default for most consumers would be to ignore the tax just like they do with California's use tax.