If, at any point in my life, I somehow managed by any possible means to get people to purchase a $400 bag squeezer... I really wouldn't give a shit.
He's already won. Will his empire persist throughout all time and dominate the consumer-grade fruit-bag squeezing market? No? Maybe? Is that even a real market? Who gives a fuck, he managed to dupe a non-insignificant number of people into actually giving him money. This IS the victory scenario. Of course he's going to try and have an exit strategy. This is NOT a long-term company. If anyone for a moment really thought that fruit-bag-squeezer was a legit product, then you deserve to watch your investment burn down in flames. Are you upset your investment isn't pay off? Too bad, you invested in a BAG SQUEEZER.
There's a TON of really stupid startups. There's also a few good ones. If your little baby business can't survive a weekend without someone in constant phone contact, that's a sign that it's fucked. If it's a shitty startup, all it takes is one investor to get their head on straight and realize it's shit. If the founder needs to be in constant contact to maintain that suspension of disbelief, then the company is fucked. If the startup has a legit idea that will make millions, but is working paycheck to paycheck and has the organization of a season of Lost, and every employee has no clue what to do without you there, and it can't survive one weekend without the founder there manually holding together the duck tape and twine contraption, then the company is fucked.
If the company has a real idea. And has some semblance of people knowing what to do. And there isn't some hard contractual obligation deadline. Then the world will continue to turn for a few days without you getting that email. "Hey Bob, you're in charge this weekend, I'm out" That's all that's needed.
And the sad fact is that this message will put an unnerving number of startup types into a cold sweat.
There would certainly be company-sized HOLES that other companies could fill. There would be void and vacuums for periods of time, and there's a real risk that corporate espionage would be a big tool for corporations to simply kill each other. But I don't think any business should be "too big to fail". If they screw up, they should pay. If that brings them under, so be it. Have a fire-sale and let some younger company pick up the pieces and start anew. Hopefully with something that doesn't pollute cyberspace with all of our info.
Did I? I guess I said "It WAS useful, now it's not." But..... that's it.
And... that's the first time someone mentioned infinity. Was it some grandparent? No? well, I guess that shmuck compared it to "conservation of energy".
oooOOooh. I see where you're going with that. YEAH! Fuck that strawman! We're gonna take him out back and really SHOW HIM WHAT FOR! Woooo! Fuck that guy!
The entire sum of human existence is in a "local eddy" and the rule that governs the whole (but quite explicitly have exceptions for the local specific) aren't really all that insightful.
OH NOES! ENTROPY! If only we had some sort of massive exterior energy source that constantly bathed half the planet with excess energy. Maybe it'd be responsible for the entire biosphere and all life as we know it.
This is the most laughable bullshit attempt at spin that I've ever seen. It's right up there with those crazy-pants young-earthers that try to use entropy as an explanation for why evolution is impossible. But trying to use to the say that FINANCIAL WEALTH can't be created? That's even worse.
Heat is not wealth. If you think it is, then go die in a pile of wealth.
Who the hell voted this up? No, wealth is not a fixed supply. WEALTH is most certainly created. And in the very next breath he switches to saying that MONEY is a fixed supply. First off, ha, no, there isn't a fixed supply of money. No, they print money and pour it in now and then. That a metaphorical printing (and literal, but that's chump-change), it's mostly a digital record these days. The FED genesis's money and loans it to banks. That money came FROM NOWHERE. The Fed has that power and authority. But they don't do that lightly, they don't want runaway inflation anymore than anyone else. There's not a completely fixed supply of money, but it really is more stable than the supply of WEALTH.
Anyway, monetary policy aside, wealth is of course created or destroyed. Not the money representing wealth, but the actual real physical STUFF that money represents. Gold, land, bags of flour, rights to a song, futures on quail eggs, your house, your car, whatever.
You have car. That's worth something. A form of wealth. It's worth $10K or whatever. Now you crash that car. It's now scrap. What is that car's WORTH? $100? WHERE DID THE VALUE GO? It went away. It was destroyed. It WAS useful, now it's not. Likewise, if you have a factory that takes $100 of scrap metal, and $100 of labor, tools, and electricity, and can turn that scrap back into a $10,000 car, then that's wealth that was CREATED. Money is just a placeholder that let's people exchange stuff. It has value in the sense other people want it. The amount of money pales in comparison to the amount of WEALTH in the world.
the only way wealth can be created or destroyed is by changing the money supply.
HOLY SHIT THAT'S EXACTLY WRONG! Don't conflate money with wealth. I know they look very similar, but come on, this is like economics 101.
Rich people aren't just hoarding money. Imagine that some dude CREATED a bunch of wealth. Turned a bunch of $100 scrap into $10K cars. People who wanted cars would give him MONEY in exchange for that WEALTH. And he would then have more money than others (who would have cars instead). That's the zero-sum MONEY game. The rich got their money by (owning the means of) creating wealth....or by inheritance. The entire idea behind the concept of money is that other people would likewise CREATE WEALTH they would then sell to others in exchange for this placeholder thing called money. And that goes for the poor too. They could do whatever to create wealth and take money from rich dicks. (but typically that means working a job which ALSO makes the rich owner money. Who reaps the gains of labor is a social issue. One the poor are losing per the GINI coefficient.)
How obtuse can you be? The examples of why "commerce happening" is a bad thing for people of authority were pretty freaking clear.
But OK, fine. Sure. Let's go with that then:
Teachers are an authority figure over students who don't know any better. They are trained and told to trust the teacher. If the teacher is paid by a corporation to push a particular brand, the students won't know when to differentiate between a lesson they're supposed to learn and an advertisement they should view critically. That's commerce happening. The teacher made a buck. The corporation can expect more business. the money comes from the student's purchasing habits (or whatever they can get their parents to buy).
If the teacher is paid by Pepsi to repeat that study about how soda is actually re-hydrating while ignoring that nearly any other drink (other than booze) is better.
Currently, most teachers advocate for their students to use TI calculators. The competition of Casio and HP simply lost that battle and now TI essentially has a monopoly. This happened WITHOUT commerce. No one was paid or bribed or manipulated in any way other than the typical marketing fluff. But the teachers leaned towards one brand and the monopoly formed and calculators are now STILL ~$100 while every other consumer electronic's price has lowered. This is the end result of teachers directing students towards particular brands. You are advocating that "commerce happen" and corporations employ teachers to direct children towards their products.
The concern is that the teacher will mislead students to make a buck. Is that clear enough?
I'm not sure how you can say those three things in the same breath.
I think maybe you need to be taught how advertising works. Their purpose is to deceive and mislead people. The burgers in the ad don't ACTUALLY look like that. The ones they take pictures of are made of glue and plastic and spray-on shine. The models they put in the ads aren't actually that happy. Those aren't terribly bad deceptions. We're used to it. Anyone with a lick of sense and experience knows to dismiss any and all advertising as a complete bullshit pile of lies. But kids DON'T have that experience.
If children or the naive or the mentally impaired are shown advertising they ARE being misled.
Ostensibly advertising simply "informs" the masses about products. But come on, look around at advertising. For a moment, try to take all that information at face-value and simple trust it. Like you'd trust what your teacher tells you. Does that jive with the actual end product you know you'd receive?
So if your ethical concern is "commerce may occur", you might want to explain how that's an ethical problem.
Sure thing. Happy to help out those with social or ethical disabilities.
The problem is that teachers are in a position of power and authority. It may not seem like much to you, but to the kids they teach, they're right up there with the voice of god and their parents. They spend 40 hours a week under the authority of these people. Parents only get 72 waking hours (with weekends) with their kids.
Now imagine how well commerce plays with other people of authority. Imagine the "commerce happened" when it came to police. Because that's typically called a bribe. Or let's get corporate about it: Do you want them to get a kickback to let Fords speed a little while anything made by Toyota gets tickets for even 2mph over?
Imagine all the "commerce" that could happen with politicians. Imagine if our politicians were ostensibly being "helped" by commercial interests on certain topics, or they were actively engaged in courting solicitations for certain policies. Do you want the government policy set by these politicians to be left up to the highest bidder?
Capitalism works GREAT... When the consumers can choose where to buy from. You don't get to choose your police department and kids don't get to choose their teacher. If a person in authority starts getting financial incentive from someone other than those their serving, that's an ethical concern.
That's a cynical view of it. She's offering a blindly optimistic view. The truth is probably somewhere in between. The first to try something like this might not run afoul of all that cynicism, but you can bet your ass that if this sort of thing becomes popular it will go to corporate dystopian hell in a cyberpunk handbasket faster than Keanu Reeves in bullet time.
It was kind of a bad sign when they tried to distance themselves from it back in 2012ish. But I didn't think they were abusing their power much and it was really just a clash of corporate vs engineering cultures.
But the switch from Google to Alphabet is the culmination of that corporate culture winning out. Google might still be run by engineers, but Alphabet is pulling the strings. Probably just for tax shenanigan schemes, but it's a pretty clear sign. I thought it wouldn't happen until Page and Brin kicked the bucket. "old guard" and all that, and Page is even back in the saddle as CEO. I dunno, I guess money changes people.
And why are we keen to harp on this? Because engineers (Or specifically Paul Buchheit) aren't typically high-functioning sociopaths like most CEOs. As companies get bigger their culture and overall policy shifts from the founding geeks who made it to the corporate bosses who run it. Of course that started with Eric Schmidt, but culture is real slow the change. Arguably it's the natural slide to the lowest energy state, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it
Don't be evil, is a good motto. The sort of thing that an upcoming disruptive new competition that has the public's attention would make. Getting rid of it, distancing themselves from it, is the sort of thing that a big established soulless corporation would do. And that goes hand in hand with being dicks t
Which is why I switched to duckduckgo and then ixquick for my searches around 2015. Google maps (and their traffic) is still handy, as is the gmail and calendar, but I'll switch away once I get off my butt or the google overlords start misbehaving. Same way I dropped facebook once that started going south.
And besides, if a company's motto is ever something as direct like that, of course you can expect people to harp on it whenever they do something that appears to run afoul of it. It's kinda why mottos exist.
But "job openings" doesn't mean anything other than a bit of HR fluff. A line on a website. A row count on a database.
Ostensibly, it's a hole in a company that's has things it needs to do to meet it's growth. Or a hole made by someone leaving. But that ignores some very serious real-world factors. A lot of job openings are just mythical bullshit made too extreme so the company can justify hiring an H1B visa. A lot of companies would snap up anyone with a PhD in data science... if they would work for under $50K. Then you have places asking for 20 years experience with TensorFlow.
And if anyone is looking at this number and deciding policy then it impacts someone's bottom line. And since anyone could go file some paperwork and incorporate their rinkydink garage company and list a million job openings for left-handed 3rd generation Navahoe with 30 years experience porting mainframe Cobol to HTC Android devices... it means the number can't be trusted.
Meanwhile an unemployed person is a real physical living breathing person that won't go away. (Until they stop looking for a job or get on disability or get a shitty part-time job, then they stop being counted).
I have 6 kids and a stay at home wife. I love being involved
You have a full-time live-in-home child caretaker. It's like loving taking trips to Paris vs enjoying living in Paris.
And hey, society has variance. Some people love kids. Some people don't. Some people really get ethused about the local PTA meeting where the committee talks about how to resolve the "balls rolling down the hill" issue that's plaguing the community. Others would rather stick their dick in a blender.
It's great that you have a fun time with your kids. Not everyone is in your position.
I had an idea a while ago about the the failings of retro-futurism.
StarWars, StarTrek, The Expanse, Firefly, and pretty much any space opera are all based around the idea of spaceships with people flying in them. Like space is just an extension of the oceans and seas. But that's pretty silly. Robots do a hell of a lot better job with fewer requirements and no need to bring them back. The more and more autonomous they get the less we even need to be in contact with them.
We won't have people handling drills on Mars getting core samples. We won't have gunners tracking tie-fighters like AA flak cannons. We won't have navigators plotting courses on a bench with calipers and charts. These are all visions of the future which are simply wrong. As wrong as Decker using a payphone. We need to let go of the sci-fi tropes born 50 years ago in the 70's.
And then it came to me: Make a show where EVERYTHING on the spaceship has to be done by hand. Valves need to be opened, there's a switchboard operator for the intercom, there's a guy that turns the big steering wheel, pilots in the fighters need to manually target the guns. And you never tell the audience (But you drop plenty of hints) that the entire crew are all programs and computers. The main characters are some sort of AGI or bullshit awakened programs. The background characters are more like cron jobs and scripts. There's some mystical god-like creature in cryostatis which must be preserved, an actual human. The bots operate on a genetic algorithm system of judging fitness to see who lives and who is selected to procreate. They're all military conscripts and expendable second-class citizens. On the ship there's exactly 2 rooms people do things because that's the main processor and the backup. Quick-clones are a thing as copying programs is trivial. A fighter pilot dies and a copy shows up wondering how his last clone screwed up. This sort of computer-metaphor list goes on and on. I think it'd make a good show.
Until you sell, at which point they are realized gains. And you have to pay taxes.
They have no right [to go investigate and identify the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto] until he cashes in the coins.
It's investigation. As a government agency or service, they can investigate whomever they want. They probably can't go get a warrant though. SHOULD they be? Well, that's up to their boss and a lot more subjective. You'd argue "no", and that's a fine stance, but I'd say that unless they know otherwise there's an obvious potential for a ton of tax dodging. It's the sort of thing the IRS is supposed to go investigate....Not typically with the NSA's help. That part is worrisome.
But realize that they can do anything that you or I can do. I'm free to try and find him. I have that right. You can't illegalize investigation.
And since they don't know which coins are his, and which ones aren't, I suspect that they don't have any way to actually get anything.
Right. Unless they... you know... figured out who he was and then AUDITED HIM. Like normal. Fuck if they care what coins he has, they care about CASH. Realized income. That thing they tax and the sole purpose for their existence.
Sucks for them.
HAHAHAHA, that's adorable that you think "sucks to be them" is how any story involving the IRS actually ends. I mean, you know, on the side of the IRS. That's how most stories with the IRS actually end, but with checks being made out to the feds.
. . . Is the bitcoin ID of Satoshi also unknown? Isn't there a log of every bitcoin ever sold? Wouldn't it be pretty trivial so see how many coins have come from his bitcoin ID, and when, and then get an estimate of how much he's cashed out?
By taking Satoshi's texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk.
ok.
The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis.
That's purposely sounding complex to make it look more impressive than it is. Fuck that hype. Strive for quality journalism and stop bullshitting us.
The result is a 'fingerprint' for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing
ok. But really it just means there's another layer of obfuscation required. If you really want to be anonymous, now you need to pass everything you write through a SIMPLE-WORDS filter. Parish the thought of giving the NSA even a modicum of tyranny inducing panopicon.....OH SHIT!
Sayman was a product manager who helped the social-media giant understand how his generation uses their phones, advising on experimental products for teens and helping executives understand trends
. . . So. . . his credentials for why we would care about him is...... He's a kid? That's it? Not some sort of prodigy?
"Hired as a Software Engineer" and yet he was a "product manager". Do you have any idea how fluffy and vague that title is? Don't get me wrong, there could be a TON of serious work being done behind that title. Or there could be just ".... make the icons flat with simple colors". It's like a movie producer. What do they do? "help produce".
Lemmeseeee.... he has a wikipedia page. Woo. He's made a game that some people looked at. At facebook the product he's managing is "Lifestage" a blatantly ageist social video thing that locks out anyone over 22. Your hand is blinking....Facebook shut it down after a year.
He's a kid that made a game and had a failed launch on a "video social app" thing....So fucking what? The news is that Google hired someone without a college degree? Is he going to wear garish cloths with a big clock and try rapping? To "get down with teens"?
Now, he might be a REALLY great guy. But so far the only reason there's an article on him is because there have been articles on him.
First off, getting up into the path of totality was fine.
We drank a lot the night before. There was a lot of history talk because they're huge nerds.
At the event I set up a quick'n'easy altar with some fancy cloth and a C'thulhu bobble-head. During the eclipse, we got a video of us sacrificing a heart.... of artichoke. So... you're welcome for
And then we road eternal, shiny, and chrome on the Eclipse road! Services were closed. Roads were clogged. We spent hours at a standstill. Now... the weekend before, I decked out my car with temporary peel-off paint and gave it some decals from MadMax. I dressed up as a raider with spikes on some (way oversized) football shoulder-pads, and a facemask, and a metalic arm thingy. We had nerf weapons and I wanted my crew to lean out the windows with the tiki torches as thundersticks, but they weren't up for it, and by the time we switched traffic had picked up. So that didn't happen. Also, the shoulder pads were WAY too big for a long-ass car-ride. And the spikes had a non-negligible risk of tearing up my upholstery, so that got ditched real early.
The 3 hour drive turned into a 6 hour drive and everyone was tired by the end. But with spare guzzoline and plenty of agricola, we survived!
(Also, the peel-off paint works fine.... as long as the coverage is enough. MASK IT, and spray it thick. Otherwise the tiny specks don't rub off nearly as easy as the thick stuff. ugh.)
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If, at any point in my life, I somehow managed by any possible means to get people to purchase a $400 bag squeezer... I really wouldn't give a shit.
He's already won. Will his empire persist throughout all time and dominate the consumer-grade fruit-bag squeezing market? No? Maybe? Is that even a real market? Who gives a fuck, he managed to dupe a non-insignificant number of people into actually giving him money. This IS the victory scenario. Of course he's going to try and have an exit strategy. This is NOT a long-term company. If anyone for a moment really thought that fruit-bag-squeezer was a legit product, then you deserve to watch your investment burn down in flames. Are you upset your investment isn't pay off? Too bad, you invested in a BAG SQUEEZER.
There's a TON of really stupid startups. There's also a few good ones. If your little baby business can't survive a weekend without someone in constant phone contact, that's a sign that it's fucked. If it's a shitty startup, all it takes is one investor to get their head on straight and realize it's shit. If the founder needs to be in constant contact to maintain that suspension of disbelief, then the company is fucked. If the startup has a legit idea that will make millions, but is working paycheck to paycheck and has the organization of a season of Lost, and every employee has no clue what to do without you there, and it can't survive one weekend without the founder there manually holding together the duck tape and twine contraption, then the company is fucked.
If the company has a real idea. And has some semblance of people knowing what to do. And there isn't some hard contractual obligation deadline. Then the world will continue to turn for a few days without you getting that email. "Hey Bob, you're in charge this weekend, I'm out" That's all that's needed.
And the sad fact is that this message will put an unnerving number of startup types into a cold sweat.
There would certainly be company-sized HOLES that other companies could fill. There would be void and vacuums for periods of time, and there's a real risk that corporate espionage would be a big tool for corporations to simply kill each other. But I don't think any business should be "too big to fail". If they screw up, they should pay. If that brings them under, so be it. Have a fire-sale and let some younger company pick up the pieces and start anew. Hopefully with something that doesn't pollute cyberspace with all of our info.
Did I? I guess I said "It WAS useful, now it's not." But..... that's it.
And... that's the first time someone mentioned infinity. Was it some grandparent? No? well, I guess that shmuck compared it to "conservation of energy".
oooOOooh. I see where you're going with that. YEAH! Fuck that strawman! We're gonna take him out back and really SHOW HIM WHAT FOR! Woooo! Fuck that guy!
The entire sum of human existence is in a "local eddy" and the rule that governs the whole (but quite explicitly have exceptions for the local specific) aren't really all that insightful.
So.... IKEA.
Damn, that man was smart.
OH NOES! ENTROPY! If only we had some sort of massive exterior energy source that constantly bathed half the planet with excess energy. Maybe it'd be responsible for the entire biosphere and all life as we know it.
This is the most laughable bullshit attempt at spin that I've ever seen. It's right up there with those crazy-pants young-earthers that try to use entropy as an explanation for why evolution is impossible. But trying to use to the say that FINANCIAL WEALTH can't be created? That's even worse.
Heat is not wealth. If you think it is, then go die in a pile of wealth.
Who the hell voted this up? No, wealth is not a fixed supply. WEALTH is most certainly created. And in the very next breath he switches to saying that MONEY is a fixed supply. First off, ha, no, there isn't a fixed supply of money. No, they print money and pour it in now and then. That a metaphorical printing (and literal, but that's chump-change), it's mostly a digital record these days. The FED genesis's money and loans it to banks. That money came FROM NOWHERE. The Fed has that power and authority. But they don't do that lightly, they don't want runaway inflation anymore than anyone else. There's not a completely fixed supply of money, but it really is more stable than the supply of WEALTH.
Anyway, monetary policy aside, wealth is of course created or destroyed. Not the money representing wealth, but the actual real physical STUFF that money represents. Gold, land, bags of flour, rights to a song, futures on quail eggs, your house, your car, whatever.
You have car. That's worth something. A form of wealth. It's worth $10K or whatever. Now you crash that car. It's now scrap. What is that car's WORTH? $100? WHERE DID THE VALUE GO? It went away. It was destroyed. It WAS useful, now it's not. Likewise, if you have a factory that takes $100 of scrap metal, and $100 of labor, tools, and electricity, and can turn that scrap back into a $10,000 car, then that's wealth that was CREATED. Money is just a placeholder that let's people exchange stuff. It has value in the sense other people want it. The amount of money pales in comparison to the amount of WEALTH in the world.
the only way wealth can be created or destroyed is by changing the money supply.
HOLY SHIT THAT'S EXACTLY WRONG! Don't conflate money with wealth. I know they look very similar, but come on, this is like economics 101.
Rich people aren't just hoarding money. Imagine that some dude CREATED a bunch of wealth. Turned a bunch of $100 scrap into $10K cars. People who wanted cars would give him MONEY in exchange for that WEALTH. And he would then have more money than others (who would have cars instead). That's the zero-sum MONEY game. The rich got their money by (owning the means of) creating wealth. ...or by inheritance. The entire idea behind the concept of money is that other people would likewise CREATE WEALTH they would then sell to others in exchange for this placeholder thing called money. And that goes for the poor too. They could do whatever to create wealth and take money from rich dicks. (but typically that means working a job which ALSO makes the rich owner money. Who reaps the gains of labor is a social issue. One the poor are losing per the GINI coefficient.)
How obtuse can you be? The examples of why "commerce happening" is a bad thing for people of authority were pretty freaking clear.
But OK, fine. Sure. Let's go with that then:
Teachers are an authority figure over students who don't know any better. They are trained and told to trust the teacher. If the teacher is paid by a corporation to push a particular brand, the students won't know when to differentiate between a lesson they're supposed to learn and an advertisement they should view critically. That's commerce happening. The teacher made a buck. The corporation can expect more business. the money comes from the student's purchasing habits (or whatever they can get their parents to buy).
If the teacher is paid by Pepsi to repeat that study about how soda is actually re-hydrating while ignoring that nearly any other drink (other than booze) is better.
Currently, most teachers advocate for their students to use TI calculators. The competition of Casio and HP simply lost that battle and now TI essentially has a monopoly. This happened WITHOUT commerce. No one was paid or bribed or manipulated in any way other than the typical marketing fluff. But the teachers leaned towards one brand and the monopoly formed and calculators are now STILL ~$100 while every other consumer electronic's price has lowered. This is the end result of teachers directing students towards particular brands. You are advocating that "commerce happen" and corporations employ teachers to direct children towards their products.
The concern is that the teacher will mislead students to make a buck. Is that clear enough?
I'm not sure how you can say those three things in the same breath.
I think maybe you need to be taught how advertising works. Their purpose is to deceive and mislead people. The burgers in the ad don't ACTUALLY look like that. The ones they take pictures of are made of glue and plastic and spray-on shine. The models they put in the ads aren't actually that happy. Those aren't terribly bad deceptions. We're used to it. Anyone with a lick of sense and experience knows to dismiss any and all advertising as a complete bullshit pile of lies. But kids DON'T have that experience.
If children or the naive or the mentally impaired are shown advertising they ARE being misled.
Ostensibly advertising simply "informs" the masses about products. But come on, look around at advertising. For a moment, try to take all that information at face-value and simple trust it. Like you'd trust what your teacher tells you. Does that jive with the actual end product you know you'd receive?
So if your ethical concern is "commerce may occur", you might want to explain how that's an ethical problem.
Sure thing. Happy to help out those with social or ethical disabilities.
The problem is that teachers are in a position of power and authority. It may not seem like much to you, but to the kids they teach, they're right up there with the voice of god and their parents. They spend 40 hours a week under the authority of these people. Parents only get 72 waking hours (with weekends) with their kids.
Now imagine how well commerce plays with other people of authority. Imagine the "commerce happened" when it came to police. Because that's typically called a bribe. Or let's get corporate about it: Do you want them to get a kickback to let Fords speed a little while anything made by Toyota gets tickets for even 2mph over?
Imagine all the "commerce" that could happen with politicians. Imagine if our politicians were ostensibly being "helped" by commercial interests on certain topics, or they were actively engaged in courting solicitations for certain policies. Do you want the government policy set by these politicians to be left up to the highest bidder?
Capitalism works GREAT... When the consumers can choose where to buy from. You don't get to choose your police department and kids don't get to choose their teacher. If a person in authority starts getting financial incentive from someone other than those their serving, that's an ethical concern.
That's a cynical view of it. She's offering a blindly optimistic view. The truth is probably somewhere in between. The first to try something like this might not run afoul of all that cynicism, but you can bet your ass that if this sort of thing becomes popular it will go to corporate dystopian hell in a cyberpunk handbasket faster than Keanu Reeves in bullet time.
Naw, the "don't be evil" motto was a good thing.
It was kind of a bad sign when they tried to distance themselves from it back in 2012ish. But I didn't think they were abusing their power much and it was really just a clash of corporate vs engineering cultures.
But the switch from Google to Alphabet is the culmination of that corporate culture winning out. Google might still be run by engineers, but Alphabet is pulling the strings. Probably just for tax shenanigan schemes, but it's a pretty clear sign. I thought it wouldn't happen until Page and Brin kicked the bucket. "old guard" and all that, and Page is even back in the saddle as CEO. I dunno, I guess money changes people.
And why are we keen to harp on this? Because engineers (Or specifically Paul Buchheit) aren't typically high-functioning sociopaths like most CEOs. As companies get bigger their culture and overall policy shifts from the founding geeks who made it to the corporate bosses who run it. Of course that started with Eric Schmidt, but culture is real slow the change. Arguably it's the natural slide to the lowest energy state, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it
Don't be evil, is a good motto. The sort of thing that an upcoming disruptive new competition that has the public's attention would make. Getting rid of it, distancing themselves from it, is the sort of thing that a big established soulless corporation would do. And that goes hand in hand with being dicks t
Which is why I switched to duckduckgo and then ixquick for my searches around 2015. Google maps (and their traffic) is still handy, as is the gmail and calendar, but I'll switch away once I get off my butt or the google overlords start misbehaving. Same way I dropped facebook once that started going south.
And besides, if a company's motto is ever something as direct like that, of course you can expect people to harp on it whenever they do something that appears to run afoul of it. It's kinda why mottos exist.
It was nice of them to have a distinct action and period in time where they decided to turn evil.
But "job openings" doesn't mean anything other than a bit of HR fluff. A line on a website. A row count on a database.
Ostensibly, it's a hole in a company that's has things it needs to do to meet it's growth. Or a hole made by someone leaving. But that ignores some very serious real-world factors. A lot of job openings are just mythical bullshit made too extreme so the company can justify hiring an H1B visa. A lot of companies would snap up anyone with a PhD in data science... if they would work for under $50K. Then you have places asking for 20 years experience with TensorFlow.
And if anyone is looking at this number and deciding policy then it impacts someone's bottom line. And since anyone could go file some paperwork and incorporate their rinkydink garage company and list a million job openings for left-handed 3rd generation Navahoe with 30 years experience porting mainframe Cobol to HTC Android devices... it means the number can't be trusted.
Meanwhile an unemployed person is a real physical living breathing person that won't go away. (Until they stop looking for a job or get on disability or get a shitty part-time job, then they stop being counted).
I have 6 kids and a stay at home wife. I love being involved
You have a full-time live-in-home child caretaker. It's like loving taking trips to Paris vs enjoying living in Paris.
And hey, society has variance. Some people love kids. Some people don't. Some people really get ethused about the local PTA meeting where the committee talks about how to resolve the "balls rolling down the hill" issue that's plaguing the community. Others would rather stick their dick in a blender.
It's great that you have a fun time with your kids. Not everyone is in your position.
I had an idea a while ago about the the failings of retro-futurism.
StarWars, StarTrek, The Expanse, Firefly, and pretty much any space opera are all based around the idea of spaceships with people flying in them. Like space is just an extension of the oceans and seas. But that's pretty silly. Robots do a hell of a lot better job with fewer requirements and no need to bring them back. The more and more autonomous they get the less we even need to be in contact with them.
We won't have people handling drills on Mars getting core samples. We won't have gunners tracking tie-fighters like AA flak cannons. We won't have navigators plotting courses on a bench with calipers and charts. These are all visions of the future which are simply wrong. As wrong as Decker using a payphone. We need to let go of the sci-fi tropes born 50 years ago in the 70's.
And then it came to me: Make a show where EVERYTHING on the spaceship has to be done by hand. Valves need to be opened, there's a switchboard operator for the intercom, there's a guy that turns the big steering wheel, pilots in the fighters need to manually target the guns. And you never tell the audience (But you drop plenty of hints) that the entire crew are all programs and computers. The main characters are some sort of AGI or bullshit awakened programs. The background characters are more like cron jobs and scripts. There's some mystical god-like creature in cryostatis which must be preserved, an actual human. The bots operate on a genetic algorithm system of judging fitness to see who lives and who is selected to procreate. They're all military conscripts and expendable second-class citizens. On the ship there's exactly 2 rooms people do things because that's the main processor and the backup. Quick-clones are a thing as copying programs is trivial. A fighter pilot dies and a copy shows up wondering how his last clone screwed up. This sort of computer-metaphor list goes on and on. I think it'd make a good show.
Yeah, pretty much.
Thinks tanks are paid to think along certain lines. Don't worry, they'll find someone else to think the right thoughts.
Pipers gotta pipe.
Think Tanks gotta psychically power their overland armored vehicles to shoot mind bullets at the enemy.
That costs dosh.
So.... Those who can afford meat and steak live longer?
Did they account for income discrepancies?
Unrealized gains are just ... paper gains.
Until you sell, at which point they are realized gains. And you have to pay taxes.
They have no right [to go investigate and identify the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto] until he cashes in the coins.
It's investigation. As a government agency or service, they can investigate whomever they want. They probably can't go get a warrant though. SHOULD they be? Well, that's up to their boss and a lot more subjective. You'd argue "no", and that's a fine stance, but I'd say that unless they know otherwise there's an obvious potential for a ton of tax dodging. It's the sort of thing the IRS is supposed to go investigate. ...Not typically with the NSA's help. That part is worrisome.
But realize that they can do anything that you or I can do. I'm free to try and find him. I have that right. You can't illegalize investigation.
And since they don't know which coins are his, and which ones aren't, I suspect that they don't have any way to actually get anything.
Right. Unless they... you know... figured out who he was and then AUDITED HIM. Like normal. Fuck if they care what coins he has, they care about CASH. Realized income. That thing they tax and the sole purpose for their existence.
Sucks for them.
HAHAHAHA, that's adorable that you think "sucks to be them" is how any story involving the IRS actually ends. I mean, you know, on the side of the IRS. That's how most stories with the IRS actually end, but with checks being made out to the feds.
. . . Is the bitcoin ID of Satoshi also unknown? Isn't there a log of every bitcoin ever sold? Wouldn't it be pretty trivial so see how many coins have come from his bitcoin ID, and when, and then get an estimate of how much he's cashed out?
"stymie" = slashdot user "Khybar".
Cataloged for future doxing efforts.
Carry on citizen.
By taking Satoshi's texts and finding the 50 most common words, the NSA was able to break down his text into 5,000 word chunks and analyse each to find the frequency of those 50 words. This would result in a unique 50-number identifier for each chunk.
ok.
The NSA then placed each of these numbers into a 50-dimensional space and flatten them into a plane using principal components analysis.
That's purposely sounding complex to make it look more impressive than it is. Fuck that hype. Strive for quality journalism and stop bullshitting us.
The result is a 'fingerprint' for anything written by Satoshi that could easily be compared to any other writing
ok. But really it just means there's another layer of obfuscation required. If you really want to be anonymous, now you need to pass everything you write through a SIMPLE-WORDS filter. Parish the thought of giving the NSA even a modicum of tyranny inducing panopicon. ....OH SHIT!
oh ho ho, that part gets better.
Guess what he did while he was at facebook?
An app that stops working once you turn 22. He turned 21 and his hand started blinking so he decided to run. (Oh, and the project was shut down).
Sayman was a product manager who helped the social-media giant understand how his generation uses their phones, advising on experimental products for teens and helping executives understand trends
. . . So. . . his credentials for why we would care about him is...... He's a kid? That's it? Not some sort of prodigy?
"Hired as a Software Engineer" and yet he was a "product manager". Do you have any idea how fluffy and vague that title is? Don't get me wrong, there could be a TON of serious work being done behind that title. Or there could be just ".... make the icons flat with simple colors". It's like a movie producer. What do they do? "help produce".
Lemmeseeee.... he has a wikipedia page. Woo. He's made a game that some people looked at. At facebook the product he's managing is "Lifestage" a blatantly ageist social video thing that locks out anyone over 22. Your hand is blinking. ...Facebook shut it down after a year.
He's a kid that made a game and had a failed launch on a "video social app" thing. ...So fucking what? The news is that Google hired someone without a college degree? Is he going to wear garish cloths with a big clock and try rapping? To "get down with teens"?
Now, he might be a REALLY great guy. But so far the only reason there's an article on him is because there have been articles on him.
First off, getting up into the path of totality was fine.
We drank a lot the night before. There was a lot of history talk because they're huge nerds.
At the event I set up a quick'n'easy altar with some fancy cloth and a C'thulhu bobble-head. During the eclipse, we got a video of us sacrificing a heart.... of artichoke. So... you're welcome for
And then we road eternal, shiny, and chrome on the Eclipse road! Services were closed. Roads were clogged. We spent hours at a standstill. Now... the weekend before, I decked out my car with temporary peel-off paint and gave it some decals from MadMax. I dressed up as a raider with spikes on some (way oversized) football shoulder-pads, and a facemask, and a metalic arm thingy. We had nerf weapons and I wanted my crew to lean out the windows with the tiki torches as thundersticks, but they weren't up for it, and by the time we switched traffic had picked up. So that didn't happen. Also, the shoulder pads were WAY too big for a long-ass car-ride. And the spikes had a non-negligible risk of tearing up my upholstery, so that got ditched real early.
The 3 hour drive turned into a 6 hour drive and everyone was tired by the end. But with spare guzzoline and plenty of agricola, we survived!
(Also, the peel-off paint works fine.... as long as the coverage is enough. MASK IT, and spray it thick. Otherwise the tiny specks don't rub off nearly as easy as the thick stuff. ugh.)