We already knew about a lot of the "hidden" Amazonian civilizations, it was knowing where to look that allowed geospatial tools to be used to notice how much larger the scale was. Even if you accept the idea that they were well-hidden, they've only been gone, what, 2000 years or so? What would finding them be like if they had been gone millions of years ago?
Building near water is obvious, but this assumes that water has always been where it is now. Wild rivers change course dramatically on a nearly annual basis, and over millions of years they may have radically changed course in addition to their flood planes accelerating the destruction of any evidence they once existed. Cities on oceans would have had millions of years of exposure to erosion, storms, tidal action, etc.
I'm glad you're so sure of your conclusions. Maybe you could write the paper's authors and share your analysis and relevant research experience.
Richard Schulze, founder of BestBuy, owns a $250 million house in Naples, Florida that he uses very little. The very wealthy own a lot of luxury assets which produce small amounts of economic activity when they are built, but don't really produce much in the way of economic activity in their useful lifetime.
The standard capitalist economic rhetoric is that while the rich are rich, they're not Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold coins. Their money is "hard at work", invested in equities. The implication is that they mostly live like you and I.
While some of it is, a lot of is dumped into luxury housing, art, and other forms of luxury consumption which don't create much economic activity.
In which case corporations would reduce their executive pay and you'd get no revenue.
I doubt the executive class would downgrade their income merely to avoid taxation. Even if they did, it's better economics for their reduced income to go into the hands of shareholders or get invested in plant upgrades, R&D and other actual business productivity.
I suspect the more likely outcome would be a minor reduction in executive compensation and an increase in employee compensation to meet the targeted pay ratios.
It's a tough thing to work out, but I don't think it's impossible.
US healthcare spending is like $3 trillion, existing social welfare spending around $1 trillion.
I'm guessing we could cut healthcare by a trillion with single payer, and UBI in theory eliminates a lot of existing social welfare spending, so let's say we get $600 billion freed up by replacing 2/3rds of welfare with UBI.
That gets us damn close without any new net spending or taxation.
I also think it helps to be somewhat philosophical about the long-term goal of UBI -- it isn't just paying cash to citizens, it's at least partly greatly reducing major income inequality which in turn leads to asset hoarding and sheltering. Reduce the income inequality and you start to long-term cut the amount of wealth hoarded/sheltered in economically non-productive assets.
One funding mechanism for UBI could be punitive taxation on companies whose executive compensation ratios exceed historical norms of about 25:1. This creates an incentive for corporations to cut executive compensation and increase employee compensation, which contributes to part of the purpose of UBI -- that jobs just don't pay enough.
I'm sure there is a future with dramatically less total employment, but it's not here yet, so making work pay more achieves some what UBI wants to achieve without actual UBI *payments* being required.
Bad news, swb. The programming process is driven by the carriers. Normally via a webpage connected to their provisioning systems. You basically sign up for service with a carrier, the carrier sends a request to an SMDP+ provider, and the SMDP+ provider gathers up all the information (assigns an IMSI, etc.) and creates a profile and sends it to the device. This is a current project I'm involved with at work (I work for a large regional cell provider)
So how the hell does a person do this within an hour of landing at a foreign airport, especially in a third world country?
When I went to London I planned ahead and had a friend in the UK buy and activate a pay as you go SIM from Asda for me. He mailed it over, and I had it with me on the plane. But even if I hadn't planned ahead, there were a whole mess of SIM card vendors at the airport and it would have been easy to get one on the spot. I had my phone up on a local UK number/plan before we left the airplane.
I worry that a complex provisioning e-transaction and all of its backend services will be overly complex in a first-world country and due to economics and local inertia/preference for physical SIMs in poorer countries not even workable.
It's only better if the entire process can be handled without dealing with a carrier storefront activation process, otherwise swapping SIM cards is dead easy and gives the carrier you're moving from absolutely no way to block it (barring a carrier locked phone).
Will phone makers have some magic process that allows me to enter the data held by the SIM (and, ideally, save it, so I can e-switch between eSIM profiles)? Please tell me it won't involve a web site or some other transactional system that won't work in half the countries, half the time.
Part of me thinks eSIM makes some sense but it also seems like the prime beneficiary are Apple and other handset makers who are wringing their hands over physical ports, not consumers who want to change carriers.
And as usual, it's easy to see how the handset makers and carriers will collude against the consumer. The carriers will give in to the handset makers desire to not have a slot, the handset makers will make sure switching eSIM data is complicated and requires a store visit or some other carrier impediment.
I had two different people tell me that, a friend of the family who ran a fairly successful recruiting agency and a friend with hiring responsibility.
I suppose a lot of it depends on how time off is scheduled. Some places can have a kind of contentious scheduling process for time off and the schedule can be highly visible and easy to count who has how many days off. New hires waltzing in with the "after 5 year" time off package creates some resentment.
Give the new guy $20k more than everyone else and it's totally invisible.
I've been told that vacation is less negotiable than salary with the rationale that vacation is measurable/noticeable by peers and can create friction when one employee is deemed "away too much".
I haven't had luck with employers negotiating vacation unless they were being really minimalist about it. You can usually get it up to the "max" for that position, but not beyond that. I had one employer tell me flat out that vacation was 100% non-negotiable but willingly gave up $10k in salary to make up for the vacation they wouldn't provide even though the time off would have cost them 5x less.
I'm kind of surprised there aren't more employers willing to go the opposite direction, "sell" time off at some multiple of the weekly salary rate. I suspect even though the math would ultimately be in their favor, vacation allotments aren't counted in middle management salary accounting and outside their negotiating ability.
I'd pretty easily take a cut in salary for more time off, even if it came with a bunch of restrictions on consecutive days off or days off per month.
Recreational vessels have autopilots now, and they are usually can be fed courses from the vessel's chart plotter. I think some of the better integrated systems can also be tied to AIS and radar for basic course corrections to avoid collisions.
I would think commercial ships would have something similar. You'll always need pilots and/or tugs for getting in and out of port, although I suppose it's possible that you could start to see remote piloting, where the harbor pilot would supply a course or where a ship would automatically track a pilot vessel. The latter is probably possible now by tracking a pilot vessel's course via AIS.
AIS smooths a lot of automated piloting. It's awful helpful to know other vessels' location, course and speed.
We use it a lot at work. I was a reluctant user, but have become kind of addicted to it.
It has some annoyances, like not being able to sort pages within a section, the linking functionality doesn't work like I think it should (ie, it'd be great to create a link to an object on a different page/section/notebook and have the linked object dynamically update).
But once you get used to it, it's a surprisingly useful way to keep track of shit. I keep my notebooks in a dropbox folder and despite using the same notebooks across multiple machines, it's proven remarkably resilient. Only rarely do I get a glitch where a section disappears, and restarting OneNote brings it back.
I wish the iOS app had an option to use Dropbox as a storage option, but it's clear they're steering everyone to sharepoint or OneDrive and I'm just not interested.
But do they have an obligation to provide transparent decision-making and predictable rules and regulations?
The more cynical among us know that web services, especially free ones, are likely to go tits up, change policies/prices, and generally fuck over their users and customers as soon as management figures out the next change that makes them an extra dime.
But most people kind of expect things to be more stable and predictable, and it is entirely unsurprising when the people who built up these services with their own content get jacked around that they get wound up.
Obviously killing people isn't right, but there's no negotiating, no explanation, nothing. You get more response out of TSA at the airport.
,,,the subway system? I'm assuming that subway rides are subsidized, that the fare does not cover the operation of the subway system. Riders pay $5 for a fare, but the actual cost to provide that fare is more, maybe 1.5-3x more.
What would a fare on the NYC subway cost if it payed to operate the subway?
I'm not opposed to mass transit subsidies, either. Lowering the price to get people into mass transit is a worthwhile goal, but if you let the subsidy get out of control it distorts the economics and you wind up with funding shortfalls because you're dependent on outside support.
Is it possible NYC's subway is approaching the point of being not economically viable? If it takes $20 billion to fix it right, is there a better transportation system that could be bought for that kind of money? $20 billion would put 5000 new electric cabs on the street and pay each driver $50k for the next 26 years. I'm not saying its better, but once the investment sizes are taken into considering it makes sense to think outside the box.
Would people be willing to pay $10 or $20 per fare for a system that self-funded, including upgrades and expansions? I bet a lot would switch to cabs or Uber for that money.
Just what does "participate in production" even mean?
My guess is that mostly how Netflix operates is by just buying content from production companies that actually produce the shows (ie, cast, film, edit, etc). The non-American productions are probably just cash infusions.
I'm sure Netflix is building out their own production house, but there's a finite amount of available production talent and going to the extent of creating a full-service production company (sound stages, technical crews, post facilities, etc) may be more difficult.
I would guess any indoor vertical farm would be segmented in a way that reduced pest spread and would also allow a given "room" or whatever to be sterilized if pests or something became a problem. Seal it off and fumigate if necessary.
You'd probably do it on a semi-regular basis anyway as a preventative, at least steam cleaning or something.
I still think Goldman is just narrowly defining "business model" as self-perpetuating rent seeking.
It also seems a bizarre analysis of the pharmaceutical industry -- your "business model" is kind of sunk by patent expiration as well. A lot of therapies that only treat but not cure disease have gone off-patent and (mostly) thanks to high drug prices for brand names, people now take the generic versions which exist in a market competitive enough that profits aren't ridiculous.
Maybe all their considerations make sense if you were a capital investor looking to fund a new drug company and were comparing a company interested in curing a disease vs. a company with a really effective long-term therapy, you might make more money long-term on the therapy vs. the cure.
But even cures will have possible new patients, unless the drug manages to eradicate the disease. How many Hepatitis 3s are there -- communicable diseases whose incidence shrinks by curing infected people? Most of the really big diseases involve metabolic syndromes -- type II diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity -- or cancers or autoimmune syndromes, diseases that will keep creating new victims regardless of how many people are cured.
At least in the west, Hep3 is one of the few communicable diseases left which achieves a network effect by curing the infected and reducing the incidence. AIDS is another, but I suspect a vaccine for that before too long. But other than that, we've wiped the others out.
The only place where Goldman's analysis makes any sense might be for genetic therapies for existing illnesses that create babies born with the genetic cure. Like if you could come up with a genetic therapy for obesity that could be passed on to children.
Why would Google care, provided people watch the videos and Google doesn't get copyright notices?
My kid watches what I would swear are videos produced by high levels of automation. I tell him the voiceover sounds like speech synthesis reading a newspaper article, but to him it's about some sports topic he doesn't know anything about and he finds it informative.
I'd kind of guess that the future will be filled with AI-generated videos, especially non-fiction content where you can easily use a source text article for narration as well as performing contextual analysis to obtain images and video content.
I don't think the problem is that it happens, the problem is that it doesn't (yet) produce a very compelling product.
Goldman may have a point that curing a single disease may not be a sustainable business model, but looking at the business as a single treatment for a single disease doesn't make sense -- it's like saying construction isn't sustainable because once you've built a building that person doesn't ever need another building.
Obviously construction isn't about building one building anymore than curing disease is about curing one disease. We need more than one building and we have more than one disease to cure.
It seems very Goldman like to evaluate a business model as representing perpetual return sales of a given product. It's not quite rent-seeking, but close. You would think as capitalists they would believe in creative destruction, that once a firm founded to find a cure for a disease runs out of consumers for their product, the firm is liquidated and its assets -- people, IP, and capital go one to other firms, presumably to cure other diseases.
Instead Goldman seems to look as a business model as a rent/toll collecting enterprise designed to be a perpetual source of income that does not require the firm to risk liquidation.
Can it be tested technically? I would think that someone on Android at this point would have created some low-level way to monitor microphone use (not just "microphone accessed" but actually seeing data come from it) and would have caught Facebook monitoring the microphone.
I feel like there should be some way to check Facebook's access of the microphone at the hardware level.
I'm not denying its value, but I don't grok your explanation.
We expect the items in the grocery store to be safe to eat thanks to the Pure Food and Drug act (among others) that long predated Magnuson-Moss. It's not like we didn't have a consumer market before it was passed, either.
It seems like exactly the kind of law that would have been blocked as too much regulation and burdensome on manufacturers without really any effect on the market, or with whatever disparate effects it had before.
I'm not knocking it, it's obviously a cornerstone of consumer rights, but it's such a cornerstone I'm mystified that it made it into law.
It seems like exactly the kind of legislation that would never get passed in almost any era and would have been heavily lobbied against by nearly every US manufacturer. In 1975, the lack of easy access to data on pending bills, etc, also seems like it would have been easier to quietly kill a bill like this.
It also seems like the kind of bill that companies almost could have rallied their employee unions' to oppose, too. "This bill will cost us millions and we will be forced to cut jobs."
I suppose to corollary question is -- how come it hasn't been repealed or (repeatedly) gutted with exceptions for specific industries, especially automotive or other industries that got beat up by foreign manufacturers?
Tim Cook as a human should get the same amount of media attention that the rest of humanity gets, ie, near zero unless you happen to be the eponymous man in the street at the right time.
Tim Cook gets access to the media because he is Apple's CEO, which means that Tim Cook "the human" gets a much better access to the media to broadcast his personal political platform.
Also, I don't think for a fucking second Tim Cook says anything to the media that either hasn't been vetted by a half-dozen lawyers and publicists, personal and Apple-employed. Some of what he says may actually reflect his personal opinions, but it's not like he's just freelancing his own personal opinions in front of a microphone.
IT is seen as an overhead expense and it results in a lot of pressure to keep costs down.
I think an unseen contributor to this is that IT vendors (hardware, software, etc) too often label needless churn as innovation in order to collect more revenue, resulting in a lot of business process redesign to manage the changes imposed on them by vendors.
How much will it cost business to adapt to Windows 10? New rollout and patching processes and systems, software compatibility testing and possibly even software changes to work with it, employee training, and so on. All because Microsoft wants to up their licensing revenue or jump on the touch screen bandwagon?
At the end of the day it doesn't surprise me that non-technology business leaders are reluctant to spend on IT. They know they're being taken for a ride by their vendors from a business perspective. Many wind up pinching too many pennies, but a lot of times it looks to me not like a spending problem but just not being able to chase the tail of IT "innovation" fast enough.
I think it's just annoying that you lose access to what had been a working app. I don't quite understand why Apple had to force 64 bit compatibility. I suspect a lot of it had something to do with just a technical excuse to purge old apps.
I keep thinking that eventually security patching will be a legal requirement, but I can't quite decide whether it will go so far as to require vendors to make security patches available for free.
I'm sure companies would howl and try to block such a requirement, but there may be counter-arguments that say you can't compel people to install patches that they can't afford, either, so any requirement to be patched probably would coincide with some level of free security patch access.
It's obvious that fees for patches are just cheap ways to push up profits, especially firmware patches (I'd argue 1/3 or more of all hardware reaches retirement with as-shipped firmware).
Non-security bug fixes are more compelling as fee-for-service, although only in as much as vendors play games with version numbering and features, blurring the line between fixing what they sold you that doesn't work and adding a feature you didn't pay for up front.
Slashdot Mirror
We already knew about a lot of the "hidden" Amazonian civilizations, it was knowing where to look that allowed geospatial tools to be used to notice how much larger the scale was. Even if you accept the idea that they were well-hidden, they've only been gone, what, 2000 years or so? What would finding them be like if they had been gone millions of years ago?
Building near water is obvious, but this assumes that water has always been where it is now. Wild rivers change course dramatically on a nearly annual basis, and over millions of years they may have radically changed course in addition to their flood planes accelerating the destruction of any evidence they once existed. Cities on oceans would have had millions of years of exposure to erosion, storms, tidal action, etc.
I'm glad you're so sure of your conclusions. Maybe you could write the paper's authors and share your analysis and relevant research experience.
Which "economically non-productive assets"?
Richard Schulze, founder of BestBuy, owns a $250 million house in Naples, Florida that he uses very little. The very wealthy own a lot of luxury assets which produce small amounts of economic activity when they are built, but don't really produce much in the way of economic activity in their useful lifetime.
The standard capitalist economic rhetoric is that while the rich are rich, they're not Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold coins. Their money is "hard at work", invested in equities. The implication is that they mostly live like you and I.
While some of it is, a lot of is dumped into luxury housing, art, and other forms of luxury consumption which don't create much economic activity.
In which case corporations would reduce their executive pay and you'd get no revenue.
I doubt the executive class would downgrade their income merely to avoid taxation. Even if they did, it's better economics for their reduced income to go into the hands of shareholders or get invested in plant upgrades, R&D and other actual business productivity.
I suspect the more likely outcome would be a minor reduction in executive compensation and an increase in employee compensation to meet the targeted pay ratios.
It's a tough thing to work out, but I don't think it's impossible.
US healthcare spending is like $3 trillion, existing social welfare spending around $1 trillion.
I'm guessing we could cut healthcare by a trillion with single payer, and UBI in theory eliminates a lot of existing social welfare spending, so let's say we get $600 billion freed up by replacing 2/3rds of welfare with UBI.
That gets us damn close without any new net spending or taxation.
I also think it helps to be somewhat philosophical about the long-term goal of UBI -- it isn't just paying cash to citizens, it's at least partly greatly reducing major income inequality which in turn leads to asset hoarding and sheltering. Reduce the income inequality and you start to long-term cut the amount of wealth hoarded/sheltered in economically non-productive assets.
One funding mechanism for UBI could be punitive taxation on companies whose executive compensation ratios exceed historical norms of about 25:1. This creates an incentive for corporations to cut executive compensation and increase employee compensation, which contributes to part of the purpose of UBI -- that jobs just don't pay enough.
I'm sure there is a future with dramatically less total employment, but it's not here yet, so making work pay more achieves some what UBI wants to achieve without actual UBI *payments* being required.
Bad news, swb. The programming process is driven by the carriers. Normally via a webpage connected to their provisioning systems. You basically sign up for service with a carrier, the carrier sends a request to an SMDP+ provider, and the SMDP+ provider gathers up all the information (assigns an IMSI, etc.) and creates a profile and sends it to the device. This is a current project I'm involved with at work (I work for a large regional cell provider)
So how the hell does a person do this within an hour of landing at a foreign airport, especially in a third world country?
When I went to London I planned ahead and had a friend in the UK buy and activate a pay as you go SIM from Asda for me. He mailed it over, and I had it with me on the plane. But even if I hadn't planned ahead, there were a whole mess of SIM card vendors at the airport and it would have been easy to get one on the spot. I had my phone up on a local UK number/plan before we left the airplane.
I worry that a complex provisioning e-transaction and all of its backend services will be overly complex in a first-world country and due to economics and local inertia/preference for physical SIMs in poorer countries not even workable.
It's only better if the entire process can be handled without dealing with a carrier storefront activation process, otherwise swapping SIM cards is dead easy and gives the carrier you're moving from absolutely no way to block it (barring a carrier locked phone).
Will phone makers have some magic process that allows me to enter the data held by the SIM (and, ideally, save it, so I can e-switch between eSIM profiles)? Please tell me it won't involve a web site or some other transactional system that won't work in half the countries, half the time.
Part of me thinks eSIM makes some sense but it also seems like the prime beneficiary are Apple and other handset makers who are wringing their hands over physical ports, not consumers who want to change carriers.
And as usual, it's easy to see how the handset makers and carriers will collude against the consumer. The carriers will give in to the handset makers desire to not have a slot, the handset makers will make sure switching eSIM data is complicated and requires a store visit or some other carrier impediment.
I liked it better when they just added laudanum to everything to make it "work better".
I had two different people tell me that, a friend of the family who ran a fairly successful recruiting agency and a friend with hiring responsibility.
I suppose a lot of it depends on how time off is scheduled. Some places can have a kind of contentious scheduling process for time off and the schedule can be highly visible and easy to count who has how many days off. New hires waltzing in with the "after 5 year" time off package creates some resentment.
Give the new guy $20k more than everyone else and it's totally invisible.
I've been told that vacation is less negotiable than salary with the rationale that vacation is measurable/noticeable by peers and can create friction when one employee is deemed "away too much".
I haven't had luck with employers negotiating vacation unless they were being really minimalist about it. You can usually get it up to the "max" for that position, but not beyond that. I had one employer tell me flat out that vacation was 100% non-negotiable but willingly gave up $10k in salary to make up for the vacation they wouldn't provide even though the time off would have cost them 5x less.
I'm kind of surprised there aren't more employers willing to go the opposite direction, "sell" time off at some multiple of the weekly salary rate. I suspect even though the math would ultimately be in their favor, vacation allotments aren't counted in middle management salary accounting and outside their negotiating ability.
I'd pretty easily take a cut in salary for more time off, even if it came with a bunch of restrictions on consecutive days off or days off per month.
Recreational vessels have autopilots now, and they are usually can be fed courses from the vessel's chart plotter. I think some of the better integrated systems can also be tied to AIS and radar for basic course corrections to avoid collisions.
I would think commercial ships would have something similar. You'll always need pilots and/or tugs for getting in and out of port, although I suppose it's possible that you could start to see remote piloting, where the harbor pilot would supply a course or where a ship would automatically track a pilot vessel. The latter is probably possible now by tracking a pilot vessel's course via AIS.
AIS smooths a lot of automated piloting. It's awful helpful to know other vessels' location, course and speed.
We use it a lot at work. I was a reluctant user, but have become kind of addicted to it.
It has some annoyances, like not being able to sort pages within a section, the linking functionality doesn't work like I think it should (ie, it'd be great to create a link to an object on a different page/section/notebook and have the linked object dynamically update).
But once you get used to it, it's a surprisingly useful way to keep track of shit. I keep my notebooks in a dropbox folder and despite using the same notebooks across multiple machines, it's proven remarkably resilient. Only rarely do I get a glitch where a section disappears, and restarting OneNote brings it back.
I wish the iOS app had an option to use Dropbox as a storage option, but it's clear they're steering everyone to sharepoint or OneDrive and I'm just not interested.
But do they have an obligation to provide transparent decision-making and predictable rules and regulations?
The more cynical among us know that web services, especially free ones, are likely to go tits up, change policies/prices, and generally fuck over their users and customers as soon as management figures out the next change that makes them an extra dime.
But most people kind of expect things to be more stable and predictable, and it is entirely unsurprising when the people who built up these services with their own content get jacked around that they get wound up.
Obviously killing people isn't right, but there's no negotiating, no explanation, nothing. You get more response out of TSA at the airport.
,,,the subway system? I'm assuming that subway rides are subsidized, that the fare does not cover the operation of the subway system. Riders pay $5 for a fare, but the actual cost to provide that fare is more, maybe 1.5-3x more.
What would a fare on the NYC subway cost if it payed to operate the subway?
I'm not opposed to mass transit subsidies, either. Lowering the price to get people into mass transit is a worthwhile goal, but if you let the subsidy get out of control it distorts the economics and you wind up with funding shortfalls because you're dependent on outside support.
Is it possible NYC's subway is approaching the point of being not economically viable? If it takes $20 billion to fix it right, is there a better transportation system that could be bought for that kind of money? $20 billion would put 5000 new electric cabs on the street and pay each driver $50k for the next 26 years. I'm not saying its better, but once the investment sizes are taken into considering it makes sense to think outside the box.
Would people be willing to pay $10 or $20 per fare for a system that self-funded, including upgrades and expansions? I bet a lot would switch to cabs or Uber for that money.
Just what does "participate in production" even mean?
My guess is that mostly how Netflix operates is by just buying content from production companies that actually produce the shows (ie, cast, film, edit, etc). The non-American productions are probably just cash infusions.
I'm sure Netflix is building out their own production house, but there's a finite amount of available production talent and going to the extent of creating a full-service production company (sound stages, technical crews, post facilities, etc) may be more difficult.
I would guess any indoor vertical farm would be segmented in a way that reduced pest spread and would also allow a given "room" or whatever to be sterilized if pests or something became a problem. Seal it off and fumigate if necessary.
You'd probably do it on a semi-regular basis anyway as a preventative, at least steam cleaning or something.
I still think Goldman is just narrowly defining "business model" as self-perpetuating rent seeking.
It also seems a bizarre analysis of the pharmaceutical industry -- your "business model" is kind of sunk by patent expiration as well. A lot of therapies that only treat but not cure disease have gone off-patent and (mostly) thanks to high drug prices for brand names, people now take the generic versions which exist in a market competitive enough that profits aren't ridiculous.
Maybe all their considerations make sense if you were a capital investor looking to fund a new drug company and were comparing a company interested in curing a disease vs. a company with a really effective long-term therapy, you might make more money long-term on the therapy vs. the cure.
But even cures will have possible new patients, unless the drug manages to eradicate the disease. How many Hepatitis 3s are there -- communicable diseases whose incidence shrinks by curing infected people? Most of the really big diseases involve metabolic syndromes -- type II diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity -- or cancers or autoimmune syndromes, diseases that will keep creating new victims regardless of how many people are cured.
At least in the west, Hep3 is one of the few communicable diseases left which achieves a network effect by curing the infected and reducing the incidence. AIDS is another, but I suspect a vaccine for that before too long. But other than that, we've wiped the others out.
The only place where Goldman's analysis makes any sense might be for genetic therapies for existing illnesses that create babies born with the genetic cure. Like if you could come up with a genetic therapy for obesity that could be passed on to children.
Why would Google care, provided people watch the videos and Google doesn't get copyright notices?
My kid watches what I would swear are videos produced by high levels of automation. I tell him the voiceover sounds like speech synthesis reading a newspaper article, but to him it's about some sports topic he doesn't know anything about and he finds it informative.
I'd kind of guess that the future will be filled with AI-generated videos, especially non-fiction content where you can easily use a source text article for narration as well as performing contextual analysis to obtain images and video content.
I don't think the problem is that it happens, the problem is that it doesn't (yet) produce a very compelling product.
Goldman may have a point that curing a single disease may not be a sustainable business model, but looking at the business as a single treatment for a single disease doesn't make sense -- it's like saying construction isn't sustainable because once you've built a building that person doesn't ever need another building.
Obviously construction isn't about building one building anymore than curing disease is about curing one disease. We need more than one building and we have more than one disease to cure.
It seems very Goldman like to evaluate a business model as representing perpetual return sales of a given product. It's not quite rent-seeking, but close. You would think as capitalists they would believe in creative destruction, that once a firm founded to find a cure for a disease runs out of consumers for their product, the firm is liquidated and its assets -- people, IP, and capital go one to other firms, presumably to cure other diseases.
Instead Goldman seems to look as a business model as a rent/toll collecting enterprise designed to be a perpetual source of income that does not require the firm to risk liquidation.
Can it be tested technically? I would think that someone on Android at this point would have created some low-level way to monitor microphone use (not just "microphone accessed" but actually seeing data come from it) and would have caught Facebook monitoring the microphone.
I feel like there should be some way to check Facebook's access of the microphone at the hardware level.
I'm not denying its value, but I don't grok your explanation.
We expect the items in the grocery store to be safe to eat thanks to the Pure Food and Drug act (among others) that long predated Magnuson-Moss. It's not like we didn't have a consumer market before it was passed, either.
It seems like exactly the kind of law that would have been blocked as too much regulation and burdensome on manufacturers without really any effect on the market, or with whatever disparate effects it had before.
I'm not knocking it, it's obviously a cornerstone of consumer rights, but it's such a cornerstone I'm mystified that it made it into law.
It seems like exactly the kind of legislation that would never get passed in almost any era and would have been heavily lobbied against by nearly every US manufacturer. In 1975, the lack of easy access to data on pending bills, etc, also seems like it would have been easier to quietly kill a bill like this.
It also seems like the kind of bill that companies almost could have rallied their employee unions' to oppose, too. "This bill will cost us millions and we will be forced to cut jobs."
I suppose to corollary question is -- how come it hasn't been repealed or (repeatedly) gutted with exceptions for specific industries, especially automotive or other industries that got beat up by foreign manufacturers?
Tim Cook is a supply chain expert and business manager. AFAIK he has no claim to expertise in terms of politics or political issues.
It's one more person who knows something about X, trying to claim it gives them expertise in Y.
Tim Cook as a human should get the same amount of media attention that the rest of humanity gets, ie, near zero unless you happen to be the eponymous man in the street at the right time.
Tim Cook gets access to the media because he is Apple's CEO, which means that Tim Cook "the human" gets a much better access to the media to broadcast his personal political platform.
Also, I don't think for a fucking second Tim Cook says anything to the media that either hasn't been vetted by a half-dozen lawyers and publicists, personal and Apple-employed. Some of what he says may actually reflect his personal opinions, but it's not like he's just freelancing his own personal opinions in front of a microphone.
IT is seen as an overhead expense and it results in a lot of pressure to keep costs down.
I think an unseen contributor to this is that IT vendors (hardware, software, etc) too often label needless churn as innovation in order to collect more revenue, resulting in a lot of business process redesign to manage the changes imposed on them by vendors.
How much will it cost business to adapt to Windows 10? New rollout and patching processes and systems, software compatibility testing and possibly even software changes to work with it, employee training, and so on. All because Microsoft wants to up their licensing revenue or jump on the touch screen bandwagon?
At the end of the day it doesn't surprise me that non-technology business leaders are reluctant to spend on IT. They know they're being taken for a ride by their vendors from a business perspective. Many wind up pinching too many pennies, but a lot of times it looks to me not like a spending problem but just not being able to chase the tail of IT "innovation" fast enough.
I think it's just annoying that you lose access to what had been a working app. I don't quite understand why Apple had to force 64 bit compatibility. I suspect a lot of it had something to do with just a technical excuse to purge old apps.
I keep thinking that eventually security patching will be a legal requirement, but I can't quite decide whether it will go so far as to require vendors to make security patches available for free.
I'm sure companies would howl and try to block such a requirement, but there may be counter-arguments that say you can't compel people to install patches that they can't afford, either, so any requirement to be patched probably would coincide with some level of free security patch access.
It's obvious that fees for patches are just cheap ways to push up profits, especially firmware patches (I'd argue 1/3 or more of all hardware reaches retirement with as-shipped firmware).
Non-security bug fixes are more compelling as fee-for-service, although only in as much as vendors play games with version numbering and features, blurring the line between fixing what they sold you that doesn't work and adding a feature you didn't pay for up front.