Well, I think the reality is that Xi isn't just one man, but more likely the leader of a CCP faction. Just like a corporate CEO is a figurehead, but really is actually an entire team of people surrounding him because one person simply doesn't have the bandwidth to run a large corporation single-handed.
My only guess -- because really, they're all guesses because nobody *really* knows, is that Xi and his faction actually believe that China has a set of existential risks to the nation, state and party. I'd wager the corruption issue in China may be way worse than even the few sensational stories that reach the Western media.
The Chinese economy has grown enormously in the last 20 years and has significantly corrupted a lot of party leaders in addition to enriching a lot of non-party people who turn bribe and further party corruption. This has all kinds of problems for China, including potentially macroeconomic-scale risks to the continued functioning of the economy. Chinese debt problems have been widely reported, including the Government takeover of Anbang recently.
Anyway, it may be that the CCP (or at least the less-than-totally-corrupted part) realizes this and also realizes there's no way to reverse these trends without allowing a strong leader of the CCP a free hand and unlimited time to root out corruption and fix the many problems they face. The CCP may fear the house of cards collapsing due to current issues more than they fear some destabilizing political transition in the future, either a normal planned transition after 2 terms or what would happen after Xi died and a power vacuum was formed.
I have no idea if Xi really is what he says he is in terms of being anti-corruption or not. Maybe he's just the leader of one corrupt faction trying to keep in control of all corruption. I guess it boils down to the fact that it's probably not knowable, due to lack of knowable information and the cultural translation problems of trying to understand Chinese politics in Western terms.
There's obviously a lot to criticize in Chinese government and politics, but the CCP's 2 term limit was actually a reasonable way of signaling that while the party wasn't willing to give up their monopoly on control they also recognized the risks and danger of cult-of-personality and dynasty and was actually interested in a rational leadership selection process.
"We're totalitarians, but its a system designed to prevent any one person from becoming dictator for life".
The fact that they are scrapping it is interesting. I'm torn between this being a naked power grab by Xi because he wants to be dictator for life, or of this is some kind of recognition that China has many problems of an existential risk nature and that they need Xi.
But it's not clear if this is because those threats (like corruption) are real or if Xi has just convinced them they are real and he's the only guy who can deal with them.
He was obviously a "good" businessman (as in made a lot of money and dealt with a lot of competitors) and he had some technical chops early on, but what makes Gates an expert on much *now*?
I'm not even sure he has more than just a slightly better-informed opinion on many things anymore.
Once the grid gets stingy and/or unreliable, people/corps with resources will just start abandoning it in favor of their own local capacity. They won't be told they can't have air conditioning.
"Managing the grid" will just boil down to middle class and lower classes being blacked out because they don't have their own power sources or can't afford super-peak rates.
I predict the desire to enforce conservation (blackouts, brownouts, high cost rates) to meet renewable power goals will be a major political issue and probably a lot of backlash.
With washers, it may be another key part besides the software/electronics.
My Kenmore front loader from 2004 had a warranty replacement on its control board and the technician said the only part I had to worry about was the drum bearing. He said if those quit under the initial warranty, they just replace the entire unit because the bearing itself is too expensive and there's no supply of them. Even with an extended warranty, they red tag the unit and only offer a pro-rated refund towards a new washer.
On the good side, I have heard from a boating forum I read that there is a small company that actually will refurbish analog and control boards for some fridges and washer/dryers. You have to open the device up, remove the board and mail it to them to have this done. The boat folks like it because in some models the washer/dryer and fridge are basically stuck. Due to some dumb engineering decisions that equipment is too big to remove and replacements require creating an opening in a bulkhead to bring in replacements.
I agree that more money could make for better public transit in theory, but in practice there never is enough money to build better systems and maintain them adequately. The NYC 2nd Avenue line alone is close to $10 billion once it's complete.
In my own city, surface light rail is running around $1 billion per line to build. There's no way this can be expanded fast enough or extensively enough to really get people to quit cars (or calling Uber) in any kind of future.
I don't think "city planning" solves this problem except on century-scale timelines and with extremely aggressive planning changes that basically depopulate the suburbs, build extensive mass transit (20 billion? More?) and manage to convince the private sector to totally re-construct the housing for 2-3 million people.
Until then I think mass transit is at best a stop gap solution and at worst a pipe dream, solving the last decade's transit problems at tomorrow's prices.
There is no "community as a whole", only a collection of individual user benefits which only appears in aggregate to be "the community as a whole." For the most part people defining the benefits to the community as a whole are just pushing a specific agenda that they think actually benefits everyone more or less equally.
I guess what I'm referring to is digging into every single patch to try to figure out what the fuck it actually patches. And if you *do* get some kind of detail on what a specific patch actually fixes, is the information meaningful enough to decide whether you *should* apply this specific patch (relevance, risk, etc)?
Is it easier or harder now with so many vendors releasing "rollup" patches which contain multiple patches, some of which are all-inclusive and some of which require some previous rollup installed? Now picking and choosing specific patches is more or less out the door.
And then there's the question of whether the vendor even makes it easy/hard to have any control over patches, automatically just giving you patch(es) in some form or other. And of course let's not forget support -- will the vendor provide any support if you are missing patches or do you have to have them all installed anyway?
I guess what I see this boiling down to is "Who cares?" Install all the latest available patches and hope for the best. Only a full-time dedicated patch admin for a narrow product silo has the time/energy/understanding to break down the compound patching environment into something coherent and also probably is also the only one to have a complex patch management system that gives them granular control over which patches get installed and which don't.
Also, based on the last few years of software quality we're all beta testers anyway. Pretty much everything released is beta quality and hits true stability and reliability just about the point the new version is released and taming its worst initial bugs.
I read where Redbox was selling the codes at the kiosk in addition to renting the discs. Disney sells the combo for $20. Redbox makes $100 renting the disc (I made that up, theoretical lifetime income from a specific disc) and another $8 from selling the code.
Disney is super torqued that Redbox is making $80 (rental - disc cost) off the rental -- that's 4 discs Disney didn't sell and they don't see any of the $80 in rental income. Insult to injury is Redbox selling the codes as well, *another* $8 Redbox makes that Disney doesn't see a dime of. The download code is just an extra irritant, not the primary economic issue.
TL;DR is that Disney is doesn't want anyone watching one of their movies without getting a cut of what every viewer had to pay to watch it. Disney just wants to be paid every time someone watches a Disney movie. The idea that someone can beat the system -- pay Disney for their content *and* then make money off it without paying Disney any more money is what makes them nuts.
IIRC, VHS tapes were all $80 at first release to "solve" this very problem -- it was a video rental tax where they expected VHS rental places to buy the VHS for $80 knowing full well that the store would rent it a bunch of times and make back the $80 cost. The $80 was the studio's cut of future rentals.
I assume that the collapse of 98% of the rental market has altered that model and discs now go on sale at more reasonable prices at initial release because nobody will buy them at the initial high price and studios like Disney no longer have a mechanism for extracting rental profits from rental businesses.
I agree with you about the headaches of people with too-large carry-on bags, but it ain't the business travelers who are doing it.
My wife has been Delta Platinum and/or Diamond status for several years and she pretty much has to buy a new bag every 18 months because she wears them out. If you have a very recent better bag like a Travelpro it is for sure meeting the airlines size requirements.
Plus the business travelers for the most part understand the system and hate the people who abuse it or stretch the limits because they know it makes everything slow down.
Based on my observations the worst travelers are the semi-entitled frequent leisure travelers, and often women. Not only do they have a max-size carry-on, they have a gigantic "personal item" shoulder bag which neither fits well under the seat nor efficiently in the overhead bin, which is often a kind of Russian nesting doll with ANOTHER, more realistic sized personal item shoved into it, too. When they have this, the stealth carry-on goes under the seat (snacks, magazines, laptop, etc) and the clunky bag takes up an entire carry on slot in the overhead bin, along with their max-size roll-aboard). They appear to be well-off and have an attitude that they have it all figured out and the rules don't apply to them, which I suspect extends to other spheres of their lives.
The actual infrequent leisure travelers aren't that bad. They're baffled by security (don't get behind them!) but generally they check their bags because they don't *own* a recent bag that could be carried on board, they just have the one suitcase suitable for a week or a weekend. They're slower, but not inconsiderate.
IMHO, it's debatable whether "suitcases" should be brought on board by anyone. Allowing it only invites abuse of the sizing rules. What the airlines should do is make everyone check their bag (1st free) and for people who REALLY don't want to, convert the first row of coach seats into a floor-to-ceiling baggage locker and SELL access to it for $$$. People who REALLY want their luggage in the cabin can have it then and it will be reasonably stacked and accessible when they walk off the plane. The entitled fuckwits won't pay for this and so their 2.5 carry-ons won't be a problem for everyone else.
But this whole debate is pointless because the airlines don't give a shit except about profit.
But is it a meaningful distinction? If you can't deal with your life circumstances because they induce a depression that disrupts your coping skills is it really that much different than a neurochemical imbalance which disrupts your life circumstances?
I suspect they will be able to get away with at least a 25% price hike because they already vary prices. I don't think I've paid a consistent price for the same ride from my house to the airport. Some some aspect of a price increase, especially over a period of months will just be invisible unless you're a real regular off-peak Uber rider.
I also think the utility value of ordering up a ride and actually getting it within about 10 minutes is as valuable as the ride itself. Before Uber, calling an actual cab in my town was a fucking crap shoot even if you called 24 hours in advance and made an appointment. I'm willing to pay a premium for that aspect by itself.
Exactly. It's like me showing up at work at 10 am, doing half the work and telling the boss this is my new, lower cost labor service. If he would like to continue enjoying the same old labor service, the new price is 20% more than the old price.
Productivity has grown substantially since the 1970s but wages have remained stagnant.
I just don't believe anyone who tells me that MORE productivity growth is somehow a predictor for wage growth. Perhaps there is some mythical level of productivity growth that overwhelm's capital's ability to capture it all, but I kind of doubt it.
I think it's just frustrating nobody can seem to make decent money *and* provide a comprehensive video library (on disc OR streaming).
I had high hopes for Netflix's big push into content creation, but so far it's been lower quality than I had hoped. There are a few gems, but there's a lot of minor cable network level stuff, too.
I just don't understand how or why the collective back catalog of motion pictures is so darn hard to view at any price. I realize there are the usually greed-based licensing issues, but IMHO the catalog owners and potential residual earners are making much LESS off those titles than they would had they come up with a much more generous licensing system.
I'm not arguing against RAID, just that if you really want it RAID HBAs have a lot of appeal.
Disk densities and shared storage have kind of nuked the external storage shelf market, which I agree was kind nuisance prone with its many cables and connectors.
The one good thing external cabinets had going for them was some portability between attached hosts. I have had situations where a host died and I had the ability to move the storage to another host's HBA RAID controller and pretty easily get the data active again.
It would be nice to see ESXi support software RAID. The fact they have embedded so much of vSAN into the kernel says to me they probably could do software RAID.
I would guess that Netflix has closed a lot of distribution centers for discs and has drastically changed their disc acquisition and replacement rates, which results in a smaller number of discs available to remaining disc customers.
IMHO, the dream was the entire movie universe was available -- you were no longer limited by the local stores limited inventory. Now I guess that's over.
I'm not sure the HBA is really the problem. I mean, you want I/O offload to some other CPU for RAID and logical disk management and some kind of physical disk channel multiplexing.
There's no reason these things are inherently slow unless you're buying low end stuff. Obviously you'll get better raw I/O with direct NVMe off the PCIe bus to the CPU, but as soon as you get into RAID it gets more complicated. Either you use software RAID at the OS level or you have to add a RAID controller to your PCIe bus. The latter is actually worse than a HBA IMHO because the controller and the drives sharing the common PCIe bus slows the whole bus down for traffic that only the RAID controller needs to see.
With a HBA, you just write blocks to one device on your bus and you let the HBA write those to disk on a separate bus. There's no reason an HBA couldn't have its own PCIe bus for NVMe drives.
The reason I'm skeptical we'll see anything other than hot-swap NVMe on the main system bus is that storage seems to be lurching towards hyperconverged where you wouldn't have more than about 12 drives on a physical system anyway and it's all software RAID.
I think there is an evaporating market for device-dense storage devices.
My guess is the broad benefit is determining new ways of identifying good hires.
The traditional signaling methods for competency revolve around big-ticket University degrees, narrow social and employment networks and so on. In a future where we realistically may need to greatly expand technology hiring there's only so many MIT/Stanford/Caltech/etc graduates to be had, regardless of diversity factors.
In many ways, these companies need to break out of the traditional signaling factors of good hiring prospects and look for other factors which may lead to long-term hiring value.
Diversity candidates now represent a minefield. For reasons beyond their control, they've generally had lower-profile education, work experience and don't participate in the social networks associated with finding "good" people. Many of them probably are legitimately less valuable, but probably not "most" and finding the good talent isn't easy and traditional hiring practices just bulk discriminate against all of them.
If you can find a good way to identify quality candidates, you could use it on ANY hiring pool, including white males.
It sounds dumb, but maybe they've worked out some formula for finding diversity hires or filtering out *good* diversity hires. I'd imagine the latter would be very useful and probably controversial.
My guess is that one challenge with wanting to do diversity hiring is that many diversity hire categories may be broad but shallow talent pools. Not that the categories have dumb people, but general social forces may result in them having weaker educational backgrounds or work histories. Filtering through this to get good candidates when conventional signaling metrics (schools, work history, etc) aren't sufficient would really be a meaningful HR trade secret and probably broadly beneficial for finding high-quality prospects in all backgrounds, as it's not like every MIT grad is a perfect hire and it's not like IBM couldn't cut its compensation load by hiring really talented people not demanding deep six figures because they had high-end degrees.
And no doubt highly controversial -- you can just see the headline "IBM rejects more $diversity_category candidates than it hires" when the reality may be that they are hiring well above the industry rate. It may even open themselves to lawsuits when $diversity_group feels like they were filtered out because of their group membership rather than actually being subjected to a superior hiring methodology that ignores the kinds of traditional qualification signalling. Or the reverse, white/male candidates being upset because their part-time state college degree was a rejection standard but some black woman got hired because they had an algorithm that looked differently at her.
Then there's just generally sensitive information, like IBM has bad discrimination patterns or whatever.
Those are the reasons you chose from the parent's list?
"Safe" decorations? You're kidding, right? What does that mean? Using silicone adhesive to glue everything down and making sure anything on a wall uses a structural grade lag bolt into a stud?
Casket integrity? I thought the entire point of putting bodies into the ground was ashes, to ashes, dust to dust -- are caskets actually supposed to be permanent capsules that will last an eternity in the Earth? Will future generations mine graveyards for stainless steel and other corrosion resistant metals?
I'd bet it'd be pretty hard to buy material suitable for upholstery that wasn't already flame retardant, especially if you did it for a living. You'd be inclined to buy from suppliers oriented towards that market and I would imagine that upholstery generally is made for the new furniture market and made to fit the existing requirements for flame retardant standards, so you'd probably be getting that no matter what. Plus do you know how many people reupholster their own furniture? We have done chair covers and one couch on our own and we're not even handy. I have no idea if we met any flame retardant standards.
Of all the things mentioned in the OP's list, pawnbroker and locksmith make the most sense to some degree. Pawnbrokers deal in used stuff and are linked to fences, burglars and other thieves as instant markets for their thefts. Locksmiths make sense because they deal in security, and it's not hard to see that position exploited for criminal purposes (although there's a counter-argument where you want the guy with the most theft experience selling you locks).
I'm wondering if they hired new architectural integrity enforcers to prevent post-its and other ad-hoc field deviations from the new design or whether they just re-tasked existing HR shills for this job.
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Well, I think the reality is that Xi isn't just one man, but more likely the leader of a CCP faction. Just like a corporate CEO is a figurehead, but really is actually an entire team of people surrounding him because one person simply doesn't have the bandwidth to run a large corporation single-handed.
My only guess -- because really, they're all guesses because nobody *really* knows, is that Xi and his faction actually believe that China has a set of existential risks to the nation, state and party. I'd wager the corruption issue in China may be way worse than even the few sensational stories that reach the Western media.
The Chinese economy has grown enormously in the last 20 years and has significantly corrupted a lot of party leaders in addition to enriching a lot of non-party people who turn bribe and further party corruption. This has all kinds of problems for China, including potentially macroeconomic-scale risks to the continued functioning of the economy. Chinese debt problems have been widely reported, including the Government takeover of Anbang recently.
Anyway, it may be that the CCP (or at least the less-than-totally-corrupted part) realizes this and also realizes there's no way to reverse these trends without allowing a strong leader of the CCP a free hand and unlimited time to root out corruption and fix the many problems they face. The CCP may fear the house of cards collapsing due to current issues more than they fear some destabilizing political transition in the future, either a normal planned transition after 2 terms or what would happen after Xi died and a power vacuum was formed.
I have no idea if Xi really is what he says he is in terms of being anti-corruption or not. Maybe he's just the leader of one corrupt faction trying to keep in control of all corruption. I guess it boils down to the fact that it's probably not knowable, due to lack of knowable information and the cultural translation problems of trying to understand Chinese politics in Western terms.
There's obviously a lot to criticize in Chinese government and politics, but the CCP's 2 term limit was actually a reasonable way of signaling that while the party wasn't willing to give up their monopoly on control they also recognized the risks and danger of cult-of-personality and dynasty and was actually interested in a rational leadership selection process.
"We're totalitarians, but its a system designed to prevent any one person from becoming dictator for life".
The fact that they are scrapping it is interesting. I'm torn between this being a naked power grab by Xi because he wants to be dictator for life, or of this is some kind of recognition that China has many problems of an existential risk nature and that they need Xi.
But it's not clear if this is because those threats (like corruption) are real or if Xi has just convinced them they are real and he's the only guy who can deal with them.
He was obviously a "good" businessman (as in made a lot of money and dealt with a lot of competitors) and he had some technical chops early on, but what makes Gates an expert on much *now*?
I'm not even sure he has more than just a slightly better-informed opinion on many things anymore.
On the other hand, I would love to have my own starship.
Which implies another laptop, doesn't it? I mean, you can't run a starship with just one laptop..
Once the grid gets stingy and/or unreliable, people/corps with resources will just start abandoning it in favor of their own local capacity. They won't be told they can't have air conditioning.
"Managing the grid" will just boil down to middle class and lower classes being blacked out because they don't have their own power sources or can't afford super-peak rates.
I predict the desire to enforce conservation (blackouts, brownouts, high cost rates) to meet renewable power goals will be a major political issue and probably a lot of backlash.
With washers, it may be another key part besides the software/electronics.
My Kenmore front loader from 2004 had a warranty replacement on its control board and the technician said the only part I had to worry about was the drum bearing. He said if those quit under the initial warranty, they just replace the entire unit because the bearing itself is too expensive and there's no supply of them. Even with an extended warranty, they red tag the unit and only offer a pro-rated refund towards a new washer.
On the good side, I have heard from a boating forum I read that there is a small company that actually will refurbish analog and control boards for some fridges and washer/dryers. You have to open the device up, remove the board and mail it to them to have this done. The boat folks like it because in some models the washer/dryer and fridge are basically stuck. Due to some dumb engineering decisions that equipment is too big to remove and replacements require creating an opening in a bulkhead to bring in replacements.
Isn't that a paradox, or at least enforcement is paradoxical?
I mean, if it's secret, they can't bust you for it because they don't know about it.
If they DO bust you for it, it means the compartment is no longer secret, so it's also not illegal.
I agree that more money could make for better public transit in theory, but in practice there never is enough money to build better systems and maintain them adequately. The NYC 2nd Avenue line alone is close to $10 billion once it's complete.
In my own city, surface light rail is running around $1 billion per line to build. There's no way this can be expanded fast enough or extensively enough to really get people to quit cars (or calling Uber) in any kind of future.
I don't think "city planning" solves this problem except on century-scale timelines and with extremely aggressive planning changes that basically depopulate the suburbs, build extensive mass transit (20 billion? More?) and manage to convince the private sector to totally re-construct the housing for 2-3 million people.
Until then I think mass transit is at best a stop gap solution and at worst a pipe dream, solving the last decade's transit problems at tomorrow's prices.
There is no "community as a whole", only a collection of individual user benefits which only appears in aggregate to be "the community as a whole." For the most part people defining the benefits to the community as a whole are just pushing a specific agenda that they think actually benefits everyone more or less equally.
I guess what I'm referring to is digging into every single patch to try to figure out what the fuck it actually patches. And if you *do* get some kind of detail on what a specific patch actually fixes, is the information meaningful enough to decide whether you *should* apply this specific patch (relevance, risk, etc)?
Is it easier or harder now with so many vendors releasing "rollup" patches which contain multiple patches, some of which are all-inclusive and some of which require some previous rollup installed? Now picking and choosing specific patches is more or less out the door.
And then there's the question of whether the vendor even makes it easy/hard to have any control over patches, automatically just giving you patch(es) in some form or other. And of course let's not forget support -- will the vendor provide any support if you are missing patches or do you have to have them all installed anyway?
I guess what I see this boiling down to is "Who cares?" Install all the latest available patches and hope for the best. Only a full-time dedicated patch admin for a narrow product silo has the time/energy/understanding to break down the compound patching environment into something coherent and also probably is also the only one to have a complex patch management system that gives them granular control over which patches get installed and which don't.
Also, based on the last few years of software quality we're all beta testers anyway. Pretty much everything released is beta quality and hits true stability and reliability just about the point the new version is released and taming its worst initial bugs.
I read where Redbox was selling the codes at the kiosk in addition to renting the discs. Disney sells the combo for $20. Redbox makes $100 renting the disc (I made that up, theoretical lifetime income from a specific disc) and another $8 from selling the code.
Disney is super torqued that Redbox is making $80 (rental - disc cost) off the rental -- that's 4 discs Disney didn't sell and they don't see any of the $80 in rental income. Insult to injury is Redbox selling the codes as well, *another* $8 Redbox makes that Disney doesn't see a dime of. The download code is just an extra irritant, not the primary economic issue.
TL;DR is that Disney is doesn't want anyone watching one of their movies without getting a cut of what every viewer had to pay to watch it. Disney just wants to be paid every time someone watches a Disney movie. The idea that someone can beat the system -- pay Disney for their content *and* then make money off it without paying Disney any more money is what makes them nuts.
IIRC, VHS tapes were all $80 at first release to "solve" this very problem -- it was a video rental tax where they expected VHS rental places to buy the VHS for $80 knowing full well that the store would rent it a bunch of times and make back the $80 cost. The $80 was the studio's cut of future rentals.
I assume that the collapse of 98% of the rental market has altered that model and discs now go on sale at more reasonable prices at initial release because nobody will buy them at the initial high price and studios like Disney no longer have a mechanism for extracting rental profits from rental businesses.
I agree with you about the headaches of people with too-large carry-on bags, but it ain't the business travelers who are doing it.
My wife has been Delta Platinum and/or Diamond status for several years and she pretty much has to buy a new bag every 18 months because she wears them out. If you have a very recent better bag like a Travelpro it is for sure meeting the airlines size requirements.
Plus the business travelers for the most part understand the system and hate the people who abuse it or stretch the limits because they know it makes everything slow down.
Based on my observations the worst travelers are the semi-entitled frequent leisure travelers, and often women. Not only do they have a max-size carry-on, they have a gigantic "personal item" shoulder bag which neither fits well under the seat nor efficiently in the overhead bin, which is often a kind of Russian nesting doll with ANOTHER, more realistic sized personal item shoved into it, too. When they have this, the stealth carry-on goes under the seat (snacks, magazines, laptop, etc) and the clunky bag takes up an entire carry on slot in the overhead bin, along with their max-size roll-aboard). They appear to be well-off and have an attitude that they have it all figured out and the rules don't apply to them, which I suspect extends to other spheres of their lives.
The actual infrequent leisure travelers aren't that bad. They're baffled by security (don't get behind them!) but generally they check their bags because they don't *own* a recent bag that could be carried on board, they just have the one suitcase suitable for a week or a weekend. They're slower, but not inconsiderate.
IMHO, it's debatable whether "suitcases" should be brought on board by anyone. Allowing it only invites abuse of the sizing rules. What the airlines should do is make everyone check their bag (1st free) and for people who REALLY don't want to, convert the first row of coach seats into a floor-to-ceiling baggage locker and SELL access to it for $$$. People who REALLY want their luggage in the cabin can have it then and it will be reasonably stacked and accessible when they walk off the plane. The entitled fuckwits won't pay for this and so their 2.5 carry-ons won't be a problem for everyone else.
But this whole debate is pointless because the airlines don't give a shit except about profit.
But is it a meaningful distinction? If you can't deal with your life circumstances because they induce a depression that disrupts your coping skills is it really that much different than a neurochemical imbalance which disrupts your life circumstances?
The PC makers are just discovering that they're not really selling hardware to users, they're actually selling data consumption to cellular providers.
I suspect they will be able to get away with at least a 25% price hike because they already vary prices. I don't think I've paid a consistent price for the same ride from my house to the airport. Some some aspect of a price increase, especially over a period of months will just be invisible unless you're a real regular off-peak Uber rider.
I also think the utility value of ordering up a ride and actually getting it within about 10 minutes is as valuable as the ride itself. Before Uber, calling an actual cab in my town was a fucking crap shoot even if you called 24 hours in advance and made an appointment. I'm willing to pay a premium for that aspect by itself.
Exactly. It's like me showing up at work at 10 am, doing half the work and telling the boss this is my new, lower cost labor service. If he would like to continue enjoying the same old labor service, the new price is 20% more than the old price.
Productivity has grown substantially since the 1970s but wages have remained stagnant.
I just don't believe anyone who tells me that MORE productivity growth is somehow a predictor for wage growth. Perhaps there is some mythical level of productivity growth that overwhelm's capital's ability to capture it all, but I kind of doubt it.
I think it's just frustrating nobody can seem to make decent money *and* provide a comprehensive video library (on disc OR streaming).
I had high hopes for Netflix's big push into content creation, but so far it's been lower quality than I had hoped. There are a few gems, but there's a lot of minor cable network level stuff, too.
I just don't understand how or why the collective back catalog of motion pictures is so darn hard to view at any price. I realize there are the usually greed-based licensing issues, but IMHO the catalog owners and potential residual earners are making much LESS off those titles than they would had they come up with a much more generous licensing system.
I'm not arguing against RAID, just that if you really want it RAID HBAs have a lot of appeal.
Disk densities and shared storage have kind of nuked the external storage shelf market, which I agree was kind nuisance prone with its many cables and connectors.
The one good thing external cabinets had going for them was some portability between attached hosts. I have had situations where a host died and I had the ability to move the storage to another host's HBA RAID controller and pretty easily get the data active again.
It would be nice to see ESXi support software RAID. The fact they have embedded so much of vSAN into the kernel says to me they probably could do software RAID.
I would guess that Netflix has closed a lot of distribution centers for discs and has drastically changed their disc acquisition and replacement rates, which results in a smaller number of discs available to remaining disc customers.
IMHO, the dream was the entire movie universe was available -- you were no longer limited by the local stores limited inventory. Now I guess that's over.
I'm not sure the HBA is really the problem. I mean, you want I/O offload to some other CPU for RAID and logical disk management and some kind of physical disk channel multiplexing.
There's no reason these things are inherently slow unless you're buying low end stuff. Obviously you'll get better raw I/O with direct NVMe off the PCIe bus to the CPU, but as soon as you get into RAID it gets more complicated. Either you use software RAID at the OS level or you have to add a RAID controller to your PCIe bus. The latter is actually worse than a HBA IMHO because the controller and the drives sharing the common PCIe bus slows the whole bus down for traffic that only the RAID controller needs to see.
With a HBA, you just write blocks to one device on your bus and you let the HBA write those to disk on a separate bus. There's no reason an HBA couldn't have its own PCIe bus for NVMe drives.
The reason I'm skeptical we'll see anything other than hot-swap NVMe on the main system bus is that storage seems to be lurching towards hyperconverged where you wouldn't have more than about 12 drives on a physical system anyway and it's all software RAID.
I think there is an evaporating market for device-dense storage devices.
My guess is the broad benefit is determining new ways of identifying good hires.
The traditional signaling methods for competency revolve around big-ticket University degrees, narrow social and employment networks and so on. In a future where we realistically may need to greatly expand technology hiring there's only so many MIT/Stanford/Caltech/etc graduates to be had, regardless of diversity factors.
In many ways, these companies need to break out of the traditional signaling factors of good hiring prospects and look for other factors which may lead to long-term hiring value.
Diversity candidates now represent a minefield. For reasons beyond their control, they've generally had lower-profile education, work experience and don't participate in the social networks associated with finding "good" people. Many of them probably are legitimately less valuable, but probably not "most" and finding the good talent isn't easy and traditional hiring practices just bulk discriminate against all of them.
If you can find a good way to identify quality candidates, you could use it on ANY hiring pool, including white males.
It sounds dumb, but maybe they've worked out some formula for finding diversity hires or filtering out *good* diversity hires. I'd imagine the latter would be very useful and probably controversial.
My guess is that one challenge with wanting to do diversity hiring is that many diversity hire categories may be broad but shallow talent pools. Not that the categories have dumb people, but general social forces may result in them having weaker educational backgrounds or work histories. Filtering through this to get good candidates when conventional signaling metrics (schools, work history, etc) aren't sufficient would really be a meaningful HR trade secret and probably broadly beneficial for finding high-quality prospects in all backgrounds, as it's not like every MIT grad is a perfect hire and it's not like IBM couldn't cut its compensation load by hiring really talented people not demanding deep six figures because they had high-end degrees.
And no doubt highly controversial -- you can just see the headline "IBM rejects more $diversity_category candidates than it hires" when the reality may be that they are hiring well above the industry rate. It may even open themselves to lawsuits when $diversity_group feels like they were filtered out because of their group membership rather than actually being subjected to a superior hiring methodology that ignores the kinds of traditional qualification signalling. Or the reverse, white/male candidates being upset because their part-time state college degree was a rejection standard but some black woman got hired because they had an algorithm that looked differently at her.
Then there's just generally sensitive information, like IBM has bad discrimination patterns or whatever.
Those are the reasons you chose from the parent's list?
"Safe" decorations? You're kidding, right? What does that mean? Using silicone adhesive to glue everything down and making sure anything on a wall uses a structural grade lag bolt into a stud?
Casket integrity? I thought the entire point of putting bodies into the ground was ashes, to ashes, dust to dust -- are caskets actually supposed to be permanent capsules that will last an eternity in the Earth? Will future generations mine graveyards for stainless steel and other corrosion resistant metals?
I'd bet it'd be pretty hard to buy material suitable for upholstery that wasn't already flame retardant, especially if you did it for a living. You'd be inclined to buy from suppliers oriented towards that market and I would imagine that upholstery generally is made for the new furniture market and made to fit the existing requirements for flame retardant standards, so you'd probably be getting that no matter what. Plus do you know how many people reupholster their own furniture? We have done chair covers and one couch on our own and we're not even handy. I have no idea if we met any flame retardant standards.
Of all the things mentioned in the OP's list, pawnbroker and locksmith make the most sense to some degree. Pawnbrokers deal in used stuff and are linked to fences, burglars and other thieves as instant markets for their thefts. Locksmiths make sense because they deal in security, and it's not hard to see that position exploited for criminal purposes (although there's a counter-argument where you want the guy with the most theft experience selling you locks).
I'm wondering if they hired new architectural integrity enforcers to prevent post-its and other ad-hoc field deviations from the new design or whether they just re-tasked existing HR shills for this job.