My guess that the CEO and the other top officials (CIO, CSO) probably mutually negotiated an orchestrated exit strategy. The CEO was probably necessary to grease the skids of the exit plans for the CIO & CSO, while the CEO's golden parachute only required pre-approval by the board and could be deployed at any time.
So in a mood of mutual defense and at the risk of mutual destruction, they coordinated a strategy that left them all leaving with maximum exit packages and minimizing personal liability. They kind of beat the prison's dilemma scenario, where one of them could have potentially flipped on the other, but they were rational enough to recognize it made no sense to throw accusations and just pay everybody off.
I'd imagine that speeches were given to the board that all of it was in the best interest of the corporation because fighting their packages would have resulted in turmoil and damaging accusations of negligence.
This only works as propaganda to the extent that people already believe it enough to have it reinforce their own perceptions.
If this is a Russian "campaign", it's only a campaign to exploit the gap between the false narrative official discourse and the everyday reality of most Americans. The false narrative of official discourse is that Americans are racist -- uniformly biased against non-whites -- and the problems of African Americans are almost exclusively the result of this racism and not of any widespread social problems they contribute to.
The every day reality is that most Americans aren't uniformly racist against all races. If they were, millions of marginally literate, marginally English capable Mexicans wouldn't have had fantastic success in getting hired for jobs, millions of South Asians couldn't have been imported into Corporate American to staff IT departments, and people like Satya Nadella couldn't wind up in charge of one of the largest corporations in America and the world. The level of active "globalism" in the US just wouldn't work if the people making decisions were racist and the employees they had to work with were racist.
Americans do hold racial biases towards African Americans specifically, but this is largely not the cause it's given credit for, but an effect of their everyday interactions in most cities with the large plurality of poor and criminally inclined African Americans. And you can't talk about that reality without blaming white racism for it and freeing African Americans from most all responsibility for it.
As long as we continue to push the phony narrative of "racism" rather than "Americans don't like many African Americans", the propaganda will work. Once we acknowledge that white Americans are generally racially tolerant EXCEPT for African Americans, we will start to acknowledge the specific problems African Americans have (many of which are structural but not racist) and possibly get around to helping them. Once that happens, then the propaganda of racism won't really work.
Project managers that don't understand the details of what they're managing, but want to manage the details. We're on our second project manager in about 4 years and she's great with clients and very personable but she doesn't know anything about the technology we implement.
So when a project has complications and I explain them to here, I can either waste my breath explaining the details of the problem and the details of the underlying technology and why the problem is a problem, or I can just tell her there's a problem. Neither one really helps us.
The other one I would add is layering in too much project management process, too many conference calls, too much forced communication. I have been on a project kickoff call with a client where we literally spent 20 minutes discussing that I would be working on a daily basis with the client and then have her ask if the client wanted daily conference call updates. Most of the time the client says they're not necessary but sometimes they agree to it without realizing it (and then stop after the 2nd time) and I always log that time towards overhead.
The real apocalypse is when all of this becomes a practical necessity and we lose about 75% of the productivity gains from computer automation.
I guess the new jobs will be in the form of a new steno pool. Millennials can re-enter the data on spreadsheets and documents in a clean-room environment. People will still "exchange" documents, they just won't realize they're being transcribed in between.
I don't know how much fractional value you can mine from a single session, but assuming you can build out the distributed computing network even a fraction of a cent multiplied across millions of users starts to be real money.
Getting $0.01 of value out of a million users is still $10,000 per day.
Maybe that will explain the future of jobs, bureaucratic jobs built around administering the bureaucracy and enforcing the bureaucracy and then at set of companion jobs around evading the bureaucracy and demonstrating compliance with the bureaucracy.
That all of it could technically be automated won't matter, because interest factions will prevent the kind of transparency and access required for automation to be applied to the problems.
It will be a kind of weird, Terry Gilliam future of strange bureaucracies and indecipherable office jobs that defy automation not because the nature of the work isn't given to automation, but because the conceptual nature of the work isn't definable in a machine-capable syntax.
Have you ever worked in an office where it wasn't very clear that the people produced enough value in an economics sense to pay for their salaries? Like they're not actually doing much? I don't mean they just sit around all day and don't work but that the work itself didn't seem to make much sense.
I wonder if that's what the future of automation looks like -- humans creating nonsensical jobs because they need hierarchies where somebody is in charge and the work is kind of inexplicable, like a human version of middleware, transforming data from one system into data for another system. You'd think it could be automated itself, but it isn't, and the higher up you go in explaining what's happening the less it makes sense.
I can see a situation where it's "there is no legal reason to deny the request, but there likely should be".
Then they should turn to their various intra-governmental lobbyists and get the law changed. If there "should be" a reason for a law or a change in a law, then that's what the legislature is for -- to debate the merits of proposed laws and implement them.
The reason they don't is that FOIA really isn't that controversial as a matter of law and policy and the kind of minutia they want to micromanage isn't really practical and generally conflicts with the intent and spirit of the law. It's specific bureaucrats wanting to protect specific information for a specific reason, usually embarrassing to them and their little empires. Their requests would never make it through the legislature because they would be forced to explain and defend why these specific exemptions from FOIA make sense and are justified.
These court challenges by government entities really are a reprehensible attempt to achieve legislation through judicial action. What's depressing is that it's gotten momentum as a strategy because of the nexus of the government and courts each scratching each other's backs.
We really need a court like the German Bundesverfassungsgericht which can rule on Constitutional and similar issues, in which I would include FOIA requests. I think open government is so important we should go a step further and have officials who drag their feet or refuse legitimate FOIA requests should be held criminally liable.
Isn't the spectrum pretty much fully allocated? If Sprint merges with T-Mobile, will there be enough surplus spectrum for any new entrant to even build a network?
If I was the head of the FCC, I would seriously consider a mandate that wireless carries be forced to enter into a technology consortium and standardize their wireless radio systems for universal handset compatibility & portability. I think there's probably a "best" radio technical standard out there and that carrier technical "innovations" on the technology side are mostly oriented towards BS lock-in incompatibilities. Carriers would benefit from a uniform standard on tower equipment as it would result in less vendor specialty product lines.
With a mature oligopoly running the wireless networks, I would also mandate that carriers sell equal network access to MVNOs at a fixed small percentage over cost. This would allow MVNOs with leaner consumer operations to compete against carriers on more equal footing and force carriers to cut fat profit margins on consumers, or risk losing business to MVNOs operating on an equal-network basis. It would also allow for alternate business models for innovation on the mobile data side.
At the end of the day, the goal should be a standardized carrier side network that enabled competition and limited rent-seeking.
I can think of a couple of possible motivations (not a defense, but a potential explanation).
One, a lot of the "fair repair" movement sprung from the auto industry's use of proprietary diagnostic information. If you didn't have the factory diagnostics, which they only sold to dealers, you couldn't diagnose the problem. It's possible that the language in some state bills is generic enough to cover the auto case, but also cover the Apple case and cause Apple to make available a bunch of its proprietary software to third parties under the heading of "diagnostic equipment and software" that makes (more?) sense in an automotive context.
Two, it may force them to open up supply chains of parts to all comers. Apple may be reluctant to create the side business of selling a lot of parts to third parties, either constraining their own production capacity or just plain being expensive in terms of overhead.
Three, there may be ways which third party repair places can make claims of "OEM Approved Service Vendor" under these laws. The real definition is "we can buy parts from Apple", the marketing perception is "Apple approved repairs". Apple's brand image gets damaged by fly by night operators who do shitty work.
I'm not sure any of these are substantive, but I can see Apple worried about potentially broad "Fair Repair" bills that try to cover a wide swath of products, from cars to combines to industrial equipment to consumer products and find the vague language potentially unpalatable to their specific business.
I think Microsoft is giving away a certain amount of Azure to anybody who uses O365 in any significant way, and there's probably a lot of mixed infrastructure shops with both MS and Linux running. What better way to lure them in deeper?
At the end of the day, MS values them more as cloud resource consumers than software licensees.
It might even make sense for someone who can run a workload on any cloud stack to figure out how to arbitrage their workload where it's cheapest, gain cross-cloud redundancy, etc.
"Disruption" as a concept is pretty buzzwordy, but there's probably something to it in some markets (Netflix and movies, Amazon and retail, etc).
But I wonder if its starting to get a negative connotation because people are sick of the actual disruption caused by it?
I kind of wish the technology world would shut the fuck up and sit down for a few years and quit disrupting. Most of their disruptions are just a pain in the ass.
If sales of 8 are weak because "everyone" is waiting for the X, then Apple is kind of fucked because of their production ceiling.
Unless, of course, those stories that it's so supercalifragilisticexpialidocious they can't make enough of them are total bullshit to increase perceptions of rarity and exclusiveness.
The thesis is "Piracy has a displacement effect on legitimate sales."
The results could not find evidence that the thesis was true, with the limited exception of "recent top films".
They couldn't verify the thesis, so doesn't that mean the thesis is false? And even if the thesis is false, doesn't that at least strongly imply that its antithesis is true?
I think there's other ways of criticizing the study, like their measurement methodologies -- how do you measure the displacement effect of piracy? It sounds complicated and ambiguous.
Then there's questions of weighting, is the demonstrated displacement effect on "recent top films" representative of the majority of losses to copyright owners? If I sell 10 items but 2 items represent 80% of my profit, then any meaningful piracy of those 2 items has an outsize effect on my profit margin. But this goes beyond the scope of the study into the nebulous world of business models and accounting practices.
I'm not entirely sure it would *ruin* Treasuries to void select quantities for specific political reasons (versus other reasons for non-payment). One other reason they're popular is its a nearly bottomless well of liquidity that cash can be pumped into and back out of.
It's an open question whether it's seen as a bottomless pit of liquidity because we don't play games with our bonds or because the US economy and government is such a giant player that there are no other equal places to put cash.
The Euro was starting to look like an alternative, but between the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, the Brexit crisis, the Europeans just don't look quite as ready to provide that kind of economic stability. The Chinese can't quite be trusted, and after that there's nothing else large enough to sink excess cash into.
The sword of Damocles works because it hangs, not because it falls.
The *potential* for voiding Chinese holdings of US treasuries should be held over them not because it's effective in any small case, but because it's an existential threat against any large-scale Chinese sell-off or other manipulation based on them.
We could void them selectively if we wanted, but ultimately the market would just price in that risk and raise interest rates.
Right, but if you're packing these pod things onto any kind of space-sensitive carrying vehicle, you're going to need to pack them tight like actual shipping containers. I could probably live with no windows for a 24 hour flight or something, but say 2-3 days on a ship?
So, personalized carbon-fiber shipping containers for people, in a small enough standardized size they can slot into different prime mover configurations?
I think it sounds great, but I think you face the challenge where it makes sense to stack them densely like actual shipping containers but on long enough trips nobody wants to be sealed inside for the whole trip or lack some kind of window they can see out of.
Wouldn't a long-haul bus be a good candidate for a small generator? It's not 100% emission free, but it would be less emissions than a full-scale engine and could potentially add a lot to the battery range, plus it would seem like buses would have ample room to fit it.
Why does it constantly have to change? Most people can learn less than friendly user interfaces (have you seen some of the stuff low-paid clerical staff have to use in 3270 terminals?).
What's totally obnoxious is having the user interface redefined every year because some new crop of developers has decided they need to leave their mark and they have somehow determined that changing everything is necessary.
IMHO, GUI user interface changes not driven by significant changes in functionality really haven't improved ease of use. The original Macintosh or Windows needed user interface enhancements when they went full-on multitasking, but by and large those interfaces were probably as functional as the flat, widget-and-gesture-laden interfaces foisted on us as improvements now.
Touch-driven, small devices like smartphones benefit from UI changes (physical use case and interface technology), but I really don't think desktop PCs have benefited at all from the UI churn.
The NYT analysis was more detailed than that and actually ran through a lot of the numbers of a lot of cities to reach the Denver conclusion.
That being said, they mention the attention Denver already has from a lot of other tech companies so it may be too late, and that by the time Amazon decides Denver may already be on its way to too expensive, if it isn't already.
I think Amazon might want to consider some kind of place that isn't obviously up and coming and may be initially dismissed as either too small-town or too rust belt.
I think Amazon will have to recruit a lot out outside talent no matter where they site, and it may look more attractive to go someplace with a cheaper standard of living where the salaries may go further.
They may also get more bargains on real estate and buildings -- buying into an already growing market makes for even more competition for real estate resources.
Most of the time IT is in a gatekeeper position because they're held responsible for systems that malfunction due to overconsumption of their limited resources, yet at the same time requests for more resources go unheeded.
I've literally been in the meeting where I've been chided for poor performance due to oversubscription and also told no, we can't spend more money on it, either. What are you supposed to do besides ration resources when demand exceeds supply?
Well, they are all about 13 years old and learning, so I kind of expect them to pick the "rights" that make sense to 13 year olds.
And really, I think the general population has been shown in polls for years to find many existing constitutional rights to be unwanted or misunderstood.
The problem is it's kind of a logic trap, where you have to have a certain list of specific rights to have any of the others hold up.
My son is in 7th grade and the US History class is doing a unit on the Constitution.
The teacher gave them a list of 20 rights written in plain language, which included the bill of rights and some others not in the constitution (everyone is entitled to a free education) and they had to pick 10 from the list. I'm pretty sure fewer than half of the original bill of rights wound up in their aggregate list.
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My guess that the CEO and the other top officials (CIO, CSO) probably mutually negotiated an orchestrated exit strategy. The CEO was probably necessary to grease the skids of the exit plans for the CIO & CSO, while the CEO's golden parachute only required pre-approval by the board and could be deployed at any time.
So in a mood of mutual defense and at the risk of mutual destruction, they coordinated a strategy that left them all leaving with maximum exit packages and minimizing personal liability. They kind of beat the prison's dilemma scenario, where one of them could have potentially flipped on the other, but they were rational enough to recognize it made no sense to throw accusations and just pay everybody off.
I'd imagine that speeches were given to the board that all of it was in the best interest of the corporation because fighting their packages would have resulted in turmoil and damaging accusations of negligence.
This only works as propaganda to the extent that people already believe it enough to have it reinforce their own perceptions.
If this is a Russian "campaign", it's only a campaign to exploit the gap between the false narrative official discourse and the everyday reality of most Americans. The false narrative of official discourse is that Americans are racist -- uniformly biased against non-whites -- and the problems of African Americans are almost exclusively the result of this racism and not of any widespread social problems they contribute to.
The every day reality is that most Americans aren't uniformly racist against all races. If they were, millions of marginally literate, marginally English capable Mexicans wouldn't have had fantastic success in getting hired for jobs, millions of South Asians couldn't have been imported into Corporate American to staff IT departments, and people like Satya Nadella couldn't wind up in charge of one of the largest corporations in America and the world. The level of active "globalism" in the US just wouldn't work if the people making decisions were racist and the employees they had to work with were racist.
Americans do hold racial biases towards African Americans specifically, but this is largely not the cause it's given credit for, but an effect of their everyday interactions in most cities with the large plurality of poor and criminally inclined African Americans. And you can't talk about that reality without blaming white racism for it and freeing African Americans from most all responsibility for it.
As long as we continue to push the phony narrative of "racism" rather than "Americans don't like many African Americans", the propaganda will work. Once we acknowledge that white Americans are generally racially tolerant EXCEPT for African Americans, we will start to acknowledge the specific problems African Americans have (many of which are structural but not racist) and possibly get around to helping them. Once that happens, then the propaganda of racism won't really work.
I'd add a couple of more.
Project managers that don't understand the details of what they're managing, but want to manage the details. We're on our second project manager in about 4 years and she's great with clients and very personable but she doesn't know anything about the technology we implement.
So when a project has complications and I explain them to here, I can either waste my breath explaining the details of the problem and the details of the underlying technology and why the problem is a problem, or I can just tell her there's a problem. Neither one really helps us.
The other one I would add is layering in too much project management process, too many conference calls, too much forced communication. I have been on a project kickoff call with a client where we literally spent 20 minutes discussing that I would be working on a daily basis with the client and then have her ask if the client wanted daily conference call updates. Most of the time the client says they're not necessary but sometimes they agree to it without realizing it (and then stop after the 2nd time) and I always log that time towards overhead.
The real apocalypse is when all of this becomes a practical necessity and we lose about 75% of the productivity gains from computer automation.
I guess the new jobs will be in the form of a new steno pool. Millennials can re-enter the data on spreadsheets and documents in a clean-room environment. People will still "exchange" documents, they just won't realize they're being transcribed in between.
I don't know how much fractional value you can mine from a single session, but assuming you can build out the distributed computing network even a fraction of a cent multiplied across millions of users starts to be real money.
Getting $0.01 of value out of a million users is still $10,000 per day.
Maybe that will explain the future of jobs, bureaucratic jobs built around administering the bureaucracy and enforcing the bureaucracy and then at set of companion jobs around evading the bureaucracy and demonstrating compliance with the bureaucracy.
That all of it could technically be automated won't matter, because interest factions will prevent the kind of transparency and access required for automation to be applied to the problems.
It will be a kind of weird, Terry Gilliam future of strange bureaucracies and indecipherable office jobs that defy automation not because the nature of the work isn't given to automation, but because the conceptual nature of the work isn't definable in a machine-capable syntax.
I've been thinking about this lately.
Have you ever worked in an office where it wasn't very clear that the people produced enough value in an economics sense to pay for their salaries? Like they're not actually doing much? I don't mean they just sit around all day and don't work but that the work itself didn't seem to make much sense.
I wonder if that's what the future of automation looks like -- humans creating nonsensical jobs because they need hierarchies where somebody is in charge and the work is kind of inexplicable, like a human version of middleware, transforming data from one system into data for another system. You'd think it could be automated itself, but it isn't, and the higher up you go in explaining what's happening the less it makes sense.
I can see a situation where it's "there is no legal reason to deny the request, but there likely should be".
Then they should turn to their various intra-governmental lobbyists and get the law changed. If there "should be" a reason for a law or a change in a law, then that's what the legislature is for -- to debate the merits of proposed laws and implement them.
The reason they don't is that FOIA really isn't that controversial as a matter of law and policy and the kind of minutia they want to micromanage isn't really practical and generally conflicts with the intent and spirit of the law. It's specific bureaucrats wanting to protect specific information for a specific reason, usually embarrassing to them and their little empires. Their requests would never make it through the legislature because they would be forced to explain and defend why these specific exemptions from FOIA make sense and are justified.
These court challenges by government entities really are a reprehensible attempt to achieve legislation through judicial action. What's depressing is that it's gotten momentum as a strategy because of the nexus of the government and courts each scratching each other's backs.
We really need a court like the German Bundesverfassungsgericht which can rule on Constitutional and similar issues, in which I would include FOIA requests. I think open government is so important we should go a step further and have officials who drag their feet or refuse legitimate FOIA requests should be held criminally liable.
Isn't the spectrum pretty much fully allocated? If Sprint merges with T-Mobile, will there be enough surplus spectrum for any new entrant to even build a network?
If I was the head of the FCC, I would seriously consider a mandate that wireless carries be forced to enter into a technology consortium and standardize their wireless radio systems for universal handset compatibility & portability. I think there's probably a "best" radio technical standard out there and that carrier technical "innovations" on the technology side are mostly oriented towards BS lock-in incompatibilities. Carriers would benefit from a uniform standard on tower equipment as it would result in less vendor specialty product lines.
With a mature oligopoly running the wireless networks, I would also mandate that carriers sell equal network access to MVNOs at a fixed small percentage over cost. This would allow MVNOs with leaner consumer operations to compete against carriers on more equal footing and force carriers to cut fat profit margins on consumers, or risk losing business to MVNOs operating on an equal-network basis. It would also allow for alternate business models for innovation on the mobile data side.
At the end of the day, the goal should be a standardized carrier side network that enabled competition and limited rent-seeking.
I can think of a couple of possible motivations (not a defense, but a potential explanation).
One, a lot of the "fair repair" movement sprung from the auto industry's use of proprietary diagnostic information. If you didn't have the factory diagnostics, which they only sold to dealers, you couldn't diagnose the problem. It's possible that the language in some state bills is generic enough to cover the auto case, but also cover the Apple case and cause Apple to make available a bunch of its proprietary software to third parties under the heading of "diagnostic equipment and software" that makes (more?) sense in an automotive context.
Two, it may force them to open up supply chains of parts to all comers. Apple may be reluctant to create the side business of selling a lot of parts to third parties, either constraining their own production capacity or just plain being expensive in terms of overhead.
Three, there may be ways which third party repair places can make claims of "OEM Approved Service Vendor" under these laws. The real definition is "we can buy parts from Apple", the marketing perception is "Apple approved repairs". Apple's brand image gets damaged by fly by night operators who do shitty work.
I'm not sure any of these are substantive, but I can see Apple worried about potentially broad "Fair Repair" bills that try to cover a wide swath of products, from cars to combines to industrial equipment to consumer products and find the vague language potentially unpalatable to their specific business.
I think Microsoft is giving away a certain amount of Azure to anybody who uses O365 in any significant way, and there's probably a lot of mixed infrastructure shops with both MS and Linux running. What better way to lure them in deeper?
At the end of the day, MS values them more as cloud resource consumers than software licensees.
It might even make sense for someone who can run a workload on any cloud stack to figure out how to arbitrage their workload where it's cheapest, gain cross-cloud redundancy, etc.
"Disruption" as a concept is pretty buzzwordy, but there's probably something to it in some markets (Netflix and movies, Amazon and retail, etc).
But I wonder if its starting to get a negative connotation because people are sick of the actual disruption caused by it?
I kind of wish the technology world would shut the fuck up and sit down for a few years and quit disrupting. Most of their disruptions are just a pain in the ass.
If sales of 8 are weak because "everyone" is waiting for the X, then Apple is kind of fucked because of their production ceiling.
Unless, of course, those stories that it's so supercalifragilisticexpialidocious they can't make enough of them are total bullshit to increase perceptions of rarity and exclusiveness.
What's so inconclusive about it?
The thesis is "Piracy has a displacement effect on legitimate sales."
The results could not find evidence that the thesis was true, with the limited exception of "recent top films".
They couldn't verify the thesis, so doesn't that mean the thesis is false? And even if the thesis is false, doesn't that at least strongly imply that its antithesis is true?
I think there's other ways of criticizing the study, like their measurement methodologies -- how do you measure the displacement effect of piracy? It sounds complicated and ambiguous.
Then there's questions of weighting, is the demonstrated displacement effect on "recent top films" representative of the majority of losses to copyright owners? If I sell 10 items but 2 items represent 80% of my profit, then any meaningful piracy of those 2 items has an outsize effect on my profit margin. But this goes beyond the scope of the study into the nebulous world of business models and accounting practices.
I'm not entirely sure it would *ruin* Treasuries to void select quantities for specific political reasons (versus other reasons for non-payment). One other reason they're popular is its a nearly bottomless well of liquidity that cash can be pumped into and back out of.
It's an open question whether it's seen as a bottomless pit of liquidity because we don't play games with our bonds or because the US economy and government is such a giant player that there are no other equal places to put cash.
The Euro was starting to look like an alternative, but between the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, the Brexit crisis, the Europeans just don't look quite as ready to provide that kind of economic stability. The Chinese can't quite be trusted, and after that there's nothing else large enough to sink excess cash into.
The sword of Damocles works because it hangs, not because it falls.
The *potential* for voiding Chinese holdings of US treasuries should be held over them not because it's effective in any small case, but because it's an existential threat against any large-scale Chinese sell-off or other manipulation based on them.
We could void them selectively if we wanted, but ultimately the market would just price in that risk and raise interest rates.
Wasn't the entire point of "wifi assist" to deal with this very issue, phones connected to bad access points that couldn't really pass data?
Now if I could just get it to stop connecting to ATT wifi access points despite telling it to not automatically connect to them...
Right, but if you're packing these pod things onto any kind of space-sensitive carrying vehicle, you're going to need to pack them tight like actual shipping containers. I could probably live with no windows for a 24 hour flight or something, but say 2-3 days on a ship?
And then there's the bathroom question.
So, personalized carbon-fiber shipping containers for people, in a small enough standardized size they can slot into different prime mover configurations?
I think it sounds great, but I think you face the challenge where it makes sense to stack them densely like actual shipping containers but on long enough trips nobody wants to be sealed inside for the whole trip or lack some kind of window they can see out of.
Wouldn't a long-haul bus be a good candidate for a small generator? It's not 100% emission free, but it would be less emissions than a full-scale engine and could potentially add a lot to the battery range, plus it would seem like buses would have ample room to fit it.
Why does it constantly have to change? Most people can learn less than friendly user interfaces (have you seen some of the stuff low-paid clerical staff have to use in 3270 terminals?).
What's totally obnoxious is having the user interface redefined every year because some new crop of developers has decided they need to leave their mark and they have somehow determined that changing everything is necessary.
IMHO, GUI user interface changes not driven by significant changes in functionality really haven't improved ease of use. The original Macintosh or Windows needed user interface enhancements when they went full-on multitasking, but by and large those interfaces were probably as functional as the flat, widget-and-gesture-laden interfaces foisted on us as improvements now.
Touch-driven, small devices like smartphones benefit from UI changes (physical use case and interface technology), but I really don't think desktop PCs have benefited at all from the UI churn.
The NYT analysis was more detailed than that and actually ran through a lot of the numbers of a lot of cities to reach the Denver conclusion.
That being said, they mention the attention Denver already has from a lot of other tech companies so it may be too late, and that by the time Amazon decides Denver may already be on its way to too expensive, if it isn't already.
I think Amazon might want to consider some kind of place that isn't obviously up and coming and may be initially dismissed as either too small-town or too rust belt.
I think Amazon will have to recruit a lot out outside talent no matter where they site, and it may look more attractive to go someplace with a cheaper standard of living where the salaries may go further.
They may also get more bargains on real estate and buildings -- buying into an already growing market makes for even more competition for real estate resources.
Most of the time IT is in a gatekeeper position because they're held responsible for systems that malfunction due to overconsumption of their limited resources, yet at the same time requests for more resources go unheeded.
I've literally been in the meeting where I've been chided for poor performance due to oversubscription and also told no, we can't spend more money on it, either. What are you supposed to do besides ration resources when demand exceeds supply?
Well, they are all about 13 years old and learning, so I kind of expect them to pick the "rights" that make sense to 13 year olds.
And really, I think the general population has been shown in polls for years to find many existing constitutional rights to be unwanted or misunderstood.
The problem is it's kind of a logic trap, where you have to have a certain list of specific rights to have any of the others hold up.
My son is in 7th grade and the US History class is doing a unit on the Constitution.
The teacher gave them a list of 20 rights written in plain language, which included the bill of rights and some others not in the constitution (everyone is entitled to a free education) and they had to pick 10 from the list. I'm pretty sure fewer than half of the original bill of rights wound up in their aggregate list.