To the extent that Brexit challenges the "free" trade mindset, the media represents the transnational corporate community who sees one less free opportunity to arbitrage actual geographic market differences, labor prices and product prices. The media is so closely aligned with these business interests that they can't see the forest for the trees.
The larger part of the panic is the existential panic of the media which is heavily invested in the idealistic politics of the EU, the anti-nationalism, the open borders and free movement and the pro-diversity politics which underlies it. There's also the rational-bureaucratic aspect of it, the kind of heavy, rational, "data" and "fact" based central administration that they admire.
I think the media's political alarms are ringing loudly -- they realize that the vote for Brexit is a vote against the media's long term political agenda and they worry this is the first domino to fall and it will only encourage other political forces also opposed to their agenda, various right wing parties opposed to immigration and in favor of stronger local controls.
I just don't see how Brexit works out to near the panic it's made out to be. The UK isn't physically relocating thousands of miles away and the basic aspects of the UK economy aren't really changing, and to the extent that they will change, the change will take years. The only major losers (and I doubt they ever really lose...) are the transnational corporations and the political advocates of open borders, diversity and central administration.
That makes some sense, with the downside that the ingredients they use are all fresh so bagging ingredients would require a lot of store time to manage bagging or cut the quality by using frozen ingredients.
What's funny is that I really like the Papa Murphys thin crust pizza, more so than all the local delivery options.
It's not a brick oven Neopolitan style pizza (which are good, too), but for something that comes out of my own oven its vastly superior to any frozen pizza and IMHO on par with anything delivered.
I have a friend who works in IT in a hospital system, managing the middleware that translates between hospital systems. He says its really heavily audited and even the middleware troubleshooting system where you can pull HL7 records out of the queue to figure out why they're not working is audited.
Pulling records at random without audit information being logged, while not technically impossible for him, is very difficult and basically impossible for anyone not operating at the IT level. Even then he says the only way he can see stuff is when doing troubleshooting -- either raw HL7 data when he's trying to fix something or the patient records related to the troubleshooting, which are then audited and he says that they do cross-reference tickets with IT access audit trails.
End user access is audited and he says people do get fired for unsanctioned lookups.
The one closest to me is crazy busy with six people working. You'll wait 20 minutes for a pizza you ordered for online pickup 45 minutes ago.
Papa Murphy's seems ideal for automating since they don't cook the pizzas. I could see a nearly totally automated facility -- kiosk ordering, robotic topping application and wrapping and out the door. Two guys maximum to keep ingredient hoppers filled and other basic maintenance.
An uncooked pizza is an ideal robotic product. The standard for topping application is just decent general distribution, not precision placement and you could get that by rotating the pizza crust and either a horizontal topping applicator the radius of the crust or a round hopper moved along the radius as the pizza spun. The ingredients are fairly uniform and some hoppers could slice toppings (whole pepperoni sticks inserted, sliced pieces output) or squeezed out (sausage, hamburger) and some dropped whole.
For some reason we like Papa Murphy's take-and-bake pizzas, and they weigh all the ingredients that go on the pizza. The only human aspect is nominally spreading the weighed amount sort of even, things I believe could be done pretty easily via automation.
I suppose there may be some ingredients more difficult to add via automation, but not many.
I think part of the problem the "Clinton left" has is that is it does live in a bubble of high income and segregated, uniform suburbs and doesn't actually see the impact of its policies as having negatives.
Further, it's dominated by an axis of people who are highly educated and to a large extent indoctrinated in its ideology and who believe this ideology is factual, rational and supported by facts to a degree that they don't just disagree with opponents, they believe them to be intellectually deficient and driven by ill intent, such as racism, homophobia and xenophobia.
In my mind the, "bubble" they occupy is an important part of this theory/explanation -- many are second or later generation professionals who have *always* lived and worked among their own kind and simply never see the down sides of their policies. Their crime rates don't increase when they shackle urban police forces with federal oversight, likewise they don't see the idea in owning a gun in a leafy, peaceful suburb or working in the corporate campus guarded by armed security. The relentless warping of urban schools by diversity-driven policies doesn't affect their children, who attend wealthy suburban districts filled with people just like them or even expensive private schools who will never be touched by such policies. Illegal immigration doesn't affect their schools or communities.
I think they endorse and provide support for the more radical elements of leftism because of their connections to universities and how radical themes echo their university educations, as well as believing that this support gives them a bohemian edge which dilutes their corporate and suburban mindset; it's a way of differentiating themselves from what otherwise would be a vintage picture of country-club Republicanism.
They're afraid of it, but Netflix and Amazon are becoming forces of their own in content creation. The MPAA will make the anti-piracy aspect of it horribly complex, but it will reach the point where it's something they either allow or streaming services won't buy their content and they become irrelevant.
The direction content seems to be heading isn't towards standalone 2 hour movies, but serial shows which when binge watched are kind of indistinguishable from 8-10 hour movies. A big budget movie is $100 million dollars and so is a Game of Thrones season, yet it delivers 10 hours versus 2 hours for a movie.
Sometimes I wonder how things would have been different if Sanders had adopted an anti-immigration (not quite like Trump's "build a wall", but ones that sounds not too extremist) position, but kept everything else the same.
I think it's only a matter of time before someone mixes and matches political positions in a way that adds up to a majority. I think Trump has demonstrated that strict adherence to traditional evangelical social agendas isn't necessary for being "conservative", just as the Clintons have demonstrated that a strict adherence to socialistic welfare policies isn't necessary to be "liberal". Sanders managed to appear more liberal than Clinton without pandering to minorities.
In a lot of ways, I think the public at large is:
* OK with gays, but skeptical of the deeper end of the equation where you get into transgender bathroom use
* OK with gun ownership beyond just hunting, but skeptical of the paramilitary stylings of gun activists
* Believes in women's equality generally, but is turned off by the shriller feminist voices
* Doesn't want to throw people in jail over pot, but has reservations about mass-marketing stoner culture
* Thinks abortion is a sad outcome, but secretly hopes its available if they need it
* Isn't anti-black, but believes poor, urban blacks are a wellspring of criminality
* Isn't xenophobic, but fearful of poor immigrants undermining communities, demanding special privileges and not assimilating
* Thinks corporations are too powerful, but is skeptical of government regulation
I think either party is probably capable of shifting on these issues to their benefit, but both parties face vocal interest groups who won't allow enough movement on any of them to capture the advantage. Someone eventually will, though.
plutocratic abuses the political *left* has answers to
At least in America, there's a sense that "the left" has been taken over by a demographic that 30 years ago would have been solidly Republican -- well educated, high salary professionals who are socially liberal (pro gun control, pro choice, pro gay rights) and often second or third generation of a similar demographic and see themselves as winners of the modern information economy and believe that its open to everyone who gets a college education.
The label that used to be applied to them was "limousine liberal" although I think historically that applied to liberals who were in fact independently wealthy rich. I think the current iteration of this group is a wider demographic that includes a lot of generically white collar types who aren't that rich, but are instead at the high end of the middle class demographic.
To the aggrieved element of the population, they see these people as favoring social positions (like immigration and free trade) that leave them behind, and see these members of the "left" as isolated and living in a bubble, backing policies that don't affect their affluent suburban lifestyles.
I think this situational analysis (which I'm paraphrasing from others) is mostly right and represents a lot of what you see in the Hillary/Bernie split. Hillary is socially liberal but basically backs the kind of status quo, nominally liberal power structure, where Bernie is much more of an advocate of traditionally leftist economic policies. Trump supporters are those less socially liberal than Bernie supporters but in their own grasping, ill-informed way want a kind of more socially conservative version of Sanders' economics -- pro-gun, but anti-immigration, skeptical of gay rights, but critical of corporate power, especially as it pertains to jobs-related questions.
I question whether the supporters are idiots or just desperate enough to believe a bad choice that disrupts the status quo is better than more status quo.
It's somewhat bizarre that around 70% of sitting MPs support remain.
This seems to fit either one of two narratives.
Narrative 1: Brexit was so colossally ignorant and short-sighted that the on-average better informed MPs were largely in agreement on the value of staying.
Narrative 2: The principal beneficiaries of remain are the establishment and they always support whatever's good for the establishment.
I think it's possible that both can be true at the same time -- the logic of remain is stronger, yet the perception among the electorate is that EU membership isn't making their lives better and principally benefits the elite power structure.
It seems to strongly parallel the rise of Trump. His ideas are crazy, but many people see the establishment power structure as so corrupt that support for Trump isn't support for Trumpism, but a desperate bid to disrupt the establishment because they don't think the establishment is helping them.
...maybe Apple could implement some user-friendly pseudoinnovation, like using the lightning port for attaching mass storage devices and some kind of filesystem to go along with it.
And while I'm thinking about it, have any iOS apps ever tried to use the camera roll as a generic filesystem? I'd imagine that the APIs make sure you're storing data that has the right filetype magic that matches supported image files, but do they resample it or otherwise manipulate the data so that you couldn't store random data to the camera roll?
Is there any reason you couldn't store an MP3 in the camera roll with just enough encoding to make the OS think it was a JPG but that apps that knew "this one trick" couldn't read it?
I'm not going to defend UKIP, but do you see the irony in labeling them "an extreme neo-Nazi group" in the comment section of an article about political bias?
I'll grant you they are a far right group with a lot of strong views towards migrants, but from what I can tell, there is no Nazi symbolism on their web site, no call for Jews or other "undesirables" to be exterminated, no stated desire to found a police state dictatorship or any other semblance of recreating the a German-style National Socialist movement.
So they don't seem very neo-Nazi to me, but you seem awfully biased by labeling them as such.
It just strikes me that over time cab fares may be too high, but ultimately the macroeconomics of taxis have settled into something of an equilibrium representing the cost to producers and consumers. Ultimately Uber may drive out the inefficiencies of the existing taxi system, but who is going to claim the excess value these inefficiencies represent? It seems unlikely that the drivers will be the beneficiary. Consumers may hang onto some of the new efficiency gains due to the difficulty in raising prices.
But overall, it seems like Uber will simply take those inefficiencies as profits. The alternative is what -- shrinking the total macroeconomy of taxi-like services? That doesn't seem likely.
By and large I've found Uber rides cheaper than cabs. It doesn't make sense that cheaper ride sources would ultimately end up in more income to the driver.
In some ways, Uber is just a more efficient and centralized way of providing the same service. They may charge less for the ride itself to the rider, but Uber is just settling for slightly less gross profit than the existing system which splits the profits between the cab company and whoever actually owns the medallions. The consumer gets the savings, but the drivers make the same money.
It doesn't seem possible that Uber could charge less than a conventional cab and pay its drivers more than a conventional cab company. That's expecting Uber to leave some profit potential on the table.
Maybe in the short run they can pay drivers more than cabbies to attract cabbies to be Uber drivers instead, but once they've driven a few cab companies out of business and the drivers can't switch back to being cabbies, they will cut driver compensation back to cabby levels and probably raise rider fares to cab levels.
There's some efficiency of scale and automation savings to be had, but they're not leaving that on the table in the long run.
Democrats voted AGAINST two gun control laws backed by an influential civil rights ogranization two days ago, and are now throwing a fit because they can't get gun control passed.
The problem is that Apple isn't improving the headphone jack, they're eliminating it in favor of a proprietary standard they control along with a "charging, or audio?" problem that a single port creates.
Wooden wheels worked fine, but they're pretty poor in comparison to a modern tire.
Apple could have *improved* the headphone jack by creating an external magnetic port (like the magsafe one) and made it an open standard. Sure, it would have obsoleted existing headphones, but the dongle it would have required would have been cheap and passive and as an open standard, it's possible many others would have adopted it in addition to providing nearly all the benefits they get from removing the existing jack. This would have killed off the barrel-insert headphone jack and created a *better* analog headphone jack that would have quickly been adopted by many vendors.
By going with their proprietary port, they extend their tax over everything that has this natively built in. And you can imagine that made for iPhone approvals for adapters and headphones that can provide an analog jack will sit unprocessed for years while Apple, Beats (and maybe some select partners) rake in 100% of the dough.
Why hasn't someone come up with a virtual video camera device that could be fed whatever input you wanted (video files, stills, etc) and tell your camera-enabled software or OS that this was the "default" video camera or just outright disable the physical camera device.
This is what passes for innovation when you run out of actual innovation.
Sure, the engineering is perhaps more elegant and you get rid of a few creaky parts like an amplifier and a jack, but what's the payback for that? If we're lucky a few extra mm^3 of battery? A device even thinner or smaller in some way, features most people don't want?
But this is what passes for innovation when you don't have ideas, and somebody made the fucking spreadsheet work, indicating it would be some tiny percentage cheaper to build and there would be a short-term bonus in terms of selling dongles and new headphones.
So really the only actual innovation is *financial* innovation -- squeezing a few more bucks out of end users and creating some licensing deals for "made for iPhone headphones" but not any innovation that anyone seriously thinks improves anything.
And you can bet that the dongles will be ass-ugly lumps sticking out the bottom of the phone, just asking to break the jack. Maybe somebody 2 years from now will finally get the green light to produce an Apple-approved adapter that makes the phone slightly longer but has a separate lightning and headphone jacks. But you can bet it will be a long delay before they approve it so they can capture every damn dollar of dongle spending.
But those pre-movie commercials are getting kind annoying.
When I was a kid, we used to pray for previews at the theater -- most didn't show them or only showed 1-2 at select evening shows. If you got to the movie before it started, at best you got to stare at kaleidoscope/lava lamp images on the screen and listen to Musak or just stare at the blank screen.
Then there was a transition period where there were a fair number of previews. Then they added advertising for the snack bar. Then they added slide shows before the movie with ads and dumb trivia.
And now we have a full-on TV show before the movie, with behind the scenes advertorials, long-form commercials, music videos. And then you get a solid 10 minutes of theater promotion, safety info, snack bar ads, a couple of actual TV commercials and a ton of previews. It's like the actual movie starts 20 minutes after the movie start time. I've eaten my snacks and need a piss before the damn thing even gets going.
The only way they could handle this would be to bundle in headphone jack adapter with the phone. It ought to be a cost wash with the shitty headphones, which they really ought to stop including anyway.
I think they could loosen up on peripheral attachment without affecting the bottom line much.
It sure seems like you could do a lot more with their devices if they allowed more ancillary peripherals to be attached to them. You still can't pair a mouse with an iPad, fer cryin' out loud.
Other than mass storage devices, it's hard to see where a sensor or some other widget attached to an iDevice would impact Apple's bottom line other than Apple not getting a cut of the sale.
In some ways, though, they seemed to have backed themselves into a profitability corner. Any change they might make which would *doesn't* directly increase profitability and even only theoretically may cause them to lose out on revenue becomes a non-option. Trouble is, without any innovation, the entire thing starts to stagnate.
So concerts would never sell out ahead of time? There's enough seats in the venue or enough performances for everyone who wants to attend? Supply and demand are in perfect balance?
Slashdot Mirror
I think panic angle is manufactured by the media.
To the extent that Brexit challenges the "free" trade mindset, the media represents the transnational corporate community who sees one less free opportunity to arbitrage actual geographic market differences, labor prices and product prices. The media is so closely aligned with these business interests that they can't see the forest for the trees.
The larger part of the panic is the existential panic of the media which is heavily invested in the idealistic politics of the EU, the anti-nationalism, the open borders and free movement and the pro-diversity politics which underlies it. There's also the rational-bureaucratic aspect of it, the kind of heavy, rational, "data" and "fact" based central administration that they admire.
I think the media's political alarms are ringing loudly -- they realize that the vote for Brexit is a vote against the media's long term political agenda and they worry this is the first domino to fall and it will only encourage other political forces also opposed to their agenda, various right wing parties opposed to immigration and in favor of stronger local controls.
I just don't see how Brexit works out to near the panic it's made out to be. The UK isn't physically relocating thousands of miles away and the basic aspects of the UK economy aren't really changing, and to the extent that they will change, the change will take years. The only major losers (and I doubt they ever really lose...) are the transnational corporations and the political advocates of open borders, diversity and central administration.
That makes some sense, with the downside that the ingredients they use are all fresh so bagging ingredients would require a lot of store time to manage bagging or cut the quality by using frozen ingredients.
What's funny is that I really like the Papa Murphys thin crust pizza, more so than all the local delivery options.
It's not a brick oven Neopolitan style pizza (which are good, too), but for something that comes out of my own oven its vastly superior to any frozen pizza and IMHO on par with anything delivered.
I have a friend who works in IT in a hospital system, managing the middleware that translates between hospital systems. He says its really heavily audited and even the middleware troubleshooting system where you can pull HL7 records out of the queue to figure out why they're not working is audited.
Pulling records at random without audit information being logged, while not technically impossible for him, is very difficult and basically impossible for anyone not operating at the IT level. Even then he says the only way he can see stuff is when doing troubleshooting -- either raw HL7 data when he's trying to fix something or the patient records related to the troubleshooting, which are then audited and he says that they do cross-reference tickets with IT access audit trails.
End user access is audited and he says people do get fired for unsanctioned lookups.
The one closest to me is crazy busy with six people working. You'll wait 20 minutes for a pizza you ordered for online pickup 45 minutes ago.
Papa Murphy's seems ideal for automating since they don't cook the pizzas. I could see a nearly totally automated facility -- kiosk ordering, robotic topping application and wrapping and out the door. Two guys maximum to keep ingredient hoppers filled and other basic maintenance.
An uncooked pizza is an ideal robotic product. The standard for topping application is just decent general distribution, not precision placement and you could get that by rotating the pizza crust and either a horizontal topping applicator the radius of the crust or a round hopper moved along the radius as the pizza spun. The ingredients are fairly uniform and some hoppers could slice toppings (whole pepperoni sticks inserted, sliced pieces output) or squeezed out (sausage, hamburger) and some dropped whole.
Why can't the automation add toppings?
For some reason we like Papa Murphy's take-and-bake pizzas, and they weigh all the ingredients that go on the pizza. The only human aspect is nominally spreading the weighed amount sort of even, things I believe could be done pretty easily via automation.
I suppose there may be some ingredients more difficult to add via automation, but not many.
I think part of the problem the "Clinton left" has is that is it does live in a bubble of high income and segregated, uniform suburbs and doesn't actually see the impact of its policies as having negatives.
Further, it's dominated by an axis of people who are highly educated and to a large extent indoctrinated in its ideology and who believe this ideology is factual, rational and supported by facts to a degree that they don't just disagree with opponents, they believe them to be intellectually deficient and driven by ill intent, such as racism, homophobia and xenophobia.
In my mind the, "bubble" they occupy is an important part of this theory/explanation -- many are second or later generation professionals who have *always* lived and worked among their own kind and simply never see the down sides of their policies. Their crime rates don't increase when they shackle urban police forces with federal oversight, likewise they don't see the idea in owning a gun in a leafy, peaceful suburb or working in the corporate campus guarded by armed security. The relentless warping of urban schools by diversity-driven policies doesn't affect their children, who attend wealthy suburban districts filled with people just like them or even expensive private schools who will never be touched by such policies. Illegal immigration doesn't affect their schools or communities.
I think they endorse and provide support for the more radical elements of leftism because of their connections to universities and how radical themes echo their university educations, as well as believing that this support gives them a bohemian edge which dilutes their corporate and suburban mindset; it's a way of differentiating themselves from what otherwise would be a vintage picture of country-club Republicanism.
They're afraid of it, but Netflix and Amazon are becoming forces of their own in content creation. The MPAA will make the anti-piracy aspect of it horribly complex, but it will reach the point where it's something they either allow or streaming services won't buy their content and they become irrelevant.
The direction content seems to be heading isn't towards standalone 2 hour movies, but serial shows which when binge watched are kind of indistinguishable from 8-10 hour movies. A big budget movie is $100 million dollars and so is a Game of Thrones season, yet it delivers 10 hours versus 2 hours for a movie.
Sometimes I wonder how things would have been different if Sanders had adopted an anti-immigration (not quite like Trump's "build a wall", but ones that sounds not too extremist) position, but kept everything else the same.
I think it's only a matter of time before someone mixes and matches political positions in a way that adds up to a majority. I think Trump has demonstrated that strict adherence to traditional evangelical social agendas isn't necessary for being "conservative", just as the Clintons have demonstrated that a strict adherence to socialistic welfare policies isn't necessary to be "liberal". Sanders managed to appear more liberal than Clinton without pandering to minorities.
In a lot of ways, I think the public at large is:
* OK with gays, but skeptical of the deeper end of the equation where you get into transgender bathroom use
* OK with gun ownership beyond just hunting, but skeptical of the paramilitary stylings of gun activists
* Believes in women's equality generally, but is turned off by the shriller feminist voices
* Doesn't want to throw people in jail over pot, but has reservations about mass-marketing stoner culture
* Thinks abortion is a sad outcome, but secretly hopes its available if they need it
* Isn't anti-black, but believes poor, urban blacks are a wellspring of criminality
* Isn't xenophobic, but fearful of poor immigrants undermining communities, demanding special privileges and not assimilating
* Thinks corporations are too powerful, but is skeptical of government regulation
I think either party is probably capable of shifting on these issues to their benefit, but both parties face vocal interest groups who won't allow enough movement on any of them to capture the advantage. Someone eventually will, though.
plutocratic abuses the political *left* has answers to
At least in America, there's a sense that "the left" has been taken over by a demographic that 30 years ago would have been solidly Republican -- well educated, high salary professionals who are socially liberal (pro gun control, pro choice, pro gay rights) and often second or third generation of a similar demographic and see themselves as winners of the modern information economy and believe that its open to everyone who gets a college education.
The label that used to be applied to them was "limousine liberal" although I think historically that applied to liberals who were in fact independently wealthy rich. I think the current iteration of this group is a wider demographic that includes a lot of generically white collar types who aren't that rich, but are instead at the high end of the middle class demographic.
To the aggrieved element of the population, they see these people as favoring social positions (like immigration and free trade) that leave them behind, and see these members of the "left" as isolated and living in a bubble, backing policies that don't affect their affluent suburban lifestyles.
I think this situational analysis (which I'm paraphrasing from others) is mostly right and represents a lot of what you see in the Hillary/Bernie split. Hillary is socially liberal but basically backs the kind of status quo, nominally liberal power structure, where Bernie is much more of an advocate of traditionally leftist economic policies. Trump supporters are those less socially liberal than Bernie supporters but in their own grasping, ill-informed way want a kind of more socially conservative version of Sanders' economics -- pro-gun, but anti-immigration, skeptical of gay rights, but critical of corporate power, especially as it pertains to jobs-related questions.
I question whether the supporters are idiots or just desperate enough to believe a bad choice that disrupts the status quo is better than more status quo.
It's somewhat bizarre that around 70% of sitting MPs support remain.
This seems to fit either one of two narratives.
Narrative 1: Brexit was so colossally ignorant and short-sighted that the on-average better informed MPs were largely in agreement on the value of staying.
Narrative 2: The principal beneficiaries of remain are the establishment and they always support whatever's good for the establishment.
I think it's possible that both can be true at the same time -- the logic of remain is stronger, yet the perception among the electorate is that EU membership isn't making their lives better and principally benefits the elite power structure.
It seems to strongly parallel the rise of Trump. His ideas are crazy, but many people see the establishment power structure as so corrupt that support for Trump isn't support for Trumpism, but a desperate bid to disrupt the establishment because they don't think the establishment is helping them.
...maybe Apple could implement some user-friendly pseudoinnovation, like using the lightning port for attaching mass storage devices and some kind of filesystem to go along with it.
And while I'm thinking about it, have any iOS apps ever tried to use the camera roll as a generic filesystem? I'd imagine that the APIs make sure you're storing data that has the right filetype magic that matches supported image files, but do they resample it or otherwise manipulate the data so that you couldn't store random data to the camera roll?
Is there any reason you couldn't store an MP3 in the camera roll with just enough encoding to make the OS think it was a JPG but that apps that knew "this one trick" couldn't read it?
I'm not going to defend UKIP, but do you see the irony in labeling them "an extreme neo-Nazi group" in the comment section of an article about political bias?
I'll grant you they are a far right group with a lot of strong views towards migrants, but from what I can tell, there is no Nazi symbolism on their web site, no call for Jews or other "undesirables" to be exterminated, no stated desire to found a police state dictatorship or any other semblance of recreating the a German-style National Socialist movement.
So they don't seem very neo-Nazi to me, but you seem awfully biased by labeling them as such.
I think you're right in principal, but...
It just strikes me that over time cab fares may be too high, but ultimately the macroeconomics of taxis have settled into something of an equilibrium representing the cost to producers and consumers. Ultimately Uber may drive out the inefficiencies of the existing taxi system, but who is going to claim the excess value these inefficiencies represent? It seems unlikely that the drivers will be the beneficiary. Consumers may hang onto some of the new efficiency gains due to the difficulty in raising prices.
But overall, it seems like Uber will simply take those inefficiencies as profits. The alternative is what -- shrinking the total macroeconomy of taxi-like services? That doesn't seem likely.
Does any of this seem surprising?
By and large I've found Uber rides cheaper than cabs. It doesn't make sense that cheaper ride sources would ultimately end up in more income to the driver.
In some ways, Uber is just a more efficient and centralized way of providing the same service. They may charge less for the ride itself to the rider, but Uber is just settling for slightly less gross profit than the existing system which splits the profits between the cab company and whoever actually owns the medallions. The consumer gets the savings, but the drivers make the same money.
It doesn't seem possible that Uber could charge less than a conventional cab and pay its drivers more than a conventional cab company. That's expecting Uber to leave some profit potential on the table.
Maybe in the short run they can pay drivers more than cabbies to attract cabbies to be Uber drivers instead, but once they've driven a few cab companies out of business and the drivers can't switch back to being cabbies, they will cut driver compensation back to cabby levels and probably raise rider fares to cab levels.
There's some efficiency of scale and automation savings to be had, but they're not leaving that on the table in the long run.
Democrats voted AGAINST two gun control laws backed by an influential civil rights ogranization two days ago, and are now throwing a fit because they can't get gun control passed.
FTFY
The problem is that Apple isn't improving the headphone jack, they're eliminating it in favor of a proprietary standard they control along with a "charging, or audio?" problem that a single port creates.
Wooden wheels worked fine, but they're pretty poor in comparison to a modern tire.
Apple could have *improved* the headphone jack by creating an external magnetic port (like the magsafe one) and made it an open standard. Sure, it would have obsoleted existing headphones, but the dongle it would have required would have been cheap and passive and as an open standard, it's possible many others would have adopted it in addition to providing nearly all the benefits they get from removing the existing jack. This would have killed off the barrel-insert headphone jack and created a *better* analog headphone jack that would have quickly been adopted by many vendors.
By going with their proprietary port, they extend their tax over everything that has this natively built in. And you can imagine that made for iPhone approvals for adapters and headphones that can provide an analog jack will sit unprocessed for years while Apple, Beats (and maybe some select partners) rake in 100% of the dough.
Why hasn't someone come up with a virtual video camera device that could be fed whatever input you wanted (video files, stills, etc) and tell your camera-enabled software or OS that this was the "default" video camera or just outright disable the physical camera device.
This is what passes for innovation when you run out of actual innovation.
Sure, the engineering is perhaps more elegant and you get rid of a few creaky parts like an amplifier and a jack, but what's the payback for that? If we're lucky a few extra mm^3 of battery? A device even thinner or smaller in some way, features most people don't want?
But this is what passes for innovation when you don't have ideas, and somebody made the fucking spreadsheet work, indicating it would be some tiny percentage cheaper to build and there would be a short-term bonus in terms of selling dongles and new headphones.
So really the only actual innovation is *financial* innovation -- squeezing a few more bucks out of end users and creating some licensing deals for "made for iPhone headphones" but not any innovation that anyone seriously thinks improves anything.
And you can bet that the dongles will be ass-ugly lumps sticking out the bottom of the phone, just asking to break the jack. Maybe somebody 2 years from now will finally get the green light to produce an Apple-approved adapter that makes the phone slightly longer but has a separate lightning and headphone jacks. But you can bet it will be a long delay before they approve it so they can capture every damn dollar of dongle spending.
But those pre-movie commercials are getting kind annoying.
When I was a kid, we used to pray for previews at the theater -- most didn't show them or only showed 1-2 at select evening shows. If you got to the movie before it started, at best you got to stare at kaleidoscope/lava lamp images on the screen and listen to Musak or just stare at the blank screen.
Then there was a transition period where there were a fair number of previews. Then they added advertising for the snack bar. Then they added slide shows before the movie with ads and dumb trivia.
And now we have a full-on TV show before the movie, with behind the scenes advertorials, long-form commercials, music videos. And then you get a solid 10 minutes of theater promotion, safety info, snack bar ads, a couple of actual TV commercials and a ton of previews. It's like the actual movie starts 20 minutes after the movie start time. I've eaten my snacks and need a piss before the damn thing even gets going.
Now get off my lawn.
How did you like your free lightning to 30 pin adapter?
I just love how this one rhetorical trick gets used so often.
Obviously their reforms are sensible, but opposing them is nonsense and unreasonable.
The only way they could handle this would be to bundle in headphone jack adapter with the phone. It ought to be a cost wash with the shitty headphones, which they really ought to stop including anyway.
Anything else is a massive failure of good will.
I think they could loosen up on peripheral attachment without affecting the bottom line much.
It sure seems like you could do a lot more with their devices if they allowed more ancillary peripherals to be attached to them. You still can't pair a mouse with an iPad, fer cryin' out loud.
Other than mass storage devices, it's hard to see where a sensor or some other widget attached to an iDevice would impact Apple's bottom line other than Apple not getting a cut of the sale.
In some ways, though, they seemed to have backed themselves into a profitability corner. Any change they might make which would *doesn't* directly increase profitability and even only theoretically may cause them to lose out on revenue becomes a non-option. Trouble is, without any innovation, the entire thing starts to stagnate.
So concerts would never sell out ahead of time? There's enough seats in the venue or enough performances for everyone who wants to attend? Supply and demand are in perfect balance?