It seems like an insolvable problem to me, because the trust issue goes both ways.
As a view/click provider, I have no way of knowing what your actual sales are. For large public companies, we can work something out with two teams of lawyers. But for a small fish, this does not make sense unless there is some "trustworthy enough" neutral third party standing between us like Amazon/Ebay.
The way it is now, you do not even bid for placement. You bid for views or clicks, and placement on webpages is decided by magic algorithms that determine statistically whether you are a client worth putting much effort into serving. The quality provide is the quality provided, and you have to make your bid, with appropriate limits and time frame, understanding that it worked out last week but you might be screwed this week by "poor quality" views/clicks. Heck, I am sure you can monitor the value provided each day or hour, and adjust your bids (or cancel) as your sales data tells you would be wise.
It comes down to money and resources. Is a B-1 with the right kind of bombs, specially trained aircrew, and specially trained ground crew that coordinates with the regular firefighters who are already in harms way cost effective relative the number of turboprop water/retardant dropping planes that could be acquired for the same or less? Surely not.
Including the B-1 is just a way to make the proposal better clickbait while throwing the MIC a bone. Obviously other craft could accomplish similar missions while flying low and slow enough to make accurate drops for less cost -- jet planes are simply very expensive to fly.
Guessing about what men or women want is a bad place to start an argument. Putting that aside...IMHO about half of Damore's points were worthy of serious consideration. The fact that half his essay is perhaps, laudable, does not protect him from consequences for errors in the other half.
Damore starts of by insulting his audience for fun, apparently, with a superficial argument based on nothing more than name calling (e.g. "ideological echo chamber"), when it is only very tangentially related to his main arguments. Then he whirls around multiple difficult topics with sloppy reasoning, and somehow expects to be given the benefit of the doubt that, having already insulted lots of people for fun, other things he said that might be insults should be parsed very carefully and kindly such that they are not insults.
Perhaps Damore is so severely deficient in his emotional and social skills that he severely erred in his in rhetorical approach -- such makes him inappropriate to hold a position of authority and influence. Or he is indeed a giant douchebag.
Where exactly the truth lies on that last point is really unimportant. It was appropriate to push him out.
It is unfortunate for both Damore and Google that Damore could not figure out how to pick one of his arguments and hone it carefully -- that could have been useful. But he chose otherwise. The blame falls 100% on Damore.
To play devil's advocate, it's the experts who f'ed it up.
Education today is the result of many decades of education experts.
Nobody gets a PhD, or massive new funding, for saying "er, yeah, keep doing the three Rs like what always worked." There are some misplaced incentives involved in this whole thing...
In fact, people do get PhDs on the topic of how to improve education, including going back to older styles of education. But their ideas are discarded by the decision makers when they involve spending more money. When the only ideas that get funded are the ones that promise better results for less money, it is unavoidable that we will eventually be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Is it reasonable to expect otherwise?
Furthermore, I question the assumption that "what always worked" ever really did. 100 or 150 years ago, there was no shame in dropping out after the 5th or 6th grade, unless you father was going to disown you for failing to become a solicitor or doctor. Schools had wide latitude to "fire" students who required remedial work, and weaker students tended to "fire themselves".
Is the average 18 year old today better or worse educated than 50 years ago? Hard to say. Our college and HS graduation rates are vastly higher. So even if some of those "graduates" are dunces, we might be better off overall.
The school school system as we know it was invented as we transitioned away from a majority rural society. As such, its take on subject matters was skewed away from common knowledge, towards topics that enhanced common knowledge (or laid a foundation for deeper studies at a university).
In that context, learning some abstract stuff about biology was helpful because how to handle farm animals was common knowledge. Learning some abstract stuff about fractions was helpful because how to guestimate measures when cooking was common knowledge. Learning some abstract stuff about plants was helpful because now I can look up stuff in books -- I already knew how to grow vegetables.
Instead of bookish takes on subject be given to little people who have easy access to a lot of common knowledge, we have little people who know about food coming from cardboard boxes and popped into a microwave. No cooking experience, no vegetable gardening, no animal husbandry.
Yes, more or less. I am suggesting that Whatsapp profitability is not necessarily important to its purchase price.
Google did not buy Youtube to increase net profits. FB did not buy Whatsapp to increase net profits.
These are strong and profitable companies that could become even stronger from the acquisition, perhaps. But they were necessary acquisitions to deny potential competitors a foot in the door.
Buying WhatsApp was a defensive play by FB so that someone else could not easily muscle in on their social media turf and prick their frothy valuation.
Similarly, Google arguably overpaid for YouTube and is ballpark only breaking even today. But the strategic value of having access to the search/usage data from the most popular video gateway is too big to let a competitor own.
Maybe. But Uber has no choice but to be in this game. If someone else arrives with reliable automated passenger car technology and Uber is far behind, Uber stock price can go to zero overnight.
The vision of the future is that you can order your ride with a convenient app, which could be Uber or Lyft or Google or Apple or Walmart -- nobody cares who is the provider when the service is a cheap commodity.
Even if that vision is a looooong way off, Uber cannot look like it will allow itself to be written out of the narrative, for want of a lousy few billion dollars. Cheaper to throw a bit of money down the toilet than let fear slash the Uber valuation in half.
"Really a problem" means what? ~500 violent crimes occurring in ~130 million BART rides in 2017. That is an incident rate of 1 in ~260,000. Of course that is ALL violent crimes, where the number of deaths and serious injuries still being very few.
If you have a long commute, your odds of dying on the road going to and from your perfectly safe suburban home and perfectly safe office park are in the same ballpark (1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles).
And there we have it -- in three exchanges, the big bad boogeyman that supposedly has been proved in court over and over has diminished from people who were once registered to vote, were deregistered, and who now physically can't get the documentation they need to get reregistered, to "people who are legal voters for decades lack state ID." Bye bye, goalposts.
If you actually understood what you just wrote, you would notice that the goalposts did not budge a nanometer, at least your comment completely fails to demonstrate as much. Perhaps you are confused by the idea that someone who has voted for decades, who registered under less stringent rules, might get pushed off the voter rolls and now has trouble re-registering? If you were familiar with the actual applicable laws at all, it would not be confusing at all.
The likely numbers of people who fall through the cracks, reasonable people can disagree. But I have never seen any evidence at all to support the conclusion that the alleged voter fraud is a bigger problem. In fact, the more I have tried to find any evidence, the more certain I have become that there is a lot of suspicions based on flagrant racism, and voter fraud is probably very very rare.
The point is that there may be reasons someone does not have a birth certificate.
To get an official birth certificate in this post-9/11 security theater world in the great state of my birth, I need to get send a request with a notarized signature. To get a notary to notarize my signature, I need a gov't issued ID. To get a gov't issued ID, I need an official birth certificate. It is possible to unwind the Gordian knot, but it requires effort of which forms to fill out with which kind of evidence to get things rolling. It is not obvious or easy how to do this to approximately everyone, although it is possible, of course.
In fact, a proper registered voter may not have ever had a birth certificate or state ID and have been voting for decades. What do they do to re-register if they were purged from the rolls? It has been proven in court that people who are legal voters for decades lack state ID. Are you denying as much?
Correct. It is you making stuff up out of whole cloth.
It has been shown to happen with regularity, with hard evidence, under the bright lights of a courtroom. The ACLU has done this multiple times.
Yet the same evidence-free arguments get trotted out again and again and again.
Now, what "regularly" means is different things to different people. If it is even a few thousand people or a few hundred who used to vote but cannot anymore, what justifies making it harder on them even very little? If the claim is voter fraud is a problem, it would sure be nice to see more examples within the state than can be counted on two hands.
We have two claims being made by the very same people: (1) There is a lot of voter fraud. (2) It is impossible to find more than a very few actual examples of voter fraud because the dog ate my homework. I am sooooo impressed.
You can't claim voter fraud is not rare when lacking a shred of evidence. It is simply dishonest. It is not my job to prove how rare unicorns are, but the person who says unicorns are everywhere. AGs have looked and looked and they cannot find more than a rare isolated example here and there.
For example, there is a consistent complaint that surely dead people are voting. Gee, it is the twentyeffinfirst century and it would be easy to detect that with computer technology if it were non-rare. No body looks into that because everyone with a brain knows the truth.
If you could figure out how to prove there was significant amount of voter fraud, there is a rightwing PAC out there who will write you a seven figure check for the evidence, I guarantee it. Put you money where you mouth is, and quick your day job for a year to serve American democracy. And get rich, too.
That is the beauty of purging rolls aggressively. Life may not have been hard 10 years ago, but maybe life happened and you no longer have a copy of your birth certificate.
It is not just the supporting documentation, but having the right supporting documentation at the right time to unravel the Gordian Knot.
Need an ID? You need to prove who you are, so you need a birth certificate. How do you get a birth certificate? You need to prove who you are -- they do not give that stuff to just anyone in the post-9/11 world. But if you have a printed bill from the county water department sent to your name at an address that is evidence. Oh, wait! You are the spouse who does not handle the money, so your name is not on any bills. I guess you can change a bill, and collect that evidence next month...
These things can be worked around, but it is very easy to get wrong the first or second attempt.
And when we are talking about rural voters, it might be a 2 hour bus trip to the county seat, 4 hour round trip. If you make a small mistake, you may have to make this trip 2 or 3 times. If you are working poor, can you afford to take 3 days off work to get all the paperwork right? Oh, and the actual fees are sometimes possible to waive, but that is more paperwork.
You were born yesterday. WBush DoJ pushed this issue. They found maybe a dozen instances in the entire US of A.
The are lots of red states with perfectly capable right-wing Attorney Generals that would love to find examples, because evidence would be valuable in the courtroom when justifying stringent voter ID laws. The reason the ACLU wins so many lawsuits is actual evidence is conspicuously lacking.
Fraudulent voting happens about as often as people die from lightning strikes. If that were not the case, then Republican AGs are surely the most incompetent attorneys who ever lived, all of them, for some reason. Is it more likely being a Republican causes actual serious brain damage? Or that the voter fraud is rare?
It is well known that there are perfectly legal get out the vote efforts that certain people complain about because the voters are black. This is especially true in the rural South, of course.
Guess what? In the rural South, the voting booth is probably placed in a small rural town. But the voters who vote in that voting booth may be miles away down dirt roads. A black church takes it minvan and makes some trips, picking up 8-10 voters, often elderly who cannot drive themselves.
The local who lives in town sees this minivan filled with bona fide legal voters filing into the voting center and panics because "Oh, no, those people are not my neighbors. Why are they voting here?"
Well, they are neighbors. But people who are too racist to ever stroll down the road to mingle with people who have darker skin have trouble considering the question in a rational way.
The "busloads of illegal darkies voting" meme is never going away until we have many fewer racist whites in the this country. The actual facts are easy enough to establish. But when the conclusion was built on a foundation of irrational racist hatred, facts and logic are not going to persuade.
What you describe works very well for 95% of the regular season games, so that is probably good enough.
But it very clearly often fails for "big games" where players are strongly incentivized to game the referee. Then it is 1 vs 22 on the field, and the ARs offer very little help.
In big games, clearly there are players who do not care who gets injured and do not care about anything the referee has to say about that purposeful foul, other than a yellow card. The normal tools for persuading players do not work. In fact, the higher profile means the referees feel greater pressure to err on the side of not enforcing the rules, because they will always be criticized for an ejection in an important match even when it is 100% justified.
The refs have to have "good enough" credibility, even if this will always be imperfect. Like it or not, fans in the stands and assistant coaches are looking at these replays on their phones, 15 seconds after the event. Those referees are being judged in a context that includes those video replays. They need to gain the advantages of this technology in some fashion. Whether what they are doing with VAR is the best way is open to debate. Doing nothing only erodes the credibility of the ref on the field and the FIFA officials running the show.
Slashdot Mirror
How does YouTube know exactly what was purchased on a vendor website, if the vendor chooses to cheat?
It seems like an insolvable problem to me, because the trust issue goes both ways.
As a view/click provider, I have no way of knowing what your actual sales are. For large public companies, we can work something out with two teams of lawyers. But for a small fish, this does not make sense unless there is some "trustworthy enough" neutral third party standing between us like Amazon/Ebay.
The way it is now, you do not even bid for placement. You bid for views or clicks, and placement on webpages is decided by magic algorithms that determine statistically whether you are a client worth putting much effort into serving. The quality provide is the quality provided, and you have to make your bid, with appropriate limits and time frame, understanding that it worked out last week but you might be screwed this week by "poor quality" views/clicks. Heck, I am sure you can monitor the value provided each day or hour, and adjust your bids (or cancel) as your sales data tells you would be wise.
It comes down to money and resources. Is a B-1 with the right kind of bombs, specially trained aircrew, and specially trained ground crew that coordinates with the regular firefighters who are already in harms way cost effective relative the number of turboprop water/retardant dropping planes that could be acquired for the same or less? Surely not.
Including the B-1 is just a way to make the proposal better clickbait while throwing the MIC a bone. Obviously other craft could accomplish similar missions while flying low and slow enough to make accurate drops for less cost -- jet planes are simply very expensive to fly.
Guessing about what men or women want is a bad place to start an argument. Putting that aside...IMHO about half of Damore's points were worthy of serious consideration. The fact that half his essay is perhaps, laudable, does not protect him from consequences for errors in the other half.
Damore starts of by insulting his audience for fun, apparently, with a superficial argument based on nothing more than name calling (e.g. "ideological echo chamber"), when it is only very tangentially related to his main arguments. Then he whirls around multiple difficult topics with sloppy reasoning, and somehow expects to be given the benefit of the doubt that, having already insulted lots of people for fun, other things he said that might be insults should be parsed very carefully and kindly such that they are not insults.
Perhaps Damore is so severely deficient in his emotional and social skills that he severely erred in his in rhetorical approach -- such makes him inappropriate to hold a position of authority and influence. Or he is indeed a giant douchebag.
Where exactly the truth lies on that last point is really unimportant. It was appropriate to push him out.
It is unfortunate for both Damore and Google that Damore could not figure out how to pick one of his arguments and hone it carefully -- that could have been useful. But he chose otherwise. The blame falls 100% on Damore.
To play devil's advocate, it's the experts who f'ed it up.
Education today is the result of many decades of education experts.
Nobody gets a PhD, or massive new funding, for saying "er, yeah, keep doing the three Rs like what always worked." There are some misplaced incentives involved in this whole thing ...
In fact, people do get PhDs on the topic of how to improve education, including going back to older styles of education. But their ideas are discarded by the decision makers when they involve spending more money. When the only ideas that get funded are the ones that promise better results for less money, it is unavoidable that we will eventually be scraping the bottom of the barrel. Is it reasonable to expect otherwise?
Furthermore, I question the assumption that "what always worked" ever really did. 100 or 150 years ago, there was no shame in dropping out after the 5th or 6th grade, unless you father was going to disown you for failing to become a solicitor or doctor. Schools had wide latitude to "fire" students who required remedial work, and weaker students tended to "fire themselves".
Is the average 18 year old today better or worse educated than 50 years ago? Hard to say. Our college and HS graduation rates are vastly higher. So even if some of those "graduates" are dunces, we might be better off overall.
The school school system as we know it was invented as we transitioned away from a majority rural society. As such, its take on subject matters was skewed away from common knowledge, towards topics that enhanced common knowledge (or laid a foundation for deeper studies at a university).
In that context, learning some abstract stuff about biology was helpful because how to handle farm animals was common knowledge. Learning some abstract stuff about fractions was helpful because how to guestimate measures when cooking was common knowledge. Learning some abstract stuff about plants was helpful because now I can look up stuff in books -- I already knew how to grow vegetables.
Instead of bookish takes on subject be given to little people who have easy access to a lot of common knowledge, we have little people who know about food coming from cardboard boxes and popped into a microwave. No cooking experience, no vegetable gardening, no animal husbandry.
Yes, more or less. I am suggesting that Whatsapp profitability is not necessarily important to its purchase price.
Google did not buy Youtube to increase net profits.
FB did not buy Whatsapp to increase net profits.
These are strong and profitable companies that could become even stronger from the acquisition, perhaps. But they were necessary acquisitions to deny potential competitors a foot in the door.
Buying WhatsApp was a defensive play by FB so that someone else could not easily muscle in on their social media turf and prick their frothy valuation.
Similarly, Google arguably overpaid for YouTube and is ballpark only breaking even today. But the strategic value of having access to the search/usage data from the most popular video gateway is too big to let a competitor own.
Maybe. But Uber has no choice but to be in this game. If someone else arrives with reliable automated passenger car technology and Uber is far behind, Uber stock price can go to zero overnight.
The vision of the future is that you can order your ride with a convenient app, which could be Uber or Lyft or Google or Apple or Walmart -- nobody cares who is the provider when the service is a cheap commodity.
Even if that vision is a looooong way off, Uber cannot look like it will allow itself to be written out of the narrative, for want of a lousy few billion dollars. Cheaper to throw a bit of money down the toilet than let fear slash the Uber valuation in half.
"Really a problem" means what? ~500 violent crimes occurring in ~130 million BART rides in 2017. That is an incident rate of 1 in ~260,000. Of course that is ALL violent crimes, where the number of deaths and serious injuries still being very few.
If you have a long commute, your odds of dying on the road going to and from your perfectly safe suburban home and perfectly safe office park are in the same ballpark (1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles).
You always have the option of taking your own advice. Unless you are a craven coward, of course.
And there we have it -- in three exchanges, the big bad boogeyman that supposedly has been proved in court over and over has diminished from people who were once registered to vote, were deregistered, and who now physically can't get the documentation they need to get reregistered, to "people who are legal voters for decades lack state ID." Bye bye, goalposts.
If you actually understood what you just wrote, you would notice that the goalposts did not budge a nanometer, at least your comment completely fails to demonstrate as much. Perhaps you are confused by the idea that someone who has voted for decades, who registered under less stringent rules, might get pushed off the voter rolls and now has trouble re-registering? If you were familiar with the actual applicable laws at all, it would not be confusing at all.
The likely numbers of people who fall through the cracks, reasonable people can disagree. But I have never seen any evidence at all to support the conclusion that the alleged voter fraud is a bigger problem. In fact, the more I have tried to find any evidence, the more certain I have become that there is a lot of suspicions based on flagrant racism, and voter fraud is probably very very rare.
The point is that there may be reasons someone does not have a birth certificate.
To get an official birth certificate in this post-9/11 security theater world in the great state of my birth, I need to get send a request with a notarized signature. To get a notary to notarize my signature, I need a gov't issued ID. To get a gov't issued ID, I need an official birth certificate. It is possible to unwind the Gordian knot, but it requires effort of which forms to fill out with which kind of evidence to get things rolling. It is not obvious or easy how to do this to approximately everyone, although it is possible, of course.
In fact, a proper registered voter may not have ever had a birth certificate or state ID and have been voting for decades. What do they do to re-register if they were purged from the rolls? It has been proven in court that people who are legal voters for decades lack state ID. Are you denying as much?
Why not just stop all the racist policies and lies? Is there something about racist white republicans that floats your boat?
Or maybe it's Maybelline.
Correct. It is you making stuff up out of whole cloth.
It has been shown to happen with regularity, with hard evidence, under the bright lights of a courtroom. The ACLU has done this multiple times.
Yet the same evidence-free arguments get trotted out again and again and again.
Now, what "regularly" means is different things to different people. If it is even a few thousand people or a few hundred who used to vote but cannot anymore, what justifies making it harder on them even very little? If the claim is voter fraud is a problem, it would sure be nice to see more examples within the state than can be counted on two hands.
We have two claims being made by the very same people: (1) There is a lot of voter fraud. (2) It is impossible to find more than a very few actual examples of voter fraud because the dog ate my homework. I am sooooo impressed.
You can't claim voter fraud is not rare when lacking a shred of evidence. It is simply dishonest. It is not my job to prove how rare unicorns are, but the person who says unicorns are everywhere. AGs have looked and looked and they cannot find more than a rare isolated example here and there.
For example, there is a consistent complaint that surely dead people are voting. Gee, it is the twentyeffinfirst century and it would be easy to detect that with computer technology if it were non-rare. No body looks into that because everyone with a brain knows the truth.
If you could figure out how to prove there was significant amount of voter fraud, there is a rightwing PAC out there who will write you a seven figure check for the evidence, I guarantee it. Put you money where you mouth is, and quick your day job for a year to serve American democracy. And get rich, too.
That is the beauty of purging rolls aggressively. Life may not have been hard 10 years ago, but maybe life happened and you no longer have a copy of your birth certificate.
It is not just the supporting documentation, but having the right supporting documentation at the right time to unravel the Gordian Knot.
Need an ID? You need to prove who you are, so you need a birth certificate. How do you get a birth certificate? You need to prove who you are -- they do not give that stuff to just anyone in the post-9/11 world. But if you have a printed bill from the county water department sent to your name at an address that is evidence. Oh, wait! You are the spouse who does not handle the money, so your name is not on any bills. I guess you can change a bill, and collect that evidence next month...
These things can be worked around, but it is very easy to get wrong the first or second attempt.
And when we are talking about rural voters, it might be a 2 hour bus trip to the county seat, 4 hour round trip. If you make a small mistake, you may have to make this trip 2 or 3 times. If you are working poor, can you afford to take 3 days off work to get all the paperwork right? Oh, and the actual fees are sometimes possible to waive, but that is more paperwork.
This all adds up.
You were born yesterday. WBush DoJ pushed this issue. They found maybe a dozen instances in the entire US of A.
The are lots of red states with perfectly capable right-wing Attorney Generals that would love to find examples, because evidence would be valuable in the courtroom when justifying stringent voter ID laws. The reason the ACLU wins so many lawsuits is actual evidence is conspicuously lacking.
Fraudulent voting happens about as often as people die from lightning strikes. If that were not the case, then Republican AGs are surely the most incompetent attorneys who ever lived, all of them, for some reason. Is it more likely being a Republican causes actual serious brain damage? Or that the voter fraud is rare?
It is well known that there are perfectly legal get out the vote efforts that certain people complain about because the voters are black. This is especially true in the rural South, of course.
Guess what? In the rural South, the voting booth is probably placed in a small rural town. But the voters who vote in that voting booth may be miles away down dirt roads. A black church takes it minvan and makes some trips, picking up 8-10 voters, often elderly who cannot drive themselves.
The local who lives in town sees this minivan filled with bona fide legal voters filing into the voting center and panics because "Oh, no, those people are not my neighbors. Why are they voting here?"
Well, they are neighbors. But people who are too racist to ever stroll down the road to mingle with people who have darker skin have trouble considering the question in a rational way.
The "busloads of illegal darkies voting" meme is never going away until we have many fewer racist whites in the this country. The actual facts are easy enough to establish. But when the conclusion was built on a foundation of irrational racist hatred, facts and logic are not going to persuade.
Affirmative action is not new: we used it for decades to give hand-outs to white men.
What you describe works very well for 95% of the regular season games, so that is probably good enough.
But it very clearly often fails for "big games" where players are strongly incentivized to game the referee. Then it is 1 vs 22 on the field, and the ARs offer very little help.
In big games, clearly there are players who do not care who gets injured and do not care about anything the referee has to say about that purposeful foul, other than a yellow card. The normal tools for persuading players do not work. In fact, the higher profile means the referees feel greater pressure to err on the side of not enforcing the rules, because they will always be criticized for an ejection in an important match even when it is 100% justified.
The refs have to have "good enough" credibility, even if this will always be imperfect. Like it or not, fans in the stands and assistant coaches are looking at these replays on their phones, 15 seconds after the event. Those referees are being judged in a context that includes those video replays. They need to gain the advantages of this technology in some fashion. Whether what they are doing with VAR is the best way is open to debate. Doing nothing only erodes the credibility of the ref on the field and the FIFA officials running the show.
It is already happening.