Just checked when we passed 1.6 Mbps average here in Norway - that was around 2005-2006. So one of the poorest connected countries in the world is just as good off as we were ten years ago. So you probably don't want to use YouTube and Netflix much, but seriously.... there's no problem downloading a Linux ISO or whatever else you want over a >1 Mbps line if you got a few hours.
Also, the kernel is known to be extremely conservative with at least one of its entropy sources: the HW RNG in most CPUs. Because there's concern the NSA may have backdoored those HW RNGs the kernel assumes their output is perfectly predictable, meaning that it provides zero entropy.
So unless NSA has built in a backdoor and it's NSA trying to hack you, the CPU has plenty entropy. I'm glad they're trying to make it NSA-proof as well, but I would think any security is fucked if you can't trust the hardware to execute the instructions it gets.
4k is cool and all, I get it. Still, why would I want my PC to render 4k at suboptimal frame rates, when I can play at full HD
Not all games are about competitive FPS, it's that simple really. If you're playing The Witcher, Metro: Last Light, Tomb Raider, Civilization or any of a bunch of other games you just want it to be smooth and otherwise crank up the resolution/details/effects as far as you can.
I once had a UK police officer officer call me in Holland (on my mobile phone) to ask why my car was parked too long in the UK, had I abandoned it? (...) I explained to the police officer that the woman thinks she owns the road outside, and my car is a taxed and legally parked car on the street.
Don't know about the UK, but in Norway they can put up temporary signs on public streets like parking prohibited and you're required to comply within 24 hours so leaving it on the street for extended periods could get you fined or towed. Happens both in winter (for snow plowing) and summer (digging up the street and repair mostly), in practice they usually give you longer notice but that's the legal minimum.
To steal a known expression, there's no such thing as a free vacation or maternity/paternity leave. Of all the people who don't get overtime pay, how many of those do you know who spend less than a typical work week at the office? Saying it's unlimited replaces clear and predictable limits with limits imposed by vague and arbitrary social norms and underhanded management pressure to work more. You think you can pull off delivering 100% in 80% of the time? Go ask your boss for an 80% position with the same pay, if he's not willing to do that he's not going let you take a day off every week either.
These are the kind of things that should be set on the macro level as part of your employment relationship. We expect you to work so many hours a week, you get this many weeks of vacation and various other benefits and you get paid this much. Because at the end of the day, you're both going to look at the totality and ask what's my employer/employee really giving me for what I give him. On the micro level there should always be a price to pay, if my employer wants me to work more he should pay more and then it's only natural that if I want to work less I should get paid less.
I have in my contract that I have five weeks vacation, it doesn't mean I have to take all five weeks or that I can't get more time off but that's then a deviation from the norm explicitly written in my contract. If I wanted a sixth week, it's naturally with no pay. If my boss wants me to work another week, that's clearly for extra pay. If either of us aren't happy with the total value the right place to take this is when negotiating salary, not trying to force me to work extra for free or trying to stretch my vacations to compensate.
Yet millions of people still take public transportation every day.
Compared to public transportation: + Leaves from where you are + Going to where you want + When you want + In solitude
Compared to private car: - No personalization - Potential left-overs
I have a decent public transport offer where I live, but driving is 15 mins and 2x bus is 35 mins, 20 mins saved twice a day that's 40 mins. Times 225 working days that's 150 hours a year. I'm thinking that even though I need it daily it can do at least three rounds in the morning (7AM, 8AM, 9AM) and in the afternoon (3PM, 4PM, 5PM) and since there'll probably be an abundance of cars in off-peak hours a smart company might try to keep commuter cars away from most of the ad hoc taxi service, since they're likely to be the worst offenders.
Intel can probably make around 5 Skylake CPUs on the same die space as 3 Sandy Bridge and still sell them for the same price, essentially two more CPUs of pure profit. Make no mistake, these are massive cash cows and if competition had been normal we should have had them for ~$200 or hex-core at current prices.
Sure, because there's nothing here that could be explained by market trends.
1. Microsoft's monopoly is cracking badly, though perhaps not in the way most of us imagined. If you look at StatCounter's platform stats it's now 55% desktop, 39% mobile, 6% tablets and the desktop has been losing 10%/year the last few years. And people expect apps for their platform, if you're only on Windows or even Mac/Linux too you're now a dinosaur unless it absolutely requires a traditional desktop. 2. The OS is going to become a commodity, they saw what happened with Android once it hit critical mass. Chromebooks are an early warning. Also that XP and Win7 work "too well" so users aren't interested in upgrading, even though it's an expense maybe twice a decade. That MS Office - their stranglehold on the business market - is now on mobile and tablets is clear proof Microsoft knows this. 3. So their old strongholds are breaking down, where do they want to go next? They want to be the middleman between the app developers and the consumers, like Apple's App Store pioneered and Google Play mimic. To do that you need Win10 everywhere. You must get the snowball rolling that to make money you must be on the MS Shop, the same way you could install apps from other sources on Android but the vast majority don't. If you're not on Google Play, you "don't exist".
As for Intel: 1. Mobile, tablets, convertibles, laptops all need wireless connectivity and it's basically just expected features today like network and sound is on desktops, they used to be add-in cards once but was integrated long ago. And fewer and fewer want the hassle of running cables as WiFi speeds go to hundreds of megabits. It's also a simple way for Intel to steal market share by vertical integration, squeezing out third party chips. 2. And here's the kicker people don't seem to understand, Intel doesn't really make desktop chips anymore. Their mainstream chips are laptop spin-offs which get a higher TDP and a few other modifications, the same way their high end chips are Xeon spin-offs. That is also why they sell grossly overpriced desktop chips with better IGP, even though you can do much cheaper with a dGPU. They're just laptop spin-offs that happen to sell well enough to make a desktop version of. 3. So what's the combined effect? Well, you get the laptop features for "free", whether you want them or not. Same way Intel puts an IGP in every chip killing off much of the second hand GPU market, before you had machines that needed any old graphics card and now you don't. Less resale/reuse value means gaming cards in net cost more. It's an indirect way of using their dominance in the CPU business to expand without running into antitrust problems, at least so far.
Or maybe I'm just a NSA disinformation agent out to discredit the revealing of our secret master plan. But you have to admit the cover story is pretty credible, yes?
The new graphics APIs will allow IGPs to be faster for some work loads.
The question is for how much extra work. As I understand it, from the DirectX/OpenGL side you don't really "notice" SLI/CF, the cards just take turns. That is why you effectively only get half the memory, they must mirror all the assets. With the low-level APIs all the details are exposed, but if you want to take advantage of the special cases well you have to write special case code. And the bulk of your market will not have any fancy new feature you introduced, so in the world with limited time and resources it doesn't happen in practice.
For example, it's estimated that there's 300k SLI/CF users. That doesn't really sound much when there's billions of computers out there. And a lot of them like me could probably sell their two cards and buy a single card that would be faster today if it gave me trouble, it's not necessary to get that performance (anymore). Apart from a few tech demos I doubt we'll see anyone use the low level APIs to exploit that we actually have double the RAM to play with.
What I'm wishing for is essentially an i5 and i7 'max core' edition that removes the IGP but has a mirror of the existing cores in it's place so they each are essentially like 2 K edition chips stuck together.
It already exists, it's called the i7-5960x and costs $999 and needs an expensive X99 motherboard. Eight cores, no IGP, fully unlocked and uses standard DDR4 UDIMMs which are now almost at price parity with DDR3. You just don't like the price.
Partner with Microsoft? Sure. Burn it to the ground so Microsoft had to buy Nokia, then make a massive write-off just so they'd have a phone in the market? Probably not the plan. He executed the "We have to get off our current platform NOW NOW NOW and go Microsoft" so well people only heard the first part. But I assume they were hoping for quite a few more converts.
Well, smaller process sizes also reduce write cycles. When they went from 2D to 3D they went back to a bigger process size with less defects due to all the layers. Though they had some controller/firmware issues the first 3D TLC NAND had more raw write cycles than state of the art planar MLC NAND. Of course now they're shrinking it again in the quest for even more storage, but the clock got a pretty good reset going from 1 layer to 48. Going from MLC to TLC is more of a variation that cuts write cycles to about 1/3rd for 50% more space, all other things being equal.
I think you got bits and bytes confused, pretty sure there's no 64GB NAND = 512 Gbit NAND to be had anywhere. So you can multiply all those prices by 8 for $205-457 for a TB. Even if it goes down to $160/TB that's still a lot more than HDDs.
My expense report would make people freak out because I listed 2 lunches for the same calendar day. It took a couple of tries before someone told me to enter one as breakfast
Here in Norway that would probably be for tax reasons. Since excessive wining and dining could be considered a fringe benefit, there are regulations for how much you can charge the company per day tax free. Those limits are adjusted relative to the number of what meals you've had and if any have been provided for you (breakfast, lunch and dinner is singled out) like part of the trip like on a conference. Some give those as part of the trip, you choose how much to eat for and how much to pocket. Eating a double lunch and no breakfast probably triggered some silly rule of gaming the system either in the company regulations or tax regulations.
This announcement of 10Gbits to 100Gbits is not impressive.. that is a typical server connection these days.
Heck, in March the first residential 10G/10G Internet connection was delivered here in Norway from Bayonette, source via Google translate. They have a 24xGbit hub with 2x10G for expansion and instead give you a direct line. Note that it mistranslates the prices, it's 5999 NOK = $727/month for 10G, 3-400 NOK = $36-50 for 1G so I'd call it mostly a publicity stunt but for a dedicated research network it's peanuts.
Now 100 Gbit is a bit more exotic but I know "The Gathering", a 5000 people data party had a 100 Gbit Internet connection in 2011 (10x10G bonded) as a publicity stunt though they never peaked beyond 20 GBit/s actual usage. So yeah in 2015 I'd say this sounds mostly like off the shelf technology, of course getting it rolled out into actual production use is nice. But clearly this is about bandwidth to research other things, not state of the art in networking technology.
I hate decyphering hieroglyphics. I propose that the unicode for "I have peanut allergies" should be the text string "I have peanut allergies."
That works well for 1-2 billion people and not so well for the remaining 5-6 billion. While we're working on that universal language, a few universal "hieroglyphics" are useful and there's no law against writing elevator next to the elevator sign. Like say these, these, these or these.
That said, allergens may be useful for store products but that's usually half the markings on a restaurant menu which typically can be stuff like vegetarian, vegan, hot, garlic and so on. And for many complete dishes many will contain lots of allergens, it's probably easier to use a negative marking like these. I don't quite see what existing use case these symbols are supposed to cover, yes it could be added to the ingredients list but you need to solve other issues like how do you prominently say no allergens and not unmarked?
I don't think it's just the companies that have changed though, it's the market the companies live in. Before there were plenty of fairly sheltered waters, where you were competing with the shop down the street but it was obvious the town needed a shop like yours. Weathering the bad times was possibly more a game of attrition than truly caring for the workers. Today it's all about globalization and open markets with huge waves like on the open ocean.
Jobs are washed away and probably never coming back, the large multinationals that have caught the huge global waves make tons of money while the small local or regional businesses get crushed. I don't think they have a choice anymore, really. That is to say, I think companies that tried this "cradle to grave" approach to employment would be crushed by the markets. And the ones who are big enough to have a choice, well they're stockholder driven and don't have any particular allegiance to anyone so they'll just squeeze out all the profit they can.
On the bright side, they can't really carry on this race to the bottom without actually pulling people out of the gutter. China and India has seen wages and living standards increase considerably, as they chase new cheap labor that in itself becomes a scarce resource to be competed for. That will cut into the profitability of outsourcing, of course balanced by your pay not being worth as much abroad. Because they make decent money now too.
You are connecting a very, very remote area of Russia with a very, very remote area of the US. Take a look at a population density map, there's no cities whatsoever nearby. And long distance shipping will either go by sea (cheaper) or plane (faster), just the maintenance on thousands of miles of rail would kill it. This is as likely as the head of NASA suggesting a manned mission to Mars, it's his idea to make lofty ideas but the people with the money will never fund it.
You would think a pair of gloves would render all the police fingerprinting useless, yet haphazard criminals are caught by it all the time. Like everyone else with limited resources, they either catch you because you're important or because you make it easy. Heck, I bet many criminals using computers don't even know what crypto is.
The car insurance industry is making a lot of money on the fact that your driving profile is individual and will trick you into keep paying a high premium despite having moved into a lower risk segment. All autonomous cars of the same model will drive the same way, which makes it a lot harder to price gouge. It doesn't matter if you're 18 or 80, male or female, single driver or whatever. It's one Google car, 10000 miles/year, parked in garage - what are you charging? In fact, Google might easily just offer insurance themselves since they're the driver and got deep enough pockets they don't need an insurance company.
One of the major reasons traffic deaths went down is we redesigned cars so that instead of being able to withstand a crash without injury to the car, they absorb the crash in a 'crush zone', meaning the car itself takes the damage instead of a person.
And this made a lot of lesser crashes that wouldn't have injured the passengers anyway far more expensive because even small damage is distributed on a large area. I was in an accident not so long ago and despite being a fairly low speed collision where the air bag did not deploy, the damage to my car alone amounted to about 1/5th of the sticker price for a new one and in total I think it wiped out everything I've paid in insurance premiums over the last ten years. So I got no reason to complain, really...
I tend to weigh on the side that sentient animals should receive protections similar to the protections we give to children or to adults deemed legally incompetent. That means they can't exercise many of the rights that we recognize adult humans have, but neither can they be wantonly exploited, physically or psychologically harmed.
There are already animal cruelty laws that could be amended to grant better protection from human-on-animal neglect and abuse. The problem with giving them rights is that they'd apply to animal-on-animal action or environmental harm. You wouldn't let a child assault another child, would you? But it would be crazy if we were equally compelled to intervene if a gorilla assaults another gorilla. And we wouldn't let kids hunger or thirst or freeze to death, yet that happens to animals in nature all the time. Not doing them harm is way different from being responsible for their well-being.
Slashdot Mirror
Just checked when we passed 1.6 Mbps average here in Norway - that was around 2005-2006. So one of the poorest connected countries in the world is just as good off as we were ten years ago. So you probably don't want to use YouTube and Netflix much, but seriously.... there's no problem downloading a Linux ISO or whatever else you want over a >1 Mbps line if you got a few hours.
Also, the kernel is known to be extremely conservative with at least one of its entropy sources: the HW RNG in most CPUs. Because there's concern the NSA may have backdoored those HW RNGs the kernel assumes their output is perfectly predictable, meaning that it provides zero entropy.
So unless NSA has built in a backdoor and it's NSA trying to hack you, the CPU has plenty entropy. I'm glad they're trying to make it NSA-proof as well, but I would think any security is fucked if you can't trust the hardware to execute the instructions it gets.
4k is cool and all, I get it. Still, why would I want my PC to render 4k at suboptimal frame rates, when I can play at full HD
Not all games are about competitive FPS, it's that simple really. If you're playing The Witcher, Metro: Last Light, Tomb Raider, Civilization or any of a bunch of other games you just want it to be smooth and otherwise crank up the resolution/details/effects as far as you can.
I once had a UK police officer officer call me in Holland (on my mobile phone) to ask why my car was parked too long in the UK, had I abandoned it? (...) I explained to the police officer that the woman thinks she owns the road outside, and my car is a taxed and legally parked car on the street.
Don't know about the UK, but in Norway they can put up temporary signs on public streets like parking prohibited and you're required to comply within 24 hours so leaving it on the street for extended periods could get you fined or towed. Happens both in winter (for snow plowing) and summer (digging up the street and repair mostly), in practice they usually give you longer notice but that's the legal minimum.
Rule #1: There's always some people with waaaaaaaaaaaaay to much time on the Internet.
See also Winning an argument on the Internet
Why not just save several thousands dollars and walk the cord over and plugin yourself.
So since no actual price has been announced I assume you're trolling?
To steal a known expression, there's no such thing as a free vacation or maternity/paternity leave. Of all the people who don't get overtime pay, how many of those do you know who spend less than a typical work week at the office? Saying it's unlimited replaces clear and predictable limits with limits imposed by vague and arbitrary social norms and underhanded management pressure to work more. You think you can pull off delivering 100% in 80% of the time? Go ask your boss for an 80% position with the same pay, if he's not willing to do that he's not going let you take a day off every week either.
These are the kind of things that should be set on the macro level as part of your employment relationship. We expect you to work so many hours a week, you get this many weeks of vacation and various other benefits and you get paid this much. Because at the end of the day, you're both going to look at the totality and ask what's my employer/employee really giving me for what I give him. On the micro level there should always be a price to pay, if my employer wants me to work more he should pay more and then it's only natural that if I want to work less I should get paid less.
I have in my contract that I have five weeks vacation, it doesn't mean I have to take all five weeks or that I can't get more time off but that's then a deviation from the norm explicitly written in my contract. If I wanted a sixth week, it's naturally with no pay. If my boss wants me to work another week, that's clearly for extra pay. If either of us aren't happy with the total value the right place to take this is when negotiating salary, not trying to force me to work extra for free or trying to stretch my vacations to compensate.
Yet millions of people still take public transportation every day.
Compared to public transportation:
+ Leaves from where you are
+ Going to where you want
+ When you want
+ In solitude
Compared to private car:
- No personalization
- Potential left-overs
I have a decent public transport offer where I live, but driving is 15 mins and 2x bus is 35 mins, 20 mins saved twice a day that's 40 mins. Times 225 working days that's 150 hours a year. I'm thinking that even though I need it daily it can do at least three rounds in the morning (7AM, 8AM, 9AM) and in the afternoon (3PM, 4PM, 5PM) and since there'll probably be an abundance of cars in off-peak hours a smart company might try to keep commuter cars away from most of the ad hoc taxi service, since they're likely to be the worst offenders.
Intel will always invest in process tech as that lowers their cost. They won't lower their price until they get competition though.
Sandy Bridge: 216 mm^2 @ 32nm, $317 list price, $336 inflation adjusted
Ivy Bridge: 160 mm^2 @ 22nm
Haswell: 177 mm^2 @ 22nm, $339 list price
Broadwell: 133 mm^2 @ 14nm
Skylake: ??? mm^2?, $350 list price
Intel can probably make around 5 Skylake CPUs on the same die space as 3 Sandy Bridge and still sell them for the same price, essentially two more CPUs of pure profit. Make no mistake, these are massive cash cows and if competition had been normal we should have had them for ~$200 or hex-core at current prices.
Sure, because there's nothing here that could be explained by market trends.
1. Microsoft's monopoly is cracking badly, though perhaps not in the way most of us imagined. If you look at StatCounter's platform stats it's now 55% desktop, 39% mobile, 6% tablets and the desktop has been losing 10%/year the last few years. And people expect apps for their platform, if you're only on Windows or even Mac/Linux too you're now a dinosaur unless it absolutely requires a traditional desktop.
2. The OS is going to become a commodity, they saw what happened with Android once it hit critical mass. Chromebooks are an early warning. Also that XP and Win7 work "too well" so users aren't interested in upgrading, even though it's an expense maybe twice a decade. That MS Office - their stranglehold on the business market - is now on mobile and tablets is clear proof Microsoft knows this.
3. So their old strongholds are breaking down, where do they want to go next? They want to be the middleman between the app developers and the consumers, like Apple's App Store pioneered and Google Play mimic. To do that you need Win10 everywhere. You must get the snowball rolling that to make money you must be on the MS Shop, the same way you could install apps from other sources on Android but the vast majority don't. If you're not on Google Play, you "don't exist".
As for Intel:
1. Mobile, tablets, convertibles, laptops all need wireless connectivity and it's basically just expected features today like network and sound is on desktops, they used to be add-in cards once but was integrated long ago. And fewer and fewer want the hassle of running cables as WiFi speeds go to hundreds of megabits. It's also a simple way for Intel to steal market share by vertical integration, squeezing out third party chips.
2. And here's the kicker people don't seem to understand, Intel doesn't really make desktop chips anymore. Their mainstream chips are laptop spin-offs which get a higher TDP and a few other modifications, the same way their high end chips are Xeon spin-offs. That is also why they sell grossly overpriced desktop chips with better IGP, even though you can do much cheaper with a dGPU. They're just laptop spin-offs that happen to sell well enough to make a desktop version of.
3. So what's the combined effect? Well, you get the laptop features for "free", whether you want them or not. Same way Intel puts an IGP in every chip killing off much of the second hand GPU market, before you had machines that needed any old graphics card and now you don't. Less resale/reuse value means gaming cards in net cost more. It's an indirect way of using their dominance in the CPU business to expand without running into antitrust problems, at least so far.
Or maybe I'm just a NSA disinformation agent out to discredit the revealing of our secret master plan. But you have to admit the cover story is pretty credible, yes?
The new graphics APIs will allow IGPs to be faster for some work loads.
The question is for how much extra work. As I understand it, from the DirectX/OpenGL side you don't really "notice" SLI/CF, the cards just take turns. That is why you effectively only get half the memory, they must mirror all the assets. With the low-level APIs all the details are exposed, but if you want to take advantage of the special cases well you have to write special case code. And the bulk of your market will not have any fancy new feature you introduced, so in the world with limited time and resources it doesn't happen in practice.
For example, it's estimated that there's 300k SLI/CF users. That doesn't really sound much when there's billions of computers out there. And a lot of them like me could probably sell their two cards and buy a single card that would be faster today if it gave me trouble, it's not necessary to get that performance (anymore). Apart from a few tech demos I doubt we'll see anyone use the low level APIs to exploit that we actually have double the RAM to play with.
What I'm wishing for is essentially an i5 and i7 'max core' edition that removes the IGP but has a mirror of the existing cores in it's place so they each are essentially like 2 K edition chips stuck together.
It already exists, it's called the i7-5960x and costs $999 and needs an expensive X99 motherboard. Eight cores, no IGP, fully unlocked and uses standard DDR4 UDIMMs which are now almost at price parity with DDR3. You just don't like the price.
Partner with Microsoft? Sure. Burn it to the ground so Microsoft had to buy Nokia, then make a massive write-off just so they'd have a phone in the market? Probably not the plan. He executed the "We have to get off our current platform NOW NOW NOW and go Microsoft" so well people only heard the first part. But I assume they were hoping for quite a few more converts.
Well, smaller process sizes also reduce write cycles. When they went from 2D to 3D they went back to a bigger process size with less defects due to all the layers. Though they had some controller/firmware issues the first 3D TLC NAND had more raw write cycles than state of the art planar MLC NAND. Of course now they're shrinking it again in the quest for even more storage, but the clock got a pretty good reset going from 1 layer to 48. Going from MLC to TLC is more of a variation that cuts write cycles to about 1/3rd for 50% more space, all other things being equal.
Back in my dad's day the memory spun and made noises. No idea if he liked it.
I think you got bits and bytes confused, pretty sure there's no 64GB NAND = 512 Gbit NAND to be had anywhere. So you can multiply all those prices by 8 for $205-457 for a TB. Even if it goes down to $160/TB that's still a lot more than HDDs.
My expense report would make people freak out because I listed 2 lunches for the same calendar day. It took a couple of tries before someone told me to enter one as breakfast
Here in Norway that would probably be for tax reasons. Since excessive wining and dining could be considered a fringe benefit, there are regulations for how much you can charge the company per day tax free. Those limits are adjusted relative to the number of what meals you've had and if any have been provided for you (breakfast, lunch and dinner is singled out) like part of the trip like on a conference. Some give those as part of the trip, you choose how much to eat for and how much to pocket. Eating a double lunch and no breakfast probably triggered some silly rule of gaming the system either in the company regulations or tax regulations.
This announcement of 10Gbits to 100Gbits is not impressive .. that is a typical server connection these days.
Heck, in March the first residential 10G/10G Internet connection was delivered here in Norway from Bayonette, source via Google translate. They have a 24xGbit hub with 2x10G for expansion and instead give you a direct line. Note that it mistranslates the prices, it's 5999 NOK = $727/month for 10G, 3-400 NOK = $36-50 for 1G so I'd call it mostly a publicity stunt but for a dedicated research network it's peanuts.
Now 100 Gbit is a bit more exotic but I know "The Gathering", a 5000 people data party had a 100 Gbit Internet connection in 2011 (10x10G bonded) as a publicity stunt though they never peaked beyond 20 GBit/s actual usage. So yeah in 2015 I'd say this sounds mostly like off the shelf technology, of course getting it rolled out into actual production use is nice. But clearly this is about bandwidth to research other things, not state of the art in networking technology.
I hate decyphering hieroglyphics. I propose that the unicode for "I have peanut allergies" should be the text string "I have peanut allergies."
That works well for 1-2 billion people and not so well for the remaining 5-6 billion. While we're working on that universal language, a few universal "hieroglyphics" are useful and there's no law against writing elevator next to the elevator sign. Like say these, these, these or these.
That said, allergens may be useful for store products but that's usually half the markings on a restaurant menu which typically can be stuff like vegetarian, vegan, hot, garlic and so on. And for many complete dishes many will contain lots of allergens, it's probably easier to use a negative marking like these. I don't quite see what existing use case these symbols are supposed to cover, yes it could be added to the ingredients list but you need to solve other issues like how do you prominently say no allergens and not unmarked?
I don't think it's just the companies that have changed though, it's the market the companies live in. Before there were plenty of fairly sheltered waters, where you were competing with the shop down the street but it was obvious the town needed a shop like yours. Weathering the bad times was possibly more a game of attrition than truly caring for the workers. Today it's all about globalization and open markets with huge waves like on the open ocean.
Jobs are washed away and probably never coming back, the large multinationals that have caught the huge global waves make tons of money while the small local or regional businesses get crushed. I don't think they have a choice anymore, really. That is to say, I think companies that tried this "cradle to grave" approach to employment would be crushed by the markets. And the ones who are big enough to have a choice, well they're stockholder driven and don't have any particular allegiance to anyone so they'll just squeeze out all the profit they can.
On the bright side, they can't really carry on this race to the bottom without actually pulling people out of the gutter. China and India has seen wages and living standards increase considerably, as they chase new cheap labor that in itself becomes a scarce resource to be competed for. That will cut into the profitability of outsourcing, of course balanced by your pay not being worth as much abroad. Because they make decent money now too.
You are connecting a very, very remote area of Russia with a very, very remote area of the US. Take a look at a population density map, there's no cities whatsoever nearby. And long distance shipping will either go by sea (cheaper) or plane (faster), just the maintenance on thousands of miles of rail would kill it. This is as likely as the head of NASA suggesting a manned mission to Mars, it's his idea to make lofty ideas but the people with the money will never fund it.
You would think a pair of gloves would render all the police fingerprinting useless, yet haphazard criminals are caught by it all the time. Like everyone else with limited resources, they either catch you because you're important or because you make it easy. Heck, I bet many criminals using computers don't even know what crypto is.
The car insurance industry is making a lot of money on the fact that your driving profile is individual and will trick you into keep paying a high premium despite having moved into a lower risk segment. All autonomous cars of the same model will drive the same way, which makes it a lot harder to price gouge. It doesn't matter if you're 18 or 80, male or female, single driver or whatever. It's one Google car, 10000 miles/year, parked in garage - what are you charging? In fact, Google might easily just offer insurance themselves since they're the driver and got deep enough pockets they don't need an insurance company.
One of the major reasons traffic deaths went down is we redesigned cars so that instead of being able to withstand a crash without injury to the car, they absorb the crash in a 'crush zone', meaning the car itself takes the damage instead of a person.
And this made a lot of lesser crashes that wouldn't have injured the passengers anyway far more expensive because even small damage is distributed on a large area. I was in an accident not so long ago and despite being a fairly low speed collision where the air bag did not deploy, the damage to my car alone amounted to about 1/5th of the sticker price for a new one and in total I think it wiped out everything I've paid in insurance premiums over the last ten years. So I got no reason to complain, really...
I tend to weigh on the side that sentient animals should receive protections similar to the protections we give to children or to adults deemed legally incompetent. That means they can't exercise many of the rights that we recognize adult humans have, but neither can they be wantonly exploited, physically or psychologically harmed.
There are already animal cruelty laws that could be amended to grant better protection from human-on-animal neglect and abuse. The problem with giving them rights is that they'd apply to animal-on-animal action or environmental harm. You wouldn't let a child assault another child, would you? But it would be crazy if we were equally compelled to intervene if a gorilla assaults another gorilla. And we wouldn't let kids hunger or thirst or freeze to death, yet that happens to animals in nature all the time. Not doing them harm is way different from being responsible for their well-being.