The trouble is a lot of her fans are minors. So many of them actually are not going to have any sort of reasonably tamper/forgery resistant identification.
I was joking about the ID at the door. Joke is that anyone willing to pay to see her performance already has an unhealthy obsession with her so basically it's an audience of 100% stalkers. The only real question is how crazy are they?
The question is the data being correlated and stored or not.
When it comes to facial recognition and it's abuses that is among the least of my concerns.
To be fair to Swift, she really does have some crazy stalkers
So does pretty much every other celebrity of her stature and that is nothing new.
Concerts are one of the few openings they have where they can try to get close
Are you kidding me? If they want to get close there are far better ways to do it than at a concert though I understand some may try. The only difference is that they know her location at least for the duration of the concert but that's not really a novel problem. Big venues like the one's she plays are used to keeping things secure for popular musicians as well as people who are actually important like world leaders. If they do things right there really should be no way for anyone to get close enough to be a real problem.
That said, it's still creepy, and given how the Chinese have used the system to sweep up enemies of the state, I'm not sure I feel comfortable with this.
You should be VERY uncomfortable with this. It will be exceptionally easy for even well intentioned governments and private enterprises to abuse. We have technology and tools that the worst dictators in years gone by could only have dreamed of having and it absolutely will get abused unless we are very careful
Englebart also failed to predict that the majority of computer capabilities would be intended to monetize the user.
Why would this even be worth mentioning? ALL commerce is some form of "monetizing the user". A farmer buying seeds from the local co-op is being "monetized". Yeah some angles of it have turned out to be creepier than we should prefer but none of it should be surprising.
I don't know about you, but over the last 10 years I have witnessed a shocking degradation in the quality and functionality of the software I use on a daily basis.
I very much doubt that. While I wouldn't dispute this is true in some cases, it's certainly not true as a general proposition for most people. It sounds to me like you have a problem with changes to your preferences for UI for applications you use which might be a valid complaint in some cases but I very much doubt you have lost meaningful productivity overall. I have the same complaint about some software I use too - there is a lot of form before function shitty UI design going on. But at the end of the day I can do more today with the software I have overall than I could 10 years ago, I can usually do it faster, and better and I suspect you can too.
Thank God for the Terminal. Without it we wouldn't be able to get anything done these days.
If you can actually get your job done with a terminal you have a ridiculously narrow job description. Nothing wrong with that but it doesn't describe the vast majority of computers users out there including me.
Taylor Swift used facial recognition technology at her live performances so that technicians running the system could then check those face scans against a private database of her stalkers.
Umm, pretty much anyone who is a Taylor Swift fan willing to actually pay to see her concert would qualify as a stalker - including teenage girls. They bulk of her fan base has an unhealthy obsession with her and her rather uninteresting music. They don't need facial recognition, just a camera or ask for ID at the door. The only question is how creepy are they.
Seriously, if true this is either a star taking herself WAY too seriously or some security asshat who got a new shiny toy to pay with and convinced an overpayed prima-donna to pay for it.
All I want is what's fair. And what's fair is based on work output.
Is it really? Fair is a VERY nebulous term. Work output can be one measure of fair but not the only one and sometimes not the most important one and sometime it is impossible to determine. Work output can be extremely difficult to objectively measure for some jobs. If you're making widgets on an assembly line it's pretty easy but most jobs are not that easy to measure. What units do you measure the productivity of a secretary answering phone calls with that would be useful in comparison to an engineer designing a widget? Both jobs need to be done and not everything can be or should be ranked. Companies with rank and yank systems don't tend to do very well in the long run because of the resentment and fear such systems instill.
To me this is like how Ohio can have fancy Botts' Dots that don't get scraped off by snowplows but here in California we have to put them into holes instead because we are paying for Ohio's road maintenance.
And I pay more money into our health care system than the value of care I receive so that my grandmother can get her health care paid for. That's not a bad thing. Some pay more so we all benefit. Someday my turn will come for someone to support me. You are trying to justify selfishness as some sort of virtue even though it results in a worse outcome for more people. California's well being depends in no tiny part on the well being of Ohio (and Michigan and Alabama and...). Sometimes California gives and sometimes they receive. That's what being in a society is about - we cooperate and support each other. At one time Ohio had a bigger population and bigger economy than California. By your argument California should have gone begging.
There's only so much money budgeted for salaries and every dollar an underperformer is paid effectively represents a dollar stolen from all of the employees who are actually doing their jobs.
Again with the selfishness. Someone is always going to be below average but evidently you missed the memo that business is a team sport and it's not a zero sum game. Help your fellow man and you can both benefit more than you might otherwise.
If you have more experience, or more valuable experience, than your direct boss it might be good to keep quiet.
That's just the company playing employees off against each other. Experience doesn't mean shit. Performance does. If someone is doing the same job and getting the same results then they should be getting paid the same. Going to a fancy school or what you did in a previous job does-not/should-not matter. Again, this is something that in most cases benefits the company to the detriment of some/most/all of the workers. And if the boss can't justify a pay disparity with an explanation based in some kind of evidence of performance then that's a problem.
In the end, what matters to me is paying my bills. How much a co-worker makes doesn't matter to me.
Really? If you are doing the same work and getting paid less for it that wouldn't bother you? You might feel very differently if you were a woman or minority and getting paid less than your white male colleagues - that happens all the time. My wife works with some people who just ran into that. They didn't know they were being paid less than a male in their company even though they did the same work with similar to better results and some had longer tenure with the company and more experience. When this was discovered they were justifiably pissed and it could have resulted in a lawsuit. (the company to their credit fixed the problem as soon as it was realized)
Really? I would. I might not pay full price but it's not hard to check a hammer for functionality. I buy used equipment all the time, much of it much more complicated than a hammer.
What possible reason could someone have for returning it other than it was defective?
Off the top of my head: 1) Bought as a gift and someone didn't need/want it 2) Wrong type of hammer for application 3) Intended for use on a job that didn't materialize 4) Found a better deal elsewhere 5) Buyer's remorse 6) Financial problems for buyer 7) Purchased wrong item by accident
There are almost innumerable reasons why someone might return something that have nothing to do with it being defective in any way.
Don't need a hammer head flying off and cracking my skull open.
If you are seriously worried about this then you probably aren't competent to use a hammer.
If you as a seller deliver goods that are as stated and not defective, should limit the right for a buyer to return them.
Why? If I buy a shirt from a store for my daughter and then realize I got the wrong size why is it unreasonable for me to return it? Nothing wrong with the merchandise - just didn't fit the need. If the seller is benefiting from having allowing returns (and they do - that's why they do it) then where is the problem? If a store isn't willing to work with me on this why should I as a buyer shop there?
Why should the seller have to bear the cost of your fickle choice.
Sellers offer returns as a value added service to customers. Nobody forces them to do it but they often do because it results in greater net sales at the end of the day and because their competition often does it too to attract more sales. The hope is that the cost of the returns is less than the profit from the extra sales. You seriously think Walmart hasn't done the math on this? If it didn't pay off in the end they wouldn't do it.
Exactly. Just because someone took it out of the box and said oh shit, that's not what I wanted, doesn't make it "USED".
So what does make it "used" in your mind and how do you tell the difference? What bright line test can a retailer apply that scales up to large quantities of merch should they use? Remember that it has to be a test that a minimum wage clerk can apply reliably. This isn't a trivial question. Opening the packaging is a reasonable bright line test given that it's unlikely the merchant can test the item if it is returned after being opened and they probably can't sell it for full value. (would you pay full price for an item that looked like it had been tampered with? I wouldn't.)
Ebay used to be people selling stuff they didn't want any more.
Still is. But there is a limit to the size of that market. And there is the problem that eBay is de-facto the biggest fence in the world for stolen merch.
About a decade ago it mostly switched to a marketplace for merchants.
That's because they reached the limit of the market for people selling surplus shit from their garage. If the company wanted to grow they needed alternative markets. The obvious answer was to go into retail. Problem for eBay is that Amazon does this REALLY well. Far better than eBay does with far less hassle and risk to the buyer. There are some deals to be had on eBay if you are willing to invest some time but seldom anything mind blowing.
They changed the rules around that time to make the feedback system a lot harsher and shift the balance in the buyer's favour.
True. I used to make my living on eBay but they made it basically impossible unless you are either a giant company with a well known brand or some solo guy in a garage selling random shit. They made it very difficult to fight bad feedback, they allow major brands to screw small sellers without evidence (because liability), they were raising auction fees like clockwork every 6-12 months, etc. If you pay with PayPal you can almost always return the item if you play by the rules even if the auction/sale says no returns. There are plenty of bad sellers but there are even more shady buyers out there and I got to see every permutation of shady buyer you can imagine.
Blake and Parris are part of a growing cottage industry where dealers acquire discarded items at very low prices, only to resell some of them back on Amazon and eBay at a premium.
It will remain a cottage industry because the overhead in doing this is rather steep for the most part. I used to own a company that sold overstock/surplus inventory and second hand goods and the cost (time mostly) of acquiring the inventory generally ate up most profit margin. A picker by himself/herself might be able to eek out an ok living but it doesn't really scale up well.
So in other words, this may be a rare leak that hurts the company, and benefits employees. Generally when employees find out other people's salaries, they aren't mad at the other employees, they're mad at the company and demand raises.
I actually saw something like this a while back. A secretary at our company was photocopying payroll data including pay rates for all the employees on the campus. She accidentally left it on the copier. By the time she realized her mistake and can scurrying back to get it, it had already been copied and distributed and soon enough was posted prominently around the building. So everyone knew what everyone else was making and the company had a lot of explaining to do for certain... discrepancies.
I've always been puzzled why employees are so willing to go along with not sharing their pay data since keeping it a secret generally only benefits the company.
So you're saying "blockchain developer" could have gone from one to 33 openings.
Basically yes. Any time you see "fastest growing" anything and they are talking about percentages, this is the problem.
Big companies have this problem all the time. For example 10% growth in a company sounds solid but pretty modest right? And it is. But for a company like Apple, 10% growth means they have generate as much new sales in one year as eBay's entire revenue. So imagine your task is to create a company the size of eBay out of whole cloth in one year. Apple does that routinely and yet people will say they are aren't growing if they only grow 5% instead. But a company that goes from $1 million to $5 million is "fast growing". True but pretty misleading in a lot of ways.
Seriously are we that bad at statistics? It's a job that didn't exist until very recently. Any time you increase something from near zero the percentage growth is going to sound like a lot. Going from 1 to 1000 is a big percentage growth. Much bigger than going from 100,001 to 101,000 even though the absolute growth is identical.
The actual number of blockchain developer jobs is a rounding error as an absolute number. There are plenty of other jobs growing MUCH faster in terms of absolute numbers.
Texas has been prosperous precisely because of fiscal conservatism.
Texas has been prosperous because it has a about 1/3 of US oil reserves and oil is doing well. 4 of the 5 largest companies based in Texas are oil and gas companies. That's how they can get away with the tax policies they do. Many other states don't have massive oil reserves to take up the slack. If conservatism were such a boon then how do you explain California which clearly is not conservative leaning having a far larger economy than Texas despite having higher tax burdens as a general proposition?
The things that are attracting Apple to there - the low taxes and so forth - are due to the conservatism.
Umm, no. The reason Apple is interested is because there is a lot of tech talent already there and the city knows how to work with big tech companies productively. Furthermore Apple is ALREADY big in Austin with over 6000 employees currently. Any other reasons are minor in comparison. Taxes played at most a minor role in why tech talent is in Austin. Apple is interested in the area because a lot of other tech companies (Amazon, Dell, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Indeed, Electronic Arts, Facebook, National Instruments, etc) have already established there and they can get the talent they need. There also is a company that comparatively few have heard of called Trilogy that did a lot back around the dotcom boom to bring high level talent to the area.
We don't want the capital of Texas to turn into the bay area.
"We"? Speak for yourself and only for yourself. Your opinion is not widely shared in Austin. People have been moving to Austin in droves precisely because it is a good place to live, the city is (mostly) well run, and there are great jobs to be had there as a tech hub. If that's not your brand of vodka, fine but that's your problem.
You can keep your leftist attitudes and taxes where they are.
A) You being uncomfortable with someone who isn't a conservative is your problem, not anyone else's B) Evidently you've never actually been to Austin if you think it's overrun by conservatives. Hell I consider it a bastion of sanity in Texas. C) The notion that Texas is uniformly conservative is a ridiculous myth. At most it's around 58%/42% skewing conservative based on recent election results.
. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole. "Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
That's not a caveat. That's a show stopping problem. In what circumstances would this finding be useful given the ridiculous pressure involved? I get that it's probably a new line of discovery and that eventually it could result in something practical but as it stands this definitely isn't practical.
What we want is superconductivity at temperatures and pressures that require minimal to (preferably) no refrigeration at temperature ranges habitable to humans and no special pressure vessels under routine circumstances.
Comparing the service that Google provides to rape is asinine.
Disagree. The issue is whether there is adequate informed consent. This requires a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, consequences, and implications of the action. It is very much akin to rape or at least malpractice if informed consent is not obtained. It's not at all clear that people are in possession of all the facts nor are they presented in a clear and understandable manner. Expecting people to know or suspect there are nuanced negative consequences without considerably effort to inform them is ridiculous
Google gives you something in return. Believe it or not, people aren't forced to use Google and generally do so because they like the products.
A medical quack gives people something in return too. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to allow it. Google is knowingly taking advantage of people's lack of technological sophistication. It's not really a question that a huge percent of the public does not understand the full implications of their actions nor are they being provided adequately clear information and opportunities to remedy this situation.
Sundar you miserable geek. Get out of the f**king petri dish and talk to average users, not the techno-incestuous gang you hang out with, but actual people who don't write code or configure servers.
Why not just use the much more likely explanation that he is lying and he knows it. He's looking for plausible deniability. The guy is smart so I don't really buy the argument that he's THAT out of touch with reality. Simple fact is that Google is doing what is in Google's financial interest and tracking you benefits Google rather a lot. They have to pretend they care about the issue but just follow the money trail to see what they really care about.
Well I can think of one example. In 1986 the US bombed Libya. One building that was hit was the French Embassy in Tripoli. The French had refused to allow US bombers to traverse their airspace from bases in England that forced the US planes to fly an additional 2600 nautical miles around France to get to Libya. It was understood/suspected right at the time that this was an "accident" with plausible deniability.
“But the plans were on display” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
So the USA taxpayer has paid about $4 billion in subsidies so that rich people can have another new car. Woo Fucking Hoo. MAGA. (/. warning to snowflakes, there may be sarcasm).
You mean instead of the $20 billion we spend each year on direct fossil fuel subsidies? (never mind the indirect ones like lack of pollution controls which are MUCH larger costs) Globally fossil fuels are directly subsidized to the tune of about $5 TRILLION per year.
By your idiot logic NASA exists so rich people can joy ride in space. Maybe consider that there is a bigger picture goal to benefit us all that you have failed to comprehend. Sometimes subsidies actually do make sense because we all benefit in the long run. Not everything is a zero sum game.
Personally I would like my daughter to be able to breathe the air 80 years from now and to not have to ride around in loud, messy vehicles built with 19th century technology. Digging up all the carbon in our soil and releasing it into the air is quite literally suicidal.
Just eyeballing the sales graph, it looks like adoption rate is about doubling every two years or so. Should these trends hold then next decade electric cars will pretty much take over.
Beware naive extrapolation. Electric cars are definitely not going to "take over" in just 10 years. It's going to take longer than that for the supply chain to develop to supply the batteries and power trains and to reconfigure the assembly lines even if the demand was there already which it definitely is not. Average age of a car on US roads is longer than a decade so it would take longer than that even if starting tomorrow we only sold electric cars. Not to mention there are issues with range and fast charging and charging infrastructure and grid updates that have yet to be fully resolved.
I could see electric cars conquering major market share within 2-3 decades and I think there will be a strong uptake in demand in the next 10 years but it's going to be a while before they really conquer the market.
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is a lot of her fans are minors. So many of them actually are not going to have any sort of reasonably tamper/forgery resistant identification.
I was joking about the ID at the door. Joke is that anyone willing to pay to see her performance already has an unhealthy obsession with her so basically it's an audience of 100% stalkers. The only real question is how crazy are they?
The question is the data being correlated and stored or not.
When it comes to facial recognition and it's abuses that is among the least of my concerns.
To be fair to Swift, she really does have some crazy stalkers
So does pretty much every other celebrity of her stature and that is nothing new.
Concerts are one of the few openings they have where they can try to get close
Are you kidding me? If they want to get close there are far better ways to do it than at a concert though I understand some may try. The only difference is that they know her location at least for the duration of the concert but that's not really a novel problem. Big venues like the one's she plays are used to keeping things secure for popular musicians as well as people who are actually important like world leaders. If they do things right there really should be no way for anyone to get close enough to be a real problem.
That said, it's still creepy, and given how the Chinese have used the system to sweep up enemies of the state, I'm not sure I feel comfortable with this.
You should be VERY uncomfortable with this. It will be exceptionally easy for even well intentioned governments and private enterprises to abuse. We have technology and tools that the worst dictators in years gone by could only have dreamed of having and it absolutely will get abused unless we are very careful
Englebart also failed to predict that the majority of computer capabilities would be intended to monetize the user.
Why would this even be worth mentioning? ALL commerce is some form of "monetizing the user". A farmer buying seeds from the local co-op is being "monetized". Yeah some angles of it have turned out to be creepier than we should prefer but none of it should be surprising.
I don't know about you, but over the last 10 years I have witnessed a shocking degradation in the quality and functionality of the software I use on a daily basis.
I very much doubt that. While I wouldn't dispute this is true in some cases, it's certainly not true as a general proposition for most people. It sounds to me like you have a problem with changes to your preferences for UI for applications you use which might be a valid complaint in some cases but I very much doubt you have lost meaningful productivity overall. I have the same complaint about some software I use too - there is a lot of form before function shitty UI design going on. But at the end of the day I can do more today with the software I have overall than I could 10 years ago, I can usually do it faster, and better and I suspect you can too.
Thank God for the Terminal. Without it we wouldn't be able to get anything done these days.
If you can actually get your job done with a terminal you have a ridiculously narrow job description. Nothing wrong with that but it doesn't describe the vast majority of computers users out there including me.
Taylor Swift used facial recognition technology at her live performances so that technicians running the system could then check those face scans against a private database of her stalkers.
Umm, pretty much anyone who is a Taylor Swift fan willing to actually pay to see her concert would qualify as a stalker - including teenage girls. They bulk of her fan base has an unhealthy obsession with her and her rather uninteresting music. They don't need facial recognition, just a camera or ask for ID at the door. The only question is how creepy are they.
Seriously, if true this is either a star taking herself WAY too seriously or some security asshat who got a new shiny toy to pay with and convinced an overpayed prima-donna to pay for it.
All I want is what's fair. And what's fair is based on work output.
Is it really? Fair is a VERY nebulous term. Work output can be one measure of fair but not the only one and sometimes not the most important one and sometime it is impossible to determine. Work output can be extremely difficult to objectively measure for some jobs. If you're making widgets on an assembly line it's pretty easy but most jobs are not that easy to measure. What units do you measure the productivity of a secretary answering phone calls with that would be useful in comparison to an engineer designing a widget? Both jobs need to be done and not everything can be or should be ranked. Companies with rank and yank systems don't tend to do very well in the long run because of the resentment and fear such systems instill.
To me this is like how Ohio can have fancy Botts' Dots that don't get scraped off by snowplows but here in California we have to put them into holes instead because we are paying for Ohio's road maintenance.
And I pay more money into our health care system than the value of care I receive so that my grandmother can get her health care paid for. That's not a bad thing. Some pay more so we all benefit. Someday my turn will come for someone to support me. You are trying to justify selfishness as some sort of virtue even though it results in a worse outcome for more people. California's well being depends in no tiny part on the well being of Ohio (and Michigan and Alabama and...). Sometimes California gives and sometimes they receive. That's what being in a society is about - we cooperate and support each other. At one time Ohio had a bigger population and bigger economy than California. By your argument California should have gone begging.
There's only so much money budgeted for salaries and every dollar an underperformer is paid effectively represents a dollar stolen from all of the employees who are actually doing their jobs.
Again with the selfishness. Someone is always going to be below average but evidently you missed the memo that business is a team sport and it's not a zero sum game. Help your fellow man and you can both benefit more than you might otherwise.
If you have more experience, or more valuable experience, than your direct boss it might be good to keep quiet.
That's just the company playing employees off against each other. Experience doesn't mean shit. Performance does. If someone is doing the same job and getting the same results then they should be getting paid the same. Going to a fancy school or what you did in a previous job does-not/should-not matter. Again, this is something that in most cases benefits the company to the detriment of some/most/all of the workers. And if the boss can't justify a pay disparity with an explanation based in some kind of evidence of performance then that's a problem.
In the end, what matters to me is paying my bills. How much a co-worker makes doesn't matter to me.
Really? If you are doing the same work and getting paid less for it that wouldn't bother you? You might feel very differently if you were a woman or minority and getting paid less than your white male colleagues - that happens all the time. My wife works with some people who just ran into that. They didn't know they were being paid less than a male in their company even though they did the same work with similar to better results and some had longer tenure with the company and more experience. When this was discovered they were justifiably pissed and it could have resulted in a lawsuit. (the company to their credit fixed the problem as soon as it was realized)
I wouldn't buy a used hammer.
Really? I would. I might not pay full price but it's not hard to check a hammer for functionality. I buy used equipment all the time, much of it much more complicated than a hammer.
What possible reason could someone have for returning it other than it was defective?
Off the top of my head:
1) Bought as a gift and someone didn't need/want it
2) Wrong type of hammer for application
3) Intended for use on a job that didn't materialize
4) Found a better deal elsewhere
5) Buyer's remorse
6) Financial problems for buyer
7) Purchased wrong item by accident
There are almost innumerable reasons why someone might return something that have nothing to do with it being defective in any way.
Don't need a hammer head flying off and cracking my skull open.
If you are seriously worried about this then you probably aren't competent to use a hammer.
If you as a seller deliver goods that are as stated and not defective, should limit the right for a buyer to return them.
Why? If I buy a shirt from a store for my daughter and then realize I got the wrong size why is it unreasonable for me to return it? Nothing wrong with the merchandise - just didn't fit the need. If the seller is benefiting from having allowing returns (and they do - that's why they do it) then where is the problem? If a store isn't willing to work with me on this why should I as a buyer shop there?
Why should the seller have to bear the cost of your fickle choice.
Sellers offer returns as a value added service to customers. Nobody forces them to do it but they often do because it results in greater net sales at the end of the day and because their competition often does it too to attract more sales. The hope is that the cost of the returns is less than the profit from the extra sales. You seriously think Walmart hasn't done the math on this? If it didn't pay off in the end they wouldn't do it.
Exactly. Just because someone took it out of the box and said oh shit, that's not what I wanted, doesn't make it "USED".
So what does make it "used" in your mind and how do you tell the difference? What bright line test can a retailer apply that scales up to large quantities of merch should they use? Remember that it has to be a test that a minimum wage clerk can apply reliably. This isn't a trivial question. Opening the packaging is a reasonable bright line test given that it's unlikely the merchant can test the item if it is returned after being opened and they probably can't sell it for full value. (would you pay full price for an item that looked like it had been tampered with? I wouldn't.)
Ebay used to be people selling stuff they didn't want any more.
Still is. But there is a limit to the size of that market. And there is the problem that eBay is de-facto the biggest fence in the world for stolen merch.
About a decade ago it mostly switched to a marketplace for merchants.
That's because they reached the limit of the market for people selling surplus shit from their garage. If the company wanted to grow they needed alternative markets. The obvious answer was to go into retail. Problem for eBay is that Amazon does this REALLY well. Far better than eBay does with far less hassle and risk to the buyer. There are some deals to be had on eBay if you are willing to invest some time but seldom anything mind blowing.
They changed the rules around that time to make the feedback system a lot harsher and shift the balance in the buyer's favour.
True. I used to make my living on eBay but they made it basically impossible unless you are either a giant company with a well known brand or some solo guy in a garage selling random shit. They made it very difficult to fight bad feedback, they allow major brands to screw small sellers without evidence (because liability), they were raising auction fees like clockwork every 6-12 months, etc. If you pay with PayPal you can almost always return the item if you play by the rules even if the auction/sale says no returns. There are plenty of bad sellers but there are even more shady buyers out there and I got to see every permutation of shady buyer you can imagine.
Blake and Parris are part of a growing cottage industry where dealers acquire discarded items at very low prices, only to resell some of them back on Amazon and eBay at a premium.
It will remain a cottage industry because the overhead in doing this is rather steep for the most part. I used to own a company that sold overstock/surplus inventory and second hand goods and the cost (time mostly) of acquiring the inventory generally ate up most profit margin. A picker by himself/herself might be able to eek out an ok living but it doesn't really scale up well.
So in other words, this may be a rare leak that hurts the company, and benefits employees. Generally when employees find out other people's salaries, they aren't mad at the other employees, they're mad at the company and demand raises.
I actually saw something like this a while back. A secretary at our company was photocopying payroll data including pay rates for all the employees on the campus. She accidentally left it on the copier. By the time she realized her mistake and can scurrying back to get it, it had already been copied and distributed and soon enough was posted prominently around the building. So everyone knew what everyone else was making and the company had a lot of explaining to do for certain... discrepancies.
I've always been puzzled why employees are so willing to go along with not sharing their pay data since keeping it a secret generally only benefits the company.
So you're saying "blockchain developer" could have gone from one to 33 openings.
Basically yes. Any time you see "fastest growing" anything and they are talking about percentages, this is the problem.
Big companies have this problem all the time. For example 10% growth in a company sounds solid but pretty modest right? And it is. But for a company like Apple, 10% growth means they have generate as much new sales in one year as eBay's entire revenue. So imagine your task is to create a company the size of eBay out of whole cloth in one year. Apple does that routinely and yet people will say they are aren't growing if they only grow 5% instead. But a company that goes from $1 million to $5 million is "fast growing". True but pretty misleading in a lot of ways.
Seriously are we that bad at statistics? It's a job that didn't exist until very recently. Any time you increase something from near zero the percentage growth is going to sound like a lot. Going from 1 to 1000 is a big percentage growth. Much bigger than going from 100,001 to 101,000 even though the absolute growth is identical.
The actual number of blockchain developer jobs is a rounding error as an absolute number. There are plenty of other jobs growing MUCH faster in terms of absolute numbers.
Texas has been prosperous precisely because of fiscal conservatism.
Texas has been prosperous because it has a about 1/3 of US oil reserves and oil is doing well. 4 of the 5 largest companies based in Texas are oil and gas companies. That's how they can get away with the tax policies they do. Many other states don't have massive oil reserves to take up the slack. If conservatism were such a boon then how do you explain California which clearly is not conservative leaning having a far larger economy than Texas despite having higher tax burdens as a general proposition?
The things that are attracting Apple to there - the low taxes and so forth - are due to the conservatism.
Umm, no. The reason Apple is interested is because there is a lot of tech talent already there and the city knows how to work with big tech companies productively. Furthermore Apple is ALREADY big in Austin with over 6000 employees currently. Any other reasons are minor in comparison. Taxes played at most a minor role in why tech talent is in Austin. Apple is interested in the area because a lot of other tech companies (Amazon, Dell, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Indeed, Electronic Arts, Facebook, National Instruments, etc) have already established there and they can get the talent they need. There also is a company that comparatively few have heard of called Trilogy that did a lot back around the dotcom boom to bring high level talent to the area.
We don't want the capital of Texas to turn into the bay area.
"We"? Speak for yourself and only for yourself. Your opinion is not widely shared in Austin. People have been moving to Austin in droves precisely because it is a good place to live, the city is (mostly) well run, and there are great jobs to be had there as a tech hub. If that's not your brand of vodka, fine but that's your problem.
You can keep your leftist attitudes and taxes where they are.
A) You being uncomfortable with someone who isn't a conservative is your problem, not anyone else's
B) Evidently you've never actually been to Austin if you think it's overrun by conservatives. Hell I consider it a bastion of sanity in Texas.
C) The notion that Texas is uniformly conservative is a ridiculous myth. At most it's around 58%/42% skewing conservative based on recent election results.
. Eremets and his colleagues say they have observed lanthanum hydride (LaH10) superconducting at the sweltering temperature of 250 K, or -23C. That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole. "Our study makes a leap forward on the road to the room-temperature superconductivity," say the team. (The caveat is that the sample has to be under huge pressure: 170 gigapascals, or about half the pressure at the center of the Earth.)
That's not a caveat. That's a show stopping problem. In what circumstances would this finding be useful given the ridiculous pressure involved? I get that it's probably a new line of discovery and that eventually it could result in something practical but as it stands this definitely isn't practical.
What we want is superconductivity at temperatures and pressures that require minimal to (preferably) no refrigeration at temperature ranges habitable to humans and no special pressure vessels under routine circumstances.
Comparing the service that Google provides to rape is asinine.
Disagree. The issue is whether there is adequate informed consent. This requires a clear appreciation and understanding of the facts, consequences, and implications of the action. It is very much akin to rape or at least malpractice if informed consent is not obtained. It's not at all clear that people are in possession of all the facts nor are they presented in a clear and understandable manner. Expecting people to know or suspect there are nuanced negative consequences without considerably effort to inform them is ridiculous
Google gives you something in return. Believe it or not, people aren't forced to use Google and generally do so because they like the products.
A medical quack gives people something in return too. Doesn't mean it's a good idea to allow it. Google is knowingly taking advantage of people's lack of technological sophistication. It's not really a question that a huge percent of the public does not understand the full implications of their actions nor are they being provided adequately clear information and opportunities to remedy this situation.
Sundar you miserable geek. Get out of the f**king petri dish and talk to average users, not the techno-incestuous gang you hang out with, but actual people who don't write code or configure servers.
Why not just use the much more likely explanation that he is lying and he knows it. He's looking for plausible deniability. The guy is smart so I don't really buy the argument that he's THAT out of touch with reality. Simple fact is that Google is doing what is in Google's financial interest and tracking you benefits Google rather a lot. They have to pretend they care about the issue but just follow the money trail to see what they really care about.
What's your source on this "long history"?
Well I can think of one example. In 1986 the US bombed Libya. One building that was hit was the French Embassy in Tripoli. The French had refused to allow US bombers to traverse their airspace from bases in England that forced the US planes to fly an additional 2600 nautical miles around France to get to Libya. It was understood/suspected right at the time that this was an "accident" with plausible deniability.
“But the plans were on display”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
So the USA taxpayer has paid about $4 billion in subsidies so that rich people can have another new car. Woo Fucking Hoo. MAGA. (/. warning to snowflakes, there may be sarcasm).
You mean instead of the $20 billion we spend each year on direct fossil fuel subsidies? (never mind the indirect ones like lack of pollution controls which are MUCH larger costs) Globally fossil fuels are directly subsidized to the tune of about $5 TRILLION per year.
By your idiot logic NASA exists so rich people can joy ride in space. Maybe consider that there is a bigger picture goal to benefit us all that you have failed to comprehend. Sometimes subsidies actually do make sense because we all benefit in the long run. Not everything is a zero sum game.
Personally I would like my daughter to be able to breathe the air 80 years from now and to not have to ride around in loud, messy vehicles built with 19th century technology. Digging up all the carbon in our soil and releasing it into the air is quite literally suicidal.
Just eyeballing the sales graph, it looks like adoption rate is about doubling every two years or so. Should these trends hold then next decade electric cars will pretty much take over.
Beware naive extrapolation. Electric cars are definitely not going to "take over" in just 10 years. It's going to take longer than that for the supply chain to develop to supply the batteries and power trains and to reconfigure the assembly lines even if the demand was there already which it definitely is not. Average age of a car on US roads is longer than a decade so it would take longer than that even if starting tomorrow we only sold electric cars. Not to mention there are issues with range and fast charging and charging infrastructure and grid updates that have yet to be fully resolved.
I could see electric cars conquering major market share within 2-3 decades and I think there will be a strong uptake in demand in the next 10 years but it's going to be a while before they really conquer the market.