Their concern is more to do with how people react under stressful situations when snap decisions are required. Knowing that your every move is being recorded and will be intensely scrutinized after the fact can alter those decisions.
That's a cop-out if I've ever heard one. Airline pilots have everything they say and every interaction with the controls recorded on every flight and somehow they manage to execute their duties quite well even in crash situations. If a train engineer is doing something they aren't supposed to be doing then they should damn well expect to get a spanking for it. Any equivocation on this point is simply trying to weasel out of being responsible for their actions.
I can understand the engineer's union attitude towards this. Would YOU want a camera on you all day? Do we really need to know whether the engineer picks his nose?
Pretty much everyone in retail has a camera on them all day. Anyone working at an airport too. And a bank. Airline pilots don't have a camera but they do have everything they say recorded. Stock traders have every piece of electronic and phone correspondence tracking in some manner.
Fact is that having a camera on you is not that big a deal as long as it is done above board and with reasonable privacy accommodations. They're really only going to review the tape if they think there is a problem. And if you are worried about whether you'll be seen picking your nose, then don't pick your nose.
The right doesn't "want stuff" taken from other people. They want to earn it.
They don't want stuff taken from other people? Bullshit. They just want the private sector to do the taking instead of the public sector. The right is all about removing restrictions from banks, deregulating industries, allowing companies to dump whatever they want into our streams, lakes and air, etc. They very much want to take things and they don't want to pay taxes so they don't have to give anything back. They are very happy to take away your rights if they don't like what you do. They want to take away women's reproductive rights. If you are an atheist they're very eager to take away your freedom to avoid organized religion. If you are gay they want to take away your right to love whomever you want. They're very eager to spend an absurd amount of money on defense and instead of taxing an appropriate amount they instead borrow the money burdening future generations.
Not strictly true at least with regard to being monitored by an employer. There are Federal and often State laws regarding whether recording is permitted in some circumstances. While employers usually have wide latitude they cannot legally record anywhere without limitation. Furthermore when a union gets involved then the right of the company to record may be subject to a collective bargaining agreement.
I bet the only time it's a distraction is when you have a helicopter boss who is constantly nagging you if you aren't always 100% focused on your task.
More or less yes. Monitoring is not the same as micromanaging. When part of your job is public safety (pilots, engineers, cops, etc) then a bit of passive monitoring is very much in the public interest and generally will outweigh the worker's right to privacy while performing their job.
A human in the cockpit is going to assess those situations much faster than an automated system can in many of these situations.
Depends on the human and depends on the automation and depends on the circumstances. Your assertion is far to broad to be correct as a general proposition.
You want to stop trains from speeding? screw the cameras, Put GPS in the engine
Already being worked on but controlling train speed isn't quite that simple. GPS has trouble in some locations on the ground so a reliable speed limiting system would necessitate something a bit more complicated. However I agree that there really isn't any good reason not to have it be a part of the technology package on trains.
More than a century of research establishes that monitoring workers actually reduces the ability to perform complex tasks, such as operating a train, because of the distractive effect.
Citation please? I'm an industrial engineer professionally and monitoring of workers is a pretty big part of my professional life. I'm not aware of any credible evidence that as a general principle that monitoring workers reduces ability to perform tasks. Perhaps a clumsy system in specific circumstances but claims of any "distracting effect" sound like union representative talking points rather than actual scientific facts. In fact in my experience the opposite is typically true. I find that people tend to be more vigilant when they are aware they are being monitored as a general rule. Some people dislike it but as long as they aren't interrupted the monitoring is rarely actually distracting. Pilots in aircraft have everything they say monitored and yet somehow they manage to operate a vehicle that is even more complex than a train quite competently.
If 90% of your business is done via selling online then shipping, this cost must be built into the item. I don't pay Walmart a separate fee for someone to unbox a carton and stock the shelves. Nor do I pay a fee for someone to put my stuff in a bag.
Just because you don't pay the fee separately doesn't mean you don't pay it. And if you go to the grocery store and someone puts your groceries in the bag you had better believe their paycheck is partly covered by your bill. They aren't doing it as a charity. Some are just more clever about hiding the charge than others.
There is no such thing as free shipping or free handling. Whether you break out the charge separately or lump it all together you'll end up paying it one way or the other.
I think he was saying that a tiny USB PacMan light is going to be so small as to not actually cost $7 to ship it.
Even a 1 pound ground package will be cost something close to $7-10 and probably more if it is any distance. UPS and Fedex don't deal in weights less than a pound - they round up to the nearest pound. You don't have to take my word for it. Go ahead and try to get a better price from Fedex or UPS. I promise you that you cannot do it.
It should be about $3 or less.
It isn't $3 and won't be unless you ship a HUGE (meaning many tens of thousands) number of packages. The only way you might get a shipping cost that low would be to ship it in a padded envelope using first class mail via USPS with no tracking. I've been shipping via UPS and Fedex for literally decades. Your perception of what it should cost to ship doesn't match reality.
The prices are already marked up so fucking high I can see up Ms. PacMan's skirt, they can afford to let a couple of small items ship for free
High prices does not mean they are necessarily profitable and no it doesn't mean they necessarily can afford to ship stuff for free. Maybe they can but you simply don't have the information to make that judgement.
There are a couple of assholes sellers on Amazon charging $18 to ship a fucking $7 item, but for the most part Amazon ships stuff for very little, or free.
There is no such thing as free shipping. If it is "free" then it is simply rolled into the price of the item, possibly at the expense of the profit margin of the vendor. Companies like Amazon get good shipping rates because they ship an enormous volume of packages. I use their Prime service and it's great but I have no illusions that the service is actually free of charge.
plus $7.00 shipping (more than it actually costs to ship).
Actually that's probably pretty close to their actual cost to ship an item like that. Couriers like Fedex and UPS charge by weight (or dimensional weight) and discounts to shippers are based almost entirely on volume. Thinkgeek doesn't do the kind of volume Amazon does and won't get the kind of discounts Amazon gets. So I'd expect their freight cost to be $5-7 or so for an item like that for ground service with tracking. Then you have to consider handling. They have to pay for a box and stuffing which will probably cost between $0.50-1.00 and they have to pay someone to put the item in the box, seal it, and ship it which is probably another $0.30-0.75. Frankly $7 isn't shocking at all.
People have gotten spoiled on freight costs but I used to own a company that would ship several hundred packages a week and $7 shipping and handling for delivery by UPS or similar is pretty much what you should expect to pay from anyone who isn't a very large company that ships thousands of packages a day.
No, you can't merge with Comcast. That would be too big of a company....suuuure, you can merge with Charter! That's fine.
First, the merger hasn't been approved yet. Second, Comcast is larger than TWC and Charter combined. TWC+Charter is roughly the same size as Comcast and in theory could be a competitor though in practice I doubt that would be the case. Third, Comcast owns content like NBC. TWC and Charter do not.
Because when AOL bought them with trumped up stock, somehow AOL was worth more than an entity with cable, programming,network infrastructure, move studios.
The two transactions couldn't be more different. In addition the buying entity here is Charter Communications, not TWC.
Most cases of what? Infrastructure? Government is the ONLY practical solution for a wide array of infrastructure projects. Roads, airports, passenger rail, ports, are all done primarily through governments. Telecom companies and utilities are typically private but heavily regulated. Power generation? Regulated. Bridges and dams? Regulated and contracted out. The blanket assertion that government is never the best option is not supported by the actual facts. Governments are often the best solution for when market incentives fail and they often fail in infrastructure which is what the internet has become.
Having government manage a rapidly change highly technical bit of infrastructure does not seem like a good idea to me.
That's why governments rarely do such things themselves. What happens is you pay taxes to the government and the government contracts out the services to a competitive bidding process among private companies. The government doesn't pave your roads (usually), it manages the company that does. The advantage of this is that the government's incentives are (more) aligned with the taxpayer and it provides a means to accomplish things that otherwise either wouldn't get done or would be done insufficiently or badly if profit motives were the only factor in play.
Yea, letting the government manage the high tech infrastructure is a recipe for success, not!
Why do you presume that the government would be any less effective than corporations? This meme that government is automatically incompetent is tiresome and demonstrably false in numerous circumstances. I have precisely one practical ISP option where I live (Comcast) and I assure you that their customer "service" is less than amazing and their prices are not even close to cheap. Would a government run ISP be any worse? Maybe, maybe not. I could see it going either way. Your assumption that they would be automatically incompetent "because, government" is both unproven and illogical. Government tends to be a good choice for things where market incentives break down, including infrastructure. Guess what? Market incentives aren't getting the job done in the ISP market for a lot of people. I have to pay a lot of money for a relatively slow connection to my choice of a single company. I doubt the government would be any worse to be honest.
Can you imagine how responsive a government run infrastructure would have been to say the Netflix issues that plagued Verizon customers?
I can imagine it potentially being quite a bit better since the government wouldn't be trying to chisel Netflix out of a cut of their profits. Corporations, particularly monopolies are noted for being less than responsive. And in fact we have to have government oversight of them precisely because the company's profit motive tends to conflict directly with incentives for good customer service.
Maybe what's needed is to separate the "providers" from the companies that own the infrastructure.
That's a good idea but it doesn't fully address the problem. Infrastructure companies would still be tempted to charge a "toll" to prioritize traffic so regulation or competition is needed. Since competition is a practical impossibility in a lot of places (expensive to have multiple wires to rural locations) then regulation becomes necessary.
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
That has ALWAYS been true. In fact just about the only way to make a name for yourself in science is to show that someone else is wrong about something. Einstein is famous because he showed how Newton was wrong. We put forward hypothesis, test them and (in what should be a surprise to no one) most of them ultimately turn out to be wrong or defective in some way. As a general rule that is both acceptable (to a point) and expected.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
Again, why the notion that any of this is somehow new?
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive and innovative.
Bullshit they aren't incentivized to be right. Being right is hugely incentivized. The problem is that it is hard to be right about something that is actually complicated and meaningful. So we have to break big problems up into little problems and most of those aren't consequential and many are going to turn out to be wrong or dead ends. Not every bit of science is going to be of world altering importance. Some people are doing some shady things to earn a paycheck and stay in the game but they tend to get found out in due time. Science is remarkably effective in weeding out bad data over time.
Man, I rail against NYT paywalls which people erroneously claim can by bypassed by private browsing, and I get accused of trolling. One failbook link, and everyone LOSES THEIR MINDS
Same basic issue but frankly I trust the NTY *far* more than I trust facebook even though I have no interest in funding either one. There should NEVER be a paywall link in an article summary. Ever. Facebook is merely a particularly egregious one since they are so full of douchebaggery.
You are incredibly self-absorbed if you think anyone other than the slash-shit echo chamber cares the slightest whether you would ever sign in to FB.
Apparently you care since you got all worked up about it here in the "slash-shit echo chamber". Little bit of irony there that seems to have escaped your notice. You also apparently are unable to comprehend that my point was in regards to the annoying assumption that everyone has a facebook account. I use myself as an example but I'm hardly the only one. I would make the exact same point about a NYT paywall link although to be honest I trust the NYT far more than I ever would trust facebook.
Well apparently now it does, or you wouldn't be complaining.
Nope. Merely expressing annoyance at the assumption that I should have to sign up for a Facebook account. "Oh you just have to log in" is utterly unhelpful to me. Even if I had an account and could log in I have no desire to do so.
ProTip: It's not like you need to give Facebook any real data to sign up, and you can access it in privacy mode to thwart tracking cookies.
It's one more annoying thing to keep track of, it gives Facebook the opportunity to track at least some of my activity even in privacy mode, and privacy mode does not thwart all tracking. Furthermore in order to really do anything genuinely useful with Facebook you need to "friend" people which pretty much ends up being a giveaway as to who you are.
Found the problem, you have to be logged in to Facebook to see it.
And why on earth would I want to do that? Facebook has nothing of value to offer me that I care about and I sure as hell do not trust the company. I do not have a Facebook account and don't expect to get one any time soon. I'm certainly not going to sign up to get some random news article that undoubtedly will be available elsewhere.
They very fact that they were banged together by an intelligent agency makes them a tool.
No it doesn't. When I was a child (ostensibly an "intelligent agency") I was known to bang rocks together but it certainly didn't make them tools - not in any meaningful sense of the word. For something to be a tool it has to have a functional purpose.
In general you can tell by close examination whether a potential tool is simply the product of natural erosion or in fact was used as a tool.
Quite correct. However I've had the same doubts being discussed here regarding whether certain rocks really were used as tools or not. I'm not an expert so I don't pretend to know the answer but I've seen "tools" in museums which made me wonder if the people who collected them really knew what they were doing. Call it skepticism even though I don't really know what I'm talking about on the subject. I tend to be skeptical about things by default until I understand them.
The rich live close while the poor have to commute (NYC tried something similar).
NYC is not necessarily reflective of the rest of the country. Very little there resembles how things work east of the Hudson River. Where I live wealthier folks tend to commute farther on average. I am GM for a manufacturing company and I live the farthest away of anyone at the company because frankly the plant is not in the nicest part of town. The lower paid employees tend to live the closest to the factory.
I've heard about Seiki but they don't currently make a >60" TV, I cannot find one anywhere to actually look at in person, and it's a little hard to tell if it is any good. I'm not brand loyal but a company I've barely heard of making oddly inexpensive TVs does tend to raise red flags.
I find that a 23", 1080p display is enough to watch Netflix.
From across a room? The monitor I'm using to type this on is 24" and you couldn't pay me to use it as a TV in my living room. I'm sitting about 12-15 feet away most of the time - sometimes further. My current TV is about 36" and it's barely usable at times. I have good eyesight but 23" would be impossible to enjoy.
That's why I use a dumb, feature-less 23" widescreen computer monitor as my TV, connected to an external AppleTV box.
So you use a monitor with a substantially smaller screen size than even my old CRT TV. I am looking at 60"+ TVs and these are basically all "smart TVs". The main feature I want in a TV for my living room is a huge screen. Like you I don't give a crap about most of the extra features. I just want enough input ports to hook up to my gear and a big screen with a very good image quality. Don't need Netflix, 3D, or any of the other crap. If I want it I'll use an external box to get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Their concern is more to do with how people react under stressful situations when snap decisions are required. Knowing that your every move is being recorded and will be intensely scrutinized after the fact can alter those decisions.
That's a cop-out if I've ever heard one. Airline pilots have everything they say and every interaction with the controls recorded on every flight and somehow they manage to execute their duties quite well even in crash situations. If a train engineer is doing something they aren't supposed to be doing then they should damn well expect to get a spanking for it. Any equivocation on this point is simply trying to weasel out of being responsible for their actions.
I can understand the engineer's union attitude towards this. Would YOU want a camera on you all day? Do we really need to know whether the engineer picks his nose?
Pretty much everyone in retail has a camera on them all day. Anyone working at an airport too. And a bank. Airline pilots don't have a camera but they do have everything they say recorded. Stock traders have every piece of electronic and phone correspondence tracking in some manner.
Fact is that having a camera on you is not that big a deal as long as it is done above board and with reasonable privacy accommodations. They're really only going to review the tape if they think there is a problem. And if you are worried about whether you'll be seen picking your nose, then don't pick your nose.
The right doesn't "want stuff" taken from other people. They want to earn it.
They don't want stuff taken from other people? Bullshit. They just want the private sector to do the taking instead of the public sector. The right is all about removing restrictions from banks, deregulating industries, allowing companies to dump whatever they want into our streams, lakes and air, etc. They very much want to take things and they don't want to pay taxes so they don't have to give anything back. They are very happy to take away your rights if they don't like what you do. They want to take away women's reproductive rights. If you are an atheist they're very eager to take away your freedom to avoid organized religion. If you are gay they want to take away your right to love whomever you want. They're very eager to spend an absurd amount of money on defense and instead of taxing an appropriate amount they instead borrow the money burdening future generations.
The right doesn't take stuff? Give me a break...
It's a train he has no right to privacy.
Not strictly true at least with regard to being monitored by an employer. There are Federal and often State laws regarding whether recording is permitted in some circumstances. While employers usually have wide latitude they cannot legally record anywhere without limitation. Furthermore when a union gets involved then the right of the company to record may be subject to a collective bargaining agreement.
I bet the only time it's a distraction is when you have a helicopter boss who is constantly nagging you if you aren't always 100% focused on your task.
More or less yes. Monitoring is not the same as micromanaging. When part of your job is public safety (pilots, engineers, cops, etc) then a bit of passive monitoring is very much in the public interest and generally will outweigh the worker's right to privacy while performing their job.
A human in the cockpit is going to assess those situations much faster than an automated system can in many of these situations.
Depends on the human and depends on the automation and depends on the circumstances. Your assertion is far to broad to be correct as a general proposition.
You want to stop trains from speeding? screw the cameras, Put GPS in the engine
Already being worked on but controlling train speed isn't quite that simple. GPS has trouble in some locations on the ground so a reliable speed limiting system would necessitate something a bit more complicated. However I agree that there really isn't any good reason not to have it be a part of the technology package on trains.
More than a century of research establishes that monitoring workers actually reduces the ability to perform complex tasks, such as operating a train, because of the distractive effect.
Citation please? I'm an industrial engineer professionally and monitoring of workers is a pretty big part of my professional life. I'm not aware of any credible evidence that as a general principle that monitoring workers reduces ability to perform tasks. Perhaps a clumsy system in specific circumstances but claims of any "distracting effect" sound like union representative talking points rather than actual scientific facts. In fact in my experience the opposite is typically true. I find that people tend to be more vigilant when they are aware they are being monitored as a general rule. Some people dislike it but as long as they aren't interrupted the monitoring is rarely actually distracting. Pilots in aircraft have everything they say monitored and yet somehow they manage to operate a vehicle that is even more complex than a train quite competently.
If 90% of your business is done via selling online then shipping, this cost must be built into the item. I don't pay Walmart a separate fee for someone to unbox a carton and stock the shelves. Nor do I pay a fee for someone to put my stuff in a bag.
Just because you don't pay the fee separately doesn't mean you don't pay it. And if you go to the grocery store and someone puts your groceries in the bag you had better believe their paycheck is partly covered by your bill. They aren't doing it as a charity. Some are just more clever about hiding the charge than others.
There is no such thing as free shipping or free handling. Whether you break out the charge separately or lump it all together you'll end up paying it one way or the other.
I think he was saying that a tiny USB PacMan light is going to be so small as to not actually cost $7 to ship it.
Even a 1 pound ground package will be cost something close to $7-10 and probably more if it is any distance. UPS and Fedex don't deal in weights less than a pound - they round up to the nearest pound. You don't have to take my word for it. Go ahead and try to get a better price from Fedex or UPS. I promise you that you cannot do it.
It should be about $3 or less.
It isn't $3 and won't be unless you ship a HUGE (meaning many tens of thousands) number of packages. The only way you might get a shipping cost that low would be to ship it in a padded envelope using first class mail via USPS with no tracking. I've been shipping via UPS and Fedex for literally decades. Your perception of what it should cost to ship doesn't match reality.
The prices are already marked up so fucking high I can see up Ms. PacMan's skirt, they can afford to let a couple of small items ship for free
High prices does not mean they are necessarily profitable and no it doesn't mean they necessarily can afford to ship stuff for free. Maybe they can but you simply don't have the information to make that judgement.
There are a couple of assholes sellers on Amazon charging $18 to ship a fucking $7 item, but for the most part Amazon ships stuff for very little, or free.
There is no such thing as free shipping. If it is "free" then it is simply rolled into the price of the item, possibly at the expense of the profit margin of the vendor. Companies like Amazon get good shipping rates because they ship an enormous volume of packages. I use their Prime service and it's great but I have no illusions that the service is actually free of charge.
Ah, yes, back in the day before Dice ruined slashdot, those were fine times, weren't they...
You think Dice ruined slashdot and yet you are still here. Curious...
plus $7.00 shipping (more than it actually costs to ship).
Actually that's probably pretty close to their actual cost to ship an item like that. Couriers like Fedex and UPS charge by weight (or dimensional weight) and discounts to shippers are based almost entirely on volume. Thinkgeek doesn't do the kind of volume Amazon does and won't get the kind of discounts Amazon gets. So I'd expect their freight cost to be $5-7 or so for an item like that for ground service with tracking. Then you have to consider handling. They have to pay for a box and stuffing which will probably cost between $0.50-1.00 and they have to pay someone to put the item in the box, seal it, and ship it which is probably another $0.30-0.75. Frankly $7 isn't shocking at all.
People have gotten spoiled on freight costs but I used to own a company that would ship several hundred packages a week and $7 shipping and handling for delivery by UPS or similar is pretty much what you should expect to pay from anyone who isn't a very large company that ships thousands of packages a day.
No, you can't merge with Comcast. That would be too big of a company....suuuure, you can merge with Charter! That's fine.
First, the merger hasn't been approved yet. Second, Comcast is larger than TWC and Charter combined. TWC+Charter is roughly the same size as Comcast and in theory could be a competitor though in practice I doubt that would be the case. Third, Comcast owns content like NBC. TWC and Charter do not.
Surely Time Warner has learned the lesson of not being bought for funny money stock?
Time Warner Cable is not the same company as Time Warner Inc. They have been separate enterprises since 2009.
Because when AOL bought them with trumped up stock, somehow AOL was worth more than an entity with cable, programming,network infrastructure, move studios.
The two transactions couldn't be more different. In addition the buying entity here is Charter Communications, not TWC.
Government is NOT the answer in most cases
Most cases of what? Infrastructure? Government is the ONLY practical solution for a wide array of infrastructure projects. Roads, airports, passenger rail, ports, are all done primarily through governments. Telecom companies and utilities are typically private but heavily regulated. Power generation? Regulated. Bridges and dams? Regulated and contracted out. The blanket assertion that government is never the best option is not supported by the actual facts. Governments are often the best solution for when market incentives fail and they often fail in infrastructure which is what the internet has become.
Having government manage a rapidly change highly technical bit of infrastructure does not seem like a good idea to me.
That's why governments rarely do such things themselves. What happens is you pay taxes to the government and the government contracts out the services to a competitive bidding process among private companies. The government doesn't pave your roads (usually), it manages the company that does. The advantage of this is that the government's incentives are (more) aligned with the taxpayer and it provides a means to accomplish things that otherwise either wouldn't get done or would be done insufficiently or badly if profit motives were the only factor in play.
Yea, letting the government manage the high tech infrastructure is a recipe for success, not!
Why do you presume that the government would be any less effective than corporations? This meme that government is automatically incompetent is tiresome and demonstrably false in numerous circumstances. I have precisely one practical ISP option where I live (Comcast) and I assure you that their customer "service" is less than amazing and their prices are not even close to cheap. Would a government run ISP be any worse? Maybe, maybe not. I could see it going either way. Your assumption that they would be automatically incompetent "because, government" is both unproven and illogical. Government tends to be a good choice for things where market incentives break down, including infrastructure. Guess what? Market incentives aren't getting the job done in the ISP market for a lot of people. I have to pay a lot of money for a relatively slow connection to my choice of a single company. I doubt the government would be any worse to be honest.
Can you imagine how responsive a government run infrastructure would have been to say the Netflix issues that plagued Verizon customers?
I can imagine it potentially being quite a bit better since the government wouldn't be trying to chisel Netflix out of a cut of their profits. Corporations, particularly monopolies are noted for being less than responsive. And in fact we have to have government oversight of them precisely because the company's profit motive tends to conflict directly with incentives for good customer service.
Maybe what's needed is to separate the "providers" from the companies that own the infrastructure.
That's a good idea but it doesn't fully address the problem. Infrastructure companies would still be tempted to charge a "toll" to prioritize traffic so regulation or competition is needed. Since competition is a practical impossibility in a lot of places (expensive to have multiple wires to rural locations) then regulation becomes necessary.
The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
That has ALWAYS been true. In fact just about the only way to make a name for yourself in science is to show that someone else is wrong about something. Einstein is famous because he showed how Newton was wrong. We put forward hypothesis, test them and (in what should be a surprise to no one) most of them ultimately turn out to be wrong or defective in some way. As a general rule that is both acceptable (to a point) and expected.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.
Again, why the notion that any of this is somehow new?
Can bad scientific practices be fixed? Part of the problem is that no-one is incentivized to be right. Instead, scientists are incentivized to be productive and innovative.
Bullshit they aren't incentivized to be right. Being right is hugely incentivized. The problem is that it is hard to be right about something that is actually complicated and meaningful. So we have to break big problems up into little problems and most of those aren't consequential and many are going to turn out to be wrong or dead ends. Not every bit of science is going to be of world altering importance. Some people are doing some shady things to earn a paycheck and stay in the game but they tend to get found out in due time. Science is remarkably effective in weeding out bad data over time.
Man, I rail against NYT paywalls which people erroneously claim can by bypassed by private browsing, and I get accused of trolling. One failbook link, and everyone LOSES THEIR MINDS
Same basic issue but frankly I trust the NTY *far* more than I trust facebook even though I have no interest in funding either one. There should NEVER be a paywall link in an article summary. Ever. Facebook is merely a particularly egregious one since they are so full of douchebaggery.
You are incredibly self-absorbed if you think anyone other than the slash-shit echo chamber cares the slightest whether you would ever sign in to FB.
Apparently you care since you got all worked up about it here in the "slash-shit echo chamber". Little bit of irony there that seems to have escaped your notice. You also apparently are unable to comprehend that my point was in regards to the annoying assumption that everyone has a facebook account. I use myself as an example but I'm hardly the only one. I would make the exact same point about a NYT paywall link although to be honest I trust the NYT far more than I ever would trust facebook.
Well apparently now it does, or you wouldn't be complaining.
Nope. Merely expressing annoyance at the assumption that I should have to sign up for a Facebook account. "Oh you just have to log in" is utterly unhelpful to me. Even if I had an account and could log in I have no desire to do so.
ProTip: It's not like you need to give Facebook any real data to sign up, and you can access it in privacy mode to thwart tracking cookies.
It's one more annoying thing to keep track of, it gives Facebook the opportunity to track at least some of my activity even in privacy mode, and privacy mode does not thwart all tracking. Furthermore in order to really do anything genuinely useful with Facebook you need to "friend" people which pretty much ends up being a giveaway as to who you are.
Found the problem, you have to be logged in to Facebook to see it.
And why on earth would I want to do that? Facebook has nothing of value to offer me that I care about and I sure as hell do not trust the company. I do not have a Facebook account and don't expect to get one any time soon. I'm certainly not going to sign up to get some random news article that undoubtedly will be available elsewhere.
They very fact that they were banged together by an intelligent agency makes them a tool.
No it doesn't. When I was a child (ostensibly an "intelligent agency") I was known to bang rocks together but it certainly didn't make them tools - not in any meaningful sense of the word. For something to be a tool it has to have a functional purpose.
In general you can tell by close examination whether a potential tool is simply the product of natural erosion or in fact was used as a tool.
Quite correct. However I've had the same doubts being discussed here regarding whether certain rocks really were used as tools or not. I'm not an expert so I don't pretend to know the answer but I've seen "tools" in museums which made me wonder if the people who collected them really knew what they were doing. Call it skepticism even though I don't really know what I'm talking about on the subject. I tend to be skeptical about things by default until I understand them.
The rich live close while the poor have to commute (NYC tried something similar).
NYC is not necessarily reflective of the rest of the country. Very little there resembles how things work east of the Hudson River. Where I live wealthier folks tend to commute farther on average. I am GM for a manufacturing company and I live the farthest away of anyone at the company because frankly the plant is not in the nicest part of town. The lower paid employees tend to live the closest to the factory.
I've heard about Seiki but they don't currently make a >60" TV, I cannot find one anywhere to actually look at in person, and it's a little hard to tell if it is any good. I'm not brand loyal but a company I've barely heard of making oddly inexpensive TVs does tend to raise red flags.
I find that a 23", 1080p display is enough to watch Netflix.
From across a room? The monitor I'm using to type this on is 24" and you couldn't pay me to use it as a TV in my living room. I'm sitting about 12-15 feet away most of the time - sometimes further. My current TV is about 36" and it's barely usable at times. I have good eyesight but 23" would be impossible to enjoy.
That's why I use a dumb, feature-less 23" widescreen computer monitor as my TV, connected to an external AppleTV box.
So you use a monitor with a substantially smaller screen size than even my old CRT TV. I am looking at 60"+ TVs and these are basically all "smart TVs". The main feature I want in a TV for my living room is a huge screen. Like you I don't give a crap about most of the extra features. I just want enough input ports to hook up to my gear and a big screen with a very good image quality. Don't need Netflix, 3D, or any of the other crap. If I want it I'll use an external box to get it.