Why would anyone give away 2% of the profits to a payment processor?
You think processing cash is free? ALL forms of payment processing cost money, including cash. You have to pay people for their time to track it, organize it, deposit it, secure it, etc. Not to mention the fact that cash is rather easy to steal. None of this is free. In some cases it might cost less than what a credit card company charges but sometimes it costs more.
We are already past ten toes over that line. When there is a power outage most businesses shut down, because they cannot process credit cards. Many cannot even process cash.
When there is a power outage there are plenty of business that keep going just fine. The reason many shut down isn't just because of payment processing, though that certainly is one significant consideration for some like large retailers. Smaller ones can usually get by for a while. My company shuts down in a power outage because we are a manufacturing company and our equipment requires power to be useful. Payment processing isn't really a big issue for us and we don't depend on it to function day to day. A company like a lawn service might not really even notice a power outage of just a few hours.
Of course, this larger ominous question is why the banks were bailed out with the 2008 meltdown
Because there really was no option to not bail them out unless you wanted the next Great Depression. The banks need/needed to be regulated more than they were but that's a separate issue.
Because if all the big banks were suddenly forced to file for bankruptcy, would the credit cards still work?
Under what circumstances is this anything besides a ridiculous rhetorical question?
The blockchain technology might be brilliant. Bitcoin very definitely is not. We shouldn't confuse the two. The jury is still out on blockchain but I think the more interesting uses of it won't be for currency. Bitcoin is an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment which might also be a pyramid scheme either intentionally or unintentionally.
Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that's for sure, but it has its pros and cons
This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions. Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic. Not everyone can get a credit card or afford a smartphone and even if they could it still wouldn't be practical some of the time.
If he actually thinks the dollar is trading bits of paper he has no idea what money actually is. (I doubt he's that naive) The vast majority of currency is nothing more than digits in a ledger somewhere. Paper currency is a tiny fraction of the total amount of money in circulation. Somewhere less than 10% of the total.
"Not everything can/should/does need to be done" on a generic unified platform that forces developers to lowest common denominator.
You are arguing that general purpose computers are de-facto a lowest common denominator. Your argument makes no sense and unified platforms are often greater than the sum of the parts. In case you have forgotten both PCs and smartphones are generic unified platforms. My smartphone replaced to varying degrees my (deep breath...) calendar, point-and-shoot camera, PDA, video recorder, laptop (for some use cases), walkman, photo album, flashlight, television, credit card (ApplePay/GooglePay), voicemail machine, remote control, alarm clock, to-do list, GPS, address book, weather station, physical books (kindle app), encyclopedia, and the list goes on. PCs have replaced a similar swath of equipment. Both are general purpose devices that can be programmed to do whatever task we need. There is no objective reason PCs and smartphones have to exist as separate operating systems for the rest of eternity and there are a lot of compelling reasons to want to merge them into a single code base.
Are you seriously going to argue that the smartphone is somehow a "lowest common denominator"? Sure I can schlep around my big heavy SLR camera which can take better pictures (at considerable cost) but at the expense of portability and convenience. It makes more sense to take Good Enough pictures with my phone 99% of the time. On the occasion when I need better image quality I know where/how to get it but that isn't a sane argument against "generic unified platforms".
Because we have it already, it's the goddamn web. Which you can build desktop and mobile apps out of
Yeah Apple tried this with the original iPhone. They were going to do everything on the web if you recall. Didn't work. Why? So glad you asked. Because not everything can/should/does need to be done on the web. There are literally countless use cases which are better done locally than on the web. PWAs have their place and will be great for some use cases but they aren't the proper solution for every problem.
I've been saying for years that mobile device software is going to gradually merge with PC software. While there are some practical difficulties in doing this, it makes a ton of sense if someone can pull it off. Microsoft has been trying to get the formula right on this for a long time with mixed success. Google is trying to get Android to be more than just a mobile phone OS. It's not an easy problem but there really is no long term advantage to Apple or to their users in maintaining two separate and mostly incompatible operating systems. Nobody has nailed the formula yet but the first company to figure it out is going to rake in a lot of money for their trouble.
I know Apple has historically said they aren't interesting in merging MacOS and iOS but you can tell by their actions that this was just a public relations move so they wouldn't get pushed on it. They've been gradually moving towards consolidating their hardware and systems for quite a while now. The problem with doing so has been A) reconciling the very different user interfaces in a practical way and B) the limitations of the hardware of the day. Over time these problems can be resolved but not before a certain tipping point is reached.
Because Dell doesn't talk shit like "you're holding it wrong"
No instead they have Michael Dell saying shit about Apple like "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders" which turned out to be remarkably arrogant and increasingly foolish since he said it.
and because Dell hasn't tried to build a reputation as making computers which are easier to use than everyone else's.
Because they couldn't. Dell doesn't make the software that runs their PCs so they don't control enough of the process to even try. Apple more or less succeeded in doing that exact thing. Several times in fact with various iterations of MacOS and iOS. There is a reason Windows mimicked the Mac and Android followed the iPhone. Like them or hate them you cannot deny that Apple does do a good job making comparatively well designed and easy to use interfaces to their products. There is a reason every other PC and smartphone maker follows Apple's lead at least some of the time.
Also, because Dell seems to have less gigantic fuckups than Apple, per unit shipped.
Not historically they haven't. Dell's hardware is fine in general but they've had plenty of problems over the years. Measurably more than Apple most years if you believe the PC reliability rankings over the years. I'm not bashing Dell here (in fact I'm typing this on one of their PCs which I purchased with my own money) but let's not pretend they are something special among big computer makers.
Amazon appears to me to be a poorly-managed company.
Are you being ironic and making a joke or is this a serious (and stupid) question? I can't tell. Amazon sells close to half of all online retail sales in the US. If that is poorly managed then give me some of that. I'm sure it's just an accident that Jeff Bezos is now the richest man on the planet.
Every Amazon web page has the distractions of Amazon trying to sell something else besides the product that interests you.
They have mountains of data that says a lot of their customers buy those other products at or around the same time as the one you are looking at. Why would they not try to sell both items at the same time?
Is trying to manipulate customers good business management?
Have you ever actually been in a store? You think a retail business trying to sell you more stuff is somehow unusual or bad? Of course they are trying to sell you as much stuff as they can. Only an idiot doesn't understand this and it's not some evil plot. Why do you think retail stores have all their merchandise sitting out on the floor for you to look at? Same thing. Exactly the same thing.
Do you think these use cases are ones Apple actually gives a shit about? For those who care there are USB-C and Thunderbolt docking stations available and they work fine. Personally I'm with you and would rather have a 8P8C ethernet port built in but clearly I'm not the customer Apple is courting.
And politicians don't really care about their constituents or the country.
Awfully broad brush you are painting with there. Yes that is too often true but there are people in positions of political power who actually do genuinely care about the people they were elected to lead/serve. Such people are to be treasured when found.
And SJWs really don't care about equality.
A) The term "SJW" is lazy nonsense catchall pejorative like "hipster" that means almost nothing and accurately describes almost no one. Including your use here. B) Equality and equity are not the same thing. You're right they don't care about equality because equality isn't necessarily what's fair or necessary. You can charge a rich person and a poor person the same tax rate and that is equal but it isn't equitable because 20% of a poor person's income has a much bigger impact on their life than 20% of a rich person's. Just because something is the same for everyone doesn't mean it is fair or good.
Interestingly enough, a credit to your bank account can take up to an order of magnitude more time to post than an instantaneous purchase.
The settlement procedures are pretty much identical once the transaction is processed for purchases or refunds. You just don't notice because most of the time the cash flows are out of your account and not in to your account and because your bank hides some of the details. Many types of transactions don't actually close for some time (days) even if they show it posting immediately. My bank will post a transaction immediately because I'm considered a safe risk based on my banking history but it's technically in sort of a "pending" status for a day or two (sometimes longer depending on the counterparty) until the settlement procedures finish. If you want the transaction to finish faster there generally are higher costs associated with that. To your point, how long a company takes to get around to posting the transaction can be telling but the actual transaction itself happens just as fast no matter which direction the cash flows.
Perhaps the banking powers that be are tipping their collective hand here... when it is in their financial interest to do so, they've developed the uncanny ability to be as fast as they need to be or as slow as necessary to maximize daily balance computations.
Sure, they know how to play these games to their advantage when they feel the need. But that mostly happens when the bank is the counterparty rather than simply being an intermediary. If you and I are exchanging money and the bank is just facilitating the transaction they reap no benefit from delaying one side or the other in the transaction.
If your case depends in any significant way on interpreting the intent of an emoji then (near as makes no difference) you have no objectively useful evidence.
They're interested in the manufacturing process - how things are made, integrated, and put together. That's the part that China needs to learn.
Manufacturing processes for most products are typically not black magic. It's what I do for a living. There are some exceptions for some high tech or high complexity stuff where the magic is in how it's put together. But how most things are assembled are not big secrets - it's more in the execution than some secret sauce. That said, companies definitely have to be very careful about what technology they expose to manufacturing in China because the odds are VERY high it will be stolen and/or replicated in fairly short order if due care is not taken. This is true for both design and assembly.
China only really knows how to make things manually in many areas,
That's not really true as a general proposition and hasn't been for some time. China uses a lot of manual labor because they have lots of (cheap) manual labor and that makes it economical. But they're quite good with automation when they need to be and have been getting better rather fast for the last 20 years.
1. "tearing one apart and reverse engineering it" would give you a lot more details than asking someone out of their memory.
That depends on precisely who is being asked and what sort of documentation they have/had access to. Reverse engineering does not usually provide more details than could be obtained from the memory banks of a talented key engineer.
2. asking interviewee for info is pretty prevalent in the Silicon Valley. for one, the company asking does not sign an NDA. it is the interviewee who has signed the NDA and hold the responsibility to guard such secrets.
So let's ignore any legal implications for a moment. Would you hire someone who would so readily spill the trade secrets of their current/former employer? I sure wouldn't. Because if they'll do it to them they'll do it to you. That is a question that says more about the character of the interviewee than it does the hiring company. Assuming legal niceties are observed, this would be a question to determine NOT to hire someone if they answer anything other than saying they either do not know or cannot divulge.
Visa being installed to virtually every retailer in the industrialised world?
Yes. Outside of China proper they have approx 50% marketshare everywhere else on the globe. Outside of major cities China is still primarily a cash economy. UnionPay dominates in China but has virtually no presence outside of China. Credit cards in general are still a growing industry in China.
But on the other side of the counter, the customer has a Google device already in their pocket, already connected to a network.
Which isn't accepted at most merchants and isn't likely to be any time soon. Visa also has a network and it's already in place. Do you know who is behind Visa? It's banks. Google would be competing head to head with banks in financial services. Stranger things have happened but that's not typically a recipe for success. You know what else people have in their pocket? A credit card (usually Visa) which works on a payment network in every retailer. Getting people to dump their plastic cards for smartphone payments has been a tough sell and there is no sign of that changing.
Online? Google's already there too. Most of us do our online shopping via mobile device. There's no reason for Visa/Mastercard to be involved at all.
Yes they are there and their payment processing infrastructure is essentially nil compared to Visa. You seem to have no appreciation of the amount of infrastructure required to operating a payment processing system that is accepted close to everywhere. Not to mention the regulatory burden and the competitive dynamics. If Google want's a piece of that market I wish them luck but many others have tried and failed and there is nothing to suggest Google will fair any better.
And they can crush Visa on transaction fees as they don't even need to turn a profit.
If it were that easy they would have already tried. Walmart has been trying to get into banking and payment services for a long time now with limited success.
They'll surely be selling the data on the back end. Actual transaction data is probably worth enough that they don't even need to charge for the service.
If Apple and Google both decided to support the same stable cryptocurrency - e.g., USDC - Venmo would be out of business in a year or two and Visa and MC would be frantic.
A cryptocurrency would have to threaten the dollar to be a threat to Visa and MC and that isn't going to happen. Cryptocurrency is not a credible threat to Visa and MC. Not even a chance.
Aren't they forbidden to do so by the agreement with credit cards operators?
Not necessarily. It's fairly common to see "convenience fees" charged for the 2-4% that it costs to process a credit card transaction. My company does it and so do a lot of big companies and government institutions. There are some circumstances where the merchant agreement prohibits some actions but these are not universal. And it's not like anyone is really checking anyway most of the time.
Google or Amazon could end you. It could happen fast and bad.
Dream on. Google and Amazon are good at what they do but bumping Visa and Mastercard out of their market? Yeah, that isn't going to happen anytime soon. They have an installed network connected to virtually every retailer in the industrialized world and they are responsible for most of the online retail payments too. Creating a payment system that could seriously threaten their duopoly will be nigh impossible even for companies as well funded as Google or Amazon. It's telling that none of the big tech companies have even tried to compete with them head on.
Furthermore do you have any idea what sort of regulatory scrutiny comes with running a financial network? You can bet that Google and Amazon and the others want no part of that mess.
They should be lowering fees as an attempt to stave off the inevitable.
I'm curious what you think is inevitable. Visa and MC have one of the deepest moats around their business I can imagine. The only real threat to them is regulatory action.
Saying it has a 41% increased risk is a meaningless statement unless some context is provided regarding how likely it was to get it in the first place. If the odds are 1-in-a-trillion and we increase that by 41% that is just statistical noise, representative of nothing. Any headline that spouts a percentage risk increase without a context is nothing but clickbait.
So to put some facts to this, your lifetime risk of contracting Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is around 1/42 if you are a man and 1/54 if you are a woman. It accounts for about 4% of all cancer in the US and about 70,000 people in the US are expected to be diagnosed this year. So a 41% increase risk turns out to be a substantial risk factor if the study results can be confirmed/replicated.
It's really not about the cables, but about the interface itself.
That's approximately the point I was trying to make, perhaps badly. Although to be fair the cables are part of the problem.
USB2 is cooked right into the cheapest SoCs, USB1 is in cheap microcontrollers, keyboard interfaces, etc. The designs for those chips have been traded around, shared, transferred in fire sales etc. and as a result they are essentially free.
Those are sunk costs and thus not really relevant to a cost analysis. The designs don't really cost much at this point but the components and assembly and supply chain do cost real money every time we build a machine that uses them. I'm fairly certain the main reason companies still include these legacy ports is because they fear (with some justification) that they will lose sales if they don't include them. It would cost them less to not have to include them and to standardize on a single port type but that doesn't matter if they cannot sell the product. People have USB devices they want to use and not many companies are confident they can convince their users to adapt them or upgrade.
So we have sort of a Mexican standoff among device makers. None of them really want to include the legacy ports but they all think they sort of have to so their competitors don't get a leg up. This is how the 3.5" floppy drive hung around for about 10 years after it should have rightfully died. It's why we still have CD drives in so many desktop PCs that don't really need one. It's why we still see freakin' PS/2 ports even to this day. Apple has something of privileged position where they can get away from some of this since they are the only PC maker who is fully vertically integrated and controls their own operating system. But they are the exception that proves the rule.
Networks effects can be very powerful but not always in a good way.
He'll never be found innocent in a court of law, they don't assess innocence in a court of law just whether or not he is guilty.
They absolutely do assess innocence in a court of law. In fact it is the default presumption under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is firmly established from the US Constitution via the 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments as well as extensive case law. The entire point of a court is to determine guilt or innocence insofar as that is possible. If the accused is not found guilty then by default they are considered innocent. You can get pedantic about the distinction between "not guilty" and "innocent" but de-facto they have the same outcome so it's a distinction without a difference. If they aren't found guilty then they are de-facto innocent as a practical matter. This is true even if they acknowledge having committed the act leading the the indictment.
To be clear the court is assessing whether there is sufficient evidence to find a violation of a law. If insufficient evidence is presented then the accused is considered innocent. Being guilty of a act is not necessarily the same as being guilty of a crime.
That said, there is meaningful dispute as to whether he was the shooter or not.
No there is not. Every bit of available evidence points to him being the shooter and there is no credible evidence to the contrary. If you have such evidence please post it and I'll reconsider.
Now before you go saying anything about crazy conspiracy. I'm not alleging or asserting any of that or trying to raise any suspicion.I'm invoking the general principle of trying to always keep an open mind.
Hogwash. You are invoking some serious tin-foil hat stuff to try to make a weak point. We can keep an open mind about his guilt in the incident and we can keep an open mind about where the evidence leads and what to do with it. But I'm not about to play stupid and pretend that every bit of evidence does anything except point to this man having committed this violent act.
Even if convicted in a court of law it is better to view it as the court or jury finding him guilty than "he did it."
Nobody is disputing whether or not he did it. Guilt in the crime is a separate discussion though a moot one given that he died.
How can someone who live in a properous country such as the US, end up like an idea like printing a gun and killing a few lawmakers....
Crazy people are in every country. The US is no exception. Prosperity does not change this fact.
I mean, you have to realise that doing that wont solve anything.... even if you killed a few lawmakers they would be replaced by someone else who would most probably continue his work.
Logic does not mean much to someone who is mentally unstable or otherwise incapable of reason. Stop trying to figure out how he logically could have behaved the way he did because logic had little to do with it. His brain was not functioning in a healthy manner.
The real problem is that it's very difficult to identify people like this in advance in an accurate, objective, and fair way so that you can keep firearms out of their hands. Many gun rights advocates like to say we should be dealing with mental health rather than restricting gun possession to improve safety. This is a reasonable and logical argument from a false premise because it presumes we can accurately identify individuals who are not mentally well prior to them acting in a manner that shows them to be a danger either to others or to themselves. We demonstrably cannot do this - no one can unless we develop mind reading technology. By the time they pull a trigger, it's far too late but we have no means to help them all earlier.
How bad can it get in the US?
If history is any judge, pretty bad. While in general the US is a very safe place to live, there are places you definitely don't want to be. While unlikely, your chances of dying by firearm in the US are quite a bit higher than most large industrialized nations. We can debate the reasons for this but the fact remains that your odds of dying from a firearm are alarmingly high and dealing with the problem rationally is politically challenging.
Not entirely true. Texas law is fairly relaxed on gun registration but there are some types required to registered to comply with federal law. Gun registration was not the issue here. He wasn't allowed to possess a gun of any description due to a 2015 court order.
and it's not illegal to manufacture your own gun or gun parts...
Generally true though here are some legal issues and they cannot make one that cannot be detected by metal detectors or similar scanning devices. Despite personal use manufacture largely being permitted legally it does not permit someone prohibited from possessing a firearm to carry one which seem to be the case here.
I thought this was TX, and I don't believe you have to 'register' your firearms there, right?
Texas generally is pretty relaxed about gun ownership (shocking I know) but in some cases they do require registration according to federal laws.
Specifically "Texas Penal Code Section 46.05 requires that "explosive weapons", "machine guns", "short-barrel firearms", and "firearm silencers", as defined in Section 46.01, be "registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or classified as a curio or relic by the United States Department of Justice". Prior to May 22nd 2015, Section 46.05 called "registration pursuant to the National Firearms Act" a "defense to prosecution".
Anyway, with that in mind, I'm curious of the law they convicted him of on that front.
I think what happened was that he was legally barred from possessing firearms due to a 2015 court order. Didn't matter how the firearm was acquired, he wasn't allowed to have it due to prior convictions.
He's innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, no matter the amount of pre-trial coverage
There is no meaningful dispute as to whether he was the shooter. Guilt or innocence in a court of law is an entirely separate discussion. He could in principle be found innocent despite there being no dispute as to whether he committed the acts for which he was arrested.
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Why would anyone give away 2% of the profits to a payment processor?
You think processing cash is free? ALL forms of payment processing cost money, including cash. You have to pay people for their time to track it, organize it, deposit it, secure it, etc. Not to mention the fact that cash is rather easy to steal. None of this is free. In some cases it might cost less than what a credit card company charges but sometimes it costs more.
We are already past ten toes over that line. When there is a power outage most businesses shut down, because they cannot process credit cards. Many cannot even process cash.
When there is a power outage there are plenty of business that keep going just fine. The reason many shut down isn't just because of payment processing, though that certainly is one significant consideration for some like large retailers. Smaller ones can usually get by for a while. My company shuts down in a power outage because we are a manufacturing company and our equipment requires power to be useful. Payment processing isn't really a big issue for us and we don't depend on it to function day to day. A company like a lawn service might not really even notice a power outage of just a few hours.
Of course, this larger ominous question is why the banks were bailed out with the 2008 meltdown
Because there really was no option to not bail them out unless you wanted the next Great Depression. The banks need/needed to be regulated more than they were but that's a separate issue.
Because if all the big banks were suddenly forced to file for bankruptcy, would the credit cards still work?
Under what circumstances is this anything besides a ridiculous rhetorical question?
I think the bitcoin structure is quite brilliant.
The blockchain technology might be brilliant. Bitcoin very definitely is not. We shouldn't confuse the two. The jury is still out on blockchain but I think the more interesting uses of it won't be for currency. Bitcoin is an interesting but ultimately flawed experiment which might also be a pyramid scheme either intentionally or unintentionally.
Paper money is going away and crypto is a far better way to transfer value than pieces of paper, that's for sure, but it has its pros and cons
This is just idiotic. Paper money isn't going away any time soon and neither is fiat currency. Maybe in the far future but even then I doubt it. There is simply too much utility in paper money for a lot of transactions. Asking everyone to either carry an expensive computer with them or carry some means to interact securely with one in order to facilitate even the most basic transaction is unrealistic. Not everyone can get a credit card or afford a smartphone and even if they could it still wouldn't be practical some of the time.
If he actually thinks the dollar is trading bits of paper he has no idea what money actually is. (I doubt he's that naive) The vast majority of currency is nothing more than digits in a ledger somewhere. Paper currency is a tiny fraction of the total amount of money in circulation. Somewhere less than 10% of the total.
"Not everything can/should/does need to be done" on a generic unified platform that forces developers to lowest common denominator.
You are arguing that general purpose computers are de-facto a lowest common denominator. Your argument makes no sense and unified platforms are often greater than the sum of the parts. In case you have forgotten both PCs and smartphones are generic unified platforms. My smartphone replaced to varying degrees my (deep breath...) calendar, point-and-shoot camera, PDA, video recorder, laptop (for some use cases), walkman, photo album, flashlight, television, credit card (ApplePay/GooglePay), voicemail machine, remote control, alarm clock, to-do list, GPS, address book, weather station, physical books (kindle app), encyclopedia, and the list goes on. PCs have replaced a similar swath of equipment. Both are general purpose devices that can be programmed to do whatever task we need. There is no objective reason PCs and smartphones have to exist as separate operating systems for the rest of eternity and there are a lot of compelling reasons to want to merge them into a single code base.
Are you seriously going to argue that the smartphone is somehow a "lowest common denominator"? Sure I can schlep around my big heavy SLR camera which can take better pictures (at considerable cost) but at the expense of portability and convenience. It makes more sense to take Good Enough pictures with my phone 99% of the time. On the occasion when I need better image quality I know where/how to get it but that isn't a sane argument against "generic unified platforms".
Because we have it already, it's the goddamn web. Which you can build desktop and mobile apps out of
Yeah Apple tried this with the original iPhone. They were going to do everything on the web if you recall. Didn't work. Why? So glad you asked. Because not everything can/should/does need to be done on the web. There are literally countless use cases which are better done locally than on the web. PWAs have their place and will be great for some use cases but they aren't the proper solution for every problem.
I've been saying for years that mobile device software is going to gradually merge with PC software. While there are some practical difficulties in doing this, it makes a ton of sense if someone can pull it off. Microsoft has been trying to get the formula right on this for a long time with mixed success. Google is trying to get Android to be more than just a mobile phone OS. It's not an easy problem but there really is no long term advantage to Apple or to their users in maintaining two separate and mostly incompatible operating systems. Nobody has nailed the formula yet but the first company to figure it out is going to rake in a lot of money for their trouble.
I know Apple has historically said they aren't interesting in merging MacOS and iOS but you can tell by their actions that this was just a public relations move so they wouldn't get pushed on it. They've been gradually moving towards consolidating their hardware and systems for quite a while now. The problem with doing so has been A) reconciling the very different user interfaces in a practical way and B) the limitations of the hardware of the day. Over time these problems can be resolved but not before a certain tipping point is reached.
Because Dell doesn't talk shit like "you're holding it wrong"
No instead they have Michael Dell saying shit about Apple like "I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders" which turned out to be remarkably arrogant and increasingly foolish since he said it.
and because Dell hasn't tried to build a reputation as making computers which are easier to use than everyone else's.
Because they couldn't. Dell doesn't make the software that runs their PCs so they don't control enough of the process to even try. Apple more or less succeeded in doing that exact thing. Several times in fact with various iterations of MacOS and iOS. There is a reason Windows mimicked the Mac and Android followed the iPhone. Like them or hate them you cannot deny that Apple does do a good job making comparatively well designed and easy to use interfaces to their products. There is a reason every other PC and smartphone maker follows Apple's lead at least some of the time.
Also, because Dell seems to have less gigantic fuckups than Apple, per unit shipped.
Not historically they haven't. Dell's hardware is fine in general but they've had plenty of problems over the years. Measurably more than Apple most years if you believe the PC reliability rankings over the years. I'm not bashing Dell here (in fact I'm typing this on one of their PCs which I purchased with my own money) but let's not pretend they are something special among big computer makers.
Amazon appears to me to be a poorly-managed company.
Are you being ironic and making a joke or is this a serious (and stupid) question? I can't tell. Amazon sells close to half of all online retail sales in the US. If that is poorly managed then give me some of that. I'm sure it's just an accident that Jeff Bezos is now the richest man on the planet.
Every Amazon web page has the distractions of Amazon trying to sell something else besides the product that interests you.
They have mountains of data that says a lot of their customers buy those other products at or around the same time as the one you are looking at. Why would they not try to sell both items at the same time?
Is trying to manipulate customers good business management?
Have you ever actually been in a store? You think a retail business trying to sell you more stuff is somehow unusual or bad? Of course they are trying to sell you as much stuff as they can. Only an idiot doesn't understand this and it's not some evil plot. Why do you think retail stores have all their merchandise sitting out on the floor for you to look at? Same thing. Exactly the same thing.
No wired network is a killer in some settings.
Do you think these use cases are ones Apple actually gives a shit about? For those who care there are USB-C and Thunderbolt docking stations available and they work fine. Personally I'm with you and would rather have a 8P8C ethernet port built in but clearly I'm not the customer Apple is courting.
And politicians don't really care about their constituents or the country.
Awfully broad brush you are painting with there. Yes that is too often true but there are people in positions of political power who actually do genuinely care about the people they were elected to lead/serve. Such people are to be treasured when found.
And SJWs really don't care about equality.
A) The term "SJW" is lazy nonsense catchall pejorative like "hipster" that means almost nothing and accurately describes almost no one. Including your use here.
B) Equality and equity are not the same thing. You're right they don't care about equality because equality isn't necessarily what's fair or necessary. You can charge a rich person and a poor person the same tax rate and that is equal but it isn't equitable because 20% of a poor person's income has a much bigger impact on their life than 20% of a rich person's. Just because something is the same for everyone doesn't mean it is fair or good.
Interestingly enough, a credit to your bank account can take up to an order of magnitude more time to post than an instantaneous purchase.
The settlement procedures are pretty much identical once the transaction is processed for purchases or refunds. You just don't notice because most of the time the cash flows are out of your account and not in to your account and because your bank hides some of the details. Many types of transactions don't actually close for some time (days) even if they show it posting immediately. My bank will post a transaction immediately because I'm considered a safe risk based on my banking history but it's technically in sort of a "pending" status for a day or two (sometimes longer depending on the counterparty) until the settlement procedures finish. If you want the transaction to finish faster there generally are higher costs associated with that. To your point, how long a company takes to get around to posting the transaction can be telling but the actual transaction itself happens just as fast no matter which direction the cash flows.
Perhaps the banking powers that be are tipping their collective hand here... when it is in their financial interest to do so, they've developed the uncanny ability to be as fast as they need to be or as slow as necessary to maximize daily balance computations.
Sure, they know how to play these games to their advantage when they feel the need. But that mostly happens when the bank is the counterparty rather than simply being an intermediary. If you and I are exchanging money and the bank is just facilitating the transaction they reap no benefit from delaying one side or the other in the transaction.
If your case depends in any significant way on interpreting the intent of an emoji then (near as makes no difference) you have no objectively useful evidence.
They're interested in the manufacturing process - how things are made, integrated, and put together. That's the part that China needs to learn.
Manufacturing processes for most products are typically not black magic. It's what I do for a living. There are some exceptions for some high tech or high complexity stuff where the magic is in how it's put together. But how most things are assembled are not big secrets - it's more in the execution than some secret sauce. That said, companies definitely have to be very careful about what technology they expose to manufacturing in China because the odds are VERY high it will be stolen and/or replicated in fairly short order if due care is not taken. This is true for both design and assembly.
China only really knows how to make things manually in many areas,
That's not really true as a general proposition and hasn't been for some time. China uses a lot of manual labor because they have lots of (cheap) manual labor and that makes it economical. But they're quite good with automation when they need to be and have been getting better rather fast for the last 20 years.
1. "tearing one apart and reverse engineering it" would give you a lot more details than asking someone out of their memory.
That depends on precisely who is being asked and what sort of documentation they have/had access to. Reverse engineering does not usually provide more details than could be obtained from the memory banks of a talented key engineer.
2. asking interviewee for info is pretty prevalent in the Silicon Valley. for one, the company asking does not sign an NDA. it is the interviewee who has signed the NDA and hold the responsibility to guard such secrets.
So let's ignore any legal implications for a moment. Would you hire someone who would so readily spill the trade secrets of their current/former employer? I sure wouldn't. Because if they'll do it to them they'll do it to you. That is a question that says more about the character of the interviewee than it does the hiring company. Assuming legal niceties are observed, this would be a question to determine NOT to hire someone if they answer anything other than saying they either do not know or cannot divulge.
Visa being installed to virtually every retailer in the industrialised world?
Yes. Outside of China proper they have approx 50% marketshare everywhere else on the globe. Outside of major cities China is still primarily a cash economy. UnionPay dominates in China but has virtually no presence outside of China. Credit cards in general are still a growing industry in China.
But on the other side of the counter, the customer has a Google device already in their pocket, already connected to a network.
Which isn't accepted at most merchants and isn't likely to be any time soon. Visa also has a network and it's already in place. Do you know who is behind Visa? It's banks. Google would be competing head to head with banks in financial services. Stranger things have happened but that's not typically a recipe for success. You know what else people have in their pocket? A credit card (usually Visa) which works on a payment network in every retailer. Getting people to dump their plastic cards for smartphone payments has been a tough sell and there is no sign of that changing.
Online? Google's already there too. Most of us do our online shopping via mobile device. There's no reason for Visa/Mastercard to be involved at all.
Yes they are there and their payment processing infrastructure is essentially nil compared to Visa. You seem to have no appreciation of the amount of infrastructure required to operating a payment processing system that is accepted close to everywhere. Not to mention the regulatory burden and the competitive dynamics. If Google want's a piece of that market I wish them luck but many others have tried and failed and there is nothing to suggest Google will fair any better.
And they can crush Visa on transaction fees as they don't even need to turn a profit.
If it were that easy they would have already tried. Walmart has been trying to get into banking and payment services for a long time now with limited success.
They'll surely be selling the data on the back end. Actual transaction data is probably worth enough that they don't even need to charge for the service.
Visa and MC are already in this business.
If Apple and Google both decided to support the same stable cryptocurrency - e.g., USDC - Venmo would be out of business in a year or two and Visa and MC would be frantic.
A cryptocurrency would have to threaten the dollar to be a threat to Visa and MC and that isn't going to happen. Cryptocurrency is not a credible threat to Visa and MC. Not even a chance.
None.
Aren't they forbidden to do so by the agreement with credit cards operators?
Not necessarily. It's fairly common to see "convenience fees" charged for the 2-4% that it costs to process a credit card transaction. My company does it and so do a lot of big companies and government institutions. There are some circumstances where the merchant agreement prohibits some actions but these are not universal. And it's not like anyone is really checking anyway most of the time.
Google or Amazon could end you. It could happen fast and bad.
Dream on. Google and Amazon are good at what they do but bumping Visa and Mastercard out of their market? Yeah, that isn't going to happen anytime soon. They have an installed network connected to virtually every retailer in the industrialized world and they are responsible for most of the online retail payments too. Creating a payment system that could seriously threaten their duopoly will be nigh impossible even for companies as well funded as Google or Amazon. It's telling that none of the big tech companies have even tried to compete with them head on.
Furthermore do you have any idea what sort of regulatory scrutiny comes with running a financial network? You can bet that Google and Amazon and the others want no part of that mess.
They should be lowering fees as an attempt to stave off the inevitable.
I'm curious what you think is inevitable. Visa and MC have one of the deepest moats around their business I can imagine. The only real threat to them is regulatory action.
Saying it has a 41% increased risk is a meaningless statement unless some context is provided regarding how likely it was to get it in the first place. If the odds are 1-in-a-trillion and we increase that by 41% that is just statistical noise, representative of nothing. Any headline that spouts a percentage risk increase without a context is nothing but clickbait.
So to put some facts to this, your lifetime risk of contracting Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma is around 1/42 if you are a man and 1/54 if you are a woman. It accounts for about 4% of all cancer in the US and about 70,000 people in the US are expected to be diagnosed this year. So a 41% increase risk turns out to be a substantial risk factor if the study results can be confirmed/replicated.
It's really not about the cables, but about the interface itself.
That's approximately the point I was trying to make, perhaps badly. Although to be fair the cables are part of the problem.
USB2 is cooked right into the cheapest SoCs, USB1 is in cheap microcontrollers, keyboard interfaces, etc. The designs for those chips have been traded around, shared, transferred in fire sales etc. and as a result they are essentially free.
Those are sunk costs and thus not really relevant to a cost analysis. The designs don't really cost much at this point but the components and assembly and supply chain do cost real money every time we build a machine that uses them. I'm fairly certain the main reason companies still include these legacy ports is because they fear (with some justification) that they will lose sales if they don't include them. It would cost them less to not have to include them and to standardize on a single port type but that doesn't matter if they cannot sell the product. People have USB devices they want to use and not many companies are confident they can convince their users to adapt them or upgrade.
So we have sort of a Mexican standoff among device makers. None of them really want to include the legacy ports but they all think they sort of have to so their competitors don't get a leg up. This is how the 3.5" floppy drive hung around for about 10 years after it should have rightfully died. It's why we still have CD drives in so many desktop PCs that don't really need one. It's why we still see freakin' PS/2 ports even to this day. Apple has something of privileged position where they can get away from some of this since they are the only PC maker who is fully vertically integrated and controls their own operating system. But they are the exception that proves the rule.
Networks effects can be very powerful but not always in a good way.
He'll never be found innocent in a court of law, they don't assess innocence in a court of law just whether or not he is guilty.
They absolutely do assess innocence in a court of law. In fact it is the default presumption under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is firmly established from the US Constitution via the 5th, 6th, and 14th amendments as well as extensive case law. The entire point of a court is to determine guilt or innocence insofar as that is possible. If the accused is not found guilty then by default they are considered innocent. You can get pedantic about the distinction between "not guilty" and "innocent" but de-facto they have the same outcome so it's a distinction without a difference. If they aren't found guilty then they are de-facto innocent as a practical matter. This is true even if they acknowledge having committed the act leading the the indictment.
To be clear the court is assessing whether there is sufficient evidence to find a violation of a law. If insufficient evidence is presented then the accused is considered innocent. Being guilty of a act is not necessarily the same as being guilty of a crime.
That said, there is meaningful dispute as to whether he was the shooter or not.
No there is not. Every bit of available evidence points to him being the shooter and there is no credible evidence to the contrary. If you have such evidence please post it and I'll reconsider.
Now before you go saying anything about crazy conspiracy. I'm not alleging or asserting any of that or trying to raise any suspicion.I'm invoking the general principle of trying to always keep an open mind.
Hogwash. You are invoking some serious tin-foil hat stuff to try to make a weak point. We can keep an open mind about his guilt in the incident and we can keep an open mind about where the evidence leads and what to do with it. But I'm not about to play stupid and pretend that every bit of evidence does anything except point to this man having committed this violent act.
Even if convicted in a court of law it is better to view it as the court or jury finding him guilty than "he did it."
Nobody is disputing whether or not he did it. Guilt in the crime is a separate discussion though a moot one given that he died.
How can someone who live in a properous country such as the US, end up like an idea like printing a gun and killing a few lawmakers....
Crazy people are in every country. The US is no exception. Prosperity does not change this fact.
I mean, you have to realise that doing that wont solve anything.... even if you killed a few lawmakers they would be replaced by someone else who would most probably continue his work.
Logic does not mean much to someone who is mentally unstable or otherwise incapable of reason. Stop trying to figure out how he logically could have behaved the way he did because logic had little to do with it. His brain was not functioning in a healthy manner.
The real problem is that it's very difficult to identify people like this in advance in an accurate, objective, and fair way so that you can keep firearms out of their hands. Many gun rights advocates like to say we should be dealing with mental health rather than restricting gun possession to improve safety. This is a reasonable and logical argument from a false premise because it presumes we can accurately identify individuals who are not mentally well prior to them acting in a manner that shows them to be a danger either to others or to themselves. We demonstrably cannot do this - no one can unless we develop mind reading technology. By the time they pull a trigger, it's far too late but we have no means to help them all earlier.
How bad can it get in the US?
If history is any judge, pretty bad. While in general the US is a very safe place to live, there are places you definitely don't want to be. While unlikely, your chances of dying by firearm in the US are quite a bit higher than most large industrialized nations. We can debate the reasons for this but the fact remains that your odds of dying from a firearm are alarmingly high and dealing with the problem rationally is politically challenging.
Texas has no gun registration laws
Not entirely true. Texas law is fairly relaxed on gun registration but there are some types required to registered to comply with federal law. Gun registration was not the issue here. He wasn't allowed to possess a gun of any description due to a 2015 court order.
and it's not illegal to manufacture your own gun or gun parts...
Generally true though here are some legal issues and they cannot make one that cannot be detected by metal detectors or similar scanning devices. Despite personal use manufacture largely being permitted legally it does not permit someone prohibited from possessing a firearm to carry one which seem to be the case here.
I thought this was TX, and I don't believe you have to 'register' your firearms there, right?
Texas generally is pretty relaxed about gun ownership (shocking I know) but in some cases they do require registration according to federal laws.
Specifically
"Texas Penal Code Section 46.05 requires that "explosive weapons", "machine guns", "short-barrel firearms", and "firearm silencers", as defined in Section 46.01, be "registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives or classified as a curio or relic by the United States Department of Justice". Prior to May 22nd 2015, Section 46.05 called "registration pursuant to the National Firearms Act" a "defense to prosecution".
Anyway, with that in mind, I'm curious of the law they convicted him of on that front.
I think what happened was that he was legally barred from possessing firearms due to a 2015 court order. Didn't matter how the firearm was acquired, he wasn't allowed to have it due to prior convictions.
He's innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, no matter the amount of pre-trial coverage
There is no meaningful dispute as to whether he was the shooter. Guilt or innocence in a court of law is an entirely separate discussion. He could in principle be found innocent despite there being no dispute as to whether he committed the acts for which he was arrested.