Anyway, my point was to provide a rebuke for the unnecessary and ill-conceived "you have no idea what you are talking about" directed at SuperKendall.
I supported your point that shipping costs don't really enter into the equation, but nothing you replied with addressed his central point, which was about the time cost of shipping around through the Panama canal. It seems like you missed what he was getting at, so I'll take a swing at it on his behalf.
So let's say that it takes the better part of a month to ship from Long Beach to Port Canaveral or Houston. And then another couple of days to unload and ship to the launch pad. So, about a month from door to door, so to speak. You might get it there quicker, but there's a lot of variables beyond your control when shipping intra-nationally in the US - you have to use a US flagged carrier, etc. So let's go with 4 weeks for simplicity's sake.
Now, SuperKendall referenced reusability as a factor. Why? Because the planned cadence for one particular BFR is high. So, for the sake of argument, let's say they plan to launch the thing twice a week. That's 8 launches in our 4 week shipping window.
How much would SpaceX stand to make from those 8 launches? Let's pretend they are going to profit $30 million per launch. That's almost a quarter of a billion dollars that they didn't make while it was waiting for a transit through the Panama canal. After they make and ship a half-dozen BFR from one side of the country to the other, the missed profit from having the thing sit on a boat instead of launching for paying customers is well over a billion dollars.
So SuperKendall did have a point, and it wasn't stupid or profoundly ignorant. There is a fairly high opportunity cost under the assumptions that SpaceX will hit a very high cadence with their reusable BFR and that there will be enough paying customers to fill a manifest that looks like 40 launches per month.
Of course, there's the flaw in the logic. If there was only 1 BFR, getting it up and running faster would be pure profit increase. Maybe the same goes for number two. But if they really have 24 hour reusability with these things... how many will they need, absent the point-to-point suborbital passenger service they speculated about? At some point shipping another core wouldn't result in any missed payloads, because the existing cores could service the entire manifest.
At any rate, it was a point worth considering and it deserved better elaboration. And it certainly didn't deserve a trollish response.
Ha ha! Yeah... you got me.... Seattle only has Boeing.... The largest aerospace company in the world. That tiny little thing. More than double the size of all of the others, save Airbus.
And the third biggest behind Airbus is Lockheed Martin. Sure, the Marietta facilities outside Atlanta from the Martin/Marietta days aren't fancy and new... but they are pretty big. Anyway, at least they are headquartered in Cali... Oh wait... no they aren't. They're over in Maryland, near DC where all that sweet government money is. Hey, maybe if you define it by "where is the money spent", DC is the hub of the aerospace industry. The cash Uncle Sam doles out certainly is the major player in the US.
Anyway, whatever we do, let's not count NASA when we are dealing with all things aerospace... I mean, they are only the world's largest civilian aerospace agency and the prime drivers of the space industry so far. Maybe we should leave out defense contractors too? That way we can eliminate everything except for airlines and communications satellites as major players.
And none of those reasons are "California is totally the best and you can't recruit top engineers and skilled workers in other places".
Had I said that, you'd have a point. But I didn't. I laid out the reasons why quite clearly.
Hmmmm.....
That downtime is balanced against the need to attract engineers and workers to Bumfuck Texas...
Yeah... not exactly word for word. But implying that Houston is an abyss where no reasonable person would wish to move is not really all that far away from that characterization. Certainly not straw-man territory. And since the "Californians are moving away to Texas" headline is so overdone as to almost be a trope at this point, claiming that it is so beyond the pale to attract workers to Texas that we can label their hypothetical destination as Bumfuck, Texas is more of a stretch.
I get it. It is great to run around feeling superior. It makes people defensive to be challenged on their ill-thought-out opinions. And defensiveness can fill one with braggadocio that makes one turn to profanity, as if that actually bolstered their argument.
You can't have 36 different measured endpoints (degrees of freedom) and then use a p-value of.05 for each of them as your threshold of significance. That isn't how statistics work.
Small effect sizes in a study with large numbers of measured variables pretty much guarantees that this is nothing more than p-hacking.
Thanks for that informative post. I was about to post the same observations.
This study does not confirm any such thing. Finding one subgroup with a small effect in one measured outcome over a large study with many subgroups and many potential outcomes is pretty much the definition of P-hacking.
As an observational study, I suppose this might work. It has pretty much eliminated all other groups and all other cancers as possible effects. A follow on study with more rigorous controls focusing solely on male mice and shwannoma tumors will undoubtedly show that the effect disappears.
Even without the extensive background of research in this area that shows the lack of such effects, anyone familiar with medical research should be able to read this study and come to the opposite conclusion of the sensationalist headlines. They did not confirm a cancer link. They mostly confirmed no cancer link and they have a small effect size possible link in an implausible subgroup. Reports like that are almost always wiped away when subsequent studies are done to rigorously target the specific subgroup. In other words, this is a huge nothing-burger.
I don't know if he has any idea what he is talking about, but most of your assertions are also nonsense.
There are lots of hubs of the aerospace industry, Cali being one of them. You've got Seattle, Atlanta, Huntsville, Houston, the Space Coast, Ogden.... Other aerospace companies are building new factories in these locations to take advantage of the existing workforce and the proximity to their customers.
SpaceX is keeping manufacturing in Cali because that's where they already are and therefore that's where their workforce is. If they were in Seattle they'd stay there.
Housing costs are not growing the same rate everywhere people want to live. They aren't even the same all over California. A major chunk of the huge costs in cities like NY, L.A. and San Francisco is the restrictive zoning laws that prevent housing from being built to meet demand. Meanwhile you have places like Houston, where housing is still quite affordable, despite the massive growth they've experienced.
I'm sure SpaceX has a thought or two about what it would take to move their operations to Florida or Texas. The drop in taxes and real estate costs moving to central Florida has to be attractive. And the same goes for Texas. Both states have a native supply of workers with the requisite skills, and spaceX probably has no trouble recruiting nationally. I'd imagine that California will need to make sure that they don't push companies like SpaceX too hard, or they will relocate. Right now it would be severely disruptive to the company to pick up and move - considering their breakneck pace of development. That's probably the main reason they are not seriously considering a move at this point. But don't be surprised if they start adding locations elsewhere over the next decade.
Look at what he's doing with Tesla. They are building massive factories across the country - not in their starting location of California. There are a lot of reasons for this. And none of those reasons are "California is totally the best and you can't recruit top engineers and skilled workers in other places".
About the only salient point you make is that the cost of shipping the rocket to its final destination is not a deciding factor in locating the factory. (although the logistics of the thing is a deciding factor - the size of the new rockets dictating that final assembly take place near the port so that the finished rocket doesn't have to traverse city streets. )
This has really been a strange turn of events. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Google.... they all started with at least some degree of the "information wants to be free" ethos. They created platforms that would allow anyone to speak for any reason. Sure, trolls were an issue - as they have been since the days of BBS and USENET. Slashdot came up with a method for handling it with moderation and meta moderation. Others created similarly soft-handed techniques.
And where are we now? These same folks are looking to control the point of view of the content that gets posted on their platforms. Reddit is hunting accounts because of their motivation for speaking (they are Russian propagandists). Facebook and Twitter are looking for ways to prevent "fake news" - which is dangerously close to "opinions I disagree with" - and Google? Well, they had a motto of "do no evil", now their chairman has founded "the Groundwork", a company designed to do what the Russians are accused of and a whole lot more, with hooks directly into the back-end of Google. Of course this is different, because it is in the service of Team Blue, not Team Red.
I'd love to see all of the people who are so adamant about doing these things go back to 1998 and explain it to their younger selves. They might cut their own throats rather than contribute to the future they are creating - everything about it is anathema to everything they stood for back then. Heck, go back to the 80's or 70's and explain all this to a country that used to ridicule the Soviet Union for trying to prevent outside news and jamming "Radio Free America". Now here we are, desperately working to do the same thing.
Never manually wound.... but has stopped working many times.
It runs off of temperature variations that drive an air cylinder to move, lifting the weights. If there isn't enough energy from these fluctuations, they just let it stop.
So a nice stunt. But not a terribly remarkable clock otherwise.
Backing up your point, YouTube is all about serving you what you'd like to see (at least as best they can guess). A couple of months back, the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe mentioned a resurgence of Flat Earth conspiracy theorists. Wondering what in the world they were talking about, I Googled it and pulled up a couple of trippy videos on YouTube. (I highly recommend it, if you are into circus side-show style entertainment on the web)
Ever since then, I'll get a flat earth video mixed in on my sidebar, about 4 or 5 videos down. I had never seen one before in my life. So the algorithm remembered my Sunday afternoon binge and kept trying to feed me more of the same. It isn't every time now, but they still pop up every once in a while.
YouTube's recommendations are a mirror of your behavior on the web. If you go for clickbait, then clickbait you shall receive. I don't get anything at all about Clinton or Trump, because I don't follow that stuff and the algorithm knows that it is wasting space pushing it out to me. Instead I get videos about SpaceX and whatever youtuber "let's play" stuff my kids have been watching on my phone.
This is the salient point. The algorithms are customized to the individual, so YouTube, Google, Facebook and other social media platforms are echo chambers.
So when the guardian writes:
The Guardian found that "the algorithm was six times more likely to recommend videos that was damaging to Clinton than Trump, and also tended to amplify wild conspiracy theories about the former secretary of state."
One must ask, to who? Who is the user that is getting served up this content, and what have they been doing online?
It would be absolutely stunning if a Google company was an overall net negative to the Clinton campaign. Alphabet (Google parent company) Chairman Eric Schmidt worked closely with the Clinton campaign and created the company "The Groundwork" for the purpose. With deep knowledge of the algorithms used by Google and YouTube and a slew of engineers from the companies, The Groundwork has direct ties into the backend at Google.
Claiming that YouTube was manipulated to shill for Trump (overall) would be like claiming that William Randolph Hurst's papers were shilling against his favored candidates. It just doesn't make any sense at all.
I wouldn't say "Alien Nation" was all that obscure. It starred James Caan and Mandy Patinkin, some pretty big name actors. It had a spinoff TV series as well.
It also had a classically implausible weakness for the aliens.... despite being bred or engineered to survive the most hazardous industrial environments unscathed, they were susceptible to salt water. A tradition of silly weaknesses that dates back to the wicked witch of the west.
I'll extend your observation to the next moments, when Darth Vader is introduced.
He walks into the battle scene just after the shooting stops, black cape flowing through still-clearing smoke, grabs a rebel by his throat and lifts him at arm's length to question him, eventually snapping his neck with one hand.
You know instantly who the bad guy is, and that he is an enemy to be feared. All of this is well-established 2 minutes into the movie.
It was the perfect tribute to the old serials. Simplified story telling with stark good/evil contrasts that plug into well-known archetypes so you can immediately invest in the plot and root for the hero.
That Ghostbusters turd made $229 million? Wow, marketing is powerful.
I suppose it makes sense. It had an A-list cast, so you should be able to drum up an audience. But dang, it sure wasn't good.
This is one of those "can't trust the critics" movies. They were able to play the gender card, and managed to pull a 75% rating with the critics on the TomatoeMeter. But only 50% of the audience liked it. Comedy is a category where the audience universally scores movies higher than the critics. Except in this case. So you can surmise why the critics were overly generous.
That feature is one of the best things about RottenTomatoes. You can gain quite a bit of insight by comparing the critics score to the audience score.
A lot of "critic pleaser" movies are not that enjoyable. Some are political or social statement movies that almost require a critic to proclaim it good, even if it is terrible. The audience has no such compulsion. Similarly, there are a lot of popular movies that just plain stink. So seeing the critics aggregate can help with that as well.
There are a lot of genres that are difficult for critics. Like broad comedies or horror movies. If you are thinking of going to a comedy, you aren't asking if it is "better" than "12 Years a Slave". You want to know if it is a solid example of the genre. Similarly, if you are in the market for a slasher film, you want to know if it delivers on being a well made slasher film, not whether the critic thinks slasher films are good. The audience score can help with this problem, since generally only people who went to the movie are rating it. And presumably you don't go to the movie if you weren't in the market for that type of movie.
If you see critics and audiences agree, you can generally count on their opinion, good or bad. And if they disagree, you can gain a bit of insight into why the critics scored it like they did. All of which adds up to helping you decide where to spend your entertainment dollar.
I was involved in building B2B systems at that time as well. Dealing with older big institutions like banks was really difficult. They had an antiquated, decades old method for moving information around, and were very slow to adapt to the new tools available. Everyone had their own proprietary format for data, even if it was reasonably close to the industry standard. So custom parsers had to be written for every type of data at every institution. XML came to that industry maybe 4 or 5 years after it was being widely used elsewhere.
We had similar experiences dealing with our business customers - we tried to provide lots of web-based services to enhance our business relationship - businesses like law firms, financial services firms, etc. They were all quite resistant to moving our relationship online - despite the benefits to them of increased speed, transparency, not having to wait to speak with a human, etc. They were used to phones, faxes and voicemail and that's how they wanted to keep it. That reticence increased costs for us and for them. But it did make sure that we both kept extra employees on the payroll to handle the extra work. So I suppose we did our part for keeping unemployment low:)
My phrase "of any size" was meant to convey "sizable", not "of all sizes". Conversationally that would have been apparent, but in a short post I see the ambiguity.
1500 customers is pretty tiny. There were probably lots of plumbers and electricians without web pages too.
But if you had a retail business with multiple outlets, you were likely on the web - at least as an advertisement. Online retail was still in its early stages.
We had a small financial services firm, just starting up in 1997. We took half that year to reach 10 employees. But we had way, way more than 1,500 customers. Our website went up pretty early on, even though it only had a sparse amount of information and a phone number and a web form that would end in a sales call. The graphics were done by a professional though. Not a professional web designer, but a professional graphic artist. And we knew enough to avoid the blink tag.
The internet was built on open source. In 1997 it was more curiosity or nerdy thing. By 2017 the internet is generating untold sums of money and is utterly essential to the economy. I wish I felt the same excitement for this technology as I did back in 1997.
By 1997 pretty much every company of any size had a presence on the internet. Amazon.com had already been around for a few years by then - selling books online, of all things. The dotcom boom was well underway. Remember Webvan? That was 1996.
I mean, sure, a lot of those those local small company websites were loaded down with blink tags in 1997, but still.... It isn't like 1997 internet was only for nerds.
Open source has unquestionably changed the world. It is silly to even pretend otherwise. Open source software has been fundamental to many tectonic shifts in our world, and to a myriad of countless lesser improvements.
But did it fulfill it's promise, I suppose is the real question being asked. If you are a doctrinaire Stallman accolyte, you probably are tragically disappointed that all information isn't free, and that any closed source code exists anywhere. You probably view the existence of cell phones with a mixture of open and closed source software as an abomination. But beyond the die-hard GLPv3 adherents, opensource is everywhere and is doing everything. It has been the most successful development in the history of computing.
I think T-Mobile is the opposite. They zero-rate certain video content.... stuff that they can recompress to save bandwidth. They also partner with Netflix to offer free content and exempt it from bandwidth caps.
As it exists, these violations of net neutrality are decidedly pro-consumer. So the issue is way more complicated than partisans pretend.
Wireless doesn't have the throughput. Not only that, you're still going to have the same problem of who's going to run the towers. It'll be the same monopolies.
Shit sandwich or shit taco. Either way, you're just going to wind up with shit.
Yes it does. He is talking about freeing up legacy TV spectrum for 5g wireless. Properly designed it would have much more throughput.
The reason you live with cable monopolies or duopolies is because the local government requires it. That was the tradeoff to get investment in infrastructure.
Of course we also have the specter of at least two satellite constellations in the near future. Monopolies have a way of collapsing without government protection. Of course they also tend to have the resources to bend the government to their will.
Infringe. Verb. act so as to limit or undermine (something); encroach on.
As in "we are going to place limits on people speaking when they buy time on TV or the internet, requiring that they must identify who they are and where the money they used came from".
This unquestionably undermines free speech.
Look, I get it. You don't like it when "they" have an advantage. "They" might be the rich, who have lots of money and can swamp your speech. "They" might be a foreign government, trying to convince you that Trump isn't evil. Or "They" might be the same foreign government trying to convince you that Communism is a good thing. So we have to make sure that "They" are transparent. So we can keep tabs on "them".
But what if you are not in the majority. Let's say you are Harvey Milk, and speaking out publicly about your opinions on gay rights might get you killed. Maybe then you'd feel differently. Or maybe you are Michael Shwerner, and you think it is really important that all people be treated equally under the law... even people of color. Maybe you'd want the ability to post flyers anonymously.
Just remember.... sometimes you are "they". And maybe what you have to say is important, but unpopular.
Civil rights aren't just for the majority. In fact, if you are only protecting popular speech, you really aren't doing any protecting, are you?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, my point was to provide a rebuke for the unnecessary and ill-conceived "you have no idea what you are talking about" directed at SuperKendall.
I supported your point that shipping costs don't really enter into the equation, but nothing you replied with addressed his central point, which was about the time cost of shipping around through the Panama canal. It seems like you missed what he was getting at, so I'll take a swing at it on his behalf.
So let's say that it takes the better part of a month to ship from Long Beach to Port Canaveral or Houston. And then another couple of days to unload and ship to the launch pad. So, about a month from door to door, so to speak. You might get it there quicker, but there's a lot of variables beyond your control when shipping intra-nationally in the US - you have to use a US flagged carrier, etc. So let's go with 4 weeks for simplicity's sake.
Now, SuperKendall referenced reusability as a factor. Why? Because the planned cadence for one particular BFR is high. So, for the sake of argument, let's say they plan to launch the thing twice a week. That's 8 launches in our 4 week shipping window.
How much would SpaceX stand to make from those 8 launches? Let's pretend they are going to profit $30 million per launch. That's almost a quarter of a billion dollars that they didn't make while it was waiting for a transit through the Panama canal. After they make and ship a half-dozen BFR from one side of the country to the other, the missed profit from having the thing sit on a boat instead of launching for paying customers is well over a billion dollars.
So SuperKendall did have a point, and it wasn't stupid or profoundly ignorant. There is a fairly high opportunity cost under the assumptions that SpaceX will hit a very high cadence with their reusable BFR and that there will be enough paying customers to fill a manifest that looks like 40 launches per month.
Of course, there's the flaw in the logic. If there was only 1 BFR, getting it up and running faster would be pure profit increase. Maybe the same goes for number two. But if they really have 24 hour reusability with these things... how many will they need, absent the point-to-point suborbital passenger service they speculated about? At some point shipping another core wouldn't result in any missed payloads, because the existing cores could service the entire manifest.
At any rate, it was a point worth considering and it deserved better elaboration. And it certainly didn't deserve a trollish response.
Ha ha! Yeah... you got me.... Seattle only has Boeing.... The largest aerospace company in the world. That tiny little thing. More than double the size of all of the others, save Airbus.
And the third biggest behind Airbus is Lockheed Martin. Sure, the Marietta facilities outside Atlanta from the Martin/Marietta days aren't fancy and new... but they are pretty big. Anyway, at least they are headquartered in Cali... Oh wait... no they aren't. They're over in Maryland, near DC where all that sweet government money is. Hey, maybe if you define it by "where is the money spent", DC is the hub of the aerospace industry. The cash Uncle Sam doles out certainly is the major player in the US.
Anyway, whatever we do, let's not count NASA when we are dealing with all things aerospace... I mean, they are only the world's largest civilian aerospace agency and the prime drivers of the space industry so far. Maybe we should leave out defense contractors too? That way we can eliminate everything except for airlines and communications satellites as major players.
Hmmmm.....
Yeah... not exactly word for word. But implying that Houston is an abyss where no reasonable person would wish to move is not really all that far away from that characterization. Certainly not straw-man territory. And since the "Californians are moving away to Texas" headline is so overdone as to almost be a trope at this point, claiming that it is so beyond the pale to attract workers to Texas that we can label their hypothetical destination as Bumfuck, Texas is more of a stretch.
I get it. It is great to run around feeling superior. It makes people defensive to be challenged on their ill-thought-out opinions. And defensiveness can fill one with braggadocio that makes one turn to profanity, as if that actually bolstered their argument.
What he said....
You can't have 36 different measured endpoints (degrees of freedom) and then use a p-value of .05 for each of them as your threshold of significance. That isn't how statistics work.
Small effect sizes in a study with large numbers of measured variables pretty much guarantees that this is nothing more than p-hacking.
Thanks for that informative post. I was about to post the same observations.
This study does not confirm any such thing. Finding one subgroup with a small effect in one measured outcome over a large study with many subgroups and many potential outcomes is pretty much the definition of P-hacking.
As an observational study, I suppose this might work. It has pretty much eliminated all other groups and all other cancers as possible effects. A follow on study with more rigorous controls focusing solely on male mice and shwannoma tumors will undoubtedly show that the effect disappears.
Even without the extensive background of research in this area that shows the lack of such effects, anyone familiar with medical research should be able to read this study and come to the opposite conclusion of the sensationalist headlines. They did not confirm a cancer link. They mostly confirmed no cancer link and they have a small effect size possible link in an implausible subgroup. Reports like that are almost always wiped away when subsequent studies are done to rigorously target the specific subgroup. In other words, this is a huge nothing-burger.
I don't know if he has any idea what he is talking about, but most of your assertions are also nonsense.
There are lots of hubs of the aerospace industry, Cali being one of them. You've got Seattle, Atlanta, Huntsville, Houston, the Space Coast, Ogden.... Other aerospace companies are building new factories in these locations to take advantage of the existing workforce and the proximity to their customers.
SpaceX is keeping manufacturing in Cali because that's where they already are and therefore that's where their workforce is. If they were in Seattle they'd stay there.
Housing costs are not growing the same rate everywhere people want to live. They aren't even the same all over California. A major chunk of the huge costs in cities like NY, L.A. and San Francisco is the restrictive zoning laws that prevent housing from being built to meet demand. Meanwhile you have places like Houston, where housing is still quite affordable, despite the massive growth they've experienced.
I'm sure SpaceX has a thought or two about what it would take to move their operations to Florida or Texas. The drop in taxes and real estate costs moving to central Florida has to be attractive. And the same goes for Texas. Both states have a native supply of workers with the requisite skills, and spaceX probably has no trouble recruiting nationally. I'd imagine that California will need to make sure that they don't push companies like SpaceX too hard, or they will relocate. Right now it would be severely disruptive to the company to pick up and move - considering their breakneck pace of development. That's probably the main reason they are not seriously considering a move at this point. But don't be surprised if they start adding locations elsewhere over the next decade.
Look at what he's doing with Tesla. They are building massive factories across the country - not in their starting location of California. There are a lot of reasons for this. And none of those reasons are "California is totally the best and you can't recruit top engineers and skilled workers in other places".
About the only salient point you make is that the cost of shipping the rocket to its final destination is not a deciding factor in locating the factory. (although the logistics of the thing is a deciding factor - the size of the new rockets dictating that final assembly take place near the port so that the finished rocket doesn't have to traverse city streets. )
Houston does have surprisingly good Indian food.
This has really been a strange turn of events. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Google.... they all started with at least some degree of the "information wants to be free" ethos. They created platforms that would allow anyone to speak for any reason. Sure, trolls were an issue - as they have been since the days of BBS and USENET. Slashdot came up with a method for handling it with moderation and meta moderation. Others created similarly soft-handed techniques.
And where are we now? These same folks are looking to control the point of view of the content that gets posted on their platforms. Reddit is hunting accounts because of their motivation for speaking (they are Russian propagandists). Facebook and Twitter are looking for ways to prevent "fake news" - which is dangerously close to "opinions I disagree with" - and Google? Well, they had a motto of "do no evil", now their chairman has founded "the Groundwork", a company designed to do what the Russians are accused of and a whole lot more, with hooks directly into the back-end of Google. Of course this is different, because it is in the service of Team Blue, not Team Red.
I'd love to see all of the people who are so adamant about doing these things go back to 1998 and explain it to their younger selves. They might cut their own throats rather than contribute to the future they are creating - everything about it is anathema to everything they stood for back then. Heck, go back to the 80's or 70's and explain all this to a country that used to ridicule the Soviet Union for trying to prevent outside news and jamming "Radio Free America". Now here we are, desperately working to do the same thing.
Never manually wound.... but has stopped working many times.
It runs off of temperature variations that drive an air cylinder to move, lifting the weights. If there isn't enough energy from these fluctuations, they just let it stop.
So a nice stunt. But not a terribly remarkable clock otherwise.
Colonize a new country of citizens that still believe in common sense, rational thought, and intelligent discourse.
That's already a thing.
Or you could wait for the BFR and move to Mars.
Backing up your point, YouTube is all about serving you what you'd like to see (at least as best they can guess). A couple of months back, the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe mentioned a resurgence of Flat Earth conspiracy theorists. Wondering what in the world they were talking about, I Googled it and pulled up a couple of trippy videos on YouTube. (I highly recommend it, if you are into circus side-show style entertainment on the web)
Ever since then, I'll get a flat earth video mixed in on my sidebar, about 4 or 5 videos down. I had never seen one before in my life. So the algorithm remembered my Sunday afternoon binge and kept trying to feed me more of the same. It isn't every time now, but they still pop up every once in a while.
YouTube's recommendations are a mirror of your behavior on the web. If you go for clickbait, then clickbait you shall receive. I don't get anything at all about Clinton or Trump, because I don't follow that stuff and the algorithm knows that it is wasting space pushing it out to me. Instead I get videos about SpaceX and whatever youtuber "let's play" stuff my kids have been watching on my phone.
This is the salient point. The algorithms are customized to the individual, so YouTube, Google, Facebook and other social media platforms are echo chambers.
So when the guardian writes:
One must ask, to who? Who is the user that is getting served up this content, and what have they been doing online?
It would be absolutely stunning if a Google company was an overall net negative to the Clinton campaign. Alphabet (Google parent company) Chairman Eric Schmidt worked closely with the Clinton campaign and created the company "The Groundwork" for the purpose. With deep knowledge of the algorithms used by Google and YouTube and a slew of engineers from the companies, The Groundwork has direct ties into the backend at Google.
Claiming that YouTube was manipulated to shill for Trump (overall) would be like claiming that William Randolph Hurst's papers were shilling against his favored candidates. It just doesn't make any sense at all.
I wouldn't say "Alien Nation" was all that obscure. It starred James Caan and Mandy Patinkin, some pretty big name actors. It had a spinoff TV series as well.
It also had a classically implausible weakness for the aliens.... despite being bred or engineered to survive the most hazardous industrial environments unscathed, they were susceptible to salt water. A tradition of silly weaknesses that dates back to the wicked witch of the west.
I'll extend your observation to the next moments, when Darth Vader is introduced.
He walks into the battle scene just after the shooting stops, black cape flowing through still-clearing smoke, grabs a rebel by his throat and lifts him at arm's length to question him, eventually snapping his neck with one hand.
You know instantly who the bad guy is, and that he is an enemy to be feared. All of this is well-established 2 minutes into the movie.
It was the perfect tribute to the old serials. Simplified story telling with stark good/evil contrasts that plug into well-known archetypes so you can immediately invest in the plot and root for the hero.
That Ghostbusters turd made $229 million? Wow, marketing is powerful.
I suppose it makes sense. It had an A-list cast, so you should be able to drum up an audience. But dang, it sure wasn't good.
This is one of those "can't trust the critics" movies. They were able to play the gender card, and managed to pull a 75% rating with the critics on the TomatoeMeter. But only 50% of the audience liked it. Comedy is a category where the audience universally scores movies higher than the critics. Except in this case. So you can surmise why the critics were overly generous.
That feature is one of the best things about RottenTomatoes. You can gain quite a bit of insight by comparing the critics score to the audience score.
A lot of "critic pleaser" movies are not that enjoyable. Some are political or social statement movies that almost require a critic to proclaim it good, even if it is terrible. The audience has no such compulsion. Similarly, there are a lot of popular movies that just plain stink. So seeing the critics aggregate can help with that as well.
There are a lot of genres that are difficult for critics. Like broad comedies or horror movies. If you are thinking of going to a comedy, you aren't asking if it is "better" than "12 Years a Slave". You want to know if it is a solid example of the genre. Similarly, if you are in the market for a slasher film, you want to know if it delivers on being a well made slasher film, not whether the critic thinks slasher films are good. The audience score can help with this problem, since generally only people who went to the movie are rating it. And presumably you don't go to the movie if you weren't in the market for that type of movie.
If you see critics and audiences agree, you can generally count on their opinion, good or bad. And if they disagree, you can gain a bit of insight into why the critics scored it like they did. All of which adds up to helping you decide where to spend your entertainment dollar.
Amazing how quickly that changed.
I was involved in building B2B systems at that time as well. Dealing with older big institutions like banks was really difficult. They had an antiquated, decades old method for moving information around, and were very slow to adapt to the new tools available. Everyone had their own proprietary format for data, even if it was reasonably close to the industry standard. So custom parsers had to be written for every type of data at every institution. XML came to that industry maybe 4 or 5 years after it was being widely used elsewhere.
We had similar experiences dealing with our business customers - we tried to provide lots of web-based services to enhance our business relationship - businesses like law firms, financial services firms, etc. They were all quite resistant to moving our relationship online - despite the benefits to them of increased speed, transparency, not having to wait to speak with a human, etc. They were used to phones, faxes and voicemail and that's how they wanted to keep it. That reticence increased costs for us and for them. But it did make sure that we both kept extra employees on the payroll to handle the extra work. So I suppose we did our part for keeping unemployment low :)
My phrase "of any size" was meant to convey "sizable", not "of all sizes". Conversationally that would have been apparent, but in a short post I see the ambiguity.
1500 customers is pretty tiny. There were probably lots of plumbers and electricians without web pages too.
But if you had a retail business with multiple outlets, you were likely on the web - at least as an advertisement. Online retail was still in its early stages.
We had a small financial services firm, just starting up in 1997. We took half that year to reach 10 employees. But we had way, way more than 1,500 customers.
Our website went up pretty early on, even though it only had a sparse amount of information and a phone number and a web form that would end in a sales call. The graphics were done by a professional though. Not a professional web designer, but a professional graphic artist. And we knew enough to avoid the blink tag.
The internet was built on open source. In 1997 it was more curiosity or nerdy thing. By 2017 the internet is generating untold sums of money and is utterly essential to the economy. I wish I felt the same excitement for this technology as I did back in 1997.
By 1997 pretty much every company of any size had a presence on the internet. Amazon.com had already been around for a few years by then - selling books online, of all things. The dotcom boom was well underway. Remember Webvan? That was 1996. I mean, sure, a lot of those those local small company websites were loaded down with blink tags in 1997, but still.... It isn't like 1997 internet was only for nerds.
Open source has unquestionably changed the world. It is silly to even pretend otherwise. Open source software has been fundamental to many tectonic shifts in our world, and to a myriad of countless lesser improvements.
But did it fulfill it's promise, I suppose is the real question being asked. If you are a doctrinaire Stallman accolyte, you probably are tragically disappointed that all information isn't free, and that any closed source code exists anywhere. You probably view the existence of cell phones with a mixture of open and closed source software as an abomination. But beyond the die-hard GLPv3 adherents, opensource is everywhere and is doing everything. It has been the most successful development in the history of computing.
Scrap metal recycling is a fully developed market, at least in the US. You can just visit the website of a local company to get spot market prices.
They even have pricing for common parts like electric motors or compressors.
Maybe Twitter should learn from Slashdot's 20 years of experience with trolls and moderation.
There are still racist trolls posting on every article, but we don't have to see them at all thanks to the system.
Instead we have regulation that requires monopolies or duopolies in most municipalities.
It is a mess. Maybe 5g or satellite constellations or freeing up TV spectrum can be the sword that cuts the Gordian knot.
I think T-Mobile is the opposite. They zero-rate certain video content.... stuff that they can recompress to save bandwidth. They also partner with Netflix to offer free content and exempt it from bandwidth caps.
As it exists, these violations of net neutrality are decidedly pro-consumer. So the issue is way more complicated than partisans pretend.
Wireless doesn't have the throughput. Not only that, you're still going to have the same problem of who's going to run the towers. It'll be the same monopolies.
Shit sandwich or shit taco. Either way, you're just going to wind up with shit.
Yes it does. He is talking about freeing up legacy TV spectrum for 5g wireless. Properly designed it would have much more throughput.
The reason you live with cable monopolies or duopolies is because the local government requires it. That was the tradeoff to get investment in infrastructure.
Of course we also have the specter of at least two satellite constellations in the near future. Monopolies have a way of collapsing without government protection. Of course they also tend to have the resources to bend the government to their will.
Infringe. Verb. act so as to limit or undermine (something); encroach on.
As in "we are going to place limits on people speaking when they buy time on TV or the internet, requiring that they must identify who they are and where the money they used came from".
This unquestionably undermines free speech.
Look, I get it. You don't like it when "they" have an advantage. "They" might be the rich, who have lots of money and can swamp your speech. "They" might be a foreign government, trying to convince you that Trump isn't evil. Or "They" might be the same foreign government trying to convince you that Communism is a good thing. So we have to make sure that "They" are transparent. So we can keep tabs on "them".
But what if you are not in the majority. Let's say you are Harvey Milk, and speaking out publicly about your opinions on gay rights might get you killed. Maybe then you'd feel differently. Or maybe you are Michael Shwerner, and you think it is really important that all people be treated equally under the law... even people of color. Maybe you'd want the ability to post flyers anonymously.
Just remember.... sometimes you are "they". And maybe what you have to say is important, but unpopular.
Civil rights aren't just for the majority. In fact, if you are only protecting popular speech, you really aren't doing any protecting, are you?