Google has been the dominant search engine for about 15 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Google has been the dominant cell phone operating system for about 10 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Microsoft has been the dominant desktop, laptop, and corporate operating system for about 25 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Amazon has been the dominant online retailer for about 15 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Facebook has been the dominant social media network for about 10 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Dominance in tech is not fleeting. When a new technology develops, it takes a few years for one product to emerge as dominant - but when it does, it has an essentially permanent monopoly. The only way it can lose power is for the entire technology to become obsolete and replaced with a different technology.
With about 300 million people in the US, it's pretty easy to find a few anecdotes of pretty much anything. That says little about the overall prevalence of the experience. For every one-in-a-million experience, there are 300 people who have experienced it.
When the anecdote concerns not a random example found online, but rather the person you're debating, it's different. You are only debating a few people at one time. If one of those few has had the experience in question, chances are the experience is relatively frequent.
Half of the US would have liked to abolish slavery before Britain. The other half had an economy which depended on it, unlike Britain's.
The UK has always had (until the last few decades) a very homogeneous population, unlike the US. There was no racial minority for the majority to be afraid of. So there were no racially discriminatory laws which needed a civil rights movement to overturn.
The UK had and has mass surveillance to a greater extent than the US.
This is actually a serious philosophical question - the Raven paradox.
Let's say you want to prove a statement like "All ravens are black". This statement is logically equivalent to saying "If something is not black, it's not a raven."
Now let's say you find an apple, and it's green. That is a non-black object, which is not a raven. So the existence of a green apple is evidence in favor of the second statement ("If something is not black, it's not a raven"), which in turn supports the first statement.
But how can finding a green apple teach you something about ravens?
What they mean (if they are thinking) is that you are knowingly degrading the quality of the discussion with your comment.
If people are having a thoughtful conversation about X, and you interject to post a 4 word comment "X is a scam artist!", then your comment is noise to the discussion, which adds nothing and interferes with the serious conversation.
If you are aware that you are having this effect (which anyone over puberty should be aware of), then you are in fact a troll.
How much time per year do I lose to foodborn illnesses?
How much time would I lose due to washing my hands for 20+ seconds at a time after every use of the toilet?
Off topic, but my grandmother said that when she installed a dishwasher, her family stopped catching diseases from each other. Presumably the dishwasher used hotter water than hand washing, and also washed more thoroughly. Now that's a cleanliness method which actually SAVES time and effort!
The "magic" never ended! Australia's exports are about 20% higher in 2018 than 2016, see the graph in my previous comment.
Investment has gone down (the graph in your link). But that is a sign that exports are stabilizing, not decreasing. Once a factory has been built, it can keep producing. In a boom, investment approximates not the amount of production, but the derivative of the amount of production.
Australia has gone 26 years without a recession because their economy is based on mining iron and coal for sale to China. The more China's economy goes up, the more Australia's does. In the last 26 years Australia's exports have gone up by 600%, so of course the economy has gone up.
"Linux Set To Shed Nearly 500k Lines Of Code By Dropping Old CPUs"
This is not comparable.
Linux dropped support for very obscure CPU architectures. Consumers are unlikely to possess these architectures at all. Corporate customers can still get the code from old Linux versions which are still available online under the GPL.
Microsoft is dropping support for extremely mainstream architectures which still have millions of users. And there's no alternative to download the code and recompile it in the future.
James Damore didn't "rebel" against Google. Google claims to have a culture of open discussion. Damore wrote a calm, measured article he wanted to be openly discussed. Google claims to want to increase female employment. Damore suggested new possible ways to increase female employment.
In the (European) country where I live, for about $15/month you can get a cellular data package with 100GB of data per month. Download/upload speeds are routinely over 1MB/second. Nowadays, I don't even have a wired internet connection at home anymore, I just use this instead. And it's actually more reliable in my experience than wired internet was.
I think San Francisco should contract with the cell phone companies to roll this out over the entire city (i.e. put up some more cell towers). It would probably be a lot cheaper than wired internet. Why waste money on a technology which is becoming obsolete?
Saddam kicked out the inspectors which were supposed to verify the lack of a nuclear program. Why on earth would he do that if he didn't have a nuclear program?
The answer is, because he wanted to convince Iran, his regional rival, that he had a nuclear program. Unfortunately, he did too good a job, and convinced the Bush administration too, and we got a very destructive war as a result.
WRT Libya (and all the more so Ukraine a couple decades earlier) you are correct that the US broke its promises and gave a massive incentive to proliferators in the future.
Or better yet, buses or trains. Single passenger cars are an incredibly inefficient way of transporting large number of people between a handful of sites.
New Yorkers earn more money on average, because poor people can't afford to live in New York!
Wherever there are jobs easily available, housing costs are high. Either you work yourself crazy in New York to make the sky-high mortgage payments, or you live elsewhere and worry that if you lose your job you won't find another.
There should be no need to choose between those two unappealing options. Allow more building in New York, and the housing price will sink to almost "flyover country" levels (a little higher, since construction is a little more expensive there), while there will still be an abundance of jobs there. The best of both worlds.
Actually, the highest birthrates nowadays are in sub-Saharan countries, which are mostly Christian not Muslim. In most Muslim countries, birthrates are relatively low. In 2 of the 3 largest Muslim countries (Indonesia and Bangladesh), they are already below replacement.
Pakistan's population is also stabilizing. The fertility rate is currently 2.62 and replacement is probably about 2.4.
In fact, the only places with exploding fertility these days are sub-Saharan Africa, and a handful of other countries like Afghanistan and Yemen. You should check the fertility statistics, a lot has changed since 20 years ago.
Pakistan no longer has "exponential" growth. It has 2.62 kids per mother, in a country where the replacement rate is probably about 2.4. That's barely above replacement fertility.
"Before the BC epoch, clerics everywhere did a tidy little business in tiny tombstones." - that was due to lack of antibiotics and clean water, not lack of birth control.
Slashdot Mirror
Google has been the dominant search engine for about 15 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Google has been the dominant cell phone operating system for about 10 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Microsoft has been the dominant desktop, laptop, and corporate operating system for about 25 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Amazon has been the dominant online retailer for about 15 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Facebook has been the dominant social media network for about 10 years. No serious threats to its future dominance are currently visible.
Dominance in tech is not fleeting. When a new technology develops, it takes a few years for one product to emerge as dominant - but when it does, it has an essentially permanent monopoly. The only way it can lose power is for the entire technology to become obsolete and replaced with a different technology.
A mix of carrots and sticks is more effective than either carrots or sticks.
(The stick is this social credit system, the carrot is a steadily growing economy.)
With about 300 million people in the US, it's pretty easy to find a few anecdotes of pretty much anything. That says little about the overall prevalence of the experience. For every one-in-a-million experience, there are 300 people who have experienced it.
When the anecdote concerns not a random example found online, but rather the person you're debating, it's different. You are only debating a few people at one time. If one of those few has had the experience in question, chances are the experience is relatively frequent.
Half of the US would have liked to abolish slavery before Britain. The other half had an economy which depended on it, unlike Britain's.
The UK has always had (until the last few decades) a very homogeneous population, unlike the US. There was no racial minority for the majority to be afraid of. So there were no racially discriminatory laws which needed a civil rights movement to overturn.
The UK had and has mass surveillance to a greater extent than the US.
This is actually a serious philosophical question - the Raven paradox.
Let's say you want to prove a statement like "All ravens are black". This statement is logically equivalent to saying "If something is not black, it's not a raven."
Now let's say you find an apple, and it's green. That is a non-black object, which is not a raven. So the existence of a green apple is evidence in favor of the second statement ("If something is not black, it's not a raven"), which in turn supports the first statement.
But how can finding a green apple teach you something about ravens?
See above link for attempted resolutions.
What they mean (if they are thinking) is that you are knowingly degrading the quality of the discussion with your comment.
If people are having a thoughtful conversation about X, and you interject to post a 4 word comment "X is a scam artist!", then your comment is noise to the discussion, which adds nothing and interferes with the serious conversation.
If you are aware that you are having this effect (which anyone over puberty should be aware of), then you are in fact a troll.
Makes sense.
I once went out with a girl who ghosted me (only time that ever happened to me). A few years later she committed suicide.
I was a bit miffed at the time, but knowing in retrospect what she was going through, I just felt sorry for her.
You recall wrong, because nobody has ever been recorded to live past 122. Source
How much time per year do I lose to foodborn illnesses?
How much time would I lose due to washing my hands for 20+ seconds at a time after every use of the toilet?
Off topic, but my grandmother said that when she installed a dishwasher, her family stopped catching diseases from each other. Presumably the dishwasher used hotter water than hand washing, and also washed more thoroughly. Now that's a cleanliness method which actually SAVES time and effort!
The "magic" never ended! Australia's exports are about 20% higher in 2018 than 2016, see the graph in my previous comment.
Investment has gone down (the graph in your link). But that is a sign that exports are stabilizing, not decreasing. Once a factory has been built, it can keep producing. In a boom, investment approximates not the amount of production, but the derivative of the amount of production.
Australia has gone 26 years without a recession because their economy is based on mining iron and coal for sale to China. The more China's economy goes up, the more Australia's does. In the last 26 years Australia's exports have gone up by 600%, so of course the economy has gone up.
https://tradingeconomics.com/a...
Depending on the fee, it is likely worth it.
"Linux Set To Shed Nearly 500k Lines Of Code By Dropping Old CPUs"
This is not comparable.
Linux dropped support for very obscure CPU architectures. Consumers are unlikely to possess these architectures at all. Corporate customers can still get the code from old Linux versions which are still available online under the GPL.
Microsoft is dropping support for extremely mainstream architectures which still have millions of users. And there's no alternative to download the code and recompile it in the future.
Exactly which papers allow you to publish papers without peer review?
Not that it matters, but I will be facing a tenure committee soon...
James Damore didn't "rebel" against Google. Google claims to have a culture of open discussion. Damore wrote a calm, measured article he wanted to be openly discussed. Google claims to want to increase female employment. Damore suggested new possible ways to increase female employment.
He gets a lot of hype for things that don't have substance.
But he also has some real accomplishments, particularly with SpaceX.
In the (European) country where I live, for about $15/month you can get a cellular data package with 100GB of data per month. Download/upload speeds are routinely over 1MB/second. Nowadays, I don't even have a wired internet connection at home anymore, I just use this instead. And it's actually more reliable in my experience than wired internet was.
I think San Francisco should contract with the cell phone companies to roll this out over the entire city (i.e. put up some more cell towers). It would probably be a lot cheaper than wired internet. Why waste money on a technology which is becoming obsolete?
That treaty outlaws WMDs in space, and any military actions on the Moon or other celestial bodies.
It does not limit non-WMD military actions in space.
Read up on it
Saddam kicked out the inspectors which were supposed to verify the lack of a nuclear program. Why on earth would he do that if he didn't have a nuclear program?
The answer is, because he wanted to convince Iran, his regional rival, that he had a nuclear program. Unfortunately, he did too good a job, and convinced the Bush administration too, and we got a very destructive war as a result.
WRT Libya (and all the more so Ukraine a couple decades earlier) you are correct that the US broke its promises and gave a massive incentive to proliferators in the future.
It's not actually a trick if no product exists yet. (The Boring Company, Hyperloop, Neuralink)
Or better yet, buses or trains. Single passenger cars are an incredibly inefficient way of transporting large number of people between a handful of sites.
New Yorkers earn more money on average, because poor people can't afford to live in New York!
Wherever there are jobs easily available, housing costs are high. Either you work yourself crazy in New York to make the sky-high mortgage payments, or you live elsewhere and worry that if you lose your job you won't find another.
There should be no need to choose between those two unappealing options. Allow more building in New York, and the housing price will sink to almost "flyover country" levels (a little higher, since construction is a little more expensive there), while there will still be an abundance of jobs there. The best of both worlds.
Actually, the highest birthrates nowadays are in sub-Saharan countries, which are mostly Christian not Muslim. In most Muslim countries, birthrates are relatively low. In 2 of the 3 largest Muslim countries (Indonesia and Bangladesh), they are already below replacement.
Pakistan's population is also stabilizing. The fertility rate is currently 2.62 and replacement is probably about 2.4.
In fact, the only places with exploding fertility these days are sub-Saharan Africa, and a handful of other countries like Afghanistan and Yemen. You should check the fertility statistics, a lot has changed since 20 years ago.
Pakistan no longer has "exponential" growth. It has 2.62 kids per mother, in a country where the replacement rate is probably about 2.4. That's barely above replacement fertility.
"Before the BC epoch, clerics everywhere did a tidy little business in tiny tombstones." - that was due to lack of antibiotics and clean water, not lack of birth control.