I know it is inconvenient, but these sites should not be connected to the Internet.
Hell, they shouldn't even be running off-the-shelf software in the first place.
I remember the first time I saw an airplane's video system rebooting. Seeing all of the text messages and various clunky graphical transitions was... painful. I mean, yes, it is a challenge to get that kind of thing right, but when you're flying on a $50M airplane which is part of a fleet of hundreds of the same, I honestly don't think it's a big deal to pay someone an extra $25k to put in a few nights or weekends to sanitize the boot process. To me, this indicates that they were either too cheap or too incompetent to manage it - and they probably have the same people working on various other aspects of their systems. Even if you assume they have "real" software engineers working on the flight controls (IMHO a dubious assumption), you still have to assume the group which accepted the various crappy experiences on the entertainment systems was also the group programming the credit-card handling and onboard wifi.
So, when I see a medical system or subway system or other critical infrastructure showing an ancient Windows boot error, I have to aggressively ignore it to maintain my sanity.
How many ways can you make a reservation for an individual hotel? I'd guess about 700. Sometimes you can even go directly to the hotel's website to do it!
Likewise, when you use a site like Expedia to make a reservation, have you ever noticed how hard it pushes associated services? You're booking a flight, how about a hotel! How about a rental car! How about dining!
Spraying your data all over the ether is not an accident, it is literally how this industry makes their money. There's a huge collection of interconnected systems, and there's no bouncer saying "You have to be THIS secure to enter the club". In fact, it's the opposite, it's "Hey, I have a lead, here's someone's private information, can you give me a kickback?", and literally nobody cares about what you're doing with the information until someone determines that you're selling it to the mafia or leaving it in an exposed AWS bucket.
Facebook can see that suddenly you started accessing your account from a completely different IP address range in another state, and that your email address was changed to prevent account recovery, and your account switched from posting puppy photos to hardcore porn, and then contacted them to say that you account was hijacked.
If they were still in doubt they could ask you to send a photo holding a sign with a code word written on it, and compare that to photos on your account. They could ask your network of friends about it.
This is all true, but the problem is that Facebook's existence is predicated on spending pennies per year supporting their users, because they can only sell off our privacy for a few dollars per year. Any sort of human-looking-at-things process makes your account unprofitable, probably forever.
Best case is that they could automate some of these things so that when you contact about a hijacked account, the system can bubble up that contact along with various posting-patterns-changed indicators to show that it's plausible. But only a tiny percentage of accounts are ever hijacked, so it's also possible that that system could be subject to people abusing false positives to hijack, and in any case what's the long-term payoff to develop that code?
You sure do not need a 9-to-5 job to be successful. But your body and mind have limits, and when you routinely push past those limits, you do damage. Once you've burned out, you don't recover quickly. So go ahead, eat that seed corn! Just make sure you're not spending much, and set the rest aside, because you'll eventually need it.
But it honestly looks a lot like Wemos shields, except as castellated PCBs. Which I think has potential for nice low-profile projects. Main problem is that we only need so many temperature sensors.
I think the real killer is how often they'll end up needing to add a microcontroller or something to force a component into an i2c mold.
It's embarrassing that we're in 2019 and we can't authenticate callers. I think it's amazing that we haven't seen some massive DoS type attack because phone providers just trust each other like "Well, you're in the club, you must be legit". So now they're going to solve the problem which is caused by their inadequate system, and do it free of charge? WTF?
Maybe instead there should be a tax on every call which is NOT end-to-end authenticated, and then let the free market take care of things.
An rpi 3b+ draws a max of 5w, and your heatsink is pretty optional. I suspect this is drawing a bit more than 5w.
And the real news is when a normal person can stably run stuff on it. I've been watching this market for a few years, and the difference between the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry-Pi-Killers is that with an rpi you can be up an running in under a half hour depending on how fast your Internet can download updates, and the result is pokey but stable (if you don't stint on the power supply). With most of the other boards, in a half hour you haven't even found the right page for burning your OS to an SD card, and once you've finally gotten to a login screen, you get to spend the next week trying to figure out why it crashes every time you visit YouTube or CNN or probe a GPIO pin. The next six months is spent listening to how the next software update will fix your problem, and then they make a hardware rev and throw out all their existing progress.
I've often thought it would be better all around if content-oriented websites started by figuring out how they could structure everything as a static archive, and then worked backwards from there to layer in the dynamic parts.
Here's an example of what happens to TDWR when an idiot blasts their router in the TDWR frequencies. The unauthorized broadcast shows up as a wedge-shaped area spanning a few degrees and extending to the edge of the radar image, completely obscuring any weather in the wedge. Multiply that by a few dozen open source routers near the airport and it becomes a major impediment.
It feels like these people are basically painting an arrow pointed at their house on their lawn. I'm not saying it isn't hard to track them down, but one would think that after this has happened a few times, by nature of this being open source someone would log a bug in the bug tracker, and now it would be a known problem and the authors would fix it either by restricting those frequencies or forcing a config option where you acknowledge understanding of the problem (as opposed "I have to know the necessary magic before starting").
I guess that if that's not how it works, I still don't see how changing the law will materially affect how people operate who are not aware of what the law says about something. This seems obscure enough that people will keep doing whatever they are doing, and probably with the same results.
While at Google, working on Chrome team, we could get a Chromebook Pixel (the original ones) to use and "eat the dogfood". Lovely device, even when it was like four year old, so when I left I set out to replace it. I ended up with an Asus Chromebook Flip C302A, the second option was a Samsung Chromebook Pro. Why not a newer Chromebook Pixel or Pixelbook? Because they cost 2x as much for minimal advantage.
Do I wish I had 8GB of RAM? Sure! But 8GB of RAM runs around $60. If they had had an offering in the $600 range, or maybe $700, I'd have probably went for it.
Unfortunately, they have the last laugh, since Apple has decided to cripple their laptop keyboard and port arrays, so now I find myself with Windows laptops in the house. Sigh.
> Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I > literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a > few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small > number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Hardly a new problem. People have been complaining about this for a very long time. Part of what spawned Ubuntu. These really large, old projects with huge user install bases tend to be very resistant to change for good reason.
He has some valid points but also much of what he expresses is personal preference. Things that bug him others really prefer. Who can say which is right / how things should change? *shrug*
Hmm, well, my experience is that often enough, it isn't so much that people _prefer_ a particular way, they just can't see how to change it. That doesn't mean that any old change which comes along is acceptable - maybe there are 20 people pulling in different incompatible directions.
I think the more likely problem is that 10 years in, you're no longer working on clear greenfield problems that are easy to move on. A higher proportion of the project's problems are hard problems, you have experience so you're getting the harder problems, and your experience means you comprehend enough of the system to realize that all of the easy solutions are wrong. You tackle a problem by main force, and after three weeks of vetting you've found the perfect 6-line change which resolves it, and then you have to spend 6 weeks arguing a third party through every step of your vetting before it gets committed. That's not because they are stupid, it's because they know what they're doing but the problem is non-obvious so your solution just looks like change for the sake of change.
If an asteroid is not rotating, it makes sense that if fractured into pieces by a thermonuclear explosion, the pieces will tend to drift back together in one place.
So our strategy for an Earth-impacting asteroid should be: if it is rotating, blow it apart and watxch the pieces fly away; if it is not rotating, nudge its orbit with a series of small explosions.
Thermonuclear devices are the biggest boom we've been able to create. Unfortunately, the only asteroids which our nukes would effectively be able to nudge (or shatter) are those which aren't of cataclysmic size in the first place.
I'm sure there's a link between cancer and cigarette smoking, but who the hell cares. Now if you'll excuse me I have yet another appointment for chemo.
In other news why are cancer rates so high? Must be that damn fluoride in the water!
There is a strong correlation between _life_ and cancer. But in the case of the roast, more people are going to die of cancers related to eating the roast than to cancers related to breathing fumes from the roast.
If you can afford that rent, you can afford a bus ticket out of there.
And that's EXACTLY what's happening. Folks are leaving both the cities AND the state because it's too expensive to live there. They are heading to places where the cost of living is lower. Places like Texas, Florida and other places where an $800K house isn't a two bedroom shack.
Wait, so people are moving away in droves, and prices continue to rise! That's crazy! It goes against pretty much everything written about supply and demand! Imagine how much apartments will cost when EVERYONE has moved away!
I'm sure it is plausible that at the PEAK there are more particles matching a SPECIFIC metric than Delhi's AVERAGE, but who the hell cares? Unless you're doing things very wrong, your roasted dinner is going to exceed these levels for maybe a few hours, whereas in a major city on a bad day it will be bad for many dozens of hours, or even for days or weeks, and will be bad on a wide variety of measures.
We've built this system of demand for "information", and the infrastructure works to fill that demand, no matter how trivial the information is, resulting in a confusing continuum from important stuff to trivial stuff to downright stupid stuff. Honestly, what we need is to add computer algorithms which STOP exposing us to stupid useless stories, to reduce the overall demand.
'Correlation is not causation' is a two-way street. I can't even do 10 pushups, but I can ride a bike 100 miles in under 6 hours, no problem, but you're going to tell me I'm at higher risk of heart disease? Nonsense. I have low bodyfat percentage, high HDLs, low LDLs, high endurance, high leg strength, and lots of muscular endurance where I need it most (below the waist). Doing pushups is meaningless, overall health and fitness is everything.
That's actually not that impressive. A reasonably fit rider on a 10 speed bike should be able to pull off 25 mph.
Yeah, so, very few cycling enthusiasts can break an hour riding solo over a 40km course (just under 25 miles). Just because you can do a 50-yard dash in 10s doesn't mean you can run a 2-hour marathon.
Their Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 lines weren't too expensive. Except they didn't make enough to satisfy demand. Then they decided it would be more fun to make phone that cost $600 to $1000. Somewhere in there they got rid of Motorola, who now makes decent phones like the X4 selling for decent prices like $300 (oops, $250, oops, $200, oops, $150).
I was working there when they acquired Android, and I remember being really chuffed that they'd be able to bring decent software to the masses rather than skimming off the top - so I was pretty salty about it when they decided they're rather join the feeding frenzy at the top. Making an amazing $1k phone isn't rocket science, you just need to avoid errors, the existing companies like Samsung and Sony can push the boundaries there. Making a great phone for $200 is where the real challenge is, and it bothers me that Google simply abdicated that position. Instead of co-evolving hardware and software to make a tight fit at $200, they're off bloating things up with elaborate camera systems and voice recognition for the high end, then getting upset that the low-end devices ship with an older Android version.
It's just not true though, unfortunately. The Moto X4 is a terrible phone. It is outperformed by iPhones from 4 years ago. You are better off spending 300 on a brand new iPhone 7, or even 150 on a used one.
I agree the X4 could be faster. But it is TONS faster than the phone I had four years ago, the only reason my phone needs to be faster at this point is because Android has greater resource needs, because... reasons? It's certainly not more capable.
Apple has done a great job both of making newer/faster devices, but also keeping older devices relevant. We have plenty of older iDevices around running current software simply because they work fine so we see no reason to replace them. I don't mean "work fine" in the sense of "You can survive on this, if you're patient", I mean that the same device feels the same as time passes. Meanwhile every Android device makes my device feel slower until I get used to it.
People don't want phones with crappy CPUs and GPUs, they want to be able to buy a phone and run the latest software, extremely quickly, for at least 4 years. They want OS updates, immediately when they come out, and for at least 4 years.
Moto X4 will get 1 update.
Wow, that's weird, my X4 has gone from Android 7 to 8 to 9, and for awhile I was actually finding myself annoyed by having frequent notifications of a new update being available.
Stepping back, though, the problem of timely and continuing updates is only semi-related to the specific Android phone. Android simply sucks on this metric, and iPhone/iPad rocks. You can't even really compare them properly, they aren't even in the same ballgame, the best Android devices don't even overlap the worst Apple devices on this metric. This will not be solved by Google making their own phone, Google needs to change their approach to Android to improve this. I don't see that happening.
We're the first species who can respond effectively to being endangered.
The point I was making in my 3rd paragraph (the bit you didn't quote) is that, yes, we COULD respond effectively to being endangered, but (for various reasons) we AREN'T responding effectively. If we were to respond effectively, we'd have significantly cut CO2 emissions and pollution/waste as soon as AGW/etc gained strong scientific consensus. We are NOT responding effectively because those in power who dictate our response either have a financial or political incentive to not respond in an effective way (or they're just plain stupid). We COULD respond effectively but we WON'T and therefore we'll go extinct anyway.
Between the military industrial complex, disposable personal computing devices (smartphones), and hugely extravagant lifestyles for the super rich (to name but a few examples) do you honestly think our species is responding effectively? If your answer is "but we're not endangered yet", by the time we are becoming an endangered species we're well past the point of being too late to change anything anyway.
I wasn't at all addressing the point of whether we're responding effectively, and I wasn't saying "we're not endangered yet". My post explicitly suggested that on our current course, most of humanity will die, which seems like an ineffective response to me. Just that extinct means ALL of humanity dies, and that probably won't happen.
Before we bash Amazon it's important to note the following from the linked to article.
"...ITEP notes that its non-existent federal tax payment is a result of the Trump Administration’s corporation-friendly tax cuts. The think tank writes that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act not only decreased corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%, but it also didn’t close “a slew of tax loopholes that allow profitable companies to routinely avoid paying federal and state income taxes on almost half of their profits.”
According to The Week, Amazon ended up paying an 11.4% federal income tax rate between 2011 and 2016, which is a contrast to the -1% rate this year."
Wow, that's terrible, it must have pushed them close to bankruptcy to pay such an onerous tax burden for those years.
The reason they can do this is because the cost is being hidden from the consumer. Do you think someone would sign up for getting "2% cashback" if they were paying 2.1% more per transaction? Nope and yet that is what is happening. The cause of this is that stores are contractually required to eat the cost of the transaction fees and thus increase the price of goods to compensate. The result is that everyone is subsidizing the transaction fees, even if they pay cash which completely eliminates any desire to compete with lower transaction fees.
It's true that nobody would sign up for 2% cashback if they paid 2.1% more per transaction.
But the reality is that only people who are a good risk get the 2% cashback card, but EVERYONE pays more per transaction. If I'm in a position to get 2% cashback at the cost of EVERYONE paying 1.1% more per transaction, yeah, I'll take that deal, why would I pass it up?
The reality is that the payment card industry is pure genius. They offer endless freebies to card holders, which makes card holders think these companies are their best friends, and then make the customers pay for it all through payment charges. But when a retailer tries to pass these fees on to the customer, the customer gets annoyed because they want all their 'free' stuff by being able to pay with the card, rather than having to use cash. It sort of relies on a level of collective stupidity that is probably impossible to eradicate from society.
It's not stupid for an individual customer to want to pay the same price as other customers, but get 2% back or whatever random rewards the card company is giving them on top of that. The fact that retailers have no power isn't the customer's fault.
Their Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 lines weren't too expensive. Except they didn't make enough to satisfy demand. Then they decided it would be more fun to make phone that cost $600 to $1000. Somewhere in there they got rid of Motorola, who now makes decent phones like the X4 selling for decent prices like $300 (oops, $250, oops, $200, oops, $150).
I was working there when they acquired Android, and I remember being really chuffed that they'd be able to bring decent software to the masses rather than skimming off the top - so I was pretty salty about it when they decided they're rather join the feeding frenzy at the top. Making an amazing $1k phone isn't rocket science, you just need to avoid errors, the existing companies like Samsung and Sony can push the boundaries there. Making a great phone for $200 is where the real challenge is, and it bothers me that Google simply abdicated that position. Instead of co-evolving hardware and software to make a tight fit at $200, they're off bloating things up with elaborate camera systems and voice recognition for the high end, then getting upset that the low-end devices ship with an older Android version.
Slashdot Mirror
I was taught by slashdot commenters that scientists always like to create alarm and panic in order to raise taxes. What happened here ?
It's a trick. The reversal actually will have severe consequences to our civilization, requiring a single world government response.
I know it is inconvenient, but these sites should not be connected to the Internet.
Hell, they shouldn't even be running off-the-shelf software in the first place.
I remember the first time I saw an airplane's video system rebooting. Seeing all of the text messages and various clunky graphical transitions was ... painful. I mean, yes, it is a challenge to get that kind of thing right, but when you're flying on a $50M airplane which is part of a fleet of hundreds of the same, I honestly don't think it's a big deal to pay someone an extra $25k to put in a few nights or weekends to sanitize the boot process. To me, this indicates that they were either too cheap or too incompetent to manage it - and they probably have the same people working on various other aspects of their systems. Even if you assume they have "real" software engineers working on the flight controls (IMHO a dubious assumption), you still have to assume the group which accepted the various crappy experiences on the entertainment systems was also the group programming the credit-card handling and onboard wifi.
So, when I see a medical system or subway system or other critical infrastructure showing an ancient Windows boot error, I have to aggressively ignore it to maintain my sanity.
How many ways can you make a reservation for an individual hotel? I'd guess about 700. Sometimes you can even go directly to the hotel's website to do it!
Likewise, when you use a site like Expedia to make a reservation, have you ever noticed how hard it pushes associated services? You're booking a flight, how about a hotel! How about a rental car! How about dining!
Spraying your data all over the ether is not an accident, it is literally how this industry makes their money. There's a huge collection of interconnected systems, and there's no bouncer saying "You have to be THIS secure to enter the club". In fact, it's the opposite, it's "Hey, I have a lead, here's someone's private information, can you give me a kickback?", and literally nobody cares about what you're doing with the information until someone determines that you're selling it to the mafia or leaving it in an exposed AWS bucket.
Accidentally.
It shouldn't be that hard.
Facebook can see that suddenly you started accessing your account from a completely different IP address range in another state, and that your email address was changed to prevent account recovery, and your account switched from posting puppy photos to hardcore porn, and then contacted them to say that you account was hijacked.
If they were still in doubt they could ask you to send a photo holding a sign with a code word written on it, and compare that to photos on your account. They could ask your network of friends about it.
This is all true, but the problem is that Facebook's existence is predicated on spending pennies per year supporting their users, because they can only sell off our privacy for a few dollars per year. Any sort of human-looking-at-things process makes your account unprofitable, probably forever.
Best case is that they could automate some of these things so that when you contact about a hijacked account, the system can bubble up that contact along with various posting-patterns-changed indicators to show that it's plausible. But only a tiny percentage of accounts are ever hijacked, so it's also possible that that system could be subject to people abusing false positives to hijack, and in any case what's the long-term payoff to develop that code?
You sure do not need a 9-to-5 job to be successful. But your body and mind have limits, and when you routinely push past those limits, you do damage. Once you've burned out, you don't recover quickly. So go ahead, eat that seed corn! Just make sure you're not spending much, and set the rest aside, because you'll eventually need it.
Seeed Grove: http://wiki.seeedstudio.com/Gr...
Sparkfun Qwiic: https://www.sparkfun.com/qwiic
But it honestly looks a lot like Wemos shields, except as castellated PCBs. Which I think has potential for nice low-profile projects. Main problem is that we only need so many temperature sensors.
I think the real killer is how often they'll end up needing to add a microcontroller or something to force a component into an i2c mold.
It's embarrassing that we're in 2019 and we can't authenticate callers. I think it's amazing that we haven't seen some massive DoS type attack because phone providers just trust each other like "Well, you're in the club, you must be legit". So now they're going to solve the problem which is caused by their inadequate system, and do it free of charge? WTF?
Maybe instead there should be a tax on every call which is NOT end-to-end authenticated, and then let the free market take care of things.
An rpi 3b+ draws a max of 5w, and your heatsink is pretty optional. I suspect this is drawing a bit more than 5w.
And the real news is when a normal person can stably run stuff on it. I've been watching this market for a few years, and the difference between the Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry-Pi-Killers is that with an rpi you can be up an running in under a half hour depending on how fast your Internet can download updates, and the result is pokey but stable (if you don't stint on the power supply). With most of the other boards, in a half hour you haven't even found the right page for burning your OS to an SD card, and once you've finally gotten to a login screen, you get to spend the next week trying to figure out why it crashes every time you visit YouTube or CNN or probe a GPIO pin. The next six months is spent listening to how the next software update will fix your problem, and then they make a hardware rev and throw out all their existing progress.
I mean, yes? But doesn't this fall out of the geometry of Kepler's laws of planetary motion? I guess I'm confused how this isn't an April 1st article.
I've often thought it would be better all around if content-oriented websites started by figuring out how they could structure everything as a static archive, and then worked backwards from there to layer in the dynamic parts.
Here's an example of what happens to TDWR when an idiot blasts their router in the TDWR frequencies. The unauthorized broadcast shows up as a wedge-shaped area spanning a few degrees and extending to the edge of the radar image, completely obscuring any weather in the wedge. Multiply that by a few dozen open source routers near the airport and it becomes a major impediment.
It feels like these people are basically painting an arrow pointed at their house on their lawn. I'm not saying it isn't hard to track them down, but one would think that after this has happened a few times, by nature of this being open source someone would log a bug in the bug tracker, and now it would be a known problem and the authors would fix it either by restricting those frequencies or forcing a config option where you acknowledge understanding of the problem (as opposed "I have to know the necessary magic before starting").
I guess that if that's not how it works, I still don't see how changing the law will materially affect how people operate who are not aware of what the law says about something. This seems obscure enough that people will keep doing whatever they are doing, and probably with the same results.
We've been working so hard on our own OS! It's Android, but with a skin and without a few apps!
A new Linux OS is out! It's Ubuntu, with a different terminal emulator!
We wrote 10,000 lines of code, added it to the existing 15 million lines of code, and now we have something new! We're relevant and important!
In reality, this just makes them on par with a precocious 8th grader.
While at Google, working on Chrome team, we could get a Chromebook Pixel (the original ones) to use and "eat the dogfood". Lovely device, even when it was like four year old, so when I left I set out to replace it. I ended up with an Asus Chromebook Flip C302A, the second option was a Samsung Chromebook Pro. Why not a newer Chromebook Pixel or Pixelbook? Because they cost 2x as much for minimal advantage.
Do I wish I had 8GB of RAM? Sure! But 8GB of RAM runs around $60. If they had had an offering in the $600 range, or maybe $700, I'd have probably went for it.
Unfortunately, they have the last laugh, since Apple has decided to cripple their laptop keyboard and port arrays, so now I find myself with Windows laptops in the house. Sigh.
> Culturally, reviews and reactions are slow. There are no deadlines. I
> literally sometimes get emails notifying me that a patch I sent out a
> few years ago (!!) is now merged. This turns projects from a small
> number of weeks into many years, which is a huge demotivator for me.
Hardly a new problem. People have been complaining about this for a very long time. Part of what spawned Ubuntu. These really large, old projects with huge user install bases tend to be very resistant to change for good reason.
He has some valid points but also much of what he expresses is personal preference. Things that bug him others really prefer. Who can say which is right / how things should change? *shrug*
Hmm, well, my experience is that often enough, it isn't so much that people _prefer_ a particular way, they just can't see how to change it. That doesn't mean that any old change which comes along is acceptable - maybe there are 20 people pulling in different incompatible directions.
I think the more likely problem is that 10 years in, you're no longer working on clear greenfield problems that are easy to move on. A higher proportion of the project's problems are hard problems, you have experience so you're getting the harder problems, and your experience means you comprehend enough of the system to realize that all of the easy solutions are wrong. You tackle a problem by main force, and after three weeks of vetting you've found the perfect 6-line change which resolves it, and then you have to spend 6 weeks arguing a third party through every step of your vetting before it gets committed. That's not because they are stupid, it's because they know what they're doing but the problem is non-obvious so your solution just looks like change for the sake of change.
If an asteroid is not rotating, it makes sense that if fractured into pieces by a thermonuclear explosion, the pieces will tend to drift back together in one place.
So our strategy for an Earth-impacting asteroid should be: if it is rotating, blow it apart and watxch the pieces fly away; if it is not rotating, nudge its orbit with a series of small explosions.
Thermonuclear devices are the biggest boom we've been able to create. Unfortunately, the only asteroids which our nukes would effectively be able to nudge (or shatter) are those which aren't of cataclysmic size in the first place.
but who the hell cares?
I'm sure there's a link between cancer and cigarette smoking, but who the hell cares. Now if you'll excuse me I have yet another appointment for chemo.
In other news why are cancer rates so high? Must be that damn fluoride in the water!
There is a strong correlation between _life_ and cancer. But in the case of the roast, more people are going to die of cancers related to eating the roast than to cancers related to breathing fumes from the roast.
How is anyone forced to live there?
If you can afford that rent, you can afford a bus ticket out of there.
And that's EXACTLY what's happening. Folks are leaving both the cities AND the state because it's too expensive to live there. They are heading to places where the cost of living is lower. Places like Texas, Florida and other places where an $800K house isn't a two bedroom shack.
Wait, so people are moving away in droves, and prices continue to rise! That's crazy! It goes against pretty much everything written about supply and demand! Imagine how much apartments will cost when EVERYONE has moved away!
I'm sure it is plausible that at the PEAK there are more particles matching a SPECIFIC metric than Delhi's AVERAGE, but who the hell cares? Unless you're doing things very wrong, your roasted dinner is going to exceed these levels for maybe a few hours, whereas in a major city on a bad day it will be bad for many dozens of hours, or even for days or weeks, and will be bad on a wide variety of measures.
We've built this system of demand for "information", and the infrastructure works to fill that demand, no matter how trivial the information is, resulting in a confusing continuum from important stuff to trivial stuff to downright stupid stuff. Honestly, what we need is to add computer algorithms which STOP exposing us to stupid useless stories, to reduce the overall demand.
'Correlation is not causation' is a two-way street. I can't even do 10 pushups, but I can ride a bike 100 miles in under 6 hours, no problem, but you're going to tell me I'm at higher risk of heart disease? Nonsense. I have low bodyfat percentage, high HDLs, low LDLs, high endurance, high leg strength, and lots of muscular endurance where I need it most (below the waist). Doing pushups is meaningless, overall health and fitness is everything.
That's actually not that impressive. A reasonably fit rider on a 10 speed bike should be able to pull off 25 mph.
Yeah, so, very few cycling enthusiasts can break an hour riding solo over a 40km course (just under 25 miles). Just because you can do a 50-yard dash in 10s doesn't mean you can run a 2-hour marathon.
Their Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 lines weren't too expensive. Except they didn't make enough to satisfy demand. Then they decided it would be more fun to make phone that cost $600 to $1000. Somewhere in there they got rid of Motorola, who now makes decent phones like the X4 selling for decent prices like $300 (oops, $250, oops, $200, oops, $150).
I was working there when they acquired Android, and I remember being really chuffed that they'd be able to bring decent software to the masses rather than skimming off the top - so I was pretty salty about it when they decided they're rather join the feeding frenzy at the top. Making an amazing $1k phone isn't rocket science, you just need to avoid errors, the existing companies like Samsung and Sony can push the boundaries there. Making a great phone for $200 is where the real challenge is, and it bothers me that Google simply abdicated that position. Instead of co-evolving hardware and software to make a tight fit at $200, they're off bloating things up with elaborate camera systems and voice recognition for the high end, then getting upset that the low-end devices ship with an older Android version.
It's just not true though, unfortunately. The Moto X4 is a terrible phone. It is outperformed by iPhones from 4 years ago. You are better off spending 300 on a brand new iPhone 7, or even 150 on a used one.
I agree the X4 could be faster. But it is TONS faster than the phone I had four years ago, the only reason my phone needs to be faster at this point is because Android has greater resource needs, because ... reasons? It's certainly not more capable.
Apple has done a great job both of making newer/faster devices, but also keeping older devices relevant. We have plenty of older iDevices around running current software simply because they work fine so we see no reason to replace them. I don't mean "work fine" in the sense of "You can survive on this, if you're patient", I mean that the same device feels the same as time passes. Meanwhile every Android device makes my device feel slower until I get used to it.
People don't want phones with crappy CPUs and GPUs, they want to be able to buy a phone and run the latest software, extremely quickly, for at least 4 years. They want OS updates, immediately when they come out, and for at least 4 years.
Moto X4 will get 1 update.
Wow, that's weird, my X4 has gone from Android 7 to 8 to 9, and for awhile I was actually finding myself annoyed by having frequent notifications of a new update being available.
Stepping back, though, the problem of timely and continuing updates is only semi-related to the specific Android phone. Android simply sucks on this metric, and iPhone/iPad rocks. You can't even really compare them properly, they aren't even in the same ballgame, the best Android devices don't even overlap the worst Apple devices on this metric. This will not be solved by Google making their own phone, Google needs to change their approach to Android to improve this. I don't see that happening.
We're the first species who can respond effectively to being endangered.
The point I was making in my 3rd paragraph (the bit you didn't quote) is that, yes, we COULD respond effectively to being endangered, but (for various reasons) we AREN'T responding effectively. If we were to respond effectively, we'd have significantly cut CO2 emissions and pollution/waste as soon as AGW/etc gained strong scientific consensus. We are NOT responding effectively because those in power who dictate our response either have a financial or political incentive to not respond in an effective way (or they're just plain stupid). We COULD respond effectively but we WON'T and therefore we'll go extinct anyway.
Between the military industrial complex, disposable personal computing devices (smartphones), and hugely extravagant lifestyles for the super rich (to name but a few examples) do you honestly think our species is responding effectively? If your answer is "but we're not endangered yet", by the time we are becoming an endangered species we're well past the point of being too late to change anything anyway.
I wasn't at all addressing the point of whether we're responding effectively, and I wasn't saying "we're not endangered yet". My post explicitly suggested that on our current course, most of humanity will die, which seems like an ineffective response to me. Just that extinct means ALL of humanity dies, and that probably won't happen.
Before we bash Amazon it's important to note the following from the linked to article.
"...ITEP notes that its non-existent federal tax payment is a result of the Trump Administration’s corporation-friendly tax cuts. The think tank writes that the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act not only decreased corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%, but it also didn’t close “a slew of tax loopholes that allow profitable companies to routinely avoid paying federal and state income taxes on almost half of their profits.”
According to The Week, Amazon ended up paying an 11.4% federal income tax rate between 2011 and 2016, which is a contrast to the -1% rate this year."
Wow, that's terrible, it must have pushed them close to bankruptcy to pay such an onerous tax burden for those years.
The reason they can do this is because the cost is being hidden from the consumer. Do you think someone would sign up for getting "2% cashback" if they were paying 2.1% more per transaction? Nope and yet that is what is happening. The cause of this is that stores are contractually required to eat the cost of the transaction fees and thus increase the price of goods to compensate. The result is that everyone is subsidizing the transaction fees, even if they pay cash which completely eliminates any desire to compete with lower transaction fees.
It's true that nobody would sign up for 2% cashback if they paid 2.1% more per transaction.
But the reality is that only people who are a good risk get the 2% cashback card, but EVERYONE pays more per transaction. If I'm in a position to get 2% cashback at the cost of EVERYONE paying 1.1% more per transaction, yeah, I'll take that deal, why would I pass it up?
The reality is that the payment card industry is pure genius. They offer endless freebies to card holders, which makes card holders think these companies are their best friends, and then make the customers pay for it all through payment charges. But when a retailer tries to pass these fees on to the customer, the customer gets annoyed because they want all their 'free' stuff by being able to pay with the card, rather than having to use cash. It sort of relies on a level of collective stupidity that is probably impossible to eradicate from society.
It's not stupid for an individual customer to want to pay the same price as other customers, but get 2% back or whatever random rewards the card company is giving them on top of that. The fact that retailers have no power isn't the customer's fault.
Their Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 lines weren't too expensive. Except they didn't make enough to satisfy demand. Then they decided it would be more fun to make phone that cost $600 to $1000. Somewhere in there they got rid of Motorola, who now makes decent phones like the X4 selling for decent prices like $300 (oops, $250, oops, $200, oops, $150).
I was working there when they acquired Android, and I remember being really chuffed that they'd be able to bring decent software to the masses rather than skimming off the top - so I was pretty salty about it when they decided they're rather join the feeding frenzy at the top. Making an amazing $1k phone isn't rocket science, you just need to avoid errors, the existing companies like Samsung and Sony can push the boundaries there. Making a great phone for $200 is where the real challenge is, and it bothers me that Google simply abdicated that position. Instead of co-evolving hardware and software to make a tight fit at $200, they're off bloating things up with elaborate camera systems and voice recognition for the high end, then getting upset that the low-end devices ship with an older Android version.