The real winner is the town next to it. Where they have lower costs, and all the employees move there to live, and pay taxes to them.
Given we're talking about a data center, and we're also talking about multi-million dollar tax breaks - how exactly is "the town next to it" getting those millions back?
Of course, they may learn there was a big win in total tax revenue that prevented their taxes from rising.
When these sorts of sweetheart deals have been analyzed, it's generally been found that the promised benefits to the local economy are much more anemic than hoped.
But, yeah, it's not like Amazon is behaving any differently than any other company (or sports team, or...).
Removal of Amazon DRM is trivial in Calibre and you don't need to use DRM ebooks in the first place.
Well, it's a little more involved than that, given that the DeDRM plugin doesn't really work with Amazon's new (and default) KFX format. It's still doable, though.
In my case, I work at a public university in a state where emails from state employees are considered public record - so I'm guessing we won't be seeing this "confidential mode" anytime soon.
In any case, I use IMAP with Google mail because the web interface sucks (compared to a desktop mail program).
The summary makes it sound as if they specialize in Vitamin D level analysis. They’re a general-purpose medical lab and do all sorts of analysis on most body fluids.
Without vitamin D testing they’d still be an industry behemoth. It’s probably not even a rounding error in their bottom line.
I tried to read it, but the author’s attention span seemed to wander somewhere along the way... plus he doesn’t do a very good job of developing his thesis even when he is on-topic. When he started pulling gmail into the story, I decided that was far enough.
There’s this place called a “library” which let’s you take out books for weeks at a time. Apparently the author never heard of it.
I do have a Kindle. But I don’t often buy books, since that “library” place actually lets me check out Kindle books same as printed ones. Plus there are programs like “Kindle Unlimited” which will let you borrow lots of stuff too.
There are very few books I want to read more than once... but those I do buy - and, when I buy a Kindle book, the first thing I do is strip the DRM off of it and save a backup copy.
Same thing with movies... there aren’t that many I want to ever see more than once. Those few that I do, I purchase (and rip a DRM-free copy so I can stream them from my media box).
Besides, the DVD/videocassette argument doesn’t really support the author’s premise. For most of the time movies have been around, people did not own them... that’s only the past few decades.
I'm sure it has nothing to to with the fact that they had trouble gaming the "best guess for you" ratings on their self-produced content.
Netflix's suggested ratings used to work extremely well, back when they were only offering third-party content - I could pretty much count on my opinion matching pretty closely with their algorithm's prediction. But then they started producing their own stuff, and amazingly it always was displayed as between 4.7 and 5 stars as their "best guess" for me - so I'd watch it, expecting something great, but most of the time the content was mediocre at best, so my actual rating would end up being 2-3 stars.
I suspect they got rid of the star rankings because of their own show's relatively bad real-world performance - but that still left the problem of less-than-glowing written reviews. So the final solution was to get rid of those as well.
On that last point, I stand corrected - I see that the press release actually claims people could buy tickets for a specific time.
I suspect the person who came up with that specific statement (Musk?) has never ridden on mass transit. It seems inefficient and likely unworkable, as the OP stated.
However I expect they’d figure that out one way or the other, and it’s not like they couldn’t shift to single-trip tickets easily enough.
BTW that Geek Wire article’s statement about being “nothing like your typical subway trip” is pretty silly - I ride a train to work most days, and what is described sounds very much like how our “typical” subway system works.
Here in the Puget Sound area, people can buy their tickets ahead of time from Sound Transit (our local multi-county transit agency). It doesn’t seem to cause any problems.
Now, we don’t have turnstile gates to contend with - instead, we have fare enforcement people doing frequent spot checks on our trains. It seems to work decently, and it’s rare that I see someone get caught without a ticket.
Even with gates/turnstiles... I’m not sure why there’d be a problem. It’s not like you can’t put scanners on the turnstiles - I believe that’s what they do in Japan. And I assume most transit agencies allow for the purchase of monthly passes, which functionally are identical to advance tickets.
But I’m a bit puzzled that you think you’d have to buy a ticket for a set time. What you likely *would* buy is a ticket good for a single (round trip) fare. Tickets have unique identifiers, and ransit system computers can deal with that, no problem.
The bullet points you pulled from that “source” are just requotes of Musk’s after-the-fact explanation regarding his “going private” tweet. It’ll certainly satisfy the Kool-aid drinkers, but the article doesn’t provide any sort of independent confirmation of anything Musk said. In fact, it seemed to me the article writer wasn’t entirely convinced regarding some of those points.
Setting politics aside for the duration of this post...
Twitter is doing its utmost best to destroy what little utility is left on the platform. I logged in yesterday for the first time in a couple weeks (which shows you where I’m at with Twitter nowadays). Right at the top was the annoying “in case you missed it” section, which I routinely flag “see less often” but continues to show up every time I log in. But then, below that, something new - two blocks, each containing numerous posts, where two accounts I follow had been mentioned by other random accounts or had been liked by other random accounts. THEN, below that, were now two paid advertisements in a row - and each one is significantly larger than has been the norm, since the advertisement (aka “promoted”) thing started.
So, at that point I’m roughly five or six page scrolls down - and I haven’t even hit my actual timeline!
Oh, and “notifications”... I’ve got about a hundred unread notifications. I stopped checking those months ago because Twitter started shoving random crap in there. It used to be that section only included stuff you’d actually want to get notified about, like new followers or direct messages. Now, any real notifications are buried in a sea of garbage posts.
It used to be that Twitter was the best place for breaking news, which was the only reason I got on the platform at all. But now, it’s basically worthless. I know they need to monetize somehow, but destroying the platform’s actual utility isn’t going to make them more money.
I used to love watching American Movie Classics, back in the day. They’d show these great old movies, with no ads. Before the movie, Bob Dorian would give a couple-minute introduction telling us some little-known story about the plot or the movie production... I loved those days...
but I can see why they want to do this as they have a lot of original content, and they have a point as to how people would find out about it otherwise.
How would we otherwise find out about the crap they’re already constantly shoving in the face of us Netflix subscribers?
So, does *nobody* really care that one giant MegaCorp is trying to own everything?
Actually, I do care. But to a large degree, it seems to me that the areas Amazon keeps trying to move into are already dominated by giant MegaCorps - almost all of the truly local retailers were already driven out of business before Amazon even existed.
I still do shop a fair bit on Amazon. Also, I currently am a Prime subscriber (I wanted to dump it, but my wife objected - gonna keep bringing it up though). But I do look for alternatives more nowadays; I stopped all my "subscribe and save" subscriptions; and I have already decided I'm not going to support them in any additional ways - so I won't be buying prescriptions from them when they start doing that, for instance (our current pharmacy is actually locally owned), and I'm going to keep buying groceries from an actual grocery store (even though Winco is regional rather than local).
Of course this decision has gotten easier since Amazon's service has started to suck over the past year or two.
Slashdot Mirror
The real winner is the town next to it. Where they have lower costs, and all the employees move there to live, and pay taxes to them.
Given we're talking about a data center, and we're also talking about multi-million dollar tax breaks - how exactly is "the town next to it" getting those millions back?
Of course, they may learn there was a big win in total tax revenue that prevented their taxes from rising.
When these sorts of sweetheart deals have been analyzed, it's generally been found that the promised benefits to the local economy are much more anemic than hoped.
But, yeah, it's not like Amazon is behaving any differently than any other company (or sports team, or ...).
I wondered what that huge-ass extension cord going from the side of my house towards the general direction of the Amazon data center was for!
Sucks to be you. I solved that by purchasing a giant Tesla PowerWall and moving the Amazon extension cord over to there!
Yeah, it's pretty funny that they got caught by a photo which was, apparently, actually taken with a phone...
And the setup is funny too - you see the guy's arm sticking out there, holding nothing!
Removal of Amazon DRM is trivial in Calibre and you don't need to use DRM ebooks in the first place.
Well, it's a little more involved than that, given that the DeDRM plugin doesn't really work with Amazon's new (and default) KFX format. It's still doable, though.
In my case, I work at a public university in a state where emails from state employees are considered public record - so I'm guessing we won't be seeing this "confidential mode" anytime soon.
In any case, I use IMAP with Google mail because the web interface sucks (compared to a desktop mail program).
Since they started adding ads to the home screen (Even the one without special offers), these were no longer worth buying.
What are you talking about? I have the Voyage, paid my $20, and the ads went away - ALL of them.
When I power on my Kindle, all I see is the last page of text I was reading.
I’m assuming admins can disable it, given records retention policies...
What’s to prevent you from accessing Gmail via an IMAP client?
I predict, six to twelve months from now:
“Oh, you mean those recordings. When we said things weren’t being recorded, naturally we weren’t referring to those...”
The summary makes it sound as if they specialize in Vitamin D level analysis. They’re a general-purpose medical lab and do all sorts of analysis on most body fluids.
Without vitamin D testing they’d still be an industry behemoth. It’s probably not even a rounding error in their bottom line.
Here ya go:
https://www.bloomberg.com/view...
I tried to read it, but the author’s attention span seemed to wander somewhere along the way... plus he doesn’t do a very good job of developing his thesis even when he is on-topic. When he started pulling gmail into the story, I decided that was far enough.
There’s this place called a “library” which let’s you take out books for weeks at a time. Apparently the author never heard of it.
I do have a Kindle. But I don’t often buy books, since that “library” place actually lets me check out Kindle books same as printed ones. Plus there are programs like “Kindle Unlimited” which will let you borrow lots of stuff too.
There are very few books I want to read more than once... but those I do buy - and, when I buy a Kindle book, the first thing I do is strip the DRM off of it and save a backup copy.
Same thing with movies... there aren’t that many I want to ever see more than once. Those few that I do, I purchase (and rip a DRM-free copy so I can stream them from my media box).
Besides, the DVD/videocassette argument doesn’t really support the author’s premise. For most of the time movies have been around, people did not own them... that’s only the past few decades.
I'm sure it has nothing to to with the fact that they had trouble gaming the "best guess for you" ratings on their self-produced content.
Netflix's suggested ratings used to work extremely well, back when they were only offering third-party content - I could pretty much count on my opinion matching pretty closely with their algorithm's prediction. But then they started producing their own stuff, and amazingly it always was displayed as between 4.7 and 5 stars as their "best guess" for me - so I'd watch it, expecting something great, but most of the time the content was mediocre at best, so my actual rating would end up being 2-3 stars.
I suspect they got rid of the star rankings because of their own show's relatively bad real-world performance - but that still left the problem of less-than-glowing written reviews. So the final solution was to get rid of those as well.
On that last point, I stand corrected - I see that the press release actually claims people could buy tickets for a specific time.
I suspect the person who came up with that specific statement (Musk?) has never ridden on mass transit. It seems inefficient and likely unworkable, as the OP stated.
However I expect they’d figure that out one way or the other, and it’s not like they couldn’t shift to single-trip tickets easily enough.
BTW that Geek Wire article’s statement about being “nothing like your typical subway trip” is pretty silly - I ride a train to work most days, and what is described sounds very much like how our “typical” subway system works.
Here in the Puget Sound area, people can buy their tickets ahead of time from Sound Transit (our local multi-county transit agency). It doesn’t seem to cause any problems.
Now, we don’t have turnstile gates to contend with - instead, we have fare enforcement people doing frequent spot checks on our trains. It seems to work decently, and it’s rare that I see someone get caught without a ticket.
Even with gates/turnstiles... I’m not sure why there’d be a problem. It’s not like you can’t put scanners on the turnstiles - I believe that’s what they do in Japan. And I assume most transit agencies allow for the purchase of monthly passes, which functionally are identical to advance tickets.
But I’m a bit puzzled that you think you’d have to buy a ticket for a set time. What you likely *would* buy is a ticket good for a single (round trip) fare. Tickets have unique identifiers, and ransit system computers can deal with that, no problem.
... (source) ...
The bullet points you pulled from that “source” are just requotes of Musk’s after-the-fact explanation regarding his “going private” tweet. It’ll certainly satisfy the Kool-aid drinkers, but the article doesn’t provide any sort of independent confirmation of anything Musk said. In fact, it seemed to me the article writer wasn’t entirely convinced regarding some of those points.
“I genuinely do believe we have a positive impact on our bottom line when we engage around the world“
it's a Unix philosophy: lots of smaller tools working well together instead of one big tool that tries to do everything and just turns into a mess.
Now, now, we’re only a few comments in and already someone’s complaining about systemd...
Setting politics aside for the duration of this post...
Twitter is doing its utmost best to destroy what little utility is left on the platform. I logged in yesterday for the first time in a couple weeks (which shows you where I’m at with Twitter nowadays). Right at the top was the annoying “in case you missed it” section, which I routinely flag “see less often” but continues to show up every time I log in. But then, below that, something new - two blocks, each containing numerous posts, where two accounts I follow had been mentioned by other random accounts or had been liked by other random accounts. THEN, below that, were now two paid advertisements in a row - and each one is significantly larger than has been the norm, since the advertisement (aka “promoted”) thing started.
So, at that point I’m roughly five or six page scrolls down - and I haven’t even hit my actual timeline!
Oh, and “notifications”... I’ve got about a hundred unread notifications. I stopped checking those months ago because Twitter started shoving random crap in there. It used to be that section only included stuff you’d actually want to get notified about, like new followers or direct messages. Now, any real notifications are buried in a sea of garbage posts.
It used to be that Twitter was the best place for breaking news, which was the only reason I got on the platform at all. But now, it’s basically worthless. I know they need to monetize somehow, but destroying the platform’s actual utility isn’t going to make them more money.
I remember.
I used to love watching American Movie Classics, back in the day. They’d show these great old movies, with no ads. Before the movie, Bob Dorian would give a couple-minute introduction telling us some little-known story about the plot or the movie production... I loved those days...
but I can see why they want to do this as they have a lot of original content, and they have a point as to how people would find out about it otherwise.
How would we otherwise find out about the crap they’re already constantly shoving in the face of us Netflix subscribers?
You’re joking, right?
I’m in IT. Cargo pants are the de facto uniform of this field.
I seriously doubt that 50-something women are buying too small stretch pants just to show off their butts.
Unfortunately my daily commute on the train has shown me that lots of 50-ish women buy too small stretch pants. ...shudder...
So, does *nobody* really care that one giant MegaCorp is trying to own everything?
Actually, I do care. But to a large degree, it seems to me that the areas Amazon keeps trying to move into are already dominated by giant MegaCorps - almost all of the truly local retailers were already driven out of business before Amazon even existed.
I still do shop a fair bit on Amazon. Also, I currently am a Prime subscriber (I wanted to dump it, but my wife objected - gonna keep bringing it up though). But I do look for alternatives more nowadays; I stopped all my "subscribe and save" subscriptions; and I have already decided I'm not going to support them in any additional ways - so I won't be buying prescriptions from them when they start doing that, for instance (our current pharmacy is actually locally owned), and I'm going to keep buying groceries from an actual grocery store (even though Winco is regional rather than local).
Of course this decision has gotten easier since Amazon's service has started to suck over the past year or two.