Noble, but It's such a lightning rod issue, and voting against it looks so bad that they will sneak all sorts of ugly into the bill. It's just too perfect an opportunity to slip in something for Safe spaces, Bullying, or ID politics.
There's also the spooky way that the phrase "Legal Content" always gets used. I can't help but imagine the different ways this can be used to enable mass censorship of the net just by declaring such-and-such discussion illegal. An easy precedent would be 3d printed firearms.
At the end of the day the internet will be faster, more regulated, and less free.
Every time the major studios try to exclude NF from anything, NF just turns around and does it better in-house. Hollywood really needs a good ass-kicking anyway, and it could be a good way to get out in front before Disney does the same.
I bought the Vita to replace the aged but thoroughly hacked PSP that had been my only entertainment for a year in Afghanistan. Soon, the exploits had been found, a damn near perfect PSP emulator was rigged up and sideloaded, and the Vita became a complete replacement for the earlier device.
Everybody loves the Nintendo handhelds, and they are great- but the PSP and the Vita are the best of their generation IMO. Both systems seem to be designed for people with much smaller hands than me, but with a proper grip, the controls are smooth and perfect. As close to a real controller as a handheld can get. I can't say that for any of the other handhelds.
The device is just capable. Stream your PC games from our desktop system upstairs? No Problem. Remote control your PS4 from your front porch? Too easy. Enjoy a nice movie on the sexy OLED screen? Why not.
Then there is the "Hacking" scene. It's quite the rabbit hole. It's hard to keep all of the exploit methods and firmware versions straight for the Vita, but it has the pretty neat payoff of blowing the system wide opened. This enabled the use of microSD cards instead of the low-capacity expensive Sony card, and suddenly you can carry pretty much the entire playstation library around in your pocket. It's a shame though, as it's the same for the Vita library, and I'm certain it's the piracy this enables that killed the system in the long run. It really is a tragedy.
I've built the Pigrrl handheld and loaded it up. I was sure that would be the one to take my Vitas place. It was a fun build, but at the end of the day, compared to the Vita, the screen is kinda shitty, the controls are clicky, and the interface gets harder to use the more games you put on it, it's less comfortable, and it just cant do as much.
I'm fairy certain the Vita represents the last of the really great standalone offline portable consoles.
Let's try to remember how much smaller the world felt 30 years ago. Let's consider the always listening surveillance devices we put in our homes. Let's point out the hundreds of options we have for things that did not even exists a decade ago. Let's look real close at the way we behave behind the anonymity tech provides. Let's try to count the hours lost to on-screen entertainment. Let's consider the way we've all unthinkingly fell in line with social media's personal data appetite. Let's remember that the reason our personal information is constantly lost is because we gave it away to begin with. Let's try and remember..... anything without consulting the supercomputer in our pocket.
Dear pretentious internet children.... enjoy your free long distance, your standard in-car navigation, and your ultra efficient smart cars. Keep on buying anything you can imagine with standard two day shipping- without leaving your bedroom. Join an inviting community covering any subject that strikes your fancy, and keep using the ad-supported step-by-step video instructions on how to do anything you can think of. Go ahead and apply for hundreds of jobs in your area, even while sitting in your underwear at 2AM, after a rousing deathmatch with all of your closest *friends*
You're welcome to all of it (as long as your parents keep paying the power bill)
This product is bought, sold, and traded. It is shared as payment for "freemium" services (at steeply discounted price of *0*) It has real monetary value.
Stop giving it away. Stop using those services, and send them each a certified letter terminating any agreements. There ARE alternatives for each and every freemium service.
Draft your own license agreement, decide what your own data is worth, define how this license is terminated in the event of a data breach and send it along with your termination letter.
Contract with the copyright settlement extortionists next, and put them to work.
Spin up the lawyers for a data breach. Losing exclusive rights to your data in a public breach is a loss right? That's standing? Keep it small claims only. No army of corporate lawyers allowed.
I'm no lawyer, but I feel like IP law has been strengthened so much over the past 20 years that this might actually work.
1. Frivolous prior art we've been doing for hundreds of years already. (like rounding corners or traveling on 2 wheels) 2. (established processes) on a computer. (like handwriting, mail delivery return*, and composing) 3. Every 100th application in the monthly stack of frivolous (but paid) applications. (like the monthly IBM collection) 4. Every application that lands on So-and-so's desk, that chick approves everything. 5. Anything to do with A/I, deep learning, machine learning, or personal assistants
"Prior art" and "invalid" is declared on-
1. Anything that may threaten the growth of %CORPORATION revenue growth. 2. Anything %CORPORATION may currently be researching. 3. Any patent application that did not spend the extra $$ on an "express application" 4 Any application that lands on So-and-so's desk, that guy denies everything.
Boo-hoo, cry me a river. If safeguarding my personal information puts your business in the red, then maybe you should stop collecting so much personal information.
You want to hoover up every bit of PI you can find about me, you're on the hook to safeguard it. As it stands right now, there is no reason not to gobble up every little data point you can get your hands on, no matter if it's relevant to your business/service or not. When you lose it (you will) you lose nothing.
Over the past 5 years or so, have you noticed how every damn thing wants you to setup a profile? Notice how these profiles are asking all sorts of different data points that have shit-nothing to do with the provided service? Right now there is no reason not to ask for everything from sexual preference to political association, and turn around and sell to the first bidder.
There is freemium services, and then there is what we have now. Something has got to change. If I have to click through a "we use cookies" banner from time to time, and in return, my valuable personal information is treated with a little respect.... I'm ok with that.
When I was 13, I was out smoking weed and breaking shit for fun. My 13 year old is hanging out in his room, gaming with his "friends" online, and watching kids on youtube smoke weed and break shit for fun.
I'm certain the urge to be a asshole teenager is still there, it's just easier to release the beast digitally, be it online videos, online gaming, or trolling forums.
The massive popularity of online shooters and other ultra violent games means that the kid that's been torturing animals under the overpass is into violent games just as much as the square honor student from the better side of town.
The video-game industry spent 2018 shooting itself in the foot. Waiting for Bethesda and EA to follow suit.
"missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019" == The microtransactions and loot-boxes are not working out. We need to start actually making games with realistic budgets and profit expectations.
My clients send me.DOCS that must be converted to a vector and printed onto very expensive machined assemblies. Libre and Open cannot be trusted to get the formatting right, the customers departments all use different file formats, and supplied documents must be verified and compared when moving software suites to ensure data integrity.
I'm stuck working with the latest office if I wanna work with the industry titans that provide half my work.
No help for it, but I still won't rent software. (but with "software maintenance" I might as well be)
By tracking down you mean visit a kids public social media feed and view an edgy video over the caption "lol wut?"
Maybe send an officer so that he understands the gravity of the situation, and put an embarrassing message on his his social media account from the local fuzz.
Our justice system ruins lives. The kid is a very dumb 13 year old. He needs his toys taken away, and his internet access restricted, not criminal rehabilitation.
There is no "justice" to serve here. Only court fines and shattered dreams.
That, or agree to pay what the burger actually costs to make in order to provide a livable wage to the flipper. We don't, but that's not saying we won't.
Slow your roll there Captain sarcastic. I think you're misunderstanding my comment, and maybe getting a little defensive. No need for name calling either. Breath dude. I'm just saying those numbers are alarming. I've got nothing against the rich...I like my own money as much as the next guy.
I think maybe you've spent a while defending your position against the growing number of angry poor people eh? It's almost like there are more and more of them every day right? All those lazy poors greedily eyeing you from the shadows can be pretty scary, so it's not surprising your a little on edge.
Is it me, or did they look extra hungry yesterday?
So is there a little room in the basement with a little man coming up with neat new ideas for law enforcement to try out? It seems every couple of weeks there is a new headline about some shiny new tech the fuzz has leveraged, and then you hear nothing else about it.
They stop talking about it because it's an embarrassing failure? They stop talking about it because it works too good? They stop talking about it because they forgot about it? They stop talking about it because they all know it's illegal and wont stand to constitutional scrutiny?
At this rate, I imagine some room full of tech gizmos and computers that nobody know how to use.
Just like the immigrants that built the railroads. They have no options. System working as designed.
Have you ever seen the inside of a meat packing plant? None of those people want to be there. They have to be there because they have no other options.
It's pretty sad that this many people are lining up for these jobs. Read between the lines. This is pretty damn bad.
The purpose of this is to prevent inmates from hijacking/sharing each other's phone cards and usage of the phone system.
You actually buy that line?
We let prisoners get buttraped in the shower, shanked in the yard, and allow gangs to form in the population, but we can't have them phone-cards for the phone system we control and directly profit off of getting mixed up, why, that would be downright WRONG!
Sure, we're doing this to help with prison system phone card theft! All of that juicy data collection and biometric collection of prisoners, friends, and family is just an unfortunate side effect! Honest! Well of course we have to strip phone privileges if they don't comply! We cant have them talking to friends and family without our protection! That would be dangerous!
"We're just looking out for the prisoners well-being!" So no american prison employee ever.
The key issues that have stopped my from getting a 3d printer are the following. (which most of these issues are with affordable models) 1. Reliability. For one that is priced where I can afford it, they all seem to have issues with reliability, things getting clogged, and failed tries.
Cant argue there. I spend equal time workingon/tuning/upgrading my fleet of printers as they spend actually building parts. It's just part of the hobby. You can spend 100k+ for industrial grade printers with sealed filament cans and service plans to get around this, but that's not cost effective.
2. Resolution. I still kinda wish I could have 3d printed something without all the "scan lines"
Here you have options. You can print at a very low resolution (layer height) and they almost vanish at the cost of print speed, you can vapor polish a few different materials, or you can jump into the resin printer game, but that comes with it's own neat peaks and valleys.
3. Color and Material. I would love to be able to have 2 or 3 different colors in a print, also perhaps having a mixture of some material. Such as a solder or some sort of medal for electrical conductivity, or more rubbery filaments for things that need to be gripped, or more stable.
Everything you're talking about here is on the market at pretty affordable price points. Some of it is a little "hacky" though. While I don't usually praise Makerbot, the replicator 2x does dual color printing pretty effortlessly as long as your ok with processing the models for dual material. There are hot ends that do on the fly mixing, and I've seen but never used printers that take 4+ materials at once.
4. Price. They are affordable models, but I just can't see using them except for some toys. and perhaps a replacement part or two, but still not worth the price.
Everything is relative as far as affordability. 1k-3k seems to be the sweet spot, but I regularly pick up broken printers of around $100 second hand. They take less than 100 the repair, and flip at a pretty nice profit. It helps that I've got all the tools and understanding already, but the community around 3d printing is super helpful and passionate. Admittedly, I make a ton of knick-knacks and neatoes, but the cosplayers keep my fleet printing cheap plastic for 6 months out of the year, I have a few artists that come with specific requests. Being able to print replacement parts sounds kinda meh until you start actually doing it.
But he does off the deep end with the government subsidies silliness.
I think many of the problems we've created with social media can be solved by simply educating users about the internet a little better. Half the reason misinfo spreads so easily is because a large subset of users don't know how this thing actually works. We made it too easy, and now every lowthinking knuckledragger can connect to the net and consume..... consume whatever gets served up to em. For good or ill.
Safe internetting should be taught in grade school through high school. We already provide K-12 students with computing platforms in many districts, but it seems like actual computer use education is just assumed.
My Son was issued a Chrome-book in 1st grade, and it's followed him into middle school. I certainly don't like the way Alphabet gets a direct line to the entire districts worth of student academic marks by default, and I would feel a lot better if some effort was given to educate the students in how to safely navigate the net, how to recognize different phishing attempts, and the value of personal information. Those are just the start. I think Alphabet aught to take the lead on this one in trade.
Our own advertising complex has grown really really good at targeted manipulation, and we already have a real good idea how easily foreign actors can manipulate people online. With that in mind, I feel social media has a social responsibility to educate users in how to use their platforms safely. If it takes government regulation, then so be it. This is one of the few places where I feel it's actually necessary.
"Moving to a place where the housing prices are insanely high" probably counts as a poor life choice.
I grew up here. Not that it matters, but having been all over the world, nothing in my opinion quite beats the greater Seattle metro.
What else do you suppose they ought to do with all that "quantitatively eased" money they're swimming in, bereft of other good investments to park it? If snapping up all the real estate they can is the best-returning investment they can find, that's what they'll do.
The rich can do whatever they want with their money,including continuing to buy up all the real estate, but if these homes are built with private grant money, public money, or any other kind of public help in the name of helping the housing crisis, then I feel at a minimum- the right of first refusal should go to single working families before they are offered to the land barons that already own every damn thing on the east-side.
Traditionally the servants lived on premises, in the cellar or the attic. By that logic, the "big tech" royalty ought to build housing for their already overpaid servants on campus.
Microsoft has its main campus in Redmond, and satellite campuses in each east side city named to receive these benefits. On the surface, it looks like quartering the servantry is exactly what is happening, and wiggling a tax break and some good PR is just icing.
So why are you still trying to live there? You're in a pretty big country, just what is tying you to that hellhole? Seems to me removing those ties and going somewhere with a better income-to-mortgage ratio is the better long-term strategy.
All of the same reasons that seem to be bringing people in from all over the country, AND the fact that I grew up here. Mild weather, great scenery, good jobs, excellent schools, very few deadly insects, decent public transport, excellent infrastructure, no natural disasters... That's just the top of a long list.
Why we don't all just move to the Mohave desert? It's sure cheap there! Living is easy if you don't need climate, jobs, schools, infrastructure....
Slashdot Mirror
Noble, but It's such a lightning rod issue, and voting against it looks so bad that they will sneak all sorts of ugly into the bill. It's just too perfect an opportunity to slip in something for Safe spaces, Bullying, or ID politics.
There's also the spooky way that the phrase "Legal Content" always gets used. I can't help but imagine the different ways this can be used to enable mass censorship of the net just by declaring such-and-such discussion illegal. An easy precedent would be 3d printed firearms.
At the end of the day the internet will be faster, more regulated, and less free.
Every time the major studios try to exclude NF from anything, NF just turns around and does it better in-house. Hollywood really needs a good ass-kicking anyway, and it could be a good way to get out in front before Disney does the same.
So I'll gush a little about my Vita.
I bought the Vita to replace the aged but thoroughly hacked PSP that had been my only entertainment for a year in Afghanistan. Soon, the exploits had been found, a damn near perfect PSP emulator was rigged up and sideloaded, and the Vita became a complete replacement for the earlier device.
Everybody loves the Nintendo handhelds, and they are great- but the PSP and the Vita are the best of their generation IMO. Both systems seem to be designed for people with much smaller hands than me, but with a proper grip, the controls are smooth and perfect. As close to a real controller as a handheld can get. I can't say that for any of the other handhelds.
The device is just capable. Stream your PC games from our desktop system upstairs? No Problem. Remote control your PS4 from your front porch? Too easy. Enjoy a nice movie on the sexy OLED screen? Why not.
Then there is the "Hacking" scene. It's quite the rabbit hole. It's hard to keep all of the exploit methods and firmware versions straight for the Vita, but it has the pretty neat payoff of blowing the system wide opened. This enabled the use of microSD cards instead of the low-capacity expensive Sony card, and suddenly you can carry pretty much the entire playstation library around in your pocket. It's a shame though, as it's the same for the Vita library, and I'm certain it's the piracy this enables that killed the system in the long run. It really is a tragedy.
I've built the Pigrrl handheld and loaded it up. I was sure that would be the one to take my Vitas place. It was a fun build, but at the end of the day, compared to the Vita, the screen is kinda shitty, the controls are clicky, and the interface gets harder to use the more games you put on it, it's less comfortable, and it just cant do as much.
I'm fairy certain the Vita represents the last of the really great standalone offline portable consoles.
Dear pretentious internet children.......
Let's try to remember how much smaller the world felt 30 years ago.
Let's consider the always listening surveillance devices we put in our homes.
Let's point out the hundreds of options we have for things that did not even exists a decade ago.
Let's look real close at the way we behave behind the anonymity tech provides.
Let's try to count the hours lost to on-screen entertainment.
Let's consider the way we've all unthinkingly fell in line with social media's personal data appetite.
Let's remember that the reason our personal information is constantly lost is because we gave it away to begin with.
Let's try and remember..... anything without consulting the supercomputer in our pocket.
Dear pretentious internet children.... enjoy your free long distance, your standard in-car navigation, and your ultra efficient smart cars. Keep on buying anything you can imagine with standard two day shipping- without leaving your bedroom. Join an inviting community covering any subject that strikes your fancy, and keep using the ad-supported step-by-step video instructions on how to do anything you can think of. Go ahead and apply for hundreds of jobs in your area, even while sitting in your underwear at 2AM, after a rousing deathmatch with all of your closest *friends*
You're welcome to all of it (as long as your parents keep paying the power bill)
Your pal,
Tech.
Nah.
Porn would have picked up the slack.
This product is bought, sold, and traded. It is shared as payment for "freemium" services (at steeply discounted price of *0*) It has real monetary value.
Stop giving it away. Stop using those services, and send them each a certified letter terminating any agreements. There ARE alternatives for each and every freemium service.
Draft your own license agreement, decide what your own data is worth, define how this license is terminated in the event of a data breach and send it along with your termination letter.
Contract with the copyright settlement extortionists next, and put them to work.
Spin up the lawyers for a data breach. Losing exclusive rights to your data in a public breach is a loss right? That's standing? Keep it small claims only. No army of corporate lawyers allowed.
I'm no lawyer, but I feel like IP law has been strengthened so much over the past 20 years that this might actually work.
Patents are granted for---
1. Frivolous prior art we've been doing for hundreds of years already. (like rounding corners or traveling on 2 wheels)
2. (established processes) on a computer. (like handwriting, mail delivery return*, and composing)
3. Every 100th application in the monthly stack of frivolous (but paid) applications. (like the monthly IBM collection)
4. Every application that lands on So-and-so's desk, that chick approves everything.
5. Anything to do with A/I, deep learning, machine learning, or personal assistants
"Prior art" and "invalid" is declared on-
1. Anything that may threaten the growth of %CORPORATION revenue growth.
2. Anything %CORPORATION may currently be researching.
3. Any patent application that did not spend the extra $$ on an "express application"
4 Any application that lands on So-and-so's desk, that guy denies everything.
That's the way it works now. Try to keep up.
Or better yet, take a look at all of the DC ripoffs that worked, and rip them off.
+5 insightful
Was that a joke, cadet? Are you authorized to make jokes, cadet?
Boo-hoo, cry me a river. If safeguarding my personal information puts your business in the red, then maybe you should stop collecting so much personal information.
You want to hoover up every bit of PI you can find about me, you're on the hook to safeguard it. As it stands right now, there is no reason not to gobble up every little data point you can get your hands on, no matter if it's relevant to your business/service or not. When you lose it (you will) you lose nothing.
Over the past 5 years or so, have you noticed how every damn thing wants you to setup a profile? Notice how these profiles are asking all sorts of different data points that have shit-nothing to do with the provided service? Right now there is no reason not to ask for everything from sexual preference to political association, and turn around and sell to the first bidder.
There is freemium services, and then there is what we have now. Something has got to change. If I have to click through a "we use cookies" banner from time to time, and in return, my valuable personal information is treated with a little respect.... I'm ok with that.
When I was 13, I was out smoking weed and breaking shit for fun. My 13 year old is hanging out in his room, gaming with his "friends" online, and watching kids on youtube smoke weed and break shit for fun.
I'm certain the urge to be a asshole teenager is still there, it's just easier to release the beast digitally, be it online videos, online gaming, or trolling forums.
The massive popularity of online shooters and other ultra violent games means that the kid that's been torturing animals under the overpass is into violent games just as much as the square honor student from the better side of town.
The video-game industry spent 2018 shooting itself in the foot. Waiting for Bethesda and EA to follow suit.
"missed expectations for 2018 and lowered expectations for 2019" == The microtransactions and loot-boxes are not working out. We need to start actually making games with realistic budgets and profit expectations.
I wish you were right.
My clients send me .DOCS that must be converted to a vector and printed onto very expensive machined assemblies. Libre and Open cannot be trusted to get the formatting right, the customers departments all use different file formats, and supplied documents must be verified and compared when moving software suites to ensure data integrity.
I'm stuck working with the latest office if I wanna work with the industry titans that provide half my work.
No help for it, but I still won't rent software. (but with "software maintenance" I might as well be)
In his defense, it WAS only a matter of time.
By tracking down you mean visit a kids public social media feed and view an edgy video over the caption "lol wut?"
Maybe send an officer so that he understands the gravity of the situation, and put an embarrassing message on his his social media account from the local fuzz.
Our justice system ruins lives. The kid is a very dumb 13 year old. He needs his toys taken away, and his internet access restricted, not criminal rehabilitation.
There is no "justice" to serve here. Only court fines and shattered dreams.
A 13 year old is supposed to do this kind of dumb shit. It's called being a teenager.
Every single teenager in america thinks they are 1 stupid video away from career of youtube stardom.
Send the kid to film school, not juvie.
That, or agree to pay what the burger actually costs to make in order to provide a livable wage to the flipper. We don't, but that's not saying we won't.
Slow your roll there Captain sarcastic. I think you're misunderstanding my comment, and maybe getting a little defensive. No need for name calling either. Breath dude. I'm just saying those numbers are alarming. I've got nothing against the rich...I like my own money as much as the next guy.
I think maybe you've spent a while defending your position against the growing number of angry poor people eh? It's almost like there are more and more of them every day right? All those lazy poors greedily eyeing you from the shadows can be pretty scary, so it's not surprising your a little on edge.
Is it me, or did they look extra hungry yesterday?
So is there a little room in the basement with a little man coming up with neat new ideas for law enforcement to try out? It seems every couple of weeks there is a new headline about some shiny new tech the fuzz has leveraged, and then you hear nothing else about it.
They stop talking about it because it's an embarrassing failure?
They stop talking about it because it works too good?
They stop talking about it because they forgot about it?
They stop talking about it because they all know it's illegal and wont stand to constitutional scrutiny?
At this rate, I imagine some room full of tech gizmos and computers that nobody know how to use.
Just like the immigrants that built the railroads. They have no options. System working as designed.
Have you ever seen the inside of a meat packing plant? None of those people want to be there. They have to be there because they have no other options.
It's pretty sad that this many people are lining up for these jobs. Read between the lines. This is pretty damn bad.
The purpose of this is to prevent inmates from hijacking/sharing each other's phone cards and usage of the phone system.
You actually buy that line?
We let prisoners get buttraped in the shower, shanked in the yard, and allow gangs to form in the population, but we can't have them phone-cards for the phone system we control and directly profit off of getting mixed up, why, that would be downright WRONG!
Sure, we're doing this to help with prison system phone card theft! All of that juicy data collection and biometric collection of prisoners, friends, and family is just an unfortunate side effect! Honest! Well of course we have to strip phone privileges if they don't comply! We cant have them talking to friends and family without our protection! That would be dangerous!
"We're just looking out for the prisoners well-being!" So no american prison employee ever.
The key issues that have stopped my from getting a 3d printer are the following. (which most of these issues are with affordable models)
1. Reliability. For one that is priced where I can afford it, they all seem to have issues with reliability, things getting clogged, and failed tries.
Cant argue there. I spend equal time workingon/tuning/upgrading my fleet of printers as they spend actually building parts. It's just part of the hobby. You can spend 100k+ for industrial grade printers with sealed filament cans and service plans to get around this, but that's not cost effective.
2. Resolution. I still kinda wish I could have 3d printed something without all the "scan lines"
Here you have options. You can print at a very low resolution (layer height) and they almost vanish at the cost of print speed, you can vapor polish a few different materials, or you can jump into the resin printer game, but that comes with it's own neat peaks and valleys.
3. Color and Material. I would love to be able to have 2 or 3 different colors in a print, also perhaps having a mixture of some material. Such as a solder or some sort of medal for electrical conductivity, or more rubbery filaments for things that need to be gripped, or more stable.
Everything you're talking about here is on the market at pretty affordable price points. Some of it is a little "hacky" though. While I don't usually praise Makerbot, the replicator 2x does dual color printing pretty effortlessly as long as your ok with processing the models for dual material. There are hot ends that do on the fly mixing, and I've seen but never used printers that take 4+ materials at once.
4. Price. They are affordable models, but I just can't see using them except for some toys. and perhaps a replacement part or two, but still not worth the price.
Everything is relative as far as affordability. 1k-3k seems to be the sweet spot, but I regularly pick up broken printers of around $100 second hand. They take less than 100 the repair, and flip at a pretty nice profit. It helps that I've got all the tools and understanding already, but the community around 3d printing is super helpful and passionate. Admittedly, I make a ton of knick-knacks and neatoes, but the cosplayers keep my fleet printing cheap plastic for 6 months out of the year, I have a few artists that come with specific requests. Being able to print replacement parts sounds kinda meh until you start actually doing it.
But he does off the deep end with the government subsidies silliness.
I think many of the problems we've created with social media can be solved by simply educating users about the internet a little better. Half the reason misinfo spreads so easily is because a large subset of users don't know how this thing actually works. We made it too easy, and now every lowthinking knuckledragger can connect to the net and consume..... consume whatever gets served up to em. For good or ill.
Safe internetting should be taught in grade school through high school. We already provide K-12 students with computing platforms in many districts, but it seems like actual computer use education is just assumed.
My Son was issued a Chrome-book in 1st grade, and it's followed him into middle school. I certainly don't like the way Alphabet gets a direct line to the entire districts worth of student academic marks by default, and I would feel a lot better if some effort was given to educate the students in how to safely navigate the net, how to recognize different phishing attempts, and the value of personal information. Those are just the start. I think Alphabet aught to take the lead on this one in trade.
Our own advertising complex has grown really really good at targeted manipulation, and we already have a real good idea how easily foreign actors can manipulate people online. With that in mind, I feel social media has a social responsibility to educate users in how to use their platforms safely. If it takes government regulation, then so be it. This is one of the few places where I feel it's actually necessary.
Here's a portal to the internet kids. Go nuts.
"Moving to a place where the housing prices are insanely high" probably counts as a poor life choice.
I grew up here. Not that it matters, but having been all over the world, nothing in my opinion quite beats the greater Seattle metro.
What else do you suppose they ought to do with all that "quantitatively eased" money they're swimming in, bereft of other good investments to park it? If snapping up all the real estate they can is the best-returning investment they can find, that's what they'll do.
The rich can do whatever they want with their money,including continuing to buy up all the real estate, but if these homes are built with private grant money, public money, or any other kind of public help in the name of helping the housing crisis, then I feel at a minimum- the right of first refusal should go to single working families before they are offered to the land barons that already own every damn thing on the east-side.
Traditionally the servants lived on premises, in the cellar or the attic. By that logic, the "big tech" royalty ought to build housing for their already overpaid servants on campus.
Microsoft has its main campus in Redmond, and satellite campuses in each east side city named to receive these benefits. On the surface, it looks like quartering the servantry is exactly what is happening, and wiggling a tax break and some good PR is just icing.
So why are you still trying to live there? You're in a pretty big country, just what is tying you to that hellhole? Seems to me removing those ties and going somewhere with a better income-to-mortgage ratio is the better long-term strategy.
All of the same reasons that seem to be bringing people in from all over the country, AND the fact that I grew up here. Mild weather, great scenery, good jobs, excellent schools, very few deadly insects, decent public transport, excellent infrastructure, no natural disasters... That's just the top of a long list.
Why we don't all just move to the Mohave desert? It's sure cheap there! Living is easy if you don't need climate, jobs, schools, infrastructure....