They were called maids. At some point that got changed to hired help and a few less savory things.
At one time we had a middle class that could afford to support people who worked in their home. Short of a gigantic economic shift that's still true. I'm at a severe loss as to how Amazon is going to make this affordable and simultaneously worthwhile for people to pursue as gainful employment.
Last night some 52% of us possible voters, voted. That means just under half of the people who could, didn't. By your logic, a mob decided last night.
Even more damning is that it is only a handful of states that are deciding things through the EC. If that's not mobbish, what is?
The point is that our current system isn't handling how fact and much the world is changing. It's likely to start stripping the cogs at any moment. I'd like to have an honest discussion on how we prevent that or, in the event of disaster, how we put things back together.
Let's start with asking ourselves does the EC accomplish what it was intended to. Does it give the rural areas have an equal voice to the urban and vice-versa? Does it make sure that the voice of all of America is heard by the political elite?
I don't think it does either of those things anymore. It needs reform.
Because in those situations there was enough political will power to look at those attempting to profit from the situation and tell them to get out of the way.
Contemporary times are different. Part of that is the collapse of state party machines necessitating multimillion dollar funding for national political presence. Part of that it regulatory capture at both state and federal levels. And part of it has been the disintegration of a middle class that might have the leisure time necessary to parse the topic and provide meaningful input into their political leadership.
Not defending Apple. Can't stand to use them myself. Can barely stand Windows most days but that's because I like knowing what's going on under the hood. I understand what those little things mean and how to use them to my advantage to make my work easier. That's not the case for everyone.
It's well past time for UI to have different modes. Have one that's for ease of use. Have another for power and expert users. It's not a matter of safety. It's a matter of different use cases. I am hobbled with certain files hidden from the UI. I am hobbled when I have to constantly confirm dialogs that shouldn't have needed confirmation. I'm looking at you, Excel. Yes, I wanted that file in a comma delimited format. Yes I want to quit because I already saved and told you I didn't want to change the format last time. Yes I am certain that I want to quit my quitting and not change the format.
It's a little over 83 liter of water per hour, presuming this is meant to be running 24 hours a day. So I'm going to guess this is meant to generate enough water for more than a single family. Maybe a good portion of a village. The details are light in the linked article. What's the target area's relative & absolute humidity and the season? Is it even possible for certain areas of the world to do that?
The lesson is the same one we've been screaming about for the past few decades. People are the weakest link. They're paid just to get on with the job, not to take the time to analyze or think that deeply. The article even mentions how the security the phone company has as part of their procedure was ignored. Why? Because for the support people it's about getting to the next caller.
Change that and you've changed security. That'll cost money, but I have a feeling it's more than affordable.
More than your average 7" tablet? It'll be a tougher sell for me.
The brand just doesn't inspire the idea of good times with games anymore. Just more tired and uninspiring retreads of their old properties. Not to mention the constant problems they've had with third parties. The Wii was drowning in shovelware. The WiiU was too underpowered for anyone to care about it.
This thing is supposed to be powered by a custom NVidia chip. So I don't know. Is it enough to attract good devs? Who can say at this point?
And that's the problem here and in other cases like it.
It has to be checked-off by a court to say exactly that. Only after that step can the guy turn around and sue for damages and lost wages. It's as backward as you can get. It's putting the onus on the defense to prove that they're _not_ infringing. Assume guilt much?
Copyright law needs a top to bottom reform. Period.
It may not be popular right now, but compromise is how we get things done. In this case, the studios and big copyright get something in return for giving up their harebrained platform exclusivity. The ability to see how harebrained platform exclusivity is for a certain time before everybody fills their coffers.
I'll give the studios some credit in this. It would appear they looked at what happened with music and book publishers and decided they didn't want any one company lording over them and being able to cut deals like Amazon and Apple did. For them, it's a choice of either shooting their left foot and let Netflix have what they want at whatever price they can get or shoot their right foot by forcing people to have more than one account.
In addition to the breakup, I'd like to see movies and television put under a compulsory licensing scheme after, say five years. Set up a similar system to how music royalties get collected and paid out. This way companies like YouTube and Netflix can stop worry about this and follow where the demand takes them. The five year buffer doesn't stop studios from cutting deals to get shows and movies out to platforms of choice earlier and gives them time to sell the physical media.
why they moved so quickly to get the settlement in. It absolves them of any other doings "just in case" something else rears up, ugly and painful.
I wonder if that settlement can be tossed when it's shown that the execs knew or should have known that further breaches of the law, like these, had yet to be reported.
I really don't know where to begin. This is another reinvention of the wheel. Something I'm seeing more and more of these days. Don't know if it's because I'm approaching a certain age or if communication is just happening faster and faster so we see more of it in a shorter amount of time.
Don't think I'm knocking it. I'm not. It's obvious someone needed this and didn't know how or where to look for the contemporary counterpart in current clients. Or because current clients made it too hard to figure out. We all have different brains and think our process out differently. Just because it's obvious to you or I how to script this in our gmail doesn't mean that everyone else sees it that way.
What bothers me is the breathless headlines. The purposeful exaggeration. The constant commercialization. That, more than anything, I'm tired of.
I've seen the same question being asked everywhere and since there's been no official answer, I'm going to go with "internal politics".
No company is immune from it. Even engineers have politics. It's what greases the wheels of human interactions.
So I'm going to guess it's the same story here. Someone came up with a nifty way to do IM, presented it to their boss, it got pushed up until it became a competing project. And instead of integrating the projects together, the teams were forced to fight for resources. Meanwhile everyone who could have ordered the integration is busy maintaining their position and trying to look like they're worth the megabucks they're being paid. Instead of, you know, actually managing things, communicating with other groups inside the same company, and so forth. Remember your game theory here.
It's not all that hard to picture. Alphabet is just another company.
Make television and movies like music with compulsory licensing? Say anything five years and older gets put into the pool of things that can be broadcast/streamed as part of your service as long as you pay the base royalties. Have the same sort of setup as music does but with a much finer grained reporting. That way everyone that should get paid, is paid.
While five years seems a bit long, that's so streaming and rebroadcast doesn't cut too deeply into the DVD/BluRay sales. That should be plenty of time for that to go through the fans that really want their personal copy at release or to wait for the price to fall or discounted.
And this doesn't stop anyone from making separate deals to get it before the five year date and/or add extras to their service like trivia, blooper reels, and so forth.
Again, the point of copyright was to give people a chance to spread culture around before it is outright given away. Seeing as how locked up it's become, anything that speeds and ease of dissemination is a good thing.
From what I've read, there's no money to be squeezed from YT right now. The service started in the red and has generally stayed there. Complaining will only generate so much hot air.
If these media companies want to see YT fail and go away that is going to be akin to cutting a leg off to spite their marathon time. Of course, these are the sorts of short-sighted people that they'd do that on the wish that everything would go back to the way it was before the internet got all the kids so uppity and wanting culture to become responsive to their needs and views and not those of the shareholders and market makers.
Pick one of the above. You can't have both, you can't pick both. You get to exert an outsized control over the medium which is going to cost much of that profit in the form of maintaining the outsized control. People are clever and will figure out ways around automated filters and counters for no other reason than because they can. It's a challenge to overcome. Countering that takes time, effort, and most importantly money.
Or you can give up the outsized control and get the profit from the views on your "channel" or whatever self-organization YT comes up with next. That's the way it works. You can try making your own streaming platform, but I'm fairly certain we all know how that's going to work out. Complaining about it isn't going to change anything.
The record labels, hell, the media business in general had all the warnings that their world was changing and they had best get along with it. But those in charge stuck their heads in the sand and ignored it. This is the result.
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road. And better, one of the government agencies in charge of seeing this happen has outlined a plan to get it to happen. Not just in terms of what the manufactures need to get done on their end to be legal but also an outline of the regulatory apparatus required to ensure the safety of everyone!
A more perfect barometer was needed to accomplish what exactly? The device can now tell that I've ascended stairs more accurately. This will lead to what? And this change was as valuable as the headphone jack, how? Sure, more waterproof will probably help some people but overall? It just seems like a dick move.
"However, the total number of app downloads is highly concentrated at the top, with 13 percent of smartphone owners accounting for more than half of all download activity in a given month."
You know what this says to me? This says that maybe there's 3% of users who do this on their own accord. The other 10% are working for astroturfers. How else can one account for the amount of people who actually rate apps and file those perfect tidbit reviews you see in the walled gardens? The vast majority of people are too lazy or just don't care. Why should they? None of this gives them anything in return. It's too bad we don't have more transparency in the app stores to verify.
To be fair, his is a political position. He's having to deal with the uncertainty that the Beltway media has thrown up around who the next president should be as well as the two jackass Republican members of his committee who are currently fighting with Congress about turning over public documents their offices generated.
I'd be coy about things in that position myself. I'd be trying to build a consensus and gaining as much political ground myself after the past few fights have landed in court. Not that they had to go there, but with the way things are right now everything he does has ended up in court. I'd be tired of being second guessed and smacked around, too.
Those countries who have been using this are largely free of the charges from banks that drive the US card system. In fact, if you're talking about the many African nations that use phones for this, they're largely free of consumer banks altogether.
In other words, they had a reason for this infrastructure to show up and be utilized. It found a niche and filled it. There is no such niche in the US to fill. It's already been taken care of. So if you want to take it over, you're going to have to offer something worthwhile to get people to switch.
You're not going to get any useful data out of things like this. Those people you've decided to ignore? The ones who brought up the statistics which made your eyes glaze over and your money-boner wilt? Well, they're correct. There's nothing new to be discovered in terms of trends or about the people purchasing your products. All the data you need about those people has already been captured at the point of sale. In fact, all you really need to know is the fact that you sold another one of your products. Forcing them to register a piece of spyware, and we really need to be honest that is what this is, isn't going to do anything but hurt you in the long term.
Now, you may be of the mindset that you're going to be out in another job in the next business cycle. That's fine, but just know that future employers are going to looking closer and closer at your results. If all you can show them is a net loss of Good Will (I'm talking about the accounting term here, not the general sentiment the purchasing public has towards your products, although that does play a factor in determining the value of said term) they're going to be much less inclined to hire you. So it's really in your own best interests if you take that step back, look at the larger picture of what's going on, and ask yourself if this is wisest decision you could be making on behalf of the brand and company that you're working for.
Slashdot Mirror
They were called maids. At some point that got changed to hired help and a few less savory things.
At one time we had a middle class that could afford to support people who worked in their home. Short of a gigantic economic shift that's still true. I'm at a severe loss as to how Amazon is going to make this affordable and simultaneously worthwhile for people to pursue as gainful employment.
when you look at the big picture.
Last night some 52% of us possible voters, voted. That means just under half of the people who could, didn't. By your logic, a mob decided last night.
Even more damning is that it is only a handful of states that are deciding things through the EC. If that's not mobbish, what is?
The point is that our current system isn't handling how fact and much the world is changing. It's likely to start stripping the cogs at any moment. I'd like to have an honest discussion on how we prevent that or, in the event of disaster, how we put things back together.
Let's start with asking ourselves does the EC accomplish what it was intended to. Does it give the rural areas have an equal voice to the urban and vice-versa? Does it make sure that the voice of all of America is heard by the political elite?
I don't think it does either of those things anymore. It needs reform.
Because in those situations there was enough political will power to look at those attempting to profit from the situation and tell them to get out of the way.
Contemporary times are different. Part of that is the collapse of state party machines necessitating multimillion dollar funding for national political presence. Part of that it regulatory capture at both state and federal levels. And part of it has been the disintegration of a middle class that might have the leisure time necessary to parse the topic and provide meaningful input into their political leadership.
Not defending Apple. Can't stand to use them myself. Can barely stand Windows most days but that's because I like knowing what's going on under the hood. I understand what those little things mean and how to use them to my advantage to make my work easier. That's not the case for everyone.
It's well past time for UI to have different modes. Have one that's for ease of use. Have another for power and expert users. It's not a matter of safety. It's a matter of different use cases. I am hobbled with certain files hidden from the UI. I am hobbled when I have to constantly confirm dialogs that shouldn't have needed confirmation. I'm looking at you, Excel. Yes, I wanted that file in a comma delimited format. Yes I want to quit because I already saved and told you I didn't want to change the format last time. Yes I am certain that I want to quit my quitting and not change the format.
It's a little over 83 liter of water per hour, presuming this is meant to be running 24 hours a day. So I'm going to guess this is meant to generate enough water for more than a single family. Maybe a good portion of a village. The details are light in the linked article. What's the target area's relative & absolute humidity and the season? Is it even possible for certain areas of the world to do that?
it's the humans at the other end of the line.
The lesson is the same one we've been screaming about for the past few decades. People are the weakest link. They're paid just to get on with the job, not to take the time to analyze or think that deeply. The article even mentions how the security the phone company has as part of their procedure was ignored. Why? Because for the support people it's about getting to the next caller.
Change that and you've changed security. That'll cost money, but I have a feeling it's more than affordable.
More than your average 7" tablet? It'll be a tougher sell for me.
The brand just doesn't inspire the idea of good times with games anymore. Just more tired and uninspiring retreads of their old properties. Not to mention the constant problems they've had with third parties. The Wii was drowning in shovelware. The WiiU was too underpowered for anyone to care about it.
This thing is supposed to be powered by a custom NVidia chip. So I don't know. Is it enough to attract good devs? Who can say at this point?
And that's the problem here and in other cases like it.
It has to be checked-off by a court to say exactly that. Only after that step can the guy turn around and sue for damages and lost wages. It's as backward as you can get. It's putting the onus on the defense to prove that they're _not_ infringing. Assume guilt much?
Copyright law needs a top to bottom reform. Period.
It may not be popular right now, but compromise is how we get things done. In this case, the studios and big copyright get something in return for giving up their harebrained platform exclusivity. The ability to see how harebrained platform exclusivity is for a certain time before everybody fills their coffers.
I'll give the studios some credit in this. It would appear they looked at what happened with music and book publishers and decided they didn't want any one company lording over them and being able to cut deals like Amazon and Apple did. For them, it's a choice of either shooting their left foot and let Netflix have what they want at whatever price they can get or shoot their right foot by forcing people to have more than one account.
Only time will show which one they shot.
In addition to the breakup, I'd like to see movies and television put under a compulsory licensing scheme after, say five years. Set up a similar system to how music royalties get collected and paid out. This way companies like YouTube and Netflix can stop worry about this and follow where the demand takes them. The five year buffer doesn't stop studios from cutting deals to get shows and movies out to platforms of choice earlier and gives them time to sell the physical media.
why they moved so quickly to get the settlement in. It absolves them of any other doings "just in case" something else rears up, ugly and painful.
I wonder if that settlement can be tossed when it's shown that the execs knew or should have known that further breaches of the law, like these, had yet to be reported.
I really don't know where to begin. This is another reinvention of the wheel. Something I'm seeing more and more of these days. Don't know if it's because I'm approaching a certain age or if communication is just happening faster and faster so we see more of it in a shorter amount of time.
Don't think I'm knocking it. I'm not. It's obvious someone needed this and didn't know how or where to look for the contemporary counterpart in current clients. Or because current clients made it too hard to figure out. We all have different brains and think our process out differently. Just because it's obvious to you or I how to script this in our gmail doesn't mean that everyone else sees it that way.
What bothers me is the breathless headlines. The purposeful exaggeration. The constant commercialization. That, more than anything, I'm tired of.
No wonder advertisement is in trouble.
But with this we'd be able to tell pretty quickly who started the market falling. All of the trades would be public readable. In theory.
The question is when the law will catch up and allow legal liability to be assessed and assigned based on the record?
Well someone read The Three Body Problem.
I've seen the same question being asked everywhere and since there's been no official answer, I'm going to go with "internal politics".
No company is immune from it. Even engineers have politics. It's what greases the wheels of human interactions.
So I'm going to guess it's the same story here. Someone came up with a nifty way to do IM, presented it to their boss, it got pushed up until it became a competing project. And instead of integrating the projects together, the teams were forced to fight for resources. Meanwhile everyone who could have ordered the integration is busy maintaining their position and trying to look like they're worth the megabucks they're being paid. Instead of, you know, actually managing things, communicating with other groups inside the same company, and so forth. Remember your game theory here.
It's not all that hard to picture. Alphabet is just another company.
Make television and movies like music with compulsory licensing? Say anything five years and older gets put into the pool of things that can be broadcast/streamed as part of your service as long as you pay the base royalties. Have the same sort of setup as music does but with a much finer grained reporting. That way everyone that should get paid, is paid.
While five years seems a bit long, that's so streaming and rebroadcast doesn't cut too deeply into the DVD/BluRay sales. That should be plenty of time for that to go through the fans that really want their personal copy at release or to wait for the price to fall or discounted.
And this doesn't stop anyone from making separate deals to get it before the five year date and/or add extras to their service like trivia, blooper reels, and so forth.
Again, the point of copyright was to give people a chance to spread culture around before it is outright given away. Seeing as how locked up it's become, anything that speeds and ease of dissemination is a good thing.
From what I've read, there's no money to be squeezed from YT right now. The service started in the red and has generally stayed there. Complaining will only generate so much hot air.
If these media companies want to see YT fail and go away that is going to be akin to cutting a leg off to spite their marathon time. Of course, these are the sorts of short-sighted people that they'd do that on the wish that everything would go back to the way it was before the internet got all the kids so uppity and wanting culture to become responsive to their needs and views and not those of the shareholders and market makers.
Re: YouTube not paying enough.
Pick one of the above. You can't have both, you can't pick both. You get to exert an outsized control over the medium which is going to cost much of that profit in the form of maintaining the outsized control. People are clever and will figure out ways around automated filters and counters for no other reason than because they can. It's a challenge to overcome. Countering that takes time, effort, and most importantly money.
Or you can give up the outsized control and get the profit from the views on your "channel" or whatever self-organization YT comes up with next. That's the way it works. You can try making your own streaming platform, but I'm fairly certain we all know how that's going to work out. Complaining about it isn't going to change anything.
The record labels, hell, the media business in general had all the warnings that their world was changing and they had best get along with it. But those in charge stuck their heads in the sand and ignored it. This is the result.
This is one of the things needed to get this technology legal and on the road. And better, one of the government agencies in charge of seeing this happen has outlined a plan to get it to happen. Not just in terms of what the manufactures need to get done on their end to be legal but also an outline of the regulatory apparatus required to ensure the safety of everyone!
I call this a win on just about every level.
A more perfect barometer was needed to accomplish what exactly? The device can now tell that I've ascended stairs more accurately. This will lead to what? And this change was as valuable as the headphone jack, how? Sure, more waterproof will probably help some people but overall? It just seems like a dick move.
"However, the total number of app downloads is highly concentrated at the top, with 13 percent of smartphone owners accounting for more than half of all download activity in a given month."
You know what this says to me? This says that maybe there's 3% of users who do this on their own accord. The other 10% are working for astroturfers. How else can one account for the amount of people who actually rate apps and file those perfect tidbit reviews you see in the walled gardens? The vast majority of people are too lazy or just don't care. Why should they? None of this gives them anything in return. It's too bad we don't have more transparency in the app stores to verify.
To be fair, his is a political position. He's having to deal with the uncertainty that the Beltway media has thrown up around who the next president should be as well as the two jackass Republican members of his committee who are currently fighting with Congress about turning over public documents their offices generated.
I'd be coy about things in that position myself. I'd be trying to build a consensus and gaining as much political ground myself after the past few fights have landed in court. Not that they had to go there, but with the way things are right now everything he does has ended up in court. I'd be tired of being second guessed and smacked around, too.
Those countries who have been using this are largely free of the charges from banks that drive the US card system. In fact, if you're talking about the many African nations that use phones for this, they're largely free of consumer banks altogether.
In other words, they had a reason for this infrastructure to show up and be utilized. It found a niche and filled it. There is no such niche in the US to fill. It's already been taken care of. So if you want to take it over, you're going to have to offer something worthwhile to get people to switch.
Hey Marketing and Execs,
You're not going to get any useful data out of things like this. Those people you've decided to ignore? The ones who brought up the statistics which made your eyes glaze over and your money-boner wilt? Well, they're correct. There's nothing new to be discovered in terms of trends or about the people purchasing your products. All the data you need about those people has already been captured at the point of sale. In fact, all you really need to know is the fact that you sold another one of your products. Forcing them to register a piece of spyware, and we really need to be honest that is what this is, isn't going to do anything but hurt you in the long term.
Now, you may be of the mindset that you're going to be out in another job in the next business cycle. That's fine, but just know that future employers are going to looking closer and closer at your results. If all you can show them is a net loss of Good Will (I'm talking about the accounting term here, not the general sentiment the purchasing public has towards your products, although that does play a factor in determining the value of said term) they're going to be much less inclined to hire you. So it's really in your own best interests if you take that step back, look at the larger picture of what's going on, and ask yourself if this is wisest decision you could be making on behalf of the brand and company that you're working for.