It's definitely not about getting fired (the funding levels aren't likely to change, so the jobs will still be there when the shutdown ends). My bet is it's because younger employees are far less likely to have savings. Without savings, they're basically forced to find other jobs just to make ends meet. I suspect that this is the strongest driving factor rather than any cultural issues.
What I find interesting is that it seems the worst impacts of the shutdown are being felt by demographics that tend to vote Republican. That makes the political fallout for this shutdown potentially disastrous for Republicans.
Maybe they'll forget come 2020. But we'll see. The Republican party's behavior has been pretty uniformly reprehensible, and there's a chance that these events will cause a few Republican voters to open their eyes and see the party for what it is: a party for the rich, by the rich, who only panders to non-rich voters by promising to harm "those people". When they find that they're often in the crosshairs, maybe they'll start expanding their news sources beyond the conservative bubble and actually learn something.
Not many, of course. It's rare for people to change their minds like this. But it does happen. And it could be the beginning of the end for the Republican party (aside: if the Republican party ends, it will be replaced by another party: our system is only stable with two parties in power; hopefully that other party will be less terrible so that we can actually have a reasonable national political discussion for once).
The difficulty is, this isn't a Google problem. It's a worldwide problem. Basically every large multinational corporation does something similar.
Selectively punishing individual companies will do little to nothing to solve the overall problem. Such selective punishment basically encourages companies to try to cut individual deals with nations to avoid such selective punishment. That's a really, really bad precedent to set.
What we really need are international standards for determining revenue/expense allocation between nations. Successfully doing that will be incredibly difficult.
If the US economy continues to grow without a substantial recession for the next 6 years, it will be in spite of Trump, not because of him. His war on trade has already caused serious, lasting harm to the US economy (short version: international trade relationships require that both companies and foreign countries can trust US behavior, but Trump's behavior is wildly erratic and unpredictable, meaning that the end result will likely be a large drop in US imports and exports, with the overall US trade deficit worsening and US citizens ending up poorer).
Additionally, the Republican party has been waging a broad campaign to eliminate the financial regulation which would have a chance of preventing or mitigating the next financial crash. Every year that economic exuberance prevails (which by my measure has been about 1-2 years so far: most of the growth during Obama's term was pretty muted and cautious) increases the likelihood that lots of money will be funneled into an unstable sector, as happened with housing around roughly 2003-2006. And without strong financial regulation, we have no protection against that.
My current thinking is that the probability of a recession within three years is quite high (whether or not the Republicans lose the House, Senate, or presidency in that time). If we get six years of solid growth without a drastic increase in financial regulation, I'll eat my hat.
This kind of trade-off may not be something you'll have to consider in the relatively near future. There are already some hybrid-electric vehicles available which do precisely what you're suggesting here (e.g. Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid). They'll typically get much better gas mileage than a similar gas-only vehicle, and if they're a plug-in hybrid like the Pacifica, they'll also have enough range to use little to no gas for shorter trips.
To provide a personal example, I have a 2017 Chevy Volt. It gets 40mpg when running in hybrid mode (almost independent of driving conditions), and has about 400 mile total range. On a full battery it gets between 40-60 mile range (it depends upon the weather: more in summer, less in winter, as the heating system eats up the battery). Most days, I'm able to use electric-only, as my work commute is well within the battery range. Depending upon how many longer trips I take, I can often go 1,000-2,000 miles between refills of the gas tank. Also, because it has a fully-electric drive system (the gas motor is an electric generator and isn't connected to the wheels in any way), the car has tremendous torque making for a very fun driving experience.
Hybrids like this are still fairly expensive. But I probably won't ever want to go back to a gas-only vehicle again. I doubt I'll shed the hybrid for electric-only, either, as electric-only vehicles seem like serious headaches on longer trips. Maybe someday, but not with current technology.
Yup. Reading through his story, it really seems like he put quite a lot on himself that he did not need to.
I generally don't doubt him at all about the shitty people he interacted with, but it really sounds like he sort of shot himself in the foot a number of times. There's no reason why he should have felt obligated to listen to his crappy manager's statement on not bothering to come back to work, for example. I'm pretty sure he could have pushed back on that and won without too much difficulty. It's very likely he could have switched teams too.
So, basically, I don't really doubt that he worked with some shitty people, and he may be correct about the poor management being a problem for Google+. But he took a bad situation and made it much, much worse for himself than it ever needed to be.
I'm not sure that's a valid conclusion. I do think this applies to Uber, because Uber operates as a way for people to get rides. Users of Uber generally see it as a cheap Taxi service, and many Uber drivers use Uber as their primary source of income.
If you compare it to a more general freelancer website, the result isn't as clear. Because such websites don't have a fixed job that they are asking freelancers to do, it isn't at all obvious that the (B) test applies. It might, but that would be up to any future court cases to decide. I imagine we may see such a case if freelancer.com is the main source of income for a substantial number of people.
The line can get blurred there if the contractors are managed based upon incentives. I don't know any of the details of how Uber interacts with its drivers, but they could have a scheme where drivers are penalized if they decline a lot of driving jobs, or rewarded for accepting them often. Imagine, for instance, if Uber had a system where Uber would stop scheduling for drivers who decline all drive requests on Tuesdays. This would make Uber drivers feel that they have to accept rides.
There are lots of really subtle ways that an employer like Uber could undercut free association in subtle ways through incentives and disincentives. This seems to me the reason for the (A) part of the test: they have to be free not just in the contract, but also in practice with the way the job is actually performed.
This is probably a mute point anyway, since driving people is Uber's core business model. Even if they have free association, driving people is the whole point.
So, according to the California Supreme Court, they should have employee protections.
OLED is useful for larger displays for HDR content, as they're really the only way (for now) to display high-contrast scenes without color bleed. As others have mentioned, OLED is in a few high-end displays. My bet is it will become more common at the high end as HDR becomes more important, but it may always be restricted to the high end for cost reasons.
Polarized glasses reduce the brightness of non-polarized light by half. If the glasses are horizontally-polarized, then the glare from horizontal surfaces will not be affected at all, but the rest of the scene will be dimmed. This will dramatically increase the visibility of glare, and make it harder to make out other parts of the scene.
I doubt it would work that well. With only two gyroscopes in operation, there's an axis along which rotation will not be measurable by either gyroscope. They can probably use other methods to figure out the approximate direction the satellite is pointing, so really big movements probably won't be a major problem. But it will likely be really hard to keep the satellite from drifting along that axis during any long exposures. Short exposures shouldn't pose a problem, but longer exposures definitely will.
A summary judgment like this doesn't result in any legal action. What it does is set the ground rules for the trial to come later. The lawyer says to the judge, "Assume A,B,C are true. What is the consequence of that in trial?" The judge makes a statement, which the lawyers for both parties use to form their arguments for the later trial.
For instance, if Uber doesn't want its drivers to be considered employees under California state law, and the judge agrees with Diva Limousine's claim, then Uber's job at trial would be to show that Diva Limousine had some of their facts wrong. If the judge rules the opposite, then Diva Limousine may try to bring up other facts which might help their case.
One thing that vexes me a bit about the ruling: if Uber were bought out (by, let's say, Microsoft), would that change the legal argument at all?
It disturbs me that it might. Clearly if Uber were purchased by Microsoft, the drivers would no longer be a core part of the company's business. But they would still be central to a particular product which they would provide. Here's hoping future court decisions fix this loophole, a loophole which may drive more mergers without actually protecting workers.
Honestly, the logic of this change is pretty reasonable. Mostly it just makes the background behavior more visible.
Previously, if I had gone onto somebody else's machine and decided to log in to check my e-mail while I was on their machine, and failed to do so in incognito mode, then they could hop onto their machine and look not only at my e-mail, but also my calendar, my Drive, and everything else I have related to Google. There would be nothing in the UI to tell me about this behavior at all.
Making it clear that this login was persistent would at least give me another opportunity to realize that I should log out before leaving the computer (or at least remind me that I should have logged in using incognito mode instead). I just wish there was an easy way to make other logins more visible (this is likely infeasible).
If this change has effects beyond simply making the login more visible (such as clearing out local bookmarks or settings), then those should, in my mind, be reported as bugs.
So, you intentionally ran a years-old browser which certainly had a large number of unpatched security vulnerabilities? If you don't like the new versions of something, you should switch to something else whose new versions you like rather than run aging software. Turning off these updates is just asking for your security to be compromised.
I think the difference with photos is that only limited information can be gleaned from a photo. The information which might be gleaned from a video is far, far more detailed. In particular, if they could effectively fake a voice, then the potential implications are pretty tremendous.
Personally, I suspect we're a long way off from reasonably-convincing fakes. And even when we do have such fakes, it's going to be far more difficult to make a fake which withstands careful scrutiny.
It's not a lack of desire. It's a lack of power. If the employees depend upon their job for their livelihood, it's really, really hard for any of them to speak out about it. Employee protections in Washington (as in most of the US) are pretty bare, so it's not hard at all for Amazon to fire its workers here. So yes, many Amazon workers are finding it very, very difficult. But the employees also feel that they don't have other options.
One major issue is that most people who work at close to minimum wage have essentially no savings, which means that they can't afford any break in income at all. The thought of having to take the time to find a job after getting fired for standing up for themselves can be truly daunting when it means they may have to rely on friends or family for support (if they have anybody that can provide that kind of help), and may have to go hungry or lose their apartment.
Making all of this even worse is that even where there are laws in place to protect employees, those laws often rely upon the employee to hire their own lawyer, which can be an expense that is far, far too high for many.
I'm pretty sure that if minimum wages increased enough, one of the main effects of that increase would be an increase in worker bargaining.
I get it. Covering an industry that is entering maturity after a number of years of breakneck innovation must be frustrating. This is hard on phone manufacturers too, because coming up with a product that people are willing to buy is becoming much more challenging.
But it just isn't possible for innovation to continue at that pace for terribly long. Especially not when we're approaching limits imposed by physics for processor designs. Maturity in the industry was always inevitable. Innovation will continue, but it will not be nearly as fast as it has been over the last few years. Get used to it.
Yup. I think it's due to the fact that regulations are much looser for contractors. If you have a company that has a mix of high-wage and low-wage jobs, chances are the high-wage jobs will be mostly filled with full-time employees and the low-wage jobs will mostly be filled by contractors. It sets up a pretty disgusting class segregation. I really think the only way to deal with it is to solve it at the regulatory level, to ensure that contractors have the same protections as full-time employees, and by reducing inequality.
Contracting might still be reasonable in situations where the number of employees needed is expected to fluctuate fairly rapidly, but having contractors be expected to accept second-class pay and benefits just means that more and more work will shift to contract work unless the employees are in such high demand that the company would lose workers if they tried it.
The inherent reason it's less efficient is that it's based off of the concept of pods, which carry a lot less than trains carry. Furthermore, maintaining the low-pressure tunnels is a massive (and expensive) engineering challenge fraught with risk.
When it comes to complex engineering projects, often times simpler is better. I doubt that the hyperloop concept will ever outpace high-speed trains in terms of cost or efficiency.
The physical security system for security keys is definitely superior in terms of security from a technical standpoint compared against security codes, but how many successful phishing attacks did they witness before this rollout?
I do hope that security keys find wider adoption (they're genuinely convenient and offer strong security), but we would need more information to know if this is actually a significant improvement in real security over more basic forms of two-factor authentication.
Usually I start calling them Nazis when they start going on about the evils of the Jews in the same breath that they talk badly about Muslims or immigrants, claim that the holocaust didn't really happen or wasn't all that bad, or start using Nazi code language like "14" or "88".
Slashdot Mirror
Younger employees may also be more likely to be contractors who won't get back-pay for the duration of the shutdown.
It's definitely not about getting fired (the funding levels aren't likely to change, so the jobs will still be there when the shutdown ends). My bet is it's because younger employees are far less likely to have savings. Without savings, they're basically forced to find other jobs just to make ends meet. I suspect that this is the strongest driving factor rather than any cultural issues.
What I find interesting is that it seems the worst impacts of the shutdown are being felt by demographics that tend to vote Republican. That makes the political fallout for this shutdown potentially disastrous for Republicans.
Maybe they'll forget come 2020. But we'll see. The Republican party's behavior has been pretty uniformly reprehensible, and there's a chance that these events will cause a few Republican voters to open their eyes and see the party for what it is: a party for the rich, by the rich, who only panders to non-rich voters by promising to harm "those people". When they find that they're often in the crosshairs, maybe they'll start expanding their news sources beyond the conservative bubble and actually learn something.
Not many, of course. It's rare for people to change their minds like this. But it does happen. And it could be the beginning of the end for the Republican party (aside: if the Republican party ends, it will be replaced by another party: our system is only stable with two parties in power; hopefully that other party will be less terrible so that we can actually have a reasonable national political discussion for once).
The difficulty is, this isn't a Google problem. It's a worldwide problem. Basically every large multinational corporation does something similar.
Selectively punishing individual companies will do little to nothing to solve the overall problem. Such selective punishment basically encourages companies to try to cut individual deals with nations to avoid such selective punishment. That's a really, really bad precedent to set.
What we really need are international standards for determining revenue/expense allocation between nations. Successfully doing that will be incredibly difficult.
I actually prefer to work in open plan offices. Probably helps that it's easy for me to tune out others' conversations.
If the US economy continues to grow without a substantial recession for the next 6 years, it will be in spite of Trump, not because of him. His war on trade has already caused serious, lasting harm to the US economy (short version: international trade relationships require that both companies and foreign countries can trust US behavior, but Trump's behavior is wildly erratic and unpredictable, meaning that the end result will likely be a large drop in US imports and exports, with the overall US trade deficit worsening and US citizens ending up poorer).
Additionally, the Republican party has been waging a broad campaign to eliminate the financial regulation which would have a chance of preventing or mitigating the next financial crash. Every year that economic exuberance prevails (which by my measure has been about 1-2 years so far: most of the growth during Obama's term was pretty muted and cautious) increases the likelihood that lots of money will be funneled into an unstable sector, as happened with housing around roughly 2003-2006. And without strong financial regulation, we have no protection against that.
My current thinking is that the probability of a recession within three years is quite high (whether or not the Republicans lose the House, Senate, or presidency in that time). If we get six years of solid growth without a drastic increase in financial regulation, I'll eat my hat.
This kind of trade-off may not be something you'll have to consider in the relatively near future. There are already some hybrid-electric vehicles available which do precisely what you're suggesting here (e.g. Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid). They'll typically get much better gas mileage than a similar gas-only vehicle, and if they're a plug-in hybrid like the Pacifica, they'll also have enough range to use little to no gas for shorter trips.
To provide a personal example, I have a 2017 Chevy Volt. It gets 40mpg when running in hybrid mode (almost independent of driving conditions), and has about 400 mile total range. On a full battery it gets between 40-60 mile range (it depends upon the weather: more in summer, less in winter, as the heating system eats up the battery). Most days, I'm able to use electric-only, as my work commute is well within the battery range. Depending upon how many longer trips I take, I can often go 1,000-2,000 miles between refills of the gas tank. Also, because it has a fully-electric drive system (the gas motor is an electric generator and isn't connected to the wheels in any way), the car has tremendous torque making for a very fun driving experience.
Hybrids like this are still fairly expensive. But I probably won't ever want to go back to a gas-only vehicle again. I doubt I'll shed the hybrid for electric-only, either, as electric-only vehicles seem like serious headaches on longer trips. Maybe someday, but not with current technology.
Yup. Reading through his story, it really seems like he put quite a lot on himself that he did not need to.
I generally don't doubt him at all about the shitty people he interacted with, but it really sounds like he sort of shot himself in the foot a number of times. There's no reason why he should have felt obligated to listen to his crappy manager's statement on not bothering to come back to work, for example. I'm pretty sure he could have pushed back on that and won without too much difficulty. It's very likely he could have switched teams too.
So, basically, I don't really doubt that he worked with some shitty people, and he may be correct about the poor management being a problem for Google+. But he took a bad situation and made it much, much worse for himself than it ever needed to be.
I'm not sure that's a valid conclusion. I do think this applies to Uber, because Uber operates as a way for people to get rides. Users of Uber generally see it as a cheap Taxi service, and many Uber drivers use Uber as their primary source of income.
If you compare it to a more general freelancer website, the result isn't as clear. Because such websites don't have a fixed job that they are asking freelancers to do, it isn't at all obvious that the (B) test applies. It might, but that would be up to any future court cases to decide. I imagine we may see such a case if freelancer.com is the main source of income for a substantial number of people.
The line can get blurred there if the contractors are managed based upon incentives. I don't know any of the details of how Uber interacts with its drivers, but they could have a scheme where drivers are penalized if they decline a lot of driving jobs, or rewarded for accepting them often. Imagine, for instance, if Uber had a system where Uber would stop scheduling for drivers who decline all drive requests on Tuesdays. This would make Uber drivers feel that they have to accept rides.
There are lots of really subtle ways that an employer like Uber could undercut free association in subtle ways through incentives and disincentives. This seems to me the reason for the (A) part of the test: they have to be free not just in the contract, but also in practice with the way the job is actually performed.
This is probably a mute point anyway, since driving people is Uber's core business model. Even if they have free association, driving people is the whole point. So, according to the California Supreme Court, they should have employee protections.
OLED is useful for larger displays for HDR content, as they're really the only way (for now) to display high-contrast scenes without color bleed. As others have mentioned, OLED is in a few high-end displays. My bet is it will become more common at the high end as HDR becomes more important, but it may always be restricted to the high end for cost reasons.
Polarized glasses reduce the brightness of non-polarized light by half. If the glasses are horizontally-polarized, then the glare from horizontal surfaces will not be affected at all, but the rest of the scene will be dimmed. This will dramatically increase the visibility of glare, and make it harder to make out other parts of the scene.
I doubt it would work that well. With only two gyroscopes in operation, there's an axis along which rotation will not be measurable by either gyroscope. They can probably use other methods to figure out the approximate direction the satellite is pointing, so really big movements probably won't be a major problem. But it will likely be really hard to keep the satellite from drifting along that axis during any long exposures. Short exposures shouldn't pose a problem, but longer exposures definitely will.
That's not quite how this works.
A summary judgment like this doesn't result in any legal action. What it does is set the ground rules for the trial to come later. The lawyer says to the judge, "Assume A,B,C are true. What is the consequence of that in trial?" The judge makes a statement, which the lawyers for both parties use to form their arguments for the later trial.
For instance, if Uber doesn't want its drivers to be considered employees under California state law, and the judge agrees with Diva Limousine's claim, then Uber's job at trial would be to show that Diva Limousine had some of their facts wrong. If the judge rules the opposite, then Diva Limousine may try to bring up other facts which might help their case.
One thing that vexes me a bit about the ruling: if Uber were bought out (by, let's say, Microsoft), would that change the legal argument at all?
It disturbs me that it might. Clearly if Uber were purchased by Microsoft, the drivers would no longer be a core part of the company's business. But they would still be central to a particular product which they would provide. Here's hoping future court decisions fix this loophole, a loophole which may drive more mergers without actually protecting workers.
Honestly, the logic of this change is pretty reasonable. Mostly it just makes the background behavior more visible.
Previously, if I had gone onto somebody else's machine and decided to log in to check my e-mail while I was on their machine, and failed to do so in incognito mode, then they could hop onto their machine and look not only at my e-mail, but also my calendar, my Drive, and everything else I have related to Google. There would be nothing in the UI to tell me about this behavior at all.
Making it clear that this login was persistent would at least give me another opportunity to realize that I should log out before leaving the computer (or at least remind me that I should have logged in using incognito mode instead). I just wish there was an easy way to make other logins more visible (this is likely infeasible).
If this change has effects beyond simply making the login more visible (such as clearing out local bookmarks or settings), then those should, in my mind, be reported as bugs.
So, you intentionally ran a years-old browser which certainly had a large number of unpatched security vulnerabilities? If you don't like the new versions of something, you should switch to something else whose new versions you like rather than run aging software. Turning off these updates is just asking for your security to be compromised.
I think the difference with photos is that only limited information can be gleaned from a photo. The information which might be gleaned from a video is far, far more detailed. In particular, if they could effectively fake a voice, then the potential implications are pretty tremendous.
Personally, I suspect we're a long way off from reasonably-convincing fakes. And even when we do have such fakes, it's going to be far more difficult to make a fake which withstands careful scrutiny.
It's not a lack of desire. It's a lack of power. If the employees depend upon their job for their livelihood, it's really, really hard for any of them to speak out about it. Employee protections in Washington (as in most of the US) are pretty bare, so it's not hard at all for Amazon to fire its workers here. So yes, many Amazon workers are finding it very, very difficult. But the employees also feel that they don't have other options.
One major issue is that most people who work at close to minimum wage have essentially no savings, which means that they can't afford any break in income at all. The thought of having to take the time to find a job after getting fired for standing up for themselves can be truly daunting when it means they may have to rely on friends or family for support (if they have anybody that can provide that kind of help), and may have to go hungry or lose their apartment.
Making all of this even worse is that even where there are laws in place to protect employees, those laws often rely upon the employee to hire their own lawyer, which can be an expense that is far, far too high for many.
I'm pretty sure that if minimum wages increased enough, one of the main effects of that increase would be an increase in worker bargaining.
I get it. Covering an industry that is entering maturity after a number of years of breakneck innovation must be frustrating. This is hard on phone manufacturers too, because coming up with a product that people are willing to buy is becoming much more challenging.
But it just isn't possible for innovation to continue at that pace for terribly long. Especially not when we're approaching limits imposed by physics for processor designs. Maturity in the industry was always inevitable. Innovation will continue, but it will not be nearly as fast as it has been over the last few years. Get used to it.
Yup. I think it's due to the fact that regulations are much looser for contractors. If you have a company that has a mix of high-wage and low-wage jobs, chances are the high-wage jobs will be mostly filled with full-time employees and the low-wage jobs will mostly be filled by contractors. It sets up a pretty disgusting class segregation. I really think the only way to deal with it is to solve it at the regulatory level, to ensure that contractors have the same protections as full-time employees, and by reducing inequality.
Contracting might still be reasonable in situations where the number of employees needed is expected to fluctuate fairly rapidly, but having contractors be expected to accept second-class pay and benefits just means that more and more work will shift to contract work unless the employees are in such high demand that the company would lose workers if they tried it.
The problem with air travel long-term is it really depends upon fossil fuels because of their power density.
The inherent reason it's less efficient is that it's based off of the concept of pods, which carry a lot less than trains carry. Furthermore, maintaining the low-pressure tunnels is a massive (and expensive) engineering challenge fraught with risk.
When it comes to complex engineering projects, often times simpler is better. I doubt that the hyperloop concept will ever outpace high-speed trains in terms of cost or efficiency.
The physical security system for security keys is definitely superior in terms of security from a technical standpoint compared against security codes, but how many successful phishing attacks did they witness before this rollout?
I do hope that security keys find wider adoption (they're genuinely convenient and offer strong security), but we would need more information to know if this is actually a significant improvement in real security over more basic forms of two-factor authentication.
Usually I start calling them Nazis when they start going on about the evils of the Jews in the same breath that they talk badly about Muslims or immigrants, claim that the holocaust didn't really happen or wasn't all that bad, or start using Nazi code language like "14" or "88".